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“Ballet is the one form of theater where nobody speaks a foolish word all evening—nobody on the stage at least. That’s why it becomes so popular in any civilized country during a war.” Edwin Denby, Dance Writings from Dual Loyalty. Very wise. I wonder if, had he heard about this, his attitude might have been…

Does anyone remember something called the Iraq Communications Group? It was the team of spindoctors and spooks chaired by Alastair Campbell in the run-up to the war with Iraq that – depending on who you believe – either did or didn’t sex up the dossiers. After all, Ali C stated to the Foreign Affairs Committee…

Link The terrorists – and I mean terrorists, no Robert Fisk fastidiousness with language this time – are back in town. At least 140 dead in two attacks on mosques on the holiest day in the Shia calendar, one in Baghdad and one in Karbala. Hard not to read the symbols – Karbala, the holy…

Interesting article, if a little techy, on the giant power failures in the USA last summer and their cause – the gap between the engineering realities of the electricity system and the tortuous attempt to impose a market system on it. Basically, the problem was that the marketisers saw the system as a large number…

Reuters – US to station inspectors at foreign airports Well, I proposed the establishment of British security controls on British aircraft and shipping in US ports right here on the blog not so long ago, in response to the regular US-inspired security scares. But it seems to have become US policy to do the opposite…

9NEWS.com – Story Some of the Transportation Security Administration’s highly trained security screeners have taken their zeal for total security one step further by apparently attempting to make sure terrorists were not hiding in their heads. Or something. “The Transportation Security Administration is not saying exactly who x-rayed themselves or when because of privacy reasons,…

The Conservatives have issued a new “report” on the future of the BBC. It was prepared by one David Elstein, the former chief executive of Channel 5, and was commissioned while IDS was still in charge. Many people forget just how aggressively US Republican the IDS Tories were – very close to the neocons, enjoying…

BBC NEWS | Business | UK 2003 growth revised up to 2.3% So what did happen to all the recession porn we were subjected to last year? Within a week, we see forecasts for growth above 3% this year and now upward revisions from last year. The forecast range everyone said was a wild gamble…

Rybkin ‘Best Speaker in the History of the Duma’ Interesting biography of the disappearing candidate. “In his verbal attacks on President Vladimir Putin, stern-voiced presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin laces harsh rhetoric with poetry and flowery metaphors. But his oration skills are hardly an advantage when he is effectively banned from Russian radio and television. The…

In the interests of good practice, I recently had this blog checked with an XHTML 1.0 validator – only to discover that there were supposedly 463 errors (57 pages of printout) in it. But it worked. Now, after several days of poring over the code, the error count is down to 308 and we have…