Nothing worthwhile.
Nov. 11th, 2003 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zotzKurt Vonnegut is 81 today. Happy birthday.
This is a topical cartoon, courtesy of the mighty Steve Bell.
Supplementary: There's also this article about John Simpson and the "friendly" bomb that injured 45 (including him) and killed 16 (including his colleague, the translator Abdurrazaq Mohammed).
"I felt very responsible. I still do. I never thought that this notion of survivor guilt was something I would suffer from, but I've got it very strongly . . . Kamaran was only there because he'd seen me on television and he thought it would be good to work with us. I'm afraid that makes me feel very bad indeed. I took him in there and he died there. I don't know how you get over a thing like that."
Oh, and compulsory ID cards? What an absolutely fucking awful idea. Under the present outfit, anyway. I have no problem with having some reliable identification mechanism aviailable to us if possible, but I've heard nothing about safeguards and have no faith in Blunkett's commitment to civil liberties. We may have the Tories back in by the time this scheme is supposed to mature, and I don't think they'd be any better (if choosing Michael Howard as leader is any guide - the famously illiberal home secretary that the famously illiberal Blunkett seems to have based himself on). Is there some law saying that the home secretary has to be a git?
Still, times and faces change, and giving a government plan ten years tends to be a recipe for it to bloat, run over budget and be cancelled.
I heard a rumour that this is all about heading off plans by Certain Other EU Nations to introduce a broadly similar scheme, but along lines which wouldn't be likely to work even in principle.
This is a topical cartoon, courtesy of the mighty Steve Bell.
Supplementary: There's also this article about John Simpson and the "friendly" bomb that injured 45 (including him) and killed 16 (including his colleague, the translator Abdurrazaq Mohammed).
"I felt very responsible. I still do. I never thought that this notion of survivor guilt was something I would suffer from, but I've got it very strongly . . . Kamaran was only there because he'd seen me on television and he thought it would be good to work with us. I'm afraid that makes me feel very bad indeed. I took him in there and he died there. I don't know how you get over a thing like that."
Oh, and compulsory ID cards? What an absolutely fucking awful idea. Under the present outfit, anyway. I have no problem with having some reliable identification mechanism aviailable to us if possible, but I've heard nothing about safeguards and have no faith in Blunkett's commitment to civil liberties. We may have the Tories back in by the time this scheme is supposed to mature, and I don't think they'd be any better (if choosing Michael Howard as leader is any guide - the famously illiberal home secretary that the famously illiberal Blunkett seems to have based himself on). Is there some law saying that the home secretary has to be a git?
Still, times and faces change, and giving a government plan ten years tends to be a recipe for it to bloat, run over budget and be cancelled.
I heard a rumour that this is all about heading off plans by Certain Other EU Nations to introduce a broadly similar scheme, but along lines which wouldn't be likely to work even in principle.
