Oh George!
I just found a link to THIS – great if you hate Dubya!!! It’s also strangely hypnotic, watching him fall and crash onto the rocks (bubbles) tossing and turning, tumbling down – I guess it sums up his popularity ratings of late?!
If he gets stuck – click and hold on him and drag him around – you can make him do all kinds of stuff!
News Bites.
Two things in the news that have been bugging me….so called ‘Torture Camps’ and the UK’s role in letting the US move people to these places via our airports, and also the Anthony Walker ‘Murder proves racism exists’…
Firstly the whole torture debate – essentially discussing whether or not the CIA has ‘torture camps’ in foreign countries where they take captured suspects and torture them to obtain evidence. Sure there’s all kinds of ethical and moral issues involved in this, and I hope my hardened view hasn’t been influenced by watching ‘24′ – but when I see people blowing themselves on trains and buses in order to kill and maim people on the streets of London, the capital city of the country I live in…I find it hard to say I would have a problem knowing that the CIA and UK Security Forces tortured suspected terrorists to gain vital information that might stop other attacks such as 9/11 in the US and the London Bombing here.
Yes, there may be mistakes made and ultimately a small minority of innocent people may potentially be tortured…but is that such a big price to pay for saving the lives of hundreds or thousands of people? You have to put yourself in the position of the person who is mistakenly tortured I suppose, but it’s highly unlikely if you are doing NOTHING wrong at all that you will be suspected of being a terrorist, or involved in terrorist activity to the extent that you will be tortured. I’m not saying torture is ok, or should be used regularly…but personally I think in extreme cases where there is substantial evidence that someone is withholding information that could lead to security forces stopping a major terrorist attack, then they should not be prevented from using every means necessary to obtain this information.
Just my personal opinion on the subject after reading a couple of news articles this evening….this could be discussed until the cows come home I’m sure, and in the end I guess there’s no right or wrong answer, just opinion. See article and more background info here.
The Anthony Walker thing also annoyed me somewhat because it would seem some people are using this tragic event to let us all know that ‘racism does exist’. Surely no one on earth ever questioned this? Racism exists in every walk of live, every community, in every village, town, city and country in the world. It’s not a particularly pleasant thought, but it’s reality. Sure, the levels of racism in some regions, or countries differ substantially, but I don’t think there’s anywhere that you won’t find some form of racism…surely the question is how it’s dealt with, not whether it exists in our communities or not?
See an article on this here.
So Here I Am…
Thanks to Tiff and Steph for replying to my last post, I hope others will soon do the same. (You and I know who you are!).
It came to my attention again today that the 24 hour drinking laws in the UK are due to come into effect on November 24th (somebody’s birthday!). I find this quite an interesting subject, as drinking at all hours is somewhat of a hobby of mine. Everyone is up in arms over whether allowing pubs to open and serve alcohol 24 hours a day is a good idea or not, and I can see both points of view. The one argument is that it will encourage people to get bamboozled around the clock and cause more misery and violence on the streets of Britain. This could well happen, but surely things are pretty bad as it is? And nothing seems to be making any difference?
I’m actually for 24 hour drinking laws, not only because it means I can drink whenever I want to, but because I think over time it may actually make this country a nicer place to socialise in during the evenings. Maybe with less pressure to get as many drinks in as possible before 11:30pm the next generation of drinkers will chill out and not ‘binge drink’. I know I certainly prefer having the option of not going out until 9 or 10pm, having a leisurely drink until 1, 2 or even 3 am.
Sure to start with there may be an increase in trouble, after all the majority of people in this country are dickheads. Or at least a large proportion anyway. But how else are we going to get away from this so called ‘binge drinking’ which appears to stem from war time laws introduced to stop the soldiers getting too drunk to fight the next day!
I think over time, and we’re maybe talking 5-10 years attitudes towards drinking will change, people will relax a bit more, take their time and hopefully Britain will become more like Europe in this way. Not that I have a vast experience of drinking on the continent, but from what experience I do have, people seem a lot more laid back and relaxed when it comes to evening beverages.
Of course, my attitude to all this may well change if during the ‘buffer’ period between now and the time when people chill out I get beaten up by someone who has been drinking for 18 hours solid, but hopefully that’s not going to happen *touches wood*.
Anyway, enough informed debate for one night.
The Moon
So – Discovery made it back okay! I was watching the landing with bated breath this morning. I felt quite nervous watching it, which was weird, but I kept thinking back to the last time I tried to watch the shuttle land on TV and those glowing white rocks shooting through the sky like shooting starts, that were actually chunks of the shuttle that had broken up on re-entry into the atmosphere. I think the most memorable and haunting memory I have of the disaster (which I’m sure is the same for most people) was the photo on the front of the Times Newspaper a couple of days later of an Astronauts helmet lying in a field in Texas where it had landed from the sky. I can still see that picture so vividly now if I think about it.
But today was a much happier occasion and everything went ‘A Okay’! Again the ridiculous speed that thing travels at amused me, with the Mission Control dude saying “225 miles from landing strip, travelling at 6,576 miles per hour” – SLOW DOWN! You’ll miss the run way if you don’t slow down! But they obviously knew what they were doing! Someone did make a sexist comment about it being a woman driver, then someone else (Female) commented that there would be no problem, as you don’t have to reverse Shuttles!
To tie in with my the Space theme of this post, click HERE to visit Google Moon! Yes, that’s right – good ol’ Google have got satellite maps of the Moon on their Google Satellite Maps site now. Make sure you zoom right in as far as you can (using the zoomer thing on the top left) to see the moon’s surface in AMAZING detail!
Discovery.
So I watched the shuttle launch earlier today and it was really amazing! Even having watched them before, it was really nerve-racking and exciting. I was kind of worried it was going to explode on take off or something, but all appeared to go well and within a minute it was 35 miles up in the sky travelling at 3,2000 mph….it got upto 21,000 mph before the TV cameras couldn’t see it! Then when the shuttle seperated from the rocket in space, (which you could see happening from a camera attached to the rocket) it seemed to be moving *really* slowly, despite the fact it was actually moving at a stupid amount of mph!
I found this photo on the BBC News site, so thanks Getty Images for taking it ;-)
I think I want to be an astronaught!
