English: American singer Whitney Houston performing on Good Morning America (Central Park, New York City) on September 1, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
3°C, gloaming with stay grey
Whitney Housten died last night.
6°C, clear and starry (including Venus)
Is this trial over yet? Woke up to hear that US voding is complete. There were only two cannidates, they got the same number of votes but somehow Wilhard lost by a wide margin. The map is coloured by each state. Red for the right-wing and blue for the even-more-right-wing, or is that left wing in their currency? The news features centre around a small number do canndidates, and a large number of voders.
Their president, in practice has limited power, so at least when they elect a half-wit nazi (Bush), or an insane war mongerer (Reagan) they can’t do as much harm as they’d like. I don’t argue with Americans’ right to vote, nor that the outcome has an effect on us non-Americans, but that it would have been better to limit election news stories to once a month until this week. It doesn’t seen to matter who they get, whoever wins will still exert economic power (protectionism), world power (mainly by bombing people), environmental (by polluting us all) and general bullying.
British TV has bored and annoyed us with this story since Easter, and will drag it out some more I fear.
Morning news will remain un-watchable for some time.
18C,
The media haas been full of 9/11 ten years on stories this week. I expected to really hate all of this, but as it happens, there have been some moving personal accounts. Opinions varied hugely on questions like “is the world safer after the War on Terror?”. Even high ranking US govt. men had seemingly balanced views on this, Bush had been advised to drop the term but decided to stick to it because American’s aren’t bright enough to adjust (how ironic). It was reassuring to remember how we felt threatened by that war on terror- it did indeed create a huge recruitment drive for the anti-American groups as we warned at the time. The reassurance lies in being right ten years ago. With hindsight- GW Bush was every bit as bad as we thought at the time, he did make the world a worse place, a less safe one. Many more US soldiers died in the various campaigns than civilians had in the World Trade Centre. The USA can’t begin to imagine how much the world hates them, and why.
I have to take this opportunity to answer the challenge that we don’t feel any diminution of our civil liberties. We do: detention without trial, tourists who are arrested for taking pictures of ‘sensitive’ buildings in London, and for most people- the conduct of security checks at airports.
15°C, clear.
Am I the only one uncomfortable with this story? An unarmed suspect is shot by USA forces on a raid in a foreign country that wasn’t aware of it happening. The press is full of gleeful relatives of the Twin towers atrocity victims, jubilant American citizens and pretty much, everyone else. Will the White house release the video footage shot at the time so we can all see what happened in the Coliseum? The guy has not admitted his supposed role in the events he is attributed with, he was never charged, all that was skipped out. Forget any trial, straight to the execution.
Obama is a christian, right? What happened to “thou shall not kill”? Does he get excommunicated now?
I sit uncomfortably with all this.
Micycle 