For reasons that can only be described as culpable stupidity, I’ve so far failed to link to Chris Young’s excellent Explanada, and the mysterious Danish family Bertram.

Should any vengeance demons be reading, please consider this error rectified. I’d be grateful if you could avoid sending huge heart-ripping-out spiders as punishment.

Or if you are, don’t bring anti-Bush literature to the RNC.

At least, I assume the reason the writer got the full anti-terrorist grilling was his Indian nationality. It’s *possible* that any journalist who attempted to enter the convention while in possession of an accidentally acquired anti-Bush sticker would have faced the same totalitarian treatment.

On some levels, that thought is even more disturbing. Mmm, murder abroad, dissenters locked up at home – here’s to four more years… (via Oxblog)

The Coalition is still pursuing a ‘hearts and minds’ strategy in Iraq. Not one of ‘impressing Iraqi civilians with our decency and respect for their lives’, admittedly, but one of ‘slicing Iraqis’ hearts and minds into small pieces with artillery shells‘.

(short link summary: the Americans sent in helicopter gunships to destroy a crippled and abandoned armoured car. Dozens of civilians including children were standing round the armoured car at the time, because it was an interesting thing to look at. The helicopter gunships opened fire anyway. Journalist Mazen Tomeizi was one of the people killed, while filming around 70 metres from the armoured car).

I’d like to believe that the airmen responsible were acting counter to their orders and will be court-martialled and suitably punished. But we know from countless other unpunished civilian-slaughtering incidents that this is more like official policy… actually, that’s unfair: the strategy is more like unimaginably clueless incompetence than deliberate policy, not that that makes much difference to the dead and wounded.

Whatever. If this is what we’re fighting for, what’s the fucking point?

Good news, everyone: Sarah Justanotherfalsealarm is back from her summer of no blogging with lots of interesting stuff on queerness and pop culture, while Michael Brooke has moved from posting twice a week to posting four times a day.

Read both, and write a full report below comparing and contrasting them [25 marks].

For the first time in about a month, this evening I had time to watch TV at the time when some good programmes were on. So I turned my TV on to catch the interesting-sounding programme on Jewish comedians, only to be met by a snowstorm with green lines superimposed on it.

None of the TV’s controls have any effect; nor does removing the aerial – overall, it seems to be entirely fucked. It’s 13 years old, and cost less than £100 when new, so I’m not really annoyed about the value for money side of things. But damn, why couldn’t I have found this out when there was only rubbish on?

I always used to like Colin Powell. Although hitching himself to the current corrupt bunch of bastards has permanently tarnished his reputation in my eyes (and I suspect, those of the world), it’s a relief to know that even he thinks the neocons are "fucking crazies".

Last year, a member of the public claimed on the Sunday Herald’s online messageboard that George Robertson, former NATO secretary, was involved in a cover-up over the Dunblane massacre. This allegation was untrue and defamatory; as soon as Lord Robertson brought the post to the editor’s attention he deleted it and apologised.

Any reasonable person would have left it there – but being unpleasantly litigious, Lord Robertson didn’t. Instead, he sued the newspaper for libel, and won a five-figure sum in damages.

The UK’s libel laws are extremely stupid, for two reasons. The first is that their bias in the plaintiff’s favour means that the main beneficiaries are often crooks, conmen, cheats and liars; the second is that they spread liability far too far (retailers and distributors can be held liable for libels printed in publications that they sell).

Lord Robertson clearly doesn’t fall into any of the former categories, but it’s equally clear that his case falls into the latter. The Herald took all reasonable steps to remove the libel once it was printed, and he would have suffered no damage to his reputation had he accepted the newspaper’s apology.

While I can see that enough money to buy a house (in Scotland at least) for no work would be a pleasant thing to receive, and that Lord Robertson’s actions are in no way unlawful, his actions would appear mercenary and unnecessary in anyone. Since we hold public servants to higher standards than regular citizens, this makes matters significantly worse.

Quick one – ex-parrot Chris Lightfoot has set up an aggregator. Quite a good selection of news and blogs, with a UK/liberal/techie bias. Plus Cambridge cinema listings.

Incidentally, you may wish to avoid pissing Mr Lightfoot off.

Animal rights terrorists are evil bastards, who’ve done far more harm in the UK – directly to individuals, even before you get onto the damage to scientific research – than Al Qaeda. But because they’re not brown-skinned and don’t wear funny clothes, they get far less negative media coverage than the Islamoloons.

So it’s excellent to see Guardian columnist Catherine Bennett pointing out that these guys are proper, nasty terrorists who should be stopped. I imagine the Guardian’s postbag tomorrow will be bulging with angry missives, letterbombs and ricin.

Laban Tall has more on what the crazy animal rights bastards do, while Tomodachi has an interesting digression on the meaning on terrorism (which also makes another insufficiently-made point: that the chances of any individual being a victim of Islamic terrorists are so small as to be worth ignoring).

If you’re going to forge documents from 1973 in an attempt to make George W Bush look even more crooked and dodgy than he already does, then you should go to the trouble of using a vintage typewriter. Or at least word process it using Courier with “autocorrect” turned off.

This isn’t exactly master forgery. It’s really, really basic stuff that I knew about when I was 11 (although admittedly I was trying to produce fake tenners on a colour laser printer using Christmas decorations as the metal strip when I was 11, so I may not be representative).

Perhaps this is why the Republicans fight so much dirtier than the Democrats: the latter just aren’t good enough liars to get away with it.

And yup, I know that there were proportionally-spaced typewriters in 1973, and that there is some evidence they may have been used in this case. Perhaps the strongest evidence is that surely no political goon could be quite as stupid as outlined above…