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Yay!

The bonkers 90-day detention without charge proposal has failed.

*does happy little dance*

The Iraq Analysis site site is accumulating an impressive amount of new content at the moment.

Among it is a fairly damning statement from the

IAMB

on contract management in Iraq:

The KPMG audit of the 23 sole sourced contracts revealed exceptions in a number of cases including

* (i) insufficient documentation to justify non-competitive contracting action,

* (ii) lack of support for the provision of services or receipts of goods, and

* (iii) discrepancies in the amount billed.

And then they recomment “_ that amounts disbursed to contractors that cannot be supported as fair be reimbursed expeditiously_”

So, one more point goes to those distrustful anti-american anti-corporate types.

On a similar topic, somebody from Corpwatch (the US one) has written this book about the economic end of the war. It might be horribly out-of-date by now (it was published November 2004), but then everything on Iraq seems out of date at the moment. I’m planning to read it anyway, if I can get hold of a copy.

I’m pretty sure that’s not the sound a hard drive should be making.

If I vanish from the the internet shortly, you’ll know what to blame.

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This, despite being 6 months old, is a very useful summary of the allegations against George Galloway.

(via crooked timber, which also brings the story up-to-date)

Wow. That weekend was

so much better

than the last one.

Details may or may not follow, depending on how much trivia I feel like inflicting on you all.

On the bright side, today I discovered Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux, which was unexpectedly wonderful.

Several people have told me that Deleuze is great, but I’d asumed they meant it in the sense of “worthy but impenetrable theory designed for academics to show off their brainpower”

In fact, it’s more like something Timothy Leary would have written if you locked him in a library for ten years. Most of its arguments are somewhere between dubious and downright wrong. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s not really philosophy: it’s more like a preternaturally well-informed rant. Every paragraph pulls together three or four very different bits of research or culture, makes a totally bogus argument that they’re all saying the same thing, then jumps off in another unexpected direction. You can start reading anywhere in the middle (I did), and inside a couple of pages you’ll have a dozen things to think about and look up.

I’m going to have to buy a copy of this book, and leave it by my bed. If nothing else, it should give me a few interesting dreams

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In the next few days, I need to decide what days I’m taking off work in November. So if you’d like to see me, or if there’s something you think I’ll be wanting to go to, now’s the time to shout.

One day I’ll be organised to plan this kind of stuff in advance. Really I will.

Where can I buy bicycle lights that don’t sizzle out at the first sign of rain, and that don’t need their batteries changing every couple of weeks?

Anyone?