So they put Jimmy Savile in charge of Broadmoor? Even if you didn’t know he was a rapist, that would be…head-burstingly weird and inappropriate. It’s yet another reason to think Chris Morris’s life work is a documentary. So, whodunnit? A valid question, especially as Grant Shapps, the man with two faces and half a brain,…
Read More so who was a health minister in 1987-88?You thought Con Coughlin was bad, but did you know he was this bad? The race for Britain’s Most Disgusting Journalist is a tough one, but rather like Roger Federer, the great champions are always in with a chance against the young’uns.
Read More a hard, hard game to pickWhy has the Guardian gone so soft on George Osborne? Today’s paper is a fine example of the art of journalism as practiced to obscure rather than reveal. On the front page, we have this story headlined: George Osborne exploits fall in borrowing costs to boost growth Now, that’s pretty much precisely what the chancellor…
Read More Respectable mendacityIn an effort to clear some of the NOTWFail stuff out of my mind, I thought I’d try to come up with some useful pointers for further investigation. 1. The Daniel Morgan/Southern Investigations line of inquiry This is by far the most serious accusation, in every sense. It has police corruption, a murder, and the…
Read More neeeews of the world(Alt. title: Look, it’s like a society but smaller!) OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the…
Read More Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent personIt says something about the modern thinkers that one of the Egyptian spooks the Piggipedia team identified turns out to be working in the “Security and Loss Prevention” department of a major hypermarket chain. Having lifted photos with names on them from their HQ, they started searching PofacedBook – sorry, LinkedIn – for them, and…
Read More aspirational torturerA major claim of the recent group of “intelligence historians” is that the study of the secret world is the “missing element” in contemporary history – that, just as the history of the second world war needed revising after the British government finally let on about ULTRA, history (especially of the Cold War) is missing…
Read More GCHQ Review, Part 4 – History and the overseas outpostsWell, this is grim. Intelligent comment is to be found here, in Jamie Kenny’s interview with David Wilson. Would you say that serial killers are a kind of negative indicator of the health of society in the sense that the fewer victims there are, the better society functions? Serial killers function best within fractured communities,…
Read More some memories of west BradfordSo, I went to see Chris Morris’s takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review – it’s desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long. Perhaps too funny – one of the markers of Chris Morris’s work is that…
Read More we’re the muslimeen, creating a sceneThis has done the rounds and been roundly done for all the right reasons. There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer. Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists…
Read More Authoritarianism Does Its Thing