Aquarionics

thejointstaff: Stand by what I said: Allowing homosexuals to serve openly is the right thing to do. Comes down to integrity.

Adm. Mike Mullen – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

The future is odd.

The Open Rights group founding was interesting.

At a talk just over a couple of years ago, organised by NTK, someone suggested that an organisation to protect the rights of people in the UK would only cost a few hundred people a fiver a month, and that there must be enough that this would be possible.

Having fairly publicly put my money where my mouth was a year or so ago, live on Hashlugradio, I’ve yet to regret doing so. And now it’s three years old, and already getting other people schooled.

It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the nation’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

So if you give a damn about protecting your rights online and off, I’d recommend throwing a couple of starbucks worth of change at the ORG each month, in return for a warm glowy feeling, a christmas party with no karaoke, and the possibility that the rights you’re guarding are your own.

But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

Go now. Go quickly. We only have a few months to save the world

In World War One

• Forty two million people were mobilised for the Allies
• There were twenty two million casualties on the Allied side.

• There are less than ten people alive left who fought.
  

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
  To children ardent for some desperate glory,
  The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
  Pro patria mori.

  In World War Two

• Over 10% of the 1939 population of Germany were killed. 16% of Poland.
• The soviet union suffered 10,700,000 military deaths.
• The UK lost 382,600.

• One of these was John Brunt

  The point of Remembrance day is not war. It’s not really peace, either, and anyone using it to push any political agenda is doing the Service a disservice. It’s the unspoken social contract between those who go to fight the powers that would attack our country and those who survive: That if you go and fight, and do not return, we will remember them.

  You may disagree with the current war, where the direct threat to our lands is diffuse and not really counterable – and possibly enhanced – by direct action in the lands of others, but this war is not all wars, and these reasons are not all reasons, and those that die of these decisions did not make them.

  And so we remember them.

For some unknown reason, possibly just the random whims and zephers of ideas that float across my mind, I have become more interested in US politics recently. This means my normal daily diet of The Daily Show (and occasionally Colbert Report if I have time) has been joined by occasional episodes of Countdown and other things. I like Countdown, the presentation appeals to me. I haven’t been watching it long enough to know how balanced it is – He’s pretty obviously liberal, but the other side have been doing more stupid things recently – but finding a balanced news source is like looking for a needle in a club whose major clientelle is pins that dress up like needles every night and get stuck in. I do hope Obama wins. John McCain doesn’t appear to be a bad chap, at the end. When he’s actually speaking as himself – instead of reading speeches or working from incomplete information he’s been fed – he appears to have a solid grasp of reality and a fair manner. My worry is that he appears not to be able to see the balance in the information that he’s accepting, which is a bad position for a president to be in. Also, I do not like Palin. I think he should ditch Sarah Palin and swap her for Michael.

New topic. At the pub last night Tristan was demonstrating his Eee’s ability to run Mame games by playing Karateka) on it. But due to pub noise and accent-parsing, I could only hear it as “Carrotica”, your one stop shop for carrot-based erotica. For Carrots, by Carrots. With a Coleslaw department for those who like Carrot bondage. Etc. I just thought I’d share that with you.

Finally, I went to see Jonathan Coulton on Thursday, although in truth I was as much there to see Paul & Storm – two of what used to be Da Vinci’s Notebook, which has kinda-split-up-ish – as the main act. Neither disappointed in the least, especially with “Soft Rock” devolving into Pink Floyd’s “Wish you were here” as well as “Welcome to the Machine” and various other songs. And, for a £20 bet supplied by the audience, Paul performing most of “Mein Herr”:

Closing off with an epic ten minute version of The Captain’s Wife’s Lament (NSFW. Also funny):

(A full featured and contentful post today)

So, it has become obvious that in a small area of the remainder of the British Empire is where the power is held, where once a system was put in place to divide the power so areas ruled – to a large extent – unto themselves, it now appears that residents of one area now get to decide the fate of the rest of the country, without the people of the areas affected being politically able to express their views.

Why is it that political residents of this small area should be able to affect the country without consequences?

I propose that this be referred to as “the West Minster Question”

From the Capitol Steps, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’:

Guantanamo

Another day, another super-virus. Clever Scientists, in the name of Global Understanding – which has capital letters, so must be both good and true, have recreated the Spanish Flu virus which killed an estimated 50,000,000 people in 1918, in the hopes that it might help folks understand what caused it, and how we can combat it. To further this cause, they’ve uploaded the details to our own internets, in case some backyard biologist can rustle some up and solve it. Hopefully before we catch it from them and it, you know, kills another few million.

Iraq. Still no win yet.

Christmas is coming. I am, apparently, living in a country where I can buy mince pies, advent calendars (I intend to buy three. One so I can count down to November 5th, another to count down to the day Advent starts, and a third to count down to Christmas), but not neither pumpkins nor fireworks. It’s also reminded me that if I intend to start this multipart story for Advent I really should be writing it now. Only 80 days to go…

The Conservative party are entertaining us once again with their autumnal show at the seaside. It never ceases to amaze me how we employ such multi-talented people, to spend their year governing the entire country and still have time to rehearse and perform these exquisite examples of the traditional English farce every autumn. This year, the Tories are once again riffing on the theme of an out-dated and moribund political party desperately searching for a leader to rail against a dangerous and politically dodging and weaving opponent. It’s not an original theme for the troupe – they performed a similar show a little while ago, and again before that – but they’ve spiced it up to pantomime levels this year with a host of overplayed stereotypes each dodging the actual problem. A fine show, though I was beginning to find some of the characters a little two dimensional towards the end, a little more realism would have been nice.
I didn’t see a box-office number, but if you can get tickets I’m told it’s playing all week.

We have a black archbishop, who is advocating gay priests and female ones. America will get him fired shortly.

Which? magazine (UK Consumers Association organ) did a study on computer reliability. Apple won. Film at 11.

Cillit Bang are hastily backing down after their marketing campaign hit a virus checker last week. A representative of their advertising company was posting comments in weblogs from the perspective of their (fictional) spokesperson. This is not really a good thing in itself, but when they followed up one of Tom Coates’ heartfelt essays on his search for his father with one of these advertising tricks, they were justifiably shouted at. They are – or employ – morons. Avoid them. (Full disclosure: I met Tom in a bar once. I also met Bobbie Johnson – who wrote the story for the Guardian – at another, different bar once. Both were UK-Bloggers gatherings, so it’s not much of a coincidence, really).

I went Warbussing today.

Warbussing, soon to be the next big event in the weblogging/interweb world, involves, having finished todays episode of CSI (the husband did it) turning on Airport as we swish though the countryside, clicking every so often to see if there were any wireless networks open.

There was one. It was called “Silvar” and is fortunately located just outside a set of traffic lights by the College, allowing me to collect my email quickly while we paused. Everything else required a password.

In other news: George Galloway? Wrong statement.

In every place where it matters to me, nothing changed.

No matter

Mucking around with a link Murky posted to Blogpulse’s “Trends” system, I’ve built this:

A graph of the election

(TinyURL)

(I’ve had to muck around with it a bit, Boris Johnson isn’t actually a candiate for PM - though it might be more fun if he was – but he had to be in there for the colours to work…)