So we’re having a moment about John Boyd: The really interesting thing about the Dom Cummings appointment is that we now have someone in charge of No10 who is a devotee of Col. John Boyd, whose central thesis was to confuse your enemy and do the opposite of what they expect (1/4). — Damian McBride…
Read More Round and Round the OODA Loop: Folk Boyd and the BrexitersSo what about that Office for Students and the twat, then? I promised Paul Bernal off the twitter a blog post, and here it is. The thing is, it wasn’t just the ‘social media vetting’ that was the problem with Toby Young. Anyone with an ounce of knowledge about him knew he was wholly inappropriate…
Read More Everyone Hates the Phone Company: The Purpose of the Office for StudentsThe Grauniad Dabatlog has produced a rather fancy network visualisation of the sources cited in Anders Behring Breivik’s personal manifesto/horse-shit compendium. This is great as I now don’t need to worry that I perhaps should have made one. It’s very pretty and you can click on stuff, and see that some of the sources are…
Read More discovering the axis of barkingChina’s neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K. For instance, Gao Yi, a well-known music critic, tweeted: “Compared with a war, US$7 billion is much more worthwhile. Right now, we lack the off-shore staging capacity for a mid-intensity war. A well-known music critic? Now that’s special. You don’t get detailed comment on the Royal…
Read More as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipadNow here’s a worthwhile Canadian initiative for you, from here. And he names the guilty men.
Read More operationalising postmodernismJohn “War Nerd” Dolan got a job, as a lecturer at the American University of Iraq. Hilarity ensued. You bet. It’s a tale of un-fantastic right-wing academics, a kind of glaring dullness, a total lack of character, and an endless supply of raw cash. It so happens that John needed that more than anything else,…
Read More Why are these scumbags so scummy?The Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyThe Book Red Plenty is a fictionalised history, or possibly a work of hard historical science fiction, which covers what it describes as the “fifties’ Soviet dream” but which might be better termed the Soviet sixties – the period from Khrushchev’s consolidation of power to the first crackdown on the dissidents and the intervention in…
Read More Review: Francis Spufford’s Red PlentyOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of busesOK, so we took the piss out of the Policy Exchange crowd for seeing reds under the seats on the bendy buses. The group rights agenda. But the interesting thing about the Borisbus is that in a sense, it bears Dean Godson and Andy Gilligan out – design and architecture are, of course, deeply political…
Read More shower jobby: the politics of buses