Thinking about my last post brought one of the ideas in this one to mind, especially given today’s front page. That is, was the miners’ strike a strategic bombing campaign? You what? But consider the strategy the NUM adopted. The basic idea was to concentrate on the supply of coal to the steel industry –…
Read More the 1980s considered as a battle in the air war over GermanySwinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny’s of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine’s thesis here that China’s emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world. It’s surely time we started calling the…
Read More MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the WeekDid the UK and France get around the Missile Technology Control Regime in order to sell Saudi Arabia the Stormshadow air-launched cruise missile just by draining off some of the fuel to get the range under a key number? This should probably get more publicity than it has.
Read More at last, a post with rocketsThere’s a good story to be told (somewhat in the New New mode) about the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo Station. It’s basically as follows: after the Eurostars moved to the new St. Pancras, the thrillingly modern structure Nicholas Grimshaw gave them was abandoned to rot by “Sir” Brian Souter’s privatised train empire and eventually…
Read More outrage turns out not so outrageous and actually quite sensibleMy lobbying project has been entered in the Open Data Challenge! Someone posted this to the MySociety list, with rather fewer than the advertised 36 hours left. I was at a wedding and didn’t read it at the time. After my partner and I had tried to invent a tap routine to the back end…
Read More meet Project LobsterReally. Seven months. Six updates including a major version. Still no fucking blogger import into WordPress. Why is this being such a fucking pain? Does anyone know if Movabletype (or whatever) has a working importer? Note that solutions that involve downloading the complete TYR Classic and then re-uploading it over home “Very” ADSL are not…
Read More pointless whiningQuiggin is discussing why some things are neo- and others are post-. How do we deal with the current revival of high modernism (see Owen Hatherley’s blog and indeed his career, the proliferating Mid-Century Modern groups on Flickr, the wave of preservation campaigns for mid-20th century landmarks)? It’s obviously silly to call it post-modernism and…
Read More post-IKEA and indeed post-furnitureStop! Don’t do it, man! Barclays is the UK’s most powerful single private lobby with a weighted network degree of 0.36. The Co-Op Bank is on 0.003 – 120 times less lobbyish. Really. Obviously, nothing in this post should be taken to condone or encourage such irresponsible, inconsiderate, and basically stupid behaviour. Especially not as…
Read More why we fightOK, so there’s a month to go before del.icio.us gets sold and anyone who hasn’t agreed to the new Ts & Cs gets zapped. I asked this on Quora but so far haven’t had a useful reply. I know the Ts & Cs are substantially different, but is there anything in them that should dissuade…
Read More lazyweb: terms and conditionsSo it must be time for a non-Thursday music link. New Order “Beach Buggy”. Not sure if this counts as a remix – IIRC it actually predates Blue Monday. It’s certainly a far better version of the same theme. Also, this rocks although I found it looking for a shareable version of something else. They’re…
Read More it’s not Thursday…