Strangely Perfect

FTC Permanently Stops Six Operators from Using Fake News Sites that Allegedly Deceived Consumers about Acai Berry Weight-Loss Products Above is the FTC’s own headline from a news release yesterday.  The story is that they’ve hammered six operators of fake news sites into making settlements that surrender their assets.  They’ve also halted the six operations [...]

Massive Spam Hit Willie R Over the weekend, I received over 600 spams from someone called Willie R (with a number appended to the name) to my gmail account which I now use for my spam-trapping on an old email address that I use for registrations and the like…  See the screenshot of one page [...]

Bloody Sunday The Saville Report, probably the longest and certainly the most expensive enquiry in the UK ever, is now out.  The ramifications are continuing, despite the Prime Minister trying to draw a line under everything.  See Bloody Sunday report published History On that day in 1972, 13 folks were killed, and overall, in what [...]

Criminal Cost? A week may be a long time in politics, but it takes several years for anti-crime agencies to crack down on scammers…  This is my observation on all the various scams perpetrated on folk by such smiling scum as Pacific WebWorks and Jesse Willms. Salt Lake Tribune (SLT) The fine publication, SLT, always [...]

Students die in India as bus plunges into river The above headline is awful enough for the people involved, but in reality, it’s subject, a road crash, is common enough in my own country, the UK. What is really bad is how the BBC is reporting this.  They should know better but essentially, they’ve reported [...]

Honi soit qui mal y pense – “Evil be to him who evil thinks”  While fishing around the exploded stomach contents purporting to be news, FoxNews.com, on a totally different topic I might add, I came across this headline, part of a poll for AP. Poll: More Than Half of Americans Say Torture OK This [...]

British Torture and Denial of Human Rights On the day that some Serbian leaders were convicted and others released as free men following charges for war crimes, (see Kosovo trial clears Serbia leader ), a UK minister, John Hutton, has “apologised for previously incorrect answers to MPs” (I’d call that lying in a normal language), and [...]

Yet another Example of the Abuse of Statistics The chart is an estimate from Netcraft of the growth in the number of web pages world-wide. This figure is extremely hard to quantify, so is a best guess. The news; European ‘cyber patrols’ to fight crime ..is a great headline that disguises much fear, doubt and [...]

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 [...]

Today is the anniversary of the founding of Soka Gakkai in 1930 and also the anniversary of the death of first president Mr Makiguchi in prison at the hands of the corrupt and fascist Japanese government during WW2, only 14 years later. This is the front page of our newspaper, Seikyo Shimbun.  The headline reads; [...]

The United States abandoned a nuclear weapon beneath the ice in northern Greenland following a crash in 1968, a BBC investigation has found. This banner paragraph to the article succinctly explains the inane reporting going on at the BBC under the disguise of “News”.  Far from being an “expose” it’s just a hash – and [...]

Problem -  a Time Bomb. Unfortunately, it’s not “the bomb” that’s the problem. Today’s news that mammals are going extinct at a faster rate than…er…well ever, actually, would hopefully make people sit up and pay attention. Mammals facing extinction threat The last time I looked (warm blood, nipples, live birth) I was a mammal and [...]

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 [...]

Following on from the two bombers landing in Venezuela only 11 days ago (which I reported here when talking about the decreasing effectualness of Bush and USA power in the world), they will shortly be joined by a mean and capable looking ship called Peter the Great as well as a few others. They are [...]