My hunt for a readable Sunday paper goes on. The Fisk, Cockburn and Watkins Journal is OK, but they insist on including a lot of other stuff that’s nowhere near as good. The Obscurer would be good if it could finally puke and call off the pony hunt for a secular Blairite democracy in Iraq,…
Read More The orange ape that walks like a manThe US Uniform Code of Military Justice now applies to civilian employees, and a damn good thing too. Various people at BoingBoing wonder whether journalists might also be affected. Curiously, P.W. Singer is quoted as saying that “the Iraq war was the first where journalists could formally embed”. Really? I’m sure, completely so, that those…
Read More Contractors, and Journalists?Did I say I loved the Financial Times? When everyone else was frontpaging with Princess Diana, the paper had the following stories on the front: the BAE investigation kibosh (this was the lead), Blair grilled by the rozzers (number two, opposite the lead and separated by a photo of the man), then the OPEC meeting…
Read More Say yes and let’s enjoy the…Well, where to start with my utter rage at the kiboshed Al-Yamamah investigation? It’s a total map of state direness, New Labour subtype: we have hypocrisy, we have a good day to bury bad news, we have cash, we have Lord Goldsmith, the professional get out of jail card himself. Obviously, this being a blog,…
Read More You’ve been bought and paid, you’re a whore and a slaveChristmas 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 claimsRight. I’m sure I said somewhere that the man shot by police in the now-infamous Forest Gate raid, who was then charged with possessing child porn, would never be prosecuted for it. Well, whaddya know. CPS concludes there is insufficient evidence to proceed. Something tells me this won’t be on the front page of the…
Read More Sir Ian Blair: Must ResignInteresting piece in the Grauniad about the British communists and the Soviet intervention in Hungary. I was especially amused by the Daily Worker doing a version of the jaunt to the Green Zone by Rush Limbaugh to “get the good news from Iraq the MSM is keeping quiet”. Their reporter, Peter Fryer, was briefed that…
Read More Guiltily sending a chequeThis Martin Kettle op ed from the Grauniad regarding General Dannatt’s act of random reason and senseless honesty really annoys me. First up, this quote from Samuel “Clash of Civilisations” Huntington, and Kettle’s approving comments: In the end, although the generals might propose, it was the political leaders who disposed, even in the heat of…
Read More Dannatt, elite consensus and Samuel HuntingtonBoingBoing: Wow! a sculpture of someone being shot in the head, and doubts about hypoallergenic cats – are they against open-source? Anna Politkovskaya shot in the head, in the lift up to her flat, while the shopping bags waited in the car.
Read More PrioritiesThe Guardian carried a large excerpt from George Monbiot’s coming book this week in which he launched a formidable attack on aeroplanes, on the grounds that they are indefensible in terms of climate change. I find it hard to work out his logic. For a start, if you get the data, you’ll find that, when…
Read More George Monbiot is Wrong