Tuesday 26 May 2026 to Tuesday 2 June 2026

[mousetrappling]

Books

• “Understanding Early Civilizations” Bruce G. Trigger
  I’ve finished the chapter on class & social mobility which shows that class exists in all the early civilisations, with the distinction being a small upper class, a large group of commoners, and a small group of slaves. How precisely the classes are constituted and discriminated varies, with more obvious class markers for the upper class in territorial states coz you might not know who your social equals are from the other parts of the state whereas in a city state chances are you know everyone in the upper class. Slaves aren’t a large part of the economy in any state but are slightly more so in city states. Social mobility and how class cuts across kinship groups varies between the civilisations. I’ve also read some of the family organisation & gender roles chapter – I’m still in the details section of the chapter of which there is much as everyone seems to organise their families differently which makes me think of Kipling’s line “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right.”

Podcasts

• The Bunker
  
  • an episode about cryptocurrency and its intersection with politics
  • an episode about the mainstreaming of far right ideas in UK politics
  • Weekly Wrap Up, with quite a bit about Blair’s intervention & the Millburn report on welfare
  • an interview with someone who used to work in the Secret Service protecting presidents, talking about how it works (on a broad level) particularly with reference to the person who tried to get to Trump at that dinner (about a month ago, when this was released)
  • Start the Week, obviously talked about the new Mandelson papers dropping, and about the Iran war, with a theme in those two of groundhog day …
  • an episode about GLP-1 drugs
• The History of China
  
  • the Taiping Rebellion starts to gain momentum – crop failure due to flooding followed by disease brings many people to the new faith which claims their God will save his people (and to some degree you do get better outcomes because they as a community share food amongst them all and look after the sick). And then they begin to gather as an army, with each person selling their goods and donating the proceeds to the community.
  • as the army marches through China it gains momentum and even a city for a while – it’s becoming something that the Qing can’t ignore and aren’t well set up to suppress. They set themselves up as an alternative dynasty with an alternative calendar & kings & so on. This episode goes through to the death of one of the leaders, who had been the man who handled the logistics & practicalities of this movement (rather than being one of the spiritual leaders).
• Oh God What Now
  
  • The Makerfield by-election and how Reform are trying to talk down Burnham in ways that don’t quite seem to work, plus more on that £5million gift to Farage where he seems to’ve committed a tactical error by saying that the Russians hacked him to release info on it as that makes no sense when put against his original defence (that it’s perfectly fine) and is also something you need to report to the police & so on.
  • talked about the Alan Millburn report on the welfare system – in particular how society is currently failing young people as many are failing to find work and then once they are on benefits the system works to disincentivise finding a job, also how politics today (and a lot of life) has become full of incivility and somehow we all just accept that’s the way it is now (like the Reform candidate for Makerfield who has said vile stuff but it’s being treated like “banter”)
  • the latest drop of Mandleson files & how they are all gossip & no substance (in large part because the substance is part of an ongoing police investigation so is redacted), a new report about how Reform voters actually aren’t just making a protest vote instead they’re actual supports of the party – in essence demonstrating a new split in UK politics between socially liberal & socially conservative that’s overriding a more traditional economic left/right split
• The Rest is Politics
  
  • boggling at the sheer scale of Trump’s corruption, and going through the results of a poll they’d commissioned to look at Gen Z attitudes
  • a bit on what the US is doing to Cuba with its blockade, a section that was supposed to be on Tice being rubbish but turned into Rory dissing the government’s net zero plans (not in a Tice like way, but as part of his having drunk the AI kool aid)
  • first episode of a subscriber series (so I won’t listen to the rest) about the history of Reform/Brexit Party/UKIP and where its money comes from
• The Rest is Politics US
  
  • the Iran war, which they are now saying looks a lot like a defeat and the current negotiations are over the US’s surrender terms, also the economy, in particular interest rates and the unlikeliness of them coming down soon
  • more on the Iran war & on Trump’s apparent cognitive decline (including how you can get him to do what you want if you tell him Obama would’ve done the opposite), a bit on the Texas Republican primary where a Trump preferred candidate has won who probably isn’t great for the real election
• Behind the Lines with Arthur Snell
  An episode of the history of Persia & the West, a little bit of ancient history but then mostly concentrating on the last couple of hundred years of countries like the UK interfering
• Empire
  
  • episode 2 of the Simón Bolívar series, which takes us through the initial part of his political/rebel career (ep 1 covered his early life, full of tragedy), through a failed revolt in Venezuela and his declaration that all Spanish should be killed
  • a short on the Koh-i-Noor diamond as it was back in the news a month ago when this released (they’ve done a 4 part series on it in the podcast before, and wrote a book about it together)
  • episode 3 of the Simón Bolívar series, covering his successful wars against the Spanish, driving them out of several South American countries with the original goal of uniting all of them into a single large state – but in the end that unity as a democracy doesn’t happen and he takes dictatorial powers & falls out with his vice president who was trying to set up a well organised civil society
  • episode 4 takes us through Simón Bolívar’s turn even more to the dark side as the dictatorial power he has corrupts him, but after a failed coup he resigns anyway and dies not long after as his TB catches up with him
  • start of a series on the Dutch East India Company, covering the period where it was set up
• The Rest is Science
  
  • a Q&A episode, with an intro bit about sick bags in planes and why one might be travel sick in a plane
  • an episode about ways to potentially look back into the past – using black holes as mirrors or using the sun as a massive gravitational telescope
  • another Q&A episode, where the intro bit was about how despite Zero Coke saying it has “no calories” it actually has 1kcal per can (in the UK), and moving on to other calorie related questions
• The History of English
  We’re up to the 1630s in the chronology, so the history is the lead up to the Civil Wars in England and in the US he talked a bit about the first 13 colonies and how they came about, the main linguistic point was stress, and how it works in English words both internally to the word & between words in a sentence, and some of the ways that the modern US dialects vary from British dialects in terms of syllable stresses
• The History of England
  The Popish Plot – Titus Oates’s confabulated conspiracy which took off in the real world and led to several innocent people being executed on nothing more than the say so of Oates.
• The History of Philosophy
  An episode looking at the reaction of Scholastic philosophers to the new Cartesian ideas – a mixture of dismissal and incorporation (as the tradition was never as unchanging as its reputation).
• The Rest is Politics Leading
  An interview with Yanis Varoufakis, who turned out to be more personable & interesting than I expected.
• Talk 90s to Me
  An episode about alcopops, many of which I “fondly” remember, and it included Miranda & her guest tasting some and her guest tastes beer professionally so that was quite entertaining (Smirnoff Ice won for him as it takes a journey across one’s palette …).
• The History of Philosophy in China
  Giving an overview of Legalist thought, with an emphasis on how it wasn’t wholly different from the other schools of thought in the Warring States Period.
• Starship Alexandria
  An episode about “Tales from Outer Suburbia” by Shaun Tan, which sounds delightful.

TV

• Later … with Jools Holland
  
  • stand out for me was Mandy, Indiana who were dance-y and a bit French, not sure I’d seek out of more them but fun at the time
  • stand out this week is harder to call, probably Fcukers who were interesting in a sort of creepy way but I’m not sure if they’d turn out to be terribly one note (and someone needs to clip the bit where Jools is introducing them and says “… I’m just going to say it, Fuckers!”).
• Scandinavia with Simon Reeve
  This episode was mostly in Norway with a bit of Iceland at the end, including the oil industry in Norway and the way it has been used to set up a sovereign wealth fund that has benefited all of Norway’s population (unlike the way the UK oil reserves found around the same time & around the same place were used to funnel profits to private companies). The Iceland segment had a disturbing bit on a volcano under a melting ice sheet that may well erupt if the ice that’s plugging it disappears.
• Lost Cities of the Ancients
  Episode 1 was about Piramesse, Ramesses II’s capital city which took a while to be identified once Egyptologists started looking for it – much of the stonework was found at Tanis which couldn’t be the right site, and only towards the end of the 20th Century did people figure out that the right site was Qantir & once the Nile changed course c. 150 years after the time of Ramesses the stones were moved to the new capital. Quite an old documentary – about 20 years ago, so felt a little old fashioned.

Games

• Diablo IV
  Did the big boss fight & banished Mephisto to the void (for at least the rest of this game, I’m sure the franchise will bring him back). Then burnt down the Tree of Whispers as the final scene of the story – of course as it’s a core game mechanic the tree is actually still there … Also did the capstone dungeon for rank 3, and a handful of the new endgame mechanic – War Plans, which are basically daisy chaining other activities together for more loot.