Sealand is the worlds smallest country, interesting mainly because it’s defeated several British attempts at invasion and hosts truly safe and anonymous servers. It’s now for sale, let’s hope the new owner keeps it as a safe place for the colocated servers.

Weird one this – Saddam is now certain that he will be hung, so his prose is all martylike. Strangely enough Yahoo news is running 2 stories on this:

and

So which one is it?

Jeremy Clarkson called a car ‘a bit gay’ and due to four complaints by a couple of poofters (four of them, no less), the Top Gear team has been told off by the BBC. Besides that calling things gay doesn’t automatically mean they are

or even sexually oriented at all, even if he had specifically meant it that way, what’s wrong with referring to items as catering specifically to the gay community? Plenty of advertisers see the gay community as a key market!
Won’t the queer, hetero-male hating, PC crowd ever let up?!

Well, lets face it – our choices all suck. There are several websites in the Netherlands that allow you to match your choices with a political party, of which none of the matches are larger than 50% and the questions are framed in such a way that you end up answering in a manner diametrically opposed to your wishes unless you read the question very carefully.
An advantage of the Dutch political system is that the government rules by coalition, so that means there are quite a few viable political parties. The downside to this is that if you want to research all of them, you have to spend quite some time looking through poorly designed websites for the party programmes which are often hidden away somewhere in a PDF download.
Now there are a few things freaking me out in the West at the moment, so I’ve chosen two main points to look at in the party I’m going to be voting for:
1) “Security”
2) Defence.

1) “Security”
Now this one winds me up no end – you peel away the veneer of the word “security” and you find a cesspit of privacy invasion and personal control. ID Cards, camera’s, unwarranted phone and internet tapping, incarceration without due process, legal systems that ignore the “innocent untill proven guilty” idea, centralised databases, etc etc etc. This reminds me of Nazi Germany and what really gets me is that almost every political party is for more “security”. As a matter of fact, the reason that the Netherlands was the greatest exporter of Jews during WWII was because it had the best personal registration system in the world at the time. People say it won’t happen again – but no one can give me that garauntee. The world changes, and we’re picking on all sorts of people here – Moroccans, Antilleans and with that kind of data at a politicians disposal, who says he won’t use it to blackmail any people opposing him / her?

The argument is trotted out that people can use these tools to catch paedofiles – after all, who wouldn’t be against harming our little children?! But all criminals are only caught after due and diligent investigation – which means that getting permission from a judge after considering the merits of the case should be a part of the investigation. Randomly spying on people without their consent doesn’t solve paedofelia – investigation through competent and thourogh policing does.

Then we get the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, what have you go to fear?” argument. Well, it’s my life, and I want it private. If I didn’t do anything wrong, why do you have to spy on me? And would you have a government camera put up in your bedroom over your bed if you accept that argument?

There is no excuse for random invasions of privacy.

2) Defense
We’re living in a much more unstable world than during the Cold War and we need to adapt to it. Now the Netherlands is doing a very good job in this respect – a professional, competent armed forces, restructured around mobility and operations other than war (OOTW), well versed in jointness (working with armed forces from other countries) and technologically advanced. We are doing a good job of protecting our foreign and local interests and it’s sheer naivite to expect that because it’s going well now we can stop investing in our armed forces. We need to keep changing to adapt to different global threats, as we do face them in the whole scale, from all out war, to undefined threats such as “terrorism” as well as disaster relief. For that we need new and diverse equipment, as well as manpower and training. We also need logistical support, transportation, and big guns to keep us safe. If we want to have a say in international politics, we need a big stick to help apply our say – even if it is by not using the stick (allthough we are using it now and heavily). We can’t expect the international community to do our dirty work for us and expect to feed our consumptive economy (which is one of the largest in the world) of the backs of our allies.
The Netherlands is a partner in an ill conceived second rate fighter programme called JSF. We should be investing in serious military hardware – F-22, Eurofighter, Gripen, Rafale, whatever gives us our best protection. Not another F-16 which won’t be wanted in coalitions untill it has had a mid life update!

So where does this leave me? Currently the only party that acknowledges my right to personal freedom and privacy is D66. The rest (traditionally I vote VVD) are all too intent in setting up a police state. Unfortunately D66 thinks we can have this liberty without protection, which I consider a bit stupid. Still, considering that D66 will never garner enough votes to actually become a dominant party in the coalition government, I’ll vote for them in the hope that the big parties (CDA, VVD, PvdA) will get the right message – Leave me to live my life the way I want to!

Last year 5 US nationals claimed asylum in the UK. There’s a lot of frustration about how failed applicants remain in the country.

Frontline aired a programme about the Taliban, which is fully viewable online, about the return of the Taliban.

Well, given the way the vote was swung by national governments in the last referendum for the consitution, it’s starting to look like the people might have something of a say, but given it’s track record on eg. Patents, I’m still waiting and seeing.
Now one million signatures have been collected to stop the EU parliament from going on holliday once a month to Strasbourg at a cost of EUR. 200 million per year. Aside from the ministers, aides and paperwork having to be carted around, the rent in Strasbourg (for buildings only used 12 times per year) is inflated.
France especially wants to keep it’s parliamentiary perks.

Over 100 countries, mainly third world, but including some large first world ones such as Venezuela and Malaysia, make up the Non-Aligned Movement, who are neither pro the US or Russia.
They have decided they don’t like the ‘Axis of Evil’ type sayings the US has been making, and that they see no problem with Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
Due to the size of this majority, this is being called a new kind of ‘cold war’ – and that there’s fighting talk, led by President and nutcase Chavez. I somehow doubt that the NAW has the coherence to stick up for each other in a NATO kind of sense, so I don’t see that the US will be seeing this as a somehow credible threat – but who knows, with time it could evolve into one.

A presidential hopeful, Dennis McCauley has had a campaign stop in Second Life, to talk to the citizens there. Apparently there is room for improvement, but considering this is the first time it’s been done, I’d say it was a bold move. The political commentary is all about whether this is genius or suicide, which is kind of missing the point IMHO.
The point is that this guy has found a large and hopefully receptive audience which has been untapped politically – most hardcore MMO players don’t do politics at all, and this is a great way to reach them. From the experience they will have learnt lessons, and hopefully will put those into practice next time it’s done.

Yup, Japan is talking pre-emptive strike. Remember, this is because N Korea is testing long and medium range missles that are fallling into the sea short of Japan itself – even though once in 1998 a missle was launched that flew over Japan itself. The threats are where you see them.

Because the USA isn’t allowed by START treaties to build more nukes, they’ve taken to refurbishing old 1960s nukes. Why? North Korea maybe? Nuclear racing is back in town.

The North has been having a field day, launching seven missles after a moratorium starting from 1998, when they fired a medium range missle over Japan. The ranges they fired aren’t reported, but apparently the long range missle failed.

Don’t fuck with N Korea or they will launch “annhilating strikes” on the US. This in response to the calls to N Korea to not testdrive their shiny new superlongrange missle.

So they’re old and seem to have been manufactured in 1991, so no ongoing WMD programme can be proved by this, but it does prove that Saddam was lying about having WMDs.

The finds started in 2003, but oddly enough the Bush administration has been sitting on this, probably in the hopes of proving an ongoing programme before going live with the information.

Looking for SEX shows that the countries that search for it most on Google are Muslim 🙂

Apparently they don’t understand it’s only for 1 day, not the whole month!

Now that missle is not only undetectable, it also has guidance systems that can’t be scrambled. They discovered that on the test of the second one.

Of course, you can’t complete this with now stating that as Iran, you can handle any invasion.

Yet again we see how deranged the whole situation with the cartoons is. Really sad that outside of Iraq the news is deliberately shifting the blame, whereas within Iraq people are shocked. But still no riots. Are the muslims trying to widen the gulf between our cultures?

Now it’s the Chinese spying on the Americans – and sending F-16 and Black Hawk engines as well as missles back home to China!

… to the Argies…
Hugo Chavez is doing a really good job making friends isn’t he?! Oh well, at least he called them the Falklands!

Well, Blackberry has infringed patents and stuff and it’s illegal and stuff, but we can’t shut down Blackberry service in the US and stuff, because – it’s a hazard to national security, and there are 200,000 government users who absolutely NEED Blackberry or they’ll, like, die and stuff!
How is this clash between the US government vs the LAW going to work out?

Well done that man – but surely the rest of the world will hate him for giving a rats ass for his country instead of just going for himself alone?

Yeah! It is safe to drive quickly – especially if you know what you’re doing! I want to take my car to the maximum speed: DAILY!

The new man of the city in Manchester has decided to not go for making money for the government, but to focus on actually targeting criminals! What a radical idea!
And most surprising of all, he’s doing very very well – more criminals caught and less handgun discharges!

Random roundup of political news and opinion sites

• European Voice
  
  EU news, Eurocrats, opinions and current affairs. Excellent site for tracking what’s happening in the EU on a political level.
• Le Monde Diplomatique
• Le Monde Diplomatique (English version)
  The French version is naturally better (more background, documentation, etc), but the English version is easier to read (for me, at least..)
• Power and Interest News Report
  

  The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an independent organization that utilizes open source intelligence to provide conflict analysis services in the context of international relations. PINR approaches a subject based upon the powers and interests involved, leaving the moral judgments to the reader.

  PINR, it’s what’s for breakfast.

• Global Security
  US-based security news site.
• Jane’s Information Group

Our most beloved dictator du jour, not satisfied with kicking out all the farmers (who happened to be white) in his country, then blaming it on the Americans, launching a massive famine, has found the solutions to his problems: kick out the city dwellers too!
est. 10,000 people dehomed in the space of 24 hours… maybe he should advance his progressive ideas about urbanism vs agriculturalism to the Iranians – they have a lot to learn yet from mr. Mugabe.