History was one of my better subjects at school, but now it seems my history teacher might have got it all wrong about how we won the Second World War. For a long time we thought it was a combination of an excellent navy and more importantly an excellent Royal Air Force, a dogged Russian […]

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Crawley reports that the economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the war in Iraq to have cost the United States three trillion dollars.
“America’s annual aid contribution to the continent of Africa costs as much as ten days fighting in Iraq. Stiglitz estimates the US could end illiteracy in the world for the price of two weeks of […]

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Northern Ireland is full of the buggers: Born Again Paramilitaries, or “BAPS” as I prefer to call them. They swan around regenerated, forgiven, no longer the bad guys who terrorised people. They’ve found Jesus. And holy Hell do they know how to moralise. Often you can detect a rather horrible aura of self-righteousness, mixed with […]

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Billy Joel is ‘retired’, but - as we learned recently from Garth Brooks - that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s given up music. For the first time since 1993, Joel has written a song which is being released as a single starting with iTunes tomorrow, called Christmas in Fallujah. But Billy won’t be on […]

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I’m not normally a terribly emotional person (except when it comes to anger), but I felt myself welling up with sadness during a feature run by the BBC for Remembrance Day. The BBC is telling the stories of “The Final Few” veterans of the Great War almost 100 years ago. One of these old soldiers […]

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William Crawley posts about a fascinating piece of research which has garnered it an Ig Nobel award:
“This year’s Ig Nobel Peace Prize goes to the US Air Force Wright Laboratory ‘for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops’. I kid you not — the US […]

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Only in the mind of an ideologically impeded, politically delusional moron could America’s missile defense system be construed as as a threat of conflict on par with the cold war. Will the last sane, rational person to leave George Monbiot babbling please switch off the light? (Save energy.)
John Wright
johnwright@softhome.net

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I rarely read the Independent newspaper, and when I do it’s normally for the (unintentional) comedy value. For those of you who have never read it, imagine a secular version of the biblical Book of Revelation and you’re getting close to how it reads. The Independent’s columnists frequently come off with absurdities beyond reason which […]

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Western liberals can be so hypocritical. On one hand, their arguments were against the Bush administration for attempting to bring Western-style democracy to Iraq, saying that we must not presume to tell an ancient culture how to run their own nation. On the other, they’re now angry that we’re going to allow that […]

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According to Glenn Beck, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the leader of Iran, is a fricking nutcase with an apocalypse wish on the world. This show, Glenn Beck Exposed, airs tonight on CNN Headline News network. In an interview today Beck described getting CNN to air this program as one of the biggest struggles of his […]

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“Incredible,” I thought. “I’ve never agreed with a New York Times leader before!” I was reading a terrific article on the threat from North Korea titled ’Mutually Assured Disruption’ giving four detailed ‘swift policy responses’ to the reclusive regime’s announced nuclear test at the weekend.
You see, normally, publications like the New York Times […]

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New York CitySeptember 11th, 2001
We must never forget.

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Trees blocked out the sky and made me feel safer. Obviously the branches of trees would do nothing to stop or slow a Katyusha attack. But when you’re under rocket and missile fire, the sky feels like a gigantic malevolent eyeball. When you’re underneath trees, the gigantic malevolent eyeball can’t see you. Therefore a rocket […]

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I’ve been amazed at the amount of scepticism over the recent terrorist scare in Britain. Many, mostly left-liberal, commentators and huge sections of Muslim opinion don’t think there really was a terrorist plot at all. Nothing inherently wrong with that, except the bizarre rationalisations of their evidentially-challenged position that have been spewed out over numerous […]

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THIS is what we pay our governments to do. THIS is the reason we have government at all. And THIS was the government doing a terrific job in its primary role as protector of its citizens.
Just last night I was at the first day of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, a remarkable movie […]

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Earlier this month, environmentalist groups on behalf of the Winnemucca Indian Colony succeeded in having Divine Strake postponed until at least June 23rd by filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon (see my original article on Operation Divine Strake here). And USA Today reports: “A number of small, rural protests have been held, and organizers […]

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The purpose of a movie is to tell a story. In the case of United 93, written and directed by Paul Greengrass and to be released tomorrow, its story is one that the whole world lived on September 11th, 2001. The most blatant terrorist attack in recent history, it was an assault upon […]

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My backyard faces out to the massive desert landscape of the American SouthWest (controlled by the Federal Bureau of Land Management). You could leave through my gate into the desert and start walking, and not find ANYTHING but desert for a few hundred miles.
What a great place to blow stuff up.
Halfway across […]

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For some time now, we have been told that Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in order that he could execute his plan to invade Iraq.
A brilliant article from Robert Kagan appeared in today’s Washington Post. It concerns the role of reporter Judith Miller in a series of 2002-2003 articles in the […]

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‘Lord of War’ is an exposé of worldwide gunrunning. It stars Nicholas Cage. Frankly, I was expecting a strong agenda here - and I don’t think lefties were in short supply during the concept stage. But in fact, ‘Lord of War’ is a sharp, intriguing look at the life of the son […]

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