Travelling

I am travelling over the next couple of days, and will post when I can.

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Dying for new roads?

Hours after the Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth warned of likely UK casualties in the new major offensive against the Taleban in Afghanistan, two British soldiers were blown up by a roadside bomb. This brings the total of British military dead to 255 – the same number that were killed in the Falklands war in 1982.

The BBC reported of this fresh surge in Afghanistan:

4,000 UK service personnel were expected to take part in the offensive - with 15,000 coalition forces in total due to be involved in the operation. If the numbers are correct, it would dwarf the largest British military operation so far in Afghanistan - Operation Panther’s Claw, which left 10 UK soldiers dead and many others seriously wounded.

Mr Ainsworth said: ‘Of course casualties are something we have to come to expect when

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American tea-party dishes hopey-changey thing

As all sentient people on the planet are now aware, Sarah Palin is a figure of extreme derision. She has been mocked for her ignorance of the world beyond Wasilla, Alaska, her total absence of education let alone sophistication, her wince-worthy wordplay, her homespun hicksville homiletics, her God-bothering gabbiness, her chavvy dysfunctional family (is she the grandmother of her son?? is she the mother of her grandson???), her hair, her glasses, her hockeyness, her beyond caricaturableness...has there ever been such a total idiot and embarrassment in political life?

How is it then that such an all-time airhead who, we were reliably informed, was ‘toast’ when she bowed out of Alaskan politics, has now put herself at the head of the most significant grassroots movement in America, the ‘Tea-Party’ populist revolt? The ‘Tea-Party’ movement started as a set of word-of mouth spontaneous protests...

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The phosphorus cloud over Ha'aretz

Two days ago, the BBC ran with a story that the Israel Defence Force had disciplined two senior officers for firing white phosphorus shells at a UN compound in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, endangering the lives of civilians. Given the enormous traction that had been given to claims that Israel had used phosphorus shells illegally in Gaza, with accusations that it had thereby recklessly endangered civilians and injured them through burns, the story was damaging. Even though it appeared that this had been a one-off breach of the international rules – which permit the use of white phosphorus in warfare to create either smoke or illumination but not to endanger civilians – rather than the wholesale unlawful practice which had been claimed, even one such incident was clearly a political setback. Accordingly the Times in particular – which had...

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Not waving but drowning

The climate change zealots continue their free fall into utter ridicule. Yesterday, the government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, told the Independent that the

highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency.

Ah! Reds under the sea-bed! But by today King had retreated. The Guardian reported:

Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a ‘side-issue’, he said. But it emerged that he had been

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By the waters of denial they sit and weep...

A few days ago, Analysis on BBC Radio Four featured a programme about environmentalism by Justin Rowlatt which concluded that the green movement was using climate change as a cover to smuggle in other agendas such as poverty or equality. No! You don’t say. It was a timid, tentative thesis; the fact is that from the start environmentalism has self-evidently been all about changing the nature of society rather than changing society’s views about nature. And of course Rowlatt’s concern was that these hidden agendas might only confirm people’s scepticism about the science of anthropogenic global warming, which as we all know is Settled and an Unchallengeable Consensus, amen.

Nevertheless when the BBC, no less, starts to allow an interviewee to start telling the truth like this:

I hate to say this – but there is a very

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