At the moment, Chris Brooke is #1 on Google for ignorant git. This is unfortunate, as Stephen Pollard is the deserved holder of the ignorant git crown. If you have a blog of your own, you’re morally obliged to help spread the word of Mr Pollard’s ignorant gittishness.

“[There is] absolutely no evidence of George W. Bush ever using cocaine. This is an outrageous slander. As for his military service, he did his duty. Nobody has found legitimate fault” – David Thompson, in Dan Drezner’s comments.

What’s that, Skippy? It’s not a joke? There are actually people who believe this kind of crazy nonsense? Well, bugger me. On the plus side, I think America disqualifies the criminally insane from voting.

Update: actually, I think this *is* a joke and David Thompson is a parody. Unless someone can explain how this could be *intended* to make sense (on John Kerry getting the date of his undercover mission to Cambodia wrong by a whole four weeks):

“Indeed, it is a very serious character flaw. The stated date makes all the difference in the world. It’s similar to a previous president claiming he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky. Kerry claimed that the date was Christmas and by doing this he slandered his country and fellow soldiers.” (from later in the same comments thread)

My employers are having a good day in the press. We think the government is offloading public sector problems to the private sector (our government? Offload public sector problems to the private sector? Crazy talk…), and we think banks will migrate to Linux to save money .

The latter quote proves that we’re corporately less stupid than CAP Gemini, which isn’t a great challenge.

No, I don’t mean ‘Israel is a Nazi state’, you wanker. Rather, Abiola Lapite has an extremely interesting and – unsurprisingly – disturbing post about Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, a German Jew who managed to be a Nazi war criminal while a prisoner in Buchenwald.

Normally, we tend to assume that people who collaborate with horrible regimes that oppress them on the grounds of their race do so because they value their own comfort and/or survival above solidarity with their co-oppressees – and society punishes collaborators chiefly to deter others from ‘cheating’ in the same way.

Mr Katzen-Ellenbogen is a different case. Despite all evidence to the contrary (chiefly, the fact that the regime he loved sent him to a concentration camp), he belived himself to be on the side of the Nazis even beyond the end of the war. It’s almost more like Stockholm syndrome… which comes dangerously close to excusing him.

Then again, even though there’s no such empirical thing as free will, there’s a strong case that we should pretend that it exists so that the co-operative aspects of society can continue to function. So perhaps Stockholm syndrome doesn’t provide a get-out clause after all.

General Theory of Rubbish has a splendid analysis of the US election campaign. Highlight: “…the majority of voters think Bush planned the 9/11 Attack with Bin Laden but most still feel he’s stronger on terrorism than Kerry. Thus: a win for Bush methinks.”.

“[D]emocracy is like a horse, or a beautiful woman. It is a fine thing to see, and everyone admires it, but in order to get it to behave sometimes you must beat it and torture it and shock its gen[i]tals.

(from Fafblog’s exclusive interview with Iyad Allawi…)

There are many mysterious things about September 11, but any would-be conspiracy theorist should be aware that certain things are highly unmysterious (and that regarding them as evidence for a conspiracy makes you look unhinged).

* US airline security was appalling before 9/11. Their are documented cases of people who managed to accidentally carry *guns* in their hand luggage, never mind small blades.

* The success rate of a air defence systems at spotting threats is not as high as people would like you to believe (this is why Star Wars is a stupid idea, among other things). If the air defence system’s controllers hadn’t been informed of a potential threat from hijacked airliners used as weapons, the threat might not even register at all.

* Flying a 767 or a 757 isn’t an easy job, but it’s not an enormously hard one – and the difficult bits are things like landing and flaps, not airside steering. Purely on the basis of my MS flight simulator experience, I managed to do some reasonably impressive-looking things in British Airways’ real 767 simulator a few years ago. The reason pilots train for a long time is because if you mess it up then everyone dies, so a 95% chance of success isn’t really acceptable. The terrorists appear not to be too worried about people dying.

* The WTC towers were specced to withstand a plane impact, but not to withstand a full planeload of kerosene setting them on fire. While passers-by didn’t think the towers would fall, experienced structural engineers did.

* The towers were also specced so that if they did ever fall due to external force, it would be in the form of a perfectly downward controlled-like demolition. This is the case for all new skyscrapers – everyone concerned really wants to avoid playing Manhattan dominoes.

* Liking strippers and drugs doesn’t stop you from being a crazy religious fundamentalist, as a cursory glance at various American TV evangelists might reveal.

Backword Dave is drunk. Very drunk. But Oliver Kamm is a pompous neoconservative, and in the morning Dave will be sober.

Me, I’m sober now. I’ve been working all night. I know…

The Rigorous Intuition list of ‘coincidences’ about September 11 certainly isn’t an impeccably sourced, Seymour Hersh-esque masterpiece (it’s way too reliant on Democratic Underground postings, for a start). It is, however, very scary.

The list tends to conflate examples and cover-ups of breathtaking incompetence with implications of something much more sinister going on. The incompetence is pretty obvious, as anyone who’s paid any attention to the 9/11 commission’s report knows.

But on the sinister side, even the reminders of the things that we already more or less know to be true (the suspiciously-behaving Israeli agents, Osama’s James Bond escapes, the anthrax’s military provenance), combined with reports that are rather more suspect but that don’t appear to have been debunked yet (the suggestion that the pilot who expertly hit the Pentagon was too incompetent to fly a Cessna six weeks beforehand, the strange drugs connections, the potential involvement of Pakistan’s ISI – and the allegation that an ISI colonel wired Mohammed Atta $100,000 and then met up with Bush Sr and Dick Cheney on September 10), are disturbing.

I don’t believe that George Bush, or senior figures in his administration, had advance knowledge of the attacks – and that isn’t even based on assuming they’re moral people. If this were true and to be found out, it would literally lead to a revolution in America: killing innocent foreigners to enrich government cronies may be tolerated by the US public, but killing 3000 innocent Americans is not. And being lynched isn’t the way anyone wants to end their presidency…

It does seem likely that the CIA knew enough about the hijackers and their plans that it’s surprising the attacks took place. It also seems likely that the same is true for Mossad, and various other Western intelligence agencies.

Putting on my conspiracy hat (mmm, real tinfoil) the most plausible explanation appears to be that the CIA were running a covert operation – whether to infiltrate Al Qaida or to do something more nefarious is unclear – but that the attacks happened sooner than they’d expected. If their supposed Al Qaida double agents were actually triple agents, this would make sense: your plans are becoming compromised, so you either go ahead early or pull out altogether.

In the aftermath, everyone involved realises that the outcome if this truth is revealed would be at best mass sackings at the CIA and no 2004 re-election (and at worst, a lot of people going to jail). So it’s time for a cover-up.

Hell, maybe they were just conventionally incompetent. I’d almost rather believe my version of events, since it at least implies intelligence agencies might be able to stop it next time.

More importantly, please can some proper investigative journalists look into this? It’s far too important to leave to armchair pundits and conspiracy theorists.

One of my favourite phrases is ‘total management incompetence’ (the correct pronunciation is in a very angry West Indian accent). It’s an excellent way of both expressing and defusing tension induced by any fuck-up perpetrated by authority, and I strongly recommend using it whenever possible.

The creator of these immortal words was a South West Trains guard in about 1996, during a tannoy announcement along the lines of ‘this train [our last train home] will now terminate at Woking due to…’. The journey home was painful, but the words made the suffering worthwhile.

Thank you, anonymous SWT guard, for enriching my vocabulary and my life.