Can London actually be considered to have a grid system? If you're insane, the answer is yes. But it's a nice try nonetheless.

Six days left in England… time to do all those things I haven’t done. Unfortunately at this point, the business of winding up my affairs leaves me with time to do little more than the Tank Museum – but I think that alone should be enough (alas, I leave exactly when “Tankfest” begins this year). Anyways, here’s what I’ve been trying to read when possible:

– Scott Tobias writes a great piece on Starship Troopers – “the most subversive major studio film in recent (or distant) memory” – for The Onion A/V Club:

Starship Troopers isn’t a satire about any specific war, it’s a brilliant dissection of how all wars work—how they’re packaged and sold via propaganda, how the enemy is (in this case, literally) dehumanized, how young people are sent eagerly to sacrifice on the front lines.

– The problem I have with Apple isn’t for OSX, it’s for the ‘iOS’. But Steve Jobs seems to have abandoned the former in favor of his glorified content distribution channel.

– How do you replace the Humvee?

– Kyle Mizokami at Japan Security Watch demonstrates Japanese urban warfare tactics through the power of Youtube.

– Starbuck dissects the real capabilities of the Russian PAK-FA and finds it sorely wanting.

– Harry’s Place reminds us of the simpler times, when a good Communist joke was as easy to find as a Trabant in East Berlin:

Three men in a Soviet labor camp were discussing why they were there.

“I got to work ten minutes late,” said the first, “so I was accused of sabotage.”

“I got to work ten minutes early,” said the second, “so I was accused of being a foreign spy.”

“I got to work exactly on time,” said the third, “so I was accused of buying a Swiss watch on the black market.”

– Hitler: disciplinarian, no-nonsense leader of men, saviour of oppressed minorities? Apparently, in India the answer is yes.

And the past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

It was even quieter than last week, somehow, as I bottled up all my rage and released it at once, much like a certain oil well in a certain gulf of a particular nation.

U.S. Soldiers march through a southern English coastal town, en route to board landing ships for the invasion of France, circa late May or early June 1944.

Just a reminder, posting will continue to be quite light for at least the next two weeks. Two exams are this week, and the second will be spent on tying up loose ends here before I head back to America (insert sigh of relief here).

– Debtors’ prison begins to make a return (via Global Guerrillas).

– The size of a New York City block – the subunits of the grid – is rather bizarre compared to other major American cities. No Boston included on the chart though, it would have been nice to see a well-drawn blob.

– ASCAP, the RIAA, and other titans of the music industry set their sights on a villainous group of dastardly ‘copyright infringers’: small coffeshops and library cafes. Because as usual, government is a tool to enforce the will of corporations.

– San Francisco is getting an unprecedented event to beat even Fleet Week: the Russian guided missile cruiser Varyag (not to be confused with the now-Chinese aircraft carrier Varyag) and three ships of the Japanese MSDF will be paying a visit to San Francisco at the end of June.

– Sean Wilkes takes over for Mike Slagh as editor at Secure Nation, and Alex Pedersen realizes that the only thing worse than a non-state actor detonating a nuclear weapon on American soil would be that group not detonating it on say, Pakistani soil.

– If you haven’t seen it already, Jon Stewart had a great interview with Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who seems slightly more for real than I’d imagined. The whole three-part series is online now.

And this past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

– I posted two interesting pictures. This one compares the size of Chinese and other world cities, and this one is an amusing banner from McSweeney’s. It was a light week.

Lessons learned from the Gaza flotilla raid.

Not so much a Sunday edition, I know. My apologies – I’ve come down with something at the worst possible time, but now my head might be starting to clear. Anyways, your links:

– Mike Burleson reveals the “dirty little secret” of the Falklands War: two “small, modestly capable” V/STOL carriers defeated the entire land-based air force of Argentina.

– General Cartwright gets it on cybersecurity and civil liberties, but Michael Tanji says there are still some major contradictions we need to resolve:

1. Is access to the Internet a right? If it is not a right (on par with life and liberty, vice, say freedom from having to hear ‘hate speech’) then stop and move on to the next national security topic. We should spend not one iota of time worrying about defending conveniences. If we are going to consider it a right, then move on to #2.
2. Is cyberspace a domain akin to land, sea and air? Which one? Pick the closest analog and start building your doctrine from there. Make it purple.

– Aliens, the Fermi Paradox, and the likelihood of humanity annihilating itself are all interconnected. But our own demise might be more of a ‘soft’ collapse than a nuclear war…

– Jalopnik has a fantastic article on the notoriously finicky U-2 and the chase cars that help it land. Join the Air Force, drive a Camaro down a runway at 140 MPH.

– Surprise, surprise! China occasionally does something deceptive regarding mass media. Film at eleven.

And this past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

We remember Memorial Day. We also remember how crazy nuclear weapons made our plans for society.

Israeli naval commandos raid a Gaza-bound “aid” flotilla, and everyone disagrees on every noun in that sentence. Especially Turkey, who might bring it up with NATO.

We look at some media including pictures and video of the Libyan anti-Gaddafi protest, maps of deep time, and my own hilariously edited video of a mugging, courtesy CCTV. And speaking of the surveillance state, don’t forget about Stephen Graham tonight at LSE.

Hot air balloons fly over the temple-studded plains of Bagan, Burma on January 14, 2010.

– A timely book, Trials of the Diaspora, examines the startling presence of antisemitism “in a supposedly enlightened, humane, liberal society.” Namely, England. Harold Bloom offers an excellent review.

– McSweeney’s forecasts the ‘corporation-as-person’ legal meme out to its logical conclusion.

– Man: officially gods since 2010. But as a wise man once said, with great power comes great responsibility…

– Daemon had the first murder through the internet. But now we have the first human infected with a computer virus? I think we all need to take a deep breath and rethink our whole human code of ethics.

– Has RadioShack accomplished its mission? Via Isegoria:

In retrospect, the launch of the TRS-80 was probably the most promising moment in RadioShack’s history — and the start of its decline.

“Let’s put it this way,” Mims says. “Hobby electronics peaked with the advent of the ready-made PC. There was no longer a need for anyone to build digital displays and TTL processors in their garage or spend time messing with circuitry. Now you could spend time at a keyboard, working on an actual computer.” It was a fulfillment of a dream. But it also served as a portent that the hands-on way of life RadioShack embodied would become irrelevant.

– “An incidental apocalypse?” Lawyers, Guns, and Money looks at the rather unremarkable instance of a volcano spewing ash 35,000 feet into the air. But couple that with what will be the worst oil spill/environmental catastrophe in human history…

And this past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

I get back from America, and end up in the middle of a Libyan anti-Gaddafi protest. News coverage is slim.

But n0t all news from Britain is bad – the LibCon coalition government has announced its plans to roll back Labour’s surveillance state, and restore the primacy of some civil liberties. I finally get around to reviewing Daemon.

A whole bunch of new links this week. I actually bothered to sort them; I hope you’re all happy. And don’t forget you can always find the whole list here.

Military

• Iranian Salute Guy
• Japan Security Watch
• Next Navy

Tech/Design/Culture

• The Daemon Technology Feed
• Design Observer
• DJ SPEAKEASY
• William Gibson
• Kottke
• The Ministry of Type

Politics/Policy

• Guido Fawkes
• Radley Balko at Reason
• The Agitator
• The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

A ground crew member removes a fuel hose from a U.S. Marine Harrier jet from Marine Attack Squadron 231 during operations in Kandahar April 4, 2010.

Happy Mother’s Day to all! Deborah Mullen offers her own greetings.

– Kyle Mizokami, a frequent contributor at War is Boring, has branched out and started his own blog, Japan Security Watch, on security issues specific to Japan and the JSDF (which naturally entails a lot of naval stuff for the more aquatic-minded among you). One of the first posts is particularly interesting: Japan’s 2010 budget includes $1.3 billion USD for the 22DDH project, a replacement for the Hyuga-class ‘helicopter destroyers’. “That’s a very big…destroyer.”

– Robert Gates publicly address the threat of asymmetric naval warfare with Iran: “Iran is combining ballistic and cruise missiles, anti-ship missiles, mines, and swarming speedboats in order to challenge our naval power in that region” (via Robert Gates’ Facebook feed).

– And speaking of Gates, Robert Farley addresses his “shot across the bow” to the Navy, and contemplates what ‘right-sizing’ it would look like.

– Malcolm Gladwell looks at Operation Mincemeat and draws lessons for the craft of intelligence:

The British theory was that using someone the Germans strongly suspected was a double agent to tell the truth was preferable to using someone the Germans didn’t realize was a double agent to tell a lie. Or perhaps there wasn’t any theory at all. Perhaps the spy game has such an inherent opacity that it doesn’t really matter what you tell your enemy so long as your enemy is aware that you are trying to tell him something.

– Vanity Fair posts a sizable excerpt from Christopher Hitchens’ forthcoming memoir, Hitch-22. Highlights include a spanking from Margaret Thatcher, Clive James’ metaphors (Arnold Schwarzenegger: “A brown condom full of walnuts”) and his trip to a brothel with Martin Amis as ‘research’ for the latter’s book (“I wearily started to count out the ever steepening fee, which was the only thing in the room that showed any sign of enlarging itself”).

– John Robb nails the precarious state of the global economy – the day before the roller coaster ride on Thursday. The seer of our time?

And from the past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

I analyze Russian ‘maskirovka‘ tactics in Operation Bagration. The British have some sort of election that may or may not affect the United States, which is a shame seeing what they were able to do as partners in the Falklands.

I offer a mea culpa for my wildly off-the-mark Times Square bomber prediction, and lash out at Greece for being infantile little communists.

America recoils in horror at the sight of a SWAT team’s raid on a man and his family for a misdemeanor charge of weed possession.

– Just why should we care what Presidents are reading? The Washington Post attempts to answer.

– A coherent argument against the coddling, wait-’til-you’re-older strain of permanent adolescence that seems to be all the rage these days. We’re not all special. We need a chance to fail. But we need a chance to begin with (via Isegoria).

– Where have all the Vlashki and Mamuju speakers gone? Why, New York, of course.

– 72% of the millennial generation is “more spiritual than religious.” One devout optimist “is encouraged by the roughly 15% who, he says, appear to be ‘deeply committed’ Christians in study, prayer, worship and action.” That’s cute. Only one or two more impediments halting progress to go…

– Why conspiracy theories matter, and why Christian Caryl thinks you’re an idiot for believing in them. Not that I necessarily disagree, I just hold the right to reserve judgment on one or two official verdicts. But I offer no theories of my own.

– China v. America: fight of the century?

And from the past week on Automatic Ballpoint:

I settle on a dissertation topic and unearth a gem from the archives, but most of my time is wasted checking out interesting new sites. Currently making me angry: old people, the state of Arizona, and at least one guy with a pickup truck in Virginia.

A post on obesity and the military blows up my traffic for the better, while an interesting map might explain the obesity. New tech is found, as is a failed car bomb in Times Square. I take a look at other dimensions to urban warfare than VBIEDs.

The Chinese naval ‘menace’ is probably overrated, but may be sent west if water tensions with India continue; knife-wielding crazies remain a threat to Chinese schoolchildren.

The French built a pretty sweet Vespa for their paratroopers.