The CDR high is powerfully addictive. See also the Malte Spitz stasimulator. Alan West doesn’t quite say that the sudden appearance and sudden disappearance of the “defence black hole” has a lot to do with clever accounting, but gets a lot of the way there. Jamie Kenny explains why Chinese doctors smoke. Noahopinion and Facts…
Read More linksIt’s high time we did a little blogdrinks. I’m off on holiday at the end of this week, so I’m thinking Tuesday or Wednesday. Update:: OK, so it’s the Three Compasses on Hornsey High St at 7pm or thereabouts.
Read More MeetupAnother request-for-book, borrowing the title from a favourite Daniel Davies-ism from the days he used to say rude things about the IMF. It strikes me as interesting that the idea of inflation/devaluation/currency debasement has such long legs and is written so deep in the culture, when its opposite – deflation/recession/depression – is so much more…
Read More when the invisible hand kills a million people, it leaves no fingerprintsSo I’ve been reading books. Books! One of them being David Edgerton’s Britain’s War Machine, his industrial history of the British Empire in the second world war. This is fascinating, in terms of hardware (especially ships), politics, and also national mythology. Edgerton is very hard on the decline historians, especially and specifically Corelli Barnett, and…
Read More From bad to worse: against the decline narrativeErik Lund has an interesting post on the high, Kipling era of the North-West Frontier and how it essentially got that way due to technology. Longer-ranged rifles meant that the forts the British and their client rulers relied on were over-watched from the hills, and that the numbers of troops needed to manoeuvre up the…
Read More Inventing the mujahideenSo we spent quite a while wondering about where all the Antonovs would go after the UAE eventually turned nasty on them and cleaned up, after a fashion. We even found some of them in Russia. We speculated about locations. Here’s a data point, and quite an encouraging one – an old mate of Viktor’s…
Read More RefusalI am not sure Nick Cohen, or indeed anyone else, should be taking News International statements as to how one of their journalists got arrested at face value. It wasn’t that long ago when they were briefing the wider media that the G-men were arresting people for “buying their sources lunch” or “fiddling their expenses”,…
Read More A message from short-term memory