Down at the railway station at midnight you can almost see the tumbleweed blowing across the tracks. Almost, because it’s closed – lifeless, except for a trickle of late-night would-be travellers who can’t believe that this major city has no night trains.
Nearby at Rotherham the new station building is way overdue, with no explanation. For over a year passengers have had little shelter, no toilets and limited… [...]
August 31, 2011
Down at the railway station at midnight you can almost see the tumbleweed blowing across the tracks. Almost, because it’s closed – lifeless, except for a trickle of late-night would-be travellers who can’t believe that this major city has no night trains.
Nearby at Rotherham the new station building is way overdue, with no explanation. For over a year passengers have had little shelter, no toilets and limited… [...]
August 30, 2011
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
H. L. Mencken
Hope is a wonderful and terrifying prospect and, much to Barack Obama’s chagrin, if you do not deliver on the prospect then… [...]
August 29, 2011
In a statement issued following his recent resignation, disgraced former Chief of Police Sir Paul Stevenson – who publicly conceded that the police made glaring tactical errors during the latest tuition fee protests – gushed with pride about “the professional and restrained approach to unexpected levels of violence in recent student demonstrations”.
The media circus surrounding the phonehacking scandal diverted public attention away from the recent
August 28, 2011
Even after several visits the scale of the Edinburgh Festival staggers me; 40,000 performances and more than 2,500 shows packed into 250 venues. That’s just the official Fringe festival and doesn’t include the events at the Book Festival and the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s one thing to know that it’s the largest arts festival in the world, but it’s quite another to walk down the Royal Mile on a Saturday… [...]
August 27, 2011
Science as a tool for understanding the world takes some beating. Most agree that there is a physical reality that trundles on regardless of our own minds. We may disagree about a lot of things, but if we can at least arrive at a consensus on physical reality then that’s a start. True scientific knowledge is different from other kinds of understanding because ideas are allowed into this revered realm