Meetup
It’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.
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when the invisible hand kills a million people, it leaves no fingerprints
Another 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 fingerprintsFrom bad to worse: against the decline narrative
So 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 narrativeInventing the mujahideen
Erik 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 mujahideenRefusal
So 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 RefusalA message from short-term memory
I 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 memoryit’s a taster of the legacy experience
Here’s a good piece on Tobacco Dock, where the soldiers covering for “can we call them Group Snore again?” G4S are camping. Wikipedia points out that it’s a building of great historic significance, marking the transition between buildings that incidentally used iron and ones that used it in their structure, and being the work of…
Read More it’s a taster of the legacy experienceMusic.
It’s not Thursday. What about a non-Thursday music link? This is great: as is this: ‘Not Another’ @ Cargo – Wednesday 4th July – Summer Vibes Mix by Dj Emily Rawson on Mixcloud
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Compare and contrast. My review of the Gary Oldman Tinker, Tailor…, CMcM‘s. Your 1000 favourite Wikipedia articles. What is it with the critic and the ass-hat? As it’s their XML export pages, perhaps somebody’s experiment has gone out of kilter. But then, why is the User Datagram Protocol at no.12? It would be interesting to…
Read More Linksperhaps we could do with more information from the information commissioner?
Does anyone else wonder if this Daily Rekkid story is the point at which the Economic League/Consulting Association blacklisting case bleeds across into the Murdoch/private detectives/cops case? Tommy Sheridan seems to be the first person to appear in both as a target of surveillance, and it’s also worth remembering that Andy Coulson is in serious…
Read More perhaps we could do with more information from the information commissioner?