Would You Like to be Rescued by a Chihuahua?
This seems to be a story that someone made up about a chihuahua being trained to be a police dog. But on reading it on the BBC, it appears that because of its size it can squeeze through small holes to find people trapped by earthquakes.
The only time I’ve seen small working dogs before, was in an airport in the United States, where the Beagle Brigade were sniffing passengers for illegal food imports.
James Blunt and His Part in Stopping World War 3
The story isn’t quite as dramatic as that, but it shows the different in attitude between US and UK forces, when it comes to dealing with a little local difficulty over Pristina airfield in Kosovo with the Russians.
In the end the view of General Mike Jackson prevailed over that of his commander, the US general, Wesley Clark. So Blunt and his troops, encircled the Russians and when the Russians food and water ran out, the Russians felt it prudent to co-operate and share the airfield.
But even so, Blunt admitted that he wouldn’t have fought the Russians, as he didn’t want to be the man who started World War 3, even if he had been court-martialed later.
Pink Elephants
There is an old joke about four men sitting in a compartment of a train. You can tell how old it is, as when did we last have compartments in a train? Three are just sitting there watching in astonishment as every time the forth man finishes a page of the Daily Telegraph, he shreds it to pieces , opens the window and throws the paper out with a determined throw.
Intrigued one of the others, asks what he is doing?
‘It’s to keep the pink elephants away!’ the paper-shredder replies.
‘But there aren’t any pink elephants!’ was the reply he got from the other three.
‘Effective! Isn’t it?’
It would appear that Dubya’s defence of waterboarding is very much on the same lines. He justifies it because there were no attacks after they tortured Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 9/11 attack.
Am I alone in believing that there would have been no 9/11 or at least a much more restricted atrocity, if the United States had employed some basic security at airports in line with what we had in place in the UK and Europe at the time? After all they had had a car bomb atack on the World Trade Centre in 1994 and the bombing in Oklahoma in 1995. So America can’t say it wasn’t warned!
I think Dubya is getting his strike in early with his book, which will go to the bottom of the worst seller lists.
Remember, the Mad Hatters are all for fiscal prudence and which President was not very prudent? Some will say stand up Dubya and be counted!
Zopa and America
In some ways, Zopa illustrates the United States’ problems.
Zopa is an innovative financial company and you’ve have thought it would have gone down well, given the country’s history with credit unions.
But no! The legislators made it impossible for the company to operate in the same way as in the UK. Read Zopa’s view on this. It may have been a bad way to launch in the United States, but another company called Prosper doing peer-to-peer lending also had troubles with the regulators.
You can read what you like into all that, but I can’t help feeling that the US still gives the banks too much power to squash possible threats.
I Don’t Like Guns!
Basically, because they kill people, but I do realise that some people need to hold them. In a review on the Derrick Bird killings in Cumbria, changes are recommended to the gun laws.
I feel that we need just one change to the gun laws and that is to make sure that guns are always locked safely away, when they are not in use, under a dual-key system.
My reason is incidents such as those in which Derrick Bird was involved are not that common, but there have been quite a few suicides involving legally-held weapons. There have also been the odd accident, where children have been playing with weapons. Incidentally, in the United States, a lot of minors are killed accidentally by legally-held firearms.
So locking them up securely with two keys held by two responsible people may be a simple measure that could cut a lot of deaths. Imagine a ard-up farmer, who perhaps felt suicide was a good way to go, having to convince, say his wife, that he needed the guns, when he was not in a fit mental state.
I have actually heard the NFU saying that this is a sensible measure.
The Legacy of Piper Alpha
Piper Alpha was a gas rig that blew up in the North Sea killing 167 people. But it does seem that the disaster has brought in a way of working that is safer and less likelt to cause accidents and leaks. As the United States is trying to decide what to do after Deepwater Horizon, read about what we have done and how others have followed the lead in the Los Angeles Times.
America on the Ropes
Read this interesting take on the Death Penalty from David Rothkopf called “America on the ropes: First GM goes bankrupt and now this…”
Whoever Supplied This Should be Prosecuted
I indicated in an earlier post that the United States was having difficulty in getting enough sodium thiopental to carry out executions. It now appears that a British company has supplied the drug. This is an extract from the BBC’s report.
Writing in the Guardian newspaper, a British civil rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, has called for the naming and shaming of the company as it was “making a business out of killing”.
“One question that immediately springs to mind is whether it is criminal for the British corporation to profit from such a killing: while the language is loose, EU Council Regulation 1236/2005 takes a step along this path, making it illegal to trade in certain goods which could be used for capital punishment, torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment…’
“When the veil of secrecy is inevitably sundered, this British corporation should be reminded that the medical profession boasts of a Hippocratic oath, not a hypocritical one,” he wrote.
I agree with Clive and will be writing to the company, when it becomes known.
The Anonymous Widower 