2009

Things are getting better in Iraq. If you’re mercenaries-turned-oil pushers Tim Spicer and Anthony Buckingham, that is! Heritage Oil has, indeed, struck oil. Up to 4.2 billion barrels of the stuff. This is of course very much subject to drilling, and even more so to Kurdish/Baghdad politics. If you’re trying to distribute wheelchairs, however, not…

Read More things are getting better in Iraq, for some values of better, for some values of Iraq…

Much-discussed article; American goes to Holland, finds welfare state actually quite OK really! I was amused by the pleasantly clueless quote below: I asked a management consultant and a longtime American expat, Buford Alexander, former director of McKinsey & Company in the Netherlands, for his thoughts on this. “If you tell a Dutch person you’re…

Read More no pony

Via Worldchanging, the machine that turns up the music, flashes lights, and eventually produces fog if you do enough freaky dancin’. Its specifications and much more stuff are here. Of course, it’s a fairly obvious feedback loop, with a side order of poking fun at superstar DJs here we go! But there’s something I like…

Read More loop

Reader “Ajay” has a theory that aviators are uniquely unfitted for government. There are a considerable number of data points in his favour. However, here’s a possible counter-example. Ernest Millington has died; he was one of three MPs for the brief Common Wealth Party, a radical leftist group that emerged during the second world war,…

Read More party of one

Great rant at Kosmograd against Kirstie Allsopp and much more economic-aesthetic crappery. I recall her grinning chops advertising some sort of Sink Your Life Savings And More In Bulgarian Property for Riches! fest on Tube hoardings in the winter of 2007-2008, which must take some sort of award for televisual irresponsibility. Swinging from branch to…

Read More get ready for another low dishonest decade

In support of the last post, here’s some more top Pakistan blogging: intelligent comment about the Army in comments at AM, as well as sense from Chris “Chris” Williams, behind a post that demonstrates one of the core failings of Western thought about Pakistan. Specifically, Andy reckons the Pakistani army is failing; but failing to…

Read More tabdump