Friday, November 23, 2007

[giuli and the lizard] what voters need to know

What's Giuliani's campaign strategy?

Is he trying to die of heart failure before the poll, given the number of diners he's been seen wolfing burgers at? Can you trust a drag artist who wolfs burgers with the lot? Did he learn the habit from Donald?

Other things I'd like to know - why did he locate his emergency command bunker in the building Federal authorities most expected to be attacked by terrorists?

Did he fail to provide the 911 first responders with adequate radios?

Did he reduce firefighter numbers in November, 2001, preventing them from finding lost colleagues?

Is it tacky to agree to participants at a fundraising event being urged to donate $9.11 each?

When Rudy Giuliani goes to to Iowa and New Hampshire, is Bernie Kerik's shadow right behind him?

Did Rudy ever tell Russell Harding he was a naughty boy? Where's the internet material now?

Will the Fulton Fish Market be enough to get him over the line?

Speaking of high profile lovers and on the subject of Huma, well who wouldn't? Can't really blame the Lizard Queen but I'd like to know how she finds the time.

I'd also like to know what Huma sees in Hillary's calves and where Hillary was the day after Thanksgiving.

Down to less important matters - has Hillary ever heard of Webster Hubbell? What about Henry Cisneros?

Does she plant questions at campaign events?

Who decided to sell taxpayer-financed trade missions in exchange for campaign contributions to the Clinton-Gore 1996 re-election campaign? Do the names Nolanda Hill and Ron Brown mean anything to her?

Does she agree with former Independent Counsel Robert Ray that she gave “factually false” testimony under oath?

Who hired former bar bouncer Craig Livingstone to obtain FBI files?

Do any campaign contributions come from Yucaipa?

How did the missing Vince Foster records reappear in the White House with her fingerprints on them?

Did she have a headache the day she forgot to report over $2 million in contributions to her Senate 2000 campaign? Were Anthony and Hugh involved in any cash deals? Was anyone pardoned as a result?

What instructions were given to James Carville and George Stephanopoulos? Are Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, Dolly Kyle Browning, and Juanita Broaddrick back on her guest list yet?

Has she ever heard of Chicago Mercantile Exchange and could she explain the financial wizardry that could turn a $1,000 investment into more than $100,000 in ten months?

Has she ever been seen in drag with Donald Trump? [That was a planted question.]

[micro-control 7] uninvited, beyond authority and opaque

The greatest problems facing this post are where to start and how much to include of the sprawling mass of emerging material on Newthink and the NGOs.

The thrust of this post is to highlight aspects of both, especially concerning web control. which permeates policy determination. It's not highbrow – you can follow it quite easily.

I'll start with an interesting meeting held by the Scottish Arts Council.

The Scottish Arts Council (SAC) organised a quiet event for an audience of 'arts managers' in Glasgow on 14/4/99. Called "Facing the Future," this took the form of a lecture by Ian Christie, then director of think tank 'Demos'.

After an obviously unwanted debate (chaired by Mrs. Jack McConnell, Labour Party) in which the audience clearly did not accept what they were told, the final words from Seona Reid (then Director of the SAC) conveyed the impression that some form of transaction had taken place, that "SAC was working to ensure the arts were incorporated into the range of Government policies - but arts organisations and artists needed to play their part in making this a reality".

Christie made reference to “reality fabrication” which had also been the purpose of another Christie talk, "A New Agenda for the Arts" which was that there was no need to form an arts policy distinct from that dictated in London. If "autonomous Scotland" were to follow the government line Scotland would be the "envy and fascination" of the rest of the country.
Interconnection

This is a key aspect of the new policy thrust – the interconnection of groups and individuals within those groups. An example is Demos, a non-governmental think-tank, according to themselves.
Demos trustees brought together Sir Douglas Hague (former adviser to Margaret Thatcher), Jan Hall (Chief Executive of the advertising agency Gold Greenlees Trott), Martin Jacques (Co-founder of Demos, former editor of Marxism Today), Julia Middleton (Chief Executive of Common Purpose), The Royal Institute of International Affairs, The RAND Corporation, The International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Hudson Institute (founded by Herman Khan - model for Kubrick's Dr Strangelove), The Heritage Foundation, The Centre for Policy Studies, The Institute of Economic Affairs, The Aspen Institute, The Adam Smith Institute and so on...
The founder and Director of Demos was Geoff Mulgan.
A Cabinet Office news release of 1/9/00 announced the appointment of Mulgan as Director of the 'Performance and Innovation Unit' (PIU):

"The PIU's aim is to improve the capacity of Government to address strategic, cross-cutting issues and to promote innovation in the development and delivery of policy and in the delivery of the Government's objectives. The Unit reports direct to the Prime Minister through Sir Richard Wilson."
So Demos is non-governmental? Technically, yes.
"Mulgan has worked since 1997 as a Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on social policy issues...responsible for social exclusion, welfare to work, family, urban, voluntary sector and other issues...
Geoff Mulgan now chairs the Advisory Council alongside Martin Taylor, a steering group member of the Bilderberg group. Mulgan's views on policy possibilities:
We now live in a world in which fantasy and reality are hard if not impossible to distinguish. Information is the raw material of both fact and fantasy, and has been so industrialised that its origins are rarely visible. Now it can be manufactured, twisted, multiplied and disseminated almost without limit.

Assisted by the power of computing, it can be created as if from nothing: tailor made to cognitive needs, put together as pastiche or copy. It needs only minimal reference points. The links between it and an objective reality - the claim of positivism and enlightenment - are ever more tenuous. As a result for the receiver there are few grounds for judgement, apart from received authority or limited experience.
Simon, on 07 November 2007, noted this about another Demos member, Julia Middleton:
In her book Beyond Authority, Middleton argues for a leadership style that enables [Common Purpose graduates] to lead beyond the traditional boundaries and constraints of their organizations. This of course means beyond the constraints of democratic accountability, whether at local or national level.

As Peter Mandelson, former Communist and European Commissioner put it in March 1998:
"It may be that the era of pure representative democracy is slowly coming to an end."
Demos and the officially unconnected other bodies emanating from the policy thrust have become very interested in Semantic Web:
For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand.

In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and Geolocation meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog.
The web gurus have become involved in this as well:
But at present there is no easy way to take into account the policies that govern the use of information, some of which could be sensitive health data, said Nigel Shadbolt, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Southampton and the incoming president of the British Computer Society.
One initiative to provide better data transfer has been John Poindexter's TIA [note the logo in the top left corner of this post and see if you notice anything interesting in the design and choice of colouring]:
Total Information Awareness - a prototype system -- is our answer. We must be able to detect, classify, identify, and track terrorists so that we may understand their plans and act to prevent them from being executed. To protect our rights, we must ensure that our systems track the terrorists, and those that mean us harm. h/t Ian P
John Poindexter was Vice President of Syntek Technologies, a government contractor. Syntek and Poindexter worked for years with DARPA to develop Genoa, a surveillance device that's a combination cutting-edge search engine, sophisticated information harvesting program", and a "peer-to-peer" file sharing system. Kind of a military-grade Google/Napster for use in instant analysis of electronic data.

The result: Facebook.

One of the rationales for Total Information Awareness is that unregulated data on the web is subject to "capture" and exploitation by unscrupulous groups:

Therefore better networking and better information transfer systems are required. For what purpose is “better information transfer' required? Back to the UK, here is one example of an application for the new technology. Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said:
"In order to... fully realise the benefits of combining registration of life events in England and Wales and the issuing of passports, it is sensible that the IPS and GRO should be part of the same organisation."
These "registration of life events" - Ian P explains that this relates in some measure to the Office of National Statistics' idea of "through life records", which were intended to take the basic and relatively uncontentious matter of birth, marriage and death registration and flesh it out into a continually updated life record.

And let's add to this:
Plans to add fingerprints to UK overseas passports are under way, despite the cost and complexity involved in gathering biometrics from UK citizens across the globe, a parliamentary answer revealed last week. Passports issued by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office are already "biometric", but only in the somewhat minimalist sense required by ICAO - the addition of fingerprints, however, would pull overseas UK residents into the National Identity Register net, closing off a prized but little-known escape route.
And:
Alongside these Byrne offered faster Criminal Records Bureau checks via ID cards, use of ID cards and/or the Identity & Passport Service's identity verification service for checking the employment status of foreign nationals, the prospect of ID cards being used for proof of age when shopping for alcohol, knives and solvents, the biometric visa programme, and ID-related projects with the Department of Work & Pensions and the Government Gateway to be unveiled next month.
Which are being promulgated at a time of continual data loss. A more recent example is the loss of Child Endowment records in the last two days.

Back to Total Information Awareness and the need to regulate the web – this is also evident in the setting up of the Media Standards Trust [you might be bemused by their own stated connection with George Orwell:
The MacArthur Foundation – famed for its ‘genius grants’ – has just awarded a grant of $350,000 to the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative to develop their plans for “authenticating news” on the web. In other words – unregulated political assertions by bloggers need to be authorized.

The plans are based on an idea originally conceived by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, and since developed by the Media Standards Trust.
Now, about the major funder MacArthur:
John D. MacArthur (1897-1978) developed and owned Bankers Life and Casualty Company and other businesses, as well as considerable property in Florida and New York.
And:
The Fellowship has no application. People are nominated anonymously, by a body of nominators who submit recommendations to a small selection committee of about a dozen people, also anonymous. The committee then reviews every nominee and passes along their recommendations to the President and the board of directors. The entire process is anonymous and confidential. Most new MacArthur Fellows first learn that they have even been considered when they receive the congratulatory phone call.
More on the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) here. More on the MST:
"The Media Standards Trust, chaired by Sir David Bell (Chairman of the Financial Times), is a new, independent not-for-profit organisation working to foster high standards in news."
Sir David Bell is Common Purpose. As is Julia Middleton. CP comes out of the ODPM and is a Prescott initiative, that is from a “Minister' with no portfolio.
The attempt to control the web in Europe finds criticism from an, at first, seemingly unlikely source:
US ambassador David Gross remained equally unimpressed. "It seems to me to be a potentially historic shift in policy by the European Union to be a much more top-down, 'governments should control technical aspects of the Internet' approach," he told us. "Something that as you know is not the policy of the United States."
The EU has also been urging both data sharing within the union, i.e. inwards towards the commission:
For example, there are European Union directives that require that government information be made available in a general way for reuse.
Also concurrent is the EU directive that data cannot be concealed by member states from the Commission - in the interests of transparency, they maintain:

The house of Lords European Union Committee's 40th Report of Session 2005/6 had grave concerns over EU these data sharing activities and data protection:

Electronic inclusion is a new buzzword. The idea is that many people in the lower and less accessible groups in society should be encouraged to communicate electronically, thereby registering with the electronic database:


In line with governmental recommendations on service transformation, that unnecessary contact between public and government should be reduced, the less accessible are advised that they should use an ICT device instead:


To assist these unregistered plebs [who must, by definition be stupid], to understand what an ICT device is, it's explained in some detail that one such device is the telephone:


Another initiative is OCAM, which proposes keeping lists of journalists and other political commentators. This is called an "open commission" for accuracy in the media, which is pure doublespeak by this genre of people:

And so it goes on and on. Dizzy, whilst also tracking down the Media Monitoring group, sums up the overall situation in his comment on the government's breaching of their own data protection guidelines:
What's important to point out here is this is not about saying you think Gordon Brown and the Labour Government are secretly trying to enslave us all in an Orwellian nightmare with the ultimate aim of destroying democracy. No, this is about asking whether the proposal passes the Stalin Test. Would someone like Stalin have found a system like this useful?

Notes
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

[micro-control 6] regional government proceeds apace


There's just too much material.

Rather than present one mega-post, it's best to do it this way in bite sized pieces. I really want to present all the quotes on the Surveillance Society but this piece on regions had to be looked at first.

Before getting to the main article, this piece by Ellee Seymour [follow link] on Mandelson’s reneging on ACP trade agreements in favour of regional agreements sets the thrust of the EU.

Now. Simon [one of the Anons] said on 07 November 2007 and I've slightly abridged where some points have been made before and left out interpretations – you can make those yourself:

Treaty of Rome and in the acquis commaunitaire.

The Preamble of the 1957 treaty includes this: ‘to strengthen the unity of their economies and ensure their harmonious development by reducing the differences existing between the various regions and backwardness of the less favoured regions’. The treaty clauses are peppered with references to regions.

The 1960s was a decade of advance for the EEC’s regional policy. In 1961 the European Commission held its first conference and set up three committees to look at running regional policy across the EEC.

These reports formed the basis of the 1965 First Commission Communication on Regional Policy. The Commission emphasised that its authority on regions came from the treaty of Rome and said every country must draw up regional economic policies.

The First Community Economic Programme of 1966 to 1970 emphasised integrating regional with national policies.

Working parties of senior civil servants from member states met regularly to advise on regional policy.

In 1969 in a second more substantial statement, the Commission said that all economic and social policy had to be determined at the European level or the region but NOT by nation states…and I quote ‘if member states were to remain responsible for regional policy then development of the Community would be jeopardised’.

The EEC began to give grants on a regional basis ensuring that the member countries would eventually change their systems of local government to receive crumbs from the Brussels’ table. That has a name – it is bribery.

So when we signed the treaty of Rome we signed up to that EU statement ‘if member states were to remain responsible for regional policy then development of the Community would be jeopardised.’

Do you remember a debate about it in the Commons? No - there wasn’t one. But there is no doubt that both Wilson’s, Callaghan’s and Heath’s govefrnments all knew.

Now fast-forward 30 years. We are in what Brussels calls the Post Democratic Era.

The London Assembly is an example of the extreme centralisation of power that is taking place in all 12 British regions. I was going to stand for the Conservatives for the London Assembly, but when I investigated what I would actually do should I be elected, I realised the best I could achieve would be to write to Ken Livingstone and he could then throw my paper in the bin.

Ken appoints all 15 members of Transport for London; all 16 members of the London Development Agency; nearly half of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority; the board of the Cultural Strategy Group; the London Health Commission executive and just over half of the Metropolitan Police Authority. He has a role in the appointment, discipline and removal of senior police officers.

Let me concentrate on the lobbyists. Because there are not enough seats for all of them [in the regions], new organisations represent a mish mash of lobby groups simply to produce a single member to ‘represent’ them in the assemblies.

For example, every region now has a Council of Faiths to represent Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Bahais, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Druids and Pagans. That produces one man to sit in the assembly. In the South West Assembly it happens to be a Quaker from North Somerset.

A new network of Economic Partnerships represents councils, health trusts, universities, and government quangos. Again one person represents these different groups inside the Assembly.

Add in the CBI, the TUC, ethnic minorities, Help the Aged the UK Youth Parliament for those aged between 11 and 18 and too young to vote but not too young for the Assemblies. And on and on.

Even more bizarre, an organisation or council can be represented in the Assembly through several different stakeholders, so diffuse is the structure. It’s a veritable cats’ cradle.

But it isn’t democracy. It isn’t transparent. What happened to one man, one vote?

So far the Assemblies have limited powers. And to lobby for money the regions have permanent offices in Brussels. So too do the county councils. There are over 150 such offices in Brussels representing regions across the European Union.

For what is happening in this country is also happening across the EU. Every country is divided into regions, sub regions, and sub sub regions, interlinked by roads, railways, electricity cables and gas pipelines to ensure dependency on neighbouring regions and to cut across national borders, all induced by grants from Brussels.

Who defines a region? The answer is Eurostat, the EU’s statistical service in Luxembourg. These boundaries have been used since at least 1961 in Community legislation. And it’s all done by population.

[An interesting sidelight is the nomenclature used, as the first commenter on this post indicated.]

Last year this system was enforced throughout EU by regulation - every local authority has to use it. The excuse was the enlargement of EU. Her are the populations for the regions:
Region 3 million 7 million
Sub region 800,000 3 million
Sub sub region 150,000 800,000
Every county council will be abolished. Devon County Council is now a sub sub region of the EU, UKK43, pending its abolition.

England, of course, if ths goes ahead, ceases to be.

Elsewhere in the EU:

President Mitterand in 1982 created 22 regions with limited powers. But President Chirac campaigned in 2002 on decentralisation assuring electors that the first article of the French constitution, France is ‘a single and indivisible republic’, was sacrosanct. If it succeeds the map of France will revert to the way it looked in mediaeval times.

Portugal voted ‘no’ to regions in a 1998 referendum. But the next year regional development agencies were imposed on the Portuguese: Unelected partnerships of local vested interests or stakeholders.

Poland had to change to join EU, applicant countries now have to. In 1998 its 49 provinces were abolished and 16 regions introduced.

The only ones not to change are the 16 German Lander.

Notes
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7

Thursday, November 22, 2007

[strange blogfocus] all from the same blog

The Yellow Sauce issue is taking the world by storm but first:

1. First up is Doctor Vee and the man who's had 5000 marriage proposal rejections:

I saw this story about a man who has come to believe that he must be the ugliest man in the world — because he has had 5,000 marriage proposals rejected (via Digg).

I don’t think Emil Kacic is ugliest man in the world. He is certainly not as ugly as some of the people of Newcastle. But is Emil Kacic the least self-aware man in the world? The most socially inept man in the world? Possibly.

that the average length of time he has known each woman before proposing is 2.19 days. No wonder he is getting rejected!

I’ve got to the point where I have even been asking women I am meeting in the streets to marry me, but they always say no.

What a shock! You know, I think if a stranger came up to me and asked me to marry them, I might do a bit more than just say no.

2. Second up this evening is Doctor Vee with the non-difference between left and right:

I hate all blogging awards except for the ones I am nominated for. That means I hate all of them (apart from James Higham’s Blogpower awards!).*

One of the biggest problems is that there are just so many of them. The ones I always saw as the most important were the Bloggies — but perhaps that is just because they are the ones I came across first. Besides, I’ve never been nominated for them, so I hate them.

It’s a bit like degrees, as we have been discussing a few posts back. There are so many blogging awards that most of them mean zilch. So it’s quite funny to see Neil Clark acting as though he is some kind of cyber-god for winning a particularly flawed poll.

3. Actually, I misled you. the third is not by the good doc - it's by Lord Somber, who reports on this raging global issue of “yellow sauce”:
First of all, the name. Calling it “Yellow Sauce” conjures up images of cafeteria sculleries with 200-litre drums of foodstuffs lorded over by heavy-set, middle-aged women with turf issues wielding stainless steel ladles.

You’d think they would’ve come up with a more appealing moniker, like “Essence of Dragon’s Breath,” or “Minamoto Mayo,” or even just “Ninja Sauce” (even the kids would dig that one).


“Come to think of it, why didn’t they just call it ‘Ranch?’ Classic City does lie in the ‘Ranch Belt’ — that region of the country where Ranch dressing is a Mandatory Condiment... [one of the original Ten Condiments manifested on stone tablets brought down from Witch Mountain by Uncle Beignet...]

But I digress...”
You'll have to get over there to get the full pic.

[advice needed] is this a scam?

Sure looks like a scam:

British National Lottery

показать подробные сведения
21 нояб. (1 день назад)
British National Lottery online program that was held on the 18th of November 2007. You have been approved to claima sum of 1,000,000.00(OneMillion British Pounds Sterling) In London Theselection process was carried out through random selection in Our computerized email selectionsystem (ess) from a database of over 100,000 email Addresses drawn from whichyou were selected.To file for your claim,please contact our fiduciaryagent by E-mail:

Provide him with the following information by email:
maxwellsmith05@yahoo.com.hk
Mr. Maxwell Smith. to claim your prize. Full Name: Address: Phone
Number Country of residence: Sex: Age: Occupation:

British National Lottery online program that was held on the 18th of November 2007. You have been approved to claima sum of 1,000,000.00(OneMillion British Pounds Sterling) In London Theselection process was carried out through random selection in Our computerized email selectionsystem (ess) from a database of over 100,000 email Addresses drawn from whichyou were selected.To file for your claim,please contact our fiduciaryagent by E-mail:

Provide him with the following information by email:
maxwellsmith05@yahoo.com.hk
Mr. Maxwell Smith. to claim your prize. Full Name: Address: Phone
Number Country of residence: Sex: Age: Occupation:

Scam?

[thanksgiving] for the good things we still enjoy


To our very dear friends in the U.S. - have a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and close friends. This Englishman does not know precisely the words to say to you but he wishes you happiness and continued prosperity.

May the dialogue between our nations continue and all of us continue to fight for the values represented by Thanksgiving and fight for them together.

This blog considers ther relations between all free thinking people of the world vital and though patriotism is a fine thing, we must never forget all our friends who believe in the same thing.

So today - eat, drink and be merry and we'll cheer you on. I'm getting hungry just thinking about those laden tables and would like to be over there with you.

[film] how far can it go

Untouchables - the way action adventures used to be

It started in the mid to late 70s when we sneaked into a double header film I forget the name of – it might not even have been Peckinpah but it was the new “realistic violence” in slow motion and I know now for sure we hadn't seen those things before on the big screen.

I didn't like it, used as I was to the cowboy shoot 'em up you're dead High Noon unrealistic stuff. Sex used to be a cut to ocean waves crashing on the shore. This new stuff was grim and more than that – seemingly unnecessary – it didn't move the plot along any and seemed to be what most of the audience were there for.

My two mates couldn't get enough of it and every time a head flew off or a woman's entrails gushed out, wild cheers went up and that started me thinking about the effects of this on people over a period of time. My best mate wasn't the “pull the wings off insects Norman Tebbit type character in spectacles” - he seemed otherwise normal and yet he was right into this.

Well, all of that's now tame and the porn on the net leaves nothing to the imagination either. I know I'm a Christian but I want to avoid the moralistic trap and not preach that it's shockingly against G-d's word but I do wonder about it's long term facilitation of an indifferent, dare I say sociopathic society the west has most certainly now become.

Above all, it's become more slow-mo, more graphic, more detailed and old classics are being re-shot to include this stuff to appeal more to younger, thrill seeking, fix seeking audiences. All I can say is I wouldn't want to entrust my fate or that of my daughter to someone who'd been brought up on a steady diet of anti-human gore and unromantic sex.

Even in simple terms – getting into a dispute with someone on the road – just look at what's swilling round his brain as he moves in for combat. In previous days the guy would take a swing, intending to lay me out cold. Now there's fiendish finesse behind those narrowed eyes – little embellishments he's envisaging in his rage.

And the rage too – don't you think there's more of it about, far more intolerance of any obstacle to our path? I read an article some time back from a journo who saw a well dressed man with a newspaper tucked under one arm and briefcase in the other hand who got into that little dance on the footpath when one pedestrian steps one way and you do too then both step the other way – a comedy of errors.

This time the man snarled: “Oh, for f—k's sake get out of my f—king way” to the well dressed lady trying to pass him and the journo noted that the guy had just come off the train, was not racing for it. How far the steady diet of violence and porn and incidents like this can be tied in I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure that both aren't healthy.

They can't be healthy with that sort of jaundiced pig swill floating around the brain.

That's why, having been silent on this matter for years, reading Fabian Tassano's piece on screen violence, it all came back. Fabian asks if we should draw the line at this:
Tenia brutally rapes Marcus's girlfriend Alex and puts her into a coma. ... This scene is filmed using a single, unbroken take, lasting nine minutes. After Tenia rapes Alex, he repeatedly punches and kicks at her head and stomach.
...or here?
He then cuts off some of her fingers, severs her spinal cord (making what Mick calls "a head on a stick") and tortures her to reveal the location of Kristy.
Which makes me ask why the hell would you want to watch this stuff in the first place? Fabian notes the reaction of directors and critics alike:
We have of course the usual rationalisations of pseudo-iconoclasm: 'challenge', 'radical', 'confronting', 'risk-taking', and so forth.
... or:
“Scenes that make people turn away are part of the fun of going to movies,” said the British Board of Film Classification in defence of allowing Eastern Promises to screen without cuts.
Now this is just sick. Who on earth is on those boards now to say those things? I think you know the answer to that. They're now being stacked with exactly the same "people" as education, law and medicine that this blog has been endlessly rabbiting on about.

Doesn't anyone realize what's happening to people with this slow inuring of the soul to violence and violent sex with refinements? At an increasingly early age? Doesn't anyone realize that this is little different to the Janjaweed stoking up in Darfur and then being given complete licence to ride in, rape, mutlilate and burn women, hack men to death, gouge babies' eyes out and a litany of other sick stuff?

Doesn't anyone see that gang rapes, date rape, the short fuses which the vast majority now possess is no different to Anakin Skywalker invited to do his worst and he does - giving way to an endless loop of revenge and hatred whilst the Emperor smiles on, nodding his approval?

We all know this loop - rage, despicable act, remorse, their revenge on you, your revenge back on them - and the Emperoro sits back and chuckles at a fine piece of handiwork.

And when it's all done and the remorse sets in or even when you're now so far gone that no remorse sets in - you've gone down one more notch, one more level towards that desolate hell in which you're headed? Chris Rea - Road to Hell.

Don't you realize that when you need a fix of more and more graphic sex, more and more refined brutality to satisfy you onscreen, this is a form of possession - slow possession of your soul? It is not just the vicissitudes of modern life although they are very much part of the dystopic scene.

In a much milder form [or maybe at an earlier stage of the malaise] I walk to the carpark and during that twenty minutes, do I look around at the beauty of nature?

Do I hell. I start to think of someone who crossed me the other day and it starts to annoy me because I'm seeing that person today and I'm thinking of raising the issue and actually, why not now? I'm going to phone up now and have it out. And then I stop and look at myself - walking to a carpark on a sunny morning and fuming with anger over something.

Stop! Stop! That's sick. What's needed at this point is a giant dose of the antidote [mine is help from the Spirit] and it calms things down, everything is calmer and the car is reached in a nice frame of mind and with a private resolution that we might discuss the matter later, we might not. But either way, it's going to be done calmly and in a gentlemanly manner.

I have to force myself not to get hyped up, not to succumb to the pressures, to take it easier. Sometimes the heat-seeking missile needs to be kept in storage. I'm already possessed by one Spirit. I'll be damned if I'm going to let a malevolent one take its place.

First Rule - don't give way to the Dark Side [in Star Wars terms].

I'm not offering advice except that if I was into a steady diet of sex and violence I'd step back at ths point, take a look at myself and then decide how best to follow the First Rule. Because that other course leads only one way .

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

[which handgun] the old dilemma


I understood that all America had the right:
The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it would decide whether the Constitution grants individuals the right to keep guns in their homes for private use, plunging the justices headlong into a divisive and long-running debate over how to interpret the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
Been thinking on this since Bob G's post here and now he quotes Jefferson:
"No man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Yep, I've been thinking hard which is better to go for - the Mark XIX Desert Eagle point five oh or the good old M1911 point four five?

The thing is, when somone comes at you with a banana, you have to feel SURE!

Desert Eagle

The students seem pretty clear on the gun issue.

[lizard queen] george and laura love her

What's going down here?

Most unusual on Tuesday was the intervention of Bush and his wife in the Democratic contest. Calling Clinton a “very formidable candidate,” the president told ABC News: “There is no question that Senator Clinton understands pressure better than any of the candidates, you know, in the race.”

Laura Bush underscored a key rationale for Clinton’s White House run, saying her predecessor’s experience as first lady would be “very helpful” in the Oval Office. “You certainly know what it’s like,” she said. “You know the pressure there is. You know the difficulties.”

Any ideas what's behind this?

Latest - Huckabee appears to be the big mover in Iowa.

[french rail] at the crossroads


The French crisis is a real litmus test:

Analysts said Mr. Sarkozy may propose cuts in labor taxes to boost the dented morale of consumers.

"He is playing public opinion against the transport workers who prevent the population from going to work," said Maryse Pogodzinski, an economist with J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

Both sides are at a crossroad.
Where are your sympathies? On the issue of the EU and Common Purpose, strange bedfellows are combining forces but on this issue, straight left/right divisions prevail and our true colours are showing.

Naturally, I'm for Sarko to prevail against those holding France to ransom.