The Bourne Ultimatum remains one of the best thriller movies of all-time (with almost the emotional punch of the film that came before - The Bourne Supremacy). Early on, amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne meets up - at Waterloo station - with a journalist who has grabbed hold of a piece of the cover story and... Continue Reading →
Blah blah heated exchanges on Twitter- and more heat than light, because, well, that’s what a) the platform encourages and b) some people want/are capable of. Blah blah Tbf, that my doomer-rants will trigger some people is to be expected. After all, I am pointing out - with sark, snark and manly certainty - that... Continue Reading →
For those who haven't had the pleasure, the late Tony Gramsci (Italian Marxist, died in one of Mussolini's jails before the war) had a way with words. One of the phrases that gets, ah, trotted out is the following - "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new... Continue Reading →
The post I dashed off yesterday, about the Van Gogh action, has had some pick-up. Thank you to those folks who retweeted it, especially to those who did not necessarily agree with all/most/much of it, but saw it as a useful contribution. It has meant some good conversations with people I already knew, and also... Continue Reading →
Uggh. a) I have COVID b) I have had enough of climate "activists" and their gormless miss-the-point-"debates" about individual versus "top-down" action. The love-and-light brigade tell us our individual footprints matter, that we need to "be the change we want to see". They ignore the corporates (indeed, blah blah BP invented carbon footprints blah blah)... Continue Reading →
I am re-reading the extraordinary World War 2 memoir "The Other Side of Time" by Brendan Phibbs. It is at least as good as I have remembered and said to various people. Easily among the top ten books I have ever read. This excerpt below comes after some American soldiers have died needlessly in a... Continue Reading →
Whose fault is the mess we are in? Good question, and it's more of a Murder on the Orient Express type thing that some would have you believe. It's also - and this is ironic given how much certain people bang on about systems, and system collapse - about synergies and mutually-reinforcing loops. Very quickly.... Continue Reading →
"The common man (sic) "must not come to see nature as a mine and his future salvation as a rocket ride to Mars..." So came the warning in 1968, in an issue of Nebraska Law Review The Necessity to Change Man's Traditional View of Nature" by Earl Finbar Murphy, 1968 I don't know what particular... Continue Reading →
You read it here first. Or second, if you get the FT Weekend and say the advert in "FT Money" on August 27th. (It may be one they have been running for a while). Got your sickbag ready? No, seriously, this is your first and last trigger warning. I could insert something here about how... Continue Reading →
Someone pointed me at a reddit group where people swap links about the pending ecological debacle (no longer pending, actually, has solidly arrived). In it was this heart-breaker of a comment, entirely accurate. https://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/wb41zu/comment/ii6gczm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 "We are solidly on the RCP 8 path and I have to work hard to not freak out about it often.... Continue Reading →
