Saturday, July 18, 2009

[weekend poll] mid-poll report

Time for the regular Saturday mid-poll report, this weekend on dance styles.



As usual, I've b---ered it up again and left out some pretty important dancing. The ethnic dancing I'll run as a separate poll [and that could be fun] but how I left jive and rock'n roll out of this weekend's is beyond me.

So, Michael Jackson comes out, as he more properly is in with Fred Astaire [they are very close in many ways]. Yes, I know I can't do that mid-poll; yes I know it skews everything but I'm gonna doowit. In his place, I'm running Bob B's jive suggestion.

Now here's an allegedly racist remark - those black girls in the vid above [*please see quote below] have more rhythm than the white girls although the guys in jackets are good. Bob, that's a nice vid and well done to the British Museum who ran the show last year.

* In the Irish Times of April 25th, 1998, Whoopi Goldberg was quoted as saying:

I dislike this idea that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called an African-American. I'm not an African. I'm an American. Just call me black if you want to call me anything.

Whoopi, your words are my command.
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[networking] blogrolls and other headaches

If you took away most of his hair, gave him more upper body and shoulders, made the face thinner and put him in a single-breasted suit, that could be me second from the left.

How do you cope with the networking and blogrolls? I thought I had them sorted but I've just been into Mybloglog and was horrified/delighted to find a whole lotta people that Mybloglog has obviously decided to add to my contacts.

Searching through these, it was annoying to find that people I really wanted to blogroll, like the Blue Contrarian, James Schneider and Alex Goodall somehow got lost in there. How do your Mybloglog [or whatever] contacts pan out?

Mine fall either into those wanting to sell something, commercial blogs, often with young female avatars, the male politicos I've just mentioned, ladies who have lady-type blogs and I'm not averse to that or the ones I don't know what to do. They seem girl blogs on the hunkiest guys around or the latest fashions. Hmmmmm. I might be a bit long in the tooth for that sort of thing.

My only social networking is Mybloglog plus my actual blog [I don't use Facebook] so how do all you readers/fellow bloggers with many social groups and fora cope with it all?
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[liberty] more tales from sphere


There's such a bewildering array of things wrong at this juncture in our history. From non-President Obama to the death of Britain, if it's wrong, it becomes policy. If the government touches it, it goes pear-shaped.

And behind the government, the clandestine DARPA [Facebook], Common Purpose [and here and here] and schemes like Citizen's Juries and State Child Mentoring, all working away, working away, to create the international totalitarian socialism they love so much.

This goes into more detail about them and thanks to those who supplied data for this post. Here is the mindset of these people. And Steve, PC is very much their language of choice.

Man in a Shed addresses the question of Labour itself and its version of how to kill a country:

But then that wasn't enough to hold back reality - so they started lying more openly. The most notorious being the WMD claims made by Blair with one particular press officers help at No 10. Blair hid behind the security services. He produced dossiers and told us in hushed terms that it was the best work of the security services, some internally tried to warn him and then the media - but one of their number has now died under suspicious circumstances.

The man who organised the smear campaign against John Major's government could not stand supporting going to war on this basis. He resigned, and then not long afterwards died whilst walking on MOD land.


Labour's credibility at this point is requiring some very robust action. So they bullied the BBC and launched a witch hunt followed by the Hutton White wash ( so good that Alistair Campbell and Cherie Blair signed copies at Labour fund raisers ). Labour down graded the ministry of defence by giving it a part time minister, then 4 others in short order. The current incumbent is ranked 21 out of 23 in the Cabinet.

The list goes on and on. Remember a certain Brazilian electrician? Man in a Shed concludes:

We have to trust to God and luck - because its all too clear the Labour government is not trust worthy or trusted by anyone.

Amen to that. Letters from a Tory addresses the issue of DARPA Facebook. I warned three people yesterday not to use it. One of my blogfriends is trying to run a debate with me currently in Facebook, despite all the posts I've written about them and don't intend to write again. Let Letters from a Tory tell the tale:

The advent of social networking has raised a huge number of issues regarding privacy and personal information, but there has been surprisingly little reaction to the way that sites such as Facebook hand out personal details to private companies.

More than 200 million people actively use Facebook, including about 12 million in Canada - more than one in three of the population. Facebook’s policy of holding on to subscribers’ personal information, even after their accounts had been deactivated, was one area that breached Canada’s privacy laws, as organisations can only retain such information for as long as it necessary to meet appropriate purposes.

The report said Facebook’s information about privacy practices was “often confusing or incomplete”, and urged the site to make its policies more transparent to users. Facebook was also criticised for failing to adequately restrict access of users’ personal details to some of the 950,000 developers in 180 countries who provide applications such as games for the site.

I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times – why do all the people who supposedly care about civil liberties when it comes to 42-day detention suddenly disappear when it comes to basic civil liberties such as protecting our privacy? Just like Facebook, Google Earth and Google Street View automatically assume that we don’t mind our lives and homes being splashed all over the internet so we are then playing catchup if we want to protect our privacy.

Now readers, if you refuse to read my posts on this issue, please at least read Letters from a Tory.

In conclusion

These have been only two issues here, picked from, as stated at the beginning, a plethora of issues and to think we're not under assault is to be very, very ostrich indeed. These things have to be brought out over and over again until we all start to realize the state of matters.

Thank the Lord for the blogosphere and the political blogger, even if we do seem to be muttering to ourselves most of the time.
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[vale] henry allingham and walter cronkite

Henry Allingham

This blog ran a post here on the recent occasion of his becoming the world's oldest person. Now he has passed away, I hope to a better place.

Maildotcom says:

Allingham's longtime friend Dennis Goodwin said he died in his sleep at St. Dunstan's care home in Ovingdean, near Brighton on England's south coast.

"It's the end of a era-- a very special and unique generation," said Goodwin. "The British people owe them a great deal of gratitude."

For details of his life, click either the post or the maildotcom links.

Vale!

Walter Cronkite

The Washington Post wrote
[you may need to be registered]:

Walter Cronkite, America's preeminent television journalist of the 1960s and 1970s who as anchor and managing editor of "CBS Evening News" played a primary role in establishing television as the dominant national news medium of that era, died last night at age 92.

CBS was widely considered the best news-gathering operation among the three major networks, and Cronkite was a major reason why. With his avuncular pipe-and-slippers presence before the camera and an easy yet authoritative delivery, he had an extraordinary rapport with his viewers and a level of credibility that was unmatched in the industry. In a 1973 public opinion poll by the Oliver Quayle organization, Cronkite was named the most trusted public figure in the United States, ahead of the president and the vice president.

Cronkite was often viewed as the personification of objectivity, but his reports on the Vietnam War increasingly came to criticize the American military role. "From 1964 to 1967, he never took anything other than a deferential approach to the White House on Vietnam," Gitlin said, but added, "He's remembered for the one moment when he stepped out of character and decided, to his great credit, to go see [Vietnam] for himself."

Might I say that this bears similarities with the British General Sir Richard Dannatt. The Washington Post's piece is quite touching and let's not speak ill of the dead but do remember that he also said:

It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward a world government patterned after our own government with a legislature, executive and judiciary, and police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace. To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield up some of our sovereignty.

Public opinion changes in the manner of the canal boat crashing into either bank, mentioned in the post before and now we have the spectre of the EU monster, the SPPNA, NAU and NAAC and the UN's own reputation taking a battering as being the focal point of the globalists' ideas of world government.

Cronkite, either wittingly or unwittingly, supported that international socialist thrust, that historic, clandestine totalitarianism which is now being fought so hard by patriots, conservatives, supporters of the constitution, libertarians and those who love their country but to give him his due, he did act as a stabilizing force during some of the darkest days of the U.S.A.

He also said, paraphrasing critics:

Any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil! Well join me… I'm glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.

I hope he has seen the light and is going to a different, happier place, now that he has passed away.

Vale!
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[discrimination] swinging wildly one way, then the other


Sometimes an issue doesn't go away and the post on rape went beyond that into broader issues in the comments section. I'd like to add a little more to that.

There was a general agreement that there is a lot of genuine rape but a lot of bogus rape and false accusations too. The real rape has its causes which the post and comments did not go into and which could be debated. William Gruff touched on some of the reasons and maybe we can blame the new, uneducated culture for the falling away of societal constraints on behaviour.

Another element was brought in by Welshcakes that:

There was a mistaken movement calling itself "feminist" in the late 70s/early 80s which preached that women should not love men, in any sense of the word. It upset many of us who were fighting merely for women's rights, as in equal pay and opportunity.

Yes, it certainly turned the majority of men and now a growing number of women off the feminazis, let's give them their designation, people like Alison Jagger and Gloria Steinem. I commented [and please forgive me for doing the unforgivable and quoting myself]:

I personally think it suits the political book of certain people through the past decades that something which has always simmered below the surface - the misunderstanding and annoyance at times - should be blown out of proportion.

I was referring here to both sides of the coin - that there seems to be great distrust and so many are concluding it might be better to be alone. That is another extreme reaction and in this thing we have extreme reactions - it seems to be a motif in this discussion.

Now that the pendulum has swung the other way with 'positive discrimination' and women are now moving towards an over-equal position, by numbers, in the workplace, except at the very top where Them still hold their places and won't relinquish those places, then I am reminded of my mate's model of the situation he is wont to tell me. To paraphrase him, it goes like this:

It's a model of a ship going down a wide canal, swinging wildly and crashing into the bank one side, then swinging wildly over to the other side and crashing into the opposite bank, all the while going down the canal and damaging itself as it goes. It never gets its act together and moves in a stately manner down the centre, avoiding destructive knee-jerk reactions on the steering wheel.

Ditto in politics, I'd say.
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Friday, July 17, 2009

[fearless friday] next move?

[weekend poll] most enjoyable dance styles

MID-POLL REPORT IS UP

My goodness, for this week's weekend poll, the first thought was sexiest countries to live in - way too many! Then sexiest cars - that was worse! Finally - most enjoyable dance styles but with only ten choices, it was near impossible. I've done what I can, long-suffering reader and here they are for your delectation:


1. Salsa


2. Ballroom


3. Lambada


4. Ska


5. Afro-American, hip hop, rap


6. Modern dance troupe


7. Ballet


8. Ice dance


9. Jive, rock 'n roll


10. Ritzy,tap, Michael Jackson

I know that Riverdance and various ethnic styles didn't get in to the ten and maybe that can be at a later date. Anyway - choose which three you like best and vote in the right sidebar if you would ...

MID-POLL REPORT IS UP
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[before we kill the muslims] let's be sure who's to blame


Some time back, I became involved in an Indonesian sub-community [as longer-term readers will recall] and in the light of that experience, this statement in the Telegraph seems true enough:

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world and most Indonesians are generally seen as following a moderate interpretation of their religion. The country recently held peaceful presidential and parliamentary elections in which Islamist candidates did not do well.

The interesting thing is that I became involved, not with the moderates but with the hardliners and what they had to say about the corruption in today's society and so on seemed valid and logical. To get society back to a sort of sanity is what this blog has also been on about for a long time now.

There were only a few giveaways which showed that the other side - the intractable, kill all the infidels attitude - was lurking behind the 'love the people' stance but those couple of incidents were enough to sour me. Let's face it though, the majority of that country would not be motivated to bomb and batter people - that's the province of the religious nutter.

Or is it?

Quite frankly, we can't trust Them and there are enough cases on file to show how their agents provocateurs are in world troublespots they feel need destabilizing. Remember that 'execution' of the American hostages when the hooded figures couldn't even get the Koran right?

If you start down this path though, this line of thinking, then 911 and 7/7 also come into the spotlight. Also Diana. Diana has the most anomalies to it and no enquiry has addressed those yet.

Whatever the truth, there are sufficient Muslims, particularly youths, angered enough to hit out. The Palestinian rockets are sufficient proof of that. I'd like to read what the average Muslim has to say about these things and how he/she explains them away.

What is quite worrying is that our emotions are seemingly being 'directed' by means of outrages and by how the MSM hypes them up. Don't know about you but I don't like being played like a violin and so I've tended to look at something like these bombings and say - hang on a minute, let's be sure that it was actually Muslims who did this.

Meanwhile, people are continuing to die and to be maimed.
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[quick poll] result on jason bournes

Had to remove the little overnight poll because the regular weekend poll is coming up at 10:30 or thereabouts today.

The overnight poll was on whether or not the CIA does, in fact, have Jason Bournes in its midst. 4 thought yes and 1 thought no.

[invective] entertaining most times

Lord William Gruff on the whole sorry crew:

Given what we know already about documentary sex it is pleasant to consider that the war criminal Blair has no more than ten months to find a safe haven for himself, his duck faced bitch of a wife, the arse licker Campbell and that artful bugger the ignoble paedophile Lord Moldevort.

My lily-livered reply on Mandelson:

The day he, Blair and Brown are led up Tyburn Hill will be a sweet one for the nation.

Lord Gruff’s retort:

Tyburn?

Higham you are far too lenient.

Mandelson deserves nothing less than a red-hot poker (not Kniphofia) in 'that place posterial', in precisely the fashion of Edward II.

Brown is destined to be flogged naked round the kingdom of England entire, blinded in his one good eye, battered bloody and senseless with pick axe handles and then, following hanging, drawing and quartering, to be decapitated so that the London mob may play football with his head, much as they did with the exhumed skull of Oliver Cromwell, another dour religious dictator, albeit an English one and not an Anglophobic foreigner.

Blair? He could serve as a urinal at a motorway service station for the rest of his miserable life.

Now, you have to admit that could almost lead the competition in the Invective Stakes. However, this by the master, Mr. Eugenides, is also hard to go by, on the subject of Jack Straw, Chris Grayling and the whole sorry crew:

Straw is exactly the sort of greasy, careerist dickwad who would get his rocks off from striking bodybuilding poses over the prostrated body of an emaciated pensioner. But wouldn't it be wonderful if, just for once, our lords and masters were subjected to the same quotidian humiliations that they are so keen to visit on their constituents?

And yet almost every MP that has stolen from us intends to remain in situ until the next election, spending my money on vats of asses' milk from John Lewis in which to bathe their wives/diary secretaries, when in any civilised country they'd be breaking rocks in a fucking quarry under the watchful eyes of a horsewhip-wielding Klingon guard.

I've really had enough of these parasitical mouth-breathers. Words can't express my contempt, however hard I try. Time to cut our losses, people. Put out a couple of troughs of baked beans in the Commons canteen and make them sleep in rusting iron beds on a fucking Titan prison ship moored off the Isle of Dogs. I hate these people more than rotting broccoli.

Sigh. Such prose in the hands of the masters – isn’t the blogosphere a wonderful place?
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Thursday, July 16, 2009

[melancholy] can soothe the savage breast





[the art of lace making] brugge and surrounds

Old Flanders Milanese Style

This post draws on two articles, here and here.

Flemish lace


Lace came into existence as a decorative edging for the clothes of the rich and was designed to replace embroidery in a manner that could with ease transform dresses to follow different styles of fashion. For unlike embroidery, lace could be unsewn from one material to be replaced on another.

Flanders grew it's own flax which was one of the reasons it was here that lacemaking blossomed. Many lace types developed in this area including Mechlin, Flanders, Brussels, Binche, Lille, Bayeux, and Duchess.

From the sixteenth century onwards, bobbin lace making was taught in private schools and orphanages. In 1717, a time of great poverty and distress, the bishop of Bruges, a certain Mgr. Van Susteran, thought that lacemaking would provide a modest income for the poorest families.

The job of teaching this delicate art was given to three nuns from Antwerp and the Congregation of Apostoline Sisters and such was its success that the lace school soon moved to larger premises. Even when Joseph II shut down 13 convents and religious houses in 1783, the Apostoline Sisters were allowed to continue with their teaching.


C17th Flanders lace

After the Napoleonic wars, the demand for lace dropped drastically and it was at this time that the inventive ladies of Bruges began developing their own lace with heavier thread that could be made more quickly. Bruges lace is a simplification of Duchesse without the heavier gimp thread.

It is generally not a lace used in lengths of trim for clothing as that fashion had almost died. It was most commonly made up of "motifs" used as appliques and doilies.

By 1860 the students numbered more than 400 and the school had become famous for its speciality, ‘Binche’ or ‘Point de Fée’ – the Fairy Queen stitch.

This lace was snapped up by the burgeoning tourist trade, of the new middle class. This saved the area and kept Bruges the lacemaking centre of the latter half of the 19th and the 20th century. It still maintains a lacemaking school know as Kant Centrum (Lace Centre).

In Bruges today

Today, Bruges lace is popular with beginning lacemakers as it is easier to learn than most lace and is worked with very few bobbins comparatively speaking.

The finest of the Bruges lace though is made with between 300 and 700 bobbins. It is composed of freely flowing trails of narrow clothwork. These trails form scrolls and connections between the flowers and leaves. This is all kept together with "braids" or narrow bridges between design elements, much like the leadwork in stained glass windows.


Royal Lace, Belgium

Bobbin lace is worked with many threads; each wound onto a separate bobbin. The pattern (pricking) of pinholes is marked on stiff card and is fastened to a firm pillow packed with straw – although nowadays a piece of polystyrene is often used. The threads are fixed at the start of the pattern, although more can be added, or removed, as the work progresses. All the stitch involved two pairs of bobbins, i.e. four threads.

Once the stitches have been made they are held in position with pins pushed through the pinholes in the pricking into the pillow. The pattern motifs, which can be outlined with gimp (a thicker thread), are usually worked in cloth stitch or half stitch but more elaborate filling stitches are also used. Bobbin laces can be worked in two different ways.

In straight laces the motifs and ground of meshes or bars are made in one continuous process. In part laces the motifs are made separately and then joined with bars or a mesh ground. Once the lace is finished it is released from the pattern by removing the pins.

Two main techniques are practised in the Flemish provinces of Belgium. The first, a needle lace, is still manufactured in the region of Aalst. It is called Renaissance or Brussels lace because it is largely sold in Brussels. The second type, the bobbin Lace, is the speciality of Bruges, is non-commercially produced and expensive. Bruges lace is typified by its flower work and can be made with a thick or thin thread.

Below you can see lace being made in Bruges.


[cloak and dagger] does the cia have jason bournes


The LA Times has an interesting piece on the CIA being far from as portrayed in Bourne. I’m just reading Ludlum’s Bourne Ultimatum now.

According to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, the CIA spent seven years trying to assemble teams capable of killing the world's most wanted terrorists but could never find a formula that worked.

The struggles came during a period in which the agency had been given unprecedented authority and resources, and a cause -- responding to the Sept. 11 attacks -- with broad public support.

But officials could not solve daunting logistical problems, including how to get teams close to their targets while keeping U.S. involvement secret and being able to extract them safely if they succeeded in killing a terrorist.

In particular, officials said, ambitions for the program expanded to include creating teams that were made up not only of CIA personnel but counterparts from other countries, presumably Pakistan; and to be capable not just of killing high-value targets but also executing raids and other operations to gather evidence and intelligence that might lead to elusive Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri.

Now isn’t that interesting because the CIA was denying the connection with the ISI but this vid claimed they had that connection:



Now it seems they had.

Former officials said support for the program persisted in recent years largely because it could compensate for a crucial shortcoming in the ongoing campaign of Predator strikes. The drones had emerged as a potent weapon against Al Qaeda in Pakistan but had failed to bring the agency closer to Bin Laden.

CIA leaders continued to pursue the idea of elite paramilitary teams that could mount lethal operations on short notice but also quietly capture lower-ranking Al Qaeda members and raid sites struck by Predator missiles to gather any intelligence material left behind.

The broader dimensions of the program may account for why some lawmakers, particularly Republicans, have been critical of CIA Director Leon E. Panetta's decision last month to kill it.

"The program [Panetta] killed was never fully operational and never took a single terrorist off the battlefield," said George Little, a CIA spokesman. "We've had a string of successes against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and that program didn't contribute to any of them."

Former intelligence officials said there were intermittent discussions about having special operations troops assigned to the CIA as part of the program, but it was not clear how far those plans progressed.

A second former official with extensive knowledge of the CIA effort said it was seen as crucial that the units reside within the CIA so that the U.S. government would be able to deny involvement if a team were exposed or captured.

Special operations forces routinely carry out clandestine missions, but unlike their CIA counterparts they operate with the expectation that their ties to the U.S. government will not be denied if the mission breaks down.

The vulnerability of being far removed from U.S. protection was seen as another major barrier to the success of the program.

Even if an assassination team were deployed and succeeded in killing a senior Al Qaeda figure, "what happens to the shooter?" said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official. "We don't send people on suicide missions. I'm sure they were troubled by how to get the guy out of there."

The agency has traditionally had paramilitary capabilities as part of its Special Activities Division, which swelled in size after the Sept. 11 attacks and is made up mainly of former members of U.S. military special operations forces.

But carrying out close-range killings "is something they don't really have a capacity for," said a former senior CIA official. "There really isn't Jason Bourne walking around doing stuff like this."

Do you think the CIA has Jason Bournes working for it?

[helicopters] let's cut some more, gordon


As long ago as 2005, the problem was being talked about:

The armed forces face an "alarming" shortage of battlefield helicopters, a Commons committee has warned. The Public Accounts Committee said the gap between the number of helicopters needed and those available to the MoD is between 20% and 38%.

The shortage was exacerbated by the MoD's £259m purchase of eight Chinook helicopters, which remain grounded. The report also said shortfalls in other protection equipment could increase risks for service people.

The MPs branded the Chinook affair "one of the worst examples of equipment procurement that the committee has seen".

Bill Quango
got to the root of the problem:

The real problem today is the one that the Lib dems and Tories are accusing the government of. The £1.4 BN cut in helicopter spending in 2004. At the height of TWO wars, each with terrain that makes airlift essential, the then chancellor, the current PM, decided to cut helicopter spending.

One really does wonder about that man Brown's mind, you know. So, with the Future Lynx not up and running until 2013 and the current ones wearing out, what to do?
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[cry rape] sorting out the truth from the lies


Click the pic to see the vid of four drunk girls who got into a cab in Edmonton, started to smoke, which is illegal there, they got nasty and refused to pay, then, when they got out of the cab, told passers-by he'd raped them.

Let me report what happened. The cabbie was sensible enough to have caught it on film and when the police came to investigate his rape of them, he showed them the footage.

The police reaction? Oh, we can't charge you then. Er ... pardon? Case closed? Now just one minute! They falsely accused me, he told them. No, we're closing the case - no case to answer. Oh yes there is, he pressed. There's the little matter that if I hadn't had that tape, my reputation, marriage, job etc. would have been shot. I want those girls charged!

The police refused so he's brought a civil case against the four and wants $60 000 compensation. Naturally, I hope he gets at least a portion of it to teach them a lesson and that it has to come from them themselves, not from daddy or mummy. It would be nice to see them have to do some community work up to the adjudged amount.

Moving on ...

This BBC audio is long but you'll get the idea some minutes in. Do listen to as much as you can because it shows the other side of the story.

Between 3 and 9% of reported rapes turn out to be false after investigation, according to the BBC. I would hazard a guess that it would be far more than that. The majority of perpetrators are known to the victim and 97% of callers to Rape Crisis lines knew their assailant prior to the assault.

In the UK, an unfounded charge remains on someone's Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) file permanently, which can affect future job prospects. Complainants are granted total anonymity on first reporting a rape. According to the 1976 Sexual Offences Act, it is a criminal offence for the media to reveal a victim's identity or any other information that might lead to them being identified.

If they are charged with an offence such as perverting the course of justice or perjury in relation to their complaint they can then be named but there is no protection for those falsely accused of committing an assault.

There is no chance for the man or boy accused. Surely while he is still not proven guilty, he shouldn't get named, just as the girl doesn't. Then, if he's convicted or she's been found to be lying, the guilty party gets named publicly so people can be on their guard in future.

One commenter named Elsa wrote, about this story:

Why in a week in which three horrific men were finally jailed for murdering and raping women, does the BBC decide to run an article and air a radio discussion on the minuscule number of men wrongly accused of rape?

Therein lies the problem - in her level of concern for one gender only. She doesn't give a damn about the falsely accused boys. For her information, the number is hardly miniscule.

From America:

In a study that span nine years, sociologist Eugene J. Kanin’s findings were that in the United States, 41% of rape allegations are false. Kanin discovered that most of the false accusers were motivated by a need for an alibi or seeking revenge.

Kanin was once popular and highly praised by the feminist movement for his groundbreaking research on male sexual aggression. His studies on false rape accusations have received very little interest.


These findings are not exceptional. The U.S. Air Force studied over five hundred rape accusations in 1985. More than 130 of the accusers admitted, either just before they took a lie detector test or after they had failed it, that no rape occurred. A more in depth investigation by independent reviewers established that 60% of the original rape allegations were a sham.

Linda Fairstein is the head of the New York County District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit. She states there are a concerning 4,000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan. Of these, about 2,000 did not happen.

Fortunately, not all women are like Elsa. Victoria Oxley, of Essex, wrote:

I think it is disgusting that girls falsely accuse men of rape. The increase of false accusations of rape make the women who have been raped not want to come forward. Therefore, there are many actual rapists that are still out there, free to attack again.

She really does have a point, you know, about the negative effect on women and girls themselves and how spurious accusations will rebound and make women and girls less safe overall. The stories above have been about young women and the stats on false accusations tend to drop off in the older age group who report rape. For a woman to be raped is something most men can't fully conceptualize and even harder to conceptualize is the difference between consent and rape. We're not talking here about line ball cases like Mike Tyson.

We're talking about where it's pretty clear and after some warning, especially outside marriage. I once spoke with a girl who'd been raped the night before and it was instructive, from the male point of view. My girlfriend tried to explain to me once what it would feel like to have been violated. I should think it would be pretty horrendous, accompanied by enormous anger and severe trauma to the sense of self-worth.

So if it is that horrendous, why then mix it up with lies?

A woman's perspective

Minette Marrin, columnist and mother with two children, wrote some time ago:

Not long ago my small son burst into tears when his older sister told him censoriously that it is men who do all the bad things in the world; men start all the wars and little boys love pretending to shoot and hurt people.

If you want to know what the prevailing orthodoxy is, you have only to listen to school-children; out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes all the one-sided propaganda about smoking, rain forests, ivory and fur coats. My daughter's attitude was just a watered-down classroom version of the hard-line feminist view that all men are rapists.

Of course it is not difficult to understand misandry. But it would be a tragic mistake to be as unjust to men as they have traditionally been to us.

Yet that is what women seem constantly tempted to do. In the debate on date-rape there seems, on the part of the most vociferous women, to be a wilful indifference towards men. They seem interested only in female sexuality and perspectives, and to discuss these things in a way that is clearly quite incomprehensible to most men.

One solution

There is a simplistic and yet cogent solution which is now maybe too late.

If a man takes his pleasures only with his wife, if we actually have wives instead of one night stands, if parents brought up girls and boys differently to today's free-for-all which saw those four girls in the top vid roaming the streets at night and large numbers of both sexes, drunk and too young to have much discretion on the town at all hours; if internet porn has the plug pulled on it, if the law would act fairly towards both accuser and accused ... then maybe some sort of solution might be forthcoming.

However, no one seems to want that state of affairs so we're stuck with what we have. Therefore, the only immediate relief is in the law adopting the principle of equal anonymity and naming, as mooted above.

Russia

For a start, I wasn't in Moscow, a westernized city at western prices but in the centre of the country, in a small city. In those 12 years, I think I heard three times of attempted rape or rape and one of those was a female friend of mine who'd been at my place and insisted on travelling home herself so she took a cab. The man was apparently half drunk and I asked her next day why she'd even got in that cab.

That was rare - and the reason actual rape was rare was perhaps an indictment of that society in other ways. From a man's point of view, there's absolutely no need to rape anyone. I don't know any man over there without a woman - even the hunchback of Notre Dame would have his 'friend'. In the younger set, it tends to be lots of boys and girls mixed up together. So let's say that any urges are quickly gratified and females are not backward in this.

If someone found himself without, then look across the road and there'd be any number you could have, I've heard, for some ridiculously low price. I always thought it ridiculous anyway to pay money for something so readily available but many men seem to avail themselves, maybe for less complications.

Anyway, we're getting off track. The bottom line is that there is no need for rape and if four girls [as in the Edmonton video] had said that, most people, especially the women who know their men back to front, would just laugh. They wouldn't laugh at all the problems they actually do have with their menfolk - the drunkenness, the lack of respect though and in that is a golden lesson if you want a Russian woman - stay in control of yourself and show respect.

And let me add once more that genuine rape is the absolute pits. To use one's power on a woman like that is gutless and unmanly, no matter how many Vikings did it in history. If we can't protect our womenfolk instead of raping them, then we've lost the plot.

Cut back to the west and I shake my head.

Any female I converse with here, she doesn't assume for one moment that it means anything dastardly [although anything's possible if both wanted] but there seem to be a lot of frustrated people round about who do assume it.

After Russia, quite frankly, this amazes me and shows such an unhealthy attitude in this respect, almost creating a paranoia not to go anywhere near a female. We seem, over here, to have lost any sort of normal ability to relate between the genders. I'm sorry but that's how it seems to me.

Since when does talking to a woman constitute "coming on" or "chatting up"? Since when? That's just sick. I'll talk to any woman who wants to talk to me and to hell with seeking anyone's permission and if she thinks this is "chatting up" [which no woman I know does], then perhaps she needs a few years in Russia to get her perspective back. Ditto the men.

What the hell has happened between male and female in the anglo-saxon west?
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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

[waterloo sunset] takes you to paradise




[quick supper] no embellishments


Excuse the washed out colours - it was taken on the phone, sent via Bluetooth, salvaged a little in iphoto and uploaded.

The dish - very simple - the trout was in the bag with the herb butter, other things were prepared whilst it was in the oven, bed of chopped spiced cabbage, bulgar wheat and a little peppered tomato - that's it, fifteen minutes, snip open the bag and lift the flakes straight from the skin, pour the remaining butter in a crescent across the wheat ... and now I'll try to eat it.

Oh damn - I forgot to pour the butter - back later.

[international quiz] what do you know of other countries


Score one for each part of each question answered correctly, making ten possible points overall:

1. Who is the second from the right in the Mt. Rushmore Memorial and what was the mountain known to the local tribe as?

2. What is Housesteads and along what is it found?

3. What was the name of the 1854 stockade near Ballarat and who was the miners’ leader?

4. What nickname do the Canadians traditionally give their currency and in which year was the current maple leaf flag adopted – 1778, 1901 or 1965?

5. "Who" is the French national symbol and what was Joan of Arc’s name she used herself?

Answers below [highlight]

Theodore Roosevelt, Six Grandfathers, Roman fort, Hadrian’s Wall, Eureka, Peter Lalor, Loonie, 1965, Marianne, Johanne [or Jeanne] la Pucelle

[wordless wednesday] captions please

[nicholas craig] third rate thespian

Bill Cameron has an interesting piece on a devastating review by the Radio Times on an upcoming programme on BBC4:

Third-division thespian Nicholas Craig is inexplicably given another hour of airtime to sound off on acting technique ... It's hard to know what's most unbearable about Craig: his vain self-promotion ... his flagrant name-dropping or his evident bitterness at having been written out of Doctors ...

Immediately, this smelt a lot like an alter-ego of comedian Nigel Planer, ex Young Ones. He did a series of shows some years back on Masterclasses and one I recall was on How to be a Weatherman, where he demonstrated Michael Fish techniques, among others.

[filming the police] is it a crime or not



What to make of this one? Clearly an old vid, as Samizdata discuss it here in 2007, well before the change in the law in February, 2009.

The Economic Voice also has one at his place. I've read via Google, this Darren Pollard described as 'BNP scum' and elsewhere as 'anti-NWO film-maker'.

He's obviously out to confront the police but I wonder if we can leave him, his party and any other peripheral issues out of it for the moment. He might have been asking for trouble with the megaphone in that central location in TEV's vid but it's difficult to see the justification for the police in the above vid, seeing him filming and coming on to his property for the reasons they did. They might not have liked it but was he breaking a law?

Now if it was a clear breach of an existing law, which the police on patrol should have been expected to have been au fait with, then why was he not immediately arrested?

The fact that they had to step off his property and check on the law and the fact that it took HQ so long to give the answer illustrates one thing. Those two officers came to him, assuming a crime had been committed and that it must have been illegal to film police.

When he asked under which section of the law it was illegal, this stopped them.

The only point I'm making in this post is that they automatically assumed he was committing a crime. If it turned out subsequently that he had breached the law, then why was that law in place in the first place and who promulgated it?

Lastly, look at the attitude of everyone in the vid. Are those two officers your friendly neighbourhood bobbies that used to pound the beat or are they something new - something thuggish? Can one expect anything else in these days of ASBOs and Chavs, of knife crime and civil unrest?

How did the civil unrest get to this stage?

Am I committing a crime by posting this vid of police faces?

Why did they not give their names and numbers when asked?

Is this a happy country?

[mutley] details are gradually emerging


Mutley appears to have died.

Sad day.

[moon landings] examine the evidence, such as it is


What strikes me most about the fake moon landing controversy is how unscholastic the debate is, just as with the Kennedy assassination.

I don’t know about you but I want to see evidence [proof is impossible, of course] and what constitutes evidence ranges from events to testimony from someone we would consider reputable.

What I’m not remotely interested in is this from the Telegraph readers:

# Have any of the conspiracy theorists been to the moon to know how things are meant to happen? I think not.

So anyone who raises a question can be instantly dismissed as a ‘conspiracy theorist’, yes and one has to go to the moon first in order to comment on it? This is evidence, is it?

# I was also disgusted with the recent publication of photos of crop circles with some gibberish about them being extra terrestrial in nature, when clearly it is just wanton vandalism.

Evidence please?

# What absolute crap! My Father was involved in the space program and his cameras brought you the first pictures back from the moon and on into the Voyager missions.

His father. So, second hand testimony and his unimpeachable source – his father. Who was his father?

# "Why are you giving even the remotest amount of credence to this long-disproved 'conspiracy' theory? Yet another example of how the Daily Telegraph has succumbed to 'dumbing down'"

Er … what does this actually prove or disprove?

# Personally, I think that this puts the Telegraph on par with The Sun. I am stunned that a mainstream newspaper dignifies this bilge by printing it.

While it is true that the Telegraph is looking for summer readership and this is always a topic which leads to controversy, are they wrong to run it? There’s a comments section for readers to refute the allegations.

On the Marcus Allen youtube [see below], here is the state of the debate in comments:

1maxperry (1 week ago) COME ON!!! if we're gonna be honest if you actually looked at ALL the facts (not just the ones you get from your conspiracy websites) you may actually realise that it is you who is the 'stupid fucker, blind idiot'.  you dumbass

rockync7 (1 week ago) let the dumb asses be dumb asses, thats why they lie like this, stupid fuckers believe it....i feel so sad most are blind idiots,  they are easy to fool, same with JFK and 9/11...damn ,people are morons

One commenter summed up the state of the debate with:

One of the most corrosive things about those who wish to prove the Moon landing I fear, are those who try to furnish proofs with Bad Science. Such as Al Frick, who suggests that one can simply go buy a $100 telescope and look for the flag... As far as I am aware, there is no telescope on Earth (or Hubble, for that matter) that is capable of such a feat, let alone an inexpensive one bought at your local store. These people are as damaging as the doubters.

That was good and this comment is also closer to the type of thing I’d like to see in the debate:

I don't believe the landings were faked, but I would enjoy reading scientific counterarguments to the 10 points above. They are by no means self-evidently false.

At last, an actual attempt to examine the facts as far as they can be ascertained.



So let’s list some of the evidence:

1. When the astronauts are putting up the American flag it waves. There is no wind on the Moon.

2. No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.

3. No blast crater is visible in the pictures taken of the lunar landing module.

4. The landing module weighed 17 tons and yet sat on top of the sand making no impression. Next to it astronauts’ footprints can be seen in the sand.

5. The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.

6. When the landing module took off from the Moon’s surface there is no visible flame from the rocket.

7. If you speed up the film of the astronauts walking on the Moon’s surface they look like they were filmed on Earth and slowed down.

8. The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.

9. The rocks brought back from the Moon are identical to rocks collected by scientific expeditions to Antarctica.

10. All six Moon landings happened during the Nixon administration. No other national leader has claimed to have landed astronauts on the Moon, despite 40 years of rapid technological development.

11. Regarding this last one - it carefully ignores the fact that Apollo VIII went to the Moon when Lyndon Johnson was President? [At the time Nixon was only President elect].

12. Not one astronaut referred to the lunar temperature (none of the 12).

13. No rope or extraction device was taken in case an astronaut fell into crater.

14. No close-up images from the Apollo 15-17 SIM cameras have been released.

15. There were two Houston Controls: DoD/CIA/NSA controlled and civilian controlled NASA (after DoD authorized all released info).

16. Considering that both Japan and China have had lunar probes in satellite of the moon and they are equipped with hi-resolution camera's, one would imagine they would have images of the Apollo landing site.

17. Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment.

18. It was dust, not sand. If you removed the landing module you would see the impressions left behind.

19. Van Allen - they weren't exposed to enough radiation to make them sick, much less kill them, although long-term effects are possible.

20. The famous rock with a C on it! Oddly enough, if you look at the original, the "C" isn't there; it only appears later in the reproductions.

21. The most obvious giveaway is the dead straight horizontal line across the "Moon" set where the stage meets the cardboard "hills".

22. They started developing Concorde in 1956 and first flight was not till 1969, with 50 years aviation experience and supersonic flight since 1946 yet in 7 years they went from no space experience to the Moon?

23. "Moon rocks are absolutely unique," says Dr. David McKay, Chief Scientist for Planetary Science and Exploration at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). McKay is a member of the group that oversees the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at JSC where most of the Moon rocks are stored. "They differ from Earth rocks in many respects," he added.

"For example," explains Dr. Marc Norman, a lunar geologist at the University of Tasmania, "lunar samples have almost no water trapped in their crystal structure, and common substances such as clay minerals that are ubiquitous on Earth are totally absent in Moon rocks."


24. If the moon landing were fake, do you think the Soviets who did monitor all the expeditions will have stayed silent ,knowing it was a fake?

25. Yes, they would stay silent if there’s were also fake and Soviet cosmonauts met with disaster which the Soviets would not want known. For example, here was even a soviet mission to orbit the moon in 1962, but the three crew memebers instead floated off into space. see Alexis Belokoniov and Ludmilla Serakovna.

26. Just thought you would like to know that the LEM used hypergolics to make sure it got somewhere in space and come back. It's just a chemical mix that reacts violently with each other and makes expanding gas, try it in you kitchen! The fuel is monomethyl hydrazine (MMH) and the oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4).

27. Did you watch the experiment where an astronaut dropped an eagle feather and a hammer simultaneously to demonstrate that, in the lack of atmosphere, they fell at the same rate?

28. Did you watch the silly way that the lunar rover jounced and bounced in the low gravity in a way that it never would on Earth?

29. How about the huge roostertails of dust that it threw up and the way that they floated back down in a way that they never would except in low gravity and in the absence of atmosphere?

30. How about the images of the lunar modules taken from space probes?

31. Or the ungainly bunny-hopping that would never have been possible on Earth?

32. Hasselblad themselves are curious about the films, especially as the only protection from radioactivity was 'silver paint'.

33. But the 'dust that came back down' avoided the shiny landing pads?

34. NASA view.

35. The astronauts crossed the Van Allen belts at 25000 mph. Their exposure was too short to do harm.

36. The rocks which came back were the same as those found in Antarctica.

36.
A diagonal strut across the flag was used to keep it open. You can see it in some of the pictures.

37. Here's a detailed timeline with links.

Conclusion

I don’t know. It seems lineball.

What I do know is that statements like, ‘Oh, let’s forget this bilge, I’m sick to death of it! The Telegraph should be ashamed of itself,’ are hardly helpful and fall into the category ‘bilge' themselves.

Why is it bilge to want to find answers to unanswered questions or where anomalies seem to exist? The Diana enquiries have been, quite frankly, badly done and that topic is by no means closed. So why should this one about the moon landings be closed?

Another worry is that on a page of videos supposedly showing evidence of the hoax, the videos have been removed by some external source, claiming violation of terms and conditions. Why? How does presenting interviews and footage violate terms and conditions?

Also, one can have a far-fetched theory which one then waits to see either supported or unsupported by subsequent events. One such idea is that the James Bond films seem to reflect things going on quite accurately. Under the guise of being a ferrago of fantasy, some things are slipped in which are more accurate than supposed but are lost in all the other stretches of credulity which abound.

In DAD, the laser technology in Iceland was paralleled by an earlier Star Wars SDI base in Iceland. In DAF, Sean Connery stealing a buggy from a desert dome where the moon landing was being filmed was indicative. In QofS, Mr. White utters his famous: 'The first thing you should know about us is …'

Not proof of anything, I know but interesting nonetheless and they sit on the shelf at the back of the mind. The Manchurian Candidate was of more than passing interest to JFK so why shouldn’t that be so with other films as well?

I confess I like to look at seemingly far-fetched theories and rather than say, ‘What hogwash,’ I’d prefer to say, ‘Show us the evidence.’ Then, rather than decide for myself, from my amateur position, rather than assume the mantle of omnipotence which many of the commenters at the beginning of this post appear to do, I’d prefer to say to the detractors, ‘Show us the evidence which leads you to disbelieve this.’

Then the question remains open, with each of us leaning one way or the other.

Interesting page.
Another interesting page on the telemetry tapes.
NASA airbrushing.
The light and photoshoot, Honeysuckle Creek.
The Russian link.
Stupid sites [usually anti-hoax].
The Marcus Allen youtube.


Tuesday, July 14, 2009

[let's get celtic] rod stewart and the corrs




[anne burns] recursive fractal landscape


Fractal landscapes are algorithmically generated mimicking of a real landscape. It's explained in a different way here.
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[efficacy of romance] the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Does this pic make you sigh or feel nauseous?

A recent correspondence suggests itself as a blog topic so here goes nothing.

I was recalling a time in Paris [where we'd impulsively flown for a few days] and we went to the far end of l'Avenue des Champs-Élysées, furthest from the Arc near le Place de la Concorde, on the right side of the road, down a side lane and on the 2nd floor, where we had a table overlooking the main road.

It was just a cafe but in France, 'just a cafe' can still be exquisite.

There are many images still in the head about that luncheon - one was the food [the sauces in particular] and another was the way the waitresses came over in our direction and 'hovered', clearly wanting to talk. I tried my French which made them giggle and so they used English. No one knew what anyone wanted to talk about but something had dragged them over.

Later, we analysed it and agreed that if I had gone in on my own, I would have been allocated a side table and virtually ignored. No one wants a single man who's not in his 20s. She would have had the chief waiter come on to her because she was a 'come-hither' type, my ex but that would have been all.

No, it was the combination of the two of us and the chemistry which was far more than the sum of the parts and at one point resulted in the owner himself bringing us a second complimentary liqueur. My ex then went all shy and it was not an act because she was genuinely very shy under the spotlight she'd worked so hard to be in.

Now there was clearly something the two of us had done or the way we'd acted or whatever but it definitely moved the French in that part of that cafe that day. Which made me think really hard, not about the chemistry between two people but the chemistry two people together might exude.


Cut to an episode I described in my book, which took place in Tenerife:

I hate dancing and disguise it with over-done moves but my ex was a good dancer. We noticed a Spaniard of about 70, a small, debonaire chap, over the other side of the dance floor and he had a slip of a girl of about 60 in his arms and they moved beautifully - my jaw dropped. Later, I saw him dancing with a 35 year old and my ex thought this woman must have been the other one's daughter [clear as mud?].

I decided there and then that I wanted to move like him and look like him the rest of my life. At one point, we found him suddenly near us and he first complimented me on the beauty of my girl [which I hardly thought was my doing] and then on my dancing, which was rubbish but we all love compliments, don't we?

All I'd done, I recall, was to try to emulate Gomez of the Addams family and the way he once took a rose and put it between his teeth [or was that Lurch?] and dropped into the three-step or whatever. That's what I did now, prancing up and down the floor and embarrassing her but he came up again later and spoke in faltering English.

The central theme of his comments was the combination of two people, both seen in terms of the other, not as two separate individuals on their own, doing their own thing.