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The Army is thinking of buying a large fleet of inflatable tanks, in the hope of fooling an enemy into believing we are still a serious military power. Even if we can find an enemy dim enough to fall for this, it probably won't work. Incompetent modern Britain, which has a weirdly contrived shortage of CO2 when everyone else is trying to get rid of it, is quite capable of running out of air when time comes to pump up the inflatable tanks. It is working very hard on running out of electricity to drive the pumps, too. Our mad...

Recently, Martin Amis noted, half-jokingly, that becoming a grandfather was like receiving a telegram from the mortuary. If so, then the news last week that his closest friend, Christopher Hitchens, has cancer of the oesophagus is more like getting a generational summons from the grave. That is not to overstate the seriousness of Hitchens's diagnosis – although oesophageal cancer is indeed a grim condition – but simply to recognise the legend of an indestructible constitution that has long attended the celebrated journalist, polemicist, author, anti-theist and bon vivant. And no less to acknowledge the vitality habitually displayed by Hitchens in...

Thousands have lined up in bookstores across the country and Amazon's website was said to have collapsed due to the fervor over the release of God's new book, "Christopher Hitchens is Not Great." God, already the author of the best seller of all time, "The Bible," was quoted as saying, "Christopher wrote a fairly interesting book, but he really put some doozies in there. I honestly had a good laugh at some of them." God's new book has been expected to sell out by the end of the business day, Friday, August 24, 2007.

Here is an unambivalent statement: "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute." And, now, here's another: Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full well that my son, my family, this nation and this world were betrayed by George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agendas after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on...

Terminal Futility Routine airport security won't thwart jihadists, but it does inconvenience and endanger the rest of us. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, June 6, 2005, at 1:02 PM PT Is there anyone reading this column who would agree with Mark O. Hatfield Jr., spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, that in the past year "the average peak wait time at [airport] checkpoints has dropped a minute ... to about 12 minutes"? This is what he was cited as having said, in a New York Times report of a confidential document from the Department of Homeland Security. The last time...