Whatever you do do not click on this link, yes this link. It might be hosted on US Government servers by the US Government for public access but the information that you would download is illegal because it leads to improper thoughts. So stop. Don't do it. Don't click this link or you will instantly have your mind corrupted and be turned into an evil Islamic Terrorist. This would mean you would be unable to carry out even the simplest terrorist opporations, and you don't want that do you? No, there are far to many authoritarian cuntface Ministers that need to be blown up first.

actions are the measure, not thoughts

I am posting from my phone, hence no link, but reading the papers today this pissed me off so much that I had to vent some spleen and this is where I do it.

Rizwaan Sibir was recently released from prison after being held for six days for downloading the wrong information from the Internet. Six days in prison because the state decides that it does not like you researching something you feel it is important to learn about. That is just wrong. He should not have been inside for six days, of two days, or even 24 hours. He should not have been arrested at all. Information is not a crime, listening or reading is not a crime. Thought is not a crime. The state has no place dictating the limits of acceptable inquiry. The state has no place dictating was can and what cannot be discussed in any way shape or form. With the latest attempted, and bungled, Islamic terrorist attack learning more about the paucity of Islamist thought and the immoral nature of Islam itself is not something that should be banned. It should be encouraged. Let everybody learn what kind of shithole they want to lead us into, a world where non-Muslims are second class citizens, where there is state approved murder of gays, a world where women are treated as mere tools for reproduction to be kept imprisoned in their houses. Let everybody know that this ideology leads its followers to care so little about life that they are willing to throw away their own in order to kill and maim. Under the glare of untrammelled inquiry they will be shown to be the pathetic nilhilists that they are, consumed by self hatred for the way that they cannot resist our culture, and would rather die than admit that it is the West that they really want rather than the culture of the death cult that they have been indoctrinated into. Let the battle of ideas be joined and we, the West, will win because our ideas are better.

Explosions in Exeter

A man walked into a restaurant in the middle of Exeter today and tried to set off a bomb.

I think that we can rule out football hooliganism because nothing anymore disastrous than normal has been happening to Exeter City recently. Likewise some weird prankster would most likely have just stuck his head around the door to lob in a firecracker then legged it. Detonating in a locked toilet is not a good practical joke since the only person to get laughed at would be you. So it could have been an attempted terrorist attack, so if that was the case what do we know?

They where after mass casualties. They chose a chose a crowded restaurant as the target.

They where after civilian casualties. Exeter has a large army barracks and the Royal Marine training base just down the road. They chose not to go after these and went for a specifically civilian target.

The restaurant was not part of a particularly big chain and they chose not to go after any of the many chain coffee shops.

The restaurant was not a 'gay' one or part of any gay district (even if the new Princesshay is rather nice) nor is it associated with large numbers of ethnic minorities, not that anywhere in Devon has many ethnic minorities other than Eastern Europeans.

There was no warning.

It was very probably a suicide attack, since when it went off they where still holding it.

They where incompetent, because only ended up injuring themselves.

If this is terrorism then it seems to rule out the IRA, Animal Rights activists, anti-globalisation nuts (who to be fair don't normally go in for anything more than the odd riot), and homophobic Neo-NAZIs. There is only one group left that has recently committed any acts of terrorism, and it certainly fits with their Modus Operendi of incompetent suicide attacks, but there aren't that many Muslims in Exeter either. If this was Islamic terrorism then confirmation will come from how studiously any mention of the M word or the I word or anything else that would link the bomber to Islam is avoided in the media.

UPDATE

Yep, Muslim. Well at least some of the media mentioned it, I wonder how long until the BBC does.

UPDATE

I was wrong. This time the BBC seems to be rather less hesitant about mentioning that he was a Muslim convert.

Pirate Rights

Via Mat Sinclair. This is the kind of thing that gives Human Rights legislation a bad name. The Royal Navy isn't able to go after pirates because it is against their Human Rights, bugger that.

Labour: big, fat, and crap

More authoritarian bullshit from the giant gaping arsehole that is the Labour government. This time they are:

considering a central database of all UK communications data including times and durations of phone calls, emails and internet access for every British citizen

Spyblog has the details and as much as I hate the EU this is not their fault (this time) it was Labour that was the prime mover the creation of this directive and was using the EU as a democracy by-pass mechanism, not the first time they have tried this trick. The EU directive that our provincial government in London will blame was only issued in 2005, and they had already put place all the privacy shredding structures needed to comply with it because of the RIP Act of 2000, before 7/7, before 9/11, but after the IRA ceasefire. So bollocks both their claims of "I didn't want to the bastards forced me," or "It's all because of terrorism. Fear, little proles, fear". No, this is simply another attack in the continuing War on Civil Liberties that Labour has been waging ever since they got into office to feed their insatiable need for power and control.

This new giant centralised communications database would go along with their giant centralised medical record database, their giant centralised DNA database, their giant centralised identity database, and their giant centralised movement database, which could well go nationwide anytime soon. These giant databases to go with the extensive warrantless snooping powers that they gave to just about everybody through the RIP Act and its extensions. All of which probably have as much security as the giant centralised medical student database

Notice the pattern developing?

Another example of this instinctive need to draw everything into huge inefficient lumps can be seen in their treatment of one of the only bits of the Last Bastion of Communism that actually works, the GP practice. Unlike with the plague pit hospitals with their Alice in Wonderland accounting the GPs get on with serving their patients as best they can despite the system that they are forced to negotiate around. The only time that you really hear anything bad about them is times like when the bureaucrats in Whitehall made that complete cock up by underestimating the amount extra work they put in over and above what is expected so that the bureaucrats thought they needed to offer a huge bribe in order to get them to produce the pointless statistics that bureaucrats love so much. This is probably because the GP service is made up of small practices run privately by the doctors themselves. GPs are hard working, efficient, parts of their local communities. Obviously Labour weren't going to stand for that forever where they?

George Monbiot seems to be the only person to have picked this up so you have to look through his obsession with pinning everything on our eeeeevil reptilian multinational corporate overlords, and there it is again. Labour is forcing pointless centralisation onto a system that is working perfectly well for absolutely no reason and the result is going to be far far worse than what was there before. The eeeeevil reptilian multinational corporate overlords will be the ones running these things (badly), but that is more because they are the only ones that can deal with the increased bureaucracy that will result since they themselves have so much of it already. However they did not create the idea, they are just after the easy money that Labour's centralised scheme offers. It is Labour that decided to trash a work system because of their obsession that big is always better.

Coming to a lab near you

So we scientists are going to get to produce human-animal hybrids (and what else are humans? Vegetables? ... OK, other than Polly), rather than having to go to Cornwall to study them in the wild. As always with all new areas of medicine the ludites where out in force, with their collective chant on "We Fear Change!" One of the main arguments to try and cover up their unthinking revulsion at the new was that it was unnatural. Well so are antibiotics, so perhaps next time the ludites get infected with some easily curable illness they should remember their objection to unnatural medical inventions, crawl under a rock, and die.

political self test thingy

The Public Whip has one of those political self test thingies running that I cannot resist due to the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. My results did not surprise me, of the main parties the Conservatives fitted my views best, followed by the Lib-Dems, then Gwyneth Dunwoody voting record and least of all Labour itself.

The FA Trophy

Association Football, a curious pasttime where twenty two grown men run around a field chasing an inflated pigs bladder. I believe that it is quite popular. So popular that it seems strange that the recent clash of Torquay United and Ebbsfleet United for the FA Trophy, yet it has only been picked up by The Register. This is not just because it is a clash of teams, but on management and ownership systems. Torquay United is a traditional team, with ownership primarily being held with one man. Ebbsfleet United on the other hand is owned by his fans via the website MyFootballClub as a type of mutual. A sign of things to come? That collective private ownership can be better than individual private ownership? I don't know but then I don't know anything about football and, quite frankly, care even less.

49% prefer blue

So the Labour party now has its lowest poll ratings since scientific polling began, which means that Gordon Brown is absolutely rock solid in his position as PM. Why would anybody challenge him? Two years to try and sort out 10 years of miss management, and then get destroyed at the election and have to resign is not a prospect that is going to get them lining up. Gordon will lead labour to defeat and then the leadership challenges will start. Given that the only people left will be deep in the Labour heartlands it will be one of them, and probably one from the unelectable left that will be given command to march his miserable band off into the wilderness for a very long time.

Surprisingly this is not a prospect that fills me with joy. I certainly want Labour out. The sooner that this government has been filed away in the history books as a bad experiment the better, but without a credible opposition it will give the conservatives a monopoly position in political space and like all monopolies it will end up being abused. I expect that the Conservatives will be a bit less statist that Labour, but they are not Libertarians, the best being simply right wing libertines, and despite the drum beat of there being other ways to solve problems than just leaving it to the state in his speeches David Cameron does have a tendency to occasional bouts of the most appalling statism. Without the real statists in the Labour Party to compete with, and therefore keep him honest, these tendencies combined with the simple the easy laziness of statist thought could lead him down the seductive path that leads to the Dark Side.

Airships

It might have been the wide-bodied jet aeroplane that brought cheap transport to the masses but airships are undeniably cool. Cruising the globe not crammed in like cattle, but sipping cocktails in an elegant lounge while the world slides serenely below you. They are also environmentally friendly as the Moonbat points out in a desperate attempt to show that not all greens are complete luddites who would rather that we all lived in caves and spent our evenings in incest. Then after showing all the advantages of airships he tries to end on a more downbeat note as to their viability.

Is this proposal just a flight of fancy? Because airships feature in no official document, because they have not been considered by either government or major industry, I have no way of knowing.

However to me that is a positive endorsement, it is not just one eccentric trying to bring back airships using somebody else's money for political gain. There are four separate private companies competing against each other all of which have been able to show enough promise so as to attract investment without the need for government subsidy. There are smart people that have worked the financial situation through and found it to be good enough to put their own money on the line. Airships could really be about to take off again!

H/T The Devil

Be seeing you

The UK is the most surveilled country on the planet, we even beat totalitarian shit holes like China and North Korea for CCTV coverage. Woo, yay us (not). So what has Airstrip One the UK gained from this level of constant surveillance? Bugger all. The police don't go through them to catch crooks, because it is too much work and they are generally too low quality to get a conviction anyway. The crooks know this so they aren't worried about the cameras at all. The general public on the other hand do have reasons to be worried. The cameras might not have good enough quality for the courts, but they are fine for a bored CCTV operator to spy on you in order to get his rocks off and getting shipped strait off to the states for their anti-sanityterrorist databases. Once there that data is never going to be removed and will simply add to the ever growing levels of noise to disguise any possible real threats. Like the no fly lists which ban even Sky Marshalls from flying and cannot get their names taken off of.