Summer looms. Attention wanders. A somewhat unthematic BBRU this week.
Let’s start – where else? – with everyone’s favourite subject. Russian spies.
One of the very best UK blogs in terms of energy and insight is Spy Blog: Watching Them, Watching Us. And it delivers this fascinating technical account of issues to do with false identities, including this more than helpful tip concerning the information your passport emits:
This laminated page has a stupid embedded contactless chip and antenna loop, which act as a "let's blab the nationality and / or unique passport number to anybody with cheap unlicensed band radio frequency equipment" device, even before any encrypted data is sent between the chip and the passport reader equipment.
It has already been demonstrated that this can be done at ranges of several tens of metres, way beyond the few centimetres that the Passport and Passport reader equipment require. It therefore puts British travellers at risk of covert surveillance and tracking, as they pass by unseen detection equipment, operated by anybody with access to some cheap electronics…
Spy Blog recommends, that just as with Oyster Travel Cards in London, you use aluminium metal foil etc. to line your Passport cover, so as to prevent this chip being sneakily detected or read, except when you are actually presenting it at passport control.
Then there’s the aimless disaster that is English football. How can anyone take seriously a manager who tries to deal with an urgent two-goal deficit, takes off a proven Tottenham striker and brings on an elderly lumberer known to be unable to score at England level?
The Football Blog sadly picks through the wreckage.
And Osama Saeed muses from a Scottish vantage-point on the issue of how far one should root for one’s neighbour.
Who would want to miss the start of the English Premier League, when our domestic dopes have good foreign players to support them and so start scoring again? HM Ambassador in Kyiv (as Kiev is known these days) Leigh Turner urges Ukrainians to apply in good time for UK visas.
Feeling peckish after all that TV World Cup stuff? Get advice from a leading Cheese blog.
If people are increasingly stupid, at least cars are increasingly smart. According to Longrider.
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The new UK government is aiming to cut government spending.
Despite the evident folly of Big Government, some people are wary of doing anything about it. Lenin’s Tomb burbles on about women and work and the sexualisation of labour:
… in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional' … Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves.
What?! Since when is expecting employees of any gender to be charming and positive a bad thing? At least this lumpen Marxism is somewhat droll:
I suggested previously that the phrase 'work-life balance' inadvertently revealed something about work under capitalism, namely the fact that the majority of one's waking hours are not spent alive, but labouring in a sort of undead capacity.
If work and life are separate and opposing modes of existence, then the tendency of the former to increasingly dominate the latter outside of formal working hours, structuring our 'fun', commanding and regulating our socialisation, governing how we conduct ourselves in public, etc., means that capitalism is almost literally sucking the life out of us.
Just think how much better it was to work in a joyous Soviet factory: neither suckers, nor sucked!
Talking of work, here’s Euro-Leftist MEP Mary Honeyball telling us that it is not up to you and me to decide how much work we do. Yes, it’s up to her to decide.
How to tackle UK welfare benefit abuse, if indeed there is any? Scabrous Scourges from Scarborough hosts Tom Pollard of Mind, who fears that reforms and cost-cutting will do more harm than good.
Which site leads us inexorably to another, spEak You're bRanes, which mercilessly lambasts the views of people as expressed on the BBC’s Have Your Say site:
A collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar.
Moving quickly on, we come to Isitfair, which campaigns in a heartfelt way for the reform of council tax and greedy public sector bosses:
The proposed £250 per annum pay rise for the lowest paid staff now seems to me to be more of an insult. I just hope that when the good times roll the flat monetary rise should apply across the board. The highly paid executives, living in their own little world of protected wealth and advantage, and thumbing their noses at their paymasters, must surely receive their comeuppance.
Raedwald gives us this superb pair of paragraphs:
Draw a horizontal line eight miles long with its centre on Westminster. At the Western end, folk will live about ten eighteen years longer than those at the Eastern end, have less than a quarter of the infant mortality, Tuberculosis will be rare and they will tend to be lean as whippets on a diet of olive oil and lettuce. In the West, bedbugs and body lice are virtually unknown; in the East, bus and tube upholstery is riddled with their eggs.
The contrast is remarkable in anyone's eyes. For socialists, it is a powerful argument for taking lots of money from the people in the West and giving it to the people in the East. In fact, they've just spent thirteen years doing just this, and the result is that ..... all the inequalities have got worse.
As the saying goes, read the whole thing.
Tim Worstall points out to Johann Hari that there is a nifty way to achieve all sorts of complex things at the same time:
What we want is some method of reducing the future demand for wheat while also increasing the amount of wheat that will be planted.
We want both consumers and producers to react rationally to this mooted future shortage.
We want consumers to substitute for wheat: eat rice, cassava, teff, rye, oats, instead.
We want producers to change their production processes: it’s a standard of farming that you can go for extensive or intensive methods and there’s a spectrum between them.
How to do all that simultaneously? Simple.
How might we tell if Marxism is on its last legs? Harry wonders about one way of measuring success:
The son of the Hon. Ædgyth Bertha Milburg Mary Antonia Frances Lyon-Dalberg-Acton has noticed that some students at a Russell Group university are attending extra-curricular lectures.
I have to admit to some doubt over whether that’s exactly what Karl Marx had in mind when he predicted the self-emancipation of the proletariat though.
Anna Raccoon notices important things falling down, to ruinous effect.
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One of the charms of doing BBRU is that it encourages you to look for new blogging universes.
Policy here at BBRU is not to link to the vast volumes of frantic and well-resourced material on the Web supporting racist supremacy in one shape or form.
Nor does religion feature very often. In the hope that mass prayer will help our teams at the next World Cup since honest human toil is evidently insufficient, here are links to three religious sites.
First, a handy roundup by Yahya Birt of the UK Muslim blogosphere
Then a long list hosted by Quantum Tea of British Christian sites.
And Rabbi Jeremy Rosen looking at issues from a Jewish perspective, including the tricky question of how far Israel can be an ‘ethical state’:
If genuine peace were a serious option in the Middle East, Israel would be both morally and politically bankrupt to reject it. But until we reach a settlement, with enemies openly and brazenly seeking Israel's destruction, survival must be the priority…
An ethical state can only survive in an ethical world. An ethical people survives despite the world.
Not to forget the Heresiarch, mulling over how far the law should intrude on, hem, private alternative lifestyles:
Even more startling, perhaps, is the probation officer who made the fatal mistake of performing his fire-eating routine in a fetish club. He wasn't even involved in the "scene", yet his employers managed to fire him for bringing the profession into disrepute.
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The last word goes to a Publicly Militant Sociologist, fretting over the Meaning of Sheds:
So bourgeois cultural products can "sink" down into the depths of society from its gilded levels, so seemingly neglected cultural artifacts of working class life can make the reverse journey.
The fate of Banksy's street art that has seen it rise from the mundane urban landscape of Bristol to the toast of the art world is one example. It would seem the shed is on a similar trajectory - and a necessary one as home offices have become depressingly common and so yesterday.
What would we all do without Leftist … analysis?
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Suggestions for next week’s BBRU should be sent to Britblog @ gmail dot com
