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Rants

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists

Thought-provoking article in Wired. Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we’re ever going to defeat terrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the first place,,,, ,,,Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a […]

Stupid Things I Have Heard (Part 6,801)

So the Large Hadron Collider got switched on this morning (and we’re all still here!). I was watching it on BBC News24; after the switchon, the presenter began reading out text and emails from the public. The very first one was, I swear to the Whatever: “Are these scientists trying to disprove the existence of […]

When Poets Attack…

The AQA exam board has withdrawn a poem from its anthology for GCSE English, after receiving a grand total of three complaints that it encouraged knife crime. The poem, Education for Leisure, by renowned poet Carol Ann Duffy is written from the POV of a disturbed, alienated teenager. It starts with the line: “Today I […]

Stupid Things I Have Seen Part 947….

All this week, BBC TV News has been congratulating itself on exposing an illegal immigration ring bringing in Pakistani workers, supplying them with fake documents and putting them to work as cheaply-paid undocumented labour. Good investigative journalism, and the highlight was a secretly filmed interview with a gang member boasting of how it was no […]