Category: current affairs

Letter bombs to MEPs are the price of EU policy, says the UK Independence Party. Rrrgh! ….bile… ..rising…. must resist urge to rant!

In the name of all that is good on this planet, what the xxxx are these idiots thinking? How on Earth can the UKIP suggest that there is any justification for letter bombs in the world of politics? I think that they have just successfully shot themselves in the foot – their constituency is dominated by the more conservative elements of British society who will, rightly, be totally abhorred by the sentiment that their spokesman has expressed.

Incidentally, responsibility for the bombs has been claimed by a group calling itself the Informal Anarchist Front. The BBC reports that they are the responsibility of the Informal Anarchist Federation, apparently a misnomer which shouldn’t be confused with the Italian Anarchists Federation, who, unlike the UKIP, have denounced these bombings. More here.
To be honest, I hadn’t realised that anarchy was so well organised. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?

UPDATE: the leader of the UKIP has now condemned the bombings, although he went on to reiterate his warnings of civil war in Europe. Scaremongering at its best.

Will someone put the bitch down at the earliest opportunity? There is a limit to what is acceptable in today’s society. The thing is an ugly brute too.

Bob Monkhouse
Alan Bates
Beagle2?

I often travel the section of road that has seen a fatal accident today. It is very dangerous. The coach looks like it belongs to Richardsons, a company often used for school and college trips from Chichester.
Maybe this will lead to new safety measures on that road. They would be long overdue.

For anyone that didn’t read the Independent on Saturday, I recommend Feargal Keane’s article Saddam’s arrest should be the signal to bring other war criminals to book.

Woo, yay and, indeed, houpla! West Pier restoration given the go-ahead. All they need now is the money.

The transport reporter on BBC South Today, Paul Clifton, used a term I’d not heard of before when talking about the campaigners opposed to the construction of a second runway at Gatwick. One step up from NIMBY (not in my back yard), he described them as BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone).
A friend of mine who is professionally involved in countryside management would describe BANANAs as being members of the "blue tit and woolly hat brigade". I know what he means – unfortunately, a balance has to be struck between conservation and infrastructure and development, and that sometimes means that what we would like to preserve has to give way for what we need to develop. Equally, sometimes that situation is reversed, and the poor people who make those decisions and then put them into practice are unlikely to ever satisfy everybody.

Not much discussion in the Blogosphere (well, I’ve not seen much) of Metronomy, a new company that is giving away umpteen million (or several hundred thousand, depending on who you believe) free new IBM PCs. Or, to be more precise, it is loaning them on a rolling three year contract. There’s a catch of course – you must agree to be exposed to one minute of adverts for every twenty minutes of computer use, and must also use your computer for not less than thirty hours per month. I don’t find either of these restrictions to be particularly challenging – it’s easy enough to use the advert time for a loo or tea break, and an hour a day is pretty low level usage for most of the people who read this site. I also predict that patches will become available very quickly to suppress the adverts.
Is this a good idea, from either a commercial or marketing point of view? In my opinion, it will certainly have an impact on the PC market, probably wiping out the bottom end low-cost and very low margin machine market. Bad news for the likes of Dixons and Comet, I’d suggest. I am also unsure about the viability of the business model itself – will enough advertising revenue be generated to make the loan of the computers (and associated transport, admin and support costs) a profitable exercise? I’m not sure, as many companies are already wary of advertising on the net, having had their fingers burned by unrealistic promises in the past. I suspect that the main beneficiaries of adverts in this context are likely to be the usual suspects – purveyors of online financial services, Amazon and their competitors, the supermarkets and possibly also e-government. I don’t see it as being any more effective than other online adverts, other than by being more closely targeted than traditional net adverts.
We shall see. Hels and I may apply for one, just to see how we get on with it. After all, we need to be a three PC family, don’t we?

How handy.
See also: this.

Assuming that the man arrested in Iraq really is Saddam Hussein, the real question that will be asked now is what exactly to do with him. So far, finding much evidence of anything at all has been a problem. I guess there is enough from the attacks on the Kurds and the war against Kuwait to convict him of something. But the question is, where will he be tried? And under which authority?