What a coincidence

September 15th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

BBC…

A senior Papal adviser has pulled out of the Pope’s UK visit after saying arriving at Heathrow airport was like landing in a “Third World” country.

Cardinal Walter Kasper reportedly told a German magazine the UK was marked by “a new and aggressive atheism”.

Oh, cheers. Thanks for that.

Isn’t that a bit of a contradiction? Being here in the UK is like being in a third world country and yet we are in the grip of Teh Eeeeviiiil Godless Ones? The impression I got, and as you know I’m not really one for sniffing out stats, so correct me (with links) if I’m wrong, was that third world countries were quite religious.

The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended “any kind of slight” and had simply pulled out due to illness.

So it was a fucking compliment, then? In what way, ever, has being like a third world country not been a compliment? You can’t even think of one way can you?

He also criticised British Airways (BA), saying that when you wear a cross on the airline “you are discriminated against”.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! What a fucking old cunt. Has he travelled with BA? He probably has. Did he get discriminated against? I’d bet my right testicle he didn’t. Has any one who’s travelled by BA whilst wearing a cross been refused service or stopped from using the toilet or been denied anything at all? Get to fuck have they.

If this deluded dipshit is referring to that woman that wanted to wear a cross but was told not to because it was against BAs’ uniform policy. Well, it’s not like wearing a cross is one of the central tenets of christianity like say, a Sikhs’ turban.

Vatican sources said Cardinal Kasper [for it is he…] – who stepped down in July as the head of the department that deals with other Christian denominations – was suffering from gout and had been advised by his doctors not to travel to the UK.

That’s fucking handy, isn’t it? The cardinal calls the country he about to visit a bunch of cunts and suddenly he’s had an attack of gout and can’t go. Obviously I don’t know if the cardinal really has gout, or has been advised by his doctor not to travel, but what is it from Rome to London? 3 hours? 4? Hardly a long haul flight.

A bit of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

On Mugabes’ ‘foreign owned comany’ policy

September 14th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Talking of fucking stupid ideas, here’s another, also based on the colour of someones skin, from Mugabe this time…

Mugabe told Reuters the government would proceed with a plan for local blacks to acquire 51 percent shares in foreign-owned firms, including mines and banks, despite criticism it will hurt investment flows into the country.

It has always been our aim to have control of our resources … and I don’t think the private sectors of the Western countries would, in total, decide to stay away

Don’t you just love the word ‘aquire’. It could mean oh so many different things.

If that 51% share of froeign owned companies is to be bought by individuals, then not many, I imagine, zimbabwean blacks are going to be able to afford to buy into it (if ‘aquire’ does indeed mean ‘buy’ and not ‘steal’), which leaves just the elite that already have money, keeping the redistrubution of wealth from local resources in the already wealthy.

The term ‘local blacks’ does not mean owned by the state, which income from those investments could be put back into the infrastructure of the country for all, for say, transport, education and health. Although the white Zimbabweans would also benefit, much much more of the impoverished black population would benefit rather than a few of the not so needy.

Denying an opportunity for a section of the popluation on the basis of skin colour, well that’s just good old fashioned racism isn’t it.

Mugabes statement tells me that he is just after an easy buck for him and his mates.

Cunt.

Oh dear, Diane

September 14th, 2010 § 1 comment § permalink

I heard Diane Abbott on Radio 4s’ Today programme this morning. I couldn’t believe what I heard (I can’t get a link to it from R4 now so here it is from the Independent)…

Ethnic and gender monitoring should be carried out when public bodies axe jobs to prevent planned spending cuts having a disproportionate impact on minority communities, Labour leadership candidate Diane Abbott said today.

Ms Abbott warned that a “last in, first out” approach to redundancies would hit black and female workers particularly hard and could set back race relations by a generation, risking “instability” in society.

What the fuck is she thinking? This is outrageous.

‘Last in, first out’ is a sensible way of deciding redundancies. If there’s two people in role, then it is a completely arbitrary way of making the decision. There is no chance of being accused of trying to get rid someone in an underhand manner, no chance of being accused of sexaul/racial discrimination. It is also not bad for the organisation either, by way of having to pay less redundacy money than needed.

Another way of deciding who gets the chop is my drawing up a skills matrix. Those with the higher skills stay. Again, colour of skin or whether someone has a penis or not doesn’t come into it. The matrix makes sure only what a person can do the matters.

Abbott may have a point about the cuts disproportionally affecting minorities and women, but that’s hardly a consolation to the employee, or their family that has been made redundant because of something an empoyer can be prosecuted for doing when hiring.

I think the public sector cuts have the potential to set back race relations and black and ethnic minority communities by a generation.

To use an over used phrase, WTF? The only way these cuts will fuck race relations is if a policy of deciding who gets the boot is done by race. Exactly as Diane Abbot is advocating.

DuckDuckGo: The private search engine

September 11th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

So. DuckDuckGo. A hybrid search engine. This one though, doesn’t collect personal data. Which many people would say is A Good Thing.

What DuckDuckGo also does is prevent what they call ‘search leakage‘…

At other search engines, when you do a search and then click on a link, your search terms are sent to that site you clicked on (in the HTTP referrer header). We call this sharing of personal information “search leakage.”

For example, when you search for something private, you are sharing that private search not only with your search engine, but also with all the sites that you clicked on (for that search).

In addition, when you visit any site, your computer automatically sends information about it to that site (including your User agent and IP address). This information can often be used to identify you directly.

So when you do that private search, not only can those other sites know your search terms, but they can also know that you searched it. It is this combination of available information about you that raises privacy concerns.

Because DuckDuckGo prevents ‘search leakage’, by redirecting your click on a result in a way…

…that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand.

No information about your computer is sent to the site you click on via a DuckDuckGo search. Not even the search terms. The very thing that tells you in your analytics package what someone was looking for.

This could present a problem for Search Engine Optimisers/Marketers if this type of ethos gains traction*. Not being able to tell what operating system someone was using when they landed on your site is one thing, but not knowing what someone was looking for when they got there is another.

*I don’t think it will as the money to be made from this information is too great an opportunity to pass up for some people.
**Discovered via Tygerland.

Merry err, Septemberval

September 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Can I be the first to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, courtesy of Tesco Abingdon.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

A Daily Mail tweet that caught my eye..

September 10th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Do you notice anything a little out of place in the following Twitter timeline?

A timeline full of links to the Daily Mail itself, since it started on Twitter and then, *pop*, a tweet to somewhere else.

Ooh, curious, I thought. It didn’t sit right. News outlets, the BBC, Guardian, Telegraph, the Sun etc, all use twitter as a broadcast medium, as variation on the RSS ‘thingy’. They are simply there to give a link to a news item. They don’t retweet, they don’t #ff and they don’t direct you to anywhere except their news pages.

There are exceptions to this, for example Guardians Comment is Free Twitterfeed has an actual person manning it that replies to you and everything, but that isn’t the main feed for it’s news items. The feed for the news item is always just a broadcast.

So when a link to somewhere not the Daily Mail appeared it made me think wonder what’s going on. Had the Mails’ feed been hacked cracked compromised? Has a Mail employee got his own site to promote and thought he’d get a few hits from the Mails followers?

Nothing quite so exciting, I’m afraid.

thisismoney.co.uk is the website for the Mails’ City & Finance section of the paper and they’re running a competition, obviously, to win an iPad.

To enter you’ve got to fill in a load of details about money stuff and search for an independent financial advisor. Once you’ve found the advisor nearest to you, you can enter the competition. Presumably you’ll also get a call from said advisor in the very near future as well (as the whole thing is in the ‘advertising-feature’ section of the site, as indicated by the URL).

So, it may be nothing dodgy going on but what does it say about the Mail when the only thing it can tweet about that isn’t sending you to it’s main website is not how to reduce your mortgage or how to play the stock market but a competition.

I hope whichever Mail reader wins the iPad isn’t stupid enough to use it to preen themselves on cancer-giving Facebook.

Tim Ireland: Still getting shafted by Conservatives

September 8th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

Since Tim Ireland uncovered that the source for a front page Sun story about a muslim hit-list was the very same chap who posted the idea on a muslim forum, whilst pretending to be a muslim, Tim has had his name dragged through the mud with despicable smears, had personal information published all over the place on the net, been threatened with physical violence and had any plea for help from the very people able to put a stop to it fall on deaf ears. All by Conservatives, or associates of Conservatives.

Well, it’s just got worse…

Recently, someone involved in this ongoing campaign of harassment began publishing material targeting my wife, my children, and other members of my extended family.

This has included false accusations aimed at my kids, making specific allegations of criminal behaviour that are not only entirely untrue, but extremely damaging (and, it must be said, upsetting).

His bloody kids.

One of those involved is Iain Dale, who just tweeted…

Hurrah. Am connected to the internet on my iPad. Praise be to Allah. Wonder what to do now….

How much of a fucking clue do you need, Iain?

If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it till it does

September 3rd, 2010 § 4 comments § permalink

For fucks sake…

An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.
[…]
The military court cleared the soldier of illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice by asking soldiers under his command to alter their accounts of the incident.

Capt R’s lawyers argued that the “confirmation of the kill” after a suspect is shot was a standard Israeli military practice to eliminate terrorist threats.

The officer always followed standard practice, you see…

A recording of radio exchanges between Capt R and his troops obtained by Israeli television revealed that from the beginning soldiers identified Iman as a child.

In the recording, many people buy 5.56 ammo online to keep themselves protect themselves, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post’s operations room and describes Iman as “a little girl” who was “scared to death”. After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Is that also standard practice? Shooting into a suspected bomb to see whether it actually is a bomb or not?

Although the military speculated that Iman might have been trying to “lure” the soldiers out of their base so they could be attacked by accomplices, Capt R made the decision to lead some of his troops into the open. Shortly afterwards he can be heard on the recording saying that he has shot the girl and, believing her dead, then “confirmed the kill”.

Even though the girl could be a lure, the captain still move some of his men into the open. Is that standard practice, too?

Capt R claimed that he had not fired the shots at the girl but near her. However, Dr Mohammed al-Hams, who inspected the child’s body at Rafah hospital, counted numerous wounds. “She has at least 17 bullets in several parts of the body, all along the chest, hands, arms, legs,” he told the Guardian shortly afterwards. “The bullets were large and shot from a close distance. The most serious injuries were to her head. She had three bullets in the head. One bullet was shot from the right side of the face beside the ear. It had a big impact on the whole face.”

He fired shots near, not at the girl? And she was shot 17 times? This man should be prosecuted for incompetence as well as murder.

Lost for words, I really am.

Via MsMaryViola

Wanted: ‘Gifted’ constituency secretary

September 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I know I shouldn’t blog anything anything to do with work, and I normally don’t, but this appeared in my rss this morning (click to enlarge)…

Naturally I clicked the links to see the full advert, and got this…

I just want to get home on to an unfiltered computer and see what exactly being a parliamentary secretary involves.

a nationalist or religious conflict?

September 2nd, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

I just heard Jeremy Bowen on Radio 4 talking about the Palestinian/Isreali peace talks…

There is a religious war developing in what has been essentially a nationalist conflict. You can make a deal with nationalists, it’s much harder to deal with people that believe they’re doing gods will.

Oh? As opposed to people that believe god gave them some land?

Come on Jeremy, the Palestinians have been fighting against a religious justification for the occupation of their land for generations.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

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