The Yorkshire Ranter

Two horrible links: Army Doctors Implicated in Abuse, and “He had apparently been pulling out his own hair”

The Grauniad’s Jonathan Steele had more to say about Ukrainian elections at the New Year, here. He wasn’t happy about the protestors’ lack of “respect for constitutional procedures”: “The core of democracy is tolerance of other people’s views. Whether it is Rosa Luxemburg’s call for respecting the “freedom of people who think differently” or Winston…

Viktor Bout’s Ilyushin 76 UN-76002, photographed loading tsunami relief supplies in Cologne on the 2nd January….

The Guardian gives a column today to the supposed “electronic voice phenomenon”, apparently because it will appear in a film soon. For those who have so far avoided this nonsense, this is the belief that you can hear the voices of dead people in white noise on various electronic devices. Now, there are two –…

Frans has an interesting little post concerning economics and particularly the question of how much real difference exists between decisions taken by state planners and those taken by the bureaucracies of large firms. This insight has a history in economics back to John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State with its notion of the power…

This may be the last year of a traditional British New Year ritual, the ceremonious release of government records previously kept secret. Traditionally, confidential files have been sealed for differing periods of time depending on Whitehall’s view of their potential for embarrassment, whoops, security importance – the vast bulk are held for 30 years (the…

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…