2005

Well, another day, another Blair/Brown feud. The Observer headlined that they had gone “out of control” yesterday – my first reaction was along the lines of “Gordon was so furious with the Prime Minister that he nearly said something”. And frankly, I just get bored of this stuff – “Sources close to a senior Government…

Read More Sources fairly close to a source not so far from a middling to very senior official…

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…

Read More At Last! Weapons of Mass Destruction Discovered

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…

Read More Celebrity Twits

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…

Read More A Sudden Bout

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…

Read More A Total Lack of Respect!

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 –…

Read More Nonsense!

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…

Read More Frans Groenendijk and some economics points

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…

Read More Secrecy – when civil servants attack