I am currently reading Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop – The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I’ll review it more fully when I’ve finished reading it – now there’s an idea – but here’s something that stands out for reasons of pure partisan rage. John Reid has been mocked plenty for saying that he thought…
Read More John Reid RetrobloggingSo, yer National Staff Dismissal Registry. Several people have asked me to comment on this horrible intersection of Blairite justice-style product and the good old Economic League, and they won’t be surprised that I’m against it. For all the usual reasons – you don’t actually need to do anything wrong to be on it, and…
Read More Keeping Britain TidyIf you can read you should read this if you read nothing else this decade. It’s all about how the Americans started torturing people, whose idea it was, how men like John Yoo came to provide the legal justifications, who was keen (the ideological core of the administration), who didn’t want to know (the FBI…
Read More Torture LawyersI finally realised what my Big Idea about the Triesman Scheme for National Phrenology was. It’s that British politics is afflicted with scienciness, by analogy to “truthiness”. Thinking about the obsession with biometric quackery, I realised that over the last 10 years we’ve been governed by people who like the idea of science, but not…
Read More Scienciness!Christmas is coming, so it must be time to start raking over old quarrels and scratching at old wounds. The Ministry has at Torygraph hack Con Coughlin, among other things because of this WMD furphy from December, 2003. I remember it well. The weapons were supposedly WMD-tastic warheads for RPGs, which is incredibly silly, and…
Read More Risible claimsIn my head-on-the-block post regarding the unlikelihood of an attack on Iran, I mentioned that most of the Royal Navy is engaging in a large exercise off Sierra Leone, with the involvement of the Fleet Lead Commando Group, HMSs Ocean and Bulwark, and a large supporting cast. Now, many miles away indeed, the Royal Marines…
Read More Tony Blair: ChopperAh, those fine Blairite institutions. South Maidstone is apparently to be blessed with a school where some rich person gets 51 per cent of the votes for 20 per cent of the money, but something has gone terribly wrong. Specifically, the Tory-run Kent county council is trying to do something unfashionable. According to our sources,…
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