Complicity

I don’t know. You take a few days off to redesign your blog template into something altogether more spiffy and all hell breaks loose as former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, releases a number of documents, including two that the Foreign Office wanted expunged from his upcoming […]

Frontier Justice

This is one of those classic stories that just make you go WTF? David Letterman, he of the TV show, is presently fighting a restraining order taken out against him by a woman in Sante Fe who claims that he has been sending her ‘code words’ by television. […]

Oedipus Wrecks

Portrait of Sigmund Freud – by Salvador Dali At the risk of waking up to find a horse’s head strapped to a red leather couch amongst my Christmas presents I’m going to let you into a few trade secrets. By training I’m a psychologist. No, that’s not a […]

Applause

Carol singers have become the latest group to defy a ban on unauthorised protests around Parliament. About 100 singers tested the limits of the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by singing in Parliament Square on Wednesday evening. The law bans demonstrating without police permission within a […]

Britishness – A Fuckwit’s Guide

Oh goody, the Fabian’s have come with an 11-point plan for a new definition of ‘Britishness’ (yawn), let’s see what they have to say Write down the constitution While we now have a Human Rights Act, the lack of public debate over its introduction means that it is […]

Rape and Prejudice

I want to be clear about something before I start here; it is a public scandal that a mere 5.6% of reported rapes result in a conviction. What is equally scandalous, however, is this figure appears set to used, yet again, to justify a further assault on the […]

Modesty forbids…

Of all the ‘heavyweight’ daily newspapers in the UK, its seems invariably to be the Independent that is most ambivalent about bloggers and blogging. While the dear old Grauniad offers near enough an open house on its content, which is why its probably only second to the Beeb […]

Carry on torturing

WASHINGTON – President Bush reversed course on Thursday and accepted Sen. John McCain’s call for a law banning cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of foreign suspects in the war on terror. Bush said the agreement will “make it clear to the world that this government does not torture […]

Life through a distorting lens

I find myself faced with something of quandary. I can’t decide quite who it is I dislike more; bureaucrats or ideologues. I’ve spent more or less the last ten years working in either of the public or the voluntary sectors, which I suppose should tip the balance in […]

How remiss of me

One of the things I’m terrible at is maintaining my blogroll at anything near the number of excellent blogs I now track by RSS (150+ and rising all the time) – which is why I’ve set myself the task of trying to bring things more up to date […]