I just read an article on a newspaper website about a New Politics that is apparently coming. The article came recommended by people I (still) respect, and was written by a commentator who is sincere, diligent and intelligent. And you know where this is going.... The article was, if not actually pants, then, well, pants-adjacent.... Continue Reading →
Will you marram me? Of “grassroots” and the need for commitment mechanisms.
Marram. This is a new word to me, thanks to Sarah Moss, in her rather excellent 2018 work Ghost Wall. According to Wikipedia... Ammophila (synonymous with Psamma P. Beauv.) is a genus of flowering plants consisting of two or three very similar species of grasses. The common names for these grasses include marram grass, bent... Continue Reading →
Book! Carbon Capture and Storage in the United Kingdom: History, Policies and Politics
This book (title is self-explanatory) has just come out. You can see table of contents etc (and buy it!) here. The history of CCS is (imho) both fascinating and important. CCS has a lot longer history than many of its advocates (and opponents) understand. This book is not the final word on the subject, but... Continue Reading →
Top bantz about writing to your MP…
This is good. Maybe you can try writing to your MP, but there doesn’t really seem to be much point doing that unless you happen to collect headed paper with some rote spiel dismissing your concerns printed on it. Props to Tom Whyman - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/18/britain-diy-tickets-illnesses-services-society See also Viable Democracy by Michael Margolis
Three quotes about how bureaucrats see (and shape) the world…
So, have recently read two books - Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe (I wish I'd read this when I was protesting about Newbury in 1996!) and The Last of the Country House Murders by Emma Tennant (very weird, in a good way. Kind of a cross over between The Year of the Sex... Continue Reading →
750 words: neologisms, foreign muck, medical, etc
I've got a little list. It's of words I hadn't encountered before, or had encountered by had never really got the hang of. It includes made up words ("wangst" is a favourite), medical terms, philosophy, foreign stuff (lots of Japanese, oddly), flora and fauna, and so on. You can see almost all of those words... Continue Reading →
Admiral Ackbar admonishes ahistorical anarchists
Horizontalism is a trap. And I want to emphasize rather strongly that this is not some academic point. As an unnamed Egyptian revolutionary puts it: "In New York or Paris, if you do a horizontal, leaderless, and post-ideological uprising, and it doesn't work out, you just get a media or academic career afterward. Out here... Continue Reading →
“unworldly men trading in third-hand ideas and verbal trinkets” Ooof.
This from the novel "Bad Timing" (based on a script for a controversial film starring Art Garfunkel, Theresa Russell, Denholm Elliott and Harvey Keitel, directed by Nicolas Roeg. I found myself thinking that if I couldn’t seduce some hyper-intelligent professor from New York then I didn’t know New York, or academics, never having met a... Continue Reading →
Of Braudel, Boeing and asset-stripping: crucial tools for understanding what’s going on.
Items discussed Doctorow, C. 2024. We may not know what’s in the box: but we can tell if it’s been damaged in transit. March 25 Tkacik, M. 2024. Suicide Mission. The American Prospect, March 28 Davies, W. 2024. Anti-market. London Review of Books, vol 46, no 7 These three articles will, separately and especially together,... Continue Reading →
Random words from this week
So, I have a page on this site called "vocabulation", and a gdrive spreadsheet of the same name. To each I add words (neologisms, foreign, obscure, whatever) that I did not know. No, I am not a bit strange at all. Why do you ask? Anyhow, here's the latest list to be added. Aasvogel -... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 