White Police Officers Are Not Your Friends, Jared

In the wake of the execution of two New York police officers by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, Jared Taylor wrote an article for his American Renaissance website:  The Media Murder Two Police Officers. According to Jared, officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down because the media has fuelled anti-white hysteria in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson and more recently the death of Eric Garner while being arrested for a victimless crime in New York.

While all four deaths were regrettable, Jared Taylor is falling into the same trap as those at the opposite end of the political spectrum, namely he is viewing the shooting, the accidental death and the double execution through the prism of race. The truth is that race had nothing whatsoever to do with the deaths of either Michael Brown or Eric Garner, and from the little we know about Ismaaiyl Brinsley, it appears he didn’t see it as entirely a race issue either. He wasn’t mad at white people, he was mad at cops. Indeed, neither victim was white.

As an avid supporter of the 14 Words it never ceases to amaze me that like the idiots of the misnamed anti-racist movement, the comrades of the left generally and the loony feminists, people on our side fail all too often to distinguish between advocacy and objectivity. One of the slogans anti-racists are fond of using is that there is good and bad in all, that just because some blacks are muggers and rapists doesn’t mean they all are, words to that effect. The white ethnic movement is not about good and bad, it is about survival or racial death; if it is good to care about the white rhino – which is now nearly extinct – why should it be bad to care about preserving something infinitely more precious, the white race?

Jared cares passionately about White Survival, but do the police in America, the UK, or anywhere? If personal experience and observation count for anything, I think not. The criminal element allude to the police as the pigs; I prefer another appellation, the filth, because they do a necessary and at times filthy job. In order to do that job, they need to have filthy, suspicious minds. When a man is murdered in an apparent botched home invasion they need to consider the possibility that his wife, his son, his daughter, or even his own mother might be responsible.

They do a filthy job policing demonstrations and such, and at times this leads to them being attacked simultaneously for being both too repressive and too liberal. Most of the time they manage  to carry off this balancing act very well, but the police have a privilege money can’t buy, one they are never afraid to exploit, and in the United States especially that privilege extends to using their weapons first and asking questions later, that is assuming there is anyone left alive to ask.

Do the police persecute blacks, do they profile them, and so on? The police like easy targets, that means certain types of blacks, it also means us. In the UK which does not have the same constitutional safeguards for free speech as the US, the police have treated us like scum, and not just the lunatic fringe of 14 Words adherents. They waged a campaign against geriatric Nazi Colin Jordan for a decade or more, beginning with a raid on his home and the seizure of dozens of boxes of documents, and all this over one poxy cartoon that was deemed to be anti-Semitic, ironically by a Zionist Jew who is now held in lower esteem by the Anglo-Jewish establishment that Jordan ever was.

When Jordan left the police with egg on their faces over this affair, they dragged him into court over a virtually unreadable satirical pamphlet, Merrie England 2000. And when the proceedings were stayed against Jordan on health grounds, they went after his printer. Among others they have persecuted and harassed were Lady Birdwood and John Tyndall – now both long deceased; Nick Griffin – who was dragged into court twice, and other political activists whose crimes amount to words, ordinary white working class men and women who were concerned at the colonisation of their country by alien races and the wilful destruction of their white inheritance.

The only reason the American police don’t give 14 Words adherents as much grief as the British police is because they can’t, rest assured if they could, they would. The police are not on your side, Jared, worse than that, in the US they are now rapidly becoming perceived as an occupying force, and I don’t mean only by blacks and wiggers. Again, while it is regrettable that two innocent men have been executed by a self-styled gangsta, in future it might make them think twice before they gun down an innocent man in cold blood, an innocent white man perhaps.

I doubt very much Ismaaiyl Brinsley read my 1997 dissertation The Wizard Of Oz Syndrome, but he has certainly captured the spirit of it. The riots in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere were mindless acts of violence; the crime of Ismaaiyl Brinsley was not.

The Great “Racism” Hoax

Do you ever get the impression that everything you have ever learned, been taught about, indoctrinated into, about a certain subject, is utter baloney, like all of it? How about “racism”, that most pernicious of evils – so we are told. What is the UK experience?

The word was coined in the 1930s by Magnus Hirschfeld, and was used but seldom until the 1960s, like anywhere. About that time, people of a certain political persuasion in the UK began using the word “racialism”, which is of a slightly older vintage, then “racism” superseded it, becoming common currency. Here it was used in a very unsubtle yet successful attempt to brainwash both the gullible “goyim” and the equally gullible non-“goyim” into acceptance of both massive waves of non-white immigration and race-mixing.

The usual method was to juxtapose photographs from the Nazi concentration camps – principally Belsen and Dachau – with photographs of the “Nazis” of the day, and to associate them with any antipathy towards immigration. And it worked, primarily because of the massive funding anti-“racist” groups received from the right as much as from the left, hysteria in the media, and eventually the fear ordinary people had of being branded “racist”. Few stopped to think that they, their fathers and grandfathers had fought two world wars to keep out the foreigner and preserve the integrity of this island race only to surrender to invaders from all over the globe without a shot being fired.

By the 1990s, the efficacy of the Nazi angle was beginning to wane, partly because there were relatively few people left who had lived through the Second World War, and partly because many people across a broad political spectrum sympathised with the plight of the Palestinians. The Nazis were in the distant past but their “victims” were suddenly victims no more. The horror of the death camps – real and imagined – was replaced with the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the type of kid you might actually have met, unlike Heinrich Himmler.

The full extent of this brainwashing needs no relating here, but it will suffice to say that we – namely anyone white and especially English – was to be viewed as thoroughly evil and bigoted. Now let me refute all that garbage with one word: Sangatte. In case that is not familiar to you, it was the location of a Red Cross asylum centre which was closed in 2002. Less than 55 miles as the crow flies from Dover, asylum seekers (so-called) queued up there in their masses to cross the English Channel by fair means or foul. Now here is the $64 million question, if the English especially are such horrible people, why would anyone – black or other – want to live here? Add to this the fact that France isn’t exactly an inhospitable place, at least it wasn’t the one time I was there briefly 22 years ago.

The bottom line is that no one from Africa nor anywhere else – whether genuine asylum seeker or more often economic migrant – no one in either of those categories who has made his way to France need seek asylum in the UK, yet they did and they still do. Why, if we are such terrible people?

Now let’s look at the United States, which has an entirely different and more painful racial heritage than the UK, that of slavery, and let us not forget of course that the original inhabitants of that great continent are now a disenfranchised minority, as the natives of these islands are swiftly becoming. Nevertheless, slavery was ended with the American Civil War, and Blacks have made great strides since then, although the same cannot be said for the Red Man. What though are we led to believe about the US? Only that slavery did not end with the American Civil War, that it did not end with the contrived judgment in Brown v Topeka, nor with the staged Rosa Parks bus protest the following year but maybe, just maybe with the misnamed Civil Rights Act of 1964. What was it that King bloke said, I have a dream? Now let me debunk all that with two words: Chuck Berry.

Earlier this year I was shopping in my local supermarket; the cashier was a young black girl wearing a name badge, Nadine. As I paid for my purchases I asked her is your Dad a Chuck Berry fan? For those who do not share even my less than formidable knowledge of contemporary music, Berry recorded a song called Nadine...in 1964. I was surprised at her response: “Who’s Chuck Berry?” Like seriously. Somehow I don’t think she would have asked “Who’s Stephen Lawrence?” who is clearly a far more important icon to most of the brainwashed blacks – and whites – of the youth of today. Not infrequently people talk of his legacy; Stephen Lawrence has no legacy because he never achieved anything; that wasn’t his fault of course, one might say the same thing about Sarah Payne, who was struck down at the age of eight in similar cruel fashion. But how can any black kid in the US or the UK not have heard of Chuck Berry?

Berry has written a lot of songs. Like Nadine... his 1955 single No Money Down is not particularly well known. Here is what he said about it; the song “got its origin from the salesman’s pitch that I usually got when buying my first few cars”.

Berry was born in 1926, and bought his first car as a teenager, a 1934 V8 Ford, for $10 down and $5 a month – he was too young to sign the hire purchase agreement, so his older sister Thelma did the honours. In his autobiography, he says he went through a dozen automobiles in 12 years or less.

I realise I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but perhaps Doreen Lawrence or better still Angela Yvonne Davis can explain to me how someone who was so “oppressed”, little more than a slave, could have afforded to buy a car at that young age? But it gets worse, in 1944 on account of youthful follies, Berry received a ten year sentence, and might have disappeared into obscurity; instead he became arguably the biggest name in rock ’n’ roll, and inarguably the most influential figure in contemporary music. If there had been no Chuck Berry there would have been no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, no Eric Clapton, and probably no Pink Floyd either.

Okay, he had luck as well as talent, but exceptional though his story is, it is far from unique, so why in the wake of recent events in Ferguson do we hear only about “racism”, more “racism” and yet more “racism”, which has expanded into a myriad forms, but structural “racism” and institutional “racism” appear to top the list at the moment.

The reality is that the entire narrative is wrong, all of it. Period. As Kent Steffgen wrote in his 1966 book...Bondage Of The Free...“The Civil Rights Movement has publicized itself as a drive for economic advancement for the Negro but actually revolves about an attempt to invade the social privacy of whites”.

He points out too that at that time, American Negroes owned 4.5 million automobiles, almost one for every four persons, while in the then Soviet Union there was one car for every 350 people, and most of those were owned either by the state or by apparatchiks. That being the case, was it really such a terrible thing to be a Negro in even the American Deep South? Was it so degrading to have to use different water fountains and rest rooms, or was this something most people simply didn’t notice or bother about until hordes of “liberals” – including many Jews – descended on them en masse to tell them how oppressed they were, and stir up animosity in communities that had for the most part lived amicably side by side for generations?

To acknowledge this fact is not to whitewash the Deep South, the murder of Emmett Till and other occasional outrages, the big question is what do Blacks have there today what they didn’t have in the 1950s when Chuck Berry was launched on an unsuspecting world? What they don’t have are stable communities, because with the outlawing of segregation, and more importantly the forced race-mixing and brainwashing that followed, there are no Black “communities” anymore; the doctor, the lawyer, the accountant, have all moved out leaving only the ghetto, or the hood as it is now known. The reason for this is, yes, you guessed it, “racism” – ie evil white men, and the solution, more anti-“racism”, ie more race-mixing.

When will the liberals and the race-mixers be satisfied? When the last white woman turns child-bearing age, and who will they blame then?

Who Owns The “Holocaust” Now?

Have you noticed something about the so-called Holocaust? It doesn’t belong to Organised Jewry anymore. At one time any criticism of their wire-pulling and especially their mendacity in the Middle East was met with incessant whining about “six million Jews”, as if the suffering of an earlier generation of Jews – real and imagined – excused or even justified their brutalisation and murder of the Palestinians.

For some time though, this has not been the case, because the Holocaust – whatever it was – does not belong to them anymore. I’m not sure precisely when this happened, but it appears to have been around the time of Operation Cast Lead. That calculated act of mass murder resulted in the deaths of over eleven hundred innocent people including hundreds of women and children.

It resulted too in Holocaust survivors – so-called – not simply condemning Israel’s barbarism but in turning against the Zionist entity, and now three years on, Jews worldwide have lined up in two camps: those who continue to defend Israel more or less uncritically, as did the late Joan Rivers, and those who have finally had the planks removed from their eyes.

Israel is now more of a pariah than South Africa ever was, and with good reason, but however much its diminishing band of supporters and apologists, Jew and Gentile, whine about anti-Semitism, there is no going back. It will take a while yet, but the Palestinian people will not be denied.

Rape – Feminist Fiction v Fact

Earlier this week, an episode of the BBC TV series EastEnders included a rape scene that generated hundreds of complaints. As rape scenes go, there wasn’t much to see. I have written about this elsewhere, commenting that whatever the storyline it is a thinly veiled piece of feminist propaganda. Thinking about it further, I think the phrase “thinly veiled” is misplaced.

The reason for this rethink is a news report of a potential sex attack in a Crawley park, around thirty miles as the crow flies from where I am sitting now. A 14 year old schoolgirl was attacked by a man from behind. That was his big mistake, because not only did the girl fight him off, but she gave him a good kicking into the bargain. Okay, she is trained in martial arts, but the contrast between her and the fictional victim in EastEnders is stunning.

Clearly a girl who is attacked under such circumstances must realise she is in big trouble, even if she finds it difficult to think on the fly, as would most of us. She was in danger of at least being raped, or far worse. It is little more than a week since the body of another 14 year old girl – Alice Gross – was fished out of the River Brent near her West London home. Alice is believed to have been murdered by Arnis Zalkalns, who committed suicide shortly after.

Having said that, predators, be they human or other, will generally attack only those they perceive to be weaker than themselves, so this girl is to be commended on two counts.

The simulated rape in EastEnders was an entirely different scenario. Although the victim was a smallish woman, her attacker was not formidable, and the rape was committed upstairs in a busy public house, and any member of her family could have walked in at any time. True, she said no, but she made no real attempt to fight him off. Self-styled anti-rape activists would have us believe it was because she was paralysed with fear. Because this rape was left to the imagination, the logistics of it are likewise unknown. In an earlier, similar scene, in the ITV soap Emmerdale, an older woman is working late in a factory with a family friend, just the two of them, so that is more plausible, but again in the EastEnders rape, the rapist is behind the victim, with the implication of him penetrating her so, but there is no indication of how he held her down with one hand while unbuttoning his trousers with the other...under such circumstances I feel sure that the overwhelming majority of women would have raised the alarm or at worst given their assailant so much grief that he would have caused visible bruising, torn the victim’s dress, and so on.

Instead, after the rape she simply lies there until he has gone, then undresses, jumps in the shower, and destroys all the forensic evidence. This may be the natural inclination to wash away the dirt of an attacker, but even a woman with a single digit IQ realises this is not the thing to do. Now we are witnessing the victim’s life coming apart as she begins behaving irrationally and doubtless breaking down. What we are supposed to conclude from this is that this is confirmation not only that she was raped, but that any woman who claims to have been raped under similar circumstances has indeed been raped, and that we, and more importantly the police and the jury, should believe her uncritically, even if she points the finger at her alleged attacker a week, a month, a year or a decade after the event, when of course there will be no corroboration at all.

This is what has happened in the Operation Yewtree cases, although in those there has been an even more mendacious perversion of the rule of law by using what has been called corroboration by volume, ie loading the indictment with charge after charge in the hope of bamboozling the jury. That tactic worked to such spectacular effect in the Rolf Harris case that he was even convicted of one sexual assault in a place he had never visited – certainly at the time – and of another in which he was accused of attacking a teenage girl in a crowded room under a cloak of invisibility. Max Clifford suffered a similar fate; Dave Lee Travis managed to beat most of the charges, but as the man himself said, it had always been his fear that if the prosecution threw enough mud, some of it would stick, and he was convicted of a solitary offence.

None of the above cases involved rape charges, but William Roache – who was tried for rape – managed to beat the rap primarily because even after the passage of decades it was clear his accusers were lying.

The whole focus of self-styled anti-rape activists appears to be to lower the threshold for conviction in sex cases, if not to abolish it entirely, that and to demonise men, hence their ludicrous promotion of so-called statistics that have absolutely no basis in fact. According to Rape Crisis (citing government figures) there are around 85,000 rapes annually.

Of course, there are government statistics and government statistics; the number of murder convictions can be calculated accurately, the number of actual murders reasonably accurately, but when statistics depend on simply asking people questions, all manner of other factors come into play, including the size of the selected pool, how it was selected, the veracity of the respondents, and so on. The reality is that no one knows how many rapes are not reported; obviously some are not, and by the same token some reported rapes  never happened.

Those who wish to genuinely reduce the incidence of rape should look to other methods, but the ludicrous feminist mantra of teaching men not to rape, or the promotion of idiotic ideas like rape culture and patriarchy theory are not the way to do it anymore than the current and ongoing attack on the rights of the accused in sex cases, something that like all other repressive legislation will be extended to other offences if not now then at some time in the not-too-distant future.

Did Jimmy Savile Ride A Bike?

A while ago I wrote about my unwanted sexual encounters as a youth with homosexuals. There was one and only one other that happened, when I was about thirteen. A friend and I were fishing for tiddlers in the Grand Union Canal at Hayes; we were using flimsy nets. I remember my friend, he was two years younger than me, and I remember especially his old man who was very tall and had some sort of nasal or speech defect. Another (on-off) friend who was in the year below me called him “Punch”, rather unkindly.

Anyway, the two of us were fishing of sorts when a young bloke rode up on his bike, dismounted, and engaged us in conversation. Then he lured us into the bushes – well, scraggly trees as I recall – and asked us if we wanted to make some money. We asked how, and he replied “Give us a wank”. Then he proceeded to show us what he wanted us to do, removing his hampton from his jeans, and rotating it. John and I looked at each other, smiled, and declined politely.

With no more ado, the guy put away his member, and getting on his bike rode off towards Southall. I never told anyone about that, and as far as I know my friend didn’t either. If I had told my old man he would almost certainly have phoned the police. I suppose I should have because with the hindsight of four decades and more, what he did was very serious, but in the 1960s and early 70s, bumboys and queers were a bit of a joke.

A few years ago I was doing some newspaper research at Colindale when I found a report of someone who had been engaged in that sort of activity by the canal. Although the year fitted, I don’t think it was him; canal towpaths are notorious for perverts of all shapes and sizes, although this was the first and only time I have ever experienced something like this on one, not that I make a habit of frequenting such places myself.

The story I have just related is totally accurate as far as I recall, and if my friend could be traced – assuming he is still alive – he might well confirm it, but what use is it as court testimony? It is an anecdote, nothing more, although unlike the story about Rolf Harris groping a 7 year old girl in Portsmouth, it is a true one. I can imagine though how it would be possible for me to milk this should I receive by some obscure quirk of fate a friendly call from the police who were trawling for historical victims of the Grand Union towpath paedo.

I think this guy may have had ginger hair, but regardless of my total inability to identify him, mine and that of the other two dozen “victims”, he would be convicted. I would then be invited to make a victim impact statement.

Where do I begin, Your Honour? I could have gone to university, but I flunked out. At the age of 19 I became a compulsive gambler; most people turn to drink and/or drugs to erase the memory of these terrible flashbacks, but I took to poker, and other things. That’s the reason I took a massive overdose in July 1976. That’s the reason I did a three year stretch in 1983-5, not the main reason but the only reason. That’s the reason I lost the only woman who ever truly loved me. That’s the reason I never made anything of myself. Well, apart from publishing more limericks than I care to remember, hundreds of poems, thousands of articles, dozens of pamphlets, a fistful of books, getting the odd citation in the academic literature, appearing in lively discussion programmes on Iranian TV, and scanning two archives for posterity.

What a load of bunk sex attack “survivors” do talk. Anyway, I was not attacked, the guy never laid a hand on me, and I certainly never put my hand on his dick.

When I was young I had not a few unpleasant experiences with adults, but apart from this, they were all of a non-sexual nature. In those days, men as well as women would not tolerate backchat from the young, and at times they would even get physical with you. They daren’t do that nowadays of course. I’m not saying that is a bad thing, but it is a different world.

There was one other, humorous incident that today would be interpreted as of a sexual nature but was no such thing. I was in a neighbour’s flat, and this woman, a family friend, was lactating, having recently given birth to her third child. For some reason she was barebreasted and showing me her tits, something to do with the baby I think. Maybe I asked a question about her producing milk, but I distinctly remember her squirting her nipple at me and hitting me in the face with a small jet. Obviously laughter followed. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but I must have been 9 at the outside because we moved from our flat to a house at some point.

As I said, this was a humorous incident, and was almost certainly prompted by my curiosity, but I wonder if today she wouldn’t be arrested and charged with some bizarre sexual offence against a minor. How sick is that?

Fun With Psychic Poker

Earlier this month I questioned the integrity of electronic cards. There is though a fascinating alternative to belligerent algorithms; what if they respond to human thoughts, or even commands? Have you ever called for that magic river only for it to come? Okay, if you keep making wild guesses about anything, you’ll eventually pick a winner, but I can’t help thinking that over the years I’ve picked more winners in this bizarre fashion than mere chance should dictate.

The screengrabs that follow all fall into this category.

February 1, 2013: Pot limit 5 card stud on Ladbrokes; I called for the straight on the river, and it came. I finished runner up of 12, and with 3 places paid picked up €18.00.

February 16, 2013: An ultra-magic river in this limit hold ’em tournament. I can’t remember what the other guy had, but it wasn’t queen anything. I didn’t cash though.
 

May 29, 2013: I called for the gutshot after seeing the first two flop cards; it came, but I didn’t cash in this tournament that has far too many runners and far too few places paid.

June 13, 2013: A magic river at Omaha hi lo, one out and it comes. I don’t think I called for this, though I probably prayed for it!

July 18, 2013: All-in with the third best hand, I called for the magic card, and it came on the river. Ironically, I was busted out with aces, but I won 72c.
 

August 14, 2013: The queens raised, I went all-in, called for the gutshot when the cards showed, and a magic river outdrew not only the queens but the suited connectors.
 

December 4, 2013: All-in before the flop, when I saw he had aces, I called for a jack. And it came! I won 14c in this freeroll. 
 

May 24, 2014: All-in pre-flop after the initial raiser folds, the 10s outflop me, but a magic river, and boing! Out he goes.

June 3, 2014: Outflopped, I called for the magic jack, and it came. I cashed in this tournament, but didn’t win much.

June 5, 2014: We were all-in before the flop – Yours Truly and the two much shorter stacks – I called for the 3 on the flop, and it came. I didn’t cash in this tournament, which as I recall had many runners and fewer places paid than most tournaments of that size.

June 5, 2014: A regular freeroll on the same site the same day. A psychic call after the flop on an insane draw, and it came. I cashed too.
 

September 13, 2014: I called for the seven after the flop, but although it came, I didn’t cash in this bounty tournament.
 

September 14, 2014: Finally, I’m not sure if I called for it, but this was the second magic river heads up in this small turbo sit and go. In fact it wasn’t simply a magic river but a runner runner. With luck like that, how could I lose?

I’ve wondered that for some time. Unlike real cards, electronic cards are shuffled using an algorithm. If real cards are not shuffled thoroughly, there will sometimes be suits that run together; a hand of three aces may turn up in the next hand, as may a straight, either in the hand of one player or around the table. Weird stuff can happen. I can think of two instances, one from the 1970s and another from the 1980s. In the first, two of us were playing stud heads up, and one of us had a straight flush. Then there were similar combinations coming up. A third player joined the game, and the weird stuff stopped dead.

Another time I was watching a game of 5 card stud at Birmingham; one player won a hand with a flush, and the very next hand the same player had another flush. I believe the suits were clubs and diamonds although I can’t remember in which order they appeared. The loser was dismayed because he couldn’t believe this could happen twice in a row in a game where a flush is a rarity, but there was no sleight-of-hand involved.

If you play games with more than one deck, all sorts of weird stuff happens; in the game called seventy-nine, which is played with four decks shuffled together, I have on many occasions seen players dealt hands that require no play, or maybe a player calls with his first draw. All the same, I can’t help feeling there is something not quite right with electronic cards. Here are a few examples.

Schooldaze

When I was young I was sent to boarding school near the coast for medical reasons. There was a character used to visit on occasion called Dr Whitehead. I don’t remember much about him or why he was interested in me, but he looked a bit like Neville Chamberlain, and smoked a pipe.

I don’t remember how many times I met him but I do remember him one day taking me out in his car and letting me drive it, or attempt to, on some waste ground. I was about 9 years old at the time, this was around 1965.

Nowadays of course an old guy taking a kid for a ride would be Jimmy Savile time, but life was so much simpler then.

He gave me a few records and if I recall a wind-up gramophone, though if he did I can’t recall how I took it home 80 odd miles on the coach at end of term time. Maybe I’m getting this all mixed up, but I do remember the song Once Aboard The Lugger and playing it over and over again. Sadly, the good memories of my boyhood are far outweighed by the bad, but at least I have memories, unlike the Sandy Hook victims.

I was contacted recently by a bloke who said Surrey Police were in the process of framing him for the Dowler murder until he produced a rock solid alibi; he became a suspect because he frequented the woods where her body was found. That much I believe, but when he told me told me that Levi Bellfield was one of a number of psychopaths used by the police to murder people in order to frame others – including Michael Stone – so that they could twist the law to require no corroboration in court, I kind of lost interest. And when he said the Sandy Hook massacre was mind control, I said good night, thanks for phoning but don’t call back. He sent me a follow up e-mail accusing me of being a government shill. That was the second time that week. The first time was in connection with my 9/11 articles by a bloke who programmes computers, composes music and obviously has a higher education. If it weren’t all so tragic, I’d laugh.

A Good Night On Strange Tables

It isn’t often you get money for nothing; months ago I received an e-mail from an affiliate that offered me €5 totally free if I signed up to a certain poker site. I signed up, and forgot about it. Of course, you can’t simply sign up and cash out, for one thing the minimum cash out is €50.00. Last night I wasn’t exactly at a loose end, but I’d had a hard day, so took to the tables playing micro-stakes. I entered an 18 seat €1 sit and go, pot limit turbo Omaha, and won the damn thing, then a regular limit hold ’em tournament.

September 3, 2014: First tournament on the new site - a sit and go - and guess who wins it?

I didn’t expect to do well in this but got lucky; with 78 runners and 10 places paid, there was a reasonable prize pool; I finished runner up winning €14.82. Here are two hands from it.

Ace rag outflops my pocket kings, but the short stack is rivered and bounced out of the tournament.

One of the chip leaders, I raised with pocket kings and had one taker; I think he re-raised; he was short stacked otherwise I would probably have dumped my cowboys when the ace hit the flop, but I ended up putting him all-in. With his A3 revealed, I could only pray for a magic river. For once, my prayers were answered.

Heads up, I decided to get creative, seeing from his earlier play that this guy was a total moron. I shouldn’t have. The last hand of the tournament is shown below. I would probably have won but for that cruel river, but having had so much luck in my first two tournaments on this new site, I can hardly complain. All I have to do now is quadruple my bankroll so I can not only cash out but still have something to play with.

There goes that pig again, flying off into the sunset.

The last hand in this first regular tournament on the new site; a cruel river, but I can’t complain.

Congratulations, you were runner up.

Who Invented Rape Culture?

[A PDF file of this (without the links) can be found here on my main website.]

The original title of this dissertation was Time For An Honest Symposium On False Allegations Of Rape. It came about after I read the December 2010 issue of VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN which contains an in-depth report, Symposium on False Allegations of Rape, pages 1318-95. This lengthy piece consists of a number of superficially scholarly articles, superficially being the operative word. VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN is a peer-reviewed journal, which should mean that before its contents are published they are read critically and fact checked. There is little if any evidence of critical reading here, and fact checking appears to have been thrown out of the window.

I had intended to write a damning critique of it and submit it half-heartedly to the journal. Had I done so it would of course have been rejected. For one thing I am not an accredited scholar, indeed many people would say I am not a scholar at all, but a quarter of a century and more researching in the British Library and some of the finest archives in the UK (read the world) is not a bad substitute for a university education, especially one that revolves around the pseudo-subject of gender studies.

Before proceeding it should not be necessary to state the obvious but for the avoidance of doubt, rape is always a serious criminal offence, when there is credible evidence of rape, it should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, and should always result in a custodial sentence. Serial rape – ie that perpetrated by a man who targets women in pre-planned, calculated attacks – should warrant an exemplary sentence, oftentimes a life sentence.

Because rape is a serious crime, a high level of proof should be warranted, and there should be no special pleading in order to erode the rights of the accused.

Having said that, too many people writing on this subject – academics and others – fail to distinguish between research and advocacy. One mantra that is repeated day in, day out, and is repeated here also, is both that rape is a vastly under-reported crime and that false reports of rape are extremely rare. In support of this mantra, feminist authors in particular are fond of quoting statistics, many of which appear to have been conjured up out of thin air. To take just one example, Kat Banyard claims at least 100,000 women are raped every year in the UK, adding the rape conviction rape is 6.5 per cent. (1)

The reality is that no one knows how many rapes go unreported, obviously some do, but the figure of 100,000 annually for the UK alone has absolutely no basis in fact. In recent years there have been a number of surveys that peddle the claim that one woman in 5, one in 4 or even one in 3 has been or will be raped or sexually assaulted in her lifetime. These surveys are obviously based on small samples, and they have about the same credibility of those that claim millions of Americans believe they have been abducted by aliens.

These surveys are skewed by unrepresentative samples extrapolated to national or near global level, and include among other things loaded questions and semantic gymnastics. It may indeed be true that one woman in 5 or even one in 3 will be the victim of rape or sexual assault in her lifetime, but that manufactured statistic doesn’t sound quite so terrible when the word “or” and the phrase “sexual assault” are taken into consideration. Using that wonderful word “or”, the claim that one woman in a million will be raped and one in 3 will be sexually assaulted means more or less the same thing.

And if one includes leering in the definition of “sexual assault” as some of the more radical feminists imply, then there is probably hardly a person on this planet – female or male – who has not been the “victim” of some kind of sexual assault in her or his life. If this kind of rhetoric sounds facile, it is, but it is not mine; check out some of the garbage they peddle on sundry feminist websites, and you’ll understand. Returning to the journal, throughout this lengthy report it is simply assumed that rape is a vastly under-reported crime. I propose though to focus on one contribution/contributor to demonstrate just how loose a grip on reality such feminist “scholars” have.

Joanne Belknap contributes Rape: Too Hard to Report and Too Easy to Discredit Victims. Incredibly she has a PhD in criminology and is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder where a truly great mind, the late Albert Bartlett, spent his entire academic career.

In her contribution to the rape symposium, Professor Belknap plays this stupid numbers game, she says at page 1335: “Although false allegations are 5% of all rapes reported to the police, the fact that at least 90% of rapes are never reported to the police” suggests “0.005% are false allegations”.

The Internet activist Angry Harry has done an interesting calculation based on this. Imagine a city in which 20 women are raped in a certain period. If only 10% of these victims report their rapes, then clearly 2 of them will turn up at the police station. But if only 5% of allegations are false, then one false accuser will turn up for those two, in other words 1 out of 3 recorded rape allegations will be bogus.

The % figure given by Joanne Belknap would mean that one rape allegation in 20,000 is bogus. That claim is not only prima facie absurd but shows a complete lack of understanding of human nature. Last year I published a timeline of false rape cases from the year 2000. I was careful to include only unambiguously false rape cases; this was done using limited resources with even more limited time, yet it gives the lie to this 1 in 20,000 nonsense. For example, in 2003, by October there were no fewer than 7 false rape cases in Dunedin, New Zealand, a city which has a population of less than 150,000.

Similarly Professor Belknap’s claim that 95% of college women do not report their “rape victimization to the police” is based on what evidence, exactly? There are though clues in her article that indicate evidence is the last thing Professor Belknap would ever accept to substantiate an allegation of false rape, in particular her summary acceptance of the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse hoaxes as real rapes. These two cases are not only in the public domain but have been subjected to intense scrutiny by journalists and academics as well as by the legal authorities. The bulk of the rest of this article will deal with these.

On page 1337, she says of the Tawana Brawley case: “...given the defendants were largely from the criminal legal system, from the small town where Ms. Brawley lived, it certainly seems feasible that evidence tampering could have occurred. It seems particularly unlikely that the police officer who killed himself shortly after Ms. Brawley reported would have done so if he had not abused her”.

While of the Duke Lacrosse case she writes: “I am also unconvinced that the complainant in the Duke case was not raped at the lacrosse team party”.

First, some historical context. There are three such incidents in American history from the 1930s to date that stand out as unique: the 1931 case of the Scottsboro Boys; the 1987 Tawana Brawley case; and the 2006 Duke Lacrosse case. All three were what are classified as “hate crime hoaxes”. Usually these involve pointing the finger of suspicion at a member or members of another race, although they are not necessarily racially motivated. Indeed, it is my belief that none of the above cases were. In addition to the “hate crime” element, all three of the above included a sexual element in the hoax.

Of the three, the Scottsboro case – which will not be discussed here – was uniquely wicked because the victims, nine young Negro males who were railroaded by the lies of one white woman (2) faced the death penalty, if not by judicial execution then by lynching.

There is another thing these three hoaxes all have in common, this is, as stated of Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse, they have been extensively researched and documented beyond all meaning of the word, and while a reasonable person may question the innocence of O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony, or the guilt of Michael Stone or Omar Benguit, no reasonable person can in all honesty claim that the Scottsboro Boys, those accused by Tawana Brawley, or the Duke Lacrosse defendants were in fact guilty. These were all manufactured crimes. Period. Furthermore, for Professor Belknap to dismiss the latter two summarily as real crimes rather than hoaxes is an act of acute intellectual dishonesty that is inexcusable. She is not an ordinary member of the public who is entitled to make snap judgments based on superficial knowledge. She was participating in what was ostensibly a symposium to further human knowledge and quite likely to shape academic and even social policy.

Let us then deal with these cases, the Tawana Brawley hoax first. In November 1987, Miss Brawley, then 15 years old, was found apparently unconscious in a garbage bag near her former home in New York State. She had been smeared with faeces, her clothing had been burned as well as torn, and on her torso written in black letters were the legend KKK, the dreaded N word – capitalised with its correct spelling – and the word “Bitch”. Brawley claimed she had been raped by six white men. And held captive for four days.

In 1987, there were small branches of the Ku Klux Klan even in the UK, but the heyday of this once notorious organisation was long past, and its meetings even in the Deep South attracted more mirth than fear. Furthermore, although Klansmen have been responsible for real crimes in the past – including murders – did they ever carry out an attack of this nature on any black person? And would any Klansman much less a gang of six rape a black woman, be she of age or a teen?

The story was treated by the media initially as a genuine rape, but was quickly exposed as a hoax, although some black activists – Al Sharpton in particular – made capital out of it. It is important to note that the Tawana Brawley case was played out as a “hate crime”, ie anti-black rather than as a mere rape, the fact that the non-victim was black being far more important than any perceived sexual motive.

Incidentally, hoaxes of this nature are surprisingly common, although seldom so outrageous. In 2013, a hate crime hoax of a strikingly similar nature was perpetrated at Winnsboro in the Deep South. Indeed, the Sharmeka Moffitt case was even more outrageous than the Tawana Brawley case because the non-victim actually set herself on fire. Again, it was quickly established that neither the Ku Klux Klan nor run-of-the-mill racists were responsible.

In spite of they’re being perpetrated mostly by blacks (and occasionally by Jews), arguably the two most outrageous hate crime hoaxes in American history are the crimes of Charles Stuart and Susan Smith. In 1989, Stuart murdered his heavily pregnant wife then shot himself in the back and phoned the police to report the couple had been the victim of an attempted carjacking. The case generated both enormous sympathy for Stuart and racial tensions in the city, Boston. Months later the truth came out, but before he could be arrested, Stuart committed suicide by throwing himself in the river.

The case of Susan Smith was equally shocking; in October 1994, the young South Carolina mother of two claimed to have been carjacked by a black man, saying he drove off with her sons on the back seat of her car. The following month she led the authorities to the lake where she had dumped the car with the boys still inside. (3)

Although the Tawana Brawley case did not involve harming a third party, it garnered worldwide publicity. One would have expected a genuine victim to have cooperated fully with the police investigation, and even if she had been too shocked (or whatever) to do so, what about her family? They did not, although race-hustlers (Al Sharpton and others) descended on the family, making allegation after allegation, although no evidence was ever forthcoming.

On January 26, 1988, the Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, appointed Attorney General Robert Abrams Special Prosecutor for the case. On February 29, a special Grand Jury was empanelled which heard from over 180 witnesses, received 250 exhibits, and generated 6,000 pages of evidence. The resulting report (4) was made available to the public, and certainly would have been available to Joanne Belknap if she had deigned to seek it out. Instead, she preferred to ignore it and in her article relied on innuendo about a cover up. She does though quote another feminist academic, Patricia J. Williams, thus, on page 1338, “After Tawana Brawley, who will believe the next black woman who says she was raped by white men?”

>The answer to that question is probably very few as according to FBI statistics – which being based on actual convictions are far more reliable than feminist statistics – white on black rape is virtually unknown in contemporary America.

Incidentally, talking of Professor Williams, this is the same Patricia J. Williams who wrote of Tawana Brawley in the same book that “This much is certainly worth the conviction that Tawana Brawley has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself. Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension. And it is this much that I grieve about. The rest of the story is lost, or irrelevant in the worst of all possible ways”. (5) There is really no arguing with that kind of twisted logic. She too simply assumes Brawley was raped; at page 176 she claims when Brawley was conveyed to the hospital she was unconscious, and alludes to “her rape”.

How can we be so certain the Tawana Brawley case was a hoax? The following is extracted from the report of the Grand Jury (see note 4 below):

Tawana Brawley was seen to climb into the garbage bag in which she was found. The person who saw this found her behavior so odd that she phoned the sheriff. At the hospital, no evidence was found to indicate Tawana Brawley had been raped, nor did she claim she had been at that time. She had no meaningful physical injuries, and was discharged that same night. There was no evidence that she had spent much time in a wooded area as claimed. She showed no signs of exposure, malnourishment or dehydration. She was also examined by a gynaecologist.

According to forensic pathologist Dr Justin Uku: “The absence of any of the factors I mentioned before on the body would seem to discount that such an assault took place.” (Page 47).

Dr Ezra Griffith of Yale University School of Medicine diagnosed here as “malingering her complaints” of unresponsiveness, (page 54). There is a lot more where that came from, so for Professor Belknap to dismiss the whole thing as a cover up is absurd. There is only one cover up here, that is of the Tawana Brawley hate crime hoax.

The more recent Duke Lacrosse case has been subjected to similar scrutiny, and indeed it beggars belief that it was ever reported in the mainstream media as anything stronger than an alleged rape. The most convenient source of information about the case is the book Race To Injustice... (6). The following is extracted from that book. The Lacrosse team booked two exotic dancers (strippers if you will); Kim Roberts turned up sober, but Crystal Gail Mangum did not. She arrived at around 23.40 on March 13, 2006. Worse, Mangum was said to have taken a powerful muscle relaxant and could hardly stand up. The “show” started at midnight and finished at 5 past because of this. Mangum was so drunk she had to he carried to the car.

There were “words” between Miss Roberts and at least one of the team, and racial insults were used on both sides. This was perhaps a little unfair to her, but it was understandable because they had paid $800. Kim Roberts was accused by Mangum of stealing her money and her phone. This may be true, Roberts is a convicted felon, but whether or not that was the case, she drove Mangum to the hospital where the “victim” told doctors she had been raped vaginally. Then she said she had been raped vaginally, anally and orally, cleaned up and taken back to the car. One should always allow for a genuine rape victim to be confused or shocked, especially if she is under the influence of both alcohol and drugs, as was Mangum, so the inconsistency here is not fatal to her account of the evening. Other factors are though.

Kim Roberts said the sexual assault claims were a “crock”; as there had been a certain amount of friction between her and at least one of the lacrosse players, this claim is not only credible but comes from the one witness who had no dog in the fight.

No semen, blood or saliva was found after Mangum was tested, and apparently no male DNA; as a result of this, DA Mike Nifong ordered a second, more sensitive DNA test.

On April 6, Mangum made a witness statement in which she claimed she had been raped in a bathroom by 3 members of the team – vaginally and orally - and had been hit in the face. The enhanced DNA test revealed no match for any of the lacrosse players, but there was evidence of male DNA from 4 unidentified men on the rectal swabs and on her undergarments.

Rather than there being any cover up or fabrication of evidence here to exculpate three guilty men, Nifong wilfully misled the media and attempted to mislead the courts too. The evidence indicates he did this because he was up for re-election, and wanted to be seen by blacks as the “good” white candidate clamping down on those wicked crackers who had raped a black girl. Whether or not that was the case, his scandalous behaviour would cost him his job, his freedom and his solvency. He filed for bankruptcy in January 2008 after being sued by his victims.

Like the Tawana Brawley hoax, all this is a matter of public record, and is so thoroughly documented that to attempt to dismiss it summarily is an act of total and utter venality, certainly for an academic of Professor Belknap’s “stature” in a peer-reviewed journal.

For the record, this was not the first false rape allegation Mangum had made; she made one ten years earlier, in 1996, when she was 18 years old. In April 2011, she was arrested after stabbing her lover Reginald Daye, who later died in hospital. In November 2013, she was convicted of second degree murder and ordered to serve 14 years 2 months to 18 years in prison. Enough said about this “victim”.

This was after the publication of this issue of the magazine and the Belknap article, but it is clear she has elected consciously to rubber stamp the most unreliable type of “evidence” - hearsay and anonymous surveys – in order to bolster the widely held but erroneous belief that rape is endemic in American society, more so on its campuses than anywhere else, a claim that is self-evident nonsense. And she has done this while summarily dismissing irrefutable evidence of pernicious rape hoaxes.

Before the very real problems of rape and sexual assault can be tackled in the United States or anywhere else, it is necessary to gauge the true extent of these crimes, that means an honest and open discussion, not the fantasy that is currently being peddled throughout the halls of academe, and brainwashing generations of young women.

Now let us attempt to answer the title of this article: who invented rape culture? Exactly who first coined this vacuous phrase is not known for certain, but it can be traced to the so-called second wave of feminism in the 1970s. More important is who is perpetuating this nonsense today? The answer is brainwashed women throughout the Western world, including and especially on the campuses of North America, and most especially by feminist academics.

These lies – and that is what we must call them – have had nothing but a detrimental effect on social policy, because good social policy cannot be based on lies. What can be done to remedy these lies is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but remember, you read it hear first, so don’t blame me if these fanatics succeed in tearing up the constitution and undermining what is left of the social order in the United States, as they have already done in Sweden and are attempting to elsewhere.

 

Notes And References

 

(1) The Equality Illusion: The Truth about Women and Men Today by Kat Banyard, published by Faber & Faber, London, (2011), page 2. The exact quote from this paperback edition is: “At least 100,000 women are raped each year in the UK and the rape conviction rate is 6.5 per cent.”

(2) Although initially Ruby Bates also claimed to have been gang-raped, she recanted; Victoria Price never did, and it is clear that but for her wantonness, the whole disgraceful incident and years of misery that followed would never have happened.

(3) Both the Stuart case and the Smith case have also been extensively documented. The interested reader/viewer will find documentary footage of both on-line, including of course on YouTube. The Stuart case was also the subject of an excellent dramatisation, Goodnight Sweet Wife: A Murder In Boston.

(4) REPORT OF THE GRAND JURY OF THE SUPREME COURT STATE OF NEW YORKCOUNTY OF DUTCHESS PURSUANT TO CRIMINAL PROCEDURE LAW SECTION 190.85SUBDIVISION (1)(b). This is its verbatim title. The report begins “Dear New Yorker” and contains an error in the first sentence, alluding to January 26, 1987 rather than January 26, 1988, but this can be forgiven as it is exhaustive beyond all meaning of the word.

(5) The Alchemy Of Race And Rights by Patricia J. Williams, published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, (1991), page 169.

(6) Race to Injustice: LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE DUKE LACROSSE RAPE CASE, Edited by Michael L. Seigel, published by Carolina Academic Press, Durham, North Carolina, (2009).

Time To Rethink Gender-Based Violence

In recent years we have heard a lot about so-called gender-based violence, which means in practice men assaulting women – sexually or otherwise. The rad-fems and their fellow travellers interpret this as unbridled misogyny and nothing else, that old men-are-the-root-of-all-evil routine – with special emphasis on white ones, of course. There are though some rather obvious flaws in the argument, but first a couple of trick questions.

Why didn’t Ted Bundy murder black women?

The answer: Because he was a racist.

And why did Jeffrey Dahmer murder blacks?

The answer: Because he wasn’t a racist.

If you don’t follow that, let’s try one more. Why didn’t Dennis Nilsen murder women?

The answer: Because he was homosexual.

Now do you get the idea?

We would not normally expect a male homosexual serial killer to target women anymore than we would expect a heterosexual serial killer to target men, unless his crimes had a non-sexual motive. There have for example been some serial killers who have murdered for money or simply for the thrill of it.

Let us take a specific example. Between New Year’s Eve 1974 and March 1976, Trevor Hardy murdered three teenage girls in shocking acts of depravity. It might be tempting to interpret this as yet another example of misogyny and gender-based violence, but that notion can soon be dispelled with a little homework. Hardy’s criminal career began when he was a teenager with anti-social crimes like burglary. Then he graduated to violence, and the first known victim of Hardy’s violence with a capital V was a man. Hardy stabbed him in the leg, narrowly missing an artery. His next victim was also a man, who was attacked with a pickaxe. There may have been some rational motive for either or both these attacks, but not for the three murders. Did Hardy kill these girls because he hated the opposite sex, or was he simply a dangerous psychopath who killed opportunistically?

It may have been that he would also have murdered young boys or vulnerable men if he’d had the chance, but it is quite likely he chose his victims partly because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and partly because though he may have been a coward as well as a psychopath he wasn’t so stupid as to attack someone who may have given him more trouble than he could handle.

Peter Sutcliffe, the psychopath known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was likewise said to have been motivated by a hatred of women. At the time, the loony feminist element in especially Leeds, made enormous capital out of his crimes. Most of Sutcliffe’s victims were whores, a traditional target of serial killers, not necessarily because they harbour an intense hatred for women who hire out their bodies to be abused by men, but because whores are easy targets. Although he has never been charged, there is good evidence that Sutcliffe’s first murder victim was a man. What does all this suggest?

How about that real acts of gender-based violence are few and far between, and that most of the nonsense we hear about it has been tailored to suit a particular narative rather than to identify a real problem we may be able to ameliorate if not solve entirely?

The “Lingua Franca” Of The Universe, And Its Evolution

I remember what might be called a trick question from when I was at school back in the 1960s: which language is most widely spoken? You were meant to answer English, only to be to it was not English but Mandarin Chinese. I found that odd because the only place Mandarin was spoken was China – and the various Chinatowns dotted around the world – while English was spoken everywhere, including in outer space.

During my misspent boyhood, before I discovered bird-nesting, then chess and then fatefully poker, I was a voracious devourer of comics: Marvel, DC, American, British and other. Even the aliens in these comics spoke English. Sometimes an alien would offer an explanation for this: “I mastered your language while listening to the BBC”. Well, maybe not the BBC. English is not simply the lingua franca of the known universe but of the entire universe.

Today there is probably no country in the world where it is not spoken to some degree, and as might be expected, some foreigners put us to shame with their use of it. When Harry Potter – the real one – said England’s greatest contribution to the world was law, he might have added that its ubiquitous contribution was its language.

That being said, not a few words of distinctly non-English origin have found their way into the Oxford Dictionary over the years. Words like pyjamas have of course been with us for a long time, but other words like ayatollah, halal and intifada came into common use much more recently. At some point I am going to have to stop italicising them.

The language has changed too, often in subtle ways in recent decades. Back in 1509 when Henry VIII wrote Paſtyme wt good 9panye, it is doubtful if he would have considered that 5 centuries on, the title of his greatest song would have been unintelligible to his countrymen. But look at the scan below, the front cover of a long defunct magazine called Britain To-day. Does anyone hyphenate to-day today?

A few years ago when I was doing some research at Colindale I found a report in the South London Press that alluded to Venner-rd., Sydenham. Who spells an address like this today?

At one time, the word on-line was spelt thus. Today, I am almost the only person in the world who hyphenates it.

On the off-chance that Man still exists five hundred years from now, what are the odds that the language we speak today will be just as alien to our descendants as is the language of Henry VIII to his?

My Final Word On The Trayvon Martin Case

The death of Trayvon Martin was a big story in the US and worldwide for all the wrong reasons, but for once the liberal media narrative did not go according to plan. When the story broke, photographs of a young Martin looking if not angelic then like the all-American black kid were splashed all over the media. The reality was somewhat different of course; by the time he was shot and killed by George Zimmerman, Martin was a self-identified gangsta who used the Twitter handle @NO_LIMIT_NIGGA – edifying stuff.

He was also a physically formidable 17 year old who gave George (Dirty Harry) Zimmerman a real pasting before he was despatched with a single shot to the heart, in reality to the lung and then the heart.

Opinion about the case polarised into two broad camps. There were those who said this was a racially motivated killing, that Martin was racially profiled – whatever that means – that it was second degree or even first degree murder. This position was taken at least to a degree by the usual suspects, many ordinary whites, and most moderate blacks.

On the other side there were those who as good as claimed he deserved it. Some of the comments and innuendo to this effect was ludicrous or even disgusting. For example, the London Daily Mail revealed that Martin was “obsessed with girls and made jokes about ‘ghetto’ culture”.

In other words he was a red-blooded heterosexual teen, and had a sense of humour. He doesn’t appear to have messed with white girls, so that is another point in his favour.

The available evidence suggests that Martin was both arrogant and none too bright, but this is par for the course for seventeen year old boys; black ones tend to be even more arrogant that white ones; that is not a racist statement, that is just how it is, in America at least. For the record, when I was seventeen I was if anything even more arrogant, and had nothing to be arrogant about. As we grow older we look back at our youth and not only wonder where it has gone but how could we ever have been or acted like that. Thirty years on, or in my case forty years on, we can laugh at those times.

An outrageous example of youthful arrogance can currently be seen in the antics of Justin Bieber; having achieved fame and fortune so young he has the resources to do more or less as he pleases, and has come down to Earth with a bump.

If Trayvon Martin had “suffered” the same luck as Justin Bieber, he would probably have got himself arrested at nineteen. If not, he may have looked back forty years from now and realised what a little twat he was. Unlike me he will never have that chance, and the world has George Zimmerman to “thank” for that.

A few words about Trayvon the hoodie. Last August when I was doing some shopping in Sydenham I noticed a young black kid with his hood up on a bright summer day. He was perhaps twelve years old. I watched him from a distance for a while, and he was clearly not doing anything suspicious. More recently I saw two white men in the street similarly attired, again it was a bright, sunny day, and both had their hoods up. It may look suspicious, but it is simply a fashion statement, the same way a punk haircut or a leather jacket may be one. End of.

Now what of Zimmerman? When it was revealed that he wasn’t white but Hispanic, he became in the eyes of the usual suspects a “white Hispanic”. The reality though is that race had absolutely nothing to do with this case. Trayvon Martin may have been shot by an asshole, but he was also yet another victim of America’s insane gun culture.

Although Zimmerman was given the benefit of the doubt by a jury, and the physical evidence tends to corroborate his version of events, we will never know precisely what happened that night. My personal view is that although he didn’t set out to kill anyone, Zimmerman wanted to draw his gun and make an “arrest” just like a real cop. Did Martin attack him first? If you’re clearly following someone late at night, that sort of confrontation is always a possibility, but even if Martin had, Zimmerman’s acquittal signals it is okay to shoot and kill a man during the course of a fight if you are getting your butt kicked, as clearly he was. Zimmerman’s subsequent behaviour demonstrates just as clearly that he is not the kind of person who should be allowed to own a gun under any circumstances. Whatever the truth about that fateful night, he is no manner of hero, and has only himself to blame for both his current and future predicament.

Time To Share Your Web Talents

If you’re not on-line, you’re either in hospital, in prison, or dead. Actually, that statement is untrue. It’s difficult to smuggle a desktop computer into a hospital ward, but mobile phones are easy to conceal, and often permitted. There are quite a few convicted criminals who use the Internet to proclaim their innocence, be they innocent or guilty. And there are tribute sites galore. It isn’t only Elvis who lives!

The pleasant truth is that most of us use the Internet every day, even if it is only e-mail for business purposes. More and more of us are also running our own websites. If you have neither the time nor the aptitude for starting your own website, how about a blog? You can open one for free on Google’s Blogger or many other such sites; you might even get lucky and make money from it.

Everyone likes to make money, but how about putting something back? That doesn’t mean you have to dig into pocket and shell out for a charity that pays its CEO a telephone number salary and remunerates its field workers with plush apartments and first class travel, you can donate your time and talents.

If you haven’t heard the name Philippe Bernard, he is the brains behind this site. Convert-JPG-to-PDF.net is exactly what it sounds like, it allows you to convert JPG images to PDFs. Just as importantly, it does so for free. Check out this interview with the man and see if you agree with his ethos.

Monsieur Bernard’s is a dedicated conversion site, but there are others that offer broader Web Designer Resources. This one, Web Design Tunes, is a premium site that also offers freebies; it contains a large collection of templates relating to not only web design but graphic design, video design, and related topics. It is also looking for talented people to contribute. If you have “extensive experience in developing for HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and WordPress and a passion for teaching”, that could include you.

Finally, if that last sentence went over your head, and you would like some free advice with your own Web work, check out what claims to be the largest web development site in the world – w3schools – the HTML Forum or similar. You will also find some excellent free lessons on YouTube.

What The Poker Books Don’t Tell You

Last week I was playing a deep stack no limit hold ’em freeroll. Freerolls are the only hold ’em tournaments I play now; technically this is not gambling because the legal definition of a wager requires that both or all parties concerned must be able to lose as well as win. If you are given a free entry to a tournament or anything, you can either win or not win, but cannot lose. With that qualification in mind, I played this tournament, and had bad cards for the most part. Then I was dealt pocket kings: clubs and spades. Normally with kings I will raise big pre-flop; here I should probably have whacked it all in, but as I said, it was a deep stack tournament, and I thought “Chip and a chair”.

The flop came diamond, diamond, diamond headed by the queen; apart from the same headed by the ace, it is difficult to imagine a worse flop for two black kings, but I bet into it anyway. There was a caller, and the third player in the hand raised. What would you do? I figured I was probably beat, maybe the guy was playing suited connectors, but the other player had called in front of him. I thought he was probably drawing to the nut flush but for all I knew he could have hit the flush as well. The guy who raised might have had a set; clearly there were many possibilities, but discretion being the better part of valour and with the bad hands I was getting, I sighed and folded.

The two played out the hand, no more diamonds came, and as I suspected, the first player had the bare ace of diamonds. And the raiser? He had Q-2 off-suit, the deuce being a diamond. What kind of moron calls a raise or even the small blind with Q-2 off-suit and then raises a 3 diamond board? In this case, the same moron who won the pot with a pair of queens.

The poker books don’t tell you about these kinds of players; this is another reason you can never beat the moron. I’ve heard it said that at higher stakes the play is very different. On occasion I’ve played higher stakes, and I can tell you that by and large, it ain’t. The only thing I do know is that if I had whacked it all in following the moron’s raise, he would have called, and I would have found myself facing either the nut flush or a set.