Bomb nearly rocks central London

A terrorist event was very luckily avoided yesterday in central London (link). What first struck me was the incompetence of the perpetrators. Imagine the effort it must have taken to train in the handling and correct use of the materiel and science behind making such a device; then purchasing the materiel (presumably in a clever and organised way to avoid detection); and then finally having the guts to go ahead and follow through with creating this terrible device and then driving it through the streets of London... only to leave it with the doors wide open, the lights on and gas escaping from it, making it such a visible bomb attempt. This poor execution (in the terrorists' terms) is an error that leads one to think that these terrorist cells are poorly organised (perhaps caused by the nature of their organisation).

There are numerous explanations, from obvious conspiracy theories implying that it was set up by the secret service, general incompetence, or that the terrorists didn't actually want to harm anyone and this was a warning to show how easily they could carry out such an awful act.

We live in truly terrible times. I fear for major cities over the next few years and the people who have to work in them (I myself am travelling to London next week, although I'll be steering clear of central London where I can).

In more general, theoretical terms it's clear to me that this kind of crime is an acceptable price that the general public are willing to pay for less taxes. It's common for people to imagine that this sort of thing will never happen to them and so they are quite happy to risk being involved in something terrible if it means they don't have to pay the taxes which would guarantee protection from terrorists (a very difficult thing to quantify, but imagine having 10 times the current police force involved!). I would be willing to pay more money to protect the general public, but politicians know that if they propose a tax rise then they will be voted out of power because of the fact that people will take this risk with their lives (albeit a very, very small risk). What really pisses me off is when our "leaders" say things like the top priority of government is to protect its citizens ("The first duty of the government is the security and safety of all the British people" G. Brown) since this is clearly not the case.

Bum DDT

I often need to validate entry to websites using the random text generator technology sometimes called CAPTCHA. Apart from usually being fairly unreadable they always make no sense and are not interesting at all. Today, however, I found this:



By the way I have found my favourite Wikipedia article ever: link. I love the juxtaposition of the two meanings in this article. LOL indeed!

Excellent News!

Following my rant about the lack of accountability in modern society a story about BBC directors made me happy today (link). These directors have not met their targets fully and have decided to give up their bonuses.

Really I think this should be the norm, however it is certainly a refreshing change and one that I hope will be followed by more and more people in future.

Well done!