Pair of Posts
It’s been a while so I have two stories for you.
The first needs no attribution, it’s all over the news. The Government somehow, with great concessions made (bribes), managed to get the controversial 42-day detention bill through Parliament. The Government are trying to spin it as powers needed by the police to combat the “terrorism threat”.
What “terrorism threat”?
We didn’t need to hold an innocent man for six weeks while the well-organized US-funded IRA were bombing the shit out of metropolitan areas nationwide. Yet we do when a rag tag bunch of rabid extremists post vague videos on the Internet?
The Government has proven time and again that it will abuse the Terrorism Act 2006, using its power to spy on citizens dropping litter, on babies crying at night, to monitor private areas…The list goes on.
‘Disappearing’ people for six weeks with neither evidence nor charge is unacceptable.
Our second is related to the exploding Nimrod in Afghanistan. The MoD yesterday flew a Nimrod over London to salute the Queen’s official birthday and, predictably, the relatives of the servicemen lost in Afghanistan are in uproar.
But wait, that’s not the whole story.
While the coroner of the investigation deemed the Nimrod “unairworthy”, he was not an aeronautical engineer, he was not familiar with the DeHaviland Comet or the Nimrod (the Nimrod is a militarised version of the Comet) and likely not familiar with the Nimrod’s essential role in supporting ground forces.
The experts, the aeronautical engineers, the Nimrod designers, the Nimrod ground crew, the people who know what they’re talking about all insist that the Nimrod is one of the safest and most reliable planes in the fleet. We employ experts for a reason.