Maybe it’s just me but when I was 15 I did some very stupid things. Some involved girls, some involved computers and some involved fire. I was a bit of an idiot.

Thankfully I was never in the wrong place at the wrong time and never did anything as stupid as throwing a grenade at an American soldier.

Even if this kid did what it is claimed he did, he was 15 at the time. 15! 3 more years of being a child. 8 more years before he can drink in the US. This Canadian citizen has been held for 6 years now and awaits the potential of life in prison. He is being held in a camp that seems to live outside international law and claims to have been tortured, something I don’t think many would be surprised by, given past reports.

After watching stuff like this I feel physically sick. It genuinely terrifies me that the US feel they have any even slight moral authority over any other regime with this torture camp still running. It sickens me to the core and I’m glad it does too.

Is it just me or should children be cut more slack than grown adults? They screw up and one (albeit huge) screw-up shouldn’t destroy their life.

Residents of the US, I really hope your next leader closes this camp down before the rest of the world becomes more disgusted that we already are at your flagrant abuse of human rights.

I am, like a lot of people in Europe, strangely attracted to the US primaries and the Democratic race in particular (as it is actually still a race).

Hearing Barrack Obama talk is pretty inspirational and I’m not even vaguely a US citizen. He seems one of the few politicians who seems to truly believe in what he says and Marc Andreessen’s blog has some really good insights into why the man is capturing the hearts of so many of the young voters in the US. Ron Paul was a pretty inspirational guy also and I know the Internet loved him but sadly this doesn’t seem to have actually translated into a huge amount of votes.

Personally, I hope he wins as it would be nice to have a US President with a less aggressive foreign policy.

I leave you with a quote from Marc’s blog that I think is particularly relevant:

[Obama] said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.

Some people seem to be in uproar about this but I can’t really understand why. At the moment many people die waiting for organ transplants. Many people die with perfectly good organs and no problem with organ donation but never got round to getting a card to signify their consent. This is, in my humble opinion, stupid and unjust.

Moving to an opt-out system would save many lives so if people have religious/moral/whatever reasons for not wanting their organs removed on death they can stop it happening. The proposed legislation also says that the family can object and stop the donation going through so I’m surprised by peoples’ opposition. Personally I’d like to be able to still have a donation card so my family can’t object as I don’t think it is their right to do so.

What do other people think? The state over-reaching again or doing something good? This seems to be working in Spain with organ donation up 250%. Does anyone know any more details of the situation there?

Like most people I’ve made a few New Year’s resolutions this year whilst trying to take on a few bits of advice on how to make them and keep them.

Anyway, here goes:

1. Hack more on KDE. I think the combination of starting a new job and not running KDE4 as my desktop (until recently) has made me slack from working on KDE. Once I actually am using it daily then I reckon I’ll be able to do more work and help with KDEPIM for 4.1.
2. Practise my bass more. Playing every two weeks with a bunch of music teachers and session musicians is making me feel a little insecure about my playing! I need to practise more, especially working on my soloing and probably buy a Fake book.
3. Study rather than just reading my Bible. I’m normally alright about reading my Bible regularly but I’ve just been reading it like a novel rather than actually using commentries and then like to properly study the passages. I’ve done this a few times lately and it is far more beneficial, I need to get up earlier and try and do it more often
4. Play less computer games. I do enjoy gaming but it is one of these activities that really benefits no-one except myself so I want to try and divert more time into things like hacking/music where I can benefit others whilst enjoying myself.
5. Be a better friend/boyfriend. Just generally take more of my time to try and focus on others and help them with their problems.
6. Become a better software engineer. Improve my knowledge of my main languages, maybe try and pick up some more and improving my algorithmic math skills.
7. Take more of an interest in politics. Now that Nick Clegg has been elected the leader of the Liberal Democrats I’ve felt myself want to try and get a little more involved and interested in British politics in the gradual run-up to the next UK elections.

I’m sure there are more but that’s all I can think of for now!

I found the film really enjoyable and thought provoking. The camera work was bordering on beautiful, loads of still shots perpendicular to flat, bland surfaces helping you to focus in on the characters. The acting was convincing enough but it was the direction and story that really dragged me in and made me think.

I find it completely abhorrent that in the supposedly civilized world of the 21st century politicians are willing to have people tortured to fight an invisible enemy. I find it doubly so that my country is willing to have these prison flights landed and refueled on their soil and allow their citizens to be sent to places like Camp X-Ray to be tortured and abused without trial only to be simply released without any compensation on their innocence being decided.

Coming out the film made me sick to my stomach of the way the world is going as of late. Average people don’t seem to care that their liberties are being revoked and their country killing hundreds of thousands abroad in an illegal war we entered under deliberately false pretenses.

The thing that saddens me the most is I truly have no idea what I can do. When faced with the power of governments, foreign wars and a populace who neither seems to notice or care I feel impotent and powerless.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on helping with some of these problems? I’d be interested in hearing your comments.

Two things have stuck in my mind when I finally heard the full story of events.

Firstly, I’m incredibly unthreatened by these terrorists. The sheer failure to cause any casualties in such crowded areas and the incompetence this shows is staggering. In my ignorant youth a close friend and I made “bombs” in his fairly large garden, as young boys tend to do. Our GCSE knowledge of chemistry allowed us to create explosions almost the size of his house, remotely activated with a radio detonator created from an old remote-controlled car. We were never harmed in these explosions and rapidly grew out of them. Considering these men who attacked Glasgow airport seemed to want to die in the explosion their sheer inability is made quite clear. This makes me a lot less intimidated by their attempted scare tactics.

Secondly (seemingly contradicting my first point), I’m amazed by the political response to these events. Both the Conservatives and Labour seem to be quick to call for “unity” and “bravery” against “terrorism” and “evil”. This political rhetoric makes me gawp. I could understand dodging the issues with the July 7th bombings when many people died but not now. No-one seems to be saying what everyone is thinking: “This wouldn’t be happening if we didn’t invade Iraq“.

I’m far from condoning the actions of the terrorists but we need to ask ourselves how many British casualties we are willing to accept to secure Iraq (read secure our oil supplies). This, in my mind, is another reason to push for renewable energy: to be able to have more self-reliant energy supplies without the need to have an aggressive foreign policy to protect our economic stability.

The worrying thing about this whole affair is that people within our country want to kill us to make us leave the middle east. How many British citizens or Iraqi civilians are going to be sacrificed before we try and get ourselves our of this situation?

“Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.”(Wikipedia)

Groupthink is something you encounter a lot on the Internet in forums, newsgroups, IRC channels and amongst bloggers. It’s also something we see a lot in any clique or group established around certain opinions or beliefs such as in a church, university course or friendship group.

Groupthink is, in my humble opinion, one of the most dangerous threats to our world and way of life. Moreso than terrorism, moreso than pedophilia, moreso than murderers. The main problem with groupthink is that people become afraid or unwilling to speak out against the majority’s viewpoint. With modern media this is especially twisted as if all the news channels or newspapers are saying something you tend to assume that is what the British people believe and therefore it is all-too-easy to simply believe what you are told rather than engaging in issues.

The classic way for people to abuse a groupthink is finding a polarising event or decision and then trying to use that to irradicate rational discussion. A classic amusing example of this found on the internet is “Godwin’s Law”

“As a [online newsgroup] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

Hitler is a classic example of the type of polarising topic I mentioned. Too often in the media or discussion we hear “Hitler did X therefore X is BAD!”. This tends to try and produce a base emotional reaction in order to override an intellectual discussion.

The current big example being used in modern culture seems to be terrorism.

Statistically you are incredibly unlikely to be affected by terrorism but that doesn’t stop idiots like Brown from trying to turn the UK into a police state. The problem with these new laws is that you are infringing on EVERYONE’S civil rights in order to attempt to reduce deaths by terrorism which are astronomically small anyway!

This brings me on to the justification part. The evil bogeyman of terrorism is being used to justify all sorts of laws and government action, from wars in the middle-east to clamping down on free speech to allowing our legal system to be subverted.

People will die from terrorism. This is inevitable. The question you should ask yourself is how many of your freedoms, rights and ways of life are you willing to sacrifice to reduce this number. Personally I’ve reached the limit.

Free speech and many of our other rights are prone to abuse. People say disgustingly horrible things and this is a shame. The problem is if you start saying what people can and can’t say where do you draw the line? Who draws the lines?

If it becomes illegal for people to say “terrorist action is the UK is justified” then what next?

The government is making serious steps toward an Orwellian police state with CCTV, detainment and extradition to the US without charge or trial. The question simply is how much you are willing to sacrifice to maintain your illusion of safety against the terrorists when you are probably more likely to be killed crossing the road.

For the last few years, every time it comes to renew my mobile phone, phone or internet contracts I threaten to cancel and immediately get around 25% of the price knocked off.

My Dell laptop I bought in the summer was £1050, and I haggled it down to £900.
You do have a lot of power in these areas, and its a good thing people are starting to realise it. Another area in which we have power, that people don’t seem to realise is in NOT buying things.

I must have heard a hundred people complain about Windows this year, and I say the same thing to almost all of them. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. The only reason Windows is so poor is because people keep buying it even when they think its rubbish, because they can’t be bothered to investigate the other options. I don’t agree with Nestle, Microsoft or McDonald’s business practises, so I don’t buy from them, simple as that!

It amazes me that more people seem to treat large business like their masters. They complain about products, but buy them anyway. People buy food they don’t like, computers that “don’t work” (sic) and appliances they can’t use. I’ll never understand why people do this. Part of me just thinks that most people just do what everyone else does simply because its easier than investigating the alternatives.

Has our apathetic nature as consumers bled into politics too? We see pathetically low voting turnouts in major western countries, hailed as the great “democracies” (really elected bureaucracies) of this world.

Are we too busy working to care about our government, our products and the rest of the world? Have we always been like this? How can we change things?