The first is at Freemania:
The really important thing about Iraq: us
Today Gordon Brown gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. This weekend, amid violent attacks on polling stations, Iraq holds an election. I wonder which will get the most coverage?
The rest of the world exists primarily as a mirror for us.
The second is at Skuds’ place:
A week is a long time […]
The BBC News Website has changed its original headline:
SARAH PALIN LASHES OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
—bring your houseboy, and let’s party like it’s 1779!—to this one:
SARAH PALIN CONDEMNS OBAMA AT FIRST TEA PARTY CONVENTION
but, Liz Jones’s latest wibble—search for it if you like; I’m not going to link to it—retains its banner:
HONOUR KILLINGS? WHAT WE’VE DONE TO YOUNG EMMA […]
I have just searched Google News for “Afghanistan”. The top three stories are, in order:
500 more British soldiers will go to Afghanistan—[report]
Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan—[report]
France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan—[report]
I picked up this Prospect blogpost, via the magazine’s twitter feed, where it carried a headline that falls into the Kamm/Rentoul category of “Great Historical Questions To Which The Answer Is ‘No’.”:
“Is Afghanistan Obama’s Vietnam?”
The article itself doesn’t bother with the question mark, but is a classic of the “another Vietnam” genre, once so popular in commentary […]
Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One chief, said yesterday that he preferred totalitarian regimes to democracies and praised Adolf Hitler for his ability to “get things done”.
Mr Ecclestone endorsed the concept of a government based on tyranny.
“Politicians are too worried about elections,” he said. “We did a terrible thing when we supported the idea of getting rid of […]
Every single “serious” newspaper in the UK led with Iran this morning. But The Daily Mail devoted its entire front page to an attack on Gordon Brown and the Iraq Inquiry, and The Express (alongside a photograph of a Euro Lotto winner cradling a giant cabbage) to asylum seekers, the largest group of whom before the war came […]
Harry Windsor is a “thug” for referring to another soldier by the nickname “Paki”, according to Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, quoted by the BBC. The BBC page links to the Website of that organisation, where Shafiq also claims that the government of Israel is like that of the Nazis.
The organization’s Chairman and Patron, Muhammad […]
Tim Newman is a blogging engineer, currently terraforming the far eastern Russian island of Sakhalin, a place Wikipedia describes as “less cold than inland Siberia”, with a view to it being fit for human habitation some time in the 22nd century. His account of his ten days spent on a Russian icebreaker is entertaining.
[J]ust how effective is it to insult someone in an alien cultural idiom? Bush, naturally enough, looked bewildered, but he ducked speedily and seemed none the worse for wear afterwards. Gordon Brown, I suspect, would have stolidly absorbed the blows; Obama would probably have caught one shoe in each hand before throwing them across the […]
Cornershop Man watches every single cricket international he can on his satellite TV under the counter—and, unlike me, he fails the Tebbit test. At the start of the week, I asked him: “Suppose you’re looking forward to whupping England’s backsides?”
“Hmm,” he inhaled, “I don’t know. You’ve got some good bowlers with you. You could give […]
Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again
[Thanks, JL.]
Al-Qaeda in Iraq have reacted to the US presidential election by issuing a statement on Friday directed at President-elect Barack Obama and his incoming administration.
…
[H]ardliners have greeted Barack Obama’s election victory with a stream of racist and other insults.
Because, previously, when Al-Qaeda in Iraq referred to Kurdish-speaking bomb victims as “Kuffir to be slaughtered”, they […]
Via The Motley Fool, comes this essential abstract from the scholarly journal Digestive Surgery:
Red Hot Chilli Consumption Is Harmful in Patients Operated for Anal Fissure - A Randomized, Double-Blind, Controlled Study
Pravin J. Gupta
Fine Morning Hospital and Research Center, Laxminagar, Nagpur, India
Do you remember Wei?
Well, Wei…
…wed…
…Bobby…
…in Edinburgh earlier this month, and I was hired to shoot the event.
It wasn’t my first tri-lingual wedding, but it was my first Cantonese/Mandarin/Scottish one. And it was the first one from which the happy couple excused me in the small hours because the tea ceremony was over-running.
[Unusually for me, one of these images was […]
NASA ASTRONAUTS ARRIVE ON CENTAURI IV AND ENCOUNTER POPULATION OF HUMANOIDS SO PRIMITIVE THAT THEY STILL HAVE FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS.
PANEL OF HISTORIANS VOTES ON MOST HATED FIGURES OF 21ST CENTURY. SADDAM HUSSEIN, CLONED HITLER, HEATHER MILLS-MCCARTNEY TOP POLL.
HUMPHREY LYTTELTON FORCED TO STAND DOWN AS PRESENTER OF I’M SORRY I HAVEN’T A CLUE AFTER EXPOSURE TO SUNLIGHT LEAVES HIM […]
I’ve taken my time getting around to this because the original email I was sent read like “benign spam” (which, in a way, it was) so it went to the bottom of my in-tray. [Sorry, Paul.] The infamous Paul Wixon is promoting a Japanese band called “Sollers” with a view to getting them some gigs […]
“Gradually restores natural looking color to gray hair”
It’s rambling, lying, conspiracist bollocks from a mass-murderer in a silly hat. He recommends Chomsky, the Kyoto Protocol, a universal flat tax, and an end to democracy. Someone give him a newspaper column. Whoops. Already been done.
I’m not quoting the costumed cock here. You can search the Web for […]
For a long time now the Philippines have been net exporters of strangeness. If you can’t watch YouTube videos on your computer then you’ll just have to imagine 1 500 orange-jumpsuited prison inmates recreating Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
[Thank you, Dee.]
Further to Anthony’s latest post about the execution of the head of China’s Food and Drug Administration, this week’s Alanis Morissette Award goes to the Beijing Public Security and Statistics Bureaux. From Reuters, via The Scotsman:
A Briton who has spent years trying to convince foreigners that China is not as repressive as Western media often portray […]
I was at a birthday party yesterday evening and had to explain this one again to a fellow guest: They hated us long before “Iraq”.
Here’s a step-by-step by Martin In The Margins and another reminder from Oliver Kamm.
Tim “Bloggerheads” Ireland uses the exciting new medium of citizen video to put the boot into a Labour candidate and gives me the biggest laugh I’ve had all week.
The official name for the place where I live is “Brighton & Hove”. A friend of mine was recently asked at interview to characterize the difference between Brighton and her non-identical Siamese twin town and came up with something along the lines of Hove being a respectable older aunt and Brighton a wayward younger sister.
The Argus, […]
Remember this place? Yesterday I’m in there and a middle-aged white bloke in a cravat is sounding off at the (Gujarati) proprietor as the nearest consultable expert on the question of contemporary Indian pulchritude.
“Everybody says that one on Big Brother is beautiful, but I’ve seen better. She’s very pale skinned. I wonder if she uses […]
Watching grim news reports from Iraq lately, many people have hoped that the ongoing suffering of its people might be put into proper perspective by a funny-looking Italian bloke clowning around Baghdad in retro underwear. At last that dream has come true.
Sentimentality, slapstick, glib geopolitics, and cut-and-paste ethnic colour. On the evidence of this trailer Roberto […]
hammertime 2
—originally uploaded by gigiagius.
Fresh from Iran’s Holocaust conference here’s a screen capture from a revisionist film showing the Nazis for the fun-loving japesters they really were.
(And this is neat.)
From a review entitled “Understanding Borat” on the blog The Libyan Observer:
Moreover, nowadays, when the Jewish State’s influence within the American administration is academically and historically established (The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt) when the support for Neoconservatism that has lead to a genocide in Iraq is largely endorsed by the Zionist intellectual […]
Squander Two is a clever fella and his impatience with irrationality is (almost) always welcome in my comments boxes. He is also a new father who has endured rather more worry than most recently. I hope his wife recovers completely and quickly. He probably came up with this brilliant revision of Alanis Morissette’s Ironic during […]
