Away and thoughts

I am away for a few days now and will update when I can.

Next week, I will be attending a blog meeting at the Adam Smith Institute and hope to attend some of the Dana Institute meetings as well. There is one on enhancement that screams out for attendance.

Otherwise, down and dirty politics is becoming a fevered process of counting the mistakes of New Labour. The biggest question is will Boris be renamed "Bunce Boots", if he fails to capture the mayoralty? Apart from Westminster froth, New Scientist (only an excerpt) had two good articles last week on the complexity of modern civilisation. Wrapped in a package of doom, the lesson is that network centric civilisations require new structures to aid the free flow of information. Brown's centralising resuscitation of the British state has rendered the birth pains of this new society more difficult than they needed to be in the short term. Culturally, they may have proved more beneficial over time as the population learns that state provision and socialised benefits are worse than their private sector equivalents.

The same lesson will apply to our good friends in Brussels.