January 2005

In Albania, of all places. Chuckle we may, but don’t forget that back in 1997, Albania’s government basically ceased to exist for several months in a upburst of popular rage after a pyramid scheme scam robbed thousands of people. The arsenals were looted, which helped to create the KLA not long afterwards and also helped…

It’s been a good few months for celebrity twits. First up, we had Jeanette Winterson’s food shop in Smithfield Market. How sweet! How, er, lefty! Unfortunately it turned out the shop that sold food from “local producers” actually imported its eggs from Tuscany. (An idea: the Waste a Ton of Jet Fuel prize for the…

Via Kathryn Cramer, (link), a source informs me about an interesting Viktor Bout development that may yet clear up one of the questions on his involvement in Iraq. It now appears that the Ilyushin 76 registered S9-DAE in Sao Tome and Principe, which was located by photos several times in Iraq in early 2004 wearing…

Two horrible links: Army Doctors Implicated in Abuse, and “He had apparently been pulling out his own hair”

The Grauniad’s Jonathan Steele had more to say about Ukrainian elections at the New Year, here. He wasn’t happy about the protestors’ lack of “respect for constitutional procedures”: “The core of democracy is tolerance of other people’s views. Whether it is Rosa Luxemburg’s call for respecting the “freedom of people who think differently” or Winston…

Viktor Bout’s Ilyushin 76 UN-76002, photographed loading tsunami relief supplies in Cologne on the 2nd January….

The Guardian gives a column today to the supposed “electronic voice phenomenon”, apparently because it will appear in a film soon. For those who have so far avoided this nonsense, this is the belief that you can hear the voices of dead people in white noise on various electronic devices. Now, there are two –…

Frans has an interesting little post concerning economics and particularly the question of how much real difference exists between decisions taken by state planners and those taken by the bureaucracies of large firms. This insight has a history in economics back to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State with its notion of the power…

This may be the last year of a traditional British New Year ritual, the ceremonious release of government records previously kept secret. Traditionally, confidential files have been sealed for differing periods of time depending on Whitehall’s view of their potential for embarrassment, whoops, security importance – the vast bulk are held for 30 years (the…