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Anthony Zacharzewski

Anthony Zacharzewski

Working to make European democracy work. "Refreshingly free of the usual platitudes". Belge par choix, Brits door opvoeding. President of Demsoc.org but posts here are personal.

📍 Brussels

Time to get judgmental

I’m working with a few others on a new non-profit to re-engage people with politics. As our first bit of work, we are trying to work up a set of axes to use in describing users’ political profiles. To create a map of opinions and axes, I’ve set

Bye Bye Rumsfeld

Link: Good Riddance.

Polish archives

Poland.pl – a government website, has an excellent collection of historical artefacts online.

Clear thinking on immigration

Not Government blather, but at least political blather. A Tory hopeful’s husband has sent round a racist email joke from her email account (BBC). Her response: “It was forwarded on by my husband, who took it in the form that he thought it was sent and that was a

A thousand bottles of wine a day

Did you hear the story about red wine cancelling out the effects of fatty foods? Yes? But did you hear that to get that effect you’d have to drink 750 to 1,500 bottles of wine a day? Thought not.

Simon Jenkins' arse

Philip Cowley writes an excellent rebuttal of Simon Jenkins’s ludicrous hyperbole on Parliament. Why anyone takes Jenkins seriously, I cannot imagine. One of the quintessential sounds of the English morning is a distant Jenkins, barking up the wrong tree.

Idiomatic English

A collection of common English idioms explained for speakers of English as a second language.

Joe Strummer on Plastic Bertrand

“I don’t like saying, “You’re a punk and you’re not.” There was a record out there called “Ca Plane pour Moi” by Plastic Bertrand, right? And I guarantee you if I had to play it for you right now you’d go, “Right! That is rockin!” Now,

Stealing electronic elections

There is a detailed, and important, and terrifying article on Ars Technica, explaining how easy it is to hack the electronic voting machines increasingly being used in the US. Example (with my emphasis): In order to use a supervisor card to access the AccuVote, you must first enter a four-digit

Slip-sliding away

Went to see the new exhibition at the Tate Modern, a series of huge slides set up in the Turbine Hall by Carsten Höller. They were rather beautiful, and Tom enjoyed sliding down them a lot, though I don’t completely buy the artist’s description of why they were