Monthly Archives: March 2006

Sleepwalking into a police state

I’m thinking of declaring the 29th of March 2006 ‘Freedom Day’, because it is the day that freedom died; or at least started to.

Maybe I’m being over-dramatic — even melodramatic — in these posts; but I don’t think so.

The House of Lords has been doing sterling work in standing up to the ID Cards […]

Stanslaw Lem

Just heard on Radio 4 that Stanslaw Lem has died. He was 84.

I’ve only read Solaris, but I recall it as being very good.Technorati Tags: books, writers, stanislaw lem

Book Notes 6: Saturday by Ian McEwan

This is an interesting one: another Booker nominee, if I’m not very much mistaken, and a strange and masterful work. It is a portrait of a single day in the life of its protagonist, one Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon.

Reading matters

This year I’ve been blogging about the books I read. I started over on my LiveJournal, but I’ll continue here. So far, though, there have been:

The first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell […]

TV roundup: what I’ve been watching recently

Turning away from politics, for a wee while, I’ve been finding things have been pretty good in the TV world, recently.

I thoroughly enjoyed Life On Mars on BBC 1, recently. I expected slightly better — or at least different — of it when it was first announced: I thought there would be more (or […]

Maybe that revolution won’t be needed, after all

After my, perhaps over-excited, post about that bill, I had some discussion with zotz on this post. Graham is clearly thinking more clearly and calmly than I am on this one, and I wonder if — and hope that — things might not be quite as bad as I feared.

Still, it would be better […]

"Pray the future will never need…"

I had hoped to be the first to coin the inevitable term, “loangate”, over the recent Labour funding scandal. Not surprisingly, though, The Independent has beaten me to it.

Labour sleaze: it’s real, it’s here, it’ll probably bring Blair down. Let’s just hope he takes the corrupt & cynical ID cards bill — and […]

“Pray the future will never need…”

I had hoped to be the first to coin the inevitable term, “loangate” over the recent Labour funding scandal. Not surprisingly, though, The Independent has beaten me to it.

Labour sleaze: it’s real, it’s here, it’ll probably bring Blair down. Let’s just hope he takes the corrupt & cynical ID cards bill — and […]

Abolition

There is now a deadly danger to British democracy. One that is even worse than the ID cards bill.

Not for nothing are they calling it the ‘Abolition of Parliament’ bill. Its official name is the Legislative and Regulatory Reform bill, and it is, quite simply an attempt to take control of power in […]

New website, blog

I’ve had the devilgate.org domain for nearly two years, now. But it has taken me this long to actually start using it for more than a source of throwaway email addresses.At last, though, I’ve put some readable stuff up there. So far it’s just a main page and a blog. In time, […]