The Yorkshire Ranter

It’s now been reported that many of the quotes in Michael Howard’s Grauni-ad were dodgy. What a surprise. And apparently Shadow Culture Secretary Julie Kirkbride…who?…”will no longer pursue her complaint about public sector bodies placing most of their job ads in Society Guardian. “She is not saying anything about this any more”, he (a spokesman)…

The lovable conservative (it says here), Michael Howard, has placed a full-page ad in the Guardian’s Society supplement. He’s apparently looking for real live public sector workers to contribute to his search for “waste and bureaucracy”, led by banker David James. We’ve dealt with the Bureaucracy Myth quite frequently here – the belief that there…

It’s been reported recently that a treaty has been signed by Israel and Turkey providing for the shipment of fresh water from Turkey to Israel, in huge ships, in return for military stores, especially Merkava tanks. LinkThis is just as depressing as it sounds, because it shows that one of the fashionable intellectual worries of…

Damn good post on Iraq Now about everyone’s favourite profiteers. “Youngster: Wow. So no matter how boneheaded an incompetent manager I am, my department is 100% guaranteed to be profitable as long as I’m good at keeping my receipts? Trainer: Absolutamente! But wait—there’s more: the more money you can profligately waste, the more money your…

A terrible disaster has occurred in Marble Bar, WA, Australia’s hottest town. This place is a tiny outback settlement that nestles, or rather hunkers down trying to find some shade in the Pilbara mountains of northwestern Aussie, the oldest part of the Earth’s crust. The Bar was originally a gold-rush town (there’s still a small…

The Americans have now had 2 helicopters shot down this year – this time it was a Blackhawk, with nine men killed. (The one before that was a highly manoeuvrable OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance heli, a worrying development.) The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting angle on the shooting-down here. “General E. J. Sinclair, commander of…

It’s not been a good year for homonyms, as mentioned in the previous post. The great aviation security scare of 2004 has so far seen a succession of serious homo-bashing episodes – greatly helped by the Transportation Security Administration only including surnames on their warnings, as revealed by Nicolas Sarkozy. Now there’s a man I…

Well, after a prolonged Christmas break blogging recommences today. Michael Howard, the exciting new Conservative leader or tiresome hasbeen depending on view, has greeted the New Year by spamming the entire party membership (and some poor unfortunate homonyms) with a “declaration of personal principles” patterned quite obviously on those on the Rockefeller Centre. link to…

Britain’s longest strike ended this week. The workers at a factory in Caernarvon, Friction Dynamics UK, that makes brakes, clutches and other vehicle parts, went on a one-week strike in April, 2001 over changes to their shifts introduced at a time when their wages had been static for 4 years and were going to be…

We welcome two blogs to the blogroll – Guild of Ghostwriters, a British group blog, and Waldheim, a lefty blog from Yale.