Aaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There’s an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies’ brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the…
Read More permanently operating factorsIf you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone’s esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again. Here’s some science, via Lou Grinzo’s blog. We’ve been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the…
Read More a reminder that things happen quicklyThis won’t be a substantive post, but more a notice to myself to build one. A seriously under-reported story on the global guerrilla beat is that the Nigerian government has succeeded, at least for the moment, in either defeating the Niger Delta rebels or making deals with them. It’s worth rolling back a little; time…
Read More it is never too late to MENDHere’s that that jihadi having a row with an Aussie blogger. Quick recap – she linked to a text of his as an example of Al-Qa’ida thinking, he noticed the referral and the traffic, he replied to deny association with the OBL team but to boast of everything else. Some points on the text. 1)…
Read More the pundit internationaleAn American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he’s currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to…
Read More eternal SeptemberWhy are there so many good bloggers on the Left who work in the financial sector? Just off the top of my head, I can think of Chris Dillow, from Investors’ Chronicle, actual fund manager Duncan Weldon, stockbroker Daniel Davies, Lloyds’ List journo David Osler. The team at Calculated Risk. You have to decide whether…
Read More red bloggers of Leadenhall StreetSomething interesting about the NHS NPfIT project. During my recently completed two-week conference binge, I spoke to people from a British telecommunications company who were fresh, if that’s the word, from tangling with the NHS IT Zombie, and had apparently escaped before it ate their brains with a spoon. I also heard people from a…
Read More the problem with NPfIT is the “NP” bitA bit of Viktor Bout news. It looks like, according to AFP, that the Americans are planning to deploy B. Hussein Stalinhitler himself, when the President is in that part of the world next month. I can remember when “someone high up in the contracting world” actively wanted to encourage him, in support of a…
Read More a bit of BoutHere’s a case study in unpopular populism: ‘The ravers should have more respect for Mr Blobby. He was a hero to a lot of kids and the thought of them taking drugs and having all-night raves in his house is completely disrespectful.’. The photographs are truly eerie. Like this one: Of course, it was never…
Read More blobby blobby blobbyOK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here’s something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling’s blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when…
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