Google tip

Posted on March 16, 2003 by acb

sometimes even the densest Mark Pilgrim post erupts into comprehensibility: I recommend searching for keywords plus site:.ru to weed out all the legitimate sites

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he’s got it bad

Posted on March 15, 2003 by acb

Somewhere in Denmark is a man who has gone insane this winter. I have had my mouse pointer chased across web pages by all sorts of things, but never before by grayling swimming through the air.

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might as well giggle

Posted on March 15, 2003 by acb

After she posted some Paxman/Portillo slash, I asked TNH why no one wrote this kind of thing about American politicians. So she went off to find some. Mostly, she failed, but hers was a truly honourable failure, as this report shows

“I’d like to know what possessed someone to write slash about A.J.P. Taylor with Hugh Trevor-Roper, A.J.P. Taylor with Kenneth Clark, and an S/M scene involving Wittgenstein and Popper. Not to mention the one taking place in an alternate universe in which Bush, Blair, Chirac and Saddam are all new girls at a boarding school.”

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feedback

Posted on March 14, 2003 by acb

I just had a very nice note from Mark Humphrys, who writes

We talked back in 1997 about my X-rated Turing Test program: just today I have discovered your nice comments in The Darwin Wars:
“one of the funniest experiments ever performed in computer science
.. it is a small milestone in human history to have produced a
machine that can do this”
Thanks very much. I’m going to use that quote!

Well, this is gratifying. But other researchers have gone further down the trail he blazed. He drew my attention to jenny18

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the news

Posted on March 13, 2003 by acb

Both personal and political is so dispiriting I can hardly bear to type anything more about it. Ghastly things have happened to my oldest friend; Britain’s place as America’s most valuable ally is assured by Richard Perle’s threat to sue Seymour Hersh in London court …

(Update — Slate has a delicious take on that threat.)

Anyway, thank God for this story in the NY Times magazine, in which Mel Gibson’s father turns out to be an extreme right-wing Catholic nutter with a succulent new blonde wife. He believes not only that all Popes since John XXIII inclusive have been antipopes, forced on the Church by a Jewish/masonic conspiracy, but that the holocaust was all made up.

He moved on to the Holocaust, dismissing historical accounts that six million Jews were exterminated. ”Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” he said. ”It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
Across the table, Joye suddenly looked up from her plate. She was dressed in a stylish outfit for church, wearing a leather patchwork blazer and a felt beret in place of the traditional headdress. She had kept quiet most of the day, so it was a surprise when she cheerfully piped in. ”There weren’t even that many Jews in all of Europe,” she said.
”Anyway, there were more after the war than before,” Hutton added.
The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and ”financiers” to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler ”had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs,” he said.

Lives in Texas, of course.

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on the news

Seeing Joan

Posted on March 12, 2003 by acb

A square, pale room, seven stories up. From the generous windows, we could see the bow-fronted stucco villas of Headington, with gardens for childhood. In the room were four old women and four beds. One sat completely silent and still, hunched in her wheelchair, for the whole visit. Next to her was an older, thinner creature, with dark hair and dark patches all along her arm. One arm rested on a pillow on the table in front of her. The other fell straight down by her side and seemed to drag her body after it. “Help me!”, she said, in a flat grating voice. “Help me. Help me, Pat”. No one took any notice. The hand on the pillow dragged slightly to one side. The other window bed had a rosy-cheeked old lady sitting beside it who would smile encouragingly when I caught her eye, but said nothing at all.

Continue reading →

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no use having only one

Posted on March 11, 2003 by acb

I have thought since last summer that Slovenia is the most civilised country in Europe. Now it turns out to have been the most technologically advanced, at least 8,500 years ago.

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torture

Posted on March 11, 2003 by acb

I keep wanting to stop writing about the war. But there is fresh horror almost every day. It is not the fact of war, or the collapse of the UN, and all the other consequences that were foreseeable, but the increasing revelations about the morals of the people running it. First there were Richard Perle’s business interests (and the subsequent revelation that in 1971, when he was a Senate aide, Kissinger caught him passing classifed NSC information to the Israelis); now it is torture.

I think it is a reasonable test of the limits of Mr Blair’s hypocrisy that we demand that he repudiate torture, and assure us that it is not practised on British territory. A reasonable case for FaxyourMP, I’d have thought. Unfortunately, my MP is the deputy speaker of the House, and thus almost unique in being ex officio useless for this kind of thing.

A thoughtful and well-informed post I found from Electrolite points out that this wicked and disastrous precedent was first set in the War on Drugs. It’s impossible to think of a worse policy outcome than that “America’s War on Terror” should be fought in the same manner and with the same success as “America’s War on Drugs”.

Posted in War | Comments Off on torture

Scum at the top

Posted on March 10, 2003 by acb

Short form: Richard Perle, once known without affection as the Prince of Darkness, now the leading warhard/Likudnik ideologue, is the chairman of a Venture Capital trust which invests in the arms trade, sorry “defence equipment, and products useful in Homeland Security”. He is also a hugely influential government adviser, with access to classified information, and thus explicitly prohibited under the relevant, formalised, code of ethics, from having a financial interest in business affected by defence policy. Since his title is “Chairman of the Defence Policy Board” this shouldn’t be too complicated for such an intelligent man to understand.

This story was dug out by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Perle’s reaction, when questioned about this on television, was to call Hersh “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.”

Continue reading →

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illustration

Posted on March 10, 2003 by acb

Some reader complained that they did not know what an armchair made from macaroni might look like. Well, here’s a picture of Max Perutz with a haemoglobin molecule (not to scale)

Posted in Worms | Comments Off on illustration