Is hosted by Redemption Blues, who somehow manages to find enough inspiration from my piece on Being, Not Producing to take readers to what I suspect is an unfamiliar place.

Namely:

Piotr Sztompka’s brilliant essay Civilisational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies (Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Volume 22, Number 2, April 1993, pp85-95.

Not one on my own reading list, I confess. But she draws a parallel of Barderesque dimensions between post-communist anomie and post-Labour UK:

There are certain familiarities with the litany of discontents related to how unpleasant a place Britain has become to live in, how courtesy and service have vanished from everyday interactions, even the pretence of politeness ousted by grasping commercialism and cynicism, the vacuous cult of celebrity and route to short-term fame (notoriety) via the likes of (now thankfully defunct) Big Brother where contestants parade and perform themselves in all their glorious banality, the eschewal of effort and quietly plugging away as the pathway to the rewards of peer recognition and achievement.

Sounds about right.

Anyway, various interesting links there, not least this one to Matt Wardman on Operation Ore.

And White Sun of the Desert knows a few things about oil blowouts – and where BP looks to have gone wrong.