The Yorkshire Ranter

Jacques Chirac worked as a taxi driver in New Orleans as a student back in 1953. Who knew? The frantically prolific David MacDuff has an interesting article about the White Guard in Chechnya, 1919. It seems they did far better than today’s Russian army in dealing with a Chechen guerrilla insurgency, through a combination of…

The FCC has got in touch with BoingBoing, begging for backbone networks geeks and kit…but no-one wants to mention Telecoms Sans Frontieres. Funny that. They have access to world-class network engineering companies and their own satellite backhaul – but they are French. I can’t pick any other possible explanation. Sad, isn’t it?

Christopher Hitchens on Newsnight: They’re not mostly Americans – really from the isthmus and the Caribbean. It’s a sign the American dream still exists that they are willing to live below sea level for it But, of course… There is of course a shared humanity Surely there is. You unforgivable whore. It might once have…

Well, I promised to insult Leeds RLFC as much as I dissed Hull, so here goes. This weekend saw a Challenge Cup final that lived up to the billing I gave it. I said the Leeds/Hull grudge intensity would rock the Pennines even though it was played in Cardiff, and – yes. The match was…

The BoingBoingers are running at top speed trying to bring light, or more accurately TCP/IP data access, to the darkness of refugees fleeing New Orleans. Now, much as I respect the BB team and the brilliance of Cory Doctorow, this is not terribly smart. There is already an outfit that specialises in bringing communications technology…

Anthony Wells has a typically encyclopaedic post up regarding Ken Clarke’s entry to the Tory leadership campaign. There’s all the usual Wellsian statsy goodness, and some very interesting points about just how popular the lover of, ahem, smoky late night jazz is, despite being unfashionable on Europe and, as AW points out, frequently despised when…

Belfast Gonzo at Slugger O’Toole has a post on the leniency showed by a Northern Irish judge to persons convicted of rioting and assorted mayhem. He compares this to the sentences passed on persons found guilty of serious offences during the 2001 Bradford race riot, unfavourably, and compliments one of the judges on a shake’em…

Some weeks ago, I took issue with this post over at Soj’s, which discussed various apparent irregularities in the London bombings investigation (or at least the impression of it that appeared in the media) and drew some quite hefty conclusions based on the statements of one John Loftus, a “former Justice Department prosecutor” who regularly…

This (slightly belated) Orwell goes to Home Secretary Charles Clarke for his cunning deployment of cultural relativism as an argument in favour of deporting people to governments known to use torture. He said that criticism of his policy was tantamount to “latter-day imperialism” in an interview with the Financial Times, which gets him an Orwell…

Unfortunately, Blogger chose yesterday to eat all the HTML below the Viktor Bout index post in the sidebar. I’ve just finished restoring it, but unfortunately the blogroll is currently restored to a previous state and quite a lot of links have gone. This will be restored in the next couple of days. It’s nothing personal.…