Through a glass, lightly

Photographed in a London basement today.

Counting beads

A headline in today’s Daily Telegraph reads “Rosary is not just a fashion item, explains church”. Accompanying it is a photograph of footballer David Beckham wearing not one, not two but four sets of rosary beads around his neck. “The soaring popularity of rosary beads among the fashion conscious”, explains the Telegraph, “has provoked the Roman Catholic Church to issue a leaflet stressing their religious significance”.

That loud whirring sound you hear is that of my late mother (a fanatical Catholic who said the rosary every day of her life) rotating at 5,500 rpm in her grave.

Google tells me that Beckham appeared on the front of Vanity Fair wearing his, er, religious kit — thus.

Custer’s Last (profitable) stand

Following on the discovery of the missing billions in ‘reconstruction’ funds for Iraq, here’s the latest instalment of the farce, as reported by the NYT:

“Managers of a security firm that won large contracts in Iraq warned their bosses in February of what they called a pattern of fraudulent billing practices, internal company memorandums suggest.

The memorandums, written primarily by two company managers, charged that the security firm, Custer Battles, repeatedly billed the occupation authorities for nonexistent services or at grossly inflated prices.

The company, which quickly grew to garner security contracts worth $100 million in little more than a year, denies the charges. It argues that the managers confused sincere attempts to document jobs done in a hurry, in a war zone, with deliberate deception and that the company provided all contracted services for the agreed-upon price.

The memos and a lawsuit filed by former employees cite several specific instances, including billing the Coalition Provisional Authority $157,000 for a helicopter pad that in fact cost $95,000, and repainting forklifts abandoned by Baghdad Airways and then charging the authority thousands of dollars a month, claiming that the forklifts were leased.

One of the managers was later fired by the company and is part of a lawsuit charging Custer Battles with defrauding the federal government of tens of millions of dollars. The other manager, who has since been appointed to a high-level position with the company, recently declared that after further research, he believed that any questionable practices were the fault of a few individuals and had not been condoned by the owners.

On Sept. 30, the Pentagon, concerned by the allegations raised by the employees, barred Custer Battles from receiving further military contracts, and it has withheld at least $10 million in payments to the company. The company is appealing the ban.”

Just fancy that!

This week’s Economist has an engaging little piece about the travails of Sainsbury, the failing supermarket chain, which is suffering from the calamitous effects of the reign of its ousted Chief Exec, the portly Sir Peter Davis.

One of his blunders — according to the Economist — was “a fancy new IT system run by Accenture, a business-services firm. But that didn’t work either: Mr King [Sainsbury’s new Chief Exec] said that the new computer system had failed to deliver, and that the contract with Accenture would be re-negotiated. Being associated with such a high-profile failure might be expected to damage one’s reputation. Certainly Sir Peter’s looks tarnished. Happily, this fate seems to have escaped Ian Watmore, the man responsible for running Accenture’s IT consultancy business at the time. He has just been appointed to head up the e-Government unit in Whitehall, where he will oversee the government’s notoriously calamitous IT projects.”

Verily, you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Broken Windows in Las Vegas

Link.

The Power of Nightmares

I’ve just watched a terrific film on BBC2 by Adam Curtis on the origins of Al Qaeda and the US Neocon movement. Two depressing sides of the same coin: both comprised of folks who know (with a fanatical certainty that is immune to rationality) what is the case. Here’s an excerpt from the BBC blurb:

“At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. These two groups have changed the world but not in the way either intended. Together they created today’s nightmare vision of an organised terror network. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. Those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

The rise of the Politics of Fear begins in 1949 with two men whose radical ideas would inspire the attack of 9/11 and influence the neoconservative movement that dominates Washington. Both these men believed that modern liberal freedoms were eroding the bonds that held society together. The two movements they inspired set out, in their different ways, to rescue their societies from this decay. But in an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neoconservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see. The Islamists were faced by the refusal of the masses to follow their dream and began to turn to terror to force the people to ‘see the truth’.”

The Draft issue

On September 26 I wrote about the strange silence surrounding the legislation currently before the US Congress enabling universal conscription (including women). Now it’s finally begun to surface in the US presidential campaign. Here’s an insightful posting by Joshua Micah Marshall on the subject:

“My point, as I’ve said previously, is not that there will necessarily be a draft or that the Bush administration is planning one or wants one. The point is that the administraiton has pursued a mix of policies that make it a very real possibility — not because the administration wants a draft, but because they may drive the country into a position where we have no choice.

Take the president’s comment to the Associated Press. We have the manpower to deal with another major theater conflict in North Korea or Iran? Really? The US military is under great strain now with current deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. How can we possibly have sufficient manpower to handle an all-out war with North Korea and its aftermath, without pushing the all-volunteer military past its breaking point?

Through a mix of conscious policy and mismanagement, the White House has gotten us to the point where another major conflict would be quite difficult to sustain for a number of reasons. The point of a debate about a potential draft is to weigh the consequences of those policies and that record of mismanagement.

By making categorical statements that are false on their face — i.e., there will never be a draft — the White House is trying to avoid or cut short that debate. And that makes sense because when you have the debate on its merits, a draft does seem like a real possibility.”

I want one of those

It’s called TV-B-Gone and it’s a universal remote controls that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like the key-fob one has for a car, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first. Just think — every time you go into a bar or a cafe or an airport lounge with some daft TV show blaring in the corner, you can unobtrusively zap it. Mmmm…..

That bulge in Dubya’s suit…

… is an iPod!

Link.

The most bizarre campaign website so far

Some of Dubya’s relatives have put together the site Bush Relatives for Kerry with the message “Don’t vote for our cousin”. Why? “Because blood is thinner than oil”.