Straight To The Point

As thousands of people sue the tobacco companies for their smoking illnesses, it comes as no surprise that the government is partly responsible.

In the 1950s the Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan put the financial benefits of cigarettes over the nation's health. Mr MacMillan, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1963, said the revenue from smoking was too valuable to inform the public of the link between smoking and lung cancer.

This may have been 50 years ago, but it's a scandal that thousands of people are dying prematurely because the Government didn't want to tell them the truth.

They're just destroying farmland for no reason whatsoever, other than they get off doing it.

I like the way they don't even hide the fact they are occupying someone else's land - they even call themselves the "Israeli Occupation Force"!

What I can't believe is how they think this will solve anything. What has a farmer - who has lost everything - got to lose? Watch him start firing rockets at Israel anytime soon. And who can blame him?

There have been lots of theories about the real reason for the Iraq war, the main one being that it was to get the oil because we need a steady supply.

I don't believe this is true.

The real reason is the opposite - to restrict the flow of oil. Have you seen the profits that the oil companies are making, now that the price of oil has reached record highs? And the fact that the Government got to fight a war and scare us into submission with stories about terrorists was an added bonus!

You almost have to admire the genius of the plan. Make lots of money and increase their power in one foul swoop. Brilliant!

7 or so years ago, everyone was talking about Friends Reunited - at work, on the radio, on the TV. For a website to get that kind of exposure was unheard of, even now. Suddenly there was a way to find out what all your old schoolfriends were doing.

Where is it now? It's still going, but it's been left for dust behind Facebook and MySpace, for two simple reasons - they charged money to send messages to other users, and they didn't make it easy enough to find those other users.

They've finally seen the light and allowed free contact between users, but it's way too late. Everyone has moved onto Facebook, which is far more straightforward, and free. And worth about a trillion times more than Friends Reunited.

Naturally distraught at just seeing his girlfriend killed by a speeding policecar, the police obviously saw fit to taser him.

How come we have all the CCTV cameras in this country, but there's never one pointing at the action?

And thanks to the police's amazing investigative powers (the kind that means they can't even identify which policeman is driving which speeding police car), they also can't tell if the sirens were on or not, or even whether it was responding to an emergency!

The Ministry of Defence is set to sign a £4bn deal to build two aircraft carriers in the UK in a move expected to provide 10,000 jobs at its peak.

That's another of the annoying things about the MoD - it's just a job creation scheme, where the Government gets to spend billions of pounds creating jobs purely for jobs sake whilst trumpeting that they're increasing the size of the army, as if that's a good thing.

Why not just simplify things and divide the 4 billion pounds between all the workers? This newaircraft carrier will float about for a few decades before being decommisioned, after which the taxpayer is 4 billion pounds down with nothing to show for it.

You can understand how the police might be understaffed these days - they have to police our language as well as our actions.

Don't get caught using the word "cult" otherwise they'll summon you to court.

Or could it be because the Church of Scientology has infiltrated the police? From the article:

The City of London Chief Superintendent, Kevin Hurley, praised Scientology for "raising the spiritual wealth of society" during the opening of its headquarters in 2006.

WTF? The police praising Scientology, and charging people who call it a cult?

As I've always said, actions speak louder than words. That's why I hate speeches by politicians - they can say whatever they like, usually what the populous want to hear. But their actions are the only thing that's importants.

So, take the War on Terror(tm). Despite all the rhetoric, our leaders are again failing - now they've dropped charges against a Saudi citizen alleged to have been the "20th hijacker" in the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, because they tortured him.

Great going!

Pete Doherty has been released from prison after serving 29 days of a 14-week sentence stemming from drug and driving offences. He must have been extremely well behaved.

The message for the kids is: it's not that wrong to drive while uninsured with no MoT while in possession of crack cocaine, heroin, ketamine and cannabis - as long as your a celebrity!