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.

Is Rape Truly A Fate Worse Than Death?

On the evening of November 7, 1974, a small woman was attacked in a dark room at her London home. Her attacker was a lot bigger than her, he was also desperate, having minutes before bludgeoned another woman to death. As he gripped her throat intending to choke the life out of her, she grabbed that vital part of a man’s anatomy that always hurts when so gripped, and squeezed hard.

Later, Countess Lucan was able to escape from the clutches of her murderous estranged husband, and tell her tale. The woman he had battered to death with a lead pipe was the children’s nanny Sandra Rivett, but Miss Rivett had not been his intended victim; that had been the Countess.

The following day on the other side of the Atlantic, a young woman found herself in an even less enviable situation, because had he succeeded, her attacker would probably have raped and tortured her to death before disposing of her body in a ditch or woodland somewhere. The 18 year old Carol DaRonch was duped by serial killer Ted Bundy who was posing as a police officer. When she realised he was not what he said he was, she fought like a tigress, and managed to escape from his clutches, throwing herself out of the car.

Like non-sexual predators, rapists tend to target those who are less formidable than themselves, be they smaller women, drunk women, women who have been incapacitated by the administration of some noxious substance...Although undoubtedly adrenalin gave them strength, both Countess Lucan and Carol DaRonch were lucky to be able to overpower in the first case, and flee from in the second, a physically more powerful assailant.

This begs the question, why apparently do so many victims of date rape and more generally acquaintance rape throw in the towel without so much as scratching their assailants’ faces? There are broadly speaking two answers to this uncomfortable question. The first is that rape is not the fate worse than death we are constantly being led to believe it is. The other is that this epidemic, this “rape culture” of Western society, exists only in the tiny minds of demented feminists and their dupes.

The shrill insistence that the majority of rapes are committed “by someone the victim knows” and that the vast majority go unreported is supported only by anecdotal evidence of the most unreliable, indeed the most untrustworthy, kind. This is all the more evident when one considers the hub of Western rape culture is purportedly the American campus, whose female denizens are by definition the most intelligent, the most educated, and often the most privileged of women.

Alas, neither formidable intellect nor the most comprehensive, expensive education guarantees the individual concerned will exhibit a shred of common sense, or that when groups of such individuals congregate that somehow they will reach a reasonable consensus. Indeed, the exact opposite is guaranteed; their dogmatism and at times sheer idiocy reinforces each others’ delusions – the well-documented phenomenon of the madness of crowds.

The conclusions we must draw from this are that rape is not the vastly under-reported crime the rad-fems would have us believe it is, and that contrary to their facile assertions, the conviction rate for rape is not unrealistically low, rather this is largely a reflection of the propensity of a certain type of (mostly young) woman to cry rape for all manner of reasons, as I have documented elsewhere.