And that is it

Final posting from me. I've lost interest; all I seem to write is bad news week.

Army blogging

I posed the question as to whether an enemy could gain any useful information from blogs written by servicemen. Nice of Slate to answer the question for me eh?

Assassination hopes run high

Seems that the Yankee poodle Yankee fool will get a pay off from the Bush regime after all. The idea that this duplicitous war-mongering criminal has any place in the Middle East is ludicrous. Truly, a Ambassador is a man sent abroad to lie for his Country.

However, I live in hope. The Middle East has a fine history of assassinating those who cause the war lords problems.

Excuse me - do I live here?

I am not yet a total reclusive hermit at the back of some dark and dank cave. Additionally, and to the best of my knowledge of course, I am not yet fully infiltrated by the Altzheimer's illness.

However, I do not recognise this treatise as being the same Scotland as the one I've been living in for the last nigh on seven years. So, I have to repeat my T-shirted request "If found wandering and confused, please phone Norma on 01361 ******"

That ain't too bad

In England, serious criminal cases such as children chalking hop-scotch boxes on the pavement attract really wide spread attention.

Seems things are different in America. A truly horrendous murder of a young man and a girl failed to gain much publicity outside the state where it took place and one adjoining state. Just some detail of the murders -

Christian and Newsom had gone on a date Saturday, January 6, 2007, but did not return home. Newsom's body was found adjacent to railroad tracks in East Knoxville the next afternoon. According to investigators, he had been shot and his body had been burned. He had apparently been raped. Some reports state that his penis had been severed from his body prior to his death.

"When the perpetrators were finished with Christopher, they allegedly turned their attention to Channon. She was beaten, gang raped and at times urinated upon. When her killers finally had their fill of her, they cut off one of her breasts while she was still alive, poured bleach down her throat, in an attempt to cover up evidence. As with Christopher, they set her body on fire; however, for unknown reasons, they did not dump her body but instead placed it in a trashcan inside the apartment"

And the reason there was only limited reporting of this? Too grim for publication - no. Seems that there was insufficient novelty in what happened. Extreme degrees of horror quite often appear in the media. Some commentators have said that this is due to a supposed media bias which supposedly provides more coverage to cases in which whites allegedly attack blacks (such as the Duke Lacrosse case) than vice versa.

I think I prefer to read about kids and hopscotch.

Rodeo night

Big event in Bush-land.

I had half-expected to see Bush with his Yo-poodle at his side. Maybe they had learned their lesson after the Wide MouthFrog described herself as England's First Lady in the publicity blurb for one of her mortgage-supplementing tours. Cannot have two First Ladies at the same time.

Our farewell tour of the land around Arizona was described as The Final Round Up (or Two Old Farts in a Canyon). Given the ages of Liz and Phil, maybe they felt the same emotions.

Hackneyed story comes true

I suppose it has provided the plot for countless essays submitted by creative writing students. "Man told had incurable disease. Will die in weeks" goes out and has a high old time. Then - mixed emotions - not ill at all. Will live for ages and ages but has no money or assets.

If the key to successful writing is to write about what you know, this guy should be on a winner.

Michael Yon

A very competent war zone blogger writes steps out of his environment.

TODAY'S GUEST BLOG
Michael Yon.

Racist bigot

I had been saving this as a tag for a suitable blog. Cannot say where I got it from as I have lost/forgotten that bit. I am going to just put it up and forget it. May come in handy if anyone has that discussion with me.

I am a racist. And a sexist. It’s true: I believe in making judgements according to individual merit, without regard to race, color, creed, sex, or national origin.

Corresponds with the usual criticism. Shows why I don't care when accused.

Post Secret.

This is just one revelation posted in to Post Secret. By the very nature of the project, the majority of those published reveal people with serious problems in their life.

Whether or not this anonymous disclosure has any beneficial effect I cannot say.

I do not intend to find out.

Does anyone care?

Whenever there is the death of a soldier on active service it seems inevitable that there is a debate about insufficient equipment or equipment not suitable for the purpose. The politicians, safe at home in the bosom of their family, then claim that the commanders on the ground are getting everything they ask for. Seems that they do not convince the man responsible for procuring the stuff who has issued a report on how he sees things.

And people are discussing what Tony's legacy should be.

Hello

Don't know if the system will allow you to see my site meter record of places from where this blog has been accessed. Just looking, seems I have lived in or visited the majority of them - excluding Oz and Kiwi Land.

So - come on, don't be shy. Drop me a quick note about how things are there right now. I may be able to tell you what they were like for me going back anything up to 55 years ago. Save looking in the profile - j.wood999@btinternet.com.

Taking refuge in MY World

I know the preamble to this page points out that when here you are in MY World and it may not be exactly what this modern pc loving world is used to.

However, there are times when I am very glad that we live in two separate worlds. I still cannot get used to people on mobile phones announcing to all and sundry that they are on The Train.

Fresh meat

I bet a few of the Bearded Ladies are looking forward to her arrival in their midst.

Change in slow motion.

So, the local elections that were forecast as likely to drastically change the face of politics are now over. Quite a few changes but my own opinion is that they were a bit of a slow burn rather than a bonfire. What did surprise me was that apathy seems to have protected B.Liar from a nation where criticism of his final years was strong.

Maybe this means that there is a silent majority at work here. Or was it due to the moral majority? We seem to have a resurrection of the Silent Majority (UK Branch)but it seems few took notice of this rabid bunch. I doubt that we here in UK could ever sustain a Moral Majority movement but my only knowledge of that organisation was gained from Jerry Falwell's preaching heard on Sunday TV in America waiting for the football to start.

ID Cards - the full story

I wrote about ID cards a day or so ago. My home-grown IT guru has responded. Sounds that the idea is as daft as I suspected. Even before the government adds it's own cock-ups to the weak idea that the ID card is any guarantee of identity.

Any form of digital ID is going to be very difficult. How will you decide that I am the me that I pretend to be, who will authorise you to issue me with a certificate, and how will you prevent people from duplicating that chain of events? If we assume that you have some magical trick that allows you to verify who I am and who you are in a manner that authorises you to issue me with a certificate of some sort, what do we do about reading, writing and updating the data that is on the chip. If for example my doctor is able to read my medical history, what is to prevent the insurance company from also being able to do this? When they discover that gene-x-102 is a very clear sign that I have a 99% chance of having a heart attack some days prior to my 64th birthday, who will be able to read that from my card? Passports were supposed to be quite difficult to copy. The criminals avoid this problem by paying large sums of money to people who issue them with real passports. Money is supposed to be very difficult to copy, but the criminals managed to do that one reasonably easily. Chip&Pin was already broken before they issued it in the UK. In other parts of the world, they capture information at the cash machine, generate a copy of your card and go off and use this for a few hours. The same thing will happen with digital
ID.The problem is that the great unwashed will all think that everything is hyper secure when the exact opposite is actually the case.Look at the requirements.

I want to have a secure card.I want to store more than one set of information on that card.I want more than one group of readers to be able to access ONLY the data that relates to them.I want to be able to have some form of appeals process as a means to correct information that is inaccurate. Four little requirements that mean that dual-key public/private password schemes will
not work for this. Just thinking about some form of secure authentication protocol that allows some authority to issue empty cards is horrendous. There are people who do not have a current passport or driving license. There are other people who have very good forged passports and driving licenses. My bank and credit card is not proof of who I am. Whilst I could get my mum to write a letter explaining who I am, how will you know that she is my mum? What happens to the droves of people in the UK who do not speak English. Just as I am able to obtain a passport, credit card, drivers license, P45 and letter from my family doctor saying I am who I am, I could reasonably easily get the same set of documents to prove that I was Mandy Smith. If you are prepared to issue them on the basis of my showing you my claim slip for unemployment and a bill from the
gas board, then I am not prepared to accept them as proof of who you are.Lets do the next clever trick. How will the copper know that the person and the card belong together. Clearly a photo is not enough or you would be happy with a passport or drivers license. You would need some form of scanner. You would need to have quite a lot of these scanners. Anyone that wanted to read my card and verify that it really was me would have to have one. Lets assume that we are only talking about 100,000 scanners. 2% of these would be bent. So 200 chances
that someone can circumvent the system. That is 199 more than I wanted to know about. Now lets assume that they manage to resolve all of those problems.What will they do about buggers like you and me who refuse to get one? What will they do for people like me who are British citizens who live abroad? What will they do when I bring Katrin on a visit to the UK?If they managed to introduce something today, it would take less than three weeks to work out how to crack it. It would then take only a few days until we saw the first card copying and duplication.

Attn Ms Rice

Current affairs have put this lady's image back on the media.

All I have to say is that if she wants to make an old man very happy spending his last few years in her company, she knows where I am!

Some mistake surely?

I think it is an accepted fact that what industry chooses to call Customer Service is just a disaster. And that was before they out-sourced things to India. As a racist bigot, I have to refrain from commenting on what happens there. So, it was nice to see what happened when someone escalated his Mac complaint up to the very gates of executive heaven. Steve Jobs, the man himself. We have to believe that it was a Jobs initiative and not his executive assistant doing good by stealth.

I went Mac after a particularly harrowing period with the Microsh*t system. My usual IT guru declined interest so I had to do it all without that helping hand that technophobes need. And yet, it was all so easy. Everything seemed simple and intuitive once one had grasped some basic ideas and rules. I did once get the whole thing so corrupted that it had to go into a local Centre to get it's guts straightened out but that was easy, quick and cheap to achieve. I've had to come back to Gates Land for the Internet but one day I will set off down the Mac yellow brick road and learn how to get what I want from my Apple.

Blair

Rory Bremner is very clever. The make-up people deserve every penny they get. This sketch contains all the Blair tics and tacs. Pity the real man could not have been so productive.

Land of the Brave.

America is known as Land of the Brave, Home of the Free. There are many brave men and women risking their health, limbs and life to maintain the Freedom so it seems a little strange that they themselves are having their freedom limited.

I am sure that the ability to openly express one's fears and feelings is a great morale booster for service people in settings of constant danger. There will also be occasions when they are frustrated by their commanders or by the general bloody-mindedness of military life. To limit their ability to open up is to lessen their morale.

I cannot see that any restriction will greatly improve any security aspects. There will always be ways for an enemy to judge the will and drive of their opponents without reading their mail. There are many locals who have access to military camps and they would be a good source. My suspicion is that the new moves are designed to make sure that the spin and propaganda put out by the top brass is not questioned. There are those on the ground who have doubts.