How could I forget this? The Obscurer‘s coverage of the Undabomber has been marked by one man. Here he is: Peter Hoekstra, the senior Republican on the House intelligence committee, said it was examining Mutallab’s links with the radical Yemeni imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, who has inspired a number of terrorists. Awlaki had contacts with Major…
Read More Profiles in Wanktankery: Alexander Meleagrou-HitchensDan Lockton would probably be interested in this… The robot is this Bristol Robotics Lab project; both people in the thread at Jamie Zawinski’s I saw it in, and everyone I’ve shown it to, immediately think it looks like a cat. In fact, in a sense, they do recognise it as a cat – it’s…
Read More we’re building robotic creatures – we decided to start with the ratEveryone’s taking the piss out of the Tories’ proposed £1m prize for a…something or other…ah, an online platform that enables us to tap into the wisdom of crowds to resolve difficult policy challenges Of course, it might be possible to make statements about this if only it was better specified. So everyone’s contented themselves with…
Read More a modest proposalWhilst we’re on the subject, a couple of other terrorism things. Kingpin of Comedy Gladio, intimate of Patrick Mercer MP, and self-made spy Glen Jenvey has been arrested, ironically on charges of inciting hatred against Jews. He’s finally convinced somebody that he’s a real jihadi! Not that he’s likely to convince anyone else of anything…
Read More wanktanks against racial profilingAs you’ll probably have guessed, I’m not terrified by the pantsbomber. As Spencer Ackerman puts it: it doesn’t do any good to blow this out of proportion, since blowing things out of proportion to spur an overreaction is Usama bin Laden’s explicit strategy However, as more details have filtered out, I’ve revised my original view…
Read More the boy’s a time bomb!The annual document dump under the 30 year rule is usually good for a story or two, but this year’s threw up something genuinely strange. Here’s Thatcher’s response to the Vietnamese boat people refugee crisis; some obvious Thatcher features are there – notably sanctimoniousness, vindictiveness, and the abiding right-wing tendency to mistake sarcasm for content:…
Read More thatchergrad – on sea!