The staff are busy again behind the scenes doing stuff which means that we can’t serve you at the bar. Help yourself to the drinks, but please leave some cash on the bar. In the meantime please talk amongst yourselves.

Say anything, write short stories, post a poem or two, repeat some Internet meme, share a joke.

If you feel like writing a short article please let us know. You can see our contact details in the About/Contact link at the top of this page. Anything from a 100 word quickie up to a 1000 word essay are welcome. Just let us know your byline (to keep your anonymity) and a suggestion for a picture to use.

Open Thread! is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We’ve been a bit busy in the pub cellar sorting out all the beer barrels so please talk amongst yourselves for a while. Normal service will be resumed soon. Talk about the weather, politics, sex, religion, state of the economy, or whatever comes to mind.

Photo by mezzoblue

In the pub cellar is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Odds are that I can guess your PIN in ten attempts.

It will be one of the following

1. “1234” – I can’t be bothered to think about my password
2. “0000” – I can’t even be bothered to count
3. “2580” – I can go down the key pad
4. “1111” – I can count to one!
5. “5555” – I’m very clever and can count to 5
6. “5683” – I do txt spk. (work it out)
7. “0852” – I do stuff vertically up
8. “2222” – I can’t be bothered to move my fingers when I press keys
9. “1212” – Testing testing 12 12
10. “1998” – Yeah, I’m about 13 years old

Out of a sample of over 200,000 PIN numbers it was found that nearly 9000 used the number 1234 for their PIN number for the application on the iPhone that gathered the data.

Now there are issues about the secret gathering of personal information but that’s a different post. Also bear in mind that this was for an iPhone app, not a banking app nor an ATM PIN. So the users might have chosen simple numbers because they didn’t feel the need to secure the app. But there probably is a grain of truth in the general trend for the top ten PINs as the author of the app tried to make his password screen look like the iPhone’s own password screen.

Common numbers

When you take into account that certain ranges of numbers occurred regularly in the top 50 you can easily build the impression that many people don’t think much about their PIN numbers. The most common range being 1990-1999, followed by 1980-1989 and 2010-2011, 1970-1979 and then 2000-2009. From this you can see that given the median age for iPhone users that they often use their birth year as their PIN number. If they are older surfers then they either use their children’s which explains the 2000-2011 range or their own.

So if you find a lost mobile phone, then given that the 15% of all PINs are represented by 10 different numbers you’ve got a 1 in 7 chance of breaking into the phone. No wonder it was so easy for certain private investigators hired by journalists to break into the voice mail accounts of certain celebs.

Now if you do use one of the above PINs don’t worry too much. So long as you don’t use the same PIN for every account, website, card then you’re not going to get your accounts cleared out.

Bear in mind that if you use the same password on Facebook and to log into your hobby forum and to access your work account, it won’t need much background info to work out your password. The advice here is to use a different password for different parts of your life; your financial part, your personal family part, your hobbies and other interests part, your work part, etc. For certain aspects of your online life use a unique password only used on that site. For instance your GMail password should be unique because the information in your emails would be a gold mine to someone who got in.

Create a complex password

To make a really hard password to guess, a suggestion would be to use the following guide.

Start with a sentence or two (about 10 words in total). Make it something meaningful to you. As a starter for ten, I’ll use the example “Long and complex passwords are safest. I keep mine safe.”

Turn the sentences into a row of letters using the first letter of each word. The phrase becomes “lacpasikms”. At this stage this password should be usable on many unimportant websites.

Add a bit of complexity by changing the case of some of the letters. Either make the letters A-J lower and the rest upper, or make odd letters (a,c,d, etc.) lower and the rest upper. Up to you. You can use this level of password on accounts like your work one.

Some sites insist on numbers and punctuation. Add the digits of a meaningful number and punctuation symbols to either end of the password or in the middle. Your password is now be “lACpAs56IKMs”. This should be secure enough for your banking apps.

Final advice

One final word of advice. Keep your passwords on a piece of paper. Yep, that sounds counter productive, but so long as the passwords are encoded in your own secret way then you can keep track of the umpteen dozens of passwords modern life requires you to have.

Don’t give your password out to anyone, no bank will ever ask for it. If you forget your password and the website lets you ask for it, then if it doesn’t give you a new one don’t trust it because it means it’s stored your password “in the clear” rather than a one way code based on your password.

Finally recognise phishing attempts and learn to avoid them.

I know your password is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Parish Notice

For the next couple of weeks SadButMadLad and me will be handling some of the site admin, working with the other contributors.

Roughly, SadButMadLad is handling site admin issues, and I’m dealing with planning content, Guest Posts and background email queries.

There may also be a couple of small changes happening in the site design.

There are more general details on the About/Contact page.

Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon’s burrow.

[Update: Just had an email from SBML pointing out that he did the emails last time, and I have got the short straw. Hmmm.]

Very Short Parish Notice is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Have you secretly recorded your neighbour stating that your cat might suddenly vanish into the great mousehole in the sky, but they deny it?

The Appeal Court accepted a covert recording made in the course of a neighbour dispute into evidence for a case, and has relied on those recordings as evidence when making a costs ruling.

It’s important to note that this was in a dispute between neighbours; the recording was accepted by a County Court, and that decision affirmed at Appeal Court level.

The recording proved that one party was likely to try an avoid paying legal costs:

… one party’s private feelings of animosity were on display. Unusually, one neighbour had surreptitiously recorded the other talking about the dispute.

The County Court allowed those recordings to be admitted as evidence. Subsequently, the Court of Appeal also relied on the recordings when resolving a costs dispute. The recordings showed that the recorded neighbour was likely to try and avoid paying any costs order made against him. That was one of the reasons why the Court required him to pay £50,000 into courts as security for his neighbour’s costs.

And the Court allowed the recording into evidence:

..the Court of Appeal took into account the secret recordings referred to above. These suggested that the losing neighbour may try to evade any order for costs made against him. One of the recordings was described as follows by the Court of Appeal judge:

“I’m going to mortgage the house up as much as I can so there’s hardly anything in it”.  He said that he would “speak to the accountants and find out whether they can do anything towards the firm”.  He said “I’m gonna cover all angles”.  He[said] he would tell the respondent “you can have what I’ve got in my pocket — that’s my tube fare” and that, when asked whether he had a business, he proposed to reply, “No, I don’t own no business no more.  I sold it, mate”. And then he suggested…that “the f***ing colour [would drain] out of [the respondent’s] face”.

I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to comment in detail, but this needs some commentary from the legal bods.

Personally, I’ve only ever made covert recordings once, and that was also in a neighbour dispute when a physical threat had been made, and so it would have been for the purposes of persuading the police to take any possible complaint of harassment seriously.

Interesting. Maybe.

There is a detailed report at Housing and Property Law Daily.

Matt Wardman blogs at The Wardman Wire, on media, politics and technology, in addition to writing at the Raccoon’s burrow.

Covert Recording accepted in Evidence by Appeal Court is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Abbottabad was named after an Englishman, British Army officer General Sir James Abbott

Hookworms, a cure for asthma?

Warmenist is a proper word.

Everything is 3d now-a-days, including microchips.

Osama Bin Laden liked to watch himself on TV.

Saturday evening facts is a post from: Anna Raccoon

A minor milestone was passed recently. This blog has just had its 30,000 comment.

In the 2 and bit years that this blog has been going since its first post in 2009 there have been many hundreds of you commentators who have added to the richness of this blog with your insight, criticisms, and occasionally with rhymes and poetry and haiku.

As Anna has said in the past, this blog is more about you the reader than us the writers. We only write a few words and leave the rest up to you to add all your opinions and thoughts.

.

.

.

And the winner of the 30K comment was……

… Simon Cooke

Good luck in the elections Simon. Hope you win in real life as well as here in virtual life.

* For those wondering why Simon’s comment is actually number 39,240 this is due to spam.

SBML

30,000 is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Some work will be carried on the website in the early hours of Friday morning. The work will be carried out from 3am Friday morning and could extend until 11am.

The website should be unaffected during this time, but there might be short periods of time when it is unavailable.

The hosting company are moving the servers into a brand new building with all the mod-cons. So if the website is offline it’s probably the hosting company carrying AnnaRaccon’s server across the road.

SBML

Parish notice is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Caedmon’s Cat in ‘Why do you Blog?’

I blog during the course of my mouse-catching activities. I do so because I’m the only moggy in the area who’s interested enough to do it. Life is getting more stupid here in the lovely Kingdom of Northumbria each passing day. There are so many examples of the window-licking idiocy of the ruling classes – and the pantomime that goes with it – that simply beg to be mocked and derided.

Oh – and I’ve come to realise – like SBML – that socialism is nothing a bag of maggots – like those who make millions of groats from it. We’ve tasted its bitter fruits, and we long-suffering creatures have endured enough of its cant and hypocrisy – not that I have any more respect for Caedmeron and the Tree Faction or their Liberationist bedfellows; they all treat the people who elect them as if they’re cash cows to be milked, herded, controlled and patronised. Idiots.

Snowolf in ‘A Man For All Reasons’.

Leaden prose? We must be reading different blogs, Anna.

I’ll indulge in one of my guilty pleasures, the ridiculous, incredible, and utterly hilarious soap opera that is professional wrestling. You are like the Undertaker. A huge crowd favourite, the ‘phenom’.

He’s been in the business too long, his body is beaten and battered, barely functioning. But he is such a draw, his name on the bill ensures an audience of millions. He comes out about five times a year, he simply can’t manage any more, but when he does come out to play, it is sublime and world class.

Pick your fights for the biggest audiences, the best shows and the deepest impact.

Pericles on ‘DCLG released Documents’.

Well, is that not the purpose of sending ‘50 per cent.’ to university :  to teach them to string together a load of drivel that can then be used to justify their being given government jobs (or jobs in the private sector trying to cope with ever more legislation) and — to all intents and purposes — receiving benefits ?

To-day we learn that the Coalition is to ‘encourage’ colleges to require lower grades at A-level of those from ‘poorer backgrounds’.  As if standards were not already dismal.  How, one wonders, will vice-chancellors set about the implementation of this ridiculous idea ?  Shall we see the perverse situation in which parents buy a second home on a sink estate for Junior to use as a home address on application forms ?

Why, then, is all this happening ?  Here’s why:  a political class with no understanding of economics or the natural sciences cannot afford to have a more capable generation coming up behind it ;  cannot risk discovery, for example, of the frauds it has perpetrated in the name of ‘sound finance’ (baling out the banks) or ‘science’ (the anthropogenic-global-warming fraud).

ΠΞ

Best comments of the week (BCotW) is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising.

Bruce Schneier on bomb sniffing mice.

John Adams on the need for a Cream Buns Act.

How to say nooooooooo!

Australia’s expensive housing, the same reason for the UK’s expensive housing – planning.

New York Times  – Smokers denied jobs – the new minority?

Spiked!  – Facebook makes you mentally disturbed.

Discovery Channel – Squid aggression based on female pheromones – So can us men blame the fairer sex for our aggression?

Saturday posts worth looking at is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Let’s put the pensioners in jail and the criminals in a nursing home. Solves two problems in one.

Pensioners

This way the pensioners would have access to showers, hobbies and walks.

They’d receive unlimited free prescriptions, dental and medical treatment, wheel chairs etc and they’d receive money instead of paying it out.

They would have constant video monitoring, so they could be helped instantly, if they fell, or needed assistance.

Bedding would be washed twice a week, and all clothing would be ironed and returned to them.

A guard would check on them every 20 minutes and bring their meals and snacks to their cell.

They would have family visits in a suite built for that purpose.

They would have access to a library, weight room, spiritual counselling, pool and education.

Simple clothing, shoes, slippers, PJ’s and legal aid would be free, on request.

Private, secure rooms for all, with an  exercise outdoor yard, with  gardens.

Each pensioner could have a PC a TV radio and daily phone calls.

There would be a board of directors to hear complaints, and the guards would have a code of conduct that would be strictly adhered to.

Prisoners

The criminals would get cold food, be left all alone and unsupervised. Lights off at 8pm, and showers once a week.  Live in a tiny room and pay £600.00 per week and have no hope of ever getting out.

Think about it.

H/t Peter Sawyer who got it from somewhere

SBML

Instead of prisoner votes, care for pensioners is a post from: Anna Raccoon

NASA has just announced that they have found some alien life forms. But before you get too excited about little green men, this is actually about little green bacteria. Well maybe not green as they are to small to have any colour.

The reason NASA says they’re alien is because they love Arsenic which to all other lifeforms on Earth is a extremely toxic. So either these bugs have come from space and are colonising our planet or they have evolved to cope with arsenic in their environment. Of these two theories I know which one is more believable.

The reasoning behind the theory about why the bacteria can handle arsenic is because it has similar chemical reactions as Phosphorus. It tends to interfere in chemical reactions involving phosphorus which is where the toxicity comes from. However just like 99% of snakes can cope with their own poison, these bacteria have evolved to cope with arsenic which sometimes occurs in high concentrations in their environment.

So life is not just carbon based with nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sulfer thrown into the mix.It could be any mix of chemicals. So there could be life on Titan or Enceladus or even Mars. It’s just that we might not recognise it at first because we have fixated ideas about what life is.

So what is life? If a bacteria here on Earth has evolved to cope with chemicals that aren’t used by the rest of the lifeforms on the planet, then what could happen elsewhere. Elsewhere being on other planets or even other planetary systems or even in other galaxies.

Because we have found something that uses arsenic in it’s metabolism whats to say that there aren’t other forms of life that use some exotic chemistry in their metabolism which to us is posionous. Or even not recognised as life. The findings show that it’s likely that just about anywhere there will be some form of life, though most will probably bacteria-like.

Now for some real alien life forms.

This was a bit of a change from the normal Anna Raccoon articles. A bit more sciency. Let me know what you think about such articles.

SBML

Aliens have landed is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Management speak – don’t you just hate them? Here are some to get your emotions running wild over the weekend.

• Going forward
• Idea showers
• Product evangelist
• Platform atheists
• Incentivise
• Touch base offline (or is that two?)
• Loop back
• Can’t turn a tanker around with a speed boat change
• Holistic, cradle-to-grave approach
• Got you in my radar
• Challenge
• Low hanging fruit
• Looking under the bonnet
• Pre-prepare
• Forward planning
• Pre-plan
• Conversate
• Sprinkling our magic
• In this space
• From the get-go
• Going forward together
• 360-degree thinking
• Feed through the sales and delivery pipeline
• Don’t let the grass grow too long on this
• Get all your ducks in a row
• It was auspiced by
• We’ve got our fingers down the throat of the organisation of that nodule
• My door is open on this issue
• Close of play
• Actioning
• Also in addition
• Were are we at
• At the end of the day
• 110%, 120%, 200%
• Not enough bandwidth
• Out of the loop
• Capture your colleagues
• Paradigm shifts
• Stakeholders
• Come to the party
• Feeding it back
• Cascading down
• Granularity
• Leverage talents
• Living the values
• 2.0
• Strategic staircase
• In negative territory
• Drill-down
• High altitude view
• Silo thinking
• Helicopter view
• Wrongside the demographic
• For sure
• You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music

From the BBC

Management buzzword bingo is a post from: Anna Raccoon

I put my ‘ illegal’ pipe of tobacco down in disbelief that this bloke has been allowed to keep a British passport this morning.

In all of my seventy nine years I can’t believe what is going on. If you are an axe wielding murderer you can get the vote, if you can threaten to kill us all for being British and still get to keep you passport.

‘Jim Hamza’ did not blow his hand off and eye out fighting with the SAS did he.

He is Egyptian by birth, and having done part of my National Service out there, I can understand why he does not want to go back. Just because Egypt don’t want him, why do we have to have him ?

As soon as he done his time, deport him as not conducive to the public good !

These Civil Servants are idiots- If he dresses like an Egyptian, was born in Egypt, He is a bloody Egyptian ! Alternatively if he wants to earn his citizenship he can join the Army and do a couple of years in the Army as a translator in Afghanistan.

We had a couple of those in my unit until they blew themselves up on an Italian landmine.

©Sid Philpott

Well His Name Is Not Jim Hamza Is It is a post from: Anna Raccoon

All members of the Libertarian Party have received the following circular this morning

Why I believe that the Party needs to campaign for a Swiss style Constitution.

1. Power is concentrated in too few hands with no checks and balances

The office of Prime Minister is a relatively new one in our political History. However this office has virtually no constraints on it at all. It enjoys the Royal Prerogative.

This has lead to abuses of power which reached its apotheosis under Blair and the ‘Sofa Government’. 646 members of Parliament largely abrogated their power of holding the executive to account by trying to become part of the executive themselves or indulging in lining their own pockets, as the sinecure of being an MP relied on office holders being and acting like Edwardian gentlemen.

Under a Swiss style Constitution you would not have had Gordon Brown signing Lisbon in a broom cupboard away from the glare of the media. We would have been guaranteed a referendum because UKIP, the Libertarian Party and a host of other parties and pressure groups would have gained the required signatures to force a referendum.

There is no point whining about the EU when you cannot do anything about it, under a Swiss style Constitution you could do something about it. So the focus of the Libertarian Party will be two fold

A) Promoting and enshrining individual Liberty in Law

B) Fettering the State in chains so that it cannot make top down decisions that we have no say on.

2. The creation of a class of permanent rulers

A big State and big Government creates a class of self perpetuating oligarchs. We have seen the rise of ‘political families’, we have the creation of unaccountable private companies like ACPO -Association of Chief Police Officers- that are using public funds and are directing public policy on policing. They have created a new class of policeman that is heavily armed making dire warnings of a summer of middle class discontent, finally we have the permanent Civil Service which has become politicised. Damien McBride was a political attack dog paid as a treasury civil servant.

None of these people are elected, they are unaccountable and they have access to your taxes.

3. Other peoples money is easy to burn

Two years ago quangos, local and central government lost one billion pounds in the Icelandic banking collapse. Investing in Iceland was reckless and against Government guidelines. Yet name me one person that went to jail or lost their job over this.

Brown actually used anti-terrorism legislation to seize the assets of a friendly nation that required not the authority of a Judge, but that of a Treasury official.

4. Constitutional change is going to happen.

However it is going to be top down. As Libertarians we have a duty to put the individual at the top of the pyramid of power, not at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of power where the individual owes duties to the State. THAT is neo serfdom. The non debate on AV is a sop to the social democrats, the Tory Bill of Rights has already been shelved in a dark ante room.

5. Continuity and Change.

The British have a genius for being non confrontational and non revolutionary. As an ardent Republican, I will have to concede that a reduced role will have to be found for that of the Monarch. The Monarch can be a true constitutional Head of State, and swear allegiance to the Constitution as would the People, Courts and Defence forces.

As a Libertarian and a Constutionalist I put a huge amount of blame on our current national predicament being founded on having a Constitution that contains just three words ‘Parliament is Sovereign’.

On accepting a constitution that is founded in the words of-

In the name of the People and Commons of England,Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Cornwall here assembled

We can have a Constitution that is founded on the individual is sovereign unless he/she has actively assented in being ruled by way of repeated national referenda.

As nobody has chosen to stand against me as Leader of the Libertarian Party on November 27th, I will argue to forge alliances with any campaign and the devil, that I think will promote the twin aims of personal Liberty and Fettering the State by way of a campaign for a Constitution.

I am urging all members to accept the change of name of the Party to that of the Libertarian and Constitutional Party, not to diminish Libertarianism but to enhance it. The Party lives by a Constitution so should we as a nation.

A cantonal form of  minimal goverment would allow within a Federal framework, Scotland and Wales to run its own affairs and finances, Cornwall to reassert its historic claim to be a Crown Dependency like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, and for the historic regions of England and Ulster to reassert their political and financial independence.

The only role therefore for Whitehall would be for Defence and Foreign Affairs.

Constitutional change is coming, but under Labour it threatened to be a series of obligations to the State. Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights are all subbordinate to the vote of Parliament. Even Habeas Corpus is subbordinate to the vote of Parliament.

The right of every citizen to challenge Government in rendering any legislation ‘unconstitutional’ including the transfer of powers to Europe is surely that there can be little dispute about.

Andrew

The British Free State is a post from: Anna Raccoon

President of the Republic reviews the new Anglo-French rapid reaction force, Brits to the left, French to the Right

This is not to to go well on past performance irrespective of the fact that we have spent most of the the last thousand years fighting the French, we don’t speak the same language and have slightly different ways of going about national defence.

The British have traditionally defended their home soil like cornered dogs, the French have had a tendancy to throw the towel in and wait for others to come along and give them a hand to get their homeland back, then change history and say they liberated themselves (yes-you DeGaulle)

Col Tim Collins who knows a bit or two about fighting, said when he was on operations with the yanks in kosovo they got their man, cooperating with the french was a nightmare, they could not communicate in the field and invariably their target was tipped off and got away.

I’d rather employ more South Africans, Fijians and Ghurkas if we are are going to rely on foreigners for defence.

©Sid Philpott

Why Are We Relying On The French For Defence is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Now that we have a supposedly pro civil liberties inclined government in power it will be interesting to see whether they keep to all their promises regarding Gary McKinnon and his extradition to the USA on trumped up charges of hacking into US military computer systems.

Before the election both Nick Clegg and David Cameron attacked the Labour governments decision to allow his extradition to the USA for numerous reasons including:

* The unbalanced extradition treaty that gives US citizens many more rights than UK citizens.
* The fact the USA waited a number of years after the crime had been committed until the unfair treaty was ratified by the UK before requesting his extradition.
* The fact that Gary, who claims he was looking for aliens, has Aspergers a form of autism which would make his extradition, trial and punishment all that more harsh.

From a technical point of view I understand that the hacking was pretty unsophisticated and didn’t involve much more than Gary running an easily available port scanner tool to find unsecured computers on various US military networks and then popping up stupid messages whilst he was looking for evidence of aliens.

Whilst the USA claim he cost them a billion dollars in damages what they actually mean is that Gary exposed the uselessness of their unsecured networks and the cost incurred was actually the amount it cost to install proper security measures that should have been there in the first place. In reality they should have been thankful that it was only a stoned autistic alien hunting geek that was poking around their unsecured networks and not a professional team of Chinese or Russian hackers.

In fact I am guessing that the real reason the US is prosecuting Gary instead of offering him a well paid job in their cyber security department like they have done with other high profile hackers is purely the unsophisticated nature of the hack which didn’t actually involve any mad hacking skills at all. It’s probably out of pure embarrassment that they are pursuing him as he has basically revealed to the world that the most advanced high tech armed forces in the world had their network breached in such a simple manner.

This is not to say that Gary didn’t commit a crime and we all know hacking is illegal. However to give him the orange jumpsuit treatment and put him in some dark penitentiary with gang members, rapists and other seriously nasty individuals seems a bit harsh to me. The crime was committed in this country on a PC in London therefore he should be punished in the UK and not sent off to the USA to never come back.

Not only does the USA have stupidly over the top sentencing guidelines they seem to love locking people up for their natural lifetimes and I can easily foresee a US judge throwing the whole book at Gary for his crime and locking him up for 20+ years. The fact that the Labour government first introduced such an unfair and biased extradition treaty in the first place is bad enough but to then bend over and just let them have their way with one of our citizens in this manner is appalling and I just hope that our new coalition leaders have a bit more bottle and are capable of keeping their word on this subject.

Obviously I don’t hold up too much hope as power corrupts very quickly and it seems that morals and high ground are quickly left on the opposition benches once the ministerial cars pull up. We have already had cries of “sell out” directed a the Lib Dem’s due to their support of Tory cuts, increased tuition fees and the raise in VAT which they actively campaigned against during the election therefore I am half expecting the same excuse to be used in relation to Gary and aspects of their proposed freedom bill which was a lofty idea aimed at rolling back Labours surveillance state, restoring Civil Liberties and reviewing the US extradition issue in particular.

Both Nick Clegg and David Cameron have gone on the record with their support for Gary McKinnon and pressure needs to be applied to both leaders of the coalition so that they are constantly reminded that this is one promise we expect them to keep. Not only is it an important case in terms of Gary’s personal situation but it is also a strong reminder and maybe even a wake up call to the UK population about how little our UK citizenship means when it really comes down to it. If we don’t fight together to keep Gary from being extradited then who is to say who could be next.

The USA is already trying to implement cut off switches claiming that they own the Internet and they are increasingly concerned about cyber security using the threat of terrorist hackers as a reason to implement mass online surveillance and tracking. Who is to say that the next person to be accused of cyber attack isn’t some middle aged housewife who accidentally forwards an email containing a dangerous virus onto an American government network. With our current extradition law British citizens can be extradited to an American jurisdiction without prima facie case of a crime having been committed which makes it very easy for the US government to import Brits into their horrible justice system even when the crime was committed here as it was in Gary McKinnon’s case.

To highlight this current injustice an online campaign has been created which aims to create a Twitter Storm on November 5th to raise awareness for Gary McKinnon. If you want to join in this campaign for Gary then you just need to send one or more tweets to @ukhomeoffice between 12pm and 5pm that mention Gary and include the following tags: #tweet4gary #freegary #mckinnon #garymckinnon.

Hopefully we can create a mad Twitter Rush, get these tags to trend and raise Gary’s plight to those people not in the know. However the main aim is to show the current UK government how much support there is to prevent his extradition and to reform the unfair treaty that currently treats Brits as 2nd class citizens.

So remember to create some automated scheduled tweets for Nov 5th or just set yourself a reminder to post some or Retweet any of the others that will filling the web. For more details check out: tweetstorm4gary.wordpress.com

PoliceState UK

The primary and only legitimate function of the State is to protect its citizens. The last Labour Government passed a disgraceful piece of legislation that allowed a foreign Government to whisk British Citizens to their jurisdiction on the minimal amount of prima facie evidence, at the same time the United States refused to ratify, and we cannot do the same to their citizens.

The fact that the Coalition Government has not announced a moratorium on all such cases is an affront to every citizen of this country.

Twitter is a good medium to protest as a lot of MP’s are tuned in.

Make a difference on November 5th.

Tweet Storm- Gary McKinnon November 5th is a post from: Anna Raccoon

We are being moved to another server by Bluehosts because of the repeated going off line. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly.

Parish Notice is a post from: Anna Raccoon

Steven Baxter was kind enough to pay Anna  Raccoon  some very nice complements in his article in today’s Guardian CiF. Should we mourn the decline of British Libertarian Blogs

I have spoken to Anna this afternoon and she wanted to relay her thanks for the kind words Steve.

However this meant that the flood of hits this afternoon temporarily knocked the server over, so apologies for going off air this afternoon.

But you can blame Steve !

Andrew

PS that is Steve’s photo, not mine though we look the same, and share the same taste in collarless shirts.

Guardian Article Tips Server Over is a post from: Anna Raccoon

John Redwood has a good discussion going on about Banking Reform Here. It is worth a read.

There has to be a reworking of the finance system before we are faced with the meltdown that caused the fall of the Roman Empire, when successive Emperors East and West, trashed their currency by constant issuing of debased coinage.

The Keynesian economists that fill the halls of the central banks seem to content to tinker with the rigging as the ship is going down.

There appears to be very little willingness to accept that the Statist model with its targets for public servants is still taking far more priority over actually  getting industry moving again. Every night on the Box it is a litany of  woe because of the ‘cuts’. Last night it was the luvvies of the theatrical variety protesting that Somerset County Council has slashed the Arts budget to …. well zero. Actooors seriously did pieces to camera on how vital the Arrrrrts (intonation my dear) were to our national well being. If it was good enough for Shakespeare to find a patron and produce works that attracted paying punters, its good enough for this current lot of artistes. The Media are not impressed by industry, they want the celebrity culture. As demonstrated by some former East Enders actress saying that knife crime should be on the national curriculum, and being taken seriously. Education is about Education not Social control

There is a serious shortage of cash in the economy at the moment though I did see somebody arguing that the velocity of money in the economy is increasing at a rate that threatened inflation. Let me define what I mean by shortage of cash.

The State has been printing money to sustain itself, not to feed into the wealth producing sector, but to finance two disastrous wars, overspending by the public sector in the good years and financing the bail out to prop up the banking system. When I say system I use that advisedly, it is an oligarchy of four major banks of which two are state owned. The market is hardly in play here.

There are simply not enough entrants into the market, over regulation means that ‘banking’ is still in the hands of a very small group of bankers who are busy rebuilding their balance sheets, in activity that is just as unproductive economically as financing rafts of diversity officers in the public sector.

The State is also a guarantor to unfunded blackholes in the public sector pensions. The only way that this circle is going to be squared is by wealth producing trade, this is not going to happen by ‘State Enterprise’ (remember De Lorean cost us £100m, a vehicle that ended up in the approriately named ‘Back to The Future’). It is going to happen by massive tax cuts (a far smaller state), regional industrial and commercial banks that our remaining pension funds can invest and get a decent return on capital.

It is good that this debate has started, but I suspect not much of this is going crowd celebs off the small screen.

De Soto,Austrians, Keynesians, Bankers, East Enders, DeLorean And Clowns is a post from: Anna Raccoon