[goldrush] so claims indonesia ... again

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Indonesia is in the same boat as all the other nations in the oncoming depression and so they have re-activated an old chestnut for foreign investors - that there's gold in them there hills - specifically, in Lembata:

When weighing the bullish claims against the independent geological evidence being made about Lembata's gold mining potential, there is reasonable cause to suspect that Indonesia's well-connected and colorful mining magnate, Jusuf Merukh, is bidding to attract foreign investment based on tenuous claims.

Critics and officials say his recent assertions that there are major gold deposits in the area are akin to those made during the 1997 Bre-X scandal, where a gold mine in Kalimantan in which Merukh had a stake was touted as potentially the world's largest, but after luring foreign investment from US mining giant Freeport McMoran, which was coaxed into taking an 85% stake in the venture, it came up dry.

The investment climate in Indonesia and the peculiar nature of duplicate local government departments at all levels has fuelled confrontation, along with environmental and religious considerations:

Indonesia is top heavy with a burdensome bureaucracy: each district replicates all national departments. Many are starved of operational funds, so a large mine offers hope of much-needed income. However, that impulse is checked by national regulations related to environmental protection and community consultation, which must be enacted before any mining activity goes ahead.

More than that, in a place like Indonesia, community unrest can cause a thorn in the side for any new venture, even if the national determination, at government level, is for a project to go ahead:

That did not stop the Sumbawa mine from closing down when simmering community unrest over environmental destruction, unmet compensation demands and social issues eventually erupted, with local people burning down areas of the mining camp.

Even officials get in on the act:

Sembiring, the recently retired head of the Department of Minerals in Bandung, said: "There are no proven minerals in Lembata. But there are rumors of bribery. Mr Merukh has a bad reputation in mining circles, so I do not care what he says. The mine will not go ahead. I give you a guarantee. There will be no mine."

"The people have the last say and if they do agree, then there will be no mine. There is no contract of work [COW]. It would have to be issued by the national government to the investor. I know a COW has not been issued, nor will it be. Merukh is not being honest if he says it is going ahead."

Holy cow, can you imagine that happening in Britain?

[climate of suspicion] versus sensible precautions

It's a topic this blog has avoided like the plague up to this point but L'Ombre has raised the issue of free speech and what constitutes child porn.

He lists two ongoing cases and builds his case, quoting:

The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.

I think we have to accept a number of things these days in the west:

1. The law is a blunt instrument;
2. Your computer is hacked and everything on it is viewable;
3. There are people who would love to see you put away;
4. There is zero percentage, not only in having questionable material on board but in having any material of a female nature;
5. Feminism has a lot to answer for in bashing the male;
6. One must make no reference whatsoever to the allure of the female.

This blog decided long ago to say bollocks to the last point for a single reason - it's sheer hypocrisy to maintain that line. For a male to say that an alluring woman is not alluring tells me he has something to hide and it just further fuels the paranoia which has seen families looking askance at the father, where fathers feel they can't go near their children without inviting suspicion and where kids grow up in a paranoid atmosphere.

I don't know about you but it looks pretty clear to me, from the manner, the pre-occupations, the degree of secretiveness, when there might be a problem. Like alcoholism, there are clearly degrees. If a kid climbs up on Dad's lap, that seems to me a far cry from a kid climbing up onto Dad's lap with Dad having a conduit to real kiddy porn on his computer, even "artistic stuff". If it comes to it, even having a vast supply of ordinary porn would be a concern of mine.

Anyone who says he or she has never viewed the standard pap freely available on the net looks to be a liar, in my eyes. Hell, you can't google anything these days without something appearing on the first page. But I think you'd agree there is that and then there is the fixation with and the storage of enormous numbers of images and the two are quite different.

It would be naive to deny there is a problem out there of silent domestic abuse which can go on for decades. Ironically, it is my closeness to many females and what they've told me over the years which convinces me that the thing is quite widespread, to the point where, if she is halfway attractive, there might have been at least something questionable happen to her in her early years.

Trouble is, in the current climate, where any contact of any kind equals abuse, the female is encouraged to interpret something, which might have had innocent antecedents, into a case of domestic abuse.

I can give examples from my own childhood. When I was about 11 or 12, I apparently went into some phase where I became attractive to the adult male and there were encounters with a number of family friends and neighbours. Thankfully I seemed to lose that attractiveness in late teenage.

There was one incident where we did a Boy Scout thing and to answer the unasked question - yes there was boy-on-boy buggery on those scout camps. Anyway, we went round to neighbours and did a job for some money. One neighbour constructed a situation where I sat beside him and he showed me how to mend some shed tool or whatever. Now I know exactly when he crossed the line. It wasn't when his hand rested on my thigh. It was when it came close to my groin.

I never let him get any further but I sure as hell never went back there again and that made me one of the lucky ones. If my father had known, half the neighbours would probably be dead by now.

Seems to me though that this is straying from the point - the point being the domestic stuff. I think the current paranoia is sick and reflects the sick western society today, for which the feminists must shoulder their share of the blame [which they never would, of course]. The average father would no more touch his child than cut off his own goolies but in not being able to have contact with his child in a normal way, the child starts getting paranoid at the withholding of love and that is a major danger in this day and age.

Yes, the genuine cases need addressing and the system should not be stacked against the child but at the same time, we have to be more than suspicious about the hysteria as well and the automatic assumption that the male is guilty, especially when that is fuelled by a man-hating female. Minette Marin wrote on this in her piece on misandry:

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.

Last year Cosmopolitan reported that hundreds of women wrote in to say that until they read the magazine's article on date-rape, they had not realised they had been raped.

Obviously this is the extreme position and there are definitely clear cut rapes and I don't wish to buy into this. What I do want to buy into is the paranoia and hysteria which now governs relations between the sexes.

Yesterday, I was at my hairdresser [don't laugh or I'll call you a Hairist] and I made the comment to the girl doing my scone that many women seem to feel the cold more than men and she shot back: "That's a bit sexist, isn't it?"

I asked why, she thought about it and then said; "Maybe we do feel the cold more."

[england] would you prefer to be spanish

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You might like to check out a humorous ditty over at Pox Anglorum, originally from Hookie:

"Always remember - if it hadn't been for the English, you'd all be Spanish."

[qantas and ba] why talks failed

In a time of airline mergers, the latest has fallen through.

The two majors were Qantas and BA and the reason for that order here is on overall market share. The Qantas objections included:

1. government stipulation that it must be 50% Australian owned;
2. worries about the large number of unsecured pension fund liabilities of BA;
3. concern over the proposed BA merger with Iberia.

BA did not state its objections but they were centred on Qantas seeking greater than 50% equity in the joint venture. Just a word on the BA plan to close the pension fund hole. They offered the unions to maintain a fund of sorts but:

In return, employees will offer one-off sacrifices worth a further £400m along with changes to future benefits, including the capping of future pensionable pay rises at the rate of inflation.

Willie Walsh's fixation on the government coming to the party on the the Heathrow third runway and parallel government dictation to the company, even on which engines it should have in its planes, has made BA's task all the harder:

As an autonomous, publicly owned company, BA is under no obligation to consider national interest when buying new aircraft. But the aviation sector is heavily regulated and BA''s future growth depends on government support for new infrastructure such as additional runways at Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick.

The Australian government has a history of support for its main carrier and is hardly likely to step back and see it go down but clearly, BA do not consider that Nu-Labour is likely to support them in the same way, whilst they are still solvent. Instead, there appears to be a climate of demand and counter-demand and a feeling BA must have that the government is just waiting for, willing them to default.

It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.

To be fair to Nu-Labour, an airline has to pay its way these days, just as pubs have to and everything else in Britain has to. However, at the same time, the government bails out fallen concerns like the banks, nationalizes them and borrows hugely to fund this.

It almost seems as if the government's policy is to say: "You're on your own, chum," until a firm defaults, then Gordo decides if it will be nationalized or not. The alternative, of course, would have been to have sat down with the British flagship companies and thrashed out a working proposal, with clearly defined government parameters to it.

On a simplistic level, there is the truism that whatever this government goes near or touches, automatically goes pear-shaped somewhere down the line. Less simplistically is the grand design, the EU demands on Gordo and the pan-European socialist vision for the next few years.

[todes] sensual cocktail from russia

In between the mud and the grime, Russia can be a sensual cocktail and nobody embodied this more than dance group Todes [pronounced Tor' dess] who used to tour the country and came to our city one year.

My girlfriend of the time was in just such a dance group and one evening I went to one of her training sessions, watched this high kicking and the multiple back flips and wondered from where she found the energy.  Predictably, she burnt out fairly quickly though  and swung over to salsa, which is still her pet thing today.

Strangely, I never saw Todes with her as we'd had a bit of a split at that point and I actually went with another girl but not to worry.  She saw them the following year with a different man, so we were square.  This dance group did conceptual dances and I don't think youtube has the best of them but the one below is close to being good.

You have to imagine that there was a lot of ballet in there as well, pas de deux, a lot of sensual stuff and some quite atmospheric numbers.  One thing for sure was that they gave their all, displayed their talent and you can't ask more than that.  There was also a lot of humour in some numbers and they were clearly enjoying themselves, let alone what the audience were feeling.

Hope you enjoy this:

[for a lady] sky's the limit

From Long Distance Voyager, the video's for the boys and the words are for a lady but all can enjoy.

[which country] five clues

This country:

1. has a dependency - Clipperton Island;

2. has won the 4th most summer Olympic medals;

3. has the iris as its national flower;

4. gave the world denim;

5. had an author, who, in 1969, wrote a novel without the letter "e".

Clue for no points: The bikini was invented here.

[the real eu] this is how they operate

Admittedly, this is a UKIP promotional, courtesy of Trixy but it needs to be viewed by all Brits. This is what Ireland is probably going to vote in next year - democracy, EU style:

Assuming that this man standing over Hannan, browbeating him, is Christopher Beazley, then wtf is he doing? He was supposed to have been elected on a eurosceptic platform. Iain Dale and commenters give a possible clue.

Further, from Daniel Hannan's blog:

A few minutes later, Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, rose to make a similar point. He reminded the Speaker, Hans-Gert Pöttering, that, when 14 MEPs were fined for demanding a referendum in the chamber, the stated reason was that they had misbehaved in the presence of a national leader: José Sócrates of Portugal. Yet when Cohn-Bendit and others behaved with outrageous boorishness to another national leader, Hans-Gert not only ostentatiously declined to restrain them, but joined in, upbraiding the Czech leader for daring to mention Communist Czechoslovakia (the complete transcript is available at the splendid EU Referendum blog).

People, this is lawlessness and blatant disregard for their own rules.

[post offices] why they are closing

Ian Parker Joseph gives the real reason for the Post Office turmoil.

My calm and reasoned response below:

[blog contacts] quick few lines

Have you noticed an increase in your blog contacts lately? I've been delighted the new [to me] faces and plan to visit them as much as poss. One of the things I've been meaning to do too is go down the Witanagemot list and visit all of them. Pity there is only so much time we can use to visit but the holiday period will give us some more.