Daily Archives:February 18th, 2005

Oil protestors meet their match

A group of Greenpeace activists tried to storm the International Petroleum Exchange in London on Wednesday and got more than they bargained for. Times report here. Now, I’m very much in favour of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and I think Kyoto is a Very Good Thing.

Some of the loony left, however, believe that when they can’t win by force of rational argument, they have a moral right to disrupt & damage things and to do so with impunity. I think it’s high time that they got a taste of their own medicine, though I fear that they won’t view their bruises in that way.

Don’t believe anything you read in the papers…

It’s quite educational, too, to read the account from the BBC of the same event and see what a very different an impression it gives you. I don’t think this is primarily because of political bias in either case. The Times, which is in danger of becoming the tabloid for the polysyllabic, paints a fairly unpleasant picture of both the traders and the protestors, gives you more gory details and portrays it as more of a battlefield. The BBC gives the impression that there was some disruption but then everybody went home for tea.

To Catch a Thief

A couple of weeks ago, a burglar broke into the flat belonging to my friend Duncan Grisby.
Sadly, burglaries are all too common in the Cambridge area, and the police are unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it. I have never, ever, heard of a burglar being caught, and certainly never heard of them being sentenced as a result.

Until now. This one hadn’t reckoned on Duncan and his software.

More information from the BBC and from Duncan’s own website.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser