Bill Higgins is boasting about buying a very cool secondhand book indeed; Manned Spaceflight Operations, stamped “Edwards Air Force Base”. I’ll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn’t track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this: Well, I watched this one: In the bad old 60’s…
Read More Blue Streak, Black ArrowThe Independent has been doing a great job tracking a crucial new trend of our times; the way modern counterinsurgent practitioners are making common features of suburban life into quiet weapons against the common enemy. 12th April: Under the protection programme, sometimes called School Councils or School Shuras, villagers agree to provide a small quota…
Read More Bourgeois COINTime for some rugby league blogging, right? I saw London knock Castleford out of the cup on Saturday, and I can report that I’m beginning to think London (sorry, sorry, Harlequins RL) are getting to be dangerous. Cas dominated the first half and went in 12-0 up, but ended up with a 42-14 thrashing. They…
Read More You’re fit, but don’t you just know it…This looks like a must-read; Kevin Myers’ personal history of 1970s Belfast, complete with fundamentalist landladies, Provos concerned about the morality of using a condom in the initiator for a carbomb, the only civil war in history where both sides were receiving welfare benefits from the same government, the UDA as the only terrorists in…
Read More hey hey hey, ring ring ringThis NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces’ deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or…
Read More The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages OnHere is the news; we’re meeting up on Thursday, the 17th April, after 1900 at the Globe pub in Southwark. Here’s a map; your nearest Tube station is Borough. There is no dress code, but I’ve been asked to put the whole thing under Chatham House rules (you can say what was said, but you…
Read More Announcement: TYR RanterCon, 17th AprilSo, after the Phorm evilhood, and the weird brokenness detailed here, and the 30-odd hour no-notice outage they dropped on me just after I started working from home, literally driving me to drink (the nearest operational open WLAN I found was in a pub), now Virgin Media comes up with this. It’s not just the…
Read More You Say Virgin, We Say Die!Well, I never imagined Robert Mugabe’s new survival gambit would be just to pretend it wasn’t happening. But it does permit us to answer the question of just how small a state can get and still function; to be clear, I don’t mean a state in the juridical/diplomatic sense, but rather in the political, realist…
Read More The real minimal stateI have been away, cutting down to only very restricted Internet/computing usage, and living in a district that would make Abu Muq piss his baggy pants. (Walthamstow, he says. You’ve never been to Bradford, have you?) Which is amusing, because (as in every poor/immigrant ‘hood in Europe) every second business is a mobile phone/computer shop.…
Read More ….here I am!If you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It’s all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn’t want to know (the FBI…
Read More Torture Lawyers