Since I’ve been back in the country I haven’t had much time for gigs. In truth, I haven’t had time for many things I used to do, but those are the sacrifices I guess I’m happy making. I haven’t had the money to buy records and I haven’t got close to the necessary energy to organise anything that I used to. There are four opening paragraphs to a zine that I have been meaning to write on my hard drive. To cap it all off, despite having seen killer new bands like Crowd Control and Mob Rules, there’s something missing, and that’s the fact that a bit of my heart isn’t in it anymore. I thought long and hard about it, but it really comes down to the root of all evil: money.

No, not the thousands of pounds that I didn’t make building an evil empire in the guise of a DIY record label purely to squeeze cash out of rich children who should know better, but the money I’m owed by people, specifically friends and bands I’ve helped out along the way. Read More: What killed it for me.

TED.com is one of my favourite ways to procrastinate in the library. Today I watched two different talks which link to each other. The first is PW Singer on war and robotics and the second is Juan Enriquez talking about evolutionary possibilities in coming decades. Put the above two together with this little snippet from Wired. It’s a brave new world. But apparently the same problems remains, such as post traumatic stress disorder half a world away.

Well, the Pentagon sure knows how to stick two fingers up at PETA. I don’t know who came up with the idea of sticking pigs in body armour and testing out IEDs on them but it’s a novel, if mildly offensive, way of investigating their effect. I’m sure Orwell would have given top marks to the Pentagon spokesman who claimed that the pigs were treated humanely. Still, the results of the study are quite striking, I for one had no idea that brain injuries caused by IEDs were running into the hundreds of thousands. Is it okay to blow up pigs in order to investigate human brain damage? On balance, I’d say yes, though I understand the moral outrage some people might feel about it.

Okay, this isn’t a complete overview, just some reflections on a few photos I took last year whilst in South America. Read More: War and society in South America

In an age where the world seems to revolve more an more around pinging an AP story back and forth over the internet with a few words of commentary attached, this blog is a breath of fresh air. I got into it via their coverage of Human Terrain Teams, but the blog as a whole rules.

Take this story on no-bid contracts for instance, it’s the kind of investigative reporting that seems to be dying a death with every media organisation dumbing down to the level of reporting about Twitter.