So, the Tories are currently making hay on the economy, while the black clouds are overhead. Unfortunately it’s all drivel, and specifically, it’s drivel because the current economic crisis is entirely the result of the Tory economic settlement. The promise of infinite free money from property was the core Thatcherite proposition, and its costs (specifically,…
Read More The grass is several shades of blue; every MP trips over you…Recently, our dear duckspeaker Philip Hammond MP had his local talking points cache refreshed. He’s now constantly saying that the Government is causing “uncertainty” in the housing market because they haven’t decided whether or not to cut stamp duty, and that this is a problem. Both statements are of course completely vacuous at best, and…
Read More Hammond’s Sauce Works BandOK, so I’ve been off line quite a bit due to a weird perversion called “moving house”. This means that my constituency MP is no longer Philip Hammond, which almost makes it all worthwhile by itself. Hammond was one of the most annoying features of living in wonderful Runnymede & Weybridge; an immensely self-satisfied and…
Read More I heard a rumour that someone got Philled in…So what’s going on with Viktor Bout? Thai judges and lawyers spoke among themselves and it was quickly clear there would be no hearing – Bout’s new lawyer was unavailable. His previous lawyer had been sick on the date of an earlier hearing. So we filed out, ready to pounce on the shackled Russian once…
Read More Dude, Where’s My Lawyer?So, those Oystercard outages. I wrote a sizable post on this immediately before going on holiday, but something odd happened with WordPress’s clever ajaxy bits and it vanished. Computers…anyway, we can work out various things about the problem from the few details supplied. In the first incident, around 1% of the cards somehow became nonfunctional.…
Read More When the world was our lobsterSpencer Ackerman wants a case for not sending more troops to Afghanistan. Specifically, he wants to know why the US military is keeping a brigade of Marines in Kuwait as a reserve. Well. The first point is that there is a very good reason to have a reserve force at the far end of the…
Read More LessVia Kings of War, an Anglo-Australian spat of sorts. The British Army has the reputation of being good at counterinsurgency, and in 2003 and 2004 there was lots of fairly snide criticism of the United States by British commanders saying that Americans didn’t understand counterinsurgency [and] were taking too kinetic an approach,” said Kilcullen, who…
Read More Are you sure?Jamie Zawinski links to a campaign to have a Californian sewage works renamed after George W. Bush. I disagree, strongly. Who on earth would associate something as civic, egalitarian, and useful as sewage treatment with the Commander Guy? Not just that, but it’s a publicly-owned sewage plant, part of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.…
Read More Civilisation is common defence and waste disposalSo, walking back from dinner, what did I catch lurking in a side street? Yes, but yes, one of these… There it waited, with a 4-way CCTV installation lunging out the roof like a Blairite erection…I took photographs, and the driver suddenly reversed. But he or she didn’t go. So I called the phone number…
Read More Birthday PresentSo, walking back from dinner, what did I catch lurking in a side street? Yes, but yes, one of these… There it waited, with a 4-way CCTV installation lunging out the roof like a Blairite erection…I took photographs, and the driver suddenly reversed. But he or she didn’t go. So I called the phone number…
Read More Birthday Present