Ivan, Sorry, I came late to your comment about Science Articles in The
Mail. Difficult for me since I mostly have no idea of what I am talking about,
beyond common sense, which is sometimes not enough.
I worry that someone
might have put in a lot of effort, so sometimes I churn out a load of old
rubbish just to let them know that I had noticed what they said.
I did
write this amazing post about fresh water pouring into The North Atlantic,
that even I knew was a pile of gobbdy gook, but it did sound okay. And then
two other posters fell out about what I had said. Ho Ho. So I Green Arrowed
the one who agreed with me, and Red Arrowed the one who didn’t.
Actually,
in retrospect, my ideas were not all that stupid, But Global Warming or not,
is a difficult thing. And while I do not believe that Man is even remotely
capable of destroying Planet Earth, I do believe that we should be a trifle
more careful, even if only for our own sake.
I don’t actually care about
The Human Race because for me The Planet will always be more important. It
will be here long after I have gone.
I was once an Air Mechanic. I serviced
aeroplanes in days of yore. when Her Majesty’s Royal Navy thought that women
were fit for the purpose, but it was never that difficult. You just needed to
know nuts and bolts and how to change some component that wasn’t working, or
perhaps to know that it wasn’t working. But at the end of every day the life
of some arsehole pilot was in your hands. And believe me, there were some
arsehole pilots..
“Can you tell me how to start this thing, dear girl?’
“Yer , hit it with a hammer, and get out of the cockpit you bloody idiot. If
you can’t start then you shouldn’t be driving it.” Hey Ho, happy days. I
personally never lost a pilot. I might have wondered why.

Will there be any room for the people who have nothing bad to say about
Jimmy Savile?

Oh come now, Moor! We can’t let pesky things like facts get in the way of a
good expose!

Incidentally and as an aside, off-the-wall genuine cures for intractable
medical ailments do occasionally occur. The most celebrated case of the last
30 years involves peptic ulcers. They were, it was suggested, caused amongst
other things, by ‘stress’.

In the early 1980s a couple of Australians suspected a bacteria, H. pylori,
was implicated. One, Barry Marshall, swallowed a culture of it and promptly
developed ulcers. Upon taking antibiotics, they equally promptly disappeared.
Marshall and his coworker, Robin Warren, duly received the Nobel prize for
Medicine in 2005. It is a wonderful, simple, heroic, satisfying story. Most of
medicine is not like this.

It is also notable that NO fringe or alternative medicine theories had
suggested a bacterial cause for ulcers. Although this was prime territory for
‘alternative’ cures: a persistent, painful medical condition for which
‘conventional’ medicine had no answer. Yet it took ‘ordinary’ medicine–and a
couple of extraordinary individuals–to come up with the answer. And then
rapidly demonstrate it–to the benefit of all–via regular science.

There are lessons here.

Also worth a read

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/nov/11/investigative-journalism-cityuniversity

comment
@ ryeats
11 November 2012 10:34PM

So the new shakers and movers in journalism are moving on to their next
story already? From a link above:
”Currently in the works: The Carlton Club
connection, and one of the biggest high-level paedophile rings ever
investigated.”

“Those hundreds of girls, including myself, took the opportunity that a
more enlightened age granted them, and made the most of it. A mere half dozen
failed to climb back up the slippery slope, and have emerged into middle age
as embittered women. Those half dozen, with their tawdry tales of ‘Jimmy
grabbed my bottom’ have run full tilt into an age of moral panic, unethical
journalism, charity empire building, a dying main stream media, and a couple
of unsupervised journalists, to take centre stage in a drama that is
threatening our entire information source.”

And so say all of us! Thanks, Anna.

Well said. There’s a lot of hysteria and sloppy/knee-jerk journalism about.
Here’s another bit of common sense from Max Hastings http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/65285bb0-299a-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2BwEnm1Bf

Anna, again you have hit the nail on the head. The fact that things,
conditions, attitudes, hysteria, today are so different from our time (my
teenage years were the 50s) that the present generation just do not understand
or appreciate what we went through to improve our lives. The very idea that we
wanted to better ourselves totally escapes them.

Yes, it was a time of turmoil. The country was recovering from a war but we
had pride in ourselves. If there was a chance for improvement we took it, I
know I did by being the first in my family to go to university and it appears,
from what you say, most of the girls at Duncroft did as well. I can only feel
pity for those that appear to have rejected that opportunity.

It would appear that personnel responsibility in this day and age is being
replaced by a culture of hysteria fostered by the MSM, including the BBC – how
have the mighty fallen. I don’t know if this trend can be reversed, but I do
know that if it isn’t the the future is going to be very bleak.

hello mi cat, great news you have helped prove I am not as mental as some
believe….

Hi Elena ‘andcart
‘Worth a Google.’ Or you could go directly to WikiP
‘Tullio Simoncini’–the sodium bicarbonate guy. No immediate link, but this to
filmmaker Massimo Mazzucco: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massimo_Mazzucco

The New American Century / Il Nuovo Secolo Americano – 2007
“As a
follow-up to Global Deceit, The New American Century presents the historical,
philosophical, economical and political background — some of which is totally
unknown to the public — that lend support to the accusation that the 9/11
terrorist attacks were in fact an inside-job.”

Which we all know! Or this:
Cancer: The Forbidden Cures – 2010
“All
the successful cures against cancer discovered in the last 100 years, and the
reasons why they were suppressed. Cancer is the only disease that has been
defeated dozens of times without anyone knowing it. In the last 100 years,
dozens of doctors, scientists, and researchers have developed diverse and
effective solutions against cancer only to be thwarted by the political and
propaganda power of the drug-dominated medical profession. This is the story
of Essiac, Hoxsey, Laetrile, Shark Cartilage, Mistletoe, and Bicarbonate of
Soda all put together in a stunning overview that leaves no doubt that
inexpensive cures for cancer do exist but are systematically blocked by Big
Pharma because they come from nature and cannot be patented.

For balance WikiP adds this:
Some criticism was directed to Mazzucco
after his decision, starting September 2008, to publicize an alternative
cancer therapy based on Sodium bicarbonate and proposed by Italian ex-doctor
Tullio Simoncini. Said therapy is currently unproven, and Simoncini was
expelled from the Italian Medical Association after he was tried and found
guilty of fraud and manslaughter, since a patient died, allegedly as result of
Simoncini’s treatment. Recent studies do show some activity of sodium
bicarbonate against cancer in animal models. However, to date no human trials
have been undertaken due to physiological implausibility as the human body
tightly controls Acid–base_homeostasis.

‘Italy, as is well recognised, has high standards for integrity and truth,
in documentaries, as in politics.’ Was it Berlusconi who said that?

Hi belinus–I’m never quite sure how seriously to take your posts! There
are, however, always entertaining.

Anecdotal–personal–experience informs all our lives. It does not always
reliably transfer from one life to another. Which is why more objective
evidence becomes preferable. Properly conducted medical trials are, if you
like, the combined testimony of many lives. Hence likely to be more
reliable.

I wouldn’t place too much importance on The British Working Class if I was
you. Most of the good ones are fighting tooth and claw to get out, or to be
called something else. And then bogged off somewhere else, as both you and I
have done. Both children of a bad beginning but both more than capable.
Nothing frightfully working class about either of us despite our origins, but
it never hurts to remember who we were.
I don’t think that Jimmy Savile
cared about who he was. He was light years more clever than the rest of us put
together. And oh my goodness me, didn’t he half do well. He did more for basic
humanity than the rest of us ever did. And I really don’t care about how many
bums he might have groped in passing. He could have groped my bum any day of
the week. I am only sorry that he never did.
I am sick to death of hearing
about what a bad man he was. He wasn’t a bad man. Okay. Prove me wrong.

You make an interesting point. It has always baffled me why any kind of
sexual interference below the age of consent is automatically regarded by many
people as permanently damaging when clearly there must be all kinds of degrees
of early sexual experience from sexual games with older cousins to rape by
step-fathers. For example, I haven’t read all of Karin Ward’s books (only the
one that relates to Duncroft), but my understanding is that she was repeatedly
raped by her stepfather from a young age. One would certainly expect such an
experience to be very psychologically disturbing, but how does this rate
alongside giving Jimmy Savile a blowjob in his car in exchange for cigarettes
and a place on the bus to the BBC studios? From her own account, she passed
this off as a very trivial event, and there is no suggestion in anything she
wrote that she suffered psychological trauma from this. Nor is it really clear
if Savile’s niece was permanently damaged by being groped at the ages of 13
and 16, by her account.

On the other hand, law enforcement simply has to look at it from the point
of view of whether laws were broken and whether cases can still be brought or
compensation sought, even after decades have passed. The legal point of view
may be very different from a common sense point of view.

I worked for a couple of years in a program for sex offenders in the United
States and had opportunities to review case notes and offender histories. A
large proportion of the offenders were pedophiles and the quality of their
offenses certainly seemed much more severe that the kind of thing Savile was
accused of, and the witness statements (from child victims, not from adults at
a remote distance in time) far more detailed and convincing than anything that
has been put in the public arena in media discussions of the Savile case and
the North Wales pedophile ring case.

Pedophilia is a very real crime and persistent pedophiles certainly need to
be taken out of circulation, but I really wonder whether the Savile case is
not a complete red herring, unless there are more witness statements regarding
events of a more severe nature that have not yet been revealed to the
public.

“Savile’s family and former friends are being forced to publicly denounce a
man they obviously loved for 50/ 60 years”

Except perhaps his niece who says he put his hand down her knickers when
she was 12, and was told “it’s only Jimmy” when she complained to her
grandmother, and that he also assaulted her again when she was 15. Radio 5
live’s interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20081577

Yes, we only have her word for any of that, but that’s the problem with a
lot of this. Lack of evidence is not proof that it did not happen – but
equally there is no proof that it did. The niece might have all sorts of
reasons for making an untrue claim now, or she might finally be able to say
publicly what she has wanted to say for 37 years. We have no way of knowing
which. “Innocent until proven guilty” applies to the accusers as well as to
the accused. We shouldn’t assume they are all lying any more than we should
assume they are all telling the truth.

In that particular case I am not sure how we will know the truth but I
found her claim that Granny knew and kept quiet because of the ‘gifts’ that
flowed from Savile, an odd claim.

Yes, the Duncroft years also have detailed reconstructions of many
conversations written in a rather flat Enid Blytonesque style, though I don’t
think she recounts any conversations with Savile verbatim. [Perhaps it would
go like this: “Now then, now then, yoong lady. As it ‘appens, you may be
woondering what is this ‘ere loomp in me pants…!”]

The dialogue is clearly a convenient fiction, though I don’t think Charles
Dickens will be losing any sleep over this literary competitor.

The following is from the Author’s notes to Karin’s second book….

As for conversations and the ability to recall them, I would be lying if I
claimed to be able to do that. What I can do, however, is recall my feelings
and the situations in question. Using my knowledge of the people, the events,
the places and my own feelings I can extrapolate a conversation. It is
actually a style of writing called ‘Dialogue-led narrative’. There are, of
course, certain words and phrases which I do recall with clarity, such as
“You’re just trying to draw attention to yourself.”

Bound to be much in what you say but I doubt Leveson is buying it and with
today’s Daily Mail ‘investigation’, I feel the good Lord will be even more
determined.

Only read the ‘Secrets of a Chelsea Basement’ so far and found it
absolutely hilarious!
Will try to read the others tomorrow.
Great
entertainment!!!

Of course, given that your comment is a trifle ambiguous, if you meant that
the comedy was merely that created by Her Majesty’s Press, and its activities,
as opposed to the antics of Mr Mosely et al, fair enough, their behaviour was
indeed risible. However, I can quite see why Mr Mosely would no more wish to
be maligned by them, any more than Lord McAlpine, for the entertainment of any
other passing ignoramus