I'm not happy that the Danes have just reinstituted their border controls. I have no idea yet what this will mean to train traffic across the Oresund. We shall see on Thursday when we go to pick up the parents from Kastrup.

One of the writers at Lawyers Guns & Money has run a policy simulation based on a scenario that posits the emergence of Vampires. Well worth a read ( Read more... )

Having given my yearly donation to the British Legion I've been wearing my poppy around the office. Most of the Swedes have given me curious looks but have avoided asking about it, except for one who said 'I saw your Prime Minister wearing one of those; what is it ( Read more... )

As a friend has pointed out to me on several occasions, the BNP's emergence might not be a blip on the political radar but an electoral corrective. We forget that the old NF's collapse coincided with the rise of Thatcher. Her rightward rhetoric drew off much of the National Front's racist support. It was widely understood by the bigots that she was ( Read more... )

I wonder whether some people saw the same QT as me, or were the BNP faithful out in force this morning? These comments are from the Times Online website:
Chris K wrote ( Read more... )

Is it me, or is last night's Question Time one of those occasions where everyone comes out feeling as if they had a win? Nick Griffin can play the martyr to his party, the major parties can feel as if they gave him a kicking and the government and papers can trash-talk the BBC. Meanwhile the Beeb execs are doing conga lines at the ratings and can ( Read more... )

Wow. Jack Straw just pwned Nick Griffin with his promise to protect him from the French and German governments.

Do any of you remember the brouhaha a month or two back when that goosestepping arschloch Nick Griffin used an image of a Polish Spitfire for the BNP roadshow? Well, it turns out that the artist who made the Spitfire model is my new colleage Anders, a Polish-born Swede who has been buddying me through my first days at Ubisoft ( Read more... )

I'm currently in the middle of Mark Thompson's history The White War about the Italian front in World War One. This is less a military history and more a political history of how a newly unified Italy tried to forge a national identity through a series of foreign misadventures, culminating in the ill-advised attack on Austria in 1915. There is much ( Read more... )

In Foreign Policy Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason draw sobering parallels between Afghanistan and Vietnam. What struck me most was this graf:
As Andrew Krepinevich noted many years ago, the army failed in Vietnam because it insisted on fighting a war of maneuver to "find, fix, and destroy" the enemy (with what became known as "search and destroy ( Read more... )