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The News You Didn’t See (4)

From SchNews:

“The push by the UK, France and Germany to refer Iran to the UN Security Council, while rooted in the language of diplomacy, is really nothing less than an act of war.” – Scott Ritter; former Chief UN Weapons-inspector in Iraq.

Iran is the new Iraq. The reaction of the US and UK leaders to a comment made by the Iranian President couldn’t have shown that more clearly. OK, so President Ahmadinejad’s comments about wiping Israel off the map were never going to help them get a win-new-Western-friends award but they weren’t supposed to be taken as a statement outlining foreign policy intentions. They were part of a speech to a student conference in Tehran where he went on to say that the Palestine issue would continue until “a democratic government elected by the people comes to power”. And comments like this have been standard rhetoric for Iranian Presidents ever since the Islamic revolution of 1979. So why all the big fuss now?

(more…)

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The News You Didn't See

Blogging

One of my favourite bloggers Orac has a post asking “Who Are Your Blogparents?”; in other words, who or what started you blogging?
I can’t really point to any one person or blog that started me off. My first blogging experience was with the Open Diary, a sort of forerunner to LiveJournal. I joined in August 2000, shortly after I got online, and cannot now remember how I heard of it. I kept a Diary on there for over a year; at first, it was completely free. I posted several times a week and, finding myself in a whole cyber-community, developed lots of new friends. (Like for instance Dustbinman, a self-described “meeja whore” who worked for the BBC; his tales about work, the Beeb and his, shall we say, interesting social life made for great reading. He still blogs, on his own site, but very infrequently and nowhere near as entertainingly)
Then, they introduced subscription Diaries, with lots of extras for the paying customers. One of the extras was the ability to lock your Diary at various levels (previously every Diary had been completely public); you could just lock it from anyone who wasn’t on OD, or you could exclude everyone who didn’t have an OD subscription, or everyone who wasn’t on your ‘Friends List’. Practically every Open Diarist I was familiar with migrated to the subscrioption service, I couldn’t afford to. I was able to still read some of their Diaries, but suddenly I was left with a vast swill of semi-literate, mostly teen, mostly American Diarists that I couldn’t get on with at all.
So I took off my Diary, archiving it on my hard drive, and forgot about keeping a public diary of any sort. Eventually, after a couple of years of reading blogs, I decided that the time was right for getting a proper blog – I already had the Oakleaf Circle site up, so I could run it on there. WordPress was recommended as the easiest blogging software going – and free. So that’s how I ended up with this.

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General

Not Happy…

…I’m not on broadband yet. Got all the equipment, I’m signed up for it. But it turns out that I need a cable or wireless router to connect me to the downstairs telephone line. And I haven’t got a money for it!
Bah.

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General

Side effects

Me and drugs – whether legal or illegal – have never mixed happily. I seem to be way too sensitive to their myriad side-effects. Take the time some years ago when I was put on a powerful steroidal painkiller for problems with my ankles. “Has been known to cause mental disturbances in some individuals” went the blurb in the information leaflet.
So, ten days into the course, I was getting on a train to get home. I sat down, looked around at my fellow passengers. They all looked normal – except for their faces. They were all wearing those big alien heads, with huge black saucer-shaped eyes. And they were all staring at me.
Luckily, I recognised that I was hallucinating (I could see through it to the reality below, with effort). So I spent the rest of the journey gazing out of the window at the passing landscape. Which was also looking pretty strange. But at least it wasn’t staring back at me. By the time I reached home, the hallucination seemed, thankfully, to have worn off. So the pills went straight in the bin – with regret, as they did a terrific job of painkilling.
So – back to the present. Yesterday, I went to see good old Doc G, about my worsening angina symptoms. He gave me some new pills. “You’ll have a headache for a couple of days, but that will wear off.” he told me.
So home I went, and popped a pill. The headache duly arrived, and got worse as the evening wore on. I also started feeling decidedly queasy. Eventually, I started heaving. And heaving. And spewing. My stomach was emptied, but the dry-retching continued. As did the headache – now close to migraine proportions. Eventually, at about 3am, it stopped and I was able to slip into an exhausted doze for a few hours. In the morning, feeling like death and with my head still thumping, I tottered downstairs, got out the packet of pills. The information sheet, which I hadn’t bothered to read before, stated “Some patients may experience nuasea and vomiting.” I would have hurled the pills into the fire, if I’d had the strength.

So, Doc G – I’ll be seeing you again!

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General

A Quickie…

…because I’m now on pay-per-minute dialup. Yup, I’ve finally bitten the bullet, waved by-by to AOL and signed up for broadband. Unfortunately, my spanking-new broadband modem won’t arrive until next Tuesday, so I’m on BT’s “how much a minute??!!??” dialup service until then. Hence the lack of posts. However, looking on the the bright side, I’m getting so much more work done now that I’m unable to spend hours surfing!
There was nothing actually wrong with my AOL service – it was dial-up, but 24/7 surfing for a fixed monthly payment is a bargain. However, it revealed its fatal flaw earlier this year, when my credit card finally crumpled into its bitter little death (don’t ask). My AOL payments were being made by credit card, so when my connection was cut off, I duly rang their help centre, explained the difficulty and asked for another method of payment.
Now, I can state quite truthfully that AOL’s help centre staff are indeed helpful – polite, pleasant, friendly, eager to assist. So I’m pretty sure that the note of sorrow I detected in the operator’s voice was genuine when he explained that there was no other method of payment. None at all. (Clearly some accountancy wonk at HQ has decreed that the cost of non-plastic billing is greater than any possible revenue from the plasticless Great Unwashed.)
How about sending them a cheque – please, pretty-please? After some higher-up discussion, he granted my request. “But only this once, you must make other arrangements in future.” Happy happy joy joy!! I kiss you, Mr AOL Call-Centre Man!!
A couple of months later, I repeated the process. Once again my petition for reconnection was granted – once again I was a happy bunny.
But – much as I liked chatting to the genuinely pleasant call-centre staff – it couldn’t go on. When my connection was refused yet again, I decided that I would no longer go beseeching pretty-please to AOL. Six weeks ago, BT finally rolled out its broadband service to this area. And you don’t need plastic to pay for it. So – into the future with BT Broadband!

I’ve got Transit almost ready to print – except I’m waiting for the all-important Council News, which won’t reach me until Sunday. Botheration – I’d expected to be posting the camera-ready copy to the printers yesterday. I’ll have to phone him later and tell him it’s going to be late.

Anyway, I’ve spent enough money this morning….

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General

errrkkk…

Work!!
I’m busy – so I haven’t been able to write a proper post for days. Got to get Transit together, got to rebuild the Elfin Diaries site…
So i can’t write about the marvelous autumn colours, or the peace now that Son is spending a few days away, or watching John & Pauline’s kitten chasing the falling leaves everywhere, or how I’ve decided to dump AOL and dialup and go for broadband, or….
… anything at all…

Back to work!

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General

Phew….

…Just had a call from Elfin Diaries Caroline. She says she keeps getting complaints from people that the website won’t load for them.
I have been trying to tell her for months that the Erol shopping-cart software that the site runs on is rubbish – full of depreciated tags, frames and buggy Javascript. So it’s no surprise that the site fails in some browsers. However, it’s the only free shopping cart software that will run with the Netbanx cc-payment scheme that she’s been signed up with for years. I’ve told her repeatedly that switching to PayPal will save her money (Netbanx charge a huge monthly fee, regardless of sales; PayPal takes a percentage of sales); she’s been reluctant to make the move.
Now, though, she’s finally agreed to make the switch. But she’s left it to me to look into all the PayPal options. Then I’ll have to rebuild the site in pretty short order. Oh well… best get on with it.

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General

News You Didn’t See (3)

“If people re-associate with the world of work, suddenly they come alive again. Work will overcome depression and stress a lot more than people sitting at home watching daytime television.” – David Blunkett, Secretary of State, Department of Work & Pensions.
While sitting down to a morning of Trisha might not help you out of your depression, SchNEWS reckons that neither will doing a shit McJob. According to Blunkett the welfare benefits system in the UK is ‘crackers’. But in the world’s fourth largest economy, the
thing that’s crackers is that the sick and disabled can be made to live on as little as £57.65 per week. Neo Labour thinks that such a large wad of cash only helps to encourage people to sit on their arses; after all in a country where the average wage is £431, it must be a doddle to get by on less than sixty quid a week. Now the plan is to take away a third of a claimant’s Incapacity Benefit as a sanction if they don’t attend ‘work focused interviews’…..
….With his £133,997 salary, David Blunkett clearly understands the plight of the poor. MPs about to vote for benefit cuts have awarded themselves another 3% increase in pay. And on behalf of their colleagues in big business, ministers have just created a new tax cut for self-invested personal pensions’. From next April, high-earners will be able to cash in on an effective 40% ‘discount’ on second homes. Higher-rate taxpayers will be able to set the cost of these properties against their tax bills. In future, a higher-rate taxpayer buying a £100,000 property through the scheme would receive a £23,000 refund personally and a further £28,000 refund into the pension fund, making a total rebate of £51,000. That’s 17 times the cost of one, annual, Incapacity Benefit claim.

Lots more at www.schnews.org.uk.

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The News You Didn't See

News You Didn’t See (2)

“Last week 600 people were stopped and searched in Brighton under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, during the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. According to the Home Office, “Stop and search under Section 44 is an important tool in the on-going fight against terrorism” and that the use of the powers was “intelligence-led and based on an assessment of the threat against the UK.” But with 600 searches and no terrorists arrested, SchNEWS reckon that’s a pretty poor level of intelligence. So for four days we got a taste of what black and Muslim communities have been experiencing for years.
The widespread use of the Terrorism Act to stifle dissent has only come to media attention thanks to the silencing of 82 year old Walter Wolfgang during Jack Straw’s speech at the party conference. Wolfgang’s unprompted ad-lib ruined the Neo-Labour
choreographed political theatre production. So he was thrown out and then detained for a search under Section 44 to stop him getting back in. Sussex Police apologised to him of course – but only because they were getting grief for it in the Daily Mail. The other 599 searched can get stuffed. What the public got was a glimpse of something that SchNEWS has been banging on about for years.
Without hammering home the obvious, Section 44 has nothing to do with stopping terrorism, it’s just another tool the cops can use to push people back into line – people who have the wrong ideas about democracy or who live in a community under suspicion. But it’s not like the Terrorism Act is the only thing that police have been using to batter anyone who protests over the past few years. From Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 etc etc. New laws have been enacted and old laws dusted off and reviewed to snuff out dissent. Any gathering of two or more people can be made subject to police control under a recent (2003) modification of the 1981 Public Order Act – and still they want more.”

More at SchNEWS

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The News You Didn't See