On suffering

There is something intolerable in the suffering of humans... for it is evil and that the person who causes it is a criminal.
Romain Rolland

Like many people, I was disgusted by the state murder of Akmal Shaikh in China. I am, have been, and will remain a passionate opponent of capital punishment and no amount of debate or argument will shift my position. I am against it viscerally and mentally. There is not enough space to go into it here, but one day maybe.

Today, three years ago, the dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged in a mockery of justice. This is in no way to condone his behaviour of over three decades in power, or the horrific crimes his regime perpetrated both on his own peoples and those in neighbouring countries, after all he did invade the land of birth Iran and fought a wasteful 8-year war to stalemate.

But there was something grotesque in the snatched mobile phone footage of him swinging stupidly as life left his body.

Twenty years back this week, the Ceauşescus, Nicolae and Elena, were summarily shot by a frightened firing squad after a hastily put together after a kangaroo court had found them guilty of crimes against the people.
Again it was a macabre scene of an old man and woman who suddenly realised that their end was imminent. It was horrible!What these state sanctioned murders (I refuse to call them executions, because it seeks to sanitise what is being done, they are pre-meditated murder pure and simple) do is to desensitise people to the value of human life and there is nothing more precious.

That is why the government is right to condemn the Chinese regime, not because they did not carry out the trial of Mr Shaikh properly and according to their penal code, but that that code still maintains the death penalty, and China kills more people officially than the rest of the world combined.

I can do no better than finish with some words of George Orwell's, telling the story of an execution that he witnessed whilst serving in the police in Burma in the 1920s.
"Until that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man... was alive just as we were alive..."

Have a look at http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty

Never in the field of Climate Chaos has so little been achieved by so many

From Hope-nhagen to Nope-nhagen in one short week.
What a shabby affair last week in Copenhagen has proved to be.
A once in a lifetime chance to grasp the opportunity of seriously tackling the problems in store for the whole planet has been let slip.

True, it did agree that we should work together to keep the global temperature from rising more than 2ºC above the levels before the industrial revolution, but who should do what, how this would be enforced, and what the timescale would be... er...!

It is hypocritical of the industrialised Western states to blame China, and to lesser extent India, after all much of what China produces is exported to the West and is in fact substitute production for the West.

We must continue to put pressure on our own government, as well as our European and Atlantic allies to take the problem seriously and get round the negotiating table as soon as possible.

Happy Birthday China

Following the Chinese Civil War and the victory of Communist forces under Mao Zedong's over the Guomindang forces of General Jiang Jieshi, who fled to Taiwan, Mao declared the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

Britain has more CCTV cameras than China

A recent report shows the absolutely mind-bogglingly frightening statistic that Britain has "half as many more CCTV cameras again as the whole of China".

We have a population of 60 million and theirs is twenty times that.
We have more than 4.2 million cameras. That works out as 1 camera for every 14 people, or two for each infant school class.
Whereas China has the equivalent of one camera for the whole of Bradford.
This shows New Labour's worrying obsession with surveillance, and we have created the model "Big Brother" state that the Chinese government, or any 21st century non-democratic regime, would love to have.

Although I am convinced of the argument that CCTV has a role to play in the fight against crime, it is still unclear how well it does this.
An argument against is that it merely moves criminal behaviour from one area that has CCTV to another area that doesn’t.

However, I believe that the money spent on cameras could be better spent on police to solve crimes and patrol the streets.