February 2005

My referral log informs me that several people have come this way from a thread on FreeRepublic.com, the web’s home of rabidly rightwing trolls. Will I give them the dignity of a link? Pah, it can’t do any harm. You can go and read, here. Obviously, I wouldn’t want anyone to take that as encouragement…

Lib Dem blogger-MP Richard Allan has sounded the alarm on a serious possibility that might get the ID Cards Bill into law without a full debate through the Lords. The government has already demonstrated its willingness to push through the Bill by applying a guillotine to all the Commons stages, shortening the available time for…

What can I say? I made a crude attempt to forecast the turnout in the Iraqi election on the basis of partial figures, here, and I got it wrong. Badly wrong. At least the key meaning – that only the Shia and Kurds would get in – got through, but then that was the easy…

Le Monde has an excellent article on the death of Alfred Sirven. There’s more coverage here. If you read French, read’em before they vanish into subscription hell.

The Washington Post reports on a lawsuit that has resulted in the publication of extensive allegations by former Coalition Provisional Authority staff that the organisation was corrupt, incompetent, and spectacularly hopeless with money. Interestingly, much of the dirtstorm centres around the security contractor CusterBattles, who Ranters will remember from this story from January. If you…

Pavel Felgenhauer of the Moscow Times follows up the discovery, as blogged on the 3rd of February, that a number of Kh55 (Nato name AS-15 KENT) strategic cruise missiles had been sold on the black market by Ukrainian officials at the time when the remaining 578 Kents in the Ukraine were returned to Russia. The…

Right… Admin! Enetation are still down, lying in a pool of their own credibility, for the third day. Blogger comments should be available today. Stuff! The French press is reacting to the death of Alfred Sirven…The Moscow Times has a story on those AS15 Kents mentioned below….there’s a major revelation on corruption at the CPA…

Alfred Sirven, the disgraced General Affairs Director of Elf-Aquitaine who became the world’s most wanted fugitive in the late 1990s after the exposure of the complex of scandals around President Mitterand, has died at his home in Deauville. This man’s remarkable career took him from fighting in Korea with the Foreign Legion to a meteoric…

Vodkapundit has an interesting project, a map of the world redrawn to reflect the interpenetration of nations better than the traditional black lines of absolute sovereign independence. He draws the US-Mexican border as a blur showing Mexican immigration into the US on one side and US investment in Mexico on the other. It’s not much…

Thinking about unmanned flying things, an interesting point comes to mind: the answer to the question “will UAVs make pilots obsolete” is one of economics, not technology. Think about it – proponents of the things argue that you can save on training human pilots, send them into greater danger, and make them do manoeuvres beyond…