After last night’s cliffhanger round of DNC primary votes, many of us were hoping the Democratic candidacy for President of the United States would finally be decided. With the Clinton campaign financially straining to keep up and hurting almost as much on the delegate votes, many political analysts assumed her exceptionally narrow win in Indiana (a state that was supposed to be strong for her) and overwhelming loss in North Carolina would encourage her to finally throw in the towel in the name of party solidarity and overall good sportsmanship. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Although her campaign continues to hemorrhage money, including a considerable amount of her own, Hillary forges ahead. While I’ve been somewhat open about my support for Obama, this is getting pretty silly. Personal feelings about Hillary aside, nobody is going to benefit from drawing this out much longer and love her or hate her, Hillary’s odds of beating McCain are dismal. Why do I say this? For a multitude of reasons I’ll explore below.

Pages: 1 · 2

Surprise! It’s no secret from my previous coverage on the international use of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras that I disapprove of this practice and disbelieve the justifications used to implement it, but here we have the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard making an outright statement that the worlds most CCTV saturated city has failed to show any significant return on investment for this intrusion into people’s lives. The UK has invested BILLIONS of pounds in their CCTV system (particularly in London) on the premise that these cameras would be a deterrent to criminals, but this argument has proven incorrect. The next phase in implementing CCTV as a law enforcement tool, according to Scotland Yard is as follows:

• A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.
• Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.
• Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

Pages: 1 · 2

There are a lot of things that I find disagreeable in this world, but not many that have the raw power to actually DISGUST me. Something I’ve been reading about lately does. It’s the very sadistic story of Josef Fritzl and his daughter Elizabeth. If you’ve been following the news at all, you’ve undoubtedly come across the shocking tale of how Fritzl imprisoned his own daughter and sexually abused her over the last 20+ years. It’s deeply distressing to me that people like this even exist, but almost as disturbing is the public response to all of this. The public at large, people, have always been nosey and had a bit of a fascination with tragedy, but enough is enough. To pursue such morbid fascination with no regard for the victims, who must now try to recover from this horrible tragedy is deplorable. It’s almost as bad as the crime itself. I’ll be the first to stand up and admit I have morbid curiosity at times. I love to read about serious killers and great criminals of the past. It’s fascinating to try to figure out what was going on in a person’s mind that led them to do these horrible things, but to go to the scene of such a horrific crime before it’s even been properly investigated, with the victims still in hospital and on top of that, to try to break into the hospital and seek out the victims against their wishes, is deplorable! Haven’t these people suffered enough? Isn’t a lifetime of torture, abuse, and neglect enough punishment? Everyone is so busy trying to indulge their morbid fascinations that they’ve lost sight of the fact they are aggravating the situation. Go home and let the police do their work. You’ll hear about it all soon enough.

I listen to CBC Radio on the way to and from work almost every day in my car. On the way in, especially I listen to The Current, which has hostess Anna Maria Tremonti often discussing a wide range of topics that generally effect us on a global scale. I’ve come to enjoy this part of my commute and pay attention with great interest. Lately there has been a strong focus on what news journalists have been calling the “Global Food Crisis“, because hey… people are starving right? Is this really a new problem? No, it really isn’t. What is new is the increased media hype about it. The price of grain has been going up (with pretty much the price of everything else) as the global economy struggles in the face of a seriously ailing American economy. As these prices continue to inflate, the media frenzy has escalated the visibility on the issue of food shortages, but I’d like to take a moment to talk about how this shortage comes to be and what it really means.

Pages: 1 · 2 · 3

We got a re-design on the site! I decided the old girl needed a new skin and here she is! New and improved. Comments (good or bad) as well as suggestions for improvement are encouraged. Please keep in mind that I absolutely despise coding and do not consider myself a programmer by any means. While I will do my best to consider all suggestions, my powers may not be so great as to honour all requests. There will be some adjustment as time goes on, but I think we are closer to what I have been working toward! Special thanks goes out to Foppe Hemminga for creating the base skin that this one is derived from.