The Yorkshire Ranter

My HOWTO Occupy Tunisia post has been attracting referrals from companycommand.army.mil, a forum set up by the US Army for officers returning from or going to Iraq to share experience and knowledge. A sensible idea. I’m rather pleased they read it. However, because as far as I know those of us outside the US DoD…

(Expanded from a comment at AFOE) The LA Times reports in detail on the recent insurgent company-sized assault on Abu Ghraibh prison. It was deeply scary: they staged diversionary raids all round the area to hinder relief and confuse the issue, then assaulted the position from three directions at once, having laid down a bombardment…

It’s been brought to my attention that the ever-informative Sharjah Airport online departures board shows that an Irbis Air Co. flight departed for nowhere else than Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan this morning. (Thanks, Hannah!) Further digging down the lists shows that, in fact, Irbis is running a regular service to the base, which has…

Phil Carter has an interesting post on why the US military establishment is still failing to provide the language skills and area knowledge its soldiers need. Rather, the post is good, but the comments discussion is cracking! Phil’s basic point is that there are nowhere near enough Arabists in their forces (no surprise, perhaps, given…

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war ‘excuse’, says the Murdoch Times. Another memo, it seems. The leaks are coming thick and fast now, no? “The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at…

Two years ago today, The Yorkshire Ranter was born in a striplit computer room in Royal Holloway College’s International Building. Since then we’ve had ranting, spam, funnies, mystery jets, vituperation, stupidity, more ranting, and some terrible afternoons spent with HTML and frustration. I’ve picked over yards of extremely dull official documents, debated the EU with…

Why is it that nobody ever gets it right about GPS? Every time the magic navigation system is mentioned in the national press, someone always tells us that the satellites “track” the user. This time, it was the Grauniad, and worse still, it was its normally fantastic science supplement, Life. In a report about the…

Remember all that kerfuffle about the 2004 local elections in Birmingham? When three Labour councillors were kicked out by a special election court because it turned out they’d been forging huge quantities of postal votes? When Judge Richard Mawsley said that the election “would have disgraced a banana republic”? Where the police discovered two of…

In our last mystery-aircraft post, we were looking into the affairs of a firm called Transafrik, which operates 11 of CIA frontco Southern Air Transport’s Hercules aircraft in Angola and holds UN contracts in various places. TA was based in Sao Tome for years, and I recently discovered that a Swiss merchant named Hellinger started…

Well, the referendum week is past and the people have spoken. As usual with referendums , though, deciding what they said is already proving to be tough. No is clear enough, but it is increasingly obvious that there were as many noes as there were voters. That’s democracy for you. It’s also one of the…