not fun at all
stoat | May 16, 2013 I got wound up by this whilst reading news on my phone while sitting in a boring meeting. So I'll vent here.
The usual scheme of things that we see so often is that bad things happen (the Assad regime in Syria); it goes on and on and people wring their hands, or ignore it, and anyway whilst bad the people are useful anti-commies or somesuch; and then it gets bad enough that the locals start revolting. At this point, its very much a "which way are you going to jump" issue for everyone in the country. Do they throw in their lot with a pile of untested rebels? Or do they sit on the fence…
stoat | August 10, 2012 Says the FT:
The UN has called for an immediate suspension of government-mandated US ethanol production, adding to pressure on Barack Obama to address the food-versus-fuel debate in the run-up to presidential elections. Most US ethanol is made from corn. The dispute over ethanol promotion pits states such as Iowa that benefit from higher corn prices – and in some cases are swing states in the election – against livestock-raising states such as Texas that are helped by lower corn prices. The UN intervention will be seized upon by state governors, lawmakers and the meat and livestock industry…
stoat | September 1, 2011There is a Wikileaks fiasco going about. Der Spiegel has what looks like a plausible story. If you read the Wikileaks version after that, the latter looks rather incomplete and self-serving. The Grauniad also says "not us guv" which isn't quite true: if they hadn't been dumb enough to publish the password, all would have been well. But assuming DS has this right, fundamentally this is a Wikileaks foul up.
h/t Bruce (not Steve) Schneier.
[Update: no-one has dented the DS story as far as I can see. So I think that, as told, this remains fundamentally a WL foul up. However (whilst I think the…
stoat | August 11, 2011Well, the riots. And whilst Harry Hutton, as usual, talks a great deal of sense, the sense of surprise remains. The beak makes some good early points; initial reports were very vague; but it now looks like only the police fired. Which really doesn't help. Part of the recent phone hacking stuff has been yet more erosion of trust in the police. Mind you, according to wiki, the family were implausibly pretending that Duggan was unarmed, which didn't help either. And also, contrary to early impressions I'd got, I can see no evidence that the police ever claimed he shot at them.
Time will tell…
stoat | October 12, 2010Well, the yanks did. Or maybe not, it really isn't clear. But what *is* clear is that initial reports that Linda Norgrove was killed by the Taliban were at best unreliable and probably made up. Apparently Cameroon still insists that the reports were "in good faith" which I think is code for "inexplicably wrong but we don't want to criticise the US in public". And indeed the entire rescue may have been pointless. That nice Mr Obama says he'll find out what happened, though.
stoat | April 8, 2010So much to rant about, so little time. Where to start?
How about with that fool Broon, who is now reduced to "it was the wrong sort of recession". Not quite literally, but very very close (for those not blessed with residence in the Sceptered Isle, "The wrong sort of X" is now a saying, begun by our much-beloved British Rail a few winters back when after a very thin snowfall brought all the trains to a standstill (again) they earned derision for saying that it was "the wrong sort of snow"). So what happened? It was on R4 this morning, Broon appearing for an interview. The obvious question: "…
stoat | December 30, 2009 Apparently, exploding underpants are to be banned on planes from now on. Security experts say that they never expected anyone to try this, but now that someone has they will look there too. They are considering banning exploding vests as well, but won't bother until someone actually tries it.
[Sorry - couldn't find the "war is pants" pic. This will have to do. Or you could take a more relaxed view -W]
[Speaking of underpants - don't forget Felix -W]
stoat | October 23, 2009Roger is having a spot of trouble: everyone is being nasty to him. Once upon a time the mighty Prometheus bestrode the world like a Colossus and ate big fish for breakfast, but now it seems Roger swims with the minnows and it isn't a nice world down there. Eli shows him no mercy - wabbits are a vicious bunch - and Tim Lambert is not kind either but Whiskey Fire probably has the best take on all this.
Incidentally, it isn't really Roger's fault but he does seem to be attracting the wacko septics in the comments, for example Of course DeepClimate consistently refuses to publish my charts…
stoat | October 23, 2009Hardly an original sentiment I know, but I feel moved to make a token gesture of disgust at the monstrous bloated pile of junk that can't even paste text sanely and appears unable to resize a table in a comprehensible manner.
stoat | September 10, 2009Tim Lambert normally does the Iraq war, for example this. But I was struck by a recent Economist (you know, those left-wing pinkos) article bemoaning Iraq's descent into a police state. Which is a shame, because in the nearly-unmitigated disaster that is our adventure in Iraq, the restoration of democracy and the end of torture and the police state were supposed to be among the few successes.
To be fair the article is called "Could a police state return?" and doesn't say it is inevitable. They quote a diplomat who gives it 2-3 years. In the meantime, press freedom is disappearing (just like…
stoat | January 6, 2009Is wander around blowing up schools. Fairly obvious really, but some people will never learn. Bozos.
[Pulled from the comments (thanks): its fun to watch: -W]
stoat | June 29, 2008The story so far: arbitrator User:FT2 posted a bizarre Arbcomm decision in which a user was, apparently, tried and sentenced in secret. Unsurprisingly, outrage ensued. One other arb then repudiated the judgement, and said it was done "without the approval or prior knowledge of the Committee as a whole". Unhelpfully, other arbs stayed fairly tight-lipped, so it was unclear who was telling the truth. Appeals to them to comment were ignored. You can read far far more about this than you would want to at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Orangemarlin and other matters. As you can see from…
stoat | June 12, 2008So, nothing new there you may well say.
My morning paper tells me that Broon has won a pointless victory over the bizarre 42-day-detention stuff. He had to buy off the Ulstermen to do this, and the Lords will veto it, and he is only doing it for cheap popularity, and he will fail, and it will all be useless. If he actually wants to increase our security, perhaps he might stop his people leaving "intelligence" documents on the train.
But in a stunning bid to make Broon look competent by competitive incompetence, Tory David Davis has decided to resign and fight a by-election errrm, for some…
stoat | February 21, 2008...said the oily US spokesman on R4 tonight, as it turns out the US has been telling us porkies about torture flights. Though I doubt our govt asked too hard, since it enabled them to make denials when it was all becoming rather embarassing.
The UK govt is still insisting that the US lied to us in good faith. Understandable, I suppose: when you're shipping so many people around, its just so hard to keep track.
stoat | February 17, 2008In order to prove my financial acuity, when Northern Rock fell to about 200p and the govt guaranteed its deposits, I bought £250 worth, believing it would bounce back. Its now down to 90p, and the news now is that its to be nationalised. My shares are now worth so little I hardly care, but this looks to be a disaster in the making, or rather in the continuing.
I can't see the govt making a success of running a bank. I guess the people who gain from the mess will be the vast numbers of lawyers and auditors who will spend the next decade crawling over the carcass sucking out any blood that…
stoat | December 9, 2007I thought I'd take advantage of a rant (sorry, yes, another one) to push some of our tat that we're selling (we hope) on ebay. So there is the disc firing robot, the ATV buggy, and the nervous alligator science kit.
We had two of the robots by some mischance, one non-working. We took it apart; it was full of fascinating gear trains and electric motors. Far more fun than actually playing with it.
Anyway, the rant: there is too much tat in the world and it makes me sad. If we were destroying the planet for a good reason I might understand; but to bury ourselves under a mountain of plastic cr*p…
stoat | November 29, 2007UK teacher jailed over teddy row: "A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad."
stoat | November 14, 2007Over in the mad world, CIP castigates his fellow countryfolk for promoting torture. AFAIK we're not doing that (except very quietly and discretely, one suspects) so instead we're going for detaining people for implausibly long times. We're currently at an insane 28 days and our glorious leader wants to extend this to a totally barking 56 days. At least thats less than the 90 they wanted at one point.
Unfortunately most of the debate is over how extending 28 would be bad; I don't see anyone saying that even 28 is grossly illiberal.
One silly piece of humour that came out of this was the sad…
stoat | September 13, 2007I don't suppose you are, but this rather indicates his casual attitude towards the truth: "I was selling the house anyway and they asked me if I would be willing to tell people I was selling the house because I was afraid somebody might solve the puzzle too fast. I said 'yes'. They said, 'Don't you mind being made to look an absolute prat', and I said, 'No - I'm quite used to that'. History is full of stories that aren't actually true. We sold shed-loads of extra puzzles and I made an handsome profit - and I sold the house as well."
stoat | September 8, 2007I notice that the Economist, which was always pro-Iraq-war, and for a long time insisted on reserving judgement as to whether it would suceed, now calls it a "disaster".
Meanwhile Thucydides proffers his advice to CIP. I'd go for partition, myself.