Archive for November, 2008
Strangely, there has been little mention in the media that the Government is talking Iraq withdrawal blues again. It’s being mentioned in news reports, in passing, as if this was certain already; the dates mentioned are some time next year. Well, that’s all good; but this of course raises the question of Iraqi employees. We [...]
I’ve long been sceptical of the UAV future. Basically, back in 2005, I reckoned that as the things get more complicated their advantages over manned aircraft disappear; the biggest advantage is that they are meant to be expendable, and things that are expendable get expended. Therefore the loss rate is much higher, both from enemy [...]
Packer vs. Kilcullen in the New Yorker. Here’s the key paragraph:
Police are another main issue. We have built the Afghan police into a less well-armed, less well-trained version of the Army and launched them into operations against the insurgents. Meanwhile, nobody is doing the job of actual policing—rule of law, keeping the population safe from [...]
An interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team’s original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. (“Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs,” said the [...]
Quite a score for our reader “Ajay”, who I think is the first to spot that the Mumbai terrorist attack bears a very close resemblance to the coup plot in Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, which makes it the third and possibly fourth case of someone actually using Forsyth’s book as a practical handbook. [...]
The Rude Pundit has a very good point.
You can’t even picture Obama pardoning a fucking turkey. Sure, he’ll probably do it. But unlike Bush, who approached such obligations with dunce-like glee, for Obama it’ll be like a kick in the groin.
As usual with Rude, there’s a serious point here, sneaking past the guards while [...]
Back in the spring of 1997, the sterling trade-weighted index stood at 93, exactly the average since 1990, and the deficit (PSBR at the time) was 8% of GDP (See note). This, according to the Conservative Party, was a golden legacy Labour were squandering. Now, the sterling trade-weighted index is at 93, exactly the average [...]
Oh dear, oh dear.
A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.
That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in [...]
Various people asked what would happen if I excluded London and Northern Ireland from the BNP analysis. Here’s a table showing the R-squared for each factor, first for the whole data set and then excluding these two outliers. (After all, who needs statistical analysis to know those two are weird?)
Factor
R-Squared
R-Squared Excluding NI, London
Immigration
0.0364
0.0810
Emigration
0.0330
0.0460
Migration
0.0343
0.0843
Services % GDP
0.0639
0.0009
Industry [...]
Arms Control Wonk has been running a series on how Iranian missiles work and how well. It’s bloody brilliant; go read, and you’ll come away thinking you could maybe start your own launcher project. Elsewhere, incredible interview with Bill Janeway about the financial crisis, Ministry of Truth on Baby P, Felix Salmon spanks rightwing mythology [...]
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