News Roundup

British Diplomat Filmed With Two Russian Prostitutes. As soon as I saw this the first thing I thought was "The KGB have done it again!". Torquil Leamington-Feltch, 29, a British Diplomat was caught on video with a couple of hookers. Now there's a guy who's never read any John Le Carre. I mean, how could you be so dense as to be a British private school boy in Sverdlovsk and think two lovelies who invited you back to their hotel room for some no strings attached nookie were on the up and up? All he had to do was insist on renting a new hotel room and they'd have disappeared in ten seconds flat. Mind you, he probably thought that Russian women all have the hots for Brits whose accent is so upper class they sound like they have a bunch of plums in their mouth when they talk, and whose mothers still stitch their names on to the lining of their undergarments.

And in other news, in the UK, there are one million people who've not worked since 1997. Actually 1,000,646 if you count members of Parliament.

Bernard Madoff Gets 150 Years

Bernie Madoff gets 150 years in Ponzi scheme

After the sentencing Madoff told his counsel that with good behaviour, he expects to cut that sentence in half.

Invest in Chinese Real Estate

I wonder if people who have put down deposits on the apartments in the two blocks which are still standing will now be entitled to their money back?

Tech Byte

I'm very impressed with the new IE 8.0 - so much so I've now dumped the Firefox 3.0.11 and made IE my default browser once more.

I surf with the default text size blown up to make it easier on my eyes. A recent Firefox update (not sure which one) introduced a bug which caused the text size of the page you're reading to suddenly reset to the default, which is annoying.

I've also noticed that the later versions of Firefox have slowed down considerably. While I'm reading a page, I'll open several links in tabs as I go so that I can have the pages ready in the background when I'm finished with the current one. Lately, it seems like something is hanging so that I frequently find that none of the pages in the other tabs have loaded at all. It happens on enough different sites to make me think the problem is in Firefox. Sometimes I've had to "PSKILL FIREFOX".

Now they've finally gotten round to adding a decent "find" function to IE, it seems to me there's no reason to go back.

Socialism Update

Time for a quick look at how caring Socialist governments are doing lately.

In Illinois the Chicago Tribune has broken a story showing how the University of Illinois was leaned on to accept unqualified candidates who had 'connected' relatives. Even to the Law School.

In return, as these candidates would have a heck of a time keeping up with and passing the course, the U of I had to insist that these people be found jobs in due course so as not to affect the U of I Law School's ranking. The money quote: "Yea I'm betting the Governorship will be open. One of them can have that job. Other jobs in Government are fine, since kids who don't pass the bar and can't think are close enough for Government work." No truer word ever written.

So what happens to lawyers who come up in this way? I have no idea, but it does shed some light on bizarre court decisions which you occasionally get here, like a 250LBS off duty drunken cop caught on video beating up a 125LB female bartender being let off with probation

Meanwhile in the UK it has been emerged that welfare payments will for the first time exceed all the revenue from the Income Tax

I wonder what's going to happen in the UK if productive, intelligent, professional people continue to leave at the present rate? The UK lost many of its best and brightest during two World Wars leaving us with a skewed population, a majority of people who thought Socialism was a good idea. It will be interesting to see if a Thatcher emerges which can reestablish the UK as an independent country with sound economics once again, or if it ends up as a poor province of the EU empire, rather like the poorer states in the USA.

New Shooter

So I finally did it. To the dismay of socialists everywhere I bought a very nice Heckler & Koch P30 9mm pistol. It's similar to the HK USP 30 which is the preferred sidearm of the British SAS (the only thing in Britain which still works). If it's good enough for the SAS, it's good enough for me, I thought.

It wasn't cheap, but it's wonderfully light and well made, and if properly maintained it should last a very long time.

There was a 72 hour waiting period. "But I'm mad now!" I joked to the cashier. I got the feeling it wasn't the first time he'd heard that.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

In other news Dalai Lama decks photographer in disco melee