2017

I’ve just been re-reading the end of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes. Here’s something interesting. Skidelsky frames the debates in Whitehall about British proposals for the post-war economic settlement and about the negotiations with the USA as being between two key groups, whom he defines as the multilateralists and the Schachtians. Schachtian, of course, is…

Read More Who is the man….SCHACHT!

This Chris Cook piece about campaigning strategy is good. Here’s something I noticed which he doesn’t call out specifically. The party leaders’ activities by ITV region are actually very similar. Going by Chris’s table, Theresa May has made 23 visits and Jeremy Corbyn 22. Both leaders have concentrated their operations on two regions, Greater London…

Read More Quick campaign post

Really good Ross Anderson interview: It’s as if you had a forest where all the animals could see only in black and white, and suddenly, along comes a mutation in one of the predators allowing it to see in color. All of a sudden it gets to eat all the other animals, at least those…

Read More In colour

If you want something completely weird, try this. The Swiss government is still so furious about the whole business with the whistleblower who sold German tax authorities a stack of CD-ROMs with lists of tax evaders that they had their intelligence service spy on the German excisemen. But German counterintelligence found out about it somehow.…

Read More Some links on my current preoccupations