Blue Streak, Black Arrow

April 20, 2008 in electronics, geekage, history

Bill Higgins is boasting about buying a very cool secondhand book indeed; Manned Spaceflight Operations, stamped “Edwards Air Force Base”.
I’ll see that, and raise him the best comment ever. We didn’t track down the Texas Instruments thing, but Colin in comments brought us this:
Well, I watched this one: In the bad old 60’s when tubes [...]

Bourgeois COIN

April 20, 2008 in 4GW, funny ha ha

The Independent has been doing a great job tracking a crucial new trend of our times; the way modern counterinsurgent practitioners are making common features of suburban life into quiet weapons against the common enemy. 12th April:
Under the protection programme, sometimes called School Councils or School Shuras, villagers agree to provide a small quota of [...]

You’re fit, but don’t you just know it…

April 20, 2008 in Rugby League, banter, beer, mindless violence

Time for some rugby league blogging, right? I saw London knock Castleford out of the cup on Saturday, and I can report that I’m beginning to think London (sorry, sorry, Harlequins RL) are getting to be dangerous. Cas dominated the first half and went in 12-0 up, but ended up with a 42-14 thrashing. They [...]

hey hey hey, ring ring ring

April 20, 2008 in 4GW, NI, books, cultures of war, engineering, terrorism

This looks like a must-read; Kevin Myers’ personal history of 1970s Belfast, complete with fundamentalist landladies, Provos concerned about the morality of using a condom in the initiator for a carbomb, the only civil war in history where both sides were receiving welfare benefits from the same government, the UDA as the only terrorists in [...]

The Bombardment of Walthamstow Rages On

April 20, 2008 in France, banter, fisking, ideology, mastur/metablogging, moral horror, naval, personal history, pirates, politics

This NYT story is nonsense. Various rightwing barkies have taken the opportunity of the French armed forces’ deliciously 007-esque mission to rescue the sailing yacht Le Ponant to tout the following story around the media: the Royal Navy has been ordered not to detain pirates under any circumstances, for fear that they might something or [...]

Announcement: TYR RanterCon, 17th April

April 15, 2008 in London, admin, beer, mastur/metablogging

Here is the news; we’re meeting up on Thursday, the 17th April, after 1900 at the Globe pub in Southwark. Here’s a map; your nearest Tube station is Borough. There is no dress code, but I’ve been asked to put the whole thing under Chatham House rules (you can say what was said, but you [...]

You Say Virgin, We Say Die!

April 14, 2008 in Internet, action, censorship, computer, dayjob, geekage, networks, politics, protest

So, after the Phorm evilhood, and the weird brokenness detailed here, and the 30-odd hour no-notice outage they dropped on me just after I started working from home, literally driving me to drink (the nearest operational open WLAN I found was in a pub), now Virgin Media comes up with this. It’s not just the [...]

The real minimal state

April 13, 2008 in 4GW, Zimbabwe, politics, protest, theory

Well, I never imagined Robert Mugabe’s new survival gambit would be just to pretend it wasn’t happening. But it does permit us to answer the question of just how small a state can get and still function; to be clear, I don’t mean a state in the juridical/diplomatic sense, but rather in the political, realist [...]

….here I am!

April 13, 2008 in China, Met, Yorkshire, action, banter, ideology, immigration, managerialism, politics, protest, special relationships, sport

I have been away, cutting down to only very restricted Internet/computing usage, and living in a district that would make Abu Muq piss his baggy pants. (Walthamstow, he says. You’ve never been to Bradford, have you?) Which is amusing, because (as in every poor/immigrant ‘hood in Europe) every second business is a mobile phone/computer shop. [...]

Torture Lawyers

April 4, 2008 in Afghanistan, Blair, Iraq, conservatives, crime, cultures of war, ideology, moral horror, my own ignorance, personal history, special relationships, torture, updated

If you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It’s all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn’t want to know (the [...]