Strangely Perfect

Introduction Yesterday’s News The use of intercept evidence in courts in England and Wales is not “legally viable”, …the Home Office has said.  This is reported on the BBC here, Using intercept evidence in court ‘not yet viable’ Security From the earliest days of the British (English) Secret Service, back in Elizabeth I’s time, all [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

Computer Shopper Interview with Home Office Dawinderpal Sahota at ‘Computer Shopper’ magazine, part of the Dennis Publishing organisation, has published a fascinating interview that the magazine had with a UK Home Office rep on the subject of the government’s policy towards tackling child abuse websites. ‘Computer Shopper’ gave all questions in advance so that the [...]

Not being a frequent foreign traveller, my recent stop in Eisenstadt, Austria, at a 5 star hotel open my eyes a bit.  A peculiar quirk, for me, was the toilet, with a shelf, in the room’s en-suite bathroom.  I’ve since found that it’s called a “shelf toilet”, a German invention to ease the inspection of [...]

A recent article on coral growth has confirmed my opinions that I’ve had for years that the assumptions about the environmental degradation and collapse of coral reefs have nothing to do with global warming, sea level rises or ice ages. News Article: Coral springs back from tsunami – BBC News Background from WCS.org:  Conservation Opportunity [...]

Workers and ordinary intelligent users of the Post Office Royal Mail system (“the post”), must be very worried by the latest news about the holistic vertically integrated business that was “the post” being further split up and creamed off. see 50,000 jobs at risk in break-up of Royal Mail or Royal Mail faces call to [...]

Many moons ago I read the short story with the above title. Although not one of Pohl’s best works, it has nevertheless left an obviously lasting impression on me. Written in the mid-fifties, it’s a future tale of consumerism gone mad. In the tale, it’s illegal not to consume as much as possible.  The hero [...]

Actually, I don’t count Redhill as part of Somerset – it’s really part of Bristol, with all that entails… Family flee neo-Nazi rally Nazi comments caught on camera When I saw the headlines last night, I thought, “surely some exaggeration”.  Well apparently not!  Hordes of Nazi types really did descend on a skanky motel-ish camping-type [...]

Is August a bad month for flying.  Is it just me or have there been a lot of large airplane crashes and near-escapes in the past few weeks? Or are they symptoms being revealed statistically, of cost-cutting and slipping maintenance at a time of falling revenues, bankruptcies and stiff competition?  What do you think? Huge [...]

I had a message from Doomage recently which allowed me to update some biographical information on the Crawling Chaos website here, http://crawlingchaos.co.uk/myths/people, but also he expressed his disappointment about the online sound quality. Needles to say, I agree with the sentiment but am forced into this mode by the technical limitations of the medium. But at [...]