October 2004

When the book of this election is written it’ll be called Margin of Error. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the world’s most pointless headline: “Bush, Kerry in Reach of Electoral Win” (Washington Post)

This site contains absolutely no “gay wank chatrooms” or indeed any chatrooms of any kind. I have never possessed this material. I have no intention of providing gay wank chatrooms at any point in the future. UN inspectors are welcome to verify this. What the chap in Ireland who searched Yahoo for them was doing…

Depending on who you listen to, the withdrawal of the European Commission candidates in the face of the Parliament’s refusal to support them was either a shameful left-wing assault on religion (the Times went so far as to use the phrase “witch burning” yesterday) or “the birth of parliamentary democracy” in the EU. There are…

Video evidence shows that explosives were indeed under IAEA seal at al-Qaa Qaa when the US 101st Airborne Division passed through. Watch the video, prepared by a local TV station from Minneapolis, here. From the text: “Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS determined our crew embedded with…

So, the explosives were gone before they got there? FOX didn’t think so at the time. In this story, the news station mentions that the US 3rd Infantry Division found something it decided was an explosive at the site. “Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of…

I never appreciated him as much as perhaps I should have done, for the key reason that my dad listened to him. Still, I recall in about 1997 hearing him play the following three bands: Folk Implosion, Ash, and the Jungle Brothers. What a choice.

One of the fashionable fields in recent economic thought has been trying to apply rational expectations theory to political events. Famously, the Pentagon had to pull its “policy analysis market” due to outcry. Now, I see via Brad DeLong that a couple of academics have tried something similar, using a US sports betting website to…

The Guardian website is now showing a Press Association story that David Blunkett has scrapped the idea of adding ID card functions to new passports and driving licences after 2007. Instead it’ll have to be an ID card that says ID CARD on it. This is considerably more honest than the last plan, which implied…

MOLE WHO GAVE TERRORISTS ID CARD DATA JAILED At Kingston Crown Court today, former Siemens Business Systems IT worker Barry Dodgy was jailed for five years for his part in a plot to sell information held in the national ID database – to terrorists. Database analyst Dodgy, 37, of Uxbridge, accepted large sums of cash…

Well, the inevitable leftwing infighting has now had a few days to marinate since the European Social Forum, and it’s boiling down to one of the most spiritually important rites in the lefty calendar – the exchange of angry letters to the Guardian. This always happens, and it takes the form of each party to…