Straight To The Point

The Burmese Military kill a journalist.

American soldiers kill several journalists (2003).

Stop press! America has now realised that global warming is a problem!

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said climate change is a real problem, and world leaders should forge a new global consensus on tackling it.

Woah! What brought about this u-turn? Someone should tell her that the rest of the world realised this a decade ago, and there was a global consenus (except for America) called the Kyoto Protocol.

Everyone knows that small print is the spawn of the devil. Take travel insurance. When you lose your suitcase on holiday, and it has your passport inside, and it turns out that you will incur two excess charges, one for the suitcase and one for the passport, the insurance company will just point you to the small print when you complain.

So you should have read the small print. However, what if you don't like what you read (assuming you are able to understand it)? You should obviously read it before you purchase the insurance, just in case, so you can go to another company.

That means that in order to compare the policies of every insurer you might want to buy insurance from, you have to read the small print of each one!

You'll need a holiday after that.

Given the current spate of videos of cop brutality, you'd be forgiven for asking if this is even news.

However, there is this website run by cops for the sole purpose of naming and shaming cops that have dared to give another cop a ticket when they break the law. They call this "professional courtesy". As the website says, Best Buy employees get a discount, why shouldn't cops get a perk?

You can't argue with logic like that.

Every time I use the Friends Reunited website, I find more and more problems with it, from technical to the design. Images sometimes don't appear but do when you refresh the page; most people don't keep their details up to date; and they sort people people by the date they left the school (so if you left a year before everyone else, like you moved house and started a different school, you'll be listed with a load of people who you never knew, who probably graduated that year.

They hit a new low for me this time though: Being a good citizen, when I noticed that one of their links wasn't working (it was another persons photo, but the link took me to my photo) I emailed them. They did reply - by sending me the login name and password of the person who's photo link didn't work!

Here is their reply (with the email and password removed):-

--

Thank you for your email.

Your FriendsReunited membership appears to be operating correctly.

Please click on the following link;

http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/frmain.htm

and in the 'sign in' section enter your email address - *********@hotmail.com

- and password - ******

Please let me know if you experience any problems when accessing your membership or if there is anything further that I can assist you with.

Regards

--

It's not like I didn't email them from the same email address that I'm registered with them. How could they think I was this other person? Did they even read my email?

What is the point of secure systems when useless people are part of the system? Okay, maybe I'm being a bit over the top. It's not like it's a bank's website or anything, but even a moron knows that you don't email passwords out. What if I were malicious? I could deface that person's whole profile, send out messages purporting to be from him, and add unsuitable photos.

* America is threatening Iran for its uranium-enrichment work.
* Yesterday, the UN passed a resolution calling all Middle-East countries to renounce atomic weapons. Only two countries opposed it: America and Israel.
* Israel still the nation with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world that is not subject to IAEA inspections.
* America attacks the UN Watchdog for calling for caution over Iran.

Where to begin with the hypocrisy and double-standards? It's like America wants a war with Iran to divert attention away from other problems!

PS - Here's details of Isreal's nuclear weapons - see Appendix A for the juicy bits.

So the Iraq Government has banned Blackwater. All the US Govt needs to do is use troops in their place; after all, that's what they were trained for.

Why does the US Govt use Blackwater in the first place? I'm guessing they are more expensive. I think that, for some reason, the death of a Blackwater employee in Iraq is far less politically sensitive than the death of a soldier. Why is that? They both voluntarily signed up.

I've just seen this video of a tazer being used on a student at a John Kerry speech, and it's pretty shocking what occurs. The camera goes a bit "wavey" for a bit halfway through, but I implore you to watch the last 20 seconds or so. The student is lying on the floor begging for help, surrounded by cops. He begs "don't tazer me" and "help" several times, and then he tazered and screams in pain. What makes it worse is that there are loads of bystanders doing nothing. And as far as I can tell, the student didn't do anything wrong, least of all when he was actually zapped.

What the hell is going on? And am I the only one worried that tazers are being introduced into the UK?

Troop numbers in Iraq are to be reduced! By 5,700! By Christmas! Oh, that's only 3.5% of the total number of troops out there. Is it worth bothering?

Oh wait! There are plans to reduce troops by 30,000! By next summer! But only if certain conditions are met...

Still, it sounds good to the sheeple. Cry it from the hilltops! We're pulling out of Iraq! Very very sloooowwwwlyyyyy. And that's until we decide to have another surge of course.

How can we properly remember 9/11 when we still don't know the facts?

• 9/11 Panel Doubted Officials
• 9/11 Panel set up to fail
• 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon
• 9/11 Commissioners Expose Obstructions

And how come people don't care? Could it be because they just want an excuse to go kick some foreign ass?

I have a question for all those wanting to join the army - what do you think will happen if you are injured or wounded?

It seems that the Government isn't going to have a referendum on the new European Constitution. And I can't help but agree with that decision. Only those who have actually read it could vote properly, and who's actually read it? The majority of people will base their decision purely on their opinion of Europe, which in turn will have been decided for them by the newspaper they read.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has vowed to lead his party into this year's election, despite trailing badly in opinion polls. In a classic bit of spin, he says he had never run from a fight before "and I don't intend to do so now".

Firstly, it's good to see him so unpopular, as he could give Tony Blair a run for his money as to who is Bush's biggest poodle.

However, hasn't anyone told him that it's not a "fight" - the electorate just don't want him in charge any more. It's as simple as that. Your time has come and gone. Go away and close the door behind you.

Arming more police with tazers is a bad idea. It is simply raising the stakes in the crime arena. If you were a criminal and knew that the police now had a "ranged weapon" to use against you, it would make sense to arm yourself with some kind of "ranged weapons" as a safeguard.

It's a slippery slope, and arming all police with guns won't be far behind. That reduces crime, doesn't it?

I never did like the phrase "human resources". To me it conjures up the image of Matrix-like structures where humans are farmed. However, thats in the far future...

I must admit it caught me by surprise however, that some companies are already requiring that employees have RFID tags surgically implanted. This is old news (Feb 2006), but news to me, and bordering on criminal. I think that companies that just require you to have a medical (unless your fitness is crucial to the job, like a fireman) are pushing the limits of invasion of privacy.