Monthly Archives: February 2006
Rant: Guantanamo Bay – (way past) time to close it!
Here in the UK, at least one senior minister (Peter Hain) has also called for the camp to be closed and has intimated that Downing street is – at the very least – uncomfortable with what is happening in Guantanamo.
For the rest of the thinking population throughout the supposed “free world” Guantanamo has come to symbolise the worst hypocrisy of the current US administration.
+22Rave: Wire Daisies “Just Another Day”
Photo Credit: by Brian Marks CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Having fallen out of touch with much of the UK music scene in the mid 90′s, (during the period I shudderingly refer to as “Clubbing and Remix Hell”) I’m enormously pleased to see the return of a growing number of original new bands emerging in a renaissance of the UK music industry.
Chief among my favourites has to be the Cornwall-based Wire Daisies. Their debut album “Just another Day” is a milestone in Indie music and rightly went straight into the iTunes charts in September 2004 when it was launched.
+14Busted! US Congress staff caught polishing Wikipedia Bios.
In the same week that we learned that the Bandanna club website had a link in Wikipedia, I also read an interesting BBC Article about how US Congress staff have been making “Partisan” changes to political biographies.
Using the edit history on Wikipedia, researchers collected the IP numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages.
+23Rave: Diver invents artifical “Gills”
An interesting article on the Beeb’s website today.
Inventor and diving enthusiast Alon Bodner from Israel, has developed a prototype underwater breathing system that extracts oxygen directly from seawater, potentially doing away with the need for compressed air tanks in the future.
The battery-powered artificial gill system, utilises a high-speed centrifuge to lower the pressure of seawater in a small sealed chamber in order to extract the small amount of dissolved air that already exists in water and supply breathable oxygen to scuba divers.
+21Rant: Exxon and Shell – taking greed to a new level
Not content with the already obscene level of profit made in recent years, oil Leviathans Shell and Exxon have both reported record profits – Shell’s profits setting a new all-time corporate profit record in the UK and Exxons in the WORLD!
And all this in a week where scientists around the world have issued a Stark warning about climate change and NASA notes that 2005 was the hottest year on record for our warming planet.
+28Rant: Dumb and Dubya
Dubya’s state of the union address this year was pretty much as expected and enough to make most of us roll our eyes skyward at least once…
His description of a country that “is being held hostage by a small elite that is isolating and repressing it’s people” seemed at last like an admission of the failings of his administration…until we realised he was talking about Iran. I’m no advocate of Iran as a nuclear power, but after the whole Iraq fiasco, it must be clear to the governments of other middle eastern countries that the best way to avoid a US-led invasion is to point a couple of warheads down the most likely invasion route!
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