I'm going to put an excerpt from The Guardian on here in a second. The Guardian, for those of you that aren't Anglophiles, is sort of the British Isles' intellectual appendix. That is to say, it doesn't seem to serve any positive function; it collects detritus; is dangerous if it ruptures into the body politic; and even though its removal from your life seems to have no deleterious effect, you just leave it there and ignore it unless it gets inflamed.
Anyway, we read the The Guardian because we are dying to know whether Bush is Hitler, or Bush is Mussolini; and they are the only ones that cover that waterfront 24/7 to our satisfaction. Personally I lean towards Hitler, as old Musso's girlfriend Clara Petacci was a babe and I can't picture George with any babes eating anything bolognese. While we were seeking Bushitlerburton guidance at the Guardian, we came across this nugget. It's industrial strength stupid. I'm talking worthy of enshrinement on the Mount Rushmore of Moronic Observations. It is profoundly dumb, which is hard to do. There's really no point in reading the whole thing. You can if you want, but like many such things, you get the idea of everything that goes throught the mind of such a person from the snippet, which appears to be lonely and pointless trip, and now you can ignore everything else he ever says forevermore.
If you haven't heard about the colossal data-loss debacle for the British government, it has something to do with some Orwellian entity I can't be bothered to look up because it gives me the heebie-jeebies to contemplate the American version I'll have foisted on me next election, because the Republicans are busy trying to outlaw abortions for expectant brain-damaged gay whales or something, and don't show up. As I was saying, there's some squishy socialist thing in Britain that requires some sort of massive registration of all families to get your crummy Big Brother ration cards or something from something called the.. oh the hell with it.
Here's the Economist, a semi-rational publication:
IT TAKES a lot to produce gasps of astonishment from British politicians. But that was what greeted Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the exchequer, when he told parliament on November 20th that two computer discs containing the personal details of 25m British individuals and 7m families had gone missing. The discs were being sent by internal mail between two government departments; they included names, addresses, bank-account details, dates of birth and names of spouses and children. The fate of the discs is unknown, but they contain just the sort of information sought after by identity thieves, who could use it to procure fake documents, commit fraud and empty bank accounts.
Now, who's to blame for this? Seems simple. The person that lost this information; the persons that think it's a good idea to collect all that information in the first place; the people that think the government should manage all aspects of your life --badly; and the people who are currently running the government. That seems like a good start. Not so fast, says some guy at the Guardian who is NOT, I repeat NOT balding, but no doubt shaves his head because that's cool, and not because he's not NOT balding, of course.
Who's to blame in Guardianland? Why, the Tories, who haven't been in power since... well, is John Major still alive? I don't know. Anyway, Tories are at fault, of course, because they were in power during the year in which the idiot clerk in the Labour government that burned half the population of Old Blighty's personal information onto a few disks and then lost them WAS BORN. That's right. Those Catholics are pikers, original sin-wise. They can't compete with Tories:
Here's an interesting fact: the junior official who burnt all that benefit data onto those two infamous CDs was born when the Data Protection Act came into force in Britain - 1984.
If the Tory government then in power had had its wits about it, by the time he or she got to secondary school (in 1995, just as the internet was taking off), the computing curriculum would have been compulsory and included something about the importance of data protection and security. "Security" isn't something that Microsoft just discovered with Windows Vista. It has been at the core of the Unix operating system and its siblings for decades.
This guy's good. There is no goat he could not scape. A pro. And the "1984" date is pure gravy, Eric Blair-wise.
Hey, this is fun. Let me try.
Remember, Bush is Hitler. The Guardian told me so. Bush was born in 1946. Harry Truman was President in 1946. I've looked into it, and besides being responsible for the birth of Hitler 2.0, Harry S. Truman was shockingly deficient in implementing Unix security too.
Harry S. Truman. Worst. President. Evar.
