You can’t beat them, so why don’t you join in… OK, so every blogger and their cat knows about “Guido Fawkes”‘s personal history these days. Hull University in the mid-80s, Federation of Conservative Students, working for David Hart and friends – this is the bit he softpedals – and then the bit he turns up…
Read More 24 hour Tory party peopleCharlie Stross is apparently thinking of using the huge GEC Marconi/BAE cost overruns as a plot device for one of his books – the idea being that some sort of really cool (and evil) skunkworks project was being funded off the books through the vast sums of money wasted on NimWACS, Astute, Eurofighter, Nimrod MRA4,…
Read More UniqueLooks like Port Hedland, Western Australia, is about to get hit head-on by a major cyclone, and Marble Bar just afterwards..this blogger has the last dispatch. Media: Transmitters serving the area between Dampier and Sandfire Roadhouse arerequested to sound the Standard Emergency Warning Signal before broadcasting thefollowing warning. TOP PRIORITY TROPICAL CYCLONE ADVICE NUMBER 43Issued…
Read More Old haunts flattened? (Cyclone George)Our regular reader, MySociety prime mover, pythonmeister, sysadmin, hammer of government mainframe psychosis, Chris “Chris” Lightfoot has died, at a terribly young age. I never met him, but I saw and used enough of his projects, and shared enough blog, to respect his good sense, campaigning venom, and technical chops greatly. In fact, Chris was…
Read More Chris LightfootThere’s been a lot of fisking on this blog lately. More than I am happy about – I try to get back to something more positive and discursive, but then, someone comes along and pisses in my pool. Usually a government minister. This trend keeps up. Paul Farrelly MP, Labour member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, recently brought…
Read More You didn’t stand by me – no, not at allAnother in our occasional series of comments that ought to be posts: Rob Farley discusses a Max Boot article in which Boot accuses Britain and Canada of “unilaterally disarming” on the grounds that Canada had the world’s third largest navy in 1945. Farley, of course, gives Boot short shrift, but does point out that armies…
Read More Bad British HistoryWhilst we’re on the subject of spooks, by the way, this tale on Slugger O’Toole is completely ridiculous, for reasons fully explained in a comment I left there. Simply, the Government has plenty of places to go underground right huurr in the South-East, without needing to go to Northern Ireland (seriously! the only part of…
Read More bunker mentalityThe plan to break up the Home Office and let John Reid keep the macho bits is permitting us a rare glimpse of the core executive in action. Consider this story in teh Grauniad. First of all, note the close symbiosis of the Cabinet Office and the intelligence services – historically, the Cabinet Secretariat evolved…
Read More Deep rumblings in the deep stateOK, so we the first to highlight the fact the military is none too certain about the EFPs-from-Iran meme. Then we were the first to draw attention to how trivially easy they are to make, and how widely available the materials and information required are. Since then, the US Army has actually shown off what…
Read More Feel the steel ballsOne good thing about blogs is that it is difficult to get away with the standard techniques of dishonest debate. Resort to straw-man arguments, and you almost always collect a bucket of shit in short order. In national newspapers’ opinion pages, not so much. Dominic Lawson, Sunday Torygraph editor, wants the world to know he’s…
Read More Dominic Lawson: Intellectually Dishonest