[join the dots] bailout in indonesia queried

The stories continue to come in from around the world on this issue. What has changed? Has banking become more corrupt or is it that the media has now had the shackles rmoved and are reporting on it finally? If so, why now? What's behind the obvious PTB authorization of bad press for bankers?

This one is form Jakarta:

When the global financial crisis was at its height last November, Indonesia's Century Bank faced a severe liquidity crisis. Spooked depositors ran on the mid-sized consumer-oriented bank, depleting its capital base and raising fears financial contagion would have a domino effect on other wobbly financial institutions.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his team of technocrats responded by providing Century Bank a financial lifeline soon after its management declared the bank was insolvent on November 21, 2008. The initial 700 billion rupiah (US$70.9 million) cash infusion was designed to allay depositor fears and provide sufficient liquidity for normal operations.

But subsequent government funds funneled through the bank drove the total bailout bill to over 6.76 trillion (US$677.4 million), four times the amount approved by parliament. That's raised questions among analysts and opposition politicians why a middle-sized bank required so much capital to be stabilized.

It certainly would raise questions but an even better question is why it happened in Britain and the U.S. simultaneously and then why it also happened in far flung corners of the world along exactly the same lines, even in Iceland.

Any investigator worth his salt looks for connections, common factors, in any possible crime he's investigating - it's basic police work to do so and to establish motive and modus operandi.

OK, so again - what's the connection between a U.S. housing crisis and a Jakarta bailout? How does the script come to be the same? Does the word "global" hover on the tip of your tongue?

[tahiti] nice native art in the background

[priorities] of some blog readers

The posts are a bit crowded in line today but I just had to run this.

Jams often gets upwards of 30 comments on a post at his blog and in fact, his current fun item entitled "What and where am I - there's a prize in it" has attracted, at the time of writing, 29 comments.

Interestingly, the post before, on the Trafigura crime of dumping toxic waste on the Ivory Coast capital [an issue I'll take up probably tomorrow morning] got how many comments, do you think?

That's right - zero, nol, zilch, not one, before mine.

[genesis of the virus] cohen and other pioneers

Robert Lemos, of CNET News.com, on November 25, 2003, had an interesting article on the genesis of the computer virus, which I found in researching Fred Cohen and abridge here:


"Of all the accomplishments in the annals of technology, Fred Cohen's contribution is undeniably unique: He introduced the term "virus" to the lexicon of computers.

The University of New Haven professor used the phrase in a 1984 research paper, in which he described threats self-propagating programs pose and explored potential defenses against them. When he asked for funding from the National Science Foundation three years later to further explore countermeasures, the agency rebuffed him.

Two decades later, countless companies and individuals are still paying for that mistake … Little has been documented about the origins of the virus. Its early iterations were not created by malcontent teenagers or antisocial geeks but by campus researchers, system administrators and a handful of old-school hackers who thought that the ability to reproduce their programs automatically was a neat trick.

The result is a tale of technical genius, academic naivete, bureaucratic arrogance and humans' penchant for tearing down institutions simply for the sake of doing so.

Sarah Gordon, senior research fellow at Symantec Security Response, says:

"Even if (viruses) are not designed to be intentionally malicious or dangerous, if they get outside of a controlled environment, there can be unexpected results."

That was precisely what happened with the fathers of the computer virus. Cohen had an inkling of much of the future when he first thought up the idea in November 1983 as a University of Southern California graduate student. During a weekly seminar on computer security, he conceived of a program that could infect other systems with copies of itself.

"All at once, a light bulb came on, and I said, 'Aha!'" Cohen recalled. "Within a few seconds, I knew how to write the program and that it would work."

His adviser at the time, Len Adleman--well known as a creator of public-key encryption and the "A" in a popular form of the security technology known as RSA (Rivest, Shamir & Adleman)--suggested that the programs were the digital analogy of viruses. The name stuck.

The birth of a concept

In a paper published the next year, he defined a virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself." Cohen proved that such a virus could spread through any system that allows information to be shared, interpreted in a general manner and given away, despite the presence of security technologies.

To demonstrate its potential dangers, Cohen created a test program to see how quickly the virus could spread and undermine the security of a mainframe computer system. He implanted the program in a command that presents Unix file structures graphically, then conducted five attack runs.

The virus managed to "gain system rights"--essentially seizing control of the computer--within an average of half an hour. The shortest run took five minutes.

"It could spread with all the security technologies out there at the time," Cohen said. "The concept showed that the least trusted user is the weakest link, and the program can quickly spread up to the most trusted user."

Cohen's work provided a concrete definition of a virus and showed how other programs, such as worms, are a subset of that definition.

Von Neumann

But a few viruslike programs existed before his research, and many of its theoretical underpinnings were established by John von Neumann, one of the founding fathers of computer science.

Born in Hungary in 1903, von Neumann was responsible for seminal work in many branches of computer science, mathematics and physics, including logical analysis of a strategy called game theory and the newly born branch of quantum physics. Between 1948 and 1956, he extended much of the work of one of his peers, computer scientist Alan Turing.

Turing established many of the theoretical foundations of computers when he created the Universal Computer, a logical construct that could solve a wide variety of problems by using a processor and a tape to store programs and data. Computers still use the basic division of labor Turing identified: processors and storage.

Von Neumann expanded Turing's concept to the creation of a universal constructor, a system that could replicate itself. This self-reproducing automaton, as he called it, used tens of thousands of elements--each of which could be in any of 29 states--to create another automaton on an imaginary grid. The system was so complex that it took more than 40 years for even a limited version of it to be implemented in hardware.

Survival of the fittest program

In August 1961, researcher Victor Vyssotsky invented a game, dubbed "Darwin," in which small programs competed with one another to dominate a digital landscape. His colleague Douglas McIlroy programmed much of the game, including the code that would run the simulation. The third researcher, Robert Morris Sr., created a lethal digital creature that evolved and passed along its successful attack to its progeny.

"It was clear that by tinkering the rules to introduce a bit of uncertainty into the game, we could have revived it after Morris' devastating entry, but we had other things to do," said McIlroy, now an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth College. The game ran on an IBM 7090 system and was largely forgotten, [running] in artificial environments. It took a different game to help introduce viruses to computers and spread infections worldwide.

The real thing

That game was "Animal," a program akin to "20 Questions," which became highly popular among mainframe computer operators in the 1970s. The game would ask a person to think of an animal and then ask questions for clues as to the type of creature it was. If the program guessed wrong, it would ask the player to provide a question and an answer that would differentiate the new animal.

John Walker, a UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Calculator) systems programmer for a large multinational firm, created his own version of the game in 1974, improving it so that erroneous information one player enters could eventually be corrected by another. The game was an immediate hit.

"It … got me thinking on how best to distribute the game. That's when I thought about making it self-reproducing."

In January 1975, Walker created another program, "Pervade," which would hitch a ride with a new version of "Animal." Any time someone played the "Animal" game, Pervade would also start running to check directories, duplicate itself in any directory that didn't already have a copy and overwrite any older versions.

Walker recalls reflecting on the implications of the program for a couple of months to ensure that he hadn't made any damaging errors. Then he released it.

Within a week, UNIVAC administrators at another corporate office started reporting that "Animal" had suddenly appeared on their system. Weeks later, other companies discovered the program on their systems as well.

"A few months later, a lot of people started talking about it, and that meant more people were asking for it," Walker said. "It propagated as much by word of mouth as by copying itself to new directories."

The Pervade program stopped working when UNIVAC released a new version of the operating system that changed its directory structure. But Walker insists that a modified copy of his program could have easily overcome its new security features.

"UNIVAC was putting forth all these security methods, and here was an example of a threat that all the defenses couldn't do anything about," he said in comments Cohen would echo a decade later.

Walker went on to found Autodesk in the early 1980s, and he remains the largest individual stockholder in the company.

The new generation

Rich Skrenta was a Pittsburgh-area ninth-grader in 1982, he knew a lot about the Apple II and loved to use software to play practical jokes on his classmates. The then-teenager supplied his friends with Apple II programs to which he had added some custom "features," such as the machine's ability to shut down automatically after being used just a few times or to display a taunting message.

"After I had done this a number of times, no one would take games from me anymore," said Skrenta, now the president of his own, soon-to-be-launched search start-up, Topix.net. "And so, I was puzzling on how to get my tricks onto their disks."

That's when he got the idea to write a self-propagating program that would infect Apple II disks. Skrenta's idea for "cloner" programs--he didn't employ the term virus--would infect a popular command on the system disks used by the Apple II. The program he created, called Elk Cloner, counted how often a disk had been used and, on every fifth run, made the computer shut down or perform some other "trick." Every 50th time the computer started up, Elk Cloner would display a little poem.

Four years later, two Pakistani brothers, Amjad and Basit Farooq Alvi, created the first computer virus to infect IBM PCs. Known as the Brain virus, the brothers used the program as a piece of true viral marketing: Each copy caused a message to flash on the screen, advertising the brothers' company, Brain Computer Services of Lahore, Pakistan.

By the end of 1990, about 200 viruses had been identified. Today, that number has jumped to more than 70,000. Although less than 1 percent of those viruses have compromised computers on the Internet, more than 80 percent of companies suffered a digital infection, according to the Computer Security Institute.

Symantec's Gordon said most virus creators--not unlike their predecessors--still don't understand the ability of the programs to spread throughout the Internet. "They tend to be curious--often articulate individuals with a variety of relationship and interaction styles," she said.

Cohen, however, said the scientific heavy lifting for today's Internet viruses was done in the 1980s. Everything else, he said, is just mechanics.

"Everything that we know now was known then," he said. "Everything we see now is just an engineering solution based on old science.""

[lamb to the slaughter] children vote to slay a pet sheep

This has elements of the bizarre and as it involves a lamb and schoolchildren, it is bound to cause trouble.

For a start, allowing a "council" of primary school children to have the power to vote on a matter of real killing should immediately focus attention on the teacher[s] who set this up. This smacks of the very worst of PCism and its disconnect with sanity.

A primary age child, no matter what the exercise in democracy that is being carried out, should in no way have the real life right to determine whether a creature should live or die.

That is utter madness.

Sorry but the demise of Marcus the sheep is of less overall concern itself here because it would be hypocritical, given that we eat lamb, chicken, beef, pork or fish every day, to bemoan an animal death, especially for humanitarian reasons.

But to virtually put the knife into children's hands, the power of life and death, years before they have the emotional and intellectual maturity to decide on these things - and even then the issue of capital punishment is debatable - that is really quite disturbing.

What makes it worse in this case is that the children had named the animal, raised it as a pet and then the teacher put the idea into the kids' minds to kill it. Worse than that, they were "sending the sheep away" to be slaughtered, to spare them the necessity of seeing the blood and guts.

Therefore, the values they are being taught, that are being reinforced, are the computer game values of "it's fine to kill, to have the power of life and death because you never have to see the actual consequences". They're the values of "let's drop an atom bomb but we'll never see the consequences of our actions because we're in a sanitized cocoon".

It's teaching kids the disconnect between a decision, a behaviour and it's consequences. That is no better than teaching kids to be good little sociopaths for that's what sociopaths are characterized by - the inability to perceive anything wrong or the full implications of their actions. Those kids who voted that way - and don't tell me it was a "free" vote at 13-1 because I know teachers and the way kids are subtly manipulated [usually for good] and such an overwhelming vote was clearly the consequence of the way the case had been presented to them - that is simply wrong.

That is the disconnect between Nu-Labour's appalling social meddling, on the grounds that someone came up with a brilliant new idea in order to score brownie points, it is the disconnect which would see the pension funds robbed and gold sold off - no concept of consequence or consideration of possible unintended fallout for actions taken.

That is the lesson these kids have been taught when they should have been taught the exact opposite.

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

Tally ho, old chaps! Lovely to be over here where I've been asked to write something about the Irish referendum. The one our great masters hope they manage to get right this time. That's the trouble with giving two options, though: you're giving people the chance to pick the wrong answer.

It appears that, confident that if people actually knew the truth about the treaty and these 'promises' they'd vote NO, the Irish establishment have decided to resort to their favourite weapon: lies.

Luckily it's quite amusing because the very low key Irish MEPs involved are clearly mentally retarded or masters of irony.

I'll guide you through an example shortly, but first of all let's return to Flanders and Swann:

The Irishman now our contempt is beneath
He sleeps in his boots and he lies through his teeth
He blows up policemen or so I have heard
And blames it on Cromwell and William the Third

See, it's supposed to be a joke but the Irish have taken this whole 'it's the EU or English Imperialism' rather seriously.

From the Irish Times today:

NO CAMPAIGN: IRISH MEPS have clashed angrily with the UK Independence Party (UKIP) over the British party’s plan to post “racist” leaflets to all Irish homes attacking the Lisbon Treaty.

UKIP confirmed yesterday it had begun posting some 1.5 million leaflets, which should arrive in people’s letterboxes between September 17th and 21st. It also accused Irish MEP Marian Harkin of “hypocrisy” for inviting fellow MEPs to donate funds to the Yes to Lisbon campaign.

“Yet again, the hypocrisy of the Yes side knows no bounds. When someone from outside Ireland who is opposed to the treaty speaks out, then it is foreign interference. But here they are invited to do the same,” said UKIP leader Nigel Farage, who plans a visit to Ireland next week to campaign for a No vote in the referendum.

Actually the leaflet is produced by the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group in the European Parliament. Not UKIP.

The UKIP leaflet (sic) on the Lisbon Treaty, which is reproduced on the website www.euinfo.ie, alleges Lisbon gives the EU full control of immigration and warns that Turkey’s entry to the EU will lead to more mass migration of cheap labour. It portrays an image of a turkey with a medallion around its neck with the message: “Free movement for 75 million people.”

Turkey's entry into the EU will do. It's not tricky - it's sort of like osmosis but with people and we've had a rather good demonstration of it with the A8 countries in 2004 and, more recently, Bulgaria and Romania. Of course the Irish Europe Minister Dick Head Roche said that Nice would have no impact on immigration but then he's hardly known for his truthful comments.

And what's with this 'alleges' crap, eh?

Lisbon gives the EU full control over immigration (Arts 79 and 67 TFEU)

Unless the Irish Times don't think that the text of the treaty is the real one?

It also alleges that Lisbon may create an “EU supreme court to overrule our values”, transform Ireland into an “EU province” and damage the economy.

Again, that's because it will. Lisbon grants the EU Court of Justice the power to order the harmonisation of national indirect taxes if it decides that this causes "a distortion of competition" in the EU market (Art. 113 TFEU)

The NO vote also stopped the CCCTB (Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base) which, if introduced, would shaft Ireland as it's currently so competitive and thus has a lot of Foreign Direct Investment.

But of course, it's when the loony MEPs get involved that it really gets unintentionally hilarious:

At the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Labour MEP Alan Kelly said UKIP was out of touch when it came to Europe and bordered on insanity if it thought Irish people would listen to them when they canvassed here. “I presume they’ll come over with their imperialist rhetoric. The thought of their smug smiles turns my stomach . . . 700 years was enough,” he said.

What can you say?

I presume they'll come over with their imperialist rhetoric

Sublime, simply sublime! Never mind the fact that the person he's talking about is actually promoting Irish independence from the EU, it's a sad state of affairs when these useless little jobsworths with no chance of getting even an internship in a private company have to drag everything back to William the Third, as the song goes. Or even Henry VIII.

Ms Harkin said the image of a turkey in the UKIP leaflet was outrageous and racist. She rejected criticism made by Mr Farage that she was “hypocritical” for inviting fellow MEPs to donate to the Yes campaign.

How is a Turkey racist? Is she confusing Bernard Matthews with Bernard Manning?

And I'm sure she did reject that she was being a hypocrite. To them the EU is so knicker wettingly orgasmic that the concept of anyone not wanting to say YES and pay money to help their appalling campaign is not going to penetrate the skulls of said MEPs. Just take a look at what she did:

The criticism from UKIP came after Ms Harkin sent an e-mail to all 736 MEPs asking them to consider contributing to a new campaign group called Europe for Ireland, which has been set up by Irish people in Brussels to lobby for a Yes vote. In the e-mail, Ms Harkin said many people had asked her if they could help in the referendum campaign.

“National referendums are, by definition, an internal national matter, even where, as in this case, the repercussions have an effect across Europe. That being said, Irish people resident in Belgium and indeed all over Europe have set up a Europe for Ireland group to promote a Yes vote to the Lisbon Treaty whatever way it can within the rules,” she added.

Unless you don't like the Treaty, think it's outrageous and an insult to every single Irish person that they are having another referendum and would like the peoples of Europe to be able to live in a prosperous, democratic country than a bloated EU mega state with a terrible anthem and soldiers who can't do drill. Because if that's you then you're an imperialist beast with no ability to read a Treaty document and the fact that you want to tell the truth to these people is sickening.

I mean, where do you get off with trying to inform voters what they're making a decision on?!?!

Get away with you. Feck off.

[one way to go] it's hell out there

[thought for the day] wednesday evening

It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.

[W.C. Fields]

[match tricks nine] try before you check

With 12 matches make 7 squares.

Check the solution here.

You might also like to try these:

Matchtricks 1
Matchtricks 2
Matchtricks 3
Matchtricks 4
Matchtricks 5
Matchtricks 6
Matchtricks 7
Matchtricks 8

[wordless wednesday] was it always like this

[late evening listening] dearieme presents gymnopédies

Dearieme with Satie:



Something I found to round it out:

[wednesday quiz] back in harness

1. What is the area of A-0 paper, in metric?

2. Did the first traffic lights appear in New York, Detroit or Hamburg, in 1919?

3. What is digamy?

4. In Roman numerals, what is the letter M with a bar over it?

5. Which was the first credit card?

Answers

One square metre, Detroit, a second legal marriage, one million, Diner's Club

[the way of the left] and that of normal people

And here is the essential difference between the Left and normal people - the Left always jump to weasel words and catchcries such as "racism" when it has zero to do with racism and all to do with whether a man has lied or not:

Former US President Jimmy Carter says much of the vitriol against President Barack Obama's health reforms and spending plans is "based on racism". Mr Carter told a public meeting there was "an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president".

Republican lawmaker Joe Wilson was rebuked on Tuesday in a House vote. He shouted "You lie!" while Mr Obama was delivering an address on healthcare to Congress last Wednesday.

Now I take Mr. Wilson's accusation as meaning, according to the English language, that he felt Mr. Obama tells lies. Ann Coulter has this to say about the Left:

Liberals always take the side of the enemies of civilization against civilization. In the view of The New York Times, every criminal trial is a shocking miscarriage of justice -- except the ones that actually are shocking miscarriages of justice.

In the interests of fairness, let's examine Carter's statement again, in the light of Wilson. Regular readers here, including the sensible left, would agree that many do not want a black as a President. That, by definition, is racist. However, lying can be done by anyone and this man, in terms of his role of president, not as a black, has lied.

So why does Carter play the racist card? Why not accuse Wilson of being a wife beater or a closet Abba lover or something like that? The answer, of course, is that racism is the popular issue of the moment, so if he can't refute Wilson with facts, he has to use the emotive slur, thereby also upping his street cred with blacks.

[meredith kercher] will she be avenged

Perugia, Italy

This piece was originally published on September 15th, as a filler and though it found its way into google search, it was not well researched at that point. Therefore it needed to be rewritten and reposted today, this time with proper research behind it, especially as the trial has been reopened. 

Update December 5th here and earlier, December 2nd here.

This link takes you to all posts on the new blog mentioning Meredith Kercher.  To save you the trouble, the best analysis, leaving my posts aside, is that of the latter commenters on Why I Think Amanda Knox is Guilty, where everyone leaves aside the infighting and starts to look again at the evidence itself.


The thing I like about this analysis of the Meredith Kercher story is that it doesn't sensationalize or take any particular stance. It presents the evidence as far as it can whilst the story unfolds.

Pretty girl turned bad

No wonder the media were going to latch onto it and play it for all it was worth, possibly to leap to the defence of the accused, as most of the reports seem to be doing now. No wonder, when the Foxy Knoxy myspace moniker came up, the media then swung round at the time and vilified her, dropping her real name and using only the moniker.

In a grotesque media circus, Italians, in a poll, voted her personality of the year – the alleged perpetrator, not the victim - and even the guards and lawyers smiled at her and she smiled her winning smile back.

The guards now call her Bambi, for her innocence and see themselves as being in the presence of a celebrity. That is plain bizarre.

Ann Coulter questions the way so many people seem to be getting behind Knox and making her into a mini-celebrity when, in fact, she is an alleged murderess in the most gruesome manner.

Call me a party pooper but Knox's irresistible charm I find eminently resistable and you'll see why below.

The story in summary

Two language majors were taking time out in Perugia, Italy to study. One, an American girl, found a place to stay, through an Italian woman. The American went away on a trip to Germany [* flag] and when she came back to Perugia, an English girl was in the house, along with two Italian girls [* flag].

It's a university town so the scene is the piazza, study, working to make ends meet, the usual thing - indiscriminate, casual sex, taking up with anyone interesting, no judgement, low self-pride. Low-lifes abounded in the town. Students call it fun.

Amanda Knox worked at a bar, which was run by a Congolese, Patrick Lumumba. He describes her as flirtatious and not looking after her customers and was about to sack her. She comes over as a person who only wanted the money for the job but wanted the pleasures of partying at the same time.

Her roommate, Meredith Kercher, of whose character nothing except the usual eulogies have come through, describes Knox as sloppy, refusing to do any chores and generally being useless. Meredith reportedly was fearful of some of the men Knox would bring back home, confronting her in the kitchen next morning, complete strangers.

This is contrasted to how her American friends describe Knox - vivacious, kind, sporty and outdoory. She's described as obedient to her mum.

Why the focus on her and not on, say, the men in the story? As Richard Owen of The Times says:

"I think, inevitably, it has come to be seen, as no doubt will be seen in future when books and films are made about this story as they inevitably will be, as Amanda’s story essentially."

Story continued

The two students began at the university in September, partying, studying and so on until Hallowe'en. Knox had met "a 23-year old-Italian computer engineering student named Raffaele Sollecito. He's a prominent doctor's son with his own apartment, a collection of exotic knives and an expensive German car." She seems to have fallen for him.

"Meredith, the roommate, had found a boyfriend, too. A guitar player in a band who lived in an apartment beneath the rental house." Seemed to be a less outgoing type than Knox, maybe more stay at home.

On Hallowe'en there was a party and next day they slept it off, next day being All Saints Day. In the evening, "Meredith went to visit her English girlfriends for a quiet evening of pizza and a video. One of the friends walked her partway home a little after 9 p.m." Knox and Sollecito had turned their mobiles off at 8.40 p.m.

Sometime the next morning, the following seems to have occurred:

Meredith's mobile had gone missing and a lady found it in her garden [*flag], contacted the police, the police had traced it and were bringing it back to her, as her supposedly stolen goods.

When they got there, Knox and Sollecito were in a deep embrace in the garden [*flag] and a window had been smashed [* flag], which the couple drew attention to. When the police went inside, the door to Meredith's room was locked. They got through and her body was on the floor, face down, a duvet was over her and her throat had been cut in three ways – one was a sharp nick under the chin, one was not mentioned other than it required a short blade and the other was right through the neck, requiring a long blade.

Forensics

Forensics placed four people in that house on November 1st - the victim who came home sometime in the evening, Amanda Knox, Sollecito, strange in himself and then someone they'd picked up, "Rudy Hermann Guede, a 20-year-old Ivory Coast born Perugia street hustler and general hangabout."

For some reason, either forced or voluntarily, no one really knows, Meredith appeared to have been on her knees and someone had been having sex with her from behind. At some point, a knife went "from left to right" through her throat and she ended up sprawled on the floor, drowning in her own blood.

Later, DNA from both Meredith and Knox was found on the kitchen knife at the house - the former's on the blade, the latter's on the handle. Guede's DNA was inside Kercher but doesn't appear to have been on the handle. Guede's DNA was in a handprint under the victim's head. There were bloodied footprints of either Knox or Sollecito. Ann Couler says:

Kercher's bloody bra strap at the crime scene that had abundant amounts of Sollecito's DNA on it.

A shop manager reported, in the next two days, seeing and hearing Knox and Sollecito loudly discussing buying lingerie for Knox and they'd been laughing and joking about what they planned to do. At some point, it is reported Knox said, "I can't keep this up much longer," whatever that means.

Developments

The police arrested the two suspects but the fourth had not yet come through forensics and when this happened, he was picked up in Germany [* flag]. The theory was that there'd been some sort of orgy, it went wrong, they killed Meredith. The theory was modified to include Guede, probably having sex with the victim from behind but someone had held a knife to her throat at some point and then the stabbing was done after that. A possible torture scenario.

Knox

Her behaviour towards the police and in court was reported by all as being obnoxious, harpy-like, contrasting with her later behaviour of all smiles.

She is reported, by friends and family, as being kind and willing to help anyone, a good girl who was very outdoory, liking sport and the company of friends.

However, a different picture emerged upon investigation. The family was dysfunctional and her mother had trouble keeping it running when the husband departed the scene, she remarried a very young man and that sent Knox crazy. She began to compete for the attention of men.

Patrick Lumumba, the café owner who employed her in Perugia, described her as a "Queen Bee", needing constant attention from men.

She's reported elsewhere as not forming good relationships with other women. A video on the net shows her seemingly normal and joking and a girlfriend is taking it but in the room are all boys apart from that. Another pic shows her drunk and loose in a room full of boys.

She'd boasted herself, in an email, that she had an Italian on the train to Perugia and when the AIDS question came up – standard procedure for Italian police, she couldn't remember how many lovers she'd had but settled on seven.

She was described as not just taking drugs for recreation but "right into them" in an extreme way.

There were reports back home that she shunned the usual girly haunts and hung out where the boys were, even doing their sports with them – hence the soccer.

One incident was shortly before she left for Italy. She threw a party and late that night, police were called because the partygoers were throwing bottles and smashing neighbours' windows. The only person arrested was Knox and she was fined in court for her actions that night [* flag].

She claimed that as she was going away, it didn't matter what she did. All of this paints a different picture from the innocent abroad her family and close friends wish to portray.

Then came the Foxy Knoxy Myspace saga, the short story she wrote on a girl being raped and how a woman had to be taught what she wanted, plus the fashion pose photo which shows her as cold as ice. Personally, I think there are far more significant things in her actions than that.

Knox's stories

Her story changes as the evidence changes. At first, she claimed she was with her boyfriend at his house. Then when it was shown he had not done as he claimed that night, she said she had been at the house after all, she'd met her boss, Patrick Lumumba, at a tennis court, had brought him back to the house, he went into Meredith's room [and this bit was at least plausible because Knox had introduced the two at the bar and they'd hit it off].

Her theory was that Lumumba had locked the door, Knox heard screaming, had put her fingers to her ears and couldn't remember any more.

In court later, after it was shown that there was no DNA or other evidence of Lumumba ever having been at that house, she suddenly changed her story, said she'd made it up about Lumumba and went back to the tale of being with the boyfriend. Now she claims, he must have gone to the house, raped and killed Meredith, come back and put the hilt of the knife in her sleeping hand.

In all this, she never mentions Guede although he was clearly at the house. In one of the flags above, he fled to Germany. She went to Germany too in the early days, for some unstated reason. Had they met and was her silence over him to protect him? Yet she seemed infatuated with Sollecito or at least under his spell, as far as her character would allow love.

Knox describes Meredith's death as "yukky".

In a bizarre twist, her own family came over for the hearing, her younger sister wearing inappropriate attire for something so sombre and the family posing for photos in fornt of the murder house, along with statements of "Amanda will be home by Christmas, once all this has been cleared up."

One other snippets which might be relevant - it came out that her story was that they had got to the house, had seen Meredith's door locked and had turned and gone out again.

State of play

Guede has already gone down for 30 years. The other two are still in custody and the trial has resumed this September, after a two month hiatus.

My thoughts

I don't like her one little bit, this Knox, for much the same reason as a law enforcement officer who commented on one of the news stories that he knew that type [Knox] very well from his 30 years or so in the force – appearing to be an angel, to be plausible and using the little girl smile to maximum effect but actually cold blooded and with a disconnect between her thoughts and her actions.

He said that this is the classic profile of the psychopath – the inability to distinguish between what is appropriate and what is not, the inability to see consequences for her actions.

It's this disconnect which is the most troublesome part. In her prison cell, she pretends to rock climb up the bars and sings at the top of her voice, then, when the guards come to take her to court, she turns on the Foxy Knoxy [her own construct from her website] and charms the men. It was noted that she'd always make a beeline for the men, supposedly her main means of defence, in her eyes.

And yet it is a woman coroner who has drawn attention to problems with the DNA on the knife. I've read this up and it seems that it's a Defence ploy, that the evidence seemed straightforward enough. She has just come into court dressed in white as the little hometown girl, which drew a stinging response from the family of Meredith.

My own bona fides are that I've been in the business of character assessment in RL for more decades than I care to say. From a distance and with the mind uncluttered by things like romance and love, nothing much impresses me and I most certainly do not trust disconnects and anomalies.

The support or distrust of millions does not constitute Knox's guilt – that will have to be established or not in court. However, one thing which strikes me is how this was a fairly open and shut case, except for one thing – it centred, from beginning to end, around Knox.

It was her changes of story which dragged it out to the second year, her making eyes at all the men, including the judge who was reported to have smiled back at the smile she gave him and which one reporter described as "disturbing", which occupies centre stage; it was her story all the way along. It's she who is "personality of the year" in Italy, not Guede, not Sollecito, both of whom have been placed at the scene and might well have done it all themselves.

This is all about Amanda Knox, centre-stage and Queen Bee.

And the flags above – where were the Italian housemates in all this? Why were the two lovers in an embrace in the garden when the police got there next morning, instead of seeking help and announcing that they'd found her housemate murdered? Where is Meredith's own boyfriend in this, the one who lived below the house in a flat?

The mobiles – how had Meredith's mobile found its way into that woman's garden and why did the couple switch off their mobiles at the same time that night, even though Meredith did not return for another hour?

Knox's conviction in Seattle for that wild party and her overall demeanour are a flag. That sort of thing would normally get a stern warning but she was arrested and taken to court. This suggests to me that she went at the police with a torrent of abuse and they decided to go for due process in return.

In the end, she's certainly not a nice person, she didn't "suddenly change" when she got to Italy – that sex on the train there was significant. In fact, she comes over as a particularly nasty piece of work but that still doesn't make her a murderess.

The trial goes on.

Meredith Kercher

I find it sickening that that other girl should have hogged all the limelight because of an alleged criminal action when the victim herself is the one whose name should stay in the memory. She should have been "little Bambi", not the other one. She should have her photo all over the net and be spoken of in connection with the case.

Saint? Who knows? Who cares? She was a student who had her life snuffed out in a gruesome way. Her killer[s] need to be punished and not sympathized with because she happens to be pretty.

End of story.

Meredith Kercher - may she find peace and her people find closure as soon as possible.

[gangster barons] holding the people to ransom

Gangster in a pinstriped suit

Look at these seemingly disparate snippets:

1. Micro-cap and OTCs.

2. Last week Glenn Beck blew the doors off a story that he had been cooking for a while: an undercover independent film-maker and associate had walked into an ACORN office pretending to be a pimp and prostitute and "asked for help" in cheating the government by obtaining both a housing subsidy and committing tax fraud.

But that's not where they stopped - they disclosed "intent" to bring in underage girls from El Salvador as the essence of their "business" to serve as prostitutes as well.In short, they declared themselves as traffickers in the sexual abuse of children and asked this government-supported and funded "community organization" - an organization that Barack Obama was associated with very closely in his time as a Chicago "machine" politician before he ran for President - for help.

Instead of being tossed out on their tail (or having the cops called) they instead received advice from ACORN on how to swindle the United States Federal Government in the promulgation and practice of their alleged-unlawful scheme!

3. FHA has been and still is putting Americans into loans they cannot afford, as is proved by the default and foreclosure statistics. The housing and banking industry has not reformed its ways, specifically, pushing loans on people they cannot afford, and the FHA is blatantly conspiring with these clowns in approving loans that statistically have a one in five shot at failure.

The claim that these mortgage programs are "helping Americans" is a damned lie. No program that winds up with one in five borrowers unable to pay - a rate double that of credit-card defaults - can be said to be "sustainable", "safe", or 'helping homeowners."

We must clear the bad, un-serviceable debt from the system. Papering it over or worse, transferring it to The Federal Government where you think people won't find it won't work.

The only solution to the housing crisis is that prices for homes must come down to where they are actually affordable on a long-term, sustainable basis.

4. Obama's speech: "To come up with creative approaches to improve financial education and to bring banking to those who live and work entirely outside the banking system. And, of course, to embrace serious financial reform, not fight it."

What sort of financial reform would that be now? Bringing banking to those outside of its clutches?

5. It is possible that the Fed monetizes sufficiently to reinflate an equity bubble, essentially whoring out the Dollar and the real economy for the sake of the financial or FIRE sector.

This is what I have been thinking - that the stock indices are now fundamentally disconnected from the health of the economy.

What connects the dots?

1. Out and out lies, distorted stats, scams, laundering money, making it disappear, riding roughshod over regulations or creating markets where regulations don't apply, creating special get-outs for favoured participants and the greatest joke of all - then bringing in draconian legislation to regulate everyone else in the market after the main crims have cut and run;

2. Blaming "capitalism" and the free market economy, which was hijacked and prostituted long ago by the gangster barons, for all the ills, shoving the zillions of debt on the ordinary non-player and getting those ordinary punters to agree to a dismantling of the capitalist system in favour of a state regulated one, in order to keep the gangster barons who would control the system, under control;

3. Complete lack of anything we, of the Judaeo-Christian heritage, would consider to be integrity, morality or fair play from the people doing this, from the presidents and PMs to the pollies and Pod people in departments all over the nation. In fact, it is Anton le Vey's "do as thou will" which rules, with laws of morality put in place only to prevent anyone else buying into or stopping them in their pursuits, whilst crying moral to the people and blaming anyone but themselves.

If these were people we met in the ordinary course of life, if they were going for jobs or engaging our trust, would you give them the time of day? And yet these are the people holding us to ransom in our nation to this very day.

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

Better by far that you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.

[Christina Rosetti 1862]

There was something else I wanted to say but ... well, it will come back ...

[bomaderry] what did he do wrong

What do you know about Bomaderry? I'd imagine not a lot. On January 25th, 2004, about 5.30 p.m., David Evans got up to bat in a cricket match in that fair town.

As he reached the wicket ... well, I'll let Bomaderry Cricket Club secretary, Graeme Sawkins take up the story:

"It wasn't even stormy at the time. We all said before the game started that if it was stormy then we'd stop play, but it was quite clear. David got up to bat and suddenly, out of the blue, a lightning bolt came down and hit his helmet, went through his body and shattered his bat. It left a hole in the ground next to the wicket where he was standing. Six or seven other players were knocked down with the impact."

Two fielders, including a 13-year-old boy, were injured. The umpire, square-leg fielder and umpire on the wicket end were knocked off their feet. A few seconds after Mr Evans was hit, a second strike injured two women at a property in Worrige.

Now my only question is if David knew those two women at Worrige or not.

[stats] on you tube

[late evening listening] hasty last minute selection

I ran out of time and so had to hastily throw these together.

1. Why, oh why must people play Bach at breakneck speed?



2. What else will I put? Oh my goodness, can't think. Ok, let's run with Luddy:

[untested swine flu drugs] ministers agree to fund gps

There are so many issues just now. From Henry North, within the medical field, about the untested swine flu vaccine where:

Ministers have agreed to pay doctors £5.25 per jab after weeks of talks.

Henry says:

Under the programme put forward, people with health conditions, such as heart disease and diabetes, pregnant women, those with weakened immune systems and frontline health and social care workers will be the first to receive the jab.

and he concludes:

I have only one thing to say - Thalidomide.

Would you go near a doctor or hospital these days?

[coffee] and the necessity to smell it now

You've all seen those films where the small anti-hero stumbles on something but when he tries to do something about it, he's faced by a wall of smug, at first tolerant disbelief. It's a pity that it's a Bruce Willis who gets the revelation in those films, an ordinary man who somehow turns into a die-hard hero because in the real world, it's more often than not a nobody, an amateur who gets it.

We know how, in those films, the wall of officialdom, like the cop big wig who threatens John McClane and tells him to get off the air or the police who jump James Bond at the airport after he's saved the plane from being exploded - how they always get it wrong, quite satisfied in their world view of what is going on. It's only a major event which shakes them out of their complacency and by then it's too late.

We can all feel the utter frustration of not being able to do anything - like Sarah Conner in Terminator 2 who knows what's going down but is then shut up in a loony bin while she sees a child on a swing being obliterated by the nuclear blast. And Sarah Conner is a woman on the edge, a strange, crazy, violent person who has got that way because no one will believe her.

We all believe we've got it right - within our sphere of accounting or finance or law or engineering or whatever, we have the world worked out and are the pub philosophers of the blogosphere. Much of what we've come to believe is right but there's always something to show that we are a bit off in some ways or haven't twigged certain other things.

For example, I was sure that the NAU was the big one and that's how my posts on it read. Now, as a result of info pumped in from outside [you'd understand that many people don't wish to commit themselves in the comments section of a blog], I can see that we've been led down a side path on this one.

OK, OK, hold up for one moment. You'd agree things are not too great out there just now, from the financial crisis through to our children on drugs and prostituted before fourteen, to the lack of respect, to the rise of the new hooligan and so on. We all have our own explanation and our own blog to push it.

This is the single biggest obstacle to any progress on this - we are self-satisfied and won't open ourselves to radically different ideas. It doesn't help when those that have stumbled upon something only have fragments of it and quite understand it ourselves. We're asked to lay down chapter and verse before you and we can't. Ipso facto, in your eyes, we're talking shite.

But we're not - we really did come across those things. Hallucination, explained by natural phenomena - all of this is thrown at us but we know what we saw and what we saw was wrong. That was the case of Obama lying [in yesterday's post]. I knew he lied because I looked at the fine print and at the same time, knew of the SPPNA meetings - I knew of this connect.

There are hundreds out there who know far more than me on this issue, some of them send me things. I check them out. They're actually right or have mysteriously disappeared off the web in the past few days. Obama used the words "dreamed up by the internet". You see what he's doing - inviting the audience, in a spirit of bonhomie, to mock along with him.

The bottom line? Internet = kook, David Icke, wild theorist. Classic propaganda move.

The point of all that

The BIS are effectively stating that nations' taxpayers should be responsible for all derivatives ever written prior to now. And also possibly ongoing. They are unique contracts, incapable of netting. The BIS is showing the net figures.

No exchange can possibly be created to insure this cr-p. Everything going over an exchange becomes ultimately the responsibility of the exchange, that's why counter parties are financially examined for qualification. Balancing is done nightly. Normal exchange accepted contracts are standardised, and are nettable and insurable.

This rubbish isn't. I'd like the financial boys and girls who read this blog in RSS to consider the following:

# Unless financial contracts have standards there is no way to clear them.

# Unless financial instruments have accurate means of daily valuation, there is no way to clear them.

# OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no standards.

# OTC derivatives outstanding from 1991 to 2008 have no sound means of true valuation in any time frame, certainly not from day to day.

It's why AIG went down, they had no assets behind the "insurance", derivatives, that they sold OTC. They were fools to get involved with GS, JPM, etc, these were the guys writing this rubbish, they knew they would fail, and given the repealed legislation, they, (GS, JPM, et al) knew the taxpayer, via treasury, would be on the hook!

Greenspan, CFRers et al campaigned for no oversight of these instruments. Meanwhile, the rest of the actual banking world, who understood the implications, were silent. The NAU is a side issue, a distraction. No one is shouting about this and that should tell the story in itself.

Why did gold jump last week? What's happening with gold?

Why did China say it was OK for Chinese Coys to default on certain derivatives, raised by certain western banks? Why has a trade dispute suddenly blown up between China and US? The short position to cap gold, right now, is unbelievable. Those who hold it are the bullion banks, in thrall to the central banks.

We are in very, very strange times right now, where very weird things, which defy explanation, are going down. They attempted to make Iran the target of a new war and Iran, the nutters, willingly obliged with their provocation. Why? Why did the U.S. shift its position on this in the sense of not going at it as gung ho as before?

The Chinese obviously woke up to this, to what was really behind the U.S. moves at key strategic points in the world and they had their own agenda, which this threatened to derail. Hence their moves in the last decade. I'm sorry to go back to Wilson's dictum again but if it's true, it keeps coming back.

There is clear international financial collusion going on and the question is where the source of it is. Wilson could only see as far as the U.S. itself when he said "Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."

It's been said by many others, even by those involved in it. It's there to read and people don't read. It is sheer lunacy to ignore what people on the inside say, when they give out warnings. Eisenhower was a brave man, hence his position in WW2. He gave the same warning , only disguised and muted, when he realized what was going on.

Do you think the things going on in America are normal, usual? Do you think the state control of our rubbish bins and over education in our country here, to the dissolution of England as an entity, is normal and usual?

There are things clearly going down, aren't there?

We know some of the centres of it but even they, the CBs, are just the visible front which can take the flak. You can see the arrogant way in which banks are getting bailed out and top execs, in the past few days, have been revealed to have given themselves huge bonuses. The world is descending into mania, it seems.

No - we are not mad. Not us. The madness is at the top, in Them, the disconnect with normality and morality and it's a very sane mania, predicated on money. Always it comes back to money and who controls the credit.

That's what's going down.

Look a your own situation. Do you have a mortgage? Why? Why isn't the house price within a range which you could pay off in five years? The answer is that the prices have, over the past decades, slipped out of your grasp. Why do mothers work? Two reasons - feminism/suffragettism and economic necessity. Nothing wrong with it but why is it necessary? Why are things so grim, so difficult?

Because they've been made so. Because this is all about control of the population. You call it Statism if you like, you call it the socialist move to break down the free enterprise system. I call it Them. Same thing, different name.

2010/11 is when the major moves come up. Which year did this blog rabbit on about, in its early days? 2012, wasn't it? Why? Because I stumbled upon something - I read some FOMC reports word for word and what was couched in there was jaw-dropping.

It was written on this blog that we'd come out of this recession for some time too before the real crash came, the crash engineered years ago by the simple expedient of sitting back and allowing some things to come to pass, knowing the game well enough to know that they would, must, come to pass. Greenspan is one of the men who did that. There were others. Blind Freddy knew that sub-prime lending must implode and that hedge-funds were fraught with issues.

They knew people would run to metals and voila - gold has shot up. Does anyone seriously say that gold and silver are not controlled?

You, the people, have no mechanisms to hit back, even if you understand it. You are effectively disempowered. There is no democracy, for the simple reason that you cannot effect change. The running of your family and you is in the hands of the government, itself riddled with and in thrall to Them. The departments of state and semi-governmental bodies are riddled with Pod people, all administering the party line.

Only major action would change this but all social upheavals have been anticipated anyway and the funded leaders end up in control again. The Who - meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We run around blindly in our impotence and frustration but there is someone we can hit immediately and it at least dents the push. That is the combination of Central Banks who are far, far more than financial institutions. All the command and control resides in there. They're powerful but anything human can go down, never forget. Hitler did, Stalin didn't but he died anyway.

Hit the humans behind the CBs, feeling safe behind their firewalls and we have part of the victory back. Then starts the long haul.

So ... who'll bell the cat? We're waiting for a hero to do something about it.

[crb checks] skip this post - it offends

Take your pick of the blogs running the story of the CRB checks gone mad. Here's the Norfolk Blogger:

The latest initiative by the government to ensure that everyone who has anything to do with children, including those parents who give lifts to and from clubs is an astonishing amount of overkill and symbolic of this government's willingness to ignore common sense at all costs.

Is it just mindlessness or is it something else as well? A bit of both really. Nich makes the point:

The other aspect is the fact that CRB checks are a very good income stream for the government. My old school had to get me CRB checked when I qualified as a teacher. I then got CRB checked again 3 years later when I became a councillor. There was then a change in the status of my school and all staff (including me) had to have further CRB checks. Then I changed school, and my old CRB check (only one year old) was deemed invalid so I was checked again ...

... and it didn't stop there. So that's a prime motivation. There is still that mindlessness aspect though and the appalling mindset of the modern civil servant - compliant, fearful for the job, wishing to score brownie points and so, so complacent in their conviction that they're on the right path.

Is it the ideologue or the 2IC, the middle to upper level numpty who sees the "need to protect the kiddies" and to hell with blighting anyone's life because it's such a good cause and we have to turn Britain/America/Canada into a nanny state a.s.a.p.?

Look at the pics of these people in this post and they are the ones I mean - do-gooding, intolerant in their PC way, riding roughshod over all who dare question the sanity of what they're doing, with a "suspect everyone, just to be sure" mindset and so, so sweetly reaching for the big stick to beat you down with, refusing to debate the issue publicly and so on.

Ezra Levant is writing on a similar mentality over in Canada, with this piece on [Such and Such a Numpty] is Delusional. Fill in your choice of name - the plot's the same.

These are the people who honestly believe they are doing good. Hell, even satanists think they're on the right track. The people in those photos, each and every one, wish to bring in more and more legislation, just to tie up the loose ends but their minds cannot encompass or else they simply don't care what they do to substantial portions of the population when they get one of their brainwaves.

Changing topic - angels and demons

There's another phenomenon I'd like to look at today - the murderer.

Lower right is a murderer. Doesn't look like one - looks like an angel but she took part in a murder in Italy.

Why? What would motivate her to do so? It's a long story.

For a start, the pic immediately below shows one reason:



This is the culture which youth has no choice but to be immersed in , from cradle to club, the values being completely twisted. In lieu of any sort of moral absolutes, instead there's booze and bodies, with the consequent deterioration of intellect and any sort of caring values plus sheer ignorance of any externals. Youth never cared much anyway for charity at home, except in a jargonistic way for birds with broken wings, little kittens and the starving poor in Africa, live aid concerts and so on.

So already, Amanda Knox was part of all that but exacerbating it was the new lack of control - the ASBO syndrome, the "Wotchoo lookin at, eh?" mindlessness. Some other girl steps on Amanda's territory - rape the bitch. In a culture with no decency but values conferred by gaming, clubbing and with parental input long since rejected and absent, it's a disaster waiting to happen.

The minds of these people have to be observed to be believed and it's not a new phenomenon. Twenty years ago I was briefly living in a city, in a house where two of this type were also living. I've never seen such gross self-centredness, where each wanted the other to wait on her hand and foot.

These are not pleasant people, except maybe 40% of the time, when they are absolute angels. We're talking, of course, of teenagers who don't grow up but instead of being Peter Pans and Wendys, they're Chucky and that girl from The Ring, only in a supposedly grown up form.

It's no accident how they got this way - the education system, the bilge on the net, the way music and games have turned dark and nasty - all of it sucks big kids in.

Little kids still cling to mum and dad.

The Annakin Skywalker syndrome

I would posit that the vast majority of personal crime, even in crimes of passion, is perpetrated by people who've already been softened up by perverse circumstances and in Knox's case, by a diet of perverse culture. You think your own son or daughter, free of any moral constraint, would be incapable of such acts?

It all comes down to your own moral fibre in the end and how far your parents and teachers imparted it to you. Someone once said of Guinevere, "How can you expect her to resist Lancelot and stay true to Arthur when she was kept shut away and ignorant?"

Parents turn around today and say, "Well what can we do? He doesn't listen to a word I say."

Why not?

Because the perverse culture has got him/her, a culture which should have been shut down the moment it reared its head decades ago. The Spock method of bringing up children. And in the schools, a different type of teacher was now in place who jollied it along in an Edmund Burkean [good men do nothing] sort of way.

So, here's our young person, with little self-control and along comes the Emperor Palpatine, feeding, Iago-like [to mix screenplays], on the natural jealousy, envy and sudden hatred of the one who's been on your mind. You fly into a blind range, you suddenly snap, you do the deed and then the tap is turned off and you can observe your handiwork.

You'll either feel remorse, as Ivan the Terrible did, going to the chapel and praying for forgiveness or else you'll harden your heart, refuse to accept responsibility and there's a sociopath and psychopath in the making. How many late teenage to early thirties psychos infest the bars and clubs around this country each evening? Or else they stay in their room, locked into the net.

You do it long enough and you have gone over to the dark side.

How can you pull back, how can you pull out of it? There's no chance while there is no moral basis underpinning the society, no moral code which is generally accepted. When that is thrown out, as it has been, only dark, empty values can take their place. Where is the messiah who appears, the embodiment of integrity and security, like the ship's officer at the end of Lord of the Flies?

Where is he? There are only false messiahs like Obama. It was even predicted so.

Therefore, the Amanda Knox/Annakin Skywalker phenomenon is only going to increase, not decrease, pollies will have expenses scandals, church leaders will be rapists, those we look up to will turn out to be hollow shells, white-anted from within, until people reattach themselves to sanity, to rationality, to the classic liberal mentality and some sort of decency and integrity can return in our dealings with one another.

And look at this! The lies which are told. It's not down to that at all.

[thought for the day] monday evening

Xlbrl presents Toqueville:

The more a cause seems to be abandoned, the more passionately I become attached to it.

[figaro it out] practical outfits

Seeing double

How much would you pay me to wear this in Leicester Square?

[late evening listening] the big o and the boss

My goodness - look who's the Big O's fellow vocalist and guitarist and look at those back up vocal girls - now that's respect!





.. and one from Bruce himself:



"At night on them banks Id lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take
Now those memories come back to haunt me, they haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it dont come true
Or is it something worse that sends me
Down to the river though I know the river is dry?

[meetings] love them or loathe them, you can't like them

Is this typical or is this typical?

With respect to Douglas Adams' Marvin.

At one staff meeting, soon into my headmastership, I stopped and said, "You know, I really hate sitting around at lunchtime, going on and on about things like this, when what I really want is my break.

The thing is, when we do have a meeting, we don't want it to drag on and we don't want to have to come back the next day and the next. Nor do we want it to go on into the night.

If we run these meetings before school, we get insufficient concentration, it pressurizes you because you like to do your preparation then and I'd like you always to be there when the parents and kids come in. We'd not resolve anything and have to continue later.

Alternatively, we could run them in our break times, such as lunchtime and we all know how we feel about that. Again, we'd have to come back the next day most like.

Or we can run them after school, in your time and mine, have fewer meetings, when sufficient business comes up to need one. In the meantime, we can deal with most issues by a sort of bulletin board with tick boxes where you can anonymously tick which option you like or suggest your own.

If there are things we really need to decide together, getting ideas, brainstorming and so on, then we'll hold a meeting, with one week's notice. However, we'd expect people to be at it, to contribute and most of all, we want a result on each question - at least an interim working plan, so that we don't have to come back next day and do it all over again.

I envisage you'd need to give up to an hour and a quarter, I'd micro-manage it so that we'd keep moving along and not overly dwell on one point but at the same time, get as many points in as possible, then it would cut off at the hour and a quarter, no matter what. Plus I don't want to have it here but over the road at the Fox and Hounds - there's a side room, as you know.

Your say."

The mothers didn't like the after-school bit but the reduction in the number was attractive. Some wanted it only in school hours but in an independent school where staff were expected to give time outside the regulation hours anyway, that wasn't taken too seriously.

One didn't like the pub idea but the rest did. No one wanted before school. Some wanted the "least worst option" of lunchtime but when it was apparent that it would need to be two lunchtimes, balked at that.

We voted and tried the pub option occasionally after school - in practice it became every two and a half weeks or thereabouts.

Question - if you were heading up a team or group, how would you arrange meetings? How do you arrange them?