.........

My own view is still the same and part of it is still stop dressing up hatred and othering other people as "spirituality" to try and make it look normal.

It's been something that's been dragged into the present from the past and deserves to be left behind along with child executions and the trials and executions of animals and all the other cruel things that have plagued human society for so long.

Well, I'm against the death penalty altogether, but that's another thing. It's still here with us.

The continuing aftermath

The sectarian killings continue in Iraq with a horrifying toll. Over 40 people killed in a day.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1148899687350&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724


Pictures from the BBC

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/5028172.stm


There's no point rehashing my views on the way the whole operation was carried out with no attention being given to this. Been there, said it and it's the present and future that are there to be tackled now.

Last month over 1,000 people were killed in Baghdad alone.

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=31509

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I've been watching the events in the Netherlands over the past few days with a feeling of sadness. I'm not sure why Ayaan Hirsi Ali is being treated the way she is because she's always been honest about her arrival in The Netherlands. But, then I suppose people will say that the law has to be seen to be equal, which ofcourse is quite right. The Netherlands does have a strict immigration policy. But the present situation does seem ridiculous in a lot of ways.

I'm not a great fan of the present leadership over there but the old government was seen as being too liberal and the death of Pim Fortuyn secured the election results for sure.

Whatever people might say she had nothing to do with Theo Van Gogh's death. His murderers had targetted him before the film he made with her. And they themselves were people who lived lives which were rather at odds with what you'd think they'd be. I suppose,like a number of psychopaths, they thought there would be no chance of capture.

I'm sad at what's happening in the country at the present. There is a feeling that a tolerant society is to be maintained at all costs but I feel that some of the attitudes that are being shown aren't the best way to achieve this. And, I do wonder if some of those attitudes are just a thin veil masking other intentions.

The far right is kept verbally in check by laws. It was very interesting some years back when a journalist infiltrated a supposedly democratic political party only to find that it's views were very different from the ones it felt it could legally talk about in the streets. It was a good learning experience to say the least.

I'm sad about the way things have changed. Though The Netherlands is still my favourite place in the world.

New Scientist 2

Quite a long time since I posted in this blog. It's not that I haven't been keeping up with the news, though I haven't been reading as much as usual, it's all been rather sporadic again for a while. But I was looking through New Scientist this morning and found an ad for the Rosetta Stone languages courses. I was thinking about them yesterday. I used to spend quite a lot of time on their US site and didn't realise that they had set up business in the UK until I came across their UK site a little while ago and blogged in delight about it. And then forgot. I will be getting one or other of their language courses. People used to say how good they are but I was put off by the fact that I'd have to order them from the States so I never bothered.

link

http://www.therosettastone.co.uk/en/offer/google


Haven't noticed them in the shops here. Looked when I was in Grant and Cutlers but I didn't see them. Maybe they'd just sold out or something, but, having said that, I've never seen any in the shops anywhere.

The course is expensive, though no different from going to night school or something like that. It's different from most of the courses you find in the shops.

New Scientist

I read Focus and New Scientist on the way back from London. They were writing about the threat of bird flu, mentioning the way it has recently been covered in some of the press. This stems from a government sponsored scientist saying that he thought there was little threat from the disease.

I wrote about this when I first saw the article on the net because I was so astounded by it. New Scientist seems to feel the same now. I was even more amazed as I read how the disease is mutating and crossing into different species. I haven't got the article in front of me and for the past months haven't been keeping up with the progression of the disease because I have had health problems of my own to get through.

It seems though that this latest version of bird flu is able to infect many different species through different mutations. It is the first known disease like this that can cause such havoc through many different species and the magazine was speculating if it might see the extinction of some endangered species. The more the disease spreads through different species the more chance of a dangerous mutation arising that will cause of lot of problems for people.

The article was pointing to poultry production as the main source of the disease and saying that methods of raising poultry must be looked into because at the moment it makes things much easier for the bird flu virus to develop different strains. Though it is known that other human flu pandemics have stemmed from bird flu in the past. But anyway the crowding and narketing of birds is giving the virus a good chance of mutating and spreading at the moment.

No one knows what will happen in the future. Viruses can lessen their potency with time and there is always a chance that this one won't mutate into a form of human flu because it has exchanged genetic material with a form of the human flu virus. But then again there is the possibility that it could. The way it seems to be able to affect so many different species and is so adaptable is worrying.

I always hope that people will work together to find ways of protecting each other out of some kind of empathy with each other. It would seem the sensible thing to do and the best way for people to survive and prosper. You'd think nature would have made us supportive of each other for the survival of the species!!!! Researchers are always trying to find reasons along these lines to explain various human traits but nature seems to have missed this one out to some extent. Therefore we have violence in different ways going through to genocide and war. You'd think with a threat like this that nature would have provided us with some kind of wanting to join together and protect each other because that would make it more likely that these sort of problems could be easily fought and overcome. You'd think there would be a rush of consciousness wanting to do our best to fight to protect everyone.

If only ..................

That we would be preparing for mass production of any vaccine found by making many many means of production. But it doesn't happen.

Politically speaking

Things don't look too good at the moment for Tony Blair if he wants to stay on as leader of the Labour Party. It's an accumulation of things over the past few months that have highlighted that really things aren't going well.

Though when I speak to a couple of people I know in some countries abroad their opinion seems to be that he's much better than their home grown politicians. I am not talking about the Netherlands here, more French and Italian opinion. They feel that corruption is the name of the game in politics in their countries while over here it's more just general political incompetence on the whole. Italy in particular has been the scene of some amazing political twists and turns over the years. France too has seen some amazing scenarios going down.

I don't know what to think. Things have moved so slowly with the present government. I look over at the Tories and think well the picture we're been presented with seems very much like the one that was presented when New Labour came on to the scene. It had very little to do with reality after the elections. Though I was somewhat reassured by being told that the reason nothing was happening was that the first major hurdle to overcome was reducing the national debt which would in turn lead to being able to spend more at home. Made sense. But even then it was apparent that very little was being considered.

I'm not even going to include the Iraq war. It was a mess, the aftermath is a mess. It wasn't thought through properly.

On the other hand as far as national decisions go it seems that there's no public debate as if everyone has been just watching rather than participating for a long, long time. There's so much detachment.

If he goes what will the difference be. I'm not even sure what this government stands for now. I stopped thinking of it as a socialist government some time ago. And I'm not going back to the 60s and 70s. More just thinking of a government who's more there for the people and trying to solve problems.

I don't feel much confidence in this government. But I don't feel easy about voting Tory either. I'd explore the Lib Dems but the world is in a state of crisis. Would things change if there was a new Labour leader or would it just be some kind of cosmetic change.

I feel the lowest I've done about politics here for a long time.

A better definition of global warming.

Some people have been saying that global warming should be referred to as climate change so that people understand the principle better. But climate change could mean anything I guess from the turn of winter into spring to the fluctuations in the weather from year to year. Perhaps we should call it climate change due to global warming.

I'm saying this because I've just read another article where someone thinks that global warming just means that the climate is just going to get warmer and warmer uniformly across the whole planet. It has been pointed out time and time again that this is not the case.

Quote from the article

"Glaciers are melting, holes are detected in the ozone layer, emission of greenhouse gasses is rising, yet we have just gone through an unusually cold winter and spring is unseasonably late arriving - it is hard to get alarmed"

It's been known for some time that the effects of climate change are having an effect on the gulf stream and that the likely effect of that is that the temperatures will change because of this and could get noticeably colder as time goes on. There are many elements that the weather turns on across the planet and this means that there's going to be different effects as the eco systems break down and change. No one knows for sure what will happen, just that it really does not look like good news. The melting of the ice will effect many changes away from the ice caps.

The scientific thought behind what is happening now was put forward over a century ago by some British scientists. It isn't something that's just being fished out of thin air to fit what's happening now. Obviously what's happening now is far more comple that the original thoughts on the subject. And the fact remains that, regardless of scientific models, the future has to remain somewhat of a mystery because of the complex interaction of the elements of the eco system.

But not enough of a mystery to see where some effects will be felt. It's just that there might be other reactions resulting from different events too.

I doubt if some parts of Europe will be quite so gung ho about the effects of global warming after the droughts that have affected them over the past couple of years.

But global warming doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be heating up in one full swoop. The complexity of the eco systems means that some places could get colder as the effects that have kept warmer weather nearer the land change.