Keith Richardson's blog

Jimmy Savile is guilty of child abuse

keith — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:36:37 +0100

Jimmy Savile is guilty of child abuse

Jimmy Savile is obviously guilty of whatever and so is the entire management of the BBC, even though I have no evidence whatsoever to prove that statement and despite the fact that no investigation has yet taken place. I hate him and all he stands for, even though I never actually met him. He must be evil because hundreds of people are saying so. And because hundreds even thousands may have been abused by him. All they seek is a cure for their blighted childhoods by seeking large amounts of money as compensation. Money cures everything the lawyer said.

The BBC is full of long haired layabouts called musicians who like sex, drugs and rock and roll and having a good time. How dare they drink alcohol while at work. They should be replaced by Ms Prim and Mr Bland and his many followers who currently run BBC4, BBC News and other instantly safe programmes and who help me switch off and get a good night's sleep.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9615119/Its-not-a-crisis-at-the-BBC.-Not-yet-anyway.html

politics,, society

Is Citizen Khan racist

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:12:29 +0100

Is Citizen Khan racist

I watched Citizen Khan and found it funny enough - even if I'd heard some of the jokes before. It's just a standard British sitcom. Thank god the writer is Adil Ray half Pakistan and half Kenyan. Otherwise the racist accusations would be even louder. If he was Jewish and the programme about Jews he would probably still be accused of being antisemitic. I bet the French hated Allo Allo. I think Germans liked it. Some communities take themselves too seriously.

It's a long standing British tradition to send up all and sundry. It's British and tough luck if you don't like it. Comedy like Citizen Khan actually humanises Pakistanis who generally get a bad press.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2196104/Citizen-Khan-does-stereotype-Muslims-says-shows-creator.html

drama, racism

Cloud - created

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:03:55 +0100

Cloud

capitalism child_abuse china companies dance democracy drama economics free_speech fuel_prices immigration middle_east nhs politics racism society telecommunications travel work

Market forces and rising prices in oil, gas and electricity

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:02:10 +0100

Market forces and rising prices in oil, gas and electricity

There is a global crisis in oil = too expensive and food = too expensive and housing = too expensive and our government says there is nothing it can do about it. There is an economic downturn and no government can do anything about it. That's correct. They are powerless. Well, actually they all chose to be powerless. In fact all World Bank affiliated countries have given up their power to control the world or at least to influence it. The Global Market and the Banks are now in control and just look at the result: spiralling prices, financial collapse, dodgy money lending, environmental destruction and not least your impoverishment.

Of course these problems will not be affecting those who have created them. They are laughing all the way to the Bank - the safe Offshore one. And besides they will increase their wages while decreasing yours to pay for their increase. See how it works?!

The Free Market is good for you

Big lie number two is: You can trust Market Forces and the Free Market.

Rising gas bills and electricity bills and petrol for your car - your fuel bills - are the result of “market forces”. When Gas and Electricity were national assets they were not part of a market and therefore did not and could not “spiral”. The lie is that market forces are something natural and inevitable and will do the world some good when in fact the “market” is just a small bunch of big capitalists and commodity exchange investors seeking to make a killing and they really don't care who or what they kill. The free market is just a few selfish greedy people maximising their profit at any cost. Be sure that the cost will be born by you or me.

Now personally, I don't care if there is a free market in Mars Bars or Trainers or whatever because I really don't need to buy them. I really do have some freedom of choice as to whether I buy such things or not. But when it comes to essential goods and services there should not be a free market. We should own our own national assets and keep control of prices. If I had my way the Building Societies would never have become banks and would have remained Mutual Societies whose sole purpose was to help people save for a house to live in and there would not have been any housing crisis or the insane prices we see now when the market price of a house far outstrips what it actually costs to build and far outstrips our real incomes.

We were sold that particular lie in the Thatcher years and of course human greed got the better of those who had Building Society savings because they would then become shareholders and feel ever so important and ever so rich. And so it goes on. Don't believe the lies about inevitable market forces when essentials such as Gas have only recently become wholesale commodities that the super-rich can buy and sell and when the same company is selling Gas to itself and then saying it too can do nothing about its high prices. What they actually do is announce billion dollar profits and huge salaries on the back of higher bills paid by the mass of people who are poorer as a result.

Oil and Gas Fact box

Did you know that the wholesale price of Gas is artificially linked to the wholesale price of Oil? There is no good reason for that, it just is!

You can compare electricity prices here.

Use the small arrows to click through the Google links.

fuel prices, capitalism

Indian Dance at Dance City, Newcastle

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:56:56 +0100

Indian Dance at Dance City, Newcastle

Saturday 22 September

Hover your mouse over the video to see navigation controls and a Full Screen option

Inspirational. These dancers were the real thing. There were 6 men and a woman who looked like she had just been magically transformed from an ancient stone goddess into colourful life. The dance was a blend of traditional Indian styles and stylised yoga positions, requiring great strength and flexibility.

A large screen backdrop projected ancient carvings, etchings and paintings, illustrating scenes from Hindu mythology. Each dance was accompanied by music or a song. Some of the sequences were sub-titled which helped me appreciate what was going on a great deal; in the same way that sub-titles during an Opera make sense of the songs and action for those of us who don't know the subjects very well. The very last sequence was danced to the sound of hypnotic Mantras. You can get a more direct experience from the video clips I took.

Gem Arts present Dhara as part of the SAMA festival

This text taken from the Dance City site

Dhara, features a stunning Odissi/Gotipua ensemble of seven dancers, with special choreography by Dr. Rekha Tandon. The programme has beautiful music and evocative back projections providing a unique insight into this ancient and fascinating tradition.

The Gotipua tradition has its origins in the temples of Orissa, where talented young boys were taken on as resident students at the temple. It is believed that the Odissi dance style evolved from the Gotipua tradition; indeed, most of the great masters/Gurus of Odissi are supposed to have begun life as Gotipua dancers.

Photos

Here are some fotos taken with a Samsung 35mm equivalent digital camera. No flash was allowed, hence the poor quality, and I was sitting some distance away. However, you get a good idea of the scene.

Use the arrows at the bottom right and left corners of the popup as a slideshow.

dance

G4S security provider for the Olympic games

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:56:07 +0100

G4S security provider for the Olympic games

The company may lose £50m from the £284m contract because it cannot supply enough security guards. Oh what a shame. They will still get almost a quarter of a billion of our money. Yet another example of a private company NOT doing better than the State. And the reward for the managers for that failure to provide will still be £57m. If Britain was run by the Mafia you wouldn't notice the difference.

capitalism

Bo Xilai's wife and Chinese justice

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:55:16 +0100

Bo Xilai's wife and Chinese justice

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9463577/Neil-Heywood-trial-secret-trial-of-Bo-Xilais-wife-ends-on-first-day-without-verdict.html

Chinese justice is swift. One day to prove guilt. One hour would have done just as well. This was a secret trial with secret evidence. We have to believe that the Communist Party of China can be trusted. But the people and the world cannot be trusted. Justice has to be in public and open to scrutiny to be justice. All we see is a sinister state control that will silence anyone who might really say what is rather than what the faceless They want to make people think is true. Truth is a lie, a lie is the truth in Communist China.

China, politics

Barry Thew's T-shirt

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:54:40 +0100

Barry Thew's T-shirt

Barry Thew was jailed for 8 months under section 4a of the Public Order Act 1986 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64– “displaying writing or other visible representation with intention of causing harassment, alarm or distress”. Basically jailed for being an idiot.

the Public Order Act 1986 is a bad law

This is totally wrong. This man is another hot headed idiot - and he does apparently have a genuine grievance against the Manchester police. Jail for being an idiot by using a catch-all clause in a law designed to gag public protest and comment is not acceptable. Is this Russia or China? With that logic you can go to jail for saying that Tony Blair is a war criminal as some people quite rationally think. Naturally such a statement will “distress” him and his family, maybe.

It is a terrible thing for anybody to be shot for no good reason but our police are not snow whites. Quite a few innocent people have been shot by the British police. Police have shot dead 33 people since 1995 and only two marksmen have ever been named.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/oct/11/manchester-man-jailed-tshirt-police?CMP=twt_gu

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1315288/Police-shot-dead-33-people-1995--marksmen-named.html#ixzz295PZVxfA

free speech, democracy

Big increase in immigration revealed by the 2011 Census

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:53:31 +0100

Big increase in immigration revealed by the 2011 Census

The population of England and Wales has reached 56.1 million, up by 3.7 million in a decade, the 2011 Census shows.

It is the largest growth shown by any census since they began in 1801. Most of the population growth was due to immigration.

Estimated net migration to England and Wales between year ending June 2002 and year ending June 2011 was 1.9 million. Census results suggest that this is an under-estimate of 267,000.

There are over 400,000 more under-fives compared with 2001, partly reflecting a rise in the number of women of child-bearing age because of inward migration, the ONS said.

The UK is the third most densly populated country in the EU after the Netherlands and Malta

I wonder why there is a shortage of housing and decent affordable rented accommodation? I don't want to see any more houses being built near where I live. Oops too late - there goes all the green land and the wildlife with it. Where did my hedgehogs go?

I can't think of any benefit at all of mass migration to the indigenous population. All that happens is that ethnic and religious groups separate off from each other. So we have Little Pakistan, Little India, Little China, Little Israel and now Little Poland and Rumania. And Little Islam. There is very little intermarriage, and especially between the religious divides. Intermarriage means true integration but it hasn't happened.

Foreign criminals

An under-reported consequence of open borders is the number of foreign criminals operating in the UK. Of the 209,000 people locked up in the past 2 years, 33,361 were from overseas.

The number has tripled in the past five years from 10,067. according to figures, revealed by the Ministry of Justice in a Freedom of Information request.

In reality there are currently 11,135 foreign inmates out of a total prison population of more than 85,000, serving time for offenses including murder, manslaughter, robbery, assault and drugs.

Perhaps surprisingly, criminals from Poland top the list with 3,654, Romania 2,975, Lithuania 2,354, Ireland 1,745, Nigeria 1,561, Pakistan 1,280, Vietnam 1,243, Jamaica 1,182, India 1,160, Somalia 1,076. The figure for Poles is 36 TIMES higher than in 2004, when it was just 99. Fortunately I only know nice Poles but I did see some scary characters in Reading.

immigration

JImmy Saville child abuse

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:49:04 +0100

JImmy Saville child abuse

The British mind is a dirty mess when it comes to sexual matters and it seems it always has been.

JImmy Saville was born in 1926 so his attitudes were like Leslie Philips as he was in his films. 40 years ago when Jimmy Saville was supposed to be doing whatever he was doing attitudes were very different to now, much more robust and paradoxically more tolerant. We are talking about the 60s and 70s when people first had sex: Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Larkin).

Attitudes in the 60s and 70s were different

In my school we used to have our “pervert” teachers who nowadays would be sacked. We used to joke about it: “Keep your back to the wall here he comes” and he used to poke his finger in your shirt and try to stroke from your head to your bottom yuk. We didn't get into a panic. Everybody knew. We didn't take it seriously. He was harmless. Another one used to push some invisible handkerchief down the top pocket of girls' blazers I wonder why. And my girlfriend was one of the sixth formers who had extra lessons in the stock room where he could accidentally touch her leg. All us students knew. All very slimy really but we just made jokes about him and he would get it in the ear from some invisible pupil shouting dirty old man or whatever from behind a wall. But it wasn't a matter for police, witchunting or total character assassination. The pocket groping English teacher was in fact a really good teacher. Jimmy Saville came from that background as an adult with old fashioned views. Patting a woman's bottom wasn't the criminal offense it now can be. If you look at St Trinians in the 50s the PE teacher fancies the sixth form girls and who wouldn't and the older girls are little sex bombs - as in the Modern version. So I suppose even the modern one is encouraging pedophilia? That's why people didn't usually complain or report men like Jimmy Saville and probably why he didn't even try to hide it or laughed it off.

The teacher who went off with the 15 year old Megan Stammers is being charged with child abduction when it really is nothing of the sort. Any kind of messing around with any girl under 16 is child abuse or perversion. But it isn't. It depends on the circumstances. If was 18 it would still be child abduction. Just about everything adults do to and with other adults is now abuse if the woman complains - and it's usually women. A woman goes back to a hotel room with a footballer for a one night stand and she accuses him of rape. I mean there needs to be some account taken of reality and realistic expectations and context and people in a state of heightened emotion. People are not robots and cannot be expected to behave in a mechanistic fashion.

child abuse

Glaxosmithkline drugs fraud

keith — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:37:03 +0100

Glaxosmithkline drugs fraud

Yet another Mega company engaged in criminal activity - except its never called criminal. So basically our Western world is run by people so greedy they will risk the lives and livelihoods of all of us. If it happened in Africa it would get presented completely differently when in fact these people are no better than any of the corrupt people who run any of the dictatorships around the world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18673220

capitalism