Here’s an extraordinary thing: a documented cover-up by a US administration—not one imagined by conspiracy theorists: There's new evidence, obtained by ABC, that the Obama administration did deliberately purge references to "terrorism" from accounts of the attack on the Benghazi diplomatic mission, which killed four people including the US ambassador to Libya. Conservatives have long [...]
Over at Ricochet.com, our producer Scott named this podcast The Politics of Petulance after an article of the same name by David Horovitz in the Times Of Israel that Judith and I mention towards the end of our discussion. There are a few other sources I’d like to give credit to: Yau-Man Chan at Skepticblog writing about the curious cult of [...]
This is the first edition of the podcast that’s freely available gratis to people who don’t subscribe to Ricochet so fill yer boots. Judith and I just wound Claire up and let her run, though I did press her to come up with some hard, pragmatic reasons for the West (the US) to intervene in [...]
Judith and I discuss current events in Israel for Ricochet.com. The sound is better all round this time, though it’s clear I’m going to have to work on being a bit slicker. It’s possibly a good thing that I talk slowly out of a fear of saying something stupid. To quote one of our listners [...]
This is a surprise: The UK must not shy away from trying to resolve international crises despite the “terrible misadventure” in Iraq, a report from charity Oxfam argues.
In the latest edition of your super soaraway Foreign Policy there is, shockingly, a year’s-end top ten. Those crazy dudes at FP—bringing you close-up views of the hottest international relations—have collected the most significant “Stories You Missed in 2006″ and they are grimly interesting, including for example India helping Iran to build the bomb and [...]
I suspect that quite a few people have, like me, recently had someone going by the name of “cell-phone-accessory” drop by and leave a comment on their blogs. The comment is a rambling rant about terrorism. Its content is similar to that of an Independent opinion piece, though the spelling and grammar are poorer. Gloria [...]
As you’d expect from an embittered wannabe academic like me, I enjoy immensely reading reviews in which genuine scholars demolish the latest fashionable nonsense published by trend-chasing academic presses. Here Ben Goldacre casually and rightly puts the boot into an absurd attack on evidence-based medicine—it’s “fascist” apparently. Here Shalom Lappin does a grand and rigorous [...]
Like a man trying to teach calculus to a hamster, Anthony “Black Triangle” Cox attempts to apply logic to the content of a front page of The Independent. For some reason I am reminded of Norm’s continuing struggles with The Guardian.
Because of a couple of gremlins over at the Euston Manifesto site we’ve accidentally been turning people away from applying for tickets to our meeting next Tuesday evening in London. It’s free and there will be three speakers on the subject: “Darfur: An Urgent Case for Humanitarian Intervention”. Follow the link to email us for [...]
Via Normblog I read the Times‘ transcript of an accidentally broadcast conversation between George W. Bush and Tony Blair at the G8 summit. By downloading the original recording and processing it with various digital sound programs I have been able to reconstruct the inaudible parts of the exchange. Here I present the full transcript, with [...]
Thank you to Pete in the comments and to everyone else who’s been sending kind wishes. It’s good to be alive on days like these. I hope eventually everyone will be just as free to say in public how they think we should live in the world we share. It’s a precious gift and one [...]
Via Instapundit I came upon this unfortunate opening to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram report on the release of Abdul Rahaman: KABUL, Afghanistan—An Afghan court on Sunday dismissed a case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity because of a lack of evidence and he will be released soon, officials said. Let’s hope the [...]
For a while I wondered if she was a parody, so broken and infantile and hackneyed were her arguments. Now I only ever read her when someone writes about her. Madeleine Bunting‘s intellectual and moral development has been so corrupted by the ideological diseases of our time that she is hardly qualified to read out [...]
When I was about nine years old I told a bunch of advancing micro-racists that I wasn’t scared of them because “Jesus was on my side”. That the Son of God was shamefully absent throughout my subsequent twatting should have been a lesson to me then, but it was a few more years before I [...]
Regular readers here know that I had little time for the argument that “we” had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had a strategic arsenal trained on Hoxton hidden under his various country homes. It’s been said that I’ve been quite rude about people who signed up too confidently for certain types of WMD-related bollocks, [...]
While I’m on the subject, during much of my youth, lazy, stupid, ungrateful, talentless, illiterate, violent, and very very ugly white people would daily tell me to fuck off “back home”. They were wrong to do so. They would, however, be right to tell the sorts of lazy, stupid, etc brown people who wave banners [...]
I don’t agree with a lot of what she says, but I think Mary Madigan at Exit Zero has a very interesting angle on Iran: What should we do about Iran? We should do nothing. Seriously. When a belligerent little foaming-at-the-mouth nation shouts about nukes, they expect us to pay attention to them. This encourages [...]
Eh! Eh! Calm down! Yes, I parenthetically threatened to kick Harold Pinter’s hospital bed for his drivelling on about the US foreign policy, but I have a lot to do right now. If I do put the boot in it won’t be before the weekend because I need a nice unbroken slot of time to [...]
Hi! Welcome to the CIA Airlines check-in desk. Could I ask you to itemize your hand luggage as you place it on the belt, sir? Er, one holdall of shoes, running gear, and toiletries; one suitcase of casual clothes; one suit carrier containing three identical black suits and ties with matching Ray-Bans; one attaché case [...]
Yesterday’s serious press carried near-full-page advertisements for Channel 4′s new substation “More4“‘s screening of Downfall, Oliver Hirschbiegel’s acclaimed cinematic imagining of the last moments of former German head of state Adolf Hitler. These advertisements read: “It’s a happy ending. He dies.” But just how happy an ending was it for the once-proud nation that was [...]
Burnt Hummer Institutional Magnolia Sambo Warm Placenta Haliborange Coldplay Yellow Kilroy Autumn Phlegm Coelacanth Brown Conrad Black [Despite / because of my being born into a country in the midst of the Biafran War, a conflict in which one weapon was starvation, it was normal in the house I grew up in for us to [...]
Guten Morgen, meine Damen und Herren, Herr Prime Minister, Frau Blair, Herr Straw, Brenda, und so weiter. Vielen Dank fur den Freiheit, ihre grossen Europaischen subsidiese zum Integraztion wir lumpen Ossis, und den neuen Robbie Williams Album—mit his dimplich Grin, er ist viel sexyer als David Hasselhof. Wir, die Britischen and die Deutschen, sind sinze [...]
One of the extracts from novelist John Fowles’ diaries in the Guardian today neatly sums up the attitude of a certain kind of educated observer to the War On Terror: Rushdie fuss. Eliz in a paranoiac state, that I might support him. This is a clear moral choice. From what I have heard of him, [...]
I think the riots in France are a protest by disenfranchised Muslim youth against that country’s involvement in the disastrous imperialist adventure in Iraq.
RT @DAaronovitch: The outraged hunt for the Tory loonsayer serves only to make his/her point.,1 hour ago
RT @tstarkey1212: Ken Robinson berates Michael Gove for not understanding creativity, then goes on to explain his own made up definition of what it is.,1 hour ago
RT @MsIntervention: When even the left-liberal "Der Spiegel" describes Obama as the heir to Kissinger's "realism without morality" you know we are in trouble.,2 hours ago
