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 RetrobloggingHa. Ha. Ha. Looks like Kelvin McFuck won’t be standing after all. Too risky, eh? There we were, thinking he was a heroic fighter for all he thought was right, not to mention a formidable enterpreneur, and a man confident in the backing of the deadliest nonkinetic weapon system on the planet. After all, heroism…
Read More fully recyclable cellulosic macro-feline predatorSo, 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 TidyHo ho ho. Another pack of secret docs left on a South West Train. One of the compensations of commuting on the Waterloo-Reading/Windsor & Eton Riverside route was the astonishing things civil servants read and said on mobile phones – I recall reading quite discreditable things about St Blair’s Academies, overhearing someone discussing the urgent…
Read More mystery trainSaid Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There’s some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it. David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be…
Read More one intelligent soldierFinally, we have the best possible argument against the dire Counter-Terrorism Bill. Unfortunately, it’s one that by definition we couldn’t have had before last week’s pornographic nightmare of a vote. It’s a sort of recursive critique. Think about it – by far the worst feature of the damn thing is the awful “concession” that Parliament…
Read More I’m a worse bastard than the fucking shite that I am, and that’s saying somethingHere’s an interesting question about the finally-released Senate Intelligence Committee Phase II report about the use of intelligence on Iraq. The “Shorter” for Phase II A is quite simply that “yes, it was all bollocks”, and specifically that it was all bollocks in the same way it was in the UK – caveats were removed,…
Read More selling the dummyI’ve repeatedly suggested that there is an emerging alignment between the Sadrists and political factions close to the NOIA insurgents and ex-insurgents. Here’s some news – a new coalition including Sadr, various mix’n’match factions including the Dialogue (close to NOIA), a chunk of Dawa that has split from SCIRI, and the Allawi fanclub (yes –…
Read More Using up SCIRISo, the US Army’s research centre employs a climate-change denier as a scientist, and then sets up a blogger conference call with him. I’m less interested in the fact he’s a weirdo on the specific issue than the simpler point that he’s talking out of his arse. Instead, Dr. Bruce West, with the Army Research…
Read More Now that’s what I call sciencinessHere’s a visualisation of today’s output from the Viktor Bout script, version 2.5, with the help of IBM ManyEyes‘s network graph function. Unfortunately the flight number data in there has somehow been filtered, and there should be arrowheads. Why can’t I have arrowheads? Rest assured the definitive version is coming…
Read More Political Pathetic Python Again