At least, according to a three second telecast on South African television he was; it wouldn't matter a great deal either way now because his influence on the world stage is largely over. The point here is that small errors on major media can cause widespread disarray.
This particular error happened when an engineer pressed a switch that put the test broadcast "ticker" into live view. The fact that such otherwise banal news could reach even the BBC, shows how powerful broadcast media is.
To Err Is Human
As a young computer programmer, one of the very first things we were taught was the American phrase, GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. Our peers also learned the immortal phrase, "To err is human, it takes a computer to really fuck things up."
In truth, these two phrases go hand in hand.
It's often said that computers don't make mistakes - when of course they do. Somewhere along the line, a human had a hand in it, so there's always the possibility for error down to really geeky bugs like the infamous Pentium FDIV bug.
The problem with computers is that when they make mistakes, they make them very, very quickly. Which brings me to the media: if it takes a computer to really fuck things up, it takes the media to spread the error at an alarming , and often unstoppable, rate.
From the ludicrous (if harmless) pronouncements about the Conisholme wind farm UFO collision to the deadly MMR debacle - our media is an unstoppable juggernaut of bullshit.
GIGO applies to our media in just the same way as it does to a computer. There was a time when journalists would check their facts. These days, things move to bloody quickly to make that a viable option so much of what is presented to us as fact is actually reported (or more often repeated verbatim) with the assumption that the source is reliable.
This is a bit of a non-story really, but I rather thought the headline was amusing so I ran with it - it's a play on the expression "the life of Riley" meaning having it easy - bit like a modern-day politician or Life Peer, perhaps...
Anyhoo.
Nicky Reilly is a 22-year old Islamic convert who tried to blow up Exeter's Giraffe Restaurant in May 2008. Calling himself "Mohammad Rashid Saeed Alim", Reilly failed in his attempt to hurt anyone when he accidentally detonated the explosive device he was preparing in the toilets. He was swiftly arrested as he staggered, injured and bloodied outside.
In sentencing Reilly to life (with a minimum tariff of 18 years) Justice David Calvert-Smith said that "The offense of attempted murder is aggravated by the fact that it was long-planned, that it had multiple intended victims and was intended to terrorise the population of this country."
Reilly's lawyer described him as, "the least cunning person ever to have come before this court for this type of offense," and while Justice Calvert-Smith accepted this, he observed that, "Unfortunately those who attempt to commit suicide and in doing so murder other people are almost invariably unsophisticated in many aspects."
What is most interesting about this case is the way that the media are alluding to Reilly's apparent affliction with Asperger's syndrome - a low-level form of autism suffered by many. Although Asperger's sufferer's are socially awkward they are no more likely (and perhaps even less so) to harm another human being than any "normal" person.
Life is like a box of chocolates and Reilly has a long time to ponder on his actions although I have to wonder if a secure psychiatric unit would be a better place for this poor misfit - like Tony Blair before him, he was a puppet controlled by an outside force determined to fuck things up their personal gain.
Row versus Wade? Geddit? No... Don't worry, you will.
Roe v Wade is a landmark US supreme court ruling which effectively afforded women the right to choose what goes on in their own bodies. The idea essentially is that a foetus has a right to life only after such time that it becomes viable - that is, when it can live outside of the mother's body: even if that means using artificial means.
Roe v Wade effectively gave US women the right to a medical termination across the entire country. This was particularly offensive and shocking in a country which puts such a religious right on life.
President Obama has already quashed Dubya's idiotic sanctions against supporting organisations outside the US but in response a group of right-wing senators have re-introduced the Life at Conception Act which will, if passed, overturn Roe v Wade and outlaw abortion by giving even a zygote equal rights as a person under the 14th amendment.
This is obviously idiotic but it's driven by religious conviction - not careful measured thought. The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868, was originally written to protect former slaves and effectively empower them with the same rights and responsibilities as the "white folk".
Laws are funny things and if their authors are not extraordinarily careful they can be widely abused, as example, consider this quote from Republican Senator, David Vitter
“As science continues to advance, the evidence that life begin at conception is becoming more and more irrefutable. This bill is critical to the fight to protect the culture of life, especially as we face an administration and new Congress that seems determined to advance the agenda of a practice that a great number of Americans find abhorrent.”
Even in the first sentence, the mind-buggering veil of ignorance & simplicity that these people operate under becomes horribly clear. Life (by this definition) has always begun at conception and we've known that for a hell of a long time.
However, how are we to define life?
The turning point in Roe v Wade was when the court accepted that life (as most of us understand it) begins when the foetus becomes capable of supporting its own life (even with medical intervention): and this in itself may prove critical.
That aside, the second part of Senator Vitter's statement demonstrates that he fails to understand the right to choose! Choice (not necessarily over pregnancy) isn't specifically written in to the US Constitution, but it is implied in the right of freedom (also implied in the 9th amendment).
No. This is about the religious right's wish to lord it over everyone else.
Choice - as we have it now and as Americans have had since Roe v Wade allows each person to chose based on their circumstance and personal belief. If it were overturned, the religious right would have removed the ability of clear thinking people to decide what goes on inside their own bodies; a dangerous precedent indeed.
As an extreme example, if a child with precocious puberty becomes pregnant the Republican idea would require she carried it to term and gave birth; by any means. Yet for a child of 5 or 6 years that is neither possible or practical. While rare, it happens. Similarly, who are they to decide - for others of conscience - that a woman should sacrifice her life for the sake of a foetus that has no hope of survival?
One law does not fit everyone and here's what a supporter of this bill has to say in a comment appearing PanHandleParade.com pasted as it appears replete with all the errors - judge for yourself:
"i totally agree. if anyone becomes pregnant, there is a reason. that is a life in there. if it is there, then God thought of that being. MADE THEM UP! why would He make a person without any intent for their life? He wouldnt.Everything has a purpose in Him, and just because you arent ready to have this child, God wants it here. So deal with it. =]"
We lay it all at your door, of course!
Myself, I'm going to "Roe, roe, roe me boat, gently down the stream."
Marie Jon a new writer over the uber-conservative Dakota blog, Dakota Voice looks to be a fun girl. Between all the hand-wringing about lies and deceit she claims to like Dubya, saying:
"Bush leaves office with a very low popularity rating in large part because of the one-sided, biased media. You’ll soon find out just how pervasive the media has been in persuading America’s electorate. In the months to come, President-elect Obama will be spoken of in glowing terms. The drive-by media will continue to lie. As our country moves in the wrong direction because of Obama’s policies, only good writes-ups and happy talk will be heard from our “in-the-tank spinmeisters.”
There's a grain of truth there. Some of the American media is very, very pro-Bush. Yet even with the media behind him, swing voters looked at the disastrous fiscal legacy and incredulous stupidity of the woman many saw as his eventual successor [McCain still is a dead man walking, politically] and thought, fuck that!
Obama is the great white hope - despite being part black. He's intelligent, articulate and so far, seems to have his head screwed on. Time will tell.
It's a sad reflection on the Bush years that the opposition fielded both a woman and African-American and won: brilliantly. I hope this has set a precedent in this country where the vacuous rub shoulders with the brilliant - in the corridors of power.
America is hated and despised in many parts of the world with good reason. Dubya led the west into an unjust war and his financial planning brought the world's financial systems to their knees. Islamic terrorism is more rife than ever before even though America has not been attacked recently, they have lost a lot of good men.
This is a man who was an alcoholic; a wastrel who has never had to balance his cheque book. A bloke who once suggested that "god" had spoken to him. Google for Bushisms and you might chuckle for a while before realising that this tongue-tied imbecile was barely able to produce a cogent sentence when he wasn't reading from a prepared speech - that someone else had written.
Yet blinded by some force that I am unable to fathom, people still profess to like the man.
Personally, I wish these people would realise the truth - not this selective biblical truth, but a scientific truth where even the nasty answers are acceptable when they happen to be the right ones.
It's said you can't keep a good man down; but, as the marketing goes you can't keep a Weeble™ down either.
Former British Primeminister and Catholic convert is now trying to meddle in American politics by leaning on Barack Obama to, "Unify the world." Writes Joe Murphy in the Mail.
Mr Blair is now an international peace envoy, which is sort of ironic considering his hand in deceiving the British people and leading us into an unjust and possibly illegal war against Sadam Hussain. He also claims to remain on friendly terms with President Bush (jnr.). Says Blair:
"I'm not a fair-weather friend. I say this to people all the time, even [to] liberal people who cannot believe I can possibly like George W Bush."
Now I believe Blair likes Dubya because if he said anything else, he'd come across looking like a hypocrite - oh wait...
Blair went on to say of the Iraq war and Bush's "war on terror":
"He [Dubya] had very difficult decisions to take after September 11th, and I think he took the right decisions, actually. I'm afraid that if there was any collective mistake that was made, it was not understanding how deep the struggle is and how long it's going to have to be fought."
You think, Mr Blair? You THINK! Dubya had some hard decisions to make for sure, but if there's one thing we've seen admirably demonstrated over the last eight years, he's prone to make the wrong ones - and run with them no matter what the cost is: provided it doesn't cost him.
So here we have a warmonger rubbing shoulders with an idiot (you decide which is which) and both of them have the gall to call on President elect Obama to fix their mess for them. Religious wars have gone on for as long as religion has existed: even the Abrahamics (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) have fought through history vying for power: and they still are despite all claiming to be one people under the same god!
The best way to win a religious war is to not get into it in the first place, but thanks to this idiot and his puppet, we're all neck-deep in shit and resentment. I want to know which fucking idiot thought that a guy responsible for the Middle East hating Britain thought it would be smart to give him a job as a peace envoy. For fuck's sake, he's a new-born member of the most hated and power-hungry major Christian sect of them all.
Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, he might not have even made the most convincing documentary on climate change, but the guy's heart certainly seems to be in the right place. At the end of the last century (less than a decade back) NASA scientists, jaded at the prospect of putting folks on the moon (been there, done that), came up with the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) - aka Discover. Gracious, these acronyms get cheesier.
The idea was for DSCOVR to stream a live colour image of the blue marble we call home from about a million miles away and help model how climate change is affecting us. The nickname "Goresat" comes from the politician's support for the project since inception. Gore wanted to steam the data live onto the Internet 24/7 so we could watch in awe at the jaw-dropping beauty of Earth from space.
But the Bush "administration" put the clog in. DSCOVR would have put a smoking gun into America's hand proving that its reliance on oil is fucking with the planet - and Dubya, a god-bothering climate-change denying idiot and his cronies weren't going to let that happen on his eight year snooze watch.
Writing for the BBC, Dr Christopher Rileycurator of the online Apollo film archive project, Footagevault, says:
"Today, the satellite still rests in storage at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland awaiting a more enlightened presidency to give it a green light. Perhaps, under a new administration, and to mark the 40th anniversary of humankind's first vision of the Earth from space, that time has now come."
According to my ultra-conservative source, even the Democratic leaning CNN is starting to doubt the prevailing scientific theory that global warming is entirely man-made.
I'm not a meteorologist, but I've lived long enough to see the climate change. When I was a child, white Christmases were a regular thing an summers were long, dryish and warm. Things have changed.
Left-wing Americans like Gore have promoted the idea that global warming is entirely man-made whereas the right-wing like Dubya have lived in some form of denial.
Gore has a point, he just makes it badly and we all know that Dubya is religiously-driven fucking idiot. You can get details of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth here but be cautioned that the film has a tendency to exaggerate: something that Dubya supporters have seized on.
The Earth's been here for 4.5 billion years give or take (or only 6,000ish if you believe Ken Ham and idiots like him) and for a large part of that, it's cooled down from a molten blob into what we see today.
Our home's molten core is still pretty hot and reminds us on occasions when it breaks through the fragile crust and forms massive volcanoe, but for the time that life has been on this planet the majority of our heat has come from our sun.
Due to our orbital eccentricity, solar orbital distance and heat lost to space, the planet's temperature has remained fairly constant over that time: warmer at the equator where it's close to the sun and cold at the poles where it's further away. Yet strikingly, the difference between the warmest and coldest places on Earth is quite dramatic: tens of degrees centigrade. We experience seasonal changes (particularly at the far north and south) because the Earth is tilted a few degrees from vertical.
We know this because life as we know it cannot survive outside of a comparatively narrow range of temperatures. While simple bacteria can survive and even thrive in extremely hot water for example, the higher lifeforms require far more modest temperatures.
Our planet, our home is an ideal temperature to sustain and nourish life as we know it (although this is in part an effect of the anthropic principal).
OK. So what about global warming - is it happening or not?
The majority of Americans, or American politicians anyway, don't want to think so. Such is the state of their denial, they refused to sign up to the Kyoto treaty. (Neither did India, China or Russia). Another excuse suggests that the Kyoto protocol causes economic stagnation and that following such a path allows the non-signatories to get an unfair economic advantage.
But global warming is a fact.
The scientist and the weatherman in the video above both miss (or ignore) an important point about evolution.
Not evolution of a species - evolution of a system.
There are more people alive now than have ever lived and we are changing the planet in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. Chaos theory tells us a lot about that.
It's not just our cars - it's us! We are net consumers: we're not putting anything back. We're cutting down the trees that scrub the CO2 from the atmosphere and that leaves us with a net imbalance that the planet cannot absorb: it's never had to in its 4.5Bya history.
Sure, the sun is warming the planet. If it should experience a slight blip in output, we'll feel it for sure, but if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, the heat energy cannot escape regardless, the planet will warm and climate will change.
We are to blame and no amount of American naval gazing and well-meant bullshit won't help.
Plant a tree and observe your environment.
Mother nature is old and wise - listen to her and listen well because our future depends that we do.
Head over the Lay Scientist to see what right-whinger, God-botherer Richard Littlejohn writes in the Daily Bullshit Mail. Original article here and please try to understand that while there are people just as stupid as Littlejohn, they don't have the opportunity to sell their ideas as facts.
In an interview for the BBC, Tony Blair continues to live in denial that his faith actually scares the shit out of a lot of us. The fact that he's now joined the largest Christian cult is nothing surprising, his letterbox-mouthed spouse has been Catholic for years and his family are being raised with invisible friends.
What is amazing (or perhaps it isn't) is that Blair (or B'Liar as many call him) admits in one breath that he feared a palaver if he admitted to being a God-botherer while in office, yet in another he thinks that people: "in one sense, are a little comforted if they think the person leading them has some sense of spiritual value," he said. "Probably we could have been a little more adventurous on this without bringing the house down."
You know, I rather wish he had.
Blair rose to power with a grin. He is, I cannot argue, charismatic but he's about as much use to the world peace his puppeteer, George 'Dubya' Bush.
It's simple. In all likelihood there is no god. We can't prove a negative, so the best we can hope for is to attempt to find evidence of some supernatural force.
There isn't any.
Not a jot. Not a single solitary drop in the ocean (because if there were, I wouldn't write this).
We simply don't know how some things work and how some things came around - the Big Bang event, the origins of life (even though Miller-Ulrey came close) and so on.
Invisible friends and belief in things that contradict what we can prove give me chills. I don't really care if Bob around the corner thinks the world is flat, but if the bloke running my country thinks that, then I've got serious cause for concern.
Either Tony Blair is a liar or he's self-deceived and either way, I'm glad he's not running Britain any more.
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