November 2005

I don’t mean in a cheesewire-wielding SAS fashion. It’s time to talk about the consti-bloody-tution. DD has recently done some very odd things con-wise, and they worry me. Apparently, he wants to have two (count’em!) referendums as a matter of policy. This is a little strange to begin with – after all, isn’t a referendum…

The Government has recently been saying that British troops might leave Iraq some time next year. As previously blogged, they have been saying this since the British troops entered Iraq, there or thereabouts, with the only difference that the number of troops has climbed steadily, from a low of one brigade group and 1 Division…

Does anyone know if freeware RSS reader works with Windows Mobile 5.0?

As well as Remembrance Sunday (what a day to write about torture), today is Webday…because 15 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee put the first web page on line. And immediately got comments from four people demanding to know why he hated freedom, three wanting to know why he’d failed to put scarequotes around President Bush…

According to news reports in Vienna’s Der Standard and the Italian paper Il Manifesto, a UN investigator in Afghanistan, Cheriff Bassiouni (who is an academic from Egypt) has stated that a secret CIA prison existed in Hungary. It’s not clear what information his statement is based on, but it certainly fits with my suspicions. (So…

I am the 10th result on search.com for “chubby men porn bear”. It’s the pride, dammit.

A blogger was present when Ahmed “The Greatest” Chalabi addressed frothing neo-con groupthink-tank the American Enterprise Institute this week, despite being under FBI investigation and accused of leaking US cryptographic data to Iran. (Note: Chalabi recently paid a call on the Iranian President. What’s going on there?) You can read full details of the visit…

Apparently the American bomb disposal men in Baghdad sometimes can’t go out because their comrades in the Air Force are jamming the GSM phone network and therefore, there’s a risk that any command detonated IEDs might go off unintentionally, and also their radio detectors won’t work. Is it me, or is this just incredibly, amazingly…

That’s it, then. Blair is officially dead as a political force. All the whipping, all the attempts to get support from the far right of the Tories, even trying to draw the Paisleyites (the last reserve of the desperate in British politics) didn’t work. The 90-day detention provisions are dead by 31 votes, and who…

…cutlasses sonic blasters and prepare to repel boarders! Cruise ship attacked by RPG-wielding Somali pirates, fights back with a device that blasts the buggers with noise. More traditionally, the captain attempted to run down the pirates’ boat, too. Dunno what to make of this, though: One of the rockets certainly hit the ship — it…