clever beard

I went to this seminar the other day... very interesting star studded line up including Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Meghnad Desai, Manmohan Singh and Kamal Nath the Commerce and industry minister.

Very interesting debate and discussion, Stiglitz in particular was storming, I'd like to get hold of his new book. Interesting point about liberalisation of labour markets having a greater effect on economies than liberalising capital markets.

"Prof Stiglitz's stress on movement of labour was endorsed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who observed that developing economies were becoming more restrictive with respect to immigration and the movement of labour. "Even economic theory has largely focused on merchandise trade and captial flows, paying little attention to the economics and politics of migration in the modern world," he said."

bishop tired and emotional

The bishop came out fighting yesterday, insisting he had probably been mugged and was having tests for amnesia - in spite of the presence of witnesses who claimed they had found him drunk in the back of their car, throwing their kids' toys out of the window and shouting: "I'm the Bishop of Southwark. It's what I do."

right to protest?

Law Lords uphold the right to protest... well that's jolly nice of them.

Fairford Coach Action

Schnews on the Fairford Protests from 2003

the age of the beard

Depp - cool

Th Guardian has just caught on to what some of us have known for years, Beards are now officially cool.


Jesus - groovy


Rasputin - full of ecstasy and fire


Che - guapissimo


Marx - still cool after all these years


we've all Bin there

revealed: ex-president turned anti-semite terror-lover

"a sick phenomenon"

Iraq Study Group Report - deride and conquer

Our embassy (in Baghdad) of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.

Summary if you can't be bothered to read it: stupidity beyond belief

skills to pay the bills

i got an email from michael albert himself telling me off for changing my card number and not telling him so he couldn't collect his sub off me which led me to think about how the poor sod prob has to spend an enormous amount of time chasing dentists for a few bucks to keep the show on the road so i thought i'd remind everyone to give, give, give to this, prob the most informative site there is.

if you do they send you a daily email which is wicked. so you get more than just a sense of smug self-satisfaction. donations start at $3 a quarter so don't be tight, have charity in your hearts.

i wonder how the lawn is today....

in spite of the weather..

"The fundamental problem with the Labour Party is that they always believed that capitalism was progressive and that they could re-distribute the crumbs that fell off the table more equitably. This was always the reality of the Labour Party."

shockmenot- it's a socialist..

daily mail reading of the meter: scandalous! hallmark of true quality i suppose..



sympathetic look at the spanish revolution

I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors

The first account of testing LSD by Albert Hoffman. Since then it has been tested and used by intelligence agencies for multiple purposes, varying from a truth serum to chemical warfare

It seems that in the war on terror detainees have been "given a 'truth serum' of an lsd like chemical".

This information comes from lawyers reperesnting U.S. national, Jose Padilla in his fourth year of detention and only now facing trial on charges of conspiring to commit terrorist bombings. Not only is he the first U.S. national to be arrested and detainbed for being an enemy combatant on American soil he has been in solitary confinement for three years of his detention.

The case is seen as one of the main pillars in the fight against the erosion of rights that has been perpetrated by the current administartion. In this case detention without trial and an extremely dubious interpretation of legal speak to claim that a national on home soil could be an enemy combatant as opposed to a criminal terrorist, a postion which merits at least a trial.

Poirot vs. Bond

Litvinenko, Goldfarb, Scaramella, Hijo de Putin, Pollonium 210, sushi, acronyms, acrimonious, is this for real?

"A new 'soft' cold war"

the it was Israel brigade
Yukos, IAEA, Nevzlin etc.

"can only be obtained from a limited number of state run laboratories"
Buy polonium 210 online, $65

Poisoned umbrellas, Ricin, Bulgarian secret service, KGB, Georgi Markov "a spherical metal pellet the size of a pin-head embedded in Markov's calf"

dollar dollar bill y'all

Welcome to the jungle
We got fun 'n' games
We got everything you want
Honey we know the names
We are the people that can find
Whatever you may need
If you got the money honey
We got your disease

meanwhile in blighty nothing of the sort is going on...

On a scale of one to terrorist......

U.S. security agencies have developed another 'great' Orewellian system. This time ominously called the Automatic targetting system; innocent civilians will be here by given a terrorist score on entering the United States. The score will be devised by a computer based on a number of factors invasively gleaned from a variety of sources. This includes the airline informing them what the potential terrorist ate on the flight. When a host of factors are compared the computer then alerts Homeland security about individuals with 'suspicious or unatural behaviour'
I would love to know what a suspicious meal on a flight is: 'would you like the chicken or the veg sir? I'm sorry we've run out of the Jihadi feast'........