Tim's Bits and Pieces

You might be wondering what a web comic, Narbonic, and an intelligence organizations, ASIO, have to do with each other; the answer of course is absolutely nothing whatsoever, I simply don't have enough to say for two separate posts.

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"Viva Cuba Libre"

One of the guy's I work with said that "Obama was essential for the World as a whole!" (or words to the effect) and the idea has been running through my mind every since. What would the effect of Obama's election be on the rest of the world? He's for change sure, but what change? Would it be for the better or for the worse?

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I was going through my archives and I came across the post I wrote about Lance Corporal Matthew Croucher back in March. I decided to do a little search and see if I could get an update on this event. I found out that he is going to receive the George Cross. Congratulations to Lance Corporal Croucher, he certainly deserves it.

The Australian Defence Force has some good news™. Congratulations are in order for the men of the SOTG.

Apparently the US terrorist watch list has now reached 1,000,000 names. Even taking into account the fact that many of these are aliases bringing the number down to only 400,000 people this is ridiculous. Also, make sure to check out the link to Bob Blakley's calculated false-positives and false-negatives rates. As would be expected it's pretty sad.

... according to Hamas: apparently Mahmoud al-Zahar (Hamas' founder) thinks that a revolt in Gaza would be morally equivalent of Jews involved in the Warsaw Uprising. Yeah, because you know, there's quite a few Palestinian extermination camps in Israel [by most estimates: ZERO]. And it's not like the Gaza Strip is virtually a independent country or anything, according the Wikipedia: since "12 September 2005, the Palestinian Authority had complete administrative authority in the Gaza Strip", admittedly Israel does control the Sea along the Coast line and all of the Airspace, but, while this is a rare arrangement between two independent countries, it is not unheard off.¹ So basically Hamas² is complaining because Israel does not allow them to freely cross the borders between itself (Israel) and a hostile country ruled by a terrorist organization that has as one of it's stated objectives the destruction of the Israeli nation, and is known for suicide bombings against civilians, gee I wonder why. I also wonder why Hamas doesn't feel the need to complain about Egypt (a fellow Islamic nation) also having a closed border policy?

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Looks like bravery among the Brits is not yet extinct: Lance Corporal Matt Croucher "threw" himself over grenade to save comrades. While he didn't actually "throw" himself on the grenade, he did deliberately place himself between it and his troop, so good on him.

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Michael J. Totten's article on Iraqi Opinion Polls is well worth a read.

Brave Sir Bin Laden on Right Wing News not only makes an amusing Monty Python reference but also mocks Al-Qaeda. I mean it's just about perfect.

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