2006

Over at Dave’s, guess what do we find? Charles Clarke in a copper’s hat. I didn’t think it would spread quite that quickly.

So far I haven’t really engaged with the row about Dubai Ports World buying P&O. Frankly, I don’t particularly care about grand icons of British industry changing hands – if you don’t think they should be nationalised, it follows that you should welcome that the stock market decides on the allocation of capital between publicly…

Whilst we’re in Iraq mode (is this blog ever in anything else? How will it ever return to civil life? Will it end up begging for hits by the roadside with a sign – Iraq Veteran, Please Give Generously Of Your Attention?), yet another of those reports on how many Iraqi army units can fight…

Well, this is going to be a serious post about serious military issues, but first, some light relief. Danielle “Arik Sharon in Stockings” Pletka editorialises against the CIA’s liberal agenda. Apparently they hate freedom so much they issued “inaccurate warnings of civil war in Iraq”. This appeared the day before whoever-it-was blew up the mosque.…

Not a bad article, except for… 1) straw-man argument – blogs are doomed to failure becausethey can never replace big media! Who says we want to replace the FinancialTimes? The argument is rubbish because the premise doesn’t hold. 2) bizarre logic – we should be even more suspicious “because no-one is evenpretending to get rich”,…

Nonsense never dies. On the Internet that’s doubly true as – far from being more ephemeral as so many think – it doesn’t sink to the bottom and die, but hangs around in search engines and obscure blogs, waiting to be dredged up. You may remember John Loftus, who claims to know more intelligence secrets…

Interesting blog on piracy and such, here. One to go next to Carlos in my “You’re further right than Genghis Khan, but we can agree on at least one thing” file. BTW, anyone who reads down to the systempunkt-rockin’ map of Nigerian oil infrastructure can certainly pride themselves on having breached the Terrorism Act by…

Is it me or are fake policemen everywhere? (now there’s a paranoid lede if ever there was one) Yesterday kicked off when 10 men dressed and equipped as the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior Commandos (in that wonderfully Soviet way of speaking they have) paid a call on a mosque where two 9th century Shia…

…It’s a tired old blogosphere cliche to link to Fafblog, but this is genius. It’s too good to quote piecemeal.

On Newsnight, after the disaster of the shrine bombing, Nick Houghton seems to get it. He said that the enemy wants as much chaos as possible so as to create their Caliphate. That might sound like standard military-press boilerplate, but is it? The caliphate is a virtual state, the nation of the mind. The chaos…