Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

My feeds disappeared

Shelley has a very funny entry called Feed the feeds, which is all about, well, feeds, for blogs. I know very little about syndication feeds and how they work and why there are different kinds, but I was feeling a bit smug about them nonetheless because I found this cool little application called Sage, which I started using just a little while ago to subscribe to a whole passel of e-learning blogs and websites. A growing passel, in fact, which I was carefully tending and watering.

But for some reason (that technology is evil, maybe?), after cleaning up and rebooting my computer today (I have been known to go for months without rebooting, until my pagein and pageout ratios are beyond belief), I clicked on my nifty Sage reader — and poof!, all my feeds were gone. My reaction has been straight along the lines of the Dynamic Driveler’s hilarious animation. You have to see this one…

From “We Are Not Afraid” to “but maybe we should be”

According to The Globe & Mail, British “police are believed to be under orders to shoot to kill if they believe someone is about to set off a bomb.” According to Sky Television (as reported by Reuters), the man shot dead by London police was not one of the four bombers who tried to attack the city’s transport system on Thursday. According to several eyewitness reports, the man killed today was thrown to the ground by police and then shot five times in the head (there are several reports on this; here is one).

In other words, as per government mandate, the police have a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policy in place.

This has the potential to make me and many others afraid. A policy like this is not right. It’s playing right into the terrorists’ hands. (And yes, two wrongs do indeed not make a right.)

I read that 84,000 Londoners were killed during the Blitz of London. German aliens living in England were rounded up and put in detention camps, including innocent Germans, anti-Nazi Germans. They weren’t treated very nicely. But I don’t think any were literally chased down by police and shot point blank in the head the way the “Asian” man today was. So, listen, what’s to stop all the other Asians (and Arabs and Blacks) in Britain from thinking — and saying — “racism” when they discuss what happened today? It seems to me that the only ethno-cultural group that comes close to having been treated as badly as “coloureds” are the Irish.

Talk about playing right into their hands by creating a sense of anarchy and absence of the rule of law (which includes the tenet “innocent until proven guilty”)…