Here’s an interesting story about US efforts to aid the Syrian rebels. Especially this bit: A centerpiece of the effort this year focused on getting Iraq to close its airspace to Iran-to-Syria flights that U.S. intelligence concluded were carrying arms for Assad loyalists—contrary to flight manifests saying they held cut flowers… One example of the…
Read More O RLY?The CDR high is powerfully addictive. See also the Malte Spitz stasimulator. Alan West doesn’t quite say that the sudden appearance and sudden disappearance of the “defence black hole” has a lot to do with clever accounting, but gets a lot of the way there. Jamie Kenny explains why Chinese doctors smoke. Noahopinion and Facts…
Read More linksIt’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.
Read More MeetupAnother 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 fingerprintsSo 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 narrativeErik 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 mujahideenSo 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 RefusalI 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 memoryHere’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 experienceIt’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
Read More Music.