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-HitchensAaronovitch Watch reflects upon dinner with Denis MacShane. There’s an important point here, and one that was well made as a by-product of Nick Davies’ brilliant reporting on Operation PENTAMETER 2, a giant police sweep looking for prostitutes brought into the UK by force that failed to find even one. It turned out that the…
Read More permanently operating factorsBoris Johnson is opposed to more congestion charging, but not quite yet; however, he is also keen on “road pricing”. I can see a couple of explanations for this. One is that there’s no “there” there – he’s an unstable personality without intellectual substance and with a practised TV clown act, like George W. Bush,…
Read More fake sheikhsKeep the shit and the drinking water separate, and you’ve gone most of the way from an average life expectancy of 35 to one of 75. Boris Johnson, famously, decided that replacing London’s water mains was a minor issue that could be thrown out as a sop to the roads lobby. So here’s the Borisfeed.…
Read More Civilisation is common defence and waste disposal. And drinking waterVia Airminded, find your local V2 rocket strike. London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Tehran have what in common? That’s right, it’s the list of cities that have been subjected to attack from space. Then, why not go here and look up how big a hole it made? Someone’s photographed and flickr’d a whole…
Read More there are, however, rockets in this postThis really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…
Read More the latent content of this airport, however…As usual, the Daily Mash catches the zeitgeist. Clubbers ditch ketamine for elephant tranquillisers – “it makes you feel really elephanty”. In North London, meanwhile, they’re wanking on the streets. Seriously. So far this weekend, I was standing in a toilet in the Sir Richard Steeles* when I heard groaning. I cancelled the maniac. But…
Read More surrounded by wankersReduced blog; I’ve been working on a version of FixMyStreet for Symbian S60 devices. If you want snark, how about this? I always thought that the BMW not-minis were telling in themselves. Objects are an ideology made manifest. The original Mini was a minimal car, one designed to be even cheaper than the ones sold…
Read More no-one ever gets the truth from plastic manOK. So we looked into voice stress analysis and the world telecoms infrastructure. And we concluded that proper VSA – the sort with the peer-reviewed scientific papers an stuff – was technically impossible. Recap; the original VSA research is based on a change in a signal in your voice between 8 and 12Hz, but even…
Read More Dr. Benway strikes again, with Venture CapitalGeorge Osborne is not getting any better. His latest shaft of brilliance is to threaten everyone with a sterling crisis – Chris Dillow has details and more. The problem here is that for a start, he is deliberately beating the water to drive sharks away from his vulnerable ideological underbelly. The Conservatives’ “economic plan” currently…
Read More George Osborne: A National Embarrassment