[The Yorkshire Ranter](http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/) is well worth reading, for the incidental comments as much as for the main thrust of the posts. His [Review](http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2007/08/review-ak47-story-of-peoples-gun.html) of a history of the AK-47 nicely explains:

Mikhail Kalashnikov’s background as the son of kulaks exiled to Siberia, and his running away to join the engineers – he fled the penal colony and jumped a train, eventually landing an apprenticeship in the Turk-Sib railway yards. This is something a lot of people fail to realise about the Soviet Union; as well as a bureaucratic tyranny, it was (especially up to the 1940s) a continent on the move, full of transients and orphans and bastards and geniuses.

Rob (WINOLJ) posted this on Facebook, and I feel obliged to propagate.

Also….

Why is it that we have tea bags, but not coffee bags?

[This is the kind of thing I can ask, safe in the knowledge that a good third of you were

born

knowing the answer]

BBC journalists have fun with Iraqi rumours:

British forces have denied rumours that they released a plague of ferocious badgers into the Iraqi city of Basra.

….

UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer said: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.

This morning I decided I’d come to Cambridge if I managed to get a decent amount done today. Within an hour, I’d cracked the problem I’ve been battering my head against for the past couple of days.

Coincidence? I think not. See some of you at elise‘s tonight.

That sums up Blair nicely. Just watched his

last Prime Ministers questions

, where he praised everyone but the Labour party, and did nothing to transfer goodwill from himself onto Brown and the party.


Edit

: Also, the Labour party line seems to be that sentencing Chemical Ali to death is an unequivocally Good Thing. Including Ann Clwyd. So much for a moral stance against the death penalty.

[that’s right. I’m not dead. I’ve just not been paying enough attention to the world around me to say anything coherent about anything. This may – or may not – change in the future]

“Humanitarian intervention – the nonconsensual use of force – is dead. It had a very short life – September 1995 to the summer of 2003 – and it’s been killed for the next decade. America is the only power than can do it and, after Iraq, we would just be recruiting fodder for this apocalyptic nihilism.”

[Samantha Power](http://www.librarything.com/author/powersamantha&norefer=1), quoted in the [NYT](http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2007/06/24/opinion/25cohen.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

I’m sure there are hundreds of articles elsewhere, making the same point in more depth. It _is_ sad in a way, but I’ve never been all that convinced by military intervention. Not only is it always twisted by the political ambitions of the great powers, but it is almost never economically worthwhile. If we could channel all the enthusiasm for military intervention into education and healthcare, we might actually improve the world.