It has now been a year and a half since I moved to France. I am not going to bore you with all the domestic challenges the move caused me, do not worry, but I need to mention this since I have only just begun to explore life in France. This post about France will [...]

The British edition of Body of Secrets, James Bamford’s second book about the US National Security Agency, gives equal billing to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the subtitle, but that’s just marketing, making the home audience feel good. The same subtitle also alludes to Echelon, an eavesdropping program that was on its way to [...]

Upon Reading the First Ninth of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle
It is a Frolick, a Cornucopia of interesting things, a narrative of the discovery of the calculus, scientific feuds, dissection, Religious Dissent, changing fashions in art, the return of comedy to the English stage, computation, coinage, banking and much, much more. One of the Leading Characters, [...]

The last week has seen the ‘great US ousourcing debate’ hit both new highs, and new lows. On the plus side would be the declarations of the oft maligned Greg Mankiw to the effect that the “outsourcing” of jobs is beneficial to the United States economy (even with the qualification ‘perhaps’ this has merit - [...]

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

Book Review:
The Tainted Source
by John Laughland
A while back, I discovered that my great-grandfather’s estate in Ukraine, Apanlee, figures in a novel which is something of a favourite among neo-Nazis and Aryan supremacists. This led me to a number of websites that I wouldn’t regularly have frequented, including the Zundelsite and Stormfront’s webpage. There [...]

One thing that I’ve often heard in a half decade or so living and working in Europe is that Americans have no sense of place. Sometimes the idea is asserted that crudely, sometimes equally crudely in a different form: America is too young to have real history, thus Americans have no sense of history and [...]