Life Should Mean Life

 General  No Responses »
Jul 142016
 

… and it pretty much does.

The “lock ’em up and throw away the key” crowd are keen on pointing out that life should mean life. Meaning that those sentenced to life imprisonment should be inside for the rest of their lives.

Everyone “knows” that murderers sentenced to life are often freed after 10-25 years or so.

What is less well known is that when someone sentenced to life is released, they are released “on license”, and are definitely not free in the normal sense of the word.

For a start, lifers do not get released until they have convinced the relevant authorities that they are no longer a risk to society (in theory). When you come down to it, there is no point keeping a murderer in prison after 20 years if the circumstances have sufficiently changed that they are no longer likely to murder anyone – that 60-year old woman who went berserk and killed her children when she was 40 isn’t likely to have more children.

Bear in mind that keeping murderers in prison is expensive and the expense of the big TV and playstation a lifer gets in their cell is irrelevant compared with the cost of the bare cell.

Even when lifers are released, they are released on license, and monitored (although I dare say there are not enough resources allocated to monitoring). And if the lifer gets up to anything that makes their monitor feel uncertain, they’ll find themselves back inside without going through court. There have been lifers who have found themselves back inside because they were drinking too much.

So, no a murderer is never truly free.

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In Defence Of Grammar Nazis

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Jun 092016
 

The grammar nazi. The scourge of the Internet who are responsible for flaming to a crisp anyone who dares let slip an aberrant apostrophe. They can often seem a bit extreme – does it really matter if someone accidentally uses “their” instead of “they’re” ? Well yes it does, and I write as someone who all too often makes mistakes myself.

Firstly the improper use of certain words can dramatically alter the meaning of a sentence – your readers will not know what you intended if you make mistakes in the wrong place.

Secondly, the more mistakes you make, the less understandable you become; at a certain point you will give up trying to read something if it is too impenetrable such as “When u wana rip ppsls faces off but kno il get into a teeny bit of trouble n I hav white on blood is a…” (a real example). I can work out what that means, but I really can’t be bothered.

So go ahead grammar nazis; unleash the flame throwers, because some people need it.

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RIP Harambe

 General  No Responses »
Jun 022016
 

A bit late to comment on this, but why not?

So we have a gorilla that has been shot dead to prevent him possibly injuring a four-year old that had somehow managed to get into the enclosure. Which is obviously a shame.

Having said that, and despite the fact that I’m fully behind limited rights for great apes, I believe that shooting Harambe was probably the right thing to do. Harambe could have ripped that four-year old apart, and from the videos I have seen, he didn’t look exactly calm. And when you come down to it, the decision has to be down to the zoo keepers.

Of course you could just let the four-year old get ripped to pieces, but you would have to be a gorilla to think that was a good idea.

But how did the four-year old get into the enclosure in the first place?

There’s two parts to that. Why did the zoo not make their enclosures toddler-proof?

And why did this toddler’s mother let him get away? Admittedly controlling a toddler makes herding cats look easy, but keeping a toddler on a leash around dangerous animals would seem to be a sensible idea.

Harambe

No We Can’t Leave Europe

 General, History, Politics  No Responses »
Jun 022016
 

One of the things that winds me up about the Brexit fans is that they keep going on about leaving Europe. Which is blatantly absurd; we can leave the EU if we’re dumb enough to choose that option (you may be able to guess what side I’m on), but there is no way we can leave Europe itself.

Britain is an integral part of Europe – geographically, historically, politically, and economically. If anything this is an argument in favour of staying within the EU so we have a greater say on what happens within Europe as a whole.

Historically we have had strong trade links to the rest of Europe since well before the Roman invasion (from Europe!). The Angles and the Saxons were European migrants; many of the Celtic aristocracy from that time made their home in Brittany (Europe again).

And we had Danish raiders from Europe (sometimes called Vikings) which demonstrated that a navy would be a good idea. And Danish migrants setting up home in Yorkshire, and other places. Followed by the Normans who arrived from Europe and helped transform Old English into a new language.

Wars with the French, wars with the Spanish, wars with the Dutch, and more recently wars with the Germans. And I’ve probably skipped over a few minor wars.

Dig through the ancestry of an English person and you’ll find a European migrant.

Trying to “leave Europe” and leave Europe to do it’s own thing just won’t work. Whatever the EU does will have an effect on us whether we’re part of the EU or not; and being part of the EU allows us a voice in what happens.

Pfizer Cripples the US Execution Engine

 General, Politics  No Responses »
May 142016
 

Pfizer now no longer supplies drugs to be used in the US lethal injection executions. Which means that there is now no major pharmaceutical company prepared to supply drugs to be used for executions. Or in other words even large capitalist-driven organisations that the major pharmaceuticals are find executions so morally repugnant that they want nothing to do with them.

So those US states have a number of options :-

  1. Try to find the drugs from “unauthorised” sources, which basically translates as obtaining drugs under false pretences.
  2. Try to find an alternative method of execution.
  3. Or finally do the right thing and stop executing people.

It’s time the US grew up and joined the civilised world.

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