Shock! NATO is secretly reviewing its plans to defend the Baltic states and Poland in the event of a war with Russia, a Wikileaked cable reveals. Interestingly enough, the details of this are already public – Gazeta Wyborcza published them on the 5th of November, appropriately enough, detailing that the NATO Response Force would be…
Read More in case of Russian invasion, break glassIn my continuing fit of doom about Korea, this isn’t helping – a US Military Sealift Command reserve freighter full of Maritime Prepositioning System kit is practising offloading it all in a Korean port. Supposedly, when they’re finished they’ll put it all back aboard and sail away. If you believe that, though… The MPS is…
Read More Korea: logistics, and propagandaImage number four here has a certain additional spice, doesn’t it? What a week. As well as WikiLeaks being the website they couldn’t hang, 4chan became a geopolitical actor, thus fulfilling my prediction that in the future, trolls would be considered a strategic resource like oil. The BBC interviewed a builder from Leeds thinking he…
Read More keeping your leaks leakyIt’s not Thursday, so it must be time for a not-Thursday music link. Special “one hand washes the other” edition.
Read More not the Thursday music linkNeed to know how to reach Wikileaks data? All the mirrors, alternative URIs, IP addresses, instructions, etc you could want are here. You might want to grab a local copy of the page itself, from this URI.
Read More Admin notice: WikileaksThe key fact to remember about the Wikileaks cable dump is this: it’s not about the Americans. There’s not been much in there that says something huge about US policy, which is why con-wissy types are so happy to deny it any significance. What there has been is something for everybody – a major purpose…
Read More not about the AmericansI’m beginning to worry seriously about Korea. There’s the wikileaked cable suggesting that Chinese tolerance is running out. There’s more recent confirmation. This after the initial non-reaction. Even if Peter Foster is right that the Chinese position hasn’t changed that much, it still looks like something has changed in the deterrent balance. On the other…
Read More Moulded from birth. Forged by hatred. Honed in ignorance.In this thread at Charlie Stross’s, it occurred to me that social outrage is a constant, but that its content is infinitely variable. You could almost call it the principle of the conservation of outrage – outrage can neither be created nor destroyed, but only transferred from one object to another. Addiction to drugs or…
Read More constant levels of outrageSo someone’s trying to raise $150,000 to buy a satellite from the bankruptcy of TerreStar, in order to “Connect Everyone”. I admire the aim, but I’m concerned that this is going to be a round of forgetting that a lot of perfectly good GSM operators are doing just that. Also, I can’t find any reference…
Read More what could possibly go wrong?I think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang’s blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there’s a great movie to be made here – the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests…
Read More review of a movie that doesn’t exist yet