October 2003

Link to story Original Berliner Kurier article Vienna’s Der Standard reports that a Berlin man will appear in court on Thursday charged with “using the characteristic marks of an unconstitutional organisation”, an offence under German legislation forbidding neo-Nazi activities, Paragraph 86a of the Federal Criminal Code. The nature of the alleged offence is unusual –…

Thunder Run: Revisiting the Battle for Baghdad (washingtonpost.com) Very interesting interview with the leader of the first assaults into Baghdad. It was his lot who were visible over the Information Minister’s shoulder whilst he was denying they existed. “in the process, you want to create as much chaos as possible out here. Why is that?…

By the way, I noticed this the day after Iain Duncan Smith made his “speech”. All those orchestrated jokes about the Liberal Democrats were mysteriously missing from the text given to the Press by the Tories. Did I hallucinate it? Or did the Tories – totally straight and honest and opposed to any of that…

After much trying we finally have an outgoing RSS feed that works. For anyone who wants to syndicate the Ranter, go to that “BlogRSS” graphic on the sidebar. All right?

A Fistful of Euros It’s good to find – at last – a pro-European blog! With a quote from the eminent (and now very late) historian, H.A.L. Fisher on the top. “Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.” Rather fine.

The same blogger who prepared that article, Mediocre Fred, has also recently written at length on another Ranter target, the US fraudster and conspiracy propagandist Lyndon LaRouche, who is apparently standing for the Democratic presidential nomination. LLR, the editor of Executive Intelligence Review, is famed whereever faintly anti-Semitic gun nuts meet for his idiosyncratic explanations…

Open Source Politics: United States: The Government Is in Business A very good post from an excellent blog on the stupidity underpinning one of the most common no-meaning proposals in modern politics – the idea that government should be run like a business. This idea has long legs, especially in the US where it goes…

Jarvis quits rail maintenance The construction firm, PFI guilty party and disastrous rail maintenance contractor Jarvis plc has decided to withdraw from all its railway maintenance contracts! So let us all rejoice! “Jarvis is pulling out of routine maintenance, partly because it is worried about its reputation being damaged by accidents caused by poor workmanship.”…

The Conservative party’s “leader” Iain Duncan Smith was on the spot today, giving what everyone said was the speech that would make or break his chances to survive a party mutiny. If that was it, you might think he was doomed already – but the hall screamed with hysterical force every time they were asked…