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 [...]

Obama President Obama was elected under the banner of change. Change for the overall health of his nation Change in economics and finance Change of a re-assertion of the higher ideals of his nation expressed in the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Rights. In this last, he even promised this change in his [...]

CIA Guilty of Torture and Kidnap – Damages of 1.5 Million Euros Amazing news today.  An Italian court has bravely taken on the leader of the Western World and convicted 22 CIA agents of kidnap and torture. (see CIA agents guilty of Italy kidnap). The man on the left with the wacky beard and hat, [...]

How Bad was Thatcher’s Recession compared to the Current Economic Slump? Q. Well, how would you find out, exactly? A. Surprisingly easily.  This graph here compares historical economic slumps with the current one, on a month by month basis.  It’s taken from the “National Institute of Economic and Social Research” (NIESR) website here.  Notionally, it’s [...]

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, [...]

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

Two news items today confirm the inadequacy of any security system made by man.  After all, once a secret is out, it’s no longer secret. We have the simple human error of losing something combined with the natural inquisitiveness of human beings.  Both these absolute facts of life should drive a big hole through any [...]

Nichiren …if the minds of living beings are impure, their land is also impure, but if their minds are pure, so is their land. There are not two lands, pure or impure in themselves. The difference lies solely in the good or evil of our minds. – Nichiren Daishonin, from his writings, page 4.  Written [...]

Gary McKinnon, the UFO spotter cum computer hacker is still not tried for his ‘offence’.  But the ice he’s treading is getting thinner and thinner. Recently our nice CPS deemed that there wasn’t enough UK evidence to try him – but that the USA had plenty so we’ll send him there! His charge, which I [...]

WARNING:  This Posting Contains Illegal Pictures I Can Be Imprisoned for Publishing Them. A little realised consequence of Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the ramping up of common hysteria across the English speaking western world is, bizarrely, that it’s now illegal to take pictures of people commemorating, in a patriotic symbolic way, the lives and [...]

Chinese Censorship: As part of the BBCs “take” on the international views on the new, 44th President of the United States, their China correspondent Michael Bristow has reported that his inauguration speech was censored in China. Apparently, the English version on the Xinghua News site is okay, but the Chinese version for the locals has [...]

It’s here on Wikileaks! Text and xls spreadsheet – it’s all here. The Wikileaks site went a bit awry earlier today and then fell over completely (as of 20081119 20:31 GMT).  There sure are a lot of people who want to know lives round the corner!   ;-) It’s back up now (20081120 20:24) Wikileaks [...]

Inmate escapes German jail in box Paralleling a personal comment I made last week to Stuart, this week in Germany, a prisoner made a post-haste dash for freedom.  I think he must’ve been listening to The Velvet Underground’s “The Gift” In the monolgued song, voiced by Cale in his Welsh accent, poor little man Waldo Jeffers has [...]

Fears for Lloyds takeover of HBOS Shares in HBOS fall more than 30% below offer price Apparently, because of all the current shenanigans, the LloydsTSB offer for HBOS is going to fall through because ..it is the discount between 188p and 127.5p that is causing confusion in the City as the HBOS share price would [...]