My “old Opinions” are:

• Why Are We Still Building Walls? To keep Palestinians out?
  [and I’d now add:] Or Syrians? Or Mexicans?
  Or anyone else we don’t like?
• Guantánamo Bay still isn’t closed; there’s a hand-written account by a prisoner in there, not serving a ‘sentence’ nor even having been charged with anything
• If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear
• Channel 4’s “Alternative Christmas Message””, 2013, by Edward Snowden
• UKIP, including a sensible comment from David Camoron!
• The Monroe Doctrine
• Diverting the Blame or institutional paranoia; public fury is whipped up by the government and its supporters (mainly the right-wing press) treating people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as enemies of the state
• Big Brother is Watching You: the one story that is destined never to go away. PRISM; How the NSA files affect you; GCHQ Surveillance
• Am I Racist?
• Chelsea (Bradley) Manning
• War atrocities leaked to the press by some very brave people (in particular Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange): the 12^th July 2007 Baghdad Airstrike; the 2009 Granai Airstrike; the Iraq War Logs; the Afghan War Logs
• My Views of People en masse
• Text Speak Guide for David Camoron
• UK Government intimidation of journalists David Miranda and Glenn Greenwald
• Many of the World’s (or at least the Western World’s) problems are of its own making.
  Governments everywhere are becoming less and less popular with their subjects, as is demonstrated by lower turn-outs in elections and the emergence of new and the revival of old left- and right-wing parties and politicians.
• Anonymous
• “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is Closed. You’ve got a Week and a Bit to get your Shit together otherwise I’m Blowing the Airport Sky High!” This tweet cost a fine of £1,000 because it was a menacing threat to security.
  Hasn’t the judge ever heard of a joke? What a waste of time, effort, and emotion! How much did it cost the taxpayer? Why aren’t the Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions not prosecuted for wasting everyone’s time and money? Why don’t these “authorities” concentrate on proper prosecutions of, for example, Police officers who slaughter 47-year-old newspaper-sellers trying to get home?
  – see Harwood – or killing unarmed hooligans – see Mark Duggan. Some of us are getting more than a little fed up with the Police State that Britain has become! Why isn’t there an offence of “wasting tax-payers’ money”? The Police thought they had nothing to lose. It’s not their money.
• Do you wish the Falkland Islands to retain their current political status as an Overseas Territory of the United Kingdom?
• Arrogant Politicians: UKIP, the respectable face of xenophobia?

• Arrogant Politician: Eric Pickles: Cut jobs then find someone to blame when it all goes wrong. Didn’t anyone tell him that resources are needed for flood defence?
• Arrogant Diplomat:
  The US Ambassador to the UK: A Bully Hates to be Laughed at: The Story of Gary McKinnon; extradition controversies: Gary McKinnon, who has Asperger’s syndrome, had been fighting extradition to the US for 10 years
• Arrogant Politician: Maggie: Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch is Dead. [I’m reminded of a parliamentary exchange between (I think) Harold Wilson and Thatcher. She was bragging about how she’d got unemployment down by 0.2% (or some such). Wilson responded that if someone was unemployed, they were 100% unemployed,
  and that was the important thing for that person.]
• Arrogant Politician: Guto Bebb: How a Tory MP treats a Constituent, Dylan Barlow, with Asperger’s Syndrome; Bebb used abusive e-mails because he wouldn’t do what his constituent wanted, which was to put him in touch with a contact
• Arrogant Politician: Boris Johnson (Mayor of London) – a ‘Nasty Piece of Work’
• Some initial thoughts about ISIL (or whatever it’s called now); more in the left-hand column
• The Collapse of Civilized Government
• US Police Fatally Shoot Naked Student at Alabama College
• Now for some good news – Gay Marriage is legal in England & Wales.
  See also Coming Out; things are slowly getting better, though opinions are very polarized
• British Police Misuse Taser Guns: British Police deployed a Taser stun gun on a blind man in the back after reports of a man with a sword; the “samurai sword” was his white stick! Another victim suffered a cardiac arrest after he was tasered four times by Merseyside police and was left critically ill in hospital. A mentally ill man on a roof was hit with a taser by police and the muscle spasms led to him falling off the roof. A disabled man was tasered after he was
  physically incapable of leaving his mobility vehicle as demanded by police. Stun guns were fired by police at a man in Cumbria, who later died. In the US, where tasers are more regularly used, there have been hundreds of deaths. The UK Police Federation wants to treble their number using tasers.
• Are British Police Immune from Guilt? “Scotland Yard admits to mistakes over an acquitted officer as his chequered disciplinary record emerges.” Scotland Yard has apologised for re-employing a riot policeman (PC Simon Harwood)
  after he was acquitted of killing Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London in 2009. British Policemen are always innocent! British juries are notoriously reluctant to convict police for serious alleged crimes carried out on duty. No police officer has been found guilty of manslaughter in 25 years, despite hundreds of cases in which families have alleged wrongdoing.
• Mark Duggan and the August 2011 Riots. Mark Duggan, a black man, was shot dead by police on 4^th August 2011 in north London. He was believed to be a small-time drug dealer and gang member.
  The official story has undergone numerous changes. Shortcomings in the police response have been blamed for stoking the August 2011 riots. According to an eyewitness, Duggan “was shot while he was pinned to the floor by police.” In May 2012 it was announced that the 31 police witnesses would not be required to answer questions – instead submitting written testimony. (This, of course, allows the Police to ensure that they are all ‘singing from the same hymn-sheet’.)
• A Florida jury decided it was legal to shoot dead an unarmed young black man on his way home because you didn’t like the look of him. Three members of the jury involved in acquitting George Zimmerman initially favoured convicting him over the death of Trayvon Martin. He isn’t the first nor will he be the last victim of a racist killing. Remember Michael Brown in Ferguson, Ohio, killed by Darren Wilson who was not indicted; and the fatal police shooting by Timothy Loehman of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, playing with a replica gun. Remember “I can’t breathe”, the last words of Eric Garner in New York where a Grand Jury refused to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer who placed the unarmed black man in a
  chokehold, having confronted Garner for selling loose cigarettes.
• Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, Anglican State and Jason Mansfield’s Facebook post.
• “The Boxes Are Still There”: Catalan democracy.
• American and Israeli ‘Justice’:
  Marines urinate on dead Taliban – Palestine reaction to Gaza conflict – Israeli police use pepper spray: