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If you want something completely weird, try this. The Swiss government is still so furious about the whole business with the whistleblower who sold German tax authorities a stack of CD-ROMs with lists of tax evaders that they had their intelligence service spy on the German excisemen. But German counterintelligence found out about it somehow.…

Here’s a good rant against bloat and ad-tracking and everything else Maciej Cieglowski has been warning you about for years. Now, somewhere on Twitter I saw @annehelen asking why it didn’t say anything about the look and feel of the nutter right’s websites. And I also saw this project, where a classic Cranky Old Engineer…

Thinking about Michael Howard’s interview fart over the weekend, I done a twitter and they liked it: Remember when politics was all about minutely planned grids, media training, and message discipline, and everyone said it was terrible? — Alex Harrowell (@yorksranter) April 2, 2017 And then I remembered the sheer weirdness of standing in Parliament…

So I went to the Royal Academy’s Russia exhibition yesterday, which led to me looking up oligarch/collector Petr Aven on Wikipedia. He’s Mikhail Fridman’s business partner in Alfa Group, which means ironically enough I was looking at paintings belonging to the guy whose employees built a whole fake website to confuse me about their ownership…

So I’m watching the chute, and then the experimenters chuck down this pellet, which turns out to be some sort of libertarian riffing off my Neo-Edwardians post around the idea that perhaps the move away from a simple, Posh vs. Oiks politics is to do with the rise of post-scarcity, idea dear to the hearts…

This is a cracking piece of work from the Bellingcat gang. It’s also quite possibly the most grimly 2016 thing of 2016 – having to do OSINT verification on a 7-year old girl’s Twitter from the siege of Aleppo, because the trolls are denying she ever existed.

Here’s a long read on Peter Thiel’s brilliant scheme to pull brilliant young people out of boring old university and get them to take risks! with skin in the game! on the big technologies of the future. And what have they delivered? The short answer would be the square root of fuck-all. The slightly longer…

So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved so…

A thought: every political party contains what Karl Popper would call a closed system of knowledge, rather as Lloyd George said each man has a House of Lords in his own head. This system incorporates the symbols of its identity and the tropes of its internal culture. The party also, however, must needs contain an…

So here’s the disgraced Liam Fox being all rah-rah about globalisation and free trade. You’d think in that case he’d be pretty keen on: A single market without barriers—visible or invisible—giving you direct and unhindered access to the purchasing power of over 300 million of the world’s wealthiest and most prosperous people. Bigger than Japan.…