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In a long post on the Shia uprising in Iraq on Tuesday, I argued that the Mahdi Army was following a strategy seen in numerous civil wars – seizing the locations of legitimate power and co-opting the police and administration. According to this story in the Indy, I was right.. “”The Americans are just as…

Damn good coverage from the Washington Post of the Fallujah battle – which rather invalidates the last sentence of the last post. The US Marines have an institutional history of being rather better at political war than the Army, going back to their 19th century role in Latin America – as evidenced by this quote:…

CNN link “Supporters of maverick Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr controlled government, religious and security buildings in the holy city of Najaf early Tuesday evening, according to a coalition source in southern Iraq. The source said al-Sadr’s followers controlled the governor’s office, police stations and the Imam Ali mosque, one of Shia Muslim’s holiest shrines. Iraqi…

Thanks to the excellent Spy Blog, the blog operated by the Watching Them Watching Us campaign for the regulation of surveillance technology, I now know that the controversial Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001 made it a criminal offence to “detonate a nuclear weapon in the UK without permission”. What? All these years it was…

Well, it has all finally happened. The potential for trouble represented by the Shia militias has been converted into actuality, and General Abizaid’s staff have supposedly been given 48 hours to think of possible sources of reinforcement (link). A cynic might say that Muggins Britain will be top of the begging letter list when it…

I’ve just taken a peek into our search referrals. The horror..the horror..and that’s without the horde of perverted googlers who the last post will no doubt draw to us like flies to shit. (Still, it’s all traffic..) Who the hell searched for “email a-z information of churches” and hit the Ranter? Now that’s just filthy.

CNN reports that a man from Los Angeles (where else?) has gone to jail after meeting a woman in a chatroom dedicated to rape fantasies. Unfortunately for all concerned he broke into the wrong flat…. “The victim stopped the attack by yelling and attacking Howard’s testicles. Howard then asked for the name the victim used…

Mr. Wightman has now declared on his website first that he would close down the site because he was being “treated like a criminal for trying to save kids” (puke!), and now apparently that the whole thing will be translated into Portuguese. One wonders why, but not what. The what is pretty clear – he’s…

Due to an unaccountable outbreak of laziness, when I saw the story about an IT consultant from Wolverhampton and his chatroom monitoring programs (Nanniebots) that appeared to pass the Turing test I didn’t blog it. (Original New Scientist story and transcript here, The Register, BBC news, Need To Know) Basically, his claim was that he…

Just to put this on record – the Daily Express is running with “THE TEEN BOMBERS” as its (huge) headline today. The story is apparently the arrest of a suspected al-Qa’ida cell as detailed below, but the headline sounds so much like a band that I had an odd feeling that I might have been…