[osculation] it's the name of the game

Osculation - it's the name of the game and in each generation, they play it the same.

Here are some of the benefits:

# Kissing stabilizes cardiovascular activity, decreases high blood pressure, and lowers cholesterol;

# Kissing prevents cavities and plaque build-up by stimulating saliva production while preventing gingivitis through the calcium present in saliva;

# Kissing stimulates over 30 facial muscles which smoothes out skin and increase blood circulation to the face;

# Kissing burns 12 calories per five-second episode and three passionate kisses a day will help you lose one pound!

# Kissing prevents the formation of the stress hormone glucocorticoids which causes high blood pressure, muscle weakening and insomnia;

# Kissing does its part to vaccinate people from new germs. Saliva contains bacteria, 80% of them are common to all people with 20% unique to each person.

… and some of the drawbacks:

# Halitosis can't be caught from a partner through kissing [although it detracts from the enjoyment at the time];

# Meningococcus and Hepatitis B are very rarely caught;

# Glandular fever is more common;

# It's best to steer clear of cold sores.

So let's face it - kissing is plain romantic after all, your chance of disease is minimal [well, at an acceptable level] and there are so many known health benefits.

So get to it - the night is still young!

[nicht akzeptabel] wasserwerfer in bern

Ein Großaufgebot der Polizei rückte an und eine Straßenschlacht entbrannte. Die Beamten setzten Tränengas und Wasserwerfer ein. Laut Polizei wurden mindestens 17 Beamte zum Teil schwer verletzt. Nach Behördenangaben gab es 42 Festnahmen.

If you can't follow the text, the photo should say it all - State using weapons on citizens whose interests they are supposedly representing. The citizens might well have been out of order - I can't read all the text - but the response is sadly worrying.

[blogfocus saturday] crimewave in the sphere

Marijuana? Much, much worse, according to Schneekonigin.

Theme this evening is crime - doing it, thinking about it and writing about it.

1. First a crime in contemplation by Pink Acorn:

As I was reading the Sicily Scene Blog today I realized I have this huge, maybe 30 acre, pepper field right next door. As I scooted over to take this picture I saw my neighbor. We keep commenting how we are going to make a midnight run for some pepper samples ....but that never seems to happen.

2. Longrider differentiates between two often confused crimes:

Credit card theft is the act of stealing people’s money; identity theft involves taking on someone else’s identity for the purposes of obtaining money, property, work or whatever the thief decides to take; they take on their victim’s persona and pose as their victim in order to carry out their fraud on an ongoing basis – this is not simple credit card theft and is much less prolific.

Conflating the two is fraudulent and government does this for its own purposes; to defraud the consumer into supporting its insidious “solution” – identity cards and the national identity register that lurks beneath the surface.

3. Hercules shows that it's the hidden criminal you have to watch out for:

I always thought that crafty little bastard was up to something, blagging his way in to millions of homes across the world, pretending to be a lovable toy and then BAM, your kids are hooked on E!!! The term "off his face" Certainly does apply to this toy, doesn't it? In the news today Customs officers discovered nearly 300 grams (10.5 ounces) of ecstasy tablets hidden inside a Mr. Potato Head toy sent to Australia from Ireland.

4. Intervening to prevent a crime can be criminal, as Cllr. Gavin Ayling explains:

If people were not punished for intervening, if people could be sure the law would protect those who were acting in society’s greater interest, if people could defend others and themselves with force that the law currently considers ‘unreasonable’ from the safe confines of the courtroom, then (and only then) would people and society start to turn on those among them who were antisocial, violent and intimidating.

Like many things, it doesn’t seem that hard so long as you purge the pink fluff which takes the place of a spine in many politicians.

5. Ross Fountain is hot on the trail of the delinquent toddlers and came across this as well:

However whilst reading this story I spotted a link to an earlier story from May this year, "Criminal age 'should rise to 18' ". This is nuts, pure and simple and I guessed before I read it that it originated with the increasingly vocal pro criminal lobby group, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at Kings College, London. It is important to realise that 'youth crime' isn't a trivial subset of general crime. it amounts for a huge proportion of total crime.

6. Neocon comments on the Philadelphia Experiment:

This is a brave, if somewhat naive initiative... I wonder what happens when the first volunteer is gunned down. I know I wouldn't be out there without Kevlar and a K-frame.

Groups of volunteers will be stationed on drug corners and other trouble spots in a bid to stop the shootings and other crimes that have given Philadelphia the highest homicide rate among the nation’s 10 largest cities.

They will not be armed, will not have powers of arrest, and will be identified only by armbands or hats during their three-hour shifts.

7. James Cleverley looks at the Youth Service scheme:

There should be a balance between rights and responsibilities, young people should understand that not everything in life comes easily and pre packed. Labour have an obsession with the "respect agenda" seeming not to understand that respect has to be earned.

I would feel very uncomfortable if this kind of scheme was limited to military service, but the mix of activities is a healthy idea. I'm sure that there will be plenty on the left who will try to paint this idea as a big step back into the fifties but until they can come up with a better idea to tackle the fragmentation of communities and the huge increases in youth crime and anti-social behaviour they should keep shtum.

8. And lastly, the Anglo-Canadian Tea and Margaritas' gets unusually violent on crime:

I love animals and despise anyone who does them harm. I would see them strung up by their heels and publicly lashed if I ruled the world. Prisons for the guilty are far too soft. Colour tv, computers, diplomas!

The same as above goes for harming children and a several other horrible crimes.

Hear, hear! Hope to see you next Wednesday evening. Cheers!

[world cup] how many of the originals are left?

Click pic to zoom.

England team to play Australia: 15-Jason Robinson, 14-Paul Sackey, 13-Mathew Tait, 12-Andy Farrell, 11-Josh Lewsey, 10-Jonny Wilkinson, 9-Andy Gomarsall, 8-Nick Easter, 7-Lewis Moody, 6-Martin Corry, 5-Ben Kay, 4-Simon Shaw, 3-Phil Vickery (captain), 2-Mark Regan, 1-Andrew Sheridan.

Australia team to play England: 15-Chris Latham, 14-Adam Ashley-Cooper, 13-Stirling Mortlock (captain), 12-Matt Giteau, 11-Lote Tuqiri, 10-Berrick Barnes, 9-George Gregan, 8-Wycliff Palu, 7-George Smith, 6-Rocky Elsom, 5-Dan Vickerman, 4-Nathan Sharpe, 3-Guy Shepherdson, 2-Stephen Moore, 1-Matt Dunning.

[lizard queen] whitehouse here we come

In the Telegraph take on Hillary, there were some juicy morsels:

"Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar [an elite college founded for women]," sniffed Maureen Dowd.

Mrs Clinton's answers to every question, Frank Rich wrote, were "a rambling and often tedious Gore-like filibuster" and she seems "especially evasive when dealing with questions requiring human reflection". Her laugh had "all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer".

Nice stuff but the following commenter seemed to me closer to the truth:

Hillary Clinton will indisputably be the next President of the United States. She will move to the political center after she wins the Democratic primary. She is extremely intelligent and experienced. She will be a centrist akin to Brown and Cameron. David Cameron would defeat her if he was the Republican nominee in the USA. His oratorical prowess and charisma would resonate with Americans. His impressive green agenda would help to defeat Hillary. [Brien Comerford, United States]

Leaving aside the alleged connection with the giga-fund scandal, Peter Paul, Whitewater and Vince Foster, Jamie Gorelick, Nolanda Hill, Independent Counsel Robert Ray, bouncer Craig Livingstone, National Finance Director David Rosen and the $2m, Juanita Broaddrick, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Yucaipa, Web Hubbell, John Huang, the Lippo Group and Norman Hsu, leaving aside her health care policy, leaving aside the clearly partisan attacks by Giulliani, leaving aside the worrying and unknown extent to which she accepts the Saul Alinsky thesis, just what is it about this woman?

The travesty of the Starr Report and Wallace's Fox attack show the Republicans need to let the Clintons hang themselves, by themselves, not leave the GOP tactics open to a public perception of overkill.

And yet there is still something fundamentally wrong with the woman.

In the end, it might even be the symptoms and signs - the hyena cackle, the heavily scripted human warmth, the way former supporters and allies are coming out against her and her voting record, rather than the concealed disease itself which sinks her.

I myself wonder about the nuclear arsenal in her hands, in conjunction with the finance she's in thrall to and finally - that phoenix brooch. In the words of another Telegraph commenter:

May G-d help this country if this woman is elected to the Presidency. [Joan - Tennessee USA]

[economics 201] the nasty side of monetarism

In my tiny bit of trade work, we were discussing today Friedman's monetarism and a bit of Hayek, Lucas, Fischer, Sargent and Wallace.

For readers not much into macro-economics, Wiki gives a reasonable summary:

Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he called the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve.

"The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government."

Interesting the equating of the Fed with government, which it is anything but, especially these days. Interesting how some people still see the Fed as government today, when the FOMC runs the show. Interesting to talk of rational expectations and assume non-intervention when the FOMC is very much intervening by means of discount and other rates and where other economic triggers have deliberately been allowed to come into play by its governing body, e.g. sub-prime lending by domestic banks and credit institutions.

Nastiness like sub-prime mortgages and other such lending is not held to be part of either their brief or that of government and the question is why not, given that they can regulate the money supply itself. Sub-primes are a major component fuelling the economy and the likely outcomes are predictable in a macro sense.

Swinging over to our situation here. The manager of [hypothetical] Swift Supermarket has money invested through the banks and other agencies. He wants to pull it out of one fund and into another but is offered attractive rates to keep it where it is.

Rather than going along with this, he smells a rat - no one offers better rates without a reason and the grapevine says there's a liquidity crisis in the offing. He panics and his prices skyrocket, with people paying the increase short term but then faced with two choices - to pull money out of the bank to pay for household goods or to cut consumption drastically.

Everyone then scrambles to get cash into their pockets and with his supermarket now virtually deserted, he doubles prices to make what he can on what is left.

He closes and so do all the others, unless someone will bale them out. That's where this little fairytale ends.