Disturbing Search Request of the decade: 213.42.21.150, searching Google for “who would handle a commercial shipment of arms and ammunitions from Sharjah to Baghdad”. That’ll be someone downstream of AS5384, or Etisalat (Emirates Telecom), the UAE’s fun-loving national telco monopoly, best known for blocking more websites than China. Ha. But there is some actual substance…
Read More War Profiteers Read My WeblogThe Government is trying to define down the Iraqi employees it is under pressure to accept as refugees after the forthcoming UK withdrawal from Basra. With the Murdoch press, it is signalling that some 91 interpreters might be accepted, but at the same time that there are as many as 20,000 people involved. That figure…
Read More We Still Can’t Turn Them AwayA prerequisite for good alternate-history is good history; as Ken MacLeod says, the trade secret of sci-fi is history. So I wasn’t too impressed by this, of James Nicoll’s, who really ought to know better. Would it be funny to do an AH where WWI never happened and the old order never fell, one in…
Read More Bad British History, AgainWe don’t just moan about today’s government surveillance projects and fiddle with other people’s webcams here. No. Sometimes we can offer you better things; like the solution to a huge mass-surveillance IT disaster that hasn’t even happened yet. Spyblog reports that even before Alastair Darling’s deranged scheme to monitor all motor vehicles by GPS has…
Read More The jamming signal increases its humSalvador Dali described his work as making use of a paranoid-critical method. Like a paranoiac, he attempted to find meaning in the associations of entirely unrelated images, an analogue to Freudian free association. Tate Modern currently has an exhibition on Dali’s influence from and work for the cinema; perhaps as well as the Looney Tunes…
Read More Paranoid CritiqueRecall this post from December, 2006? It was about how the Iranian government was actually rebuilding things in Afghanistan; things like electricity supply, fibre-optic interconnection, roads, and maybe even a railway. Not just that, but they were supplying today’s version of Marlboros and jeans; the best Internet connection in town. The Christian Science Monitor goes…
Read More Iranian Money: Rebuilding AfghanistanJohn Redwood has a secret plan to solve the pensions crisis and boost the economy; change the fire regulations so you can cram more codgers per square foot into your “care home” (Orwellian of the decade; they don’t and it’s not). Given a brief to banish Teh Curse of Regulation, this is what he comes…
Read More Still crazy after all these yearsIt’s quite surprising literally no-one during the recent reopening of the missing Iraqi guns story has thought fit to mention the delicious kicker that the shipment travelled in an aircraft chartered by a company that had just been shut down for cocaine-smuggling. Except for various random forum users. Jet Line International, for it was they…
Read More 99 Tonnes of Guns, ReduxIraqi employees: suddenly they’re everywhere. On the front of the Times. In its leader. On the main news. On BBC Radio 5 Live. In Ming Campbell’s talking points. In Gordon Brown’s inbox. Even here. You might almost think there was some sort of campaign going on. Now, there’s more; video. There’s also a useful sidebar…
Read More Roll Bandwagons, Roll!The Board of Inquiry into the loss of the Hercules C-130K XV206 on landing at Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan on the 24th of May last year (see here) has reported (pdf link). More documents are here. After much effort, and extensive exploration of all sorts of other options, the Board concluded that (as was blindingly obvious…
Read More Reading the Documents: XV206