Alternate Seat of TYR

Anyone remember this post from March last year? The Tories somehow managed to swing a deal on the freehold of their HQ in Smith Square that would have left them paying a yield of 6.42% to the buyer, a £2.2m hit to cashflow. I had originally had the impression that the deal had been suspiciously [...]

It’s come to my attention, again, that the fine Samuel Smith’s Brewery of Tadcaster, West Yorkshire produces beer that a nontrivial number of bloggers enjoy and recommend. Smiths is best-known outside Yorkshire and the real ale community for the clutch of pubs it owns in central London, much favoured for their low prices and scruffy [...]

I recall a fellow student at RHUL, an American, who argued constantly that this-or-that detail of Chinese economic growth meant that democracy in China was imminent and George Bush was right. So thought Thomas Friedman, whose The Lexus and the Olive Tree was at the time a set text on our course (MSc International Relations!). [...]

Because, on top of one of ‘em, there’s a great big phased-array radar, pointing right down to Saudi Arabia. Check out this paper by Pavel Podvig of RussianForces, and scroll right to the bottom for the radar coverage map. Alternatively, there’s this Globalsecurity.org page, which is rather out of date. But the key point is [...]

Via comments at Our Word, Rob makes this excellent point.
It’s always struck me as a serious tactical mistake for those on the left to argue against laissez-faire on the grounds that it deprives people of economic security, because this hands a powerful rhetoric of liberty to the right, who basically only care about it for [...]

Failed states and warzones, like Iraq, create a plume of violence downwind of them, like burning oilwells. Iraqslogger:
Sulaimaniyah, Feb 17, (VOI)- Iraq’s Kurdistan region border guards arrested on Saturday two persons while trying to smuggle arms to Iran, an official at Sulaimaniyah border guards department said. “The border guards arrested today two persons trying [...]

BBC News:
UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the operation to hand over frontline security in Basra to Iraqi troops had been “completed” and been “successful”.
Asked about reports he would announce within weeks an effective halving of UK troop numbers in Iraq, he told the BBC’s Sunday AM: “Let’s wait and see.”
He said Iraqi [...]

Simulated Laughter reads an al-Qa’ida document and asks if the terrorist disorganisation is moving to a new phase of “lone wolf” individualised terrorism. They argue that this would be a very bad thing. I disagree. I suspect the core of the disagreement is probably a cognitive framework issue.
Laughter argues that the worst acts of terrorism, [...]

Remember this post?
It looks to me like they cut back their activities over Christmas, whilst it was on the table. But now, with this explicitly rejected, and the talk of “the 80 per cent solution” and such..well, all that keeps it from being a betrayal is that there was no explicit offer, at least [...]

This is now getting silly. Admiral Fallon, the head of CENTCOM, is saying that he has no idea who might be smuggling weapons into Iraq. General Pace of the JCS says he hasn’t seen any evidence that the Iranian government is involved or even merely complicit. One wonders who the people at the “anonymous briefing” [...]