Apparently, Dick Cheney’s lawyers are actually trying to invoke in court this batshit insane doctrine they seem to have cooked up, that claims that Cheney is both part of the Executive and the Legislature, and that therefore he answers to neither. That’s just head-spinningly weird. They are arguing, in a sense, that a sort of…
Read More Schrödinger’s VeepFollowing an unexpected referral to this blog, I came to this discussion of Theodor Adorno. Well, that takes me back. I remember having reams of him stuffed down my neck at Vienna University in the winter of 2001, which I didn’t like in the least. I certainly didn’t like the cult of personality some people…
Read More The enemies of embittered freedom come in unexpected formsCurrently in Barcelona for the 3GSM World Congress, the mobile phone industry’s annual shindig. And, blogging from the TYR Deployable Intelligence Centre Kit, aka my laptop, a length of cat 5 and a slightly iffy Internet connection, here I am. First, though, a warning to travellers. If you are heading to Barcelona on BA, Iberia…
Read More 3GSM World Congress: Iberia Pax BewareDear Lazyweb: Where can I host a small WebDAV file before Saturday afternoon? Does NTL provide this service? (I’m a customer, but I dread talking to their support line. No, “turn it off and back on again” does not answer my question.)
Read More Bleg: WebDAVWhat it says on the tin.
Read More Build Beauly-DennyThis is the kind of story journalists are meant to dream of. But just how would you headline a tale that involves a knife- and pepper-spray wielding female astronaut, an apparently fantasised love triangle, a 900-mile drive, adult nappies, and a freakout confrontation in an airport carpark? So J.G. Ballard. Fortunately it happened in the…
Read More Enter headline hereWhat a sick business the affair of the A-10A tapes is turning into. Recap: the inquest into the deaths of the Household Cav soldiers killed by a US airstrike in Iraq in the spring of 2003 had learned that the MOD’s own board of inquiry, which sat in secret, had heard a cockpit voice recorder…
Read More Something’s happening, but you don’t know what it is..OK, so there’s a memetracker web service called Visibility Index that claims to monitor “positive” and “negative” Internet activity about your company. Seems either Caterpillar, Inc. or someone with an interest in them is using it. On Sunday, I used a metaphor and described Thomas Barnett as being like a Republican caterpillar beginning to stretch…
Read More When Memetrackers AttackSebastian Junger has a spectacular report in Vanity Fair on the MEND guerrillas in the Niger Delta. Seriously, read the whole thing – we have corrupt warlords, men with Czech machine guns, huge outboards, and a crazy look in the eye, communiqués issued by a mysterious online presence, people in the US phoning their friends…
Read More Never get out of the boatEvolution appears to accelerate over time, and new scientific evidence suggests this is due to bacteria exchanging genes – but not within their own species, but horizontally, between groups. Thus, the total rate at which genetic information is exchanged can be faster than that provided by sexual reproduction and random mutations alone. Horizontal information exchange…
Read More What links these links?