coming up…

May 25, 2009 in books

Just to say that next week we’ll be reviewing David Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerrilla.

no data for some

May 25, 2009 in Viktor

OK, this space should be occupied by a visualisation showing time series of airlines in the Viktorfeed by week, which ought to show what happened to BGIA’s share of the business. But IBM ManyEyes is down or at least not up, the data hardly fits on an OpenOffice spreadsheet in any sensible way, so you’ll [...]

don’t leave me hanging on the telephone

May 25, 2009 in GSM, hacker, Internet, open source, ORGANISE, protest

An idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it. Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co. Observation 2: Political campaigns of all [...]

Review: Alistair Crooke, “Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution”

May 25, 2009 in 4GW, books, class, command, communism, conservatives, cultures of war, democracy, economics, empire, ideology

Resistance – The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke’s survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such [...]

firefox

May 25, 2009 in geekage, open source

Whining about Firefox crashes. Here’s one day last week: Start 0930 1515 – 5 groups, 111 tabs. Pressed page down key; CRASH. Resume successful. 1538 – Hang. RAM usage peaks at 66%, CPU 1 goes to 100% 1541 – Running, very slowly. Resource utilisation still very high 1542 – Hang 1550 – Cache cleared, normal [...]

For constituency work

May 25, 2009 in ideology, politics, press, protest, special relationships

What is all this whining about MPs doing constituency work? It seems to be conventional wisdom across the more fogeyish commentators (Simon Jenkins, Vernon Bogdanor etc) that members of the Commons are spending too much time representing the interests of their constituents; no article on the upshot of the great expenses row is complete without [...]

news-style product

May 25, 2009 in press

I recall saying about the British press’s coverage of the US elections that, in contrast to 2004 when the British papers were where you went to for actual information, this time around they delivered the most anodyne and skewed conventional wisdom possible, just three days late. They’re still at it. Journalism! If you were going [...]

oh, the interwebs

May 25, 2009 in press

Journalism! Where would we be without it? You can already see some of the risks of a country reliant on the internet without the traditional checks and balances provided by the professional standards of established journalism. During last year’s US election, several stories whirled through the media sourced to one political pundit, Martin Eisenstadt. You [...]

disgusting reptile creep bully tribal predator snout

May 17, 2009 in fisking

Craig Murray seems to have taken a blog pill. Britain’s most disgusting journalist, New Labour creep and Jack Straw cheerleader Michael White, is on Sky News trying to justify his New Labour chums… That information comes from two sources both of which I trust not at all – White and a New Labour minister. … [...]

firedump: S9-DAE

May 17, 2009 in Operation Firedump

Our old friend S9-DAE, Ilyushin-76 serial 83483513, has been scrapped at Fujairah last month.