Rants ‘n’ Raves
Snow and Chaos
Last night’s heavy snowfall (at least by British standards) has predictably caused the usual commuter chaos today.
Large sections of the rail network have shutdown completely, London buses, trains and even the tube have largely ground to a halt and the roads are, by all accounts jam-packed.
And all for less than 6 inches of snow.
Why is that?
+15Rant: Lazy Cartoonist Poster Boy
I’m a long time fan of Scott Adams Dilbert Comic strip, as are millions of cubicle farm workers in the ranks of the oppressed and downtrodden.
But I’ve always taken note of Adams’ willingness to shamelessly exploit his creation to make a few trainloads of cash in the vast world of merchandising and his apparent willingness to play both sides of the employee/employer war against each other, if there was a buck in it for him.
+16Rave: XKCD Comics
Recently, we were given a board-game version of the World of Warcraft. It looked interesting and we decided to give it a go over the Christmas break.
Jaysus! It took us almost 2 hours to set the damn thing up and an hour or so later, I was mightily relieved to be eliminated from the game as my last hero bit the dust. I’m the first to admit that I’m hardly Mr Patient and the game is obviously complex, which means that it takes a while to get used to, but even so…
+24Rant: And the hits keep on coming
Jaysuz! Ya couldn’t make it up could you? Just when you think that the finance watchdogs of the western world couldn’t fuck up any worse, along comes the story of Bernard Madoff and his 50 billion pyramid scheme.
Not only did the SEC fail to perform even a spot inspection of this geezer as a matter of routine, they appear to have entirely ignored / failed to act on information received from an apparently reliable source, advising them of the large-scale Ponzi fraud being perpetuated by Madoff for years!
+13DNA Database Ruling: A Victory for Liberty
Yesterday’s news about the DNA database was most welcome to those of us concerned about the growing infringement of civil liberties here in the UK.
In one of the most decisive rulings to ever come out of the European Court of Human Rights’ (a unanimous ruling by 17 judges), the current policy of the Home Office to store DNA data of over 800,000 innocent citizens has effectively been shown to be what it is; a breach of civil liberties, which cannot be reasonably tolerated in a democratic society.
+25Hopeless Home Office Harasses Hookers’ Habitue’s
After months of head-scratching, endless policy committee meetings and (no doubt) lots of expensive conferences and retreats at the taxpayers expense, Jacqui Smith our latest “Home Office Hero” has presented plans to further criminalise men who pay for sex.
And no surprise that after all the hoo-hah we find that the half-baked proposals, presented to the public are pretty much exactly like Smith herself; well-intentioned…but entirely unfit for purpose.
+17Credit Crunch con-trick: Who’s really to blame?
A few days ago, I was listening to one of a seemingly endless series of radio discussion programmes about the credit crunch.
Most of these programmes have a fairly low-to-middle range annoyance factor, but this particular programme really got my blood boiling, because the interviewee had the gall to state:
+24