Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count - an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad [...]

It’s polling day in Iran and

I’ve been asked to crosspost this from my blog…
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, [...]

The antiliberal collective have a good data thread going on; it’s been interesting listening to the BBC Radio feed on one brain interface and reading actual data on another, an experience that reminds just how conventionalised the news experience is. Based on the numbers, it looks like the EPP-ED parties have held their own and [...]

I have just been reading Misha Glenny’s McMafia. It is excellent; an intelligent tour through the criminal landscape that emerged since the late 1980s, driven by a combination of globalisation, un-globalisation, technical change, and the usual things that fertilise big crime. We hear about the early history of the modern Russian mafia, how the UN [...]

An interesting post on the reaction from the late-Stalinist Soviet Union towards what was about to become the ECSC/EEC-and-beyond. It seems that the Soviet leadership was much more concerned about the European Defence Community proposal, an eventual failure, than the economic, social, and administrative/political version. But then, this was Europe ten years after the war; [...]

Those horrible surveillance proposals came up again in the European Parliament, and got shot down again. Even though their co-author Syed Kamall did come out against some forms of mass surveillance, I promised I’d look into the two British Conservative MEPs who keep doing this. Anyway, so we’ve got Syed Kamall and Malcolm Harbour, and [...]

An unexpected consequence of the North Korean attempted satellite launch was that it has demonstrated that Russian early-warning radar coverage is poor. Specifically, the Russians didn’t detect the North Korean launch at all; they picked up the object during its suborbital flight, but not during its ascent. This is worrying, because it suggests two things [...]

China’s top climate change negotiator wants the Chinese export sector to be excluded from their targets, and “consumers to pay” instead. This is not good news.
For a start, the tactics. It means accepting the principle of letting some special interests off. We know, after all, that there will be the mother of all lobbying wars [...]

The French government is moving its ministry of defence, pulling a whole gaggle of institutions together into a “French Pentagon” to be built on an old Navy site in the suburbs of Paris. Obviously there are the usual complaints, but this is interesting. Jean-Dominique Merchet’s Sécret Défense reports that they are going to knock down [...]