pap

She's impressive because she's top looking without too much makeup.

Worthy of its own thread? We'll see. Vamp drama True Blood returns to our screens this week. If you've never seen it, I recommend you do. Believe me, I am just as f**ked off with vampires as everyone else (apart from ms pap, who border-line bean-flicks over the boys in Vampire Diaries). True Blood is different. The real big change in this series is that vampires are out in the open, and exist as a lobbying concern in much the same way as any other special interest movement. Why should you be interested? Well, if you answer yes to any of the following questions, it might be for you. 1) Do you like seeing nooky on TV? I know this is a contentious question. People have kids, which limits viewing opportunity. Also, if you live in a shared house occasionally, as I do, people will hear the moans emanating from your room and assume you are involved in some kind of epic porn-driven w4nk, possibly involving Swarfega. If you do like seeing nooky on TV, True Blood delivers in spades. They really play on the superhuman angle too. There's stuff on here you won't find on YouTube. Well, hopefully, anyway. 2) Do you like humour? True Blood is very funny without ever trying to be a comedy show. Jason Stackhouse is the biggest source of lols. He's a complete **** with a relatively good heart. It's good viewing. 3) Do you like utterly sexy supernatural ginger minxes? My respect for the redheads is well documented. Enter Queen Redhead, Jessica Woll. Yum. Brilliant show. Well recommended, and entirely worth the catch up.

Nah, you're in good company it would seem. Everybody loves a bad girl. C'mon now, Kira Nerys or The Intendant?

See, I never did. She seemed a little mannish for my tastes. That all said, she featured in one of the finest episodes of Trek ever, Yesterday's Enterprise. I might give Denise Crosby a bone out of respect for her work in that ep Might

I find myself in agreement with both buctootim and Verbal on their respective points. We are heading into some very dangerous times. I said earlier that I didn't want to turn this into a conspiracy thread. Still don't. However, Tim's point about the slow crawl to an authoritarian regime is well made. Also, Verbal's point about the EU is bang on. I have zero confidence in the UK as an independent player on the world stage. We have marched in lockstep to American foreign policy, and I believe that's wrong too. The Conservatives love American ideas; much of their policy is inspired by largely failed American programmes, such as welfare-to-work. I still have no idea why a supposedly left-wing government (Labour in the 2000s) would cosy up to the most hawkish US administration since the 1960s. I'm not sure that I ever will. Ideally, I'd like our country to position itself as a wise state. We have enough of our own history to know the score, to be an independent voice, to have the confidence to say "hang on, old bean - are you sure you want to do that?". Furthermore, the peace settlement in Northern Ireland shows that we do have the maturity to deal with terrorists, or freedom fighters, or legitimate politicians as we have now. It wasn't easy. It required some hard choices, and still does now. I'm writing from Northern Ireland right now. My client is having a sports day in the near future. No-one is allowed to wear football shirts, or anything that might indicate some sort of sectarian allegiance. The wags at work have pointed out the irony of having a sports day yet not being able to wear sports shirts, but to me, I totally understand where the firm is coming from. Things have moved on a long way since the Troubles. They've done so because people have genuinely considered contentious issues with sensitivity. It's not perfect; and believe me, a lot of stuff that is reported here isn't necessarily made into a big thing on the news, as it used to be in the 1980s. The dreaded question "what are ye" is still asked all too often. Even so, it's a sh!tload better than where we were. I'm not sure if anyone has ever solved a terrorist problem simply by killing them all, simply because that act in itself creates more of them. We should have used our expertise in delicately handling the NI situation and applied it to the situation in the Middle East.

C'mon now, Batman. badgerx16 makes an excellent analogy there, in more ways than one. Should we have invaded the ROI to get rid of the terrorists?

I was amused and slightly disturbed to see the comments earlier about Russia and China not holding back. First off, do we really want to compare ourselves with those two states? China isn't a democracy, and Russia is rife with corruption and special interests. The point? Neither of them are going around proclaiming any moral authority, and neither have ever been billed as the Land of the Free ™.

You can try and riff on the Afghanistan war all you like to prove whatever point you're trying to make. Regardless of the legality of the Afghanistan war, it wasn't the right response, and I suspect it has a lot to do with the Taleban refusing to play ball on an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Then we move onto Iraq, which was entirely illegal, resulted in the deaths of a million people, and for what? Freedom? Democracy? Or oil? The US had plans to invade Iraq well in advance of 9/11, even going as far as divvying up the oil rights. Tom Clancy often refers to war as "armed robbery writ large" in his books. Seems to be an apt enough description.

Certainly doesn't help, and perspectives change depending on culture and geography. To many in the world, the UK & US are seen as bad guy imperialists and murderers, with some justification.

You're a bad man, scotty - trying to profiteer off my middle-aged fantasies. Shame on you

You asked in a different thread why lefties love Bill Hicks so much. He had some pretty interesting things to say about fear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGTWRYMmnuY

Fair play to Edward Snowden, the chap who leaked all of this. Obama's administration is prosecuting whistleblowers at an unprecedented rate. He was raking in the cash in his job ( $200K p.a. ) and a lot of his family members also work for the US government. He is currently hiding out in Hong Kong, where he describes all of his options as bad. His best hope is political asylum in Iceland, although he is not too optimistic.

You're right, but when the Berlin Wall came down, there were was a little while when I thought it might all work out.

The politics of fear. Sadly, it's all we've had since 2001.

Please, no. You're not even comparing apples with oranges, let alone apples with apples. Strachan. Former top flight and international player with some of the best quips football has ever seen. Brevity the soul of wit. Adkins. Can speak for yonks without actually saying anything. We had "manager blindness" when he was in charge, but he was a cliche factory.

Well, data is already used commercially. Targeted advertising is pretty much how Google and Facebook make their money.

Feck me, Luke Shaw is pwning left back.

It's not really been a sterling week for the Land of the Free ™. The Guardian have been plugging away at the Prism data surveillance program and have had some interesting pieces over the last few days. Essentially, the US has been using a program called Prism to get access to individuals' personal data, the sort of common-or-garden stuff you see on social networks. Details are sketchy. Big IT corporates like Google have insisted they've not given unfettered access to user data, but then, they've also had to admit they're under some serious non-disclosure agreements. We're currently in the weird position where these companies are currently determining how much of what they've disclosed they can disclose. Apple and Facebook are also confirmed to be involved, while many other US companies are reported to be responding to data access requests. This hasn't gone down too well in the EU. The Justice Commissioner has written to the US Attorney General asking some very direct questions. Her view is that information should only be released in "clearly defined, exceptional and judicially reviewable situations", things that the US has not been overly strong on in the past decade. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22872884 For the record, I've no intention of turning this into a conspiracy-style thread. The intention here is to gather opinions about how we feel about a foreign government being able to look at almost any of your electronic communications, supported by major corporations that people place a lot of implicit trust in. Let's do it.

I've been watching The Falls. Mmm. Gillian Anderson. Very yummy mummy, with a bit of previous for being a ginge. Total would.

Explain.

Yup. I think they realise they've been out-UI'ed by Droid. Since moving to the S3, don't really have any plans to return to Apple for phones.

Mate of mine at work was telling me that they cannot actually sell the current full size Mac Pro in the UK anymore because it uses too many non-recyclable metals or something.

I disclose this information largely because it is f**king funny.

The really scary thing was that I quite fancied her when I was 17. Another dubious "would" from that era was Sharon Watts from Eastenders. I know; terrible - but next to Michelle Fowler she looked quite fit.

I understand, Tokes. I was once like you. I thought Star Trek was rubs. I was wrong. Depending on the girly, I often prefer it to boning.