Tim's Bits and Pieces

Apparently Prince Harry has been deployed in Afghanistan, about time really, I mean he volunteered to go to Iraq ages ago and they refused him. I suppose I could understand the MoD being cautious about deploying him because his presence could have endangered the men under his command, but they had managed to think of a solution that at least alleviated that problem. Or at least it did until certain members of the media choose to reveal his presence, these media groups should be ashamed to have endangered this brave man and the rest of his unit, just to improve ratings. Heck, I'm ashamed simply because the embargo was broken by "...an Australian magazine." See the following articles for more details:

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I've written a Perl script to add support for comments to my blog, try clicking on the comments link at the bottom of a post to try it out. If you want to have a look at the source code or use it yourself grab the actual script.

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The church I've recently started attending calls their Bible studies caregroups. I can understand why their doing this and it's really not that big of a thing, but I see it as another example of the new¹ course the Christian Church is starting to follow, towards a purely feel-good theology. Here's how I see a conversation going between your average Modern Church (YAMC) and an earnest seeker of the truth (EST):

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Apparently "Nelson ruined the day" with his apology speech yesterday, the 13th of February. I wonder how they figure that. You should go read his speech for yourself.

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Looks like other people are not surprised that women that dress like sex objects sometimes get treated like sex objects, well duh. Here's another article on this situation. Don't get me wrong, I'm in complete agreement with Dr Such when he says that he doesn't believe "...that it in any way justifies a sexual assault...", but still when you dress and act like a sex object it does sort of hurt your argument that you are not a sex object.

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I was rather shocked too find out just how much the government spends on welfare payments, from the Commonwealth Budget for 2007-2008 we learn the government receives $119,560 million in income tax and pays $96,450 million in "Social security and welfare". Gee so, %80 of income tax goes to welfare payments. According to the ABS the average weekly income for full time employees is $1,103.60 as of August last year. Using this figure, the cost to maintain the welfare system costs the equivalent of 87 ($96,450 / $1,103.60) million weeks of work a year. From the 2006 census we find that the employed labour force consists of about 9.1 (9.6 total labour force - 0.5 unemployed) million people. Therefore to maintain the welfare system each and every employed person is doing the equivalent of 9.5 (87 million / 9.1 million) weeks of basically forced, unpaid labour* for people who either can't or won't get a job, or you spend %18 of your life on this.

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A couple more interesting links on gun control:

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While Jeffrey R. Snyder's " A Nation of Cowards" may be a bit extreme in some areas, it is well worth a read and careful consideration for it's general applicability to self-defense and not just gun control.