According to this site, I should be a LibDem voter

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -20
Conservative -6
	Liberal Democrat 15
UK Independence Party 0
	Green 11

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Close I suppose. I’m glad to see that I don’t fall into the NuLab camp, not the Tory one either. Maybe I’m just a fence sitter?

Mykeru.com

I started reading mykeru.com a few months back after seeing an excerpt on someone else’s blog. He’s excellent. Well worth a regular read – here’s an example of the kind of high quality work he does.

http://haloscan.com/tb/mykeru/gunners_dream

The work he does is funny, angry, excellent and consistent. For what it’s worth, I’m adding him to my blogroll in the hope that it gives him some of that sweet, sweet googlejuice. He deserves it.

Mykeru.com

This – U.S to bomb Iran this June. – is very scary. I hope it turns out to be crap, but if it goes ahead, I really hope the UK has no part in it. Whatever you made of the ‘45 minutes from death‘ shit that Straw and others produced in the last justification for their war of choice (excuse the popup, you should be running firefox!), I don’t think even Blair’s toerag advisors could come up with something to justify that kind of action. Maybe he’s feeling bold, maybe he thinks he’s invincible. Maybe he knows there’s no alternative. Maybe Tim’s latest project could change things a wee bit.

Anyway, June is Luke’s birthday, so I’ll be busy doing something. Probably involving trains, engines, track, switches and locomotives. York, here we come….!

This will prove to be illuminating…

British TV to Show ‘Guantanamo-Style’ Stress Techniques

The program, due to air in mid-March, will examine the effects of the interrogation techniques over 48 hours in a London warehouse. It is part of a four-part series on torture hosted by news presenter Jon Snow.

It could be a useful way of showing viewers that seemingly innocuous techniques like sleep deprivation can have a devastating effect, said Steve Crawshaw, director of Human Rights Watch’s London office.

After all the ‘justification’ I’ve heard about it ‘not really being torture’ since it’s just a bit of sleep deprivation, some stress positions and a bit of playing with dogs, this will probably change a few minds in the UK. Doubtless it won’t be shown in the US but it’s the kind of thing that will enflame moderate, enrage left-leaning folks and cause the apologists for war to cough and look around. If they had the decency, that is.

Nothing serious, right?

This is a perspective post, mainly for me. Get your head back together Pete!

I’ve actually met a neocon colleague, one of those that reads Michelle Malkin and thinks she’s ‘funny’ (she’s the author of the door-stopper yawnfest ‘In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror’). Lovely woman, pity she can’t seem to remember her family history past 1980, bless. Too busy posing for pictures for her blog. Tip for you love, less backcombing and porn star, mouth open photos. You could look classy without the second-rate pic. In fact, you could write classy and lose the pic, but I don’t see that happening – presentation seems to be a big thing in this womans’s world.

Anyway, I read her blog again for the first time in a while and as per usual, it came across as vacuous, a bit whiny (she wants to be a google news source, it seems!), and mostly devoid of anything actually interesting. I contast her writings with this list and wonder if she’d ever link to it or write about the names listed. Probably not, it’s a bit too REAL for her sort of writing, not enough fluff, flannel and wittering. I mean, how can you bang on about the democracy and the liberty and the voting and the democracy and the voting, with the purple fingers and the liberty and the democracy and all that stuff when people are dying?

Shit, all that trickle, trickle, drip, drip dying troop stuff just gets in the way of the 27 freedoms and the 15 liberties that good old Georgie promised to the world.