Ongoing #1

President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Into Law

Publicly having serious reservations about something you later sign, while promising that your people won't use the more overreaching powers of the law and making a blanket statement about how future administrations will operate is stretching credulity, even for a politician. It seems that after managing to kill fugitive terrorist and Level 20 Boss 'Osama Bin Laden', President Obama thinks he's a knight of the Jedi Order with +12 believability. He is not.

I'd like to hope that there'll be no "long tail" from this story; no human rights travesties that wouldn't have happened without this law's assistance, but I'm almost certain that my hopes will be dashed. Happy New Year America, and here's to 2012: year of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens.

Cameron to tackle "excess" City pay

WARNING: article contains a large picture of David Cameron.

It's hard to believe that the financial meltdown kicked off all the way back in 2008 because since then "the news" seems to have been a constant cycle of reports that the government is going to go after these naughty, cheeky little bankers. Tut tut. What do you call a promise that keeps getting promised over the course of years and repeated as if it is a new promise each time, without anything having been done in the time since you last promised it? Is it 'a lie', by any chance?

But don't worry because this time they really, honestly are going to tackle excessive executive pay, bonuses, perks, the ability to call up the Prime Minister and ask him to turn a blind eye to your abuses of power and then give you a job because he's your buddy... oh no sorry, they never said anything about that last one, making it pure conjecture that it ever happened. It is true conjecture, though.

I just find it very unlikely that Cameron will make any kind of movement towards cropping the salaries of the people who keep him in power and bring nice bottles of wine to his dinner parties. Any other action on his part would require him to have empathy for people he doesn't personally know and therefore to act as if they are sentient beings capable of suffering. This moral failing suggests to me that he possesses either a form of autism, or a form of cuntism. You decide.