Iraqi parliament votes to revoke an MP’s immunity. Details: Earlier this year he was caught at Baghdad airport carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in a suitcase, reinforcing the belief of many that he was engaged in illicit profiteering. During the debate on lifting his parliamentary immunity, the head of the integrity commission said that…
Read More A quick Iraq round-upReid wants to change the law so you can be tortured if he says you’re evil enough. Not only that, he wants one of the people who the courts found innocent of preparing ricin in the great no-ricin no-plot tortured, presumably to get out of him why he didn’t prepare any ricin. This is an…
Read More Recidivist with alert populationsSo, the redeployment of the Queen’s Own Hussars battle group from Abu Naji to the border. How’s that going? Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post goes to the non-front and finds out. A few hundred British troops living out of nothing more than their cut-down Land Rovers and light armored vehicles have taken to the…
Read More Test the theoryBoingBoing: Wow! a sculpture of someone being shot in the head, and doubts about hypoallergenic cats – are they against open-source? Anna Politkovskaya shot in the head, in the lift up to her flat, while the shopping bags waited in the car.
Read More PrioritiesIf the Americans were going to attack Iran, you’d think they would do it when they had a ship or two available. Various people have been getting their knickers in a twist because the Dwight D. Eisenhower and her task group sailed for the Indian Ocean on the 3rd of October. (The Nation, this means…
Read More There will be no attack on Iran this yearD2’s post on statis (it’s the new change) and crap government IT brought something to mind. Dan mentions the success of the Bank of England-run Crest settlement system for the London Stock Exchange, contrasted with the hellbroth of disaster the NHS National Programme for IT is descending into. One thing I think he should have…
Read More Why BT’s bit of the NHS IT contract worksThis has been knocking around the blogosphere for a while now, but I may as well engage with it. Apparently, David Brin thinks coming generations will miss out because computers don’t come with BASIC any more. I’m not so sure. I was a ZX Spectrum kid, and I used to spend a lot of time…
Read More 10 PRINT “BASIC”This is the kind of good news that only illuminates how terrible your problems are. Yeah, it’s cracking that the Iraqi spooks (supposedly) got to hear about a plot for the Final Shootout, but it’s pretty bad news that the speaker of parliament’s bodyguards were behind it. Worse, it looks like a hell of a…
Read More Near-missI’m beginning to think that it’s possible to discern so many similarities between really stupid opinions on terrorism that we can call it a theory. Specifically, if you’re talking about state sponsorship, you’re probably wrong, unless overwhelming evidence contradicts this. As far as I can tell, the modern version of this theory originated in the…
Read More A unified theory of stupidity on terrorismThe RBC’s James Wimberley posts on one of those wonderful “competitiveness surveys” rightwing people like. Apparently the US has fallen from 1st to 6th, which would be important if it meant anything. Wimberley did a more formal and scientific version of this old post of mine, in which I plotted GDP growth rates and rankings…
Read More Useless Competitiveness Surveys