Splinters

Drag City has posted a preview of Smog's new LP. It's not the highlight of the record by a long way.

Next year is the 50th anniversary of what we know in the UK as "the Suez crisis". Simon Jenkins reviews the letters between the Prime Minister Eden and President Eisenhower as they discuss the issue (presumably this was a time when Presidents could write). Jenkins plays up the comparisons with current events: "Eden?s language is pure neo-con"; "Eden?s response was pure Donald Rumsfeld", and it seems Britain wanted to use an imminent attack on Egypt by Israel "as a casus belli: so it could 'protect' the Canal". So nothing changes. Jenkins, a former editor of The Times, concludes (in this extract at least): We are left wondering with Hegel whether governments ever learn from history. They stumble across the well-trodden sand as if visiting it for the first time. As these letters show, they make the identical mistakes. But now they leave only coffee cups. Sofa diplomacy deposits no sofa correspondence in the archive.

Well, they leave more than coffee cups; there are also 100,000+ more graves. Journalists are like governments.