Egypt

Here’s Yahoo!, heroically defending the image rights of individual Egyptian torturers. It looks like it’s getting time to slurp all my stuff out of Y!, but beyond that, what a thread. The number of people queuing up to explain how compassionate and reasonable the boss is being. Ugh. Frankly, I think you might as well…

Read More You are experiencing the flexibility in the rule in that they haven’t already deleted you

Sultan al-Qassemi kicks in a data point to the ArseDex. Apparently Libyan agents are distributing flyers in Guinea and Nigeria calling for mercenaries to fight for $2,000 a day. Yesterday, loyalist thugs cost $500 a day in Libya. Even with the huge supply of potential thugs in sub-Saharan Africa’s demobilised militias being available, the ArseDex…

Read More the CIA decided they wanted Roland dead, so that son of a bitch Van Owen cut off Roland’s head

Pulling together various resources, I’m beginning to get a picture of what happened with the cut-off and restoration of the Internet in Egypt. First up, at least in some senses, it may be valid to say that the Internet played a role – Arbor Networks observed that traffic to and from Egyptian networks (and between…

Read More A Little Bit of Egyptian Internet Twaddle

Meanwhile, a scoop from Robert Fisk. This is amusing; if some sort of art-terrorist group had wanted to mock US policy, could they have done better than appointing as special envoy a man whose father was the CIA’s head of planning and who is actually Mubarak’s lawyer? The State Department should probably review personnel policy.…

Read More lawyer

Daniel Davies‘s post about arseholes, and more formally about the importance of the reactionary mob as an institution, has been a well deserved hit. Here’s something interesting, though. Fairly serious rumours reckoned that the arseholes were being paid as much as $68 a day. In theory, if an arsehole was on duty 340 days a…

Read More Cash rules everything around me (but perhaps less than you might think)

So what happened in Tunisia? It’s probably worth pointing out that they’ve signed a gaggle of UN human rights conventions, dissolved the old ruling party, and are having a strike wave. Having done the broad strokes of the revolution, they’re now working on the detail.

Read More detail