Among their other achievements, the Prussian military apparently invented wargames. That’s wargames in the tabletop sense: turns, figurines, battles decided by dice, landscapes marked in squares, pen and paper and immensely convoluted rules. Warhammer without the orcs, basically. All this in 1812.

The “Tactical War-game” (Taktisches Kriegsspiel) was the work of a Prussian military advisor by the name of George Leopold von Reiswitz. He constructed the rules, and presented the king with an elaborate cabinet containing the (many) pieces needed to play. It went down well:

the King would usually command one side and Prince von Mecklenburg would command the other…In later life the King claimed that the games played at Potsdam often gave him ideas for the army manoeuvres which took place there.

The King’s interest in the game became well known, and it was as a direct result that the Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia made visits in 1816 and 1817 and became a devotee himself. This lead to a visit to Moscow by Wilhelm in October 1817 during which time they improvised a game on a large scale by chalking out terrain on a number of green topped card tables which were put together.

After a few years the army got really serious about it, issuing a game set to each regiment. Makes sense, given that the alternative to gaming was to march real soldiers around in the mud by their thousands. It was replicated in a few places, and inspired H.G. Wells in the wargame he created a century later. But mostly it fell out of fashion, and seems to have been repeatedly reinvented (rather than copied) over the following 200 years.

More:

• Detailed history
• The rules have been published in English
• Philipp von Hilgers is The Expert, currently finishing a book on the subject(?). Here’s an article (in german.)
• Article in Der Spiegel

Does anybody know the origin of the term ‘kettle‘ — i.e. the police tactic?

I ask because there’s an equivalent German word, which seems to be much older. So, is kettling in the UK a result of German police sharing their crowd-control expertise in one of the european/international police cooperation forums? Or is it just coincidence?

Al-Qaeda (Yemen) claims it’s sufficient for the West to disintegrate into paranoia — killings aren’t necessary:

“It is such a good bargain for us to spread fear amongst the enemy and keep him on his toes in exchange of a few months of work and a few thousand bucks,” the statement said.

“We are laying out for our enemies our plan in advance because as we stated earlier our objective is not maximum kill but to cause [damage] in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the US and Europe”.

AQAP said: “Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. We will continue with similar operations and we do not mind at all in this stage if they are intercepted.

“To bring down America we need not strike big.”

Granted, this is largely putting a good face on their inability to do more than mail parcels.

Is it true that neoliberalism and new forms of religious fundamentalism appeared simultaneously? If so, why? (cf. here)

Lemuel @CT on non-electoral activism:

More pacifically, I would like to see a National Debtor’s Union that would organize collective mortgage strikes, destigmatize bankruptcy, block evictions from foreclosed houses, etc. There is no reason for the banksters to agree to any meaningful financial reform, or any more stimulus, until there is a plausible alternative that looks much worse for them.

Liz Phair writes an impressive review of Keith Richards’ autobiography.

A rant from Rhian:

I was born in the 1980s. I grew up to get away from them. The only good thing about getting older was, I fondly deluded myself, that at least it wouldn’t be the fucking, fucking 1980s anymore.

And now what have we got? A Tory Prime Minister, unemployment through the roof, pointless wars abroad, strikes, bankers still raking it in and now a fucking, fucking, fucking Royal Wedding that we’re all expected to take a blind bit of notice of because it’ll take our minds off how SHIT everything is. And we will, of course.

Sofie Buckland has apparently restarted blogging. Many years ago she wrote an excellent blog under the name of Volsunga — then removed it, and I’m possibly the only person left fondly remembering it, and hoping for a comeback. Maybe this time?

The German interior minister has lately been warning of imminent terrorist attacks.

Berlin’s senator for the interior has built on this with an impromptu guide on how ‘we’ can spot the terrorists in our midst:

“

If you notice that 3 people have moved into the neighbourhood, looking a bit strange, keeping to themselves, only talking Arabic or another foreign language that you don’t understand, then you might want to think about notifying the authorities

“

Depressing, isn’t it? This bigoted idiocy is from a minister in Germany’s most liberal and broad-minded city. He’s even from an ostensibly centre-left party (the SPD, which admittedly has lately produced an impressive stream of high-profile racists).

Worst is, he’s just being unusually blunt in expressing the general logic of calls to public vigilence.

Any

non-specific call to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ will get people disproprtionately reporting people they already distrust. In the political climate of the past decade, that’ll often mean arabs. But more generally: is there any liklihood of getting warnings of genuine terrorist plots, rather than just a mass of paranoid fantasy?

[Things I’d love to read on this topic: the police on how much useful information they get from these campaigns, compared to time-wasters. Statistics on what things/people get reported. Memoirs of a Home Secretary or similar, explaining what the hell they were thinking — whether it was cynical political manipulation, or if they believed they were being useful]

ETA: not entirely convincing retraction here

Actually, it looks like I’ve misunderstood the LJ/Kazakhstan timeline. It’s more like this:

– Oct. 2008: Kazakhstan blocks livejournal

– 8. Nov 2010: Livejournal suspends the account of rakhataliev, a critic of the Kazakh president and ex-husband of his daughter

– 15. Nov 2010: Kazakhstan unblocks Livejournal

Which puts things in a

very

different light. It’s pretty hard to look at that timeline without suspecting some kind of tit-for-tat between LJ and the Kazakh authorities.

There’s a commission in the US, investigating the BP oil spill. Last week, the chief counsel said:

To date, we have not found a single instance where human beings made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,

I find this utterly bizarre. However angelic BP might be (?), surely it’s impossible to run an engineering project on this scale without trade-offs between cost and safety? Won’t there always be another layer of expensive and marginally-useful checks that you could add?

dolboeb: Alcoholism is scarier than fascism. Survey asks Russians what issue most concerns them:

• 56%: inflation
• 53%: alcoholim and drug use
• 46%: unemployment
• 44%: standard of living
• 15%: economic crisis
• 13%: salary