Saturday 28 December 2019

Russian Culture Is Flowering In London

Hillary Clinton may not like Russia, even though her husband has been known to line his pockets with a few roubles, but lesser mortals in the UK are less hostile to this colossus which was once our enemy but should now be our friend. Whatever the state of relations between our two nations, some individual Russians have boosted the UK economy in no uncertain terms. However much the Russian-based Internet Research Agency spent on Facebook advertisements in the run-up to the US Presidential elections, this was dwarfed by the money spent by certain Russian “oligarchs” in the English capital. From 2003, the Russian-born Roman Abramovich has invested heavily in Chelsea, one of the country’s leading football clubs. From the available public information, this ownership does not appear to have benefited him financially, so why does he do it? Who cares? Chelsea fans don’t!

In 2009, Evgeny Lebedev bought the Evening Standard, the major London evening newspaper and one of the country’s major regional newspapers. The paper was founded in 1827 as The Standard, a skimpy broadsheet which sold for a hefty 7d. (A hundred years later the same money would have bought you a kilogramme of sugar). Mr Lebedev’s newspaper is free, supported by advertising.

Away from the business of sport and publishing, we have Russian culture. While its charismatic leader Mr Putin is still not very popular here, Pushkin is in heavy demand.

Alexander Pushkin was born in 1799, and is universally recognised as one of Russia’s greatest literary figures. Pushkin House is a registered charity based in Bloomsbury. Founded by Russian émigrés and their supporters in 1954, it is dedicated to Pushkin and all Russian culture. From January 28 to February 2, it will be hosting its inaugural Festival Of Russian Music.

Puskin House: centre of Russian culture in London.

The Eurasian Creative Guild (London) is a much newer organisation with a similar though slightly broader remit. Founded by Marat Akhmejanov, it meets at the Russian Cultural Centre in High Street Kensington and publishes a glossy magazine, OCA. This year it launched the Eurasian Film Festival, which was held in Romford. The next one will be held from May 24-30. Details can be found on the dedicated website: http://eurasianfilmfestival.uk/ in English and Russian.

If that is too far ahead, the Nutcracker is currently playing at the London Coliseum until January 5, and The Sleeping Beauty at the Royal Opera House until January 16. This famous ballet runs to three hours with two intervals, and tickets are a very reasonable £30.

Is D’Andre Lane Innocent?

In October 1994, Susan Smith told police in Union, South Carolina she had been carjacked by a man who drove off with her two young sons on the back seat. Nine days later, she led them to the lake into which she had driven the vehicle, drowning both boys. This horrific tale has been thoroughly documented, and Smith has been the subject of countless hours of viewing. Right from the start there were problems with her story, but every day, police all over the world hear both improbable stories that turn out to be true and plausible ones that are outright lies.

In December 2011, D’Andre Lane of Detroit told a similarly implausible story in which he was carjacked by not one but two men, who drove off with his two year old daughter Bianca Jones on the back seat. Like Smith, Lane was charged with and convicted of murder, but that is where the similarities end, because in Lane’s case there is no confession, no body, and no real motive. Smith murdered her sons because they stood in the way of what she saw as a rosy future with the son of her employer. It has been claimed Lane beat his daughter to death because she wet the bed, but the evidence for this is weak at best.

Lane is no angel, to put it mildly, he has several convictions including for violence, and has served hard time. He is also a father of seven. By seven different women!

He failed a polygraph, and a cadaver dog is alleged to have detected traces of death in his car, which was found abandoned a mile from where he claimed to have been hijacked. Polygraphs are junk science, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. As for the dog, did it actually lead the police to a body?

On the plus side, Lane had returned to college and was trying to turn his life around. And there are witnesses who claim his daughter was alive after she was alleged to have been murdered, including one who claims the girl was kidnapped by someone close to home.

Lane lost an appeal against conviction in 2014, but two years ago, his attorney told True Crime Daily he too had evidence Bianca was still alive, and he is not the only one.

Above: D’Andre Lane with the daughter he is alleged to have murdered. But what happened to her body?

Although they have not been very active of late, Lane’s supporters can be found on Twitter. The big question has to be, if Lane really did murder his daughter, where in Hell did he dump the body? He had a limited time frame in which to dispose of it, and in cases like this, the police usually go the extra mile and then some, but there has been not a trace of Bianca Jones. It appears too that once they were satisfied in their own minds that Lane’s carjacking story didn’t hold up, the police didn’t bother to pursue other lines of investigation.

Monday 18 November 2019

The Great Reading Gang-Rape Hoax Of 1982 (And Its Aftermath)

On January 18, 1982, the BBC screened a controversial documentary. A Complaint Of Rape was part of a series using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique; its subject was not simply the police but their methods. Part of a series called simply Police, this episode caused outrage and led to changes in the way rape complainants are dealt with by the police in Britain.

The outrage was due to the way the complainant in this particular case was treated. A young woman was seen sitting in a room with three male detectives who obviously did not believe her story about being gang-raped by three men. To say the detectives were dismissive would be to understate the case. Among other things, they accused her of being a prostitute. As it turned out, they were not far off the mark, but the viewing public was not to know that.

The outrage over this perceived ill-treatment was augmented by something far worse. Earlier that month, John Allen had stood trial at Ipswich Crown Court for the rape of a teenage hitchhiker. Allen had pleaded not guilty, but after the girl broke down in court he changed his plea. What happened next was extraordinary. Instead of sentencing Allen to a substantial gaol term, Judge Bertrand Richards said the girl had been “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence” then fined him £2,000. This led to the MP Arthur Lewis asking the Attorney General if the Lord Chancellor would dismiss the judge, to which he received a one word answer: “No”.

Unlike this poor girl who was clearly denied justice, the young woman at Woodley Police Station was not a rape victim, she was a head case, and a far greater danger to innocent men than they were to her. Obviously the detectives knew this, but you wouldn't know this if you read contemporaneous reviews of the programme.

If you are skeptical, see if you can find A Complaint Of Rape on the regular Internet. You won't be able to, for good reason, any critical investigation would tear its bogus narrative to shreds. One of the men behind the programme was Roger Graef. When he was asked to comment on it in 2017, he fell strangely silent, although 9 years previously he had already backtracked slightly when he wrote an article for the London Evening Standard in which he urged women not to drink too much and give out mixed signals to men.

Roger Graef — one of the men behind the 1982 Reading gang-rape hoax.

The truth about the 1982 documentary was not long in coming out but was not widely disseminated. On January 29, the Reading Chronicle published a letter from Mrs E.M. O’Rourke who wrote “I believe there had been no rape in the legal sense, but no-one doubted the woman’s story was substantially correct”. Seven days earlier, the Bradford newspaper Telegraph & Argus published a letter from a correspondent who pointed out that “she had (a) made a similar complaint that proved groundless and (b) she had a history of mental disturbance”.

History and future! On February 1, she was arrested for creating a disturbance in the centre of Reading, and promptly Sectioned. This was apparently not the first time, nor the second, she had been taken off the street in this fashion.

In spite of non-partisan reporting by the Reading Chronicle, the country heard only the whinings of the sexual grievance industry which to this day continues to spout vacuous statistics and factoids about how many men get away with rape aided and abetted by the police.

In June 2016, another documentary with the same title was screened. This focused on an allegation made by a young Spanish tourist in Bedford who the previous June had gone voluntarily with a man who had by his own admission drunk nine pints of beer. There was no suggestion of money changing hands, but their relationship had been confined to sex in his hotel room. For whatever reason, it had not ended well, and she accused him of rape. A prompt investigation led not only to his arrest but to exculpatory CCTV evidence and an earwitness. Even so, a woman detective assigned to the case had clearly drunk the feminist Kool-Aid, but thankfully the CPS declined to charge him. Think about this, what couldn’t most men do after drinking nine pints of beer?

At the end of this second documentary, the viewer was treated to the same contrived feminist statistics: 9 out of 10 rapes go unreported. How does anyone know if they are not reported? And only 6% of reported rapes result in conviction. There is an obvious solution to this: the authorities should stop bringing so many weak cases. In addition to that, women should be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves, and gratuitous false accusers need to be severely punished.

While fortunately (grooming gangs aside) gang-rapes are rare, false allegations of gang-rapes are not. Here are a few examples from both sides of the Atlantic:

November 2005: At Oldham, Lancashire, single mother Sherelle Deblasio has sex with four men, then filled with shame decides to frame them for rape. Fortunately, three of them had smartphones.

March 2006: the outrageous Duke University hoax. The false accuser in that case received no punishment, and went on to murder her lover.

September 2009: the notorious Hofstra University case — the reprobates concerned were saved by mobile phone footage.

February 2010: Teenager Cheryll Dannatt has sex with three men, the fourth declined. The next day she tells her mother she was gang-raped.

May 2014: At the Cirencester Mad Hatter’s Ball, Cirencester, four students have sex with Miss X. Yet again, video evidence saves the wrongly accused.

Sadly, rather than tackle the problem of false rape allegations and the abuse of alcohol that leads to so many rapes — real and imaginary — the focus of the sexual grievance industry is squarely on the erosion of due process, making it easier to convict the guilty and innocent alike. In the United States it has become positively dangerous for any man especially a student to have sex with a woman who has consumed any quantity of alcohol, while in Canada no evidence is required to convict a suspect, only a story. Along with statutes of limitations, jury trials have long been abolished, making Canada arguably the most dangerous country in the world for a man to be falsely accused of rape. And we haven’t even mentioned the ludicrous #MeToo Movement yet.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, September 15, 2019].

TRUMP — The Reckoning

Now that the Mueller Report has been published and Donald Trump has been cleared of colluding with Russia, heads will roll.

Donald Trump was nearly seventy years old when he announced he was running for President of the United States. He had been asked if he would run way back in the 1980s, and ruled it out. Having literally no political experience, he was treated largely as a joke candidate, something he took in good humour, but the joke turned sour, first when he decimated a seventeen strong field of Republican hopefuls, and then when he beat Hillary Clinton losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college and thus the Presidency.

By this time, the jokes had turned to hysteria. What would any reasonable person have expected him to do at his age? With a much younger wife, a young son, an extended family, fame, and wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, he could have spent his golden years playing golf, doting on his grandkids, and doing anything he wanted and was able to within reason. Instead he elected to spend six hundred million dollars of his own money on a long shot to capture the Presidency, then work like a dog afterwards. Why? Because he saw his country being trashed and figured only he could save it.

Donald Trump

You can call that wishful thinking, arrogance, even a Messiah complex, but the fact remains he put his money where his mouth is and delivered the goods. He didn’t even take a salary. And he has clearly been enjoying himself in both the run up to the election and in his Presidency, but there has been a dark side, a very dark side. While Trump has won millions of fans, he has earned the scorn of the elites, the intellectuals, the mass media, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. To date he has been the victim of an albeit half-hearted assassination attempt by a deranged British national, he has been assassinated in effigy in imitation of the Ides of March, decapitated in effigy, slandered and libelled from pillar to post.

After his Republican enemies released the now notorious Access Hollywood tape, a gaggle of demented and simply dishonest, attention-seeking females came forward to accuse him of a variety of sexual misdemeanours. He has been branded a bigot, a money launderer for the mob, his sanity has been questioned, and crude innuendo has been directed at him about his relationship with his eldest daughter.

Not content with trashing the man himself, elements of the media have attacked his daughter, his son Donald as a Russian “colluder”, his wife has been branded a prostitute, even his young son Barron has not been spared. Fifty years from now or even twenty, future American historians will look back on his treatment in shame. But the biggest lie, one that should never have been credited, is that he was somehow in the pockets of the Kremlin, or Vladimir Putin in person. How this lie came about has now been thoroughly documented, not by the mainstream media but by Fox News and its pundits who have broadcast the findings of Gregg Jarrett, Dan Bongino, Sara Carter, Joe diGenova, the Judicial Watch team, The Epoch Times, and other Conservative organisations. To this list must be added the names of several leading Republican politicians, including Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan, Louis Gohmert, Jason Chaffetz, Trey Gowdy and Lindsey Graham.

So how did the Russian collusion hoax begin? It is based entirely on a spurious so-called dossier written ostensibly by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, a man who had excellent credentials, although in view of its contents one is entitled to ask if those credentials should not now be scrutinised carefully. The most outrageous claim of this dossier is that while he was in Moscow, Trump hired a brace of prostitutes to urinate on a mattress in the hotel suite that had been used by the Obamas.

Although there is little or no chance of his ever submitting himself to questioning by Congress, Steele has now admitted (ie claimed) in civil proceedings that he didn’t actually visit Russia to “research” this dossier but did so by telephone. This has led some people to claim the Russians have played the Democratic leadership for fools, but we have no proof that any Russians much less any working for the Russian Government had anything to do with the Steele dossier. Dan Bongino has pointed out that this Russian collusion stupidity actually originated as far back as 2007 and has simply been rewritten and tailored to fit Trump. Dick Morris, who knows how a certain person’s sick mind works, suggests it was written in-house by two Clinton henchmen.

Whoever actually wrote the dossier, most of this so-called opposition research was funded by Hillary Clinton who disguised its funding by paying for it through the law firm Perkins Coie. This is not so much a campaign violation as money laundering, but as with her e-mail scandal, laws are for the little people.

Although Clinton was responsible for the Steele dossier, Republicans were initially involved, including the late John McCain. McCain may have been a war hero, but that was the limit of his humanity. If he had beaten Obama in 2008, the Middle East would quite likely have gone up in flames.

The dossier was used not only to spread disinformation in the mainstream media but to dupe the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into issuing warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. Its contents were fed to the Yahoo! News hack Michael Isikoff, a so-called investigative journalist, and the resulting news reports were used to bolster its authenticity, a classic case of circular reporting. This allowed rogue operators to spy on Carter Page, and in effect on Trump himself.

If the Steele dossier and spying on Page had been the limits of the conspiracy, that would have been bad enough, but the extent of it and the names of the major players is breath-taking. We know now for certain that in addition to Hillary Clinton, the following people were involved: James Comey, John Brennan and James Clapper — the top men of the three major intelligence agencies; Andrew McCabe, the number two man at the FBI; Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, also top FBI agents; Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie, the former being a senior Department Of Justice official; Susan Rice, a top aide to Barack Obama; Loretta Lynch, Attorney General in the same administration; and Sally Yates, an Obama holdover who was sacked by Trump for insubordination.

The Trump/Russia hoax has been called bigger than Watergate, in reality it dwarfs Watergate, this was America’s Gunpowder Plot because its intention was nothing less than to destroy a duly elected President and topple his administration. That amounts to sedition, some would even call it treason.

Not content with simply spreading disinformation about Trump/Russia, the conspirators used agents provocateurs to infiltrate the Trump campaign and try to set up innocent men as Russian assets. Two we know of are the academic Stefan Halper and the mysterious Joseph Mifsud.

The attempt to set up Donald Trump Junior by arranging a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was blatant. Don Junior was clearly gullible, otherwise he would have arranged for his attorney to be present, or better still his attorney and a video camera. Adam Schiff made much of this, claiming it was an attempt to collude to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Then he was hoist by his own petard when two Russian comedians phoned him at his office and offered him photographs of Trump naked! Schiff was enthusiastic, but he is so far gone he doesn’t see the double standard.

How did they expect to get away with this? As Joe diGenova has pointed out, under President Hillary Clinton, all this would simply have gone away; the problem is, she didn’t win. The conspirators also had other, greater aims besides taking down Trump, in particular covering up Clinton’s earlier crimes, stopping any future Trumps, and, some of them, of reigniting the Cold War.

It is not difficult to understand why the Deep State and its operatives hate Trump so much and moved Heaven and Earth to get rid of him. Trump is a businessman, he knows how big business operates, how it plays the system and buys influence. He intended to put a stop to that, and has done to a certain extent. He was also intent on downsizing so-called capitalist America’s massive bureaucracy. A simple but spectacular example of this is his simplification of the tax system which especially benefits small companies and the self-employed. Now, most Americans filing their tax returns need fill out only one double-sided sheet of paper instead of thirty or so pages. Think of the bureaucracy and make-work jobs that destroys.

Apparatchiks are extremely well paid, have excellent terms of service, fat pensions, and are all but unsackable. All that is changing under Trump. Now imagine he gets only so much done, and ten, twenty years from now someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg comes along, someone who like him is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice so cannot be bought, bribed or intimidated. The Hell Trump has been put through was designed to ensure that never happens. The Deep State and their allies have also sought not only to punish Trump but anyone who has the temerity to work with him.

This is why we have seen people on the fringes prosecuted for process crimes like lying to the FBI, crimes that would not have been committed but for the Mueller investigation, and crimes that are extremely minor. This is why Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were arrested by armed agents in dawn raids, tactics that may be suitable for taking down terrorists but not for men accused of white collar crimes. Manafort is now serving a heavy prison sentence for such crimes committed years before Trump announced his Presidential run. The arrest and pressurising of Roger Stone and others was done in the words of Alan Dershowitz, not only to make them sing but to compose.

Trump’s lawyers wisely advised him not to sit down for a formal interview with Mueller because it was clearly a perjury trap. In situations like this, perjury is anything the “investigators” say it is. Their utter ruthlessness is proof positive of that.

Another reason his enemies have gone all out to stop Trump is to cover up the crimes of Hillary Clinton. When she was Secretary of State, she set up a private e-mail server in her home on which she conducted Government business. This was uncovered accidentally by Judicial Watch. This is such a big thing because the e-mails of a public servant belong to the state. A humble police constable or low level local government administrator who did what she did would be sacked. But Hillary Clinton was using her private e-mail too for correspondence that must remain secret because lives could literally be at stake. And, as the YouTube vlogger HA Goodman has pointed out repeatedly, Clinton or someone close to her found a way to transfer top secret information from JWICS onto the regular Internet. JWICS is a high security American Government Intranet, so communications cannot be transferred onto the Internet accidentally; such transfers must have been manual. This alone constitutes serious espionage, and it begs the question why?

The answer to that question is simple, Clinton was peddling influence through the foundation she and her husband set up after he left office. Eric Trump summed it up with a question, what service or goods did they supply that made them so rich? The Clintons are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, yet when they left the White House, he had lost his law license and was at best looking forward to making a living on the rubber chicken dinner circuit, a perk of the Presidency. That would certainly have kept him in cigars, but would it have stretched to a private jet? If Jason Goodman and especially Charles Ortel are right, the corruption of the Clintons and their associates is off the scale.

The third reason the Deep State was and remains so anxious to take down Donald Trump is because there are lunatics in high places who seek to reignite the Cold War. Indeed, there are some who even want to see war with China. How insane is that? It isn’t for those who make money out of it, only for us peasants, especially those who are sacrificed in these obscene, never-ending, no-win wars.

It is difficult to assess how much damage these people have already done. We know for example that Chinese agents hacked Clinton’s e-mails while she was Secretary of State. And this absurd mantra of “Russia, Russia, Russia” has even pushed Trump in the direction of confrontation instead of cooperation with Russia because every time he backs off , he is attacked as a Putin puppet, absurd as that is.

There are signs though that big change is coming, and it may be coming sooner than anybody thinks. Trump himself has said what happened to him cannot be allowed to go unpunished, and that nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen to a future President. The Democratic leadership and the mass media may howl and scream in unison, but there is already more than enough damning information in the public domain for Trump and his new Attorney General to do what he promised back in 2016: drain the Swamp.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, April 23, 2019 and republished shortly by The Duran].

Who Hacked America?

In spite of the Mueller Report delivering nothing on “Russia, Russia, Russia!” there is still hysteria about Russian interference in the American electoral process. The puerile nature of this apparent interference was discussed here last month, but leaving aside the Internet Research Agency and assorted fake Facebook advertisements placed by sockpuppet accounts, what is going on in the cyberworld? Who else is playing silly, expensive or even dangerous games? Here are a few suggestions in no particular order:

Scotsman Gary McKinnon hacked into 97 US military and NASA computers over a thirteen month period in 2001–2002. He said he was looking for evidence of UFOs and other fringe subjects. His was said to have been the biggest military hack of all time — one man.

In October 2012, the South Carolina Department Of Revenue was hacked; this affected over three and a half million accounts.

In August 2013, hackers targeted Yahoo. Although based in the US, this Internet giant has branches worldwide. According to a report by National Public Radio four years later, it was likely that every Yahoo! account in existence at the time had been hacked.

Also in 2013, the social network site Tumblr was hacked, which led to the compromise of over 65 million passwords.

In May 2014, eBay was hacked, and 145 million users had their data compromised.

Navinder Singh Sarao was said to have helped trigger a multibillion dollar Wall Street crash. He was living with his parents in Hounslow, West London at the time of his arrest in April 2015. Although not a hacker, he made (and apparently lost) millions by manipulating markets with a sophisticated computer program of his own design. Last year, someone hacked the Pentagon compromising the personal information of over thirty thousand staff. Has Rachel Maddow even mentioned this?

Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta’s personal Gmail account was hacked, and there is no suggestion this was masterminded by Vladimir Putin. Clinton was herself hacked, but not by Russia, by China or some agency of the Chinese Government. This was announced to the world by Congressman Louis Gohmert. The entity concerned managed to blind copy her e-mails to another address.

How the brilliant cartoonist Clay Jones sees the hacking controversy.

Finally, way back in March 1995, a Russian by the name of Vladimir Levin rather than Vladimir Putin was arrested at Stansted Airport on suspicion of hacking into Citibank and stealing money — a massive financial fraud. He was eventually extradited to the United States where after a plea bargain he was sentenced to three years behind bars and ordered to pay restitution.

It would seem then that over the past quarter century, American companies and Government institutions have suffered far more damaging attacks than those supposedly inflicted on the country by the Kremlin, yet the hacks continue. This tends to indicate that rather than scapegoat the new Russia, the American authorities should pay more attention to improving their own security. Using AVG might be a good start!

[The above article was first published on Medium, June 1, 2019].

Basic Income — Reductio Ad Absurdum

Andrew Yang’s proposed freedom dividend should he win the Presidency has attracted a certain amount of ridicule and a great deal of contempt in right wing circles, but the arguments against it are largely misguided. Most of these arguments are pseudo-moral rather than economic, they go something like this: anyone of a certain age who is able-bodied should be gainfully employed. Those who are not gainfully employed are sponging off the system.
Andrew Yang is on the right track.

For working class people, especially those holding down more than one job, this is an appealing argument — why should people get stuff for free when I am treated like a dog? However, this particular argument soon falls apart when one considers the large numbers of people doing make-work jobs or those which are actually socially harmful. An extreme example of this would be a burglar or a drug trafficker; these people may work hard, but it would be better for society if they didn’t work at all. Less obvious are the many people working in the grievance industry who actually make bad situations worse, and if you think fund managers benefit their wealthy clients, you haven’t read The Shares Game which points out that the best route for the average investor is simply to buy a tranche of shares and hold onto them. A quarter of a century after this iconoclastic book was published, the author was vindicated in spectacular fashion when a competition in South Korea showed that a parrot picking out shares with its beak outperformed most of the so-called professional investors.

There are plenty of other people making a comfortable living out of ignorance or gullibility, professional psychics and other flim-flam artists, for example.

People who adhere to pseudo-moral arguments to attack Andrew Yang are not asking the right question, namely what is the purpose of (paid) work? The answer is not to ennoble people with some ludicrous idea about the dignity of labour, but to produce the goods and services the community demands. Once this is acknowledged, most people will recognise work for what it is — a necessary evil, the curse of the drinking classes. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the US — has two primary goals: to maintain a low rate of inflation, usually 2%, and to promote something called full employment. Again, paid employment is seen as a duty of those lower down the food chain. People of independent means are not required to work. How many unemployed billionaires are there?

Do we want to bring about full employment, so-called, at any cost? The best way to do that is to start a war, and at times people have actually called for this. Now let us consider Andrew Yang’s argument.

Advances in technology, in particular, automation, are destroying jobs. Should we strive to create new jobs, or is there a better way? Imagine a world in which all the paid work currently undertaken in the United States and elsewhere was performed by robots. Yes, this is an unlikely scenario, but imagine it: robots do all the work. How is purchasing power to be distributed? If robots can grow wheat, bake bread, and sell you the loaf, which is collected by your own personal robot, where do you get the money to pay for it?

Andrew Yang proposes a tax on Amazon and other mega-corporations to fund his freedom dividend; this is the one place he goes wrong. The freedom dividend must be paid out of newly created debt-free money as proposed by the great Major Douglas nearly a century ago.

The cost of the freedom dividend would be a lot less than we are led to believe by the apparatchiks. For one thing, it would enable most if not all state benefits to be gradually phased out. This would reduce bureaucracy enormously, and benefit fraud with it. Petty crime would undoubtedly fall, and the burden on both social services and charities would be reduced.

Best of all, the freedom dividend would destroy the poverty trap and enable many people at the bottom of society to supplement their basic income by performing low paid work, work which under the current régime is not economical for employers to farm out.

Although the goal of the freedom dividend is to provide a universal basic income, it cannot be universalised at present. The United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, certain Middle East nations and possibly China would be able to implement some sort of freedom dividend, but for it to be extended to the rest of the world would require a greater investment in infrastructure and resources than at present. But, it must come, because for those at the bottom of the food chain, the alternative does not bear thinking about.

[The above article was first published on Medium, September 13, 2019].

“Sex On Trial” (3) — Review

Unlike the first two episodes, this one concentrates solely on one incident, the disgraceful and quite sordid Steubenville High School rape case. What actually happened here has been thoroughly documented, conveniently by the perpetrators themselves. Briefly, a teenage girl went to a party, got blind drunk or was got blind drunk, and was then “used” by a couple of high school football players. The rape consisted of digital penetration, and even the district attorney who prosecuted the case said they didn’t appear to realise what they did constituted rape. (It does in Ohio, but not in every jurisdiction).

Besides the usual suspects, the outrage generated over the case was down to a) the perception that it was being swept under the rug by the authorities and b) the sympathy engendered for the two convicted in juvenile court. Though the verdict was just, one can sympathise to a degree with two high-spirited but utterly stupid high school kids being branded as rapists over what they considered “fun”, even though they received extremely lenient sentences.

The two Steubenville rape case defendants.

Perhaps a comparison with the far more notorious Vanderbilt University rape case is in order. This saw the three main defendants awarded sentences of fifteen, fifteen and seventeen years respectively, but these sentences were warranted on account of the treatment they meted out to the unconscious victim, who in addition to being drunk was almost certainly drugged to ensure she remained unconscious the whole time.

The most interesting aspect of the current case was the testimony of an expert witness concerning alcohol-induced blackouts. Although it was rejected in this instance on purely evidential grounds, the science behind it is sound. Namely, someone who has consumed a lot of alcohol may do things consciously and voluntarily, but the transition from short term memory to long term memory is blocked, so a woman may wake up the next morning and genuinely believe she has not consented to sex. To this one should add the well recognised fact that alcohol breaks down inhibitions, including sexual inhibitions. Members of both sexes may engage in behaviour after a few drinks they wouldn’t dream of when sober. One should add further that women have a lower tolerance for alcohol than men.

A striking example of alcohol-induced blackout occurred in June 2018 when a woman named Amanda Barrow was filmed performing a sex act on a total stranger on a train at Aldermaston. Like the imbeciles they are, the British police wasted no time tracking down the perpetrator of this outrage to public decency. When she appeared in court, Miss Barrow did not dispute it was her on the film but said she had absolutely no memory of the incident.

If she was telling the truth, and she almost certainly was, this sort of blackout/amnesia could and probably does account for the majority, perhaps the vast majority of rape cases in which women claim they were too drunk to consent. This means that Steubenville aside, there are very likely hundreds of innocent men behind bars convicted of rape in the UK alone. Evidence from other sources including Operation Matisse, bears that out. Sadly, instead of highlighting this reality, the series continued to plug the ludicrous rape culture narrative of Lisa Avalos, whose voice can be heard at the start of the programme claiming that only 3% of rapists are ever brought to book.

[The above article was first published on Medium, May 26, 2019].

Akhmejanov And Parry — Bringing Russian Culture To London

While politicians on both sides of the Atlantic seem intent on demonising Russia, two men in London are going in the opposite direction.

Marat Akhmejanov from the former Soviet Union and Londoner David Parry have been working together for some time. Akhmejanov is a long time UK resident who publishes the quarterly OCA Magazine. He is also the founder of the Eurasian Creative Guild whose projects include publishing, film, graphic design, and all things literary from across Eurasia.

Marat Akhmejanov — founder of ECG.

Parry is best known as a man of the theatre with ties to especially Azerbaijan. In 2013, he put on the first ever London/UK/Western performance of Citizens Of Hell by the politician/playwright Elchin Afandiyev.

David Parry — tireless champion of the arts.

The Eurasian Creative Guild’s London Facebook group alone now has several thousand members. It meets at Rossotrudnichestvo which translates as Russia in the United Kingdom; this is based in Kensington, close to High Street Kensington Underground Station.

Alexander Muzykantov

The ECG’s London meeting earlier this month included a programme by the talented pianist Alexander Muzykantov. At this meeting, Marat and David both promised further expansion of the output of Guild members and the bridging of the gap between Western Europe and the far reaches of Asia. Their next big London event will be the ECG Film Festival; held from May 22–9, this will share a venue with the Romford Film Festival, which was first held in 2017.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, January 28, 2019].

The Rights And Wrongs Of Andrew Yang

The Democratic Party has a heavy but pathetic line-up of 2020 Presidential contenders. With two exceptions.

These two exceptions are Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang. Gabbard did two tours of the Middle East in a medical unit of the Hawaii Army National Guard and came home with some strong anti-war views. Although she labels herself a progressive, she is unlikely to make much headway and has already been smeared from pillar to post by the same vested interests who have attacked Donald Trump unremittingly since before he ascended to the Presidency. Leaving that aside, Gabbard is economically illiterate; she supports the minimum wage, something that always sounds good to the oppressed working class, but does far more harm than good.

Andrew Yang
Andrew Yang is a different kettle of fish though. The first Chinese-American to run for the Presidency, he understands business, and also understands something about economics. Yang has captured the imagination of progressives including comedian Jimmy Dore because he advocates and says if elected he will institute universal basic income for American citizens. This concept, which is actually hundreds of years old, goes by a number of names including Social Credit — after the great Major Douglas — and in Yangspeak, the Freedom Dividend.

As might be expected, conservatives blinded by their wage-slave mentality claim it will never work, some even ridicule it, yet something they never seem to realise, and probably Yang doesn’t either, is that there is a vast army of parasites out there who are essentially paid for doing nothing. If some of them actually work hard, the only people who benefit from their money manipulations are themselves. If you still don’t understand, check out Tony Levene’s classic book The Shares Game, or ask yourself if share trading is so beneficial to the economy how a parrot picking out trades with its beak can outperform seventy percent of professional investors?

Yang’s championing of basic income is motivated by what many people perceive foolishly as the “threat” of automation. The reality is that automation and the resulting increased output of goods and services benefits society as a whole, but, and here is the big but, it destroys many traditional jobs that have provided people with good or even exceptional livelihoods. If you want to see this expressed visually, go to YouTube and view street scenes from around 1895 when the motor car as we know it first became a regular visitor to our cities. At first you will see only or mostly horses, but fast forward five years at a time and you will see more and more motor vehicles and fewer horses until eventually, today, in most cities the only horse you will see is a police horse or one drawing the occasional novelty funeral procession.

Horses were big business for most of human history, but now the blacksmith, the stable owner, the groom, the rider, these are all gone. The rise of the motor car destroyed the livelihoods of those working in an entire industry, yet who would go back? The reality is that a world of seven billion people and rising could not exist without modern technology including the internal combustion engine and cars galore. There would be mass starvation without them.

Although Andrew Yang recognises this, what he does not understand is money. When asked where is the money to come from to fund his Freedom Dividend, his reply is a value added tax. No, no, no!

Leaving aside the Libertarian observation that taxation is theft, taxation reduces purchasing power. The valued added tax foisted on the UK, Australia via Malaysia and so many countries both in between and elsewhere is not the way to do it. As is now recognised though it was long denied, the vast majority of money in existence comes from the banking system, which creates it out of thin air then lends (ie sells) it to the rest of us: individuals, businesses, corporations, and governments. As Alessio Rastani said after the last big stock market crash, “Goldman Sachs rules the world”. He has faced criticism for that statement, but if he had said instead central banks rule the world, no reasonable person would have been able to criticise him.

Currently, central banks including the Federal Reserve create money by a conjuring trick known as quantitative easing. They may dress this up by claiming corporations deposit securities with them in exchange for cash, but the bottom line is the money appears out of thin air. To finance his Freedom Dividend, Andrew Yang needs to abolish the Federal Reserve and restore the right to create money to the US Congress, where it belongs. Good luck with that project.

In fact, all governments create a certain amount of their own credit through the coin and note issues. Why can’t they create it all? The scare story we are repeatedly fed is that to do that would cause hyper-inflation. No! Inflation is not caused by increasing the money supply, it is caused by printing money (including electronically) out of all proportion to the goods and services in circulation. Furthermore, we have inflation already, and a certain amount is not bad for the economy. One of the roles of central banks including the Bank Of England, is to ensure a 2% limit of inflation by controlling (ie manipulating) the money supply.

Even if he were to win the Democratic nomination and by some miracle defeat Donald Trump in 2020, Yang would still have a mountain to climb. Trump hasn’t taken on the money creators, but the hatred and vitriol that has been spewed on him has been a wonder to behold. Yet the only alternatives to basic income are slavery and war. A full discussion of this would take us far afield, but back in the 1930s, Major Douglas explained how a continued shortage of purchasing power leads to war.

Also, the institution of basic income is the only way to truly liberate the underclass, the large and slowly increasing body of mainly men who are unemployable at a living wage because no employer in his right mind would employ them. Check out this half hour video for a comprehensive exposition.

[The above article was first published on Medium, April 21, 2019].

Sunday 17 November 2019

The Great Russian American Election Conspiracy Hoax

Hillary Clinton would have the world believe she is not President of the United States due solely to the efforts of Russian disinformation operatives. The fact that she was an awful candidate has nothing to do with it. There was indeed Russian interference in the United States electoral process, or more accurately an organisation and individuals based in Russia posted messages on Facebook and elsewhere on-line, but can any honest person really believe this is the reason she lost to Donald Trump?

In February last year, the Mueller investigation handed down a 37 page indictment against the Internet Research Agency, an organisation that goes by the unfortunate acronym of IRA. Doubtless any member of the British security forces would rather tackle the Russian IRA than the one that has been murdering people in Northern Ireland and on the Mainland for decades.

Take a gander at this indictment, it does allege real crimes, in particular identity theft which was used to facilitate money laundering, but this sounds a lot more sinister than it is. The money “laundered” through these accounts was not stolen, simply disguised; it was used to purchase advertisements and pay supplementary expenses.

Russian propaganda against the United States?

Back in the 1960s during the Cold War, the cinema portrayed Russia spies as sinister and deadly, men and women who travelled on professionally forged documents, carried sophisticated, at times Aramaic weapons, and would kill without conscience. The modern equivalent of the KGB agent sits behind a keyboard and trolls social media. The above cartoon depicts Bernie Sanders; it is said to have been produced by the Internet Research Agency and aimed at potential Sanders voters. Ask yourself, if you were the septuagenarian Bernie Sanders, would you be unhappy with it?

Russian journalist Lyudmila Savchuk claims to have infiltrated (ie worked at) the Internet Research Agency. A presentation given by her at the Atlantic Council was uploaded to YouTube by this august organisation on October 2 last year. Doubtless, she is sincere, but she appears to be a bit of a flake.

Incidentally, the Atlantic Council is a think tank, one of many such organisations that operates worldwide to churn out pro-American propaganda. Its output appears to be a great deal more sophisticated than that of the Internet Research Agency, which can best be described as puerile, somewhat reminiscent of the pathetic fake hate mail produced by the FBI during the COINTELPRO years. The comedian Lee Camp has an alternative explanation for the activities of the Internet Research Agency.

Internet Research Agency aside, some big names in US Intelligence have made grandiose claims about the influence of Russia propaganda on the American election process. These big names include James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan; all are now former big names, and two if not all three of them are currently in serious legal jeopardy for abusing their authority to smear and carry out black operations against the Trump team and later the Trump Administration. But what details specifically do they make in these claims? How did Russian Intelligence, Russian trolls or Russian anything advance the Trump agenda? How did they discredit Hillary Clinton, the woman who told her rich backers to ignore her public pronouncements and that with her in the White House it would be business as usual for banks and corporations? The woman who called half of Trump’s supporters deplorables, ordinary, decent Americans who felt rightly their voices were not being heard as their standard of living stagnated or plummeted?

Less parochially, over half the world’s population uses the Internet, and English is its dominant language. Literally hundreds of millions of people post regularly to social media. These people have countless opinions on all manner of subjects, and not all of them are honest. Is it fair or even intelligent to blame any permutation of Russians for every negative comment made about America or Hillary Clinton, or every positive one made about Donald Trump?

[The above article was first published on Medium, May 4, 2019].

“Sex On Trial” (2) — Review

The second episode of this Channel 4 series is a lot more disturbing than the first. Rather than one unambiguous case of regret sex, it includes a clearly false allegation and the quite appalling rape of a young student that a detective dismissed almost summarily in spite of the victim suffering some of the worst vaginal injuries an experience sexual assault nurse examiner said she had ever seen.
Rape victim Abby Honold with then Senator Al Franken.

The false rape case has a racial aspect to it; Ray Buford and five other black football players from Minnesota University took home a white cheerleader, a young woman who was clearly a slut. She told one of these dudes she’d had a threesome before with two girls and a guy, and she was up for a threesome with two dudes. According to the players she had full sex with five of them and oral sex with a sixth. One of them smirked all the way through his interview, something that didn’t go down at all well with Mail Online readers.

The next day, the non-victim messaged one of the players and asked him what had happened the previous night, as if she didn’t know. Unsurprisingly, the programme follows the usual specious narrative of the sexual grievance industry and moronic liberal film-makers, namely, rape is a vastly under-reported crime, false allegations are extremely rare, and far too many rapists are “let off” by complacent or conniving jurors. And in this case, why would a woman lie?

We are not told the full truth about this false allegation; fortunately, as usual the American legal authorities have released enormous amounts of material which help the viewer piece together what really happened. When she arrived home the following day, the cheerleader told her mother she had been sexually assaulted (raped) but didn’t want to report it. Her mother did.

What saved these reprobates was one of them filming part of the multiple sexual encounter — echoes of the notorious 2009 Hofstra University case. The District Attorney was interviewed, and though he made clear his disgust at the way this woman was treated (ie allowed herself to be treated) he added that his concern was the law, not the morals of the participants.

As might be expected when Title IX is involved, the case did not end with the legal case, and the University handed down its own punishments.

The rape of Abby Honold is in a different class altogether. On both sides of the Atlantic, defendants — women as well as men — are regularly convicted of heinous crimes and handed lengthy prison sentences on far less compelling evidence than was present in her case. After being raped multiple times and multiple ways by Daniel Drill-Mellum she did everything right. She looked like a rape victim, sounded distraught, dialled 911 immediately, attended hospital, gave a statement, yet…what was clearly a trick phone call from an associate of the perpetrator led the investigating officer to drop the case. Even if she had told the person in question the sex was consensual, this was surely a case in which the physical evidence should have trumped mere words. Fortunately, wiser counsels would eventually prevail, and Drill-Mellum ended up with a sentence of six years two months for raping Abby and another girl. All things considered, this was incredibly lenient; a sentence of fifteen years would not have been appealable. The following is not mentioned in Sex On Trial.

Sadly, her suffering at the hands of this creep has led Abby into the wrong sort of advocacy. Not mentioned here is the fact that she has taken up campaigning for victim-centred rape investigations. Abandoning traditional methods of investigating rape can be disastrous, as is evinced by the case of Victor Zheng and the little psycho who fitted him up for rape. She has also rather unkindly sought to remove the name of Al Franken from a bill he helped sponsor following the sexual allegations made against him. These allegations, even if true — and they are probably not — are in no way comparable with the treatment meted out to her by a sexual sadist.

[The above review was first published on Medium, May 17, 2019].

TANK — 80s Music For Today

The 1970s and 1980s saw some of the greatest music ever written, performed and recorded. Singer-songwriters, progressives, melodic rock, heavy metal, were all at their peak. Then came what has been called the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, abbreviated to the unpronouncable acronym NWOBHM.

Initially this was an English phenomenon, but it soon spread to the far corners of the Earth. Praying Mantis was formed in 1974; Iron Maiden in 1975; Def Leppard, Samson and Saxon in 1977.

Motörhead was formed in June 1975, but frontman Lemmy had previously been with Hawkwind, and although the band was new, it was in a sense old school.

So where does Tank fit in with all this? Tank was formed in 1980 by Algy Ward who had briefly been a member of The Damned, better known as a punk band. The Damned are still around today but the longevity of many rock bands is truly phenomenal. As bass player and vocalist, Ward was the man largely responsible for Tank’s lyrical content. There is quite a lot of information about Tank in the public domain, but Cliff Evans, one of the band’s two lead guitarists, was more than happy to fill in the blanks through their management. What follows is gleaned largely from him.

There is quite a lot of information about Tank in the public domain, but Cliff Evans, one of the band’s two lead guitarists, was more than happy to fill in the blanks through their management. What follows is gleaned largely from him.

Veteran rockers Tank — from a recent press release.

When Tank was formed, they had the same management as Motörhead, which can’t have hurt. In 1979, Motörhead released two albums, the second, Bomber, included the blistering Stone Dead Forever, and they were well on their way.

Although Cliff is more modest about the band’s achievements than their management, he says “several other bands who have gone on to achieve mega success have cited Tank as a main influence in their early days of development. Two of those bands are Metallica and also very surprisingly Nirvana.”

Ward was not a founder member of The Damned, and was only bass player from 1978–80. He founded Tank with brothers Mark and Pete Brabbs. Unfortunately, two successful albums — Filth Hounds Of Hades and Power Of The Hunter — were coupled with alcohol and drug problems, something that is hardly uncommon in these circles. The third album brought in a second guitarist, Mick Tucker. After that, the band line up kept changing, then there was a split resulting in two Tanks, again, something that is hardly unique.

Cliff Evans joined in 1984, leaving in 1989, rejoining in 1997. Ten years later, a Polish record label contacted Cliff about the possible release of a Tank box set. This turned out to be a successful project. Although Ward has continued with his Tank project, he has made it clear he has no intention of returning to performing live.

A lot more could be written about Tank, but the reader should in the first place check out the band’s official website. Now a five piece, you will have to wait until August 18 to see them. And buy a plane ticket to São Paulo!

The second thing the reader can do is check out Re-Ignition, a retrospective album available both as a digital download and a physical format CD from this link. Their latest album is the 2015 offering Valley Of Tears; last year the Algy Ward Tank released Sturmpanzer, which according to Cliff was not a success.

Returning to Re-Ignition, this contains some classic uptempo metal beginning with Walking Barefoot Over Broken Glass from the 1982 album Power Of The Hunter and ending with the epic The War Drags Ever On.

A final word from Cliff about Valley Of Tears: “Working with vocalist ZP Theart on this album really took us out of our comfort zone for a change. We went for a much bigger production on this album which worked really well for his vocal style and he put in an amazing performance. I’d say probably the best album he’s ever made but I haven’t heard the new Skid Row album yet. The album opened up a bigger market for us which was great. Many people who would not have perhaps ever listened to Tank were discovering our music for the first time which was great”.

It was also their best selling album since Honour And Blood which was released way back in 1984 and was the first album on which he played.

It “really helped to establish the Tucker/Evans version of Tank as the only one that was really still making great new music and touring”.

Who would disagree?

[The above review was first published on Medium, May 24, 2019].

The Witch-Hunt Of John Leslie

Sexual impropriety is currently much in the news, real and imagined. The real is the incredibly sordid Jeffrey Epstein affair which is best not mentioned so as to avoid prejudicing any forthcoming trial. The imagined includes two clearly false allegations against Donald Trump which both the gullibles and the maliciously anti-Trump media took seriously and are still trying to.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a man who was always only ever a minor celebrity is back in the news for a similar reason. In 1989, John Leslie joined the team of Blue Peter, a UK children’s television programme that debuted in 1958 and is still running today. From there he moved into news becoming a regular presenter. By 2002 he was an established face on the morning news, then his career went into a nosedive that few could have imagined. His contemporary, the Swedish-born weather girl Ulrika Jonnson, published her autobiography. Called Honest, she reported therein she had been raped by an unnamed individual some fifteen years earlier. Obviously she did not name this individual, but another TV presenter did; Matthew Wright blurted out Leslie’s name on live television, apparently by accident. Within two weeks, Leslie was sacked, not because of the rape allegation but because of other (genuine) revelations about his private life, in particular his using cocaine. These obviously came to light on account of the intensive scrutiny to which his personal life was then being subjected.

Leslie would shortly find himself accused of raping and indecently assaulting women left, right and centre. None of the allegations against him came to anything, but although his media career was not over, his days as a big earner were.

John Leslie — plagued by false allegations and persecuted maliciously.

In 2008, he faced yet another allegation, this time a woman claimed he’d raped her at a party in 1995. Although her name was not released, it is clear from the information that was, she is yet another pathetic woman seeking to blame the downward spiral of her life on something tangible, albeit something that was also imaginary. This sort of nonsense is well documented, and is even used by men to explain away their life failures, and at times worse. In March 1994, the New York Times reported that according to his lawyer, Richard Caputo had been raped in an alleyway when he was a boy. Caputo was about to stand trial for serial murder, and was shortly convicted.

After the 2008 historical allegation was dropped, Leslie might rightly have thought this kind of insanity was behind him, and got on with his life as best he could. Alas! On June 25, 2017, back in his native Scotland, he danced with a woman in a nightclub, something he is unlikely ever to do again, and was accused of a minor indecent assault. He was charged the following November, and stood trial at Edinburgh Sheriff Court in June last year. Although he was only found not proven rather than not guilty, he appears to have gone to considerable lengths to prove his innocence. Was this woman acting out of malice, hallucinating, or what? We will attempt to answer that shortly when we discuss an even more bizarre allegation against Donald Trump.

After his acquittal, Leslie gave a TV interview, and again hoped to get on with his life. But guess what? On June 5, he was charged with sexually assaulting yet another woman. In December 2008!

It is difficult to believe the police and the Clown Prosecution Service would take such an allegation seriously after all Leslie has been through, and it is equally difficult to believe that someone in authority has not got it in for him big time, and wants to ensure that he is convicted of something at some point. This is by no means unique, at times the police have gone to extraordinary lengths to convict or even to entrap individuals they don’t like simply because they can. On occasion they have even incited people to commit serious crimes, including murder on at least one occasion, but best say no more of that here.

As with almost all historical allegations, no evidence is required to charge or even convict an accused, only a story. And perhaps a few tears for the camera. The allegation is almost impossible to disprove, the accuser is guaranteed lifelong anonymity unless she sees an opportunity to sell her story, and the accused is on a hiding-to-nothing.

Even if his is totally exonerated, there will still be those who claim there is no smoke without fire, and why would a woman lie?

The ridiculous historical allegation against Donald Trump by E. Jean Carroll has now been thoroughly debunked, but another Trump accuser gives an insight into how powerful or simply high profile men can be falsely accused by women who may be totally sincere yet not right in the head.

In August 2016, candidate Trump kissed campaign worker Alva Johnson. In February this year, she filed a lawsuit against the President accusing him of forcibly kissing her, and a number of other things. As was to be expected, this generated substantial publicity. On February 27, MSNBC uploaded to YouTube a 17 minute report on the case treating her allegation as credible, yet it is clear from her testimony therein that this is a woman who has serious emotional problems totally unrelated to Donald Trump. A short video clip of the actual kiss has recently been uploaded to YouTube, which not only undermines her credibility but must question her perception of reality.

Alva Johnson - a woman who has serious emotional problems.

There is unlikely to be any such video of John Leslie’s December 2008 encounter in Westminster, which may in any case have been imaginary, but while the imbeciles who control our criminal justice system are prepared to give spurious credence to any demented, attention-seeking or malicious female who points a retrospective finger at a famous face and cries assault or worse, no man anywhere is safe. Perhaps that is what they want?

[The above was published originally on Medium, July 13, 2019].

“Sex On Trial” (1) — Review

On October 14, 2016, Nikki Yovino entered a small basement bathroom with two other students at a Sacred Heart University off-campus party. Both were male football players. The following day she attended St Vincent’s Medical Center where she claimed to have been raped.

After what some might reasonably consider an imperfect investigation, it was she rather than the two men she had accused who ended up in court. She received a one year sentence of which she served six months.

False rape accuser Nikki Yovino

This openly partisan Channel 4 documentary portrays this false accuser as a victim, and to this end enlists Lisa Avalos who is alluded to as an expert on rape. In reality she is no such thing; Lisa Avalos is a professional feminist propagandist, and a woman who never met a false accuser she didn’t like. For example, in her polemic Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free… she discusses a number of cases of false accusers from the victim perspective, totally ignoring the damning evidence against them. One of these false accusers is Rhiannon Brooker, who went to quite extraordinary lengths to frame former lover Paul Fensome. The totally innocent Fensome spent five weeks behind bars and was cleared only when detectives searching for further evidence to bolster an already strong case realised they’d been played.

Nikki Yovino is not in the same league as Rhiannon Brooker, rather she has more in common with Julie Gavin. On March 28, 1999, Gavin banged on the door of a Birmingham police station and claimed to have been dragged into a car then raped at knifepoint, an unambiguous allegation of aggravated rape by a total stranger, and one that if proved would warrant a sentence well into double figures. However, on April 15, she returned to the police station and told an entirely different story: she flagged down a passing motorist for a lift, then consented to sex with two passengers in the car. She came up with the rape story because she felt “guilty and dirty”, as well she might.

A surprising number of women who are neither prostitutes nor nymphomaniacs do on occasion drop their knickers for total strangers. Some of these women then claim to have been raped, or rewrite these sordid but consensual experiences in their tiny minds as rape. This is what is known as regret sex, and this is what happened with Nikki Yovino.

Unlike Julie Gavin, Yovino had no sense of shame, she admitted the lie only because the investigating officer tricked her with a lie of his own, telling her there was video of the encounter. Lying to suspects is not only legal in the United States but condoned, and can lead to terrible miscarriages of justice, especially if the accused is of low intelligence. Yovino has no such excuse because not only is she reasonably if not highly intelligent but she would have known Detective Cotto was lying. If she had been telling the truth. One of the pleasantly surprising side-effects of this age of near total surveillance is that not only are dangerous criminals regularly brought to book but innocent men who have been wrongly and gratuitously accused have been cleared. In 1993, grainy CCTV footage led to the apprehension and conviction of two ten year old boys for the shocking murder of two year old James Bulger. Six years later, teenager Matthew Hilliard was cleared of rape when CCTV showed him walking out of a nightclub holding hands with the sixteen year old he was said to have dragged out and raped twice.

Since then, the quality of CCTV footage has improved, and with falling prices so has the quantity, including from mobile phones. Leaving that aside, no one heard Yovino scream rape, and she raised no alarm at the party. Why was that, do you think?

The flim-flam we are supposed to swallow from the sexual grievance industry is that women “freeze”. They delay reporting sometimes for months or years, not to make it more difficult for exculpatory evidence to be adduced, but because they are terrified they won’t be believed.

From Lisa Avalos we hear that only 3% of rapists are ever convicted — total nonsense — and that for many victims, the legal process is worse than the original assault. It is clear from her haircut she has never had any kind of sex with a man, so how would she know?

Predictably, the mainstream press is peddling the same line, ie poor Nikki. Little attention is paid to the fact that both her alleged violators were black. In view of the Bill Cosby witch-hunt, this is telling. When the corrupt attorney Gloria Allred began recruiting women to falsely accuse the ageing star, the talking heads didn’t know what to do. As all the alleged victims were white, did they side with them and risk being branded racist, or with Cosby and be accused of condoning rape culture? One of Cosby’s accusers was black, but she was so disreputable she could be ignored. Even after former supermodel Beverly Johnson accused him of a ludicrous attempted rape, they vacillated. It was only after his deposition from a decade earlier was leaked that they all turned on him.

Although Cosby was convicted of sexually assaulting one victim, the myth that he spent decades drugging and raping women has been clearly disposed of, but likewise the rules of intersectionality have been rewritten. Now any woman, including a white woman, is to be believed uncritically when she accuses any man of rape, be he white, black, or any other race. Yet look at the facts of this case like any rational human being. Nikki Yovino went into a small bathroom with two men voluntarily. What did she think they were going to do in there, play chess? No, this is not victim blaming, because there was no victim, at least no female victim. Yovino’s six months in a soft prison is in stark contrast to what Dhameer Bradley and Malik St Hilaire would have faced. It is not only women who make bad decisions of a sexual nature. An attractive young man who wakes up next to a grossly overweight hag ten years his senior after a drunken night out will groan, shake his head, and put the bad experience behind him. So should Nikki Yovino, and all these other women who cry rape the morning, month or year after when like Julie Gavin they regret their transient depravity, feeling “guilty and dirty” on account of it.

[The above review was first published on Medium (as “Sex On Trial” — Review, May 10, 2019].

Saturday 16 November 2019

Rape Liar Syndrome

Yet another woman has come forward to make a scurrilous allegation against President Donald Trump. Feminist airheads in certain sections of the media have called her claims “credible”. They are indeed credible — incredible.

E. Jean Carroll is said to be or to have been an advice columnist. Well, here is some sound advice for her, next time something like this happens to you in a department store, scream.

As rape is a violent crime that attracts serious punishment, perpetrators usually commit it in private, that much is acknowledged universally. On January 3, 1993, a woman claimed to have been raped in a San Diego department store, and unlike E. Jean Carroll she reported it at once. The crime was so outrageous that it was said to have generated more media coverage than all the rapes committed in the city the previous year; it also attracted a $10,000 reward. And like Miss Carroll’s rape, it never happened. How can we be so sure of the latter?

Donald Trump, a victim of multiple false accusers.

Because what we are witnessing here is not the so-called #MeToo Movement but the weaponisation of sexual lies. Having said that, #MeToo is cut from the same cloth. Laura Loomer has summed up #MeToo poetically in a live hangout on YouTube, March 12 this year. It is valid, but only in the moment. A woman who comes forward and claims to have been raped thirty years ago after trading her sexual favours with a man has zero credibility. Those were not her exact words, but for the sake of decency the abstract will suffice.

Donald Trump went on record saying he had never met E. Jean Carroll. What he should have said was he had no recollection of ever meeting her, because he was photographed with her in 1987, her and probably several hundred other people at the same event. While Trump’s memory lapse is understandable, what is not understandable is why so many people give any credence at all to such claims. Actually, that is only part of the story, the idea has been around since at least the 1970s that rape is so uniquely traumatic an experience that most victims don’t report it, heck, some don’t even realise they were raped until years or even decades later. Are these claims credible? Of course not, but to understand how they became so we need to examine the propaganda of second wave feminism and the fallacious concept of rape trauma syndrome.

Second wave and now third wave feminism would have us believe men are never trustworthy and women always are. Furthermore, when women commit bad acts, be they acts of dishonesty or even murder, they have no agency for them. It was all the fault of the patriarchy, men, or perhaps one man. Anyone who believes this to be an exaggeration should read Phyllis Chesler’s essay on female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, A Woman’s Right To Self-Defense, which, incredibly, was published in a peer reviewed journal.

The phrase rape trauma syndrome entered the literature in September 1974 when Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom published an article so titled in The American Journal Of Psychiatry. Over three hundred and sixty-five days in 1972–3, they interviewed 146 patients admitted to Boston City Hospital including 92 adult women who claimed to have been victims of forcible rape. It is reasonable to assume all these women were in fact raped, although faux victims do on occasion seek medical treatment.

So what did these women say? People who suffer trauma, be it physical, psychological and especially both, seldom feel good. Burgess and Holmstrom went on to list a wide number of symptoms these women suffered and continued to suffer. They also made a claim that although still widely believed is not supported by any credible evidence:

“Since a significant proportion of women still do not report a rape, clinicians should be alert to a syndrome that we call the silent reaction to rape.”

Obviously some rapes do go unreported, usually when the victim is a genuinely vulnerable woman, like those preyed on by the corrupt Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, but the ludicrous statistics thrown around like confetti by feminist activists have no basis in fact. Furthermore, the list of symptoms garnered by Burgess and Holmstrom is sufficiently broad to allow them to “diagnose” rape trauma syndrome in almost any woman.

In spite of its having no basis in fact, rape trauma syndrome still manages to find its way into courtrooms on occasion. Most significantly, Burgess made a fool of herself testifying for the defense in the trial of the odious Menéndez brothers who tried to mitigate the murder of their parents by claiming to have been repeatedly sexually abused.

The greatest use of rape trauma syndrome is to explain away delay in reporting. It has often been said that rape is a he said/she said crime, in reality she said/he said. Mostly though rape is she said plus physical evidence/he said. If there was no sexual contact at all, there can be no physical evidence. (See the shocking 1982 case of Pedro Figueroa for a rare exception). A false allegation that is sufficiently backdated is almost impossible to refute, therefore there is no downside for the false accuser. That being said, on occasion false accusers do leave themselves open to refutation. A striking example of this was the recently deceased Louisa Moritz, one of the myriad false accusers of Bill Cosby. She gave a specific date and place for her oral violation by the comedian, as did the much younger accuser, Chloe Goins. Though neither of their claims had or has any credibility, the gullibles including credulous journalists who should know better continue to claim they were victims.

Louisa Moritz — one of the myriad false accusers of Bill Cosby.

Therefore, in the absence of strong corroboration we should reject any and all historical allegations by any woman against Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Justin Fairfax, or any man be he a politician, an entertainer, famous or not so. An historical allegation requires no evidence, only words, and perhaps a few tears. That is all it takes to ruin a man’s reputation, and in certain jurisdictions to trash his life totally.

While feminist activists continue to plug the nonsense of rape culture, we should all remember that depravity has no gender, and should heed this warning from 1919:

“Sex is woman’s strongest weapon. She uses it as a weapon of defence and offence. She uses it to attract and to repel, to reward, and to punish. When intent upon punishment, she is utterly without scruples, and there is no vileness, no falsehood, at which she will draw the line.”

[The above article was first published on Medium, June 25, 2019].

A Tale Of Two Investigative Reporters

According to the International Federation Of Journalists, over ninety of their number and media people were murdered worldwide last year. Fortunately for Western hacks, this happens mostly in other parts of the world, not just because we are more “civilised” than Africa, Asia or China, but because the enemies of freedom have developed other, less sinister but often equally effective methods for keeping reporters in check.

One is the co-opting of members of the press by the government and other state agencies. In the UK, reporters working for the BBC, the Times, so-called independent television…often uncover quite major scandals, but there is a line they dare not cross, failing which their sources will dry up.

In the United States, the election of Donald Trump has revealed just how in bed with the Deep State most major media outlets are. Apart from Fox News, one or two smaller, independent outlets, and a host of commentators on YouTube, the media gratuitously promoted lies about Trump and his team colluding with Russia, and when that failed, obstructing justice by his railing at an illegitimate investigation while on the other hand the crimes of Hillary Clinton and her gang have simply been ignored.

The American media never misses an opportunity to promote the narrative of right wing violence while excusing the far worse excesses of the left, including against the police. Probably no more shocking example of this was the attack on video-journalist Andy Ngo in Portland, Oregon on June 29 by members of the domestic terrorist group Antifa. The most outrageous aspect of this attack was the apparent disregard of the police. Ngo suffered bleeding on the brain — a potentially crippling or even life-threatening condition.

Andy Ngo immediately after the Portland attack.

When he went on camera shortly afterwards, his speech was slurred, yet rather than receiving sympathy and his attackers being condemned, Ngo was branded a provocateur by Salon and others. It was stated openly that he deserved it for “hanging out” with “hate groups”. A hate group being any outfit slightly to the right of Leon Trotsky.

In the UK, another journalist has been attacked in a less barbaric fashion. Asa Winstanley writes for The Electronic Intifada, a website founded early in 2001 that monitors the ongoing saga of Israel/Palestine. He was recently banned from attending the forthcoming Labour Party conference. Winstanley is also a member of the Labour Party and has been suspended for some unspecified reason, hence the ban from attending the conference. This one is complicated and involves not simply the banning of one journalist but organised campaigns of defamation and at times harassment of pro-Palestinian individuals and groups.

Asa Winstanley, victim of Zionist smears.

The suffering of the Palestinian people since and before the Nakba is now widely known, but that wasn’t always the case. Up until the 1982 massacre of Sabra & Shatilla, Israel and its sympathisers were able to portray it successfully as the only democracy in the Middle East, one surrounded by a sea of Arab tyranny. The First Intifada in which Israeli soldiers were shown breaking the arms of Palestinian youths in a merciless and inhuman fashion further dented that image, and the far more recent massacres in Gaza have utterly destroyed it.

Up until then, there were basically two Jewish lobbies in the West: the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox who view Zionism as a heresy, and the Jewish establishments which were uncritically pro-Zionist. Today the situation is a lot more complicated. There are the über-Zionists who seek to establish a Greater Israel — from the River to the Sea, to purloin a phrase. Anti-Zionist Jews have been joined by large numbers of so-called anti-racists who demand a single state. Finally, there are the realists — J Street and similar organisations, Jewish and other — who believe a proper two-state solution is the only way forward.

In May 2016, a Zionist pressure group succeeded in foisting a ludicrous definition of anti-Semitism on Europe. Instead of simply “hating Jews because they are Jewish”, we are now led to believe that anti-Semitism includes criticising the Zionist historical victim narrative and almost any criticism of the state of Israel. Organisations like Canary Mission and the misnamed Campaign Against Antisemitism use this definition to smear perceived opponents of Zionism with gay abandon. This includes Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, a man who has as much sympathy with anti-Semitism as the Chief Rabbi.

Having said that, it may be that so much pressure has been put on Corbyn by Zionists like Margaret Hodge that he feels obliged to buckle to some of their demands. Secret blacklists are nothing new and are not confined to those involved in Middle East politics. The Economic League founded in 1919 tracked people with suspected communist sympathies excluding them from certain professions.

Whatever the case, there is now so much documentation on the activities of this lobby in the public domain that these kind of smear campaigns can no longer be ignored. Having said that, some Palestinian supporters do themselves no favours, and that includes the BDS Movement. The simple fact is that Israel is a fact of life, giving it back to the Palestinians is now almost as absurd as those who claim America should be given back to Native Americans. Palestinians are not only living under an occupation but many are kept in extreme poverty; what they need is not disinvestment but investment. This requires both sides to give ground, and to quit the smears.

As for the situation on the streets of Portland, Oregon and other areas in the United States, this is purely a law and order issue. Journalists have as much right as anyone else to go about their business without being attacked by thugs, least of all thugs to whom the authorities turn a blind eye.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, September 12, 2019].