Michael Hodges’s new book on the history of the Kalashnikov assault rifle is clearly a work that fits in with this blog. And we can say that it’s also well worth reading; not just for the knockabout, although there are some good stories (the brothel in the Izhevsk arsenal; Mikhail Kalashnikov’s special elk soup). As…
Read More Review: “AK47: The Story of the People’s Gun”This is interesting; apparently one of the problems with Iraq’s electricity supply is that the original control centre was looted back in 2003, with the result that local switching stations were instead given instructions on the phone. Over time, however, these sites have come under the control of whoever has the most guns; and they…
Read More Taking over the systemThe clock is ticking ever faster on British withdrawal from Iraq. This is of course nothing but a good thing. However, as I’ve said before, this is also a reason to hold the Government’s feet to the fire; the more time passes, the harder it is going to be to get people out. Nobody wants…
Read More Ticking of the clockThere’s something about this, that I’m not sure if I find intensely cool or deeply disturbing; that is, of course, a neat definition of anything worth writing about. (It’s certainly the sci-fi project; thrilling wonder and uncanny menace.) So, a ski resort is short of snow due to the gradually warming winters; they make snow,…
Read More Making electricity to make snow and not make more CO2Disturbing Search Request of the decade: 213.42.21.150, searching Google for “who would handle a commercial shipment of arms and ammunitions from Sharjah to Baghdad”. That’ll be someone downstream of AS5384, or Etisalat (Emirates Telecom), the UAE’s fun-loving national telco monopoly, best known for blocking more websites than China. Ha. But there is some actual substance…
Read More War Profiteers Read My WeblogThe Government is trying to define down the Iraqi employees it is under pressure to accept as refugees after the forthcoming UK withdrawal from Basra. With the Murdoch press, it is signalling that some 91 interpreters might be accepted, but at the same time that there are as many as 20,000 people involved. That figure…
Read More We Still Can’t Turn Them AwayA prerequisite for good alternate-history is good history; as Ken MacLeod says, the trade secret of sci-fi is history. So I wasn’t too impressed by this, of James Nicoll’s, who really ought to know better. Would it be funny to do an AH where WWI never happened and the old order never fell, one in…
Read More Bad British History, AgainWe don’t just moan about today’s government surveillance projects and fiddle with other people’s webcams here. No. Sometimes we can offer you better things; like the solution to a huge mass-surveillance IT disaster that hasn’t even happened yet. Spyblog reports that even before Alastair Darling’s deranged scheme to monitor all motor vehicles by GPS has…
Read More The jamming signal increases its humSalvador Dali described his work as making use of a paranoid-critical method. Like a paranoiac, he attempted to find meaning in the associations of entirely unrelated images, an analogue to Freudian free association. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition on Dali’s influence from and work for the cinema; perhaps as well as the Looney Tunes…
Read More Paranoid CritiqueRecall this post from December, 2006? It was about how the Iranian government was actually rebuilding things in Afghanistan; things like electricity supply, fibre-optic interconnection, roads, and maybe even a railway. Not just that, but they were supplying today’s version of Marlboros and jeans; the best Internet connection in town. The Christian Science Monitor goes…
Read More Iranian Money: Rebuilding Afghanistan