Archive for August 2006

I've just posted a new review, of John Gray's brief study, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. The title seems to have been moulded a little by publishing opportunism; fair enough. The meat of the matter is the delusions that modern political currents, such as Marxism and... More »

The recent conflict between Israel and Hezbollah on the Lebanese border has seen the usual absence of depth and context in the majority of mainstream media coverage. Riding on unquestioned waves of habit and unconscious history, we're usually satisfied with the sensational froth of righteousness, anger, vilification, violence, and devastation.... More »

I'm up late getting a website ready for someone in Australia who's going to be up soon. Just had (and am still having) a pleasant diversion in the form of some kind of marimba-playing gathering in the communal back garden on my street. A wonderful sound to drift in the... More »

Back in the mid-nineties (do shoot me if I say that more than once a year) I happened across a website by some people calling themselves Team Satan. They made crop circles. I've never been that interested in crop circles, despite my penchant for paranormality in the West Country, but... More »

Via the Peak Energy blog, I just read this interesting debunking (at another "Peak Energy" blog) of Bruce Sterling's recent bigging up of ethanol as a viable bio-fuel. I'm not an energy scientist, but it seems like a duty for anyone claiming to be interested in where the world's at to... More »

Where do you start with Ann Coulter? The answer is, you don't. You smile wryly, realize that life is too short for certain things, and walk away. However, rubbernecker that I am, I just spent a short time reading about this extreme right-wing American media figure, just to see what the... More »

Well, last night's post was well timed. I swear, I know nothing about it. (I should stress that I knew nothing about it, as I'm slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered... More »

In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States. John Mueller, 'A False Sense of Insecurity?' Via WorldChanging.com, I just read this report (PDF)... More »

Getting close to completion of the first Dreamflesh Journal has got me thinking about the print stuff I've done in the past. I've realised I really should make all my old, out-of-print stuff available as PDF eBooks. So here's the first: a new eBook edition of Verbeia: Goddess of Wharfedale. You... More »

Being blissfully bereft of television these days, I do tend to miss the odd nugget of goodness that occasionally drifts by in that stream of sewage. DVD rental serves well for intelligent, entertaining trash. And it seems that YouTube and Google Video, copyrights notwithstanding, are stepping in more and more... More »