Video from remote control helicopter shows the extent of flooding in Frankwell, #Shrewsbury. http://t.co/R8UUl6HtSx pic.twitter.com/FcqHL3qfYV — Shropshire Star (@ShropshireStar) February 10, 2014 OK, so the weird weather and infrastructure crisis exacerbated by the Galbraithian combination of private affluence and public squalor is being monitored by the local newspaper using a web platform for 140-character snarkfarts…
Read More ProliferationI seem to remember having said I worried about this government’s response to a major crisis like the floods of 2007. The current situation shows all the basic flaws in the government. Our key source for this post is the Daily Hell. First up, we have the lack of administrative grip. This lot are routinely…
Read More So we found out how the coalition would perform in a crisisCharles Murray, as far as I can make out, has dropped racism in favour of old-school reactionary elitism. It’s not that other races are inferior, any more, it’s that the race, in general, is inferior. I understand this to mean he’s realised that Gang A are no closer to the White House than they were…
Read More A novel theory of the business cycle, with an old critiqueI have been reading Orlando Figes’ Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia. Something I didn’t know, which I’m sure Erik Lund will like: Siberia moved. The original minor khanate of that name expanded to include the vast rich fur-bearing forests further east. As colonisation, and most of all, identity-changing, hybridity, and syncretism, proceeded, the…
Read More Where is Siberia? Well, I wouldn’t start from now…So, Patti Smith played Cadogan Hall. This sounds incongruous, but according to her gloss of Mapplethorpe in Just Kids he’d have fit right into the Sloane Square crowd. Even though as a visual artist he had patrons who wanted mithering, while she had a job and then a paying public*, he was a killer snob.…
Read More Thursday Music Post, On ThursdaySo George Lakoff is interviewed in the paper. This thread discusses (facebook warning). My opinion is requested. “The progressive mindset is screwing up the world. The progressive mindset is guaranteeing no progress on global warming. The progressive mindset is saying, ‘Yes, fracking is fine.’ The progressive mindset is saying, ‘Yes, genetically modified organisms are OK’,…
Read More I disagree with George Lakoff. Greenpeace knows propagandaThere’s a lot of interesting stuff in this Randeep Ramesh piece in the Grauniad. However, the coalition is concerned that these levels of building will not meet the demand for properties, particularly in south-east England where outright normal home ownership is not an option for many. So [Danny] Alexander and his Tory cabinet colleague Eric…
Read More Two simple plans – mine and anotherIain Martin has done a book about the Royal Bank of Scotland, entitled Making it Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy after their corporate slogan from the boom era. I’m gradually reading the books that fell out of the banksplosion, and I would rate this one not as…
Read More Making It Happen: How Thatcherism Just Happened Like That And It Was Nobody’s FaultFreakyTrigger recalls the Chemical Brothers’ Setting Sun going No.1. I associate myself entirely with the following sentiments: If you’d have asked me in 1996 who my favourite band was, I’d have said the Chemical Brothers, without hesitation. I was 15 and knew next to nothing about dance culture or psychedelia or hip-hop but their music…
Read More Music.Some technology links. This is a fabulously weird and awful idea, and it’s probably for the best someone did it as art before someone made a startup. In January, 2013, she moved to Portland, Oregon, a city where she barely knew anyone, and went on sixteen first dates. For each date, she streamed audio and…
Read More Links, sciency