In my usual search around YouTube I came across a song and a band from my past, one that I use to love when I was at school and much to my parents annoyance I would play loudly. So I decided that I would do one of the blogging sins and create a list of 10 songs that influenced me when I was a child/teenager (It seems a long time ago now).
Adam & The Ants - Probably one of the first bands and songs that I really liked as a child was Stand and deliver by Adam & the Ants. Im not quite sure what it was about it, perhaps the White tape across his nose or when he smashed through the window, who knows. I still on occassion listen to some of there music.
Taken from the Telegraph.co.uk, “A seven-year-old boy was kept chained in a closet as relatives hacked off pieces of his flesh to eat, a court has heard.”
We hear pretty nasty things happening all the time, but my daughter came across the above story while browsing the Internet for the usual random thing.
Its an extremely disturbing article about a mother would chained up her two sons and allowed some horrendous abuse in the name of a religious cult. below are some excerpts from the article itself.
The abuse – involving members of a religious cult – was uncovered by chance last May when a neighbour’s television baby monitor picked up graphic pictures of what was happening next door.
Ondrej and his nine-year-old brother Jakub were locked and chained in the cellar for months by their mother Klara, 31 – a member of a group called the Grail Movement.
He was caged, beaten and gagged to stop him screaming, according to reports.
Mauerova had the monitor installed so that she could watch the abuse from her kitchen but the images were picked up by a neighbour who used an identical system to monitor a newborn baby, the regional court in Brno has heard.
Police were called and the two boys as well as what appeared to be a 13-year-old girl were freed.
But the girl later turned out to have been one of the alleged abusers, 34-year-old Barbora Skrlova.
We all need sleep but many of us internet addicts fuel our night times with Caffeine just to allow us to cope for that few extra hours online while we update our blogs, kill a few more enemies or just to chat with friends we have never actually met. What if there was a way to stay awake longer without feeling tired??. The military is always developing ways to make soldiers stay awake for days at a time without the need for sleep, but at what cost?
There have been many attempts to surpress the need for sleep. 70 years ago a chemical called dexedrine (dextroamphetamine) was introduced by the pharmaceutical company Smith, Kline, and French. It was used in the the 2nd World War and appeared to have few side effects. But by the 60’s it was discovered that higher and higher doses were needed and giving up the drug was another problem causing disturbed sleep to violent outbursts. Not to be detered by this, the latest solution is Modafinil, researchers found that troops could perform effectively 40 hours at a time and then get a normal nights sleep without needed sleeping pills. The US Airforce has approved its use and the French Foreign Legion gave it to soldiers in the first Gulf war. So is this the solution, developed further could we live in a sleep free society? being able to operate productively days at a time without getting fatigued or imparing our judgement?
Looking further into this shows more worrying facts. Firstly no one really knows the true purpose of sleep. Is it true we sleep to stop feeling tired? is it also true that we eat to stop feeling hungry? Scientists are now starting to discover links between life-threatening illnesses and sleep deprivation, including Breast cancer (especially women involved in shift work) and heart disease. Even reducing your sleep by one hour a day could have a significant impact. A major study showed that reducing your sleep by 2 hours from 7 hours a night to 5 hours a night increases our chance of premature death by up to 70%. So by gaining a few extra hours a night by not sleeping are we in fact risking losing this time later on.
Perhaps instead of finding ways to get more hours in the day and get more out of our lives, we should be looking at ways of having better nights sleep. If you don’t get some sleep now, the saying ‘We can sleep when we are dead’ might happen sooner than you realise.
We hear pretty nasty things happening all the time, but my daughter came across the above story while browsing the Internet for the usual random thing.
