[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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[fearless friday] next move?