The Leonids

The Leonids are in fact debris left behind by the comet Tempel Tuttle/55P. This comet runs an elliptical orbit that returns to the inner solar system and releases material that forms into a new dust trail each in slightly different location than the previous dust trails. Leonids are an annual occurance that happens roughly around mid November every year. In November 2001 and 2002, the Earth passed very near the centre of the trail released at the 1866 return, while in November 2003, the Earth passed within a trail that was put down in 1533.

November 19th (yesterday) was the day the Leonids appeared in the skies. UT (GMT) 4.45am was the predicted time (+4 mins for UK).
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The night before, after watching Borat in the afternoon, monopoly at night and a few DotA rounds late at night, I couldn't wake up at 4.30am after collapsing in my bed at 2-something AM. Actually I did, but I fell asleep sitting down on my bed, and woke up at 5am again and went to sleep, too tired to wake up for the 10am archery session on Sunday.

Damn, should have slept earlier.

Links
Leonid Activity
Listening and Watching Leonids on TV/Radio

The Boss has spoken!

I was opening my inbox and I saw a message from Blogger, then I saw.. Boss Stewie?!

ZoMgWtFBbQ!! The bOss has posted in my little unknown-and-no-one-wants-or-even-wanted-to-visit blog!!

Released this morning was this statement:
The owner and publisher of this blog would like to express his utmost gratitude that Boss Stewie has written something, well at least something.

Yahoooooooooo.

Legal Positivism

From last update:

Thomas Hobbes also founded a contractualist theory of Legal Positivism. Legal Positivism is often described as the view that there is no necessary relationship between law and moral values. Such an understanding of positivism is both unfruitful and far removed from the concerns of the figure most often associated with the origins of the positivist tradition, Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, legal positivism represented a decisive break with the intellectual tradition of common law scholarship which could no longer provide a satisfactory account of political authority.

Positivism began, therefore, as an explanation of the basis of law's authority within wider theories of social order: legal rules came to be seen as possessing authority not as the specific outcomes of broader moral precepts, but because they represent definitive, posited solutions to the problems of collective living. Analytical positivism, by contrast, centres upon the possibility of descriptive neutrality: an essential property of law, it is felt, is that ascertainment of its content does not necessarily depend upon moral assessments of the purpose of value of legal rules.

Legal positivism also implies that law is something that can be separated from ethics. On this view it is possible that there are legal rules that have no ethical component, and laws that are positively evil, such as the laws of slavery and segregation. Some natural lawyers argue that even the most pedestrian of laws carry the moral or ethical requirement that, as Samuel Adams said, the State of Nature may be abridged only for the basic maintenance of the greater society. Such order is a moral imperative. Thus, a law requiring driving on the right side of the road indeed has a philosophically moral basis. Not that right is socially preferable to left. But, that right is socially preferable to nothing.

Of course, not all legal decisions are as free of ethical content as this one is. Legal positivism is not synonymous with ethical positivism, or for that matter with moral relativism. It is at least a possible viewpoint that there exists a natural ethical code while maintaining that its translation into law remains local and contingent.The argument of legal positivism is not that ethics is irrelevant to every law; rather, that law and ethics are two different things, two fields that occasionally overlap but whose underlying logic remains separate. The legal positivist emphasizes that the law that forbids theft and the law that commands that you drive on the proper side of the road are two exemplars of the same phenomenon.

It's that time again!

I'm not really in the mood for bashing again but since the Malaysian press is all so hyped up as if the world has ended, I guess it's time some other points of view came in (Me!). Not that anyone reads this at all.. :(

I'll be back in a few hours~

Natural Law

I was browsing through Saddam Hussein's trials just today and this word came up.. in absentia.

If he is hanged, Saddam may also be tried in absentia for events
dating to the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait, including war crimes,
crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Wikipedia

Now this part just beats the crap out of me, how come he isn't charged altogether with the entire package and just charged for the Dujail killings? It doesn't make any sense to charge someone who is deceased for crimes that he has committed while he's alive. Normally wouldn't it be that all charges and sentences were accumulated?

Now this page is interesting, it states on all latin legal terms in law. One of this is interesting..

jus naturale which falls under jurisprudence is law that exists independently of the positive law of a given political order, society or nation-state. It is simultaneously a legal philosophy or perspective, and a genre of law-depending on the jurisdiction in which the term is used. The theory of natural law was introduced by Aristotle before being further developed within a Christian context by St Thomas Aquinas. As a genre, natural law is the law of nature-that is, the principle that some things are as they are, because that is how they are. This use is especially valid in Scotland, where "natural law" operates as a genre of law parallel to both civil and criminal law, and its discussion is not limited to human beings.All human laws were to be judged by their conformity to the natural law. An unjust law was in a sense no law at all. The common law accepted this in determining the content of the law in a particular case. At this point, the natural law was not only used to pass judgment on the moral worth of various laws, but also to determine what the law said in the first place.

This brings us to Thomas Hobbes' view on natural laws. In his book Leviathan the law of nature is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or takes away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that by which he thinks it may best be preserved.

The nine laws of nature according to Hobbes are:

• that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
• that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth, as for peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself.
• that men perform their covenants made. (when a covenant is made, to break it is unjust and the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of covenant)
• that a man which receiveth benefit from another of mere grace, endeavour that he which giveth it, have no reasonable cause to repent him of his good will. (Breaching of this law is ingratitude)
• that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest. (Contrary to stubborn, insociable, intractable)
• that upon caution of the future time, a man ought to pardon the offences past of them that repenting, desire it.
• that in revenges, men look not at the greatness of the evil past, but the greatness of the good to follow.
• that no man by deed, word, countenance, or gesture, declare hatred of contempt of another. (Breach of this law is called contumely)
• that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. (The breach of this precept is pride)

But Hobbes says more than this, and it is this point that makes his argument so powerful. We do not just have a right to ensure our self-preservation: we each have a right to judge what will ensure our self-preservation. And this is where Hobbes's picture of man becomes important. Hobbes has given us good reasons to think that human beings rarely judge wisely. Yet in the state of nature no one is in a position to successfully define what is good judgment. If I judge that killing you is a sensible or even necessary move to safeguard my life, then - in Hobbes's state of nature – I have a right to kill you. Others might judge the matter differently, of course. Almost certainly you'll have quite a different view of things. Because we're all insecure, because trust is more-or-less absent, there's little chance of our sorting out misunderstandings peacefully, nor can we rely on some (trusted) third party to decide whose judgment is right. We all have to be judges in our own causes, and the stakes are very high indeed: life or death.

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More on next update. :)

Credits given to Internet Encyclopedia for Philosophy, Wikipedia, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.