Disproportionate Stacey Ruling

21 year old student Liam Stacey got drunk on the day Fabrice Muamba collapsed and posted 'LOL. Fuck Muamba. He's dead!!!' on his Twitter account followed by vile racist comments as other tweeters hit back at him and has now been sent to jail for 56 days. Something feels excessive about this.
Now i don't condone Stacey conduct, it was reprehensible and appalling to publicly mock someone who was widely believed to be dying and he fully deserved punishment, but a custodial sentence seems too harsh when there was other options available to the judge.
A tough community sentence or even a suspended sentence with the judge ordering him to apologise to Muamba would probably have sufficed but now he has a criminal record, has been thrown off his University course and has had his life ruined all for being an offensive idiot.
Maybe i am in the minority and most people share the view of ex-footballer Stan Collymore who said that 'Seems to be a few who think that calling someone a W*g, ni***r or c**n and being arrested for it is an infringement of Freedom of Speech. Soppy liberal tree huggers. Don’t have a clue.'
Now i'm not trying to defend Stacey's freedom of speech, i think too many people hide behind that in order to cause offence, i'm saying that Stacey may have been a distasteful, odious moron after a few drinks but should his life have been ruined for it?
Stan Collymore of all people should know all about a few seconds of madness, that was his excuse when he punched and kicked his girlfriend in the head in a Paris Bar a few years ago. He also suggested that having had too much to drink may have been partly responsible for his shameful behaviour for which he escaped any jail time.
Not to excuse Stacey but fining the racist idiot, which he clearly is, should have been enough but jailing the student is disproportionate unless all Tweeters like this are now going to be pursued, then I would look back at this ruling as a first and very welcome step towards removing hatred from the internet.
At the moment, though, the sentence seems to be more of a knee jerk aimed to please those with the harsh views of Collymore than out of any strategy to fight online bigotry and maybe there should be some cause for concern because it isn't the soppy liberal tree huggers that are most likely to write racist abuse, it's idiots with right wing, bang 'em up views like the woman beating Collymore who perhaps should show some empathy for someone else's few seconds of drunken madness.

Biggest Lottery Win In History

The largest lottery jackpot in history, $640m, or £400m, has been won in the US by either a single a ticket holder or by three ticket holders depending on who you are reading, but whether it is $640m to one person or $213m to three, congratulations.
Even after buying the flash car, big house, going on holiday and looking after their family, the lucky winner(s) will still have more money than they will know what to do with which is an enviable position to be in.
Obviously in an ideal world it would have been better to see 640 people winning a million dollars each and changing their lives but of course that isn't how these things work.
What i can't stand are those people who complain about how a big win has ruined their lives. Simple solution, give it away to charity, to family members or even just divvy it out into envelopes and post it through random doors in your neighbourhood, don't just leave it in your bank account and whinge about it because nobody on the planet will give you any sympathy.

Fun Filled Napoleon

When times are tough, what the public most need to distract them is a new theme park and the French have decided that the theme should be Napoleon Bonaparte so he can bring as much joy as he did when he was alive.
Oh, how the Haitians must have partied when he reintroduced slavery and how the 100,000 Haitians slaves who rebelled must have cheered as they were bundled into makeshift gas chambers in the hull of ships and executed with poisonous gas.
Behold the joy of the 6 million left dead across Europe after 17 years of Napoleons continual wars which took in Italy, Austria, Egypt, Malta, Syria, Russia, Spain, Portugal, Prussia, Poland and Germany.
The 3000 men who surrendering in Jaffa, Syria, probably couldn't believe their luck when Napoleon decided rather than take them back to France, the preferable way to deal with them was to hack them to death with bayonets to save bullets.
How the world booed and hissed at the spoilsport Duke of Wellington as he ruined their fun by giving the tiny Frenchie a damn good licking at Waterloo and banished him to an island in the Atlantic Ocean.
'The theme park is a fantastic way to teach young people about history' so said France's tourism minister Frederic Lefebvre so other countries should exploit their murderous tyrants and dictators with a fun filled day out.
Just imagine how much fun there is to be had at Stalinland or Genghis Khan Towers where the kids can thrill at the wholesale massacre of civilian populations.
Alternatively, we can just not re-invent tyrants and dictators who are responsible for wars and the killing of millions as somehow worthy of celebration. Just a thought.

Chuggers

I don't know what it is that attracts me to them, but i do seem to be a regular target for the Chuggers, or Charity Muggers, that hang around shopping centres these days.
Usually wearing bright coloured t-shirts with the name of the chosen Charity who have employed them today specifically to harass me with their over the top patter, it is becoming harder and harder to avoid them, especially when they physically block your path like the one who tried to stop me today and asked me if i wanted a hug.
The reply to my polite but firm 'no thank you' was that he was collecting for Cancer Research and did i not care that thousands of children die each year from Cancer when for just £5 a month i could...his plea fell on deaf ears as i just carried on walking and pretended to be interested in the contents of Sports Direct's window display.
I know tomorrow it will be another charity and a new, fresh faced chugger who will some smile and invite me to sign over my direct-debit details so my £5 a month donation can help fund Cancer research or Save Children which it probably will, after the money paid to the Chuggers agency has been paid off that is.
Charities pay between £100-£140 to private contractors for every direct debit secured by the High Street fundraisers so my £5 will only go to the Charity that i signed up for after approximately 20 months so if i cancel my direct debit before that time, the Charity loses out.
The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association admit that Chuggers are paid and are not volunteers and even compares them to call centre staff which will be worth remembering the next time one of them asks you to fund a homeless shelter or give money to the Heart Foundation because they will get your money. Once the Chugger has been paid and their employer has taken their commission that is.
If you do feel the urge to give to Charity and you want them to receive your money immediately and not in 18 months time, do it through the Charities website and cut out the middleman. If enough people do it then hopefully we won't be faced with trying to pick our way around the overly enthusiastic Chuggers wanting to give out hugs before they get you to pay their wages.

Wasn't Prayers That Saved Muamba

So is there a God looking after us or not? That's one of those subjects that always acts as a red button to those on either side of the argument and i was readying myself to test my recently discovered tolerance of religion, but it never came.
What i thought would be the ignition was the case of Fabrice Muamba, the 23 year old Bolton footballer who collapsed with a heart attack during last weeks game. It is reported that he wasn't breathing for 60 minutes and doctors had to shocked his heart fifteen times before it started beating on its own again.
Thankfully, although still in intensive care, he is now conscious and talking again but while his life was in the balance, we were being urged to pray for the footballer. His family were in the media urging the country to pray for him, as was his teammates, several wearing 'Pray 4 Muamba' t-shirts.
Now i agree it is a nice sentiment but phrases like 'It is all in God's hands' and 'God will decide' as i have heard from those of a religious standpoint during those first days do not sit very easily with me.
It is a terrible thing that has happened to the young player and i wish Muamba a full and speedy recovery but if he fully recovers, thinking that it was the 'power of prayer' is a massive insult to the dedicated surgeons and nurses that fought so hard to save him and will be the only people who saved the poor man's life.
It drives me to distraction when people credit God instead of modern medicine in these cases and leads to the unanswerable question of why, if God is willing and able to save the poor victim, did he do his damnedest to kill him with a massive heart attack in the first place and would have succeeded if it hadn't been for the quick actions of the medical team?
Have faith if you want, praying for victims can do no harm, but let's not get carried away with who is responsible for keeping him alive because Muamba is still with us because he was taken to a highly trained medical team at a hospital, not a Bible clutching priest at a Church.

The Granny Tax

Age UK called it 'disappointing' and warned that it would leave pensioners hundreds of pounds worse off and the TUC general secretary said that the decision to raise more than £1 billion extra in tax from pensioners by freezing age allowances will haunt the Chancellor. Even the Treasury acknowledged that 4.5 million pensioners would lose out by today's announcement.
Already dubbed the Granny Tax, the Government have done such a hatchet job that they have not even had the comfort of a few days grace before people start shouting just what a steaming pile today's Budget has been.
It did try to spin the Granny Tax plan by weakly explaining that 'many pensioners don't understand the Tax System so this will simplify their tax' but the smokescreen was blown away before it even had chance to cover their tracks.
Instead, the cry went up immediately and grew louder when it became apparent that the elderly are being asked to pay more while the rich earning over £150,000 a year have their tax liability reduced.
The Tories did have a dilemma though, whether to tax wealthy individuals who donate a lot of money to the Tory party which could pay for the pensioners or cut money to pensioners. Of course they went for the latter and reduced the amount the the rich pay by 5% and they couldn't even spin that right.
The Chancellor said a study by HM Revenue and Customs found that the '50p rate had raised just a third of the £3 billion predicted'. So he scrapped it but £1 billion is not a trifling amount and is almost how much he was looking to save by slashing Disability Living Allowance to the disabled.
So £1 billion taken from the disabled is a significant amount but £1 billion from the rich is not significant enough to collect?
The Labour Party should already be formulating the line that the millionaires in the Government are handing their millionaire backers a tax rebate by snatching it from disabled children and pensioners.
At least the uproar over the nasty parties latest piece of wrecking-ball politics will allow the fact that they passed the bill last night which opens the doors to privatisation of the NHS to slide by unnoticed.

Cobain Today

I'm not sure where it came from but for the last few days i have had the opening bass line from Nirvana's 'Come As You Are' running through my head. As with most ear worms, i find actually digging out the song and listening to it is the best way to remedy the constant repeats inside your mind so that's what i did and as Krist Novoselic did his thing, i found myself looking through the inside of the album cover and at the picture of the three young men but especially the blonde haired figure in the middle flipping the finger to the camera.
Only 27 when he died, i began to wonder just what Kobain would be doing today if he hadn't taken that self-imposed exit that April morning in 1994.
Looking at what he left behind, Nevermind was Nirvana's highspot, what followed never lived up to that first album so they may have just faded away as the 90s rolled on and we would be suffering today through a lacklustre Nirvana reunion tour like Guns n Roses or they may have continued making album after album of sub standard pap like U2 or The Rolling Stones.
They could easily have sold out and be on our television screens hawking beer like Lemmy from motorhead or flogging car insurance like Iggy Pop.
In my mind, Cobain will always be the shaggy haired blonde dude in the out of shape cardigan, belting out those fast-slow-loud-quiet songs that epitomised the Grunge sound.
I can’t imagine him being 45 and can't believe Nevermind was over 20 years ago and its probably very selfish that there is a side of me that is content that he will be forever that brash, angry, handsome 27 year old sticking up a finger to the camera and not a balding, overweight, washed up has been living on former glories.

Don't Waste Sympathy On Sergeant Bales

The case of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales who killed 16 people, mostly women and children, in Afghanistan cannot be that baffling to even to most amateur psychiatrist. The man obviously has a short circuit somewhere in his brain and went on a murder spree. Because he had access to weapons like an automatic machine gun, his murder spree was all the more devastating.
So that's the explanation, and his defence is likely to be post-traumatic stress disorder caused by Bales being unhappy about being returned to combat after being wounded in Iraq and having seen a comrade's leg blown off the day before he armed himself and headed towards those civilian houses that day in Kandahar.
Obviously it's tough in Afghanistan but it is beyond belief that there seems to be the start of a public relations campaign on behalf of Sergeant Bales.
All our sympathies should be with the 16 dead and their families, not the man who flipped out and murdered them in their beds. The authorities wouldn't accept this as a reasonable excuse if anyone of the kids who shoot up a school or Anders Behring Breivik made it, so why is it deemed acceptable by some if a member of the military says it after going on a murderous rampage?
It was wrong that the Americans quickly spirited him away and plan to give him a Court Martial hearing in America, he should have been tried in the country where his offence took place as was called for by the Afghan parliament.
If an Afghan national went on a killing spree in New York, the Americans would not allow the killer to be taken back to Kabul to face trial so why was Bale allowed to be whisked back to Kansas?
No sympathy should be wasted on Sergeant Bales who should be as vilified as those soldiers filmed urinating on dead Afghans, the ones who chopped off fingers to keep as trophies, the ones the Pentagon discovered had formed a death squad aimed at civilians and the military members filming themselves laughing and dancing as they burned copies of the Koran.
It's worth recalling these incidents to those who still scream support for this war, and did for the one in Iraq and Libya, and are now screaming that we should do the same in Iran and Syria.

End Of The World As We Know It

We do like a good old the-end-is-nigh story and we are sure to be hearing a lot more of our demise as we get closer to December 21 this year which is the date the ancient Mayan calendar stops and the war Deity Bolon Yokte is timed to descend upon us with great vengeance and furious anger.
Scary stuff but he could be hard pressed to find anybody left down here when he arrives because there is a stack of other things poised to wipe us out first.
Things like super volcanoes whose eruption is not just larger than normal but its scientific name is 'supermassive' and according to the Geological Society of London, 'would devastate an area the size of North America' and 'deteriorate the climate to such an extent that the very fabric of civilization would be threatened'.
One such super volcano sits beneath Yellowstone National park and the U.S. Geological Survey reassure us that such a supermassive explosion occurs about every 600,000 years. Less reassuringly they go on to say that it's been about 620,000 years since the last one.
If a super volcano doesn't do for us, it could be an asteroid. NASA catalogues all Near Earth Objects that are at least 1 kilometer wide as the impact of such an object would be expected to produce catastrophic effects for life on earth and so far 7,954 NEOs have been discovered with 1,215 classified as potentially hazardous and 992 of them greater than the catastrophic 1km in size.
In 1989 we came within 6 hours of devastation when the 300 meter wide asteroid 4581 Asclepius (1989 FC) missed the Earth by 700,000 kilometers, passing through the exact position where the Earth was only 6 hours before.
Throw in the long threatened global pandemic from mutating avian flu, the creeping devastation of Global Warming or even the Large Hadron Collider which is not running at full power but has already created tiny black holes and the scientists are are set to ramp up the power, and we have done well to reach this far.
My money for the end of life as we know it would be on the LHC warping space time so our world collapses into a gravitational singularity where not even light can escape and all matter is crushed to infinite density.
Sleep tight and don't let the chicken wielding Mayan Deity bite.

Awe-Inspiring

There is something quite awe inspiring about astronomy. Standing there beneath all those billions of stars can give you a great perspective on matters.
It is the distances and sheer size of everything up there that always makes me pause and i have spent hours this week staring up at the dazzling spectacle of Jupiter and Venus side by side in the night sky.
We seem to take for granted the night sky without actually stopping to consider that there is this thing in the sky tonight, approximately 400 million miles away, and we can see it beside something else approximately 26 million miles away.
That's staggering but then the second thing that strikes me is that what i am looking at at this moment out of my window as i type this, can be seen by every other single person on the planet. All 7 billion of us can turn up our faces and see the same moon that I am looking at right now and was seen by every human that has ever lived.
The very first cavemen, if they looked up, saw the same stars and planets that we are looking at today in 2012 and there is something beautiful about that thought. Everybody in our history books, famous and infamous, would
have seen those same constellations, stars, planets and nebula's that are above us tonight and everyone from this day until the earth dies in billions of years time will see them also.
You can't help but feel very small and insignificant yet awestruck by it all.