More and more reports suggest that the Coalition and specifically the US Army and Marines in Iraq are having serious difficulties keeping open the roads. This was no doubt behind the announcement that several major highways would be closed to civilian traffic, despite the rather pathetic attempt to spin this as “repairs”. After all, by…
Read More Logistics crisis in Iraq – and the negotiationsYou are Paul Krugman! You’re a brilliant economistwith a knack for both making sense of thecurrent economic situation and exposing theBush administration’s lies about it. Yousomehow came out as the best anti-war writer onthe Op-Ed staff. Other economists hate yourguts for selling out to the liberals. To hellwith ’em. Which New York Times Op-Ed Columnist…
Read More Which New York Times Columnist Are You?We now have referrer tracking.
Read More Admin – referrer trackingI’ve changed the way the Ranter’s blogroll works. From now on, blogs with RSS/XML feeds will be included in the RSS display under Ranter Coverage. Blogs without will simply be linked. At the moment I can’t display Atom feeds, so Atom users will get a link but not feed coverage. We welcome British Spin, Bloggerheads,…
Read More Admin – blogroll changesI recently commented on this blog entry concerning the Right’s fascination with vouchers – education vouchers, health vouchers – and some possible extensions. They seem to consider that all problems may be solved simply by invoking the magic of vouchers. A couple of things stand out: firstly, what’s the point of a voucher? The entire…
Read More Vouchers, vouchers, vouchersIt is reported that a US Army psychological operations team is broadcasting the songs of AC/DC, combined with a nice line in taunts (“You shoot like a goat herder!” Well, I rather suspect Iraqi goat herders are the sort of folk who learn to shoot straight before they can walk, but it’s the thought that…
Read More AC/DC in Iraq – Highway to Hell!Our beloved Criminal Records Bureau has apparently owned up to incorrectly listing some 193 persons as convicted criminals, usually by mis-associating applicants with similar names to criminals on the police national computer. This is fairly typical of David Blunkett’s brilliant idea, which famously couldn’t actually check criminal records much and took three months to process…
Read More BBC – CRB brands innocent citizens criminalsGlobalSecurity.org has a useful list of US Army and Marine operations in Iraq. Here goes: Operations Operation PLANET X (15 May 2003) Operation PENINSULA STRIKE (9 June – 12 June 2003) Operation DESERT SCORPION (15 June 2003 – ?) Operation SCORPION STING Operation SPARTAN SCORPION Operation SIDEWINDER (29 June – 07 July 2003) Operation SODA…
Read More A Brief Guide to the Non-War so far…Another damn good WaPo article from Iraq “A few miles to the south, at 4:30 a.m., Capt. John Combs, the convoy commander, radioed back, “This is a known ambush point.” It was a message he repeated frequently on the first part of the journey. Near dawn, he radioed back with another worrisome message: The bridge…
Read More “When we get to the far side, I’ve got absolutely no clue where we are going.”The Guardian is currently running a series of reports by the excellent Nick Davies on the criminal justice system and how crap it is (I paraphrase). Today’s story focused on the huge percentage of trials that simply don’t happen because the bureaucracy bungles, people don’t turn up, the court is double booked (really). “A lot…
Read More CPS – still a hive of indolence?