December 2004

Having just bollocked Gerald Haworth for capitalising on the dead, I suspect I may be about to indulge in the same vice myself. Via Phil Carter, an interesting point relating to the explosion that slaughtered US soldiers in Mosul last week. Apparently Iraqis permitted to enter US Marine bases, as well as the citizens of…

What the hell does Gerald Haworth, Conservative MP for Aldershot, think he’s doing with comments like this? It must take a very special degree of shameless self promotion to get a dig in at the government on the back of the drowning of some forty thousand people, just two days after the event. But he…

Just to let you know, the Ranter will observe its traditional Christmas ceasefire until some time on the 26th of December. That is all. Anyway, what would you be doing reading blogs on Christmas Day?

Well, only 93 MPs were willing to reject ID cards. Sad, really. But with the right encouragement they can do better. We have to be tough on deadbeat MPs and tough on the causes of deadbeat MPs. I’ll come back to this downblog. Let’s recap. ID cards will force all of us to give up…

Frans Groenendijk has an interesting post about the politics of international development aid, specifically the question of whether or not it’s working. Holland prides itself on meeting the UN target of 0.7% of gross national income, but it seems (if I have his argument aright) that there is a growing disagreement as to whether or…

I have had the long-term project of redesigning the Ranter for some time. In the last few weeks, work on a new Ranter has proceeded apace and a nearly complete template has been in use on a test blog for several days. The test blog’s purpose is to check the new template’s performance, accessibility and…

Not so long ago, I mentioned that the director of the Rudolfinerhaus, Lothar Wicke, had resigned on the same day the clinic announced that it had confirmed that Viktor Yushchenko had been poisoned. This resignation, officially due to overwork, was the basis for a brief flowering of conspiracy theories at the time. It seems there…

I’m about to do that stereotype blogger thing of doing an unfocused round-up post for want of inspiration, so please bear with me. In the Ukraine, for example, more details are out from AP (via Neeka) about the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko. Apparently, he has the second highest concentration of dioxin ever recorded in a…

Caller to BBC Radio 5 discussion on today’s court ruling against the indefinite incarceration of terrorist suspects in Belmarsh: “I believe in the majority, not the individual!” It was almost enough to make me sympathetic towards Patrick Mercer, the Tory who is luckless enough to be “shadow secretary of state for homeland security” – that…

Yesterday’s Times carried this article concerning binge drinking. Bizarrely, the print version of this contained a large pull-quote about half-way down the story which read “Teenage drinking is out of control – ministers have been all talk” Now, your keen and agile mind will recognise the “all talk” bit as a major Conservative talking point.…