August 2005

Belfast Gonzo at Slugger O’Toole has a post on the leniency showed by a Northern Irish judge to persons convicted of rioting and assorted mayhem. He compares this to the sentences passed on persons found guilty of serious offences during the 2001 Bradford race riot, unfavourably, and compliments one of the judges on a shake’em…

Some weeks ago, I took issue with this post over at Soj’s, which discussed various apparent irregularities in the London bombings investigation (or at least the impression of it that appeared in the media) and drew some quite hefty conclusions based on the statements of one John Loftus, a “former Justice Department prosecutor” who regularly…

This (slightly belated) Orwell goes to Home Secretary Charles Clarke for his cunning deployment of cultural relativism as an argument in favour of deporting people to governments known to use torture. He said that criticism of his policy was tantamount to “latter-day imperialism” in an interview with the Financial Times, which gets him an Orwell…

Unfortunately, Blogger chose yesterday to eat all the HTML below the Viktor Bout index post in the sidebar. I’ve just finished restoring it, but unfortunately the blogroll is currently restored to a previous state and quite a lot of links have gone. This will be restored in the next couple of days. It’s nothing personal.…

Today’s Sun headlines with PARAS TO BLITZ DRUG LORDS. What on earth can they mean? For a horrible, sick-throat here-we-go moment I thought they were reporting some half-bright great idea from No.10 to send the Parachute Regiment into, say, Holmewood or Feltham, or perhaps any number of dinner parties, on a desperate mission to blast…

I’m really disappointed, having read more reports about the discovery of an “insurgent chemical factory” in Mosul, to discover that the first reports that made it a “chemical weapons” story weren’t true. The irony would have been perfect. But, of course, an idea whose time has gone dies terribly hard – even though there isn’t,…

Time again to nominate a name for the TYR Orwell Awards, issued at the year’s end to the person responsible for the most egregious political misuse of the English language…this week was difficult, partly due to a lot of candidates but also because none of them quite had that spark of sinister inspiration that distinguishes…

Yesterday was Lords Reform Day in the blogosphere, marking 94 years of the statement in the Parliament Act 1911 that it was time to have an upper house established on a “popular rather than hereditary foundation”. Strangely, among the many bloggers who responded to a call on Pledgebank to contribute, there was a remarkable degree…

Chris Morris has apparently joined the Iraqi insurgency:Link. On a barren stretch of road in northern Iraq, a dog rigged with explosives approaches a group of Iraqi police officers. Detonated by remote control, the bomb tears the dog apart but doesn’t harm the cops. In a war where the line between civilian and soldier is…