Monday 29 September 2008

Miliband goes bananas

I could not resist a bit of conservative humor here, as today the UK Conservative Party had a life size image of David Miliband hading out free bananas. While I could not find it on the google image search, here is one of the real Miliband going bananas...

£ and $

The buck was quoted at 1.839 to the pound, down about .007 from Friday.

Sunday 28 September 2008

Amazing architecture in Bedford Square




Front and side images of the DRL TEN Pavilion in Bedford Square, WC1, SW corner or Bedford Square. Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang of the Design Research Lab developed this for an Architectural Association competition. It uses 13mm fiber reinfoced concrete panels which are usually used for cladding. This really is an impressive structure with a light, friendly feel to it. Could not help admiring the spontaneity and originality, along with the functionalism. I imagine we may see more of these in the future. It holds about 10 people.

Saturday 27 September 2008

Wired Link

Click here to read Kevin Poulsen's latest expose on Gary McKinnon in Wired News.

From Russia with Love

When you think of Russia, what comes to mind? Snow, vodka...and cracking - that is, advanced forms of hacking. Pirate hacking software sells along with candy and newpapers, it is now a part of the culture just like hotdogs are to Americans. No surprise that Russia is the mother of all bank hacks and child porn. When they arrest a cracker comrade red handed, all they do with is ask him to work for the FSB (the new improved KGB). The better crackers are protected by the hiearchy - and vice versa. In March of 2000, just as Novaya Gazeta was about to run some articles on financial irregularities in the Putin campaign, the pages disappeared from their site.
Three guesses who did it, and no, it was not the CIA.

Russian and Iran hacking into military websites

As we sleep here in the West, the wicked around the world are at it 24/7. A spate of hacking incidents in the US, Israel and our allies has evinced a bellicosity that is of grave concern. Reston Va. firm iDefense has been able to ascertain that the recent attack on Lithuanian state computers emanated from Russia. These attacks shut down the National Ethics Body and the Securities and Exchange Commission inter alia. Kimberly Zenz of iDefense noted the fact that a similar attack on Estonian systems also emanated from the Russians, noting hack-wars.ru as playing a central role. Ha'aretz reported this summer on Iranian attacks on Israeli computer systems, and Today.AZ outed the Russians intel services for attacks on Azerbaijan government computer systems.
Should this be more widely aired? Yes, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Homeland Security, the FBI, CIA, NSA and DIA have all come to similar conclusions lately regarding the source of cyber hacking - it is embedded in Western countries, where the Russians and Iranians all have agents. Liberal campuses are often hotbeds of espionage, and the more computer literate students are turned into traitors by dint of filthy lucre.
So the world is like a ticking time bomb, the 5th columnists working away at their laptops at a college campus near you. The recent case of Gary Mckinnon in the US serves to highlight this concern; he is a Western hacker who got into the Pentagon, he claims, from a home computer with a 56K modem...OK, we believe it, but Kevin Poulsen of Wired News is not buying this or the nerd syndrome defense. I've been on the web to read Poulsen's article and found lots of ignorance and anti-Americanism. Read it and weep.
Due to the large multi-national community in the UK, both the Russians and the Iranians have been able to operate more freely and hook people like Gary Mckinnon. Recently the Russians also poisoned a UK citizen, former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, under the noses of MI6 - and just footsteps away from the US Embassy. The Iranians shot a UK policewoman from their embassy. It is an undeclared war.
But despite all this, tomorrow, supporters of cyber terrorist Gary McKinnon will also be footsteps away from the US Embassy - some with support from Americans here who hate America and Israel. The battleground, however, is not limited to these spaces or even entire countries, it is in cyber space and must be fough there tooth and nail; spy vs spy, and; mouse vs. mouse.

Friday 26 September 2008

£ and $

The buck lifted yesterday, opening this morning at 1.825 against the pound.

Democrats block bill for bailout

Despite Senator McCain's efforts to back the bailout proposal that Bush sensibly wanted to aid America, and the world, Democrats have thwarted our hopes. Instead they will have money to spend on abortions and other frivolous programs. And '60 terrorists who teach our kids at universities in the Obama state.
The UK is already feeling the bad effects of this stubbornness. Today the mood in the City, where I just spent the afternoon, is sombre. The pubs are full with the usual Friday afternoon crowd, but this is not an indication of financial health, rather, there are lots of financial services workers out drowning their presentiments in alcohol. One young banker I talked to from HSBC told me flat out it was the beginning of the end. An hour later he was drunk, but not as drunk as the parties in the US who brought this on us with irresponsible lending and stubborn veto tactics.
The bad news is the headline of the Evening Standard here, and it sent a shudder up and down Threadneedle Street and the vicinity.
So have a good weekend, but you better brace for the worst.

Thursday 25 September 2008

£ and $

The buck gained .001 against the pound in yesterday's trading, to open this morning at
1.852. Small change, unless you happened to be changing in a million pounds, in which case
you would be about a $500 difference. But that is just small change to many people...

When Sarah met Sarah

Last night in New York, Sarah Palin met Sarah Brown. It does not sound exciting that first line, except of course that Brown lives at 10 Downing Street and Palin is looking to move house
to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Brown was co-hosting a dinner for the White Ribbon Alliance, a charitable organisation whose aim is to improve the health of women and their babies. Other co-hosts were Queen Rania of Jordan and Wendi Deng, wife to Rupert Murdoch. Elle McPherson and the Duchess of York were also in attendance. To add to the excitement, Mr Brown will be in New York to address the UN tomorrow. Whilst he is away from the UK, expect the mice to play.
In Washington Bush is calling for a $700 billion dollar bank bailout, and Senator John McCain has the grace to attend rather than debate his Arab-American opponent, who hails from a state that puts known terrorists in jobs at the univeristy (see previous post on the Weathtermen and Barack Obama).
We live in interesting times...

Wednesday 24 September 2008

£ and $

The buck opened this morning at 1.853, unchanged from the day before.

Afghans in New York

Yesterday Sarah Palin met a real life Afghan, Hamid Karzai - who travelled all the way from Kabul to meet her. She also met with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Wonder if she asked either of them about the drug trade?
Probably not. But we hope this abates with another four years of republican leadership.
To follow the campaign, click on www.johnmccain.com and see how it is progressing.
Here in London everyone is wondering if Brown will stay on, and Miliband, ever the geek, is trying hard to tell us he is not a usurper. His eyes are not on the crown, he says, he is just hanging around. Will Brown last? Maybe not - even a kiss from his wife Sarah did not do much as a minister quit today. Personally I like Brown and think the press is making too much of it,
ministers quit for various reasons and they did not state the reason. So let's not jump to conclusions. Anyway, stability is better for any nation and we hope the Brits the best.
This Sunday, however, a few of the rowdy crowd will march on the US Embassy to - get this -
ask for a pardon for a dangerous computer hacker who got into Pentagon websites - more
dangerous than Matthew Bevan who in turn was almost as dangerous as Hitler.
OK, whatever. Kevin Poulsen already wrote a very good piece on Wired News so google it and see, I did manage to leave a comment at the end.
Justice is justice and hackers, those who were partly responsible for 9/11, as Gary McKinnon was, have got to go.

Tuesday 23 September 2008

£ and $

The dollar lost about 1% against the pound according to this morning's quote, which was 1.853 to the pound.

Birds Eye View

Yesterday I went on the Eye, that impressive feature on the South Bank. It takes about 45 minutes the whole thing, you get on ski lift style and share a capsule with a bunch of strangers. I heard at least three different languages spoken in mine, not a word of which I understood. Je parle un peu francais but that's it.
I highly recommend the experience, all you need to know will be at www.londoneye.com so click on that and you're all set to ride 500 feet up in a 10 ton capsule! Tremendous views of the whole city stretching for miles, as if on a train out west in slow motion.

Monday 22 September 2008

£ and $

The dollar opened at 1.831 to the pound today, edging down just a bit over the weekend.

Rabbi Obama

David Toube in the Jewish Chronicle for this week points out that one of Obama's wife's cousins is a rabbi. A black one, converted from having been in the American Methodist Episcopal Church. From the cross to the draidl he spun. OK, no problem with that. But bear in mind that his brand of Judaism is not exactly what Mamonoides or Ehud Olmert would be into.
Being from the US, I recongnized exactly what kind of synagogue this is - it is akin to the Nation of Israel which claimed real Jews were black. They stood around Times Square in New York trying to peddle this, and no surprise they got little response. Not far removed, physically or ideologically, there were other groups of African-Americans who called themselves the Nation of Islam, and most Moslem groups were not keen to get in with them. For years they preached through loudspeakers in Times Square that the white man was the devil. In prison this group was big, lots of drug dealers suddenly became adherents in the Tombs. Once the handcuffs came off, they were reading the Koran.
Their free speech was not appreciated by most New Yorkers, including fellow Moslems and the many law abiding African Americans who did not want them to represent their community. A non-partisan petition was signed, and finally acted on by Mayor Giuliani in the '90s. Now they are gone, along with the many sex shops that were so much an eyeore in the heart of the Big Apple.
Speaking of Giuliani, I have to admit I was in favor of his bid for presidency, and still do not understand why it got scuppered, but that is history, and McCain is running, so I support him. Especially in light of the strange religious connections that Obama has; on one hand, he seems to hang out with anti-Semites, on the other, he has a rabbi for a cousin; or is his cousin an anti-Semite in disguise - and will he be preaching that the white man, most Jews included, are the devil? I hope simply that I never find out. Some day in the future, I hope, Obama will be but a footnote in history, and he will be sitting at the back of a church, or shul, wiser for his loss.

Sunday 21 September 2008

An ill wind blowing

In the '60s a group of terrorists called the Weathermen made a bid for anarchy with homemade bombs. One of their recipes failed in 1970, killing their own members in Greenwich Village, though this was not their aim; they had wanted the concoction to kill police in New Jersey. While the bumbling bomb makers missed the Garden State police, they did end up killing police in New York, when they pulled off a Brinks truck robbery, which resulted in the deaths of the guard and two NY State Troopers. In 1980 William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn turned themselves in. But they got no prison time, thanks to the left wing ideology in the courts. In fact, they got lucrative gigs at left wing Chicago schools and lots of speaking royalties. Maybe Osama bin Laden is next on the ex-terrorist circuit. If he is, he might be warmly welcomed by Barack Hussein Obama, who was so welcomed by Ayers and Dohrn. They served together on the board of the Woods Fund of Chicago (1999-2002), and Obama was introduced to left wing power brokers by these two idiots. True to form, Obama stabbed his mentor, Alice Palmer, in the back and got her thrown off the bandwagon. Serves her right though, as she it was who initially introduced Obama to the terrorists. Ayers, during his term on the board with Obama, was noted as telling the New York Times "I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough." What more would he have wanted to do? It sends a chill up the spine. He was responsible for 25 bombings and how many other acts of terrorism? Yet all that was not enough...
The weathermen of today have chilled out, but we do have to endure ad nauseum reports of global warming, or, as it has been rebranded, climate change. This nonsense has made a chunk of change for Al Gore, who travels around the world with his hot air telling people they ought not to fly. Your tax monies could all be cracked up to this addiction, and US industry could suffer terrible setbacks from it. Here in the UK misguided climate change activists got off after acts of vandalism in the southeast, the jury accepting a defense that they were trying to save the world or some such nonsense. Maybe they are all linked up, some lefty global network stretching from the caves of Afghanistan to the universities in Chicago - all grabbing for the White House.
Their friendships, however, seem to fall apart every so often. No surprise there, it just shows they are fair weather friends; and with such, we would not need enemies. This November if you're an American let's keep them out and get in the best we can.

Saturday 20 September 2008

Baby Killers

This month Sarah Palin took a lot of heat from the usual suspects. They get a woman on the ticket - after they rejected Hillary - and they scream. Why? Partly because Sarah Palin chose to go forward with her pregnancy when her baby was diagnosed with Down's synrome.
But if she had murdered the foetus in the womb, crushed its skull and all, she would be OK.
Go figure. Right to kill ought to be the Democrat motto, ever wonder why the donkey is their
mascot?

£ and $

The dollar strengthened a couple of weeks ago against the pound, quite possibly due to measures the Bush administration took to control the fincancial problems in the sub prime mortgage housing market - which those of us with not so short memories might recall was created by Bill
Clinton against the advice of many Republicans.
It was trading at $1.78 and Friday was $1.82, after being around $2 for a while. That makes it more affordable for Americans to visit London, and, this time of year, flights are down. But make sure you don't book your flight on a fly by night firm or you may not fly at all, which is what has happened here to some 300,000 people!
This blog will give updates on the pound/dollar exchange rate on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
One way to strengthen the old buck is to get in a senior statesman as President, watch the market rally as McCain wins in November.

RAUK

Just need to put a useful link here till I get to putting proper links on the side.
http://www.raukonline.org/ is for Republicans Abroad UK.

Saddam Hussein for President

My last post exhorted people to vote. Then I realised the irony of what it would be like to become and Obamanation. After spending years getting rid of Saddam Hussein, we would
then be getting Barack Hussein Osama, I mean, Obama, sorry, hard to type here, you know,
you miss a key and say what you really mean, I mean, what you're not supposed to mean...
know what I mean?

One bad bean for 4 years could really spoil the harvest....

So let us ponder the consequences of such an event and not take any chances.

Vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin and let's keep America safe.
Let me look into my crystal ball today and tell the world what will happen on November 5
2008. That will be when we know who is boss in the US. And I know how it will be.
As Tim Spangler said in a Washington Post interview on April 20 this year, we live in an era
of 50.0001% vs 49.9999% elections.
That means, if 100,000,000 American vote, 100 people determine the vote. And in one comi-tragic real life example, even less can be crucial - a Congressman in New England lost a few years ago by one vote; he himself had not bothered to vote that day. I bet he does now.
Writing from London, where some 300,000 US voters reside, I am concerned.
I said I would predict the future; but I stop short of saying whether McCain, Obama, or, who knows, McKinney or Nader get in - I predict that there will be lots of voters gritting their teeth
when they hear that the winner got in by a thin margin, and wondering if they and their friends
had not betrayed their nation by going out to drink, or staying in to watch the idiot box, rather
than voting. If the vote is 50/50 among American in London, then 150,000 could vote either way...or stay in and watch some jerk on TV.
My feeling is that McCain will win, and that by a very small margin, and we will go into the future with a thankful heart that RAUK - that is - Republicans Abroad UK - got their 150,000
people out to vote.

Thursday 18 September 2008

First Post

Testing, testing.
OK. Mike has joined the blogosphere.
Got lots on my mind, what with all the news, mostly bad,
but I guarantee there will be good news on this blog you won't
find elsewhere. Today I read all about financial collapse and satanists
sacrificing teenagers in Russia, or the Soviet Union, or whatever it is called.
But enough bad news.
Good news is I am up and running.
So mark this blog and keep checking it for updates, leave comments,
take a break from bad news.

For those Americans living in the UK this will be THE blog!
And you can send in anything you want posted by emailing me at
homelanddude@googlemail.com

Mike