Amazing appetizer (Mushroom Cupcake, Lollipop and Parfait) on What The Hell Does A Vegan Eat Anyway?

Home Secretary cheap at the price

I was quite surprised by the general reaction to Jaqui Smith's expenses claims. Surely, from a taxpayer's perspective, it's better to spend a small amount on porn films (and a slightly greater amount on second homes) than the billions that go on, for example, nuclear weapons?

Politicians in the UK have been very muted in their criticism - something to do with people in glass houses, I suspect. Government ministers in particular seem to live by the creed,

Ask not what your country can do for you - ask how you can do your country

Taking liberties

Oddly, perhaps, the Metropolitan Police Federation is supporting photojournalists in their protest against the under-reported change to the law that means you're effectively no longer allowed to take pictures of the police in the UK (article). (Surely, as the police often argue about others, if they're doing nothing wrong, why should they mind? Oh, right...)

This is just another small step in the constant erosion of civil liberties in the UK, highlighted this week by Stella Rimington (article), the former UK spy boss, who was (yet again) very critical of the UK government. As was the International Commission of Jurists, headed by Mary Robinson, who reckon that the UK and the US are undermining international law. (Their dodgy practises and financial deregulation haven't done much for international economics either recently.)

Empire-db

I've been looking at empire-db, which appears to be a really interesting alternative approach to Java persistence - without the need for XML config, annotation config, yet more funny query languages, etc. It'll take a while to see how well it really works in practise, but it's definitely worth a look if it can cut down on all the pointless plumbing and/or SQL strings in code.

The main problem I can see so far with the approach is that it seems almost intended to encourage people not to separate out domain objects from the persistence layer, which isn't too good, but maybe I haven't fully understood what's going on yet...

Abused become abusers cycle

I was thinking about the peculiar parallels between what the Israelis have been getting up to, and what the Nazis were doing to them not so long ago, which led me to an interesting article by a rabbi in Wales. The Israeli desire for Lebensraum, coupled with a strange belief that Jewish lives are somehow more valuable than others, seems to have led them into repeating exactly the kind of atrocities that were perpetrated against them. It's impossible (unless, apparently, you're an Israeli) not to see frightening similarities between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto, and phrases like the frequently used 'end-game', horribly reminiscent of the 'final solution', send a shiver down the spine. Gerald Kaufman made a good speech in the UK parliament with a similar theme; worth a look - the whole debate was quite interesting (it's unusual to hear politicians in the West get past the block of the Holocaust that Israel can usually rely on), though it highlights just how ineffective the UK is in this area.

Investment advice

NatWest, part of Royal Bank of Scotland, is running ads at the moment for a new free personal financial review, which - amongst other things - 'will check you are getting the best possible returns from your savings and investments'. Someone in the bank has a sense of humour (or bare-faced cheek) - RBS is now mainly owned by the state, precisely because it wasn't very good at spotting dodgy investments.

Would you take advice from an organization that has had to accept a 20 billion pound bailout, and that has now admitted that it has lost up to 400 million pounds which it placed with (the aptly named) Madoff?

On the receiving end of poor design

Having cancelled my Sky subscription, I waited for the final payment to be taken, and then stopped the direct debit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I then received a demand this morning that I reinstate the direct debit, with the threat that I would be charged administration fees for any payments made by invoice. On contacting Sky, at my expense, I was told that this was just an automated response, as their accounting system doesn't check the account status before mailing out threats to (ex-)customers.

Perhaps not quite as bad as one financial institution where I worked for a bit, where payment requests were regularly sent out to customers who had died, even though the customer status was known to the system. Even some of the staff there found this a bit insensitive...