This blog has been getting spammed up a storm lately for some reason, but frustratingly the spam is unimaginative drivel that gets pumped into the comments OVER AND OVER AND OVER from the same IP address somewhere in Central Europe.
So far it’s just pages and pages of stuff like this:
pathological lying symptoms
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bfi jobs in houston
belks department store website
predicate nominative and adjective worksheets
a z lyrics universire
ukrainian lolitas bbs
tiffany villareal fhm
who is keshia pulliam hair stylist
layered bob with bangs hairstyle
blood gang layouts
trim tag brakedown 70 camaro
Just in case you’re wondering about the bizarre concoctions of words that are in that lot. It’s designed to help raise the page rankings of any sites with those words on search engines like Google. The more pages that like to a specific site and can be found with a specific term, the higher they are ranked on the results. Meanwhile every single one of those lines is normally a link that more than likely either leads to an phishing attack site or some kind of penis enlargement, Viagra selling or porn touting micro site that acts as a click through to something else. Worse it goes on like that for over 400 comments since I last cleared them: on Monday. Thank goodness that wordpress now comes with the Akismet anti-spam plug-in built in.
Like almost everyone on the planet I’ve got a hotmail/windows live account for playing online games and specifically for access to MSN Messenger, and just like most of the rest of the world I don’t use it for email. It might have been one of the first webmail services out there, but I personally find it to be very poor compared to the excellent GMail from Google.
It’s not that the service is bad technically. Hotmail does all the basics fairly well, you can send, receive and file your mail as you would expect. The spam filter is fairly good and it does everything you would expect an email client to do. In most respects it could be considered only slightly less capable that Gmail.
Unlike GMail however subscribers to hotmail are stuck with near constant emails from “The Windows Live Team” or other parts of Microsoft. These emails are generally just the usual corporate marketing spam you would expect from any large corporation. Blah blah blah we have improved your Hotmail account by 3% etc etc. Naturally even if you mark them as spam they never really go away. I eventually managed to find the setting that stops these messages from being sent and unchecked the box.
Today though The Windows Live Team have outdone themselves as I found this sitting in my inbox:
Dear Windows Live User,
We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN.
Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile here to change your preferences.
Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team
Note: You can also change your Account settings by going to your browser and typing in: http://account.live.com. After logging-in to your account, look for ‘Additional options’ and click ‘Marketing preferences’. Then uncheck the top preference box and click ‘Save’.
Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement.
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
This has to be some kind of one of a kind, or even a seminal event. I have never, ever before seen a request from a company to allow you to recieve its stupid trash marketing circulars. I’ve backtracked through the odd “IMPORTANT UPDATE!” sent by the Windows Live Team and frankly there isn’t a single thing of importance in any of them.
You see Microsoft it’s like this, and I’m sure I speak for most of the planet here: unless you’re writing to tell us that using Hotmail gives you ASS CANCER you’ve got nothing that I want to hear. Even if you did I’d read about it on Digg long before you would send out an email admitting it.
The American congressman Ron Paul posted a video towards the beginning of the week that instantly piqued my interest. In it he discusses the current pirate activity in and around Somalia. He waffles quite a bit at the beginning about how nebulous Islamic radicals and their effect in destabilising Somalia. It just after that he mentions the idea of using a power established within the Constitution of the United States to issued Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private groups.
Here’s the video in full:
A Letter of Marque is an official document, like a warrant or private commission which empowers the bearer to seize and attack the assets of any group or power that is an enemy of the issuing government. They were used extensively during the early modern period when governments lacked the resources or finances to outfit and supply ships. Private warships would be outfitted by companies or rich investors and issued with letters of Marque allowing them to attack and seize enemy ships. These would then be conveyed to one of the issuing government’s ports and an amount of prize money awarded dependant upon the value of the ship and its cargo. The distinction between vessels carrying a letter of marque who were known as privateers, and pirates who plundered other ships for simple profit, was so fine that often the privateers themselves hardly knew the difference. To the nation under attack by the privateers there was no difference, and a privateer would be hung at the low tide markers as sure as any pirate.
Now as someone that has studied historical piracy in quite some detail I feel I have to pass comment on his idea. I think that like a lot of people Mr. Paul has forgotten, or maybe never took the time to learn, the lessons of the past. Historically the issuing of letters of marque has often backfired on the governments that granted them. Either through political embarrassment or through reckless or through the the privateer wilfully overstepping the bounds of their authority as set out in the letter.
In fact it backfired so often, and so disastrously, that most of great powers signed a treaty called The Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law in 1856. The treaty had several purposes, but the key one was the absolute abolishment of Privateers and Letters of Marque. Young United States however refused to sign the treaty citing concerns that neautral shipping suspected of carrying war materials to belligerent powers could still be seized, and that it needed to employ privateers owing to the small size of her navy. The USA still hasn’t ratified this, or any similar treaty.
Interstingly many of the most famous historical figures that we would commonly call pirates were actually privateers of some kind or another. A prime example would be Captain Kidd one of the most famous pirates of the early modern era, and a Scotsman to boot. He was granted a letter of marque and commissioned to outfit a ship and cruise against pirates and French shipping in the Indian Ocean. He suffered a run of bad luck, including much of his crew being shanghaied and pressed into naval service, a cholera outbreak and being utterly unable to locate any French or pirate vessels along the east African coast. Eventually in desperation to turn a profit for his backers it seems he resorted to outright piracy. It was around this time that he seized the Armenian ship the Quedagh Merchant and her cargo which was worth a kings ransom. This may not have been entirely his idea however, as eyewitness accounts suggest he could barely control his mutinous and plunder hungry crew. Eventually many deserted and signed on with another pirate leaving Kidd with a skeleton crew and the Quedagh Merchant. Kidd was eventually captured in New York and put on trial accused of piracy. It was one of the most sensational trials of the eighteenth century; Kidd was forced to forego legal representation and had to defend himself against what amounted to a political show trial. Unsurprisingly he was found guilty and hanged on May 23, 1701 at Execution Dock in Wapping.
He is not alone in being a government man that served his king and country as a privateer and yet be remembered as a pirate by history. Sir Henry Morgan, perhaps the greatest of the Caribbean buccaneers saw himself as a patriot and defender of Jamaica. He undertook daring raids against the Spanish empire in the new world secure in the knowledge that he was serving his king and country. Unfortunately a shift in Europe’s political landscape left him an embarrassing liability to the English Crown and he was summoned back to England. However by the time he returned the political winds had shifted once more and he was returned to Jamaica in triumph as the new governor.
Much as I hate to admit it, piracy was largely eliminated by strong national navies, and the British Navy played a particularly important role in this. I sincerely doubt that a policy of adding government sanctioned trigger happy private enterprise forces into the already volatile region around the Indian Ocean would have the effect that Ron Paul believes. It seems more likely that you would have quickly replaced a few groups of badly equipped, if determined individuals, with an unregulated and profit driven armed force operating in international waters beyond the effective rule of law. How long do you think it will be before some of them start carrying out “inspections” of passing vessels or “impounding” goods?
If you’re of a historical bent you might be interest to learn that tonight is the ninety-seventh anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. I don’t think that it would be exaggeration to describe the sinking of this huge vessel, the pride of the White Star Line is one of the great historic events of the 20th century.
The Titanic, as everyone is probably well aware, struck a drifting iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at 2339HRS on the night of Sunday the 14th of April 1912. After an initial damage investigation the first lifeboat was launched around 0045HRS on the morning of April 15th. Over the next few hours the passengers and crew discovered to their horror that there were far fewer lifeboats than would be necessary to evacuate everyone aboard. With typical Edwardian chivalry the women and children were offloaded into the lifeboats while the gentlemen remained aboard and talked or smoked while they waited for sign of rescue. Finally between 0200HRS and 0220HRS the Titanic succumbed to the overwhelming flooding below her decks which caused the stern to rise high into the air. For a few minutes the ship’s great propellers were exposed above the water, rising higher and higher into the air. The forward smoke stack broke off, crushing part of the exposed bridge, and falling onto survivors floating in the water below. Then at 0220HRS a huge rending crash filled the air as the superstructure gave way. The mighty ship snapped in half and plunged into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of over 1,500 lives.
The story of the Titanic has always fascinated me. It’s such a grand tale of human self sacrifice, achievement and indeed hubris that if it wasn’t a true historical event someone would have eventually had to write it. I’ve recently learned that an American author by the name of Morgan Robertson published a novel in 1898 called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan which follows broadly the same sequence of events that the actual sinking of the Titanic did. There are differences between the reality and the novel, but there are more than enough similarities to be spooky. Naturally I’ve been looking on Amazon for a copy to see what it’s like.
Odder still is the existence of a film about the sinking that was made in Nazi Germany during World War II. Called simply Titanic the film is a shameless piece of Nazi propaganda that was long banned in the west due to its anti-capitalist and fascist message. Filmed in 1943 aboard the SS Cap Arcona a liner that was to have a fate perhaps even more tragic than that of the titanic herself, the project endured wartime shortages and even the arrest and possible murder of the director Herbert Selpin on the orders of Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister. The film enjoyed a great deal of success in the soviet bloc during the cold war due to its anti-capitalism themes, but has seemingly been released recently on DVD.
Even odder than the film’s existence in the first place are allegations that James Cameron’s film Titanic released in 1997 contains elements that appear in the Nazi film but in no other version of the Titanic story yet filmed or written.
It’s often said in Scotland that the British Broadcasting Corporation should be renamed the English Broadcasting Corporation. Their radio and television channels display a remarkable level of Anglo-centric behaviour and a great many of their Scottish programs are just the English ones with a bit of tartan and shortbread sitting beside the presenter.
If their general programming is bad for this national bias then their international sports coverage is many times worse. of Scottish, or indeed Welsh and Northern Irish is infamous for English bias. It’s fair to say that as long as a sportsman is winning they will be British, but as soon as they start to loose they are instantly returned to their respective nationality. The Scottish tennis player Andy Murray is an excellent example of this phenomenon: when he’s winning he’s a true Brit and a great British sportsman. The instant he loses he’s back to being just a Scottish tennis player or that plucky young boy from Scotland.
Today I found yet another cracking example of the English Broadcasting Corporation at it’s finest. It was while checking the RSS Feed for the BBC news I spotted the following headline:
The RSS hyperlink is entitled “Evidence of McFlinstones Found” but the actual page is headlined with the far more descriptive “Signs of earliest Scots unearthed.” I may be over-reacting but I can’t see this as anything more than yet another quick pun at the expense of Scotland by a London based media. I’m surprised they didn’t just entitle the entire article “Jocks find some rocks and don’t try to eat them!” or “kilt wearing haggish munchers find rocks.”
It’s time we cut these arseholes off entirely and got our own Scottish news media on the go.
(And don’t talk to me about STV. They’re just the poor man’s BBC nowadays.)
I don’t know if anyone’s been paying attention to The Sun newspaper lately, but they’re running a big thing about the search for Miss Scotland 2009 and I’m bemused by the variable standard of entrants. I’ve decided to compile a quick list of the ones that have amused me the most since I started checking it out. As a bonus I’ve taken the unusual step of grading them from the one with the least fake tan to the one with the most:
The Undead Maid of the North will swallow your soul!
With my secret weapons I cannot fail to win!
Real Dolls - Now available in Scotland
This IS my best side!
Also available in white
Ronseal wood stain does exactly what it says on the tin
The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human - sweat, bad breath, everything.
Scottish national flashing champion
Lose the dress son, there's no room for your kind in this man's army
Why so serious?
Awright Troops me an tinkerbell here are gaun up the dancin
Courtney Love has come down in the world (if that's possible)
LOL the only way I'd enter that stupid contest is if you drugged me first...
Did you feel rain?
Daddy said I could stay up and wait for him. I haven't slept since 1998
I know I quite often complain about the youth of today and how things were different when I was a kid, which admittedly wasn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but today I found a news story that really takes the biscuit.
The reader’s digest version is that last year a 12 year old girl from Quebec sued her own father for grounding her and won. Not only that, but her father has just yesterday lost an appeal against that decision in Quebec’s Superior Court.
Seemingly her father had banned her from the internet after he found her posting what are described as “inappropriate images of herself” online. I only hope this means standard weird angle tween-age facebook pictures of her pouting and not something more sinister. Her dad having warned her once, in what I would say were her own best interests, then refused to sign her permission slip for a school graduation trip to Quebec City. The kid instead of stomping up to her room and telling her dad how much she hated him naturally went straight to the lawyers that handled her parent’s divorce and set them on her dad.
Now all I can say here is WHAT THE HELL?
She’s damn lucky that this is touchy-feely let’s hold hands and talk about our problems without upsetting the minorities 2009 and not some earlier more sane decade. If this had been 1989 when I was about her age she’d have got her backside tanned and the computer would have been off to the scout jumble sale without a hint of mercy.
The appeal court says that the punishment far exceeded the actual offence, but I think they’re acting outside their jurisdiction. This wasn’t a cop assaulting a bystander or a child kidnapping. It was a father trying to discipline his daughter in a way that would actually get through her thick generation 2K head.
Now sure children should be protected from physical or emotional abuse, and parental neglect but this is going too far in the other direction. The man was acting in his daughter’s own best interests, and he may have been harsh to stop her going the trip, but personally I think he should have tanned her backside for her cheek.
The judge and all the lawyers present should have given her a skelp too for wasting public official’s time and money on such a frivolous waste of time.
