I did not have sexual relations with those minors

Watched the Netflix documentary of infamous paedophile Jeffrey Epstine who I keep getting muddled up with infamous paedophile Jacob Epstine.  For those of you who can’t remember the difference Jacob is the sculptor who had sex with his own daughters and his own dog and Jeffrey is the financer who had sex with other people’s daughters and ran an international underage trafficking ring.

It was interesting and depressing seeing who had on his plane … some were obviously just trapped in the web of targeted philanthropy he spun around himself to try and look respectable.  Then there were others.  Things have been a bit awkward for Prince Andrew since it was revealed he had visited “paedophile island”.  However, Epstine also hung out with both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Things have been looking bad for Clinton since photos emerged of him on Epstein’s plane on his way to a charity event with that soul of propriety Kevin Spacey...

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7Gz1t8gW1e/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet

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A slew of images obtained by #ThePost show a smiling #BillClinton posing alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and Chauntae Davies — the masseuse who’s accused late convicted pedophile #JeffreyEpstein of rape. Actors #KevinSpacey and Chris Tucker also pop up in some of the shots. Tap the link in our bio for more photos.

A post shared by New York Post (@nypost) on Jan 9, 2020 at 8:56am PST

Things looked worse when the man who maintained Epstine’s phone masts on his island (Steve Scully) said he saw Clinton there – Clinton denies this.  Epstine’s flight logs are available and these would seem to suggest he didn’t go to the island.  It seems odd then that two independent witnesses saw him there – although both insist that they witnessed no impropriety other than simply being on a paedophile island.

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/08/the-epstein-connections-fueling-conspiracy-theories/

One’s mind started to ruminate about how plausible any of this might be and it wandered back to Monica Lewinsky… and then one remembered that the Lewinski affair came out of an accusation of sexual naughtiness against Clinton by Paula Jones who said he “propositioned and exposed himself to her” in 1991.  This civil case ended with Clinton paying Jones $850,000 and having to pay a further $90,000 when Judge Wright found him in contempt for misleading testimony.  This in turn led to Clinton’s license to practice law in Arkansas being suspended for a period of five years.  It was Jones’s lawyers who subpoenaed Monica Lewinsky in an attempt to prove Clinton’s character dubious.  It was this in turn and Clinton’s selective truths about the affair that lead to the failed attempts to impeach him.  Clinton could at the time have been charged with perjury if he hadn’t been a sitting President…

Now all of these things might be unrelated coincidences but look at the number of them…

Whitgift Centre launches new sandbag stepping stones attraction

On a preponderance of the evidence but not beyond reasonable doubt....

This week I have been mostly watching Storyville OJ: Made In America on BBC Iplayer.  It’s in five parts and it took me a long time to get through. 

The first part about his sporting career is quite hard going …particularly if you don’t understand American football and find sport in general about as interesting as watching paint dry.  This is interspersed with sections about the civil rights movement in America and OJ’s involvement in it which was, the documentary claims, as minimal as possible.  The repeated accusation from other sports people and civil rights people interviewed can be summarised simply as “Uncle Tom”.

The next part follows his rise as a celebrity and actor as his sports career waned and his trading in of his first wife Marguerite for Nicole Simpson.  It also charts his relationship with advertising industry and the commercialisation of the persona.  But the thing that makes the documentary so absorbing is they really have interviewed everyone he ever knew with no exceptions.  His coaches, his team mates, his neighbours, the police …his cat… no one and nothing is left out.  It has to be the most exhausting documentary about a living person that I have ever seen. So much so that it’s only by part 3 (and some episodes are 90 minutes long) that we start to get the murder, the chase and the trial. 

Simpson had a long history of beating his estranged wife Nicole who was found (with Ron Goldman) brutally murdered in her condo in Brentwood, Los Angeles.  The crime scene photos are shown and they’re pretty grim with Nicole’s head almost hacked off. 

However, OJ had a lot of money so hired the best legal team in town led by the flamboyant defence lawyer Johnnie Cochran - along with Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Shawn Holley, Carl E. Douglas,  Gerald Uelmen and Robert (Kim’s dad) Kardashian.  Having advised OJ not to take the witness stand they then threw as much doubt on all the evidence and witnesses as possible.  Unable to disprove the forensic evidence they fell back on the only defence possible – it was planted.  Fortunately the Detective Mark Fuhrman had given hours and hours of off the record interviews to a TV drama team for an unrelated TV drama project and when they came to light they were liberally peppered with the N word and various unpleasant opinions and there were hours and hours of it.  They now had a motive for the police to plant evidence and all they had to show was that it was plausible that it might have happened…

At various points members of the prosecution team are asked if they think any of this was true and they give the response that it isn’t their job to assess the truth just put forward the best case for their client – it’s the Jury’s job to assess truth.  Being the USA all the jurors can be interviewed as well and many say outright that a factor in not finding OJ guilty was the recent murder of Rodney King and the acquittal of the arresting officers in that case.  However, it is easy to blame the jury when the larger truth may be that the defence really didn’t properly make their case.  Things became more complicated when the prosecution fell out with each other over whether they’d acted ethically.  And more complicated still when OJ was found responsible for the murderers in a civil court where he was forced to take the witness stand and be cross examined …meaning he did the murder on the preponderance of the evidence but not beyond reasonable doubt.

OJ’s life after getting off the murder charge became a pitiful affair.  After all, even if you accept he didn't do it he still comes out of the trial looking like a nasty wifebeater.

With no sports career and now being regarded as Hollywood box office poison and being pursued by Ron Goldman's family to cough up $33million Simpson’s life consisted of living off his pension, playing golf and generating revenue through signing memorabilia.  His associates stashed this memorabilia across the country for him and also stole chunks of it while Simpson tried to keep his assets in forms that were hard for the Goldmans to aquire.  This resulted in an argument in a hotel over a van of memorabilia that ended up with Simpson and his mates pulling guns which turned into an armed robbery charge that turned into 33 years in prison…

…after 12 years he’s now out on parole and can be found wandering round golf courses on twitter talking about black lives matter … but anyway what’s really amazing about this documentary is not whether or not Simpson did it ...but simply the love, fantastic hard work and detail that has gone into making the documentary…

Did he do it?

On a preponderance of the evidence yes but not beyond reasonable doubt...

Proof that the right are terrible at petitioning...

You think you've seen it all then this.... The Daily Mail has a petition...

Yes, I'll repeat those words...

The Daily Mail has a petition - the first time in the whole of history they've ever petitioned against a perceived injustice - against the removal of Churchill's statue

And... The best bit...

.. Its not on change or the parliament website... Oh no.. Its on paper and you have to cut it out with a pair of scissors and mail it to your MP snail mail...

... They're not used to this petitioning thing, are they?

YouTube...

In other censorship news my xtranormal videos of the Iraq Inquiry transcripts that used to live here have suddenly dematerialised from Youtube.  These were animations of real interview transcripts on the Iraq Inquiry website - made because obviously not everyone involved was allowed to be seen in public for security reasons.

They probably tried to contact me but I don't use the email account I used to make them anymore so ...I've had to fill in a form to try and retrieve them as the originals don't exist anymore because Xtranormal went bust.

But even if they had contacted me ...isn't there a point where they've been up several years with no one complaining then ...you can just leave them up?  I read through the strikedown mechanism notes and ...what?  You have to curate these things all the time ...every time someone puts in a spurious objection? 

I've got better things to do with my time than curate old youtube chanels because they've gone out of fashion?

Maybe there was another reason.  But I can't see it.  There was no libel - it's all inquiry transcripts covered by qualified privilege.  There's no copyright issues I can think of - it's all original animation.  And if anyone cares now ... why now?  Why not 5 years ago when it was a live issue?  It's really just primary source historical information...  Of course it could be that someone's taken them down because they were boring...

But how annoying ... anyway I've sent my form in ...

Please note since this blog was written Youtube have kindly restored my channel although why it was removed in the first place remains a mystery.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PearShapedIraq 

The radical liberals...

Listening to right wing people going on about John Wayne movies being possibly banned due to the recent outbreak of iconocasts I pointed out that this would be ironic given John Wayne's attempts to get people banned during the era of the Hollywood blacklist.  Most notable was the debacle over High Noon (see here).

But although he was a cheerleader for the House Un-American Activities Committee  how personally responsible was Wayne for what went on?  I found online this interesting interview with Parkinson in which Michael asks him very politely "what's your problem, mate?"

I post it without any other commentary because I think it speaks for its self...

If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, Churchill was racist

Churchill’s statue has been defaced again so…

The Churchill haters are out again. 

Not that I’m a great Churchill fan but the visceral hatred of some of them is pretty amazing.  One showed me a copy of Churchill’s quote about Hitler... so crudely clipped you could see it had been literally decontextualised...

“If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations”

This is a selective quote of

“One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as indomitable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations” from a “1939” essay that goes on to say “I find myself pilloried by Dr. Goebbels’ Press as an enemy of Germany. That description is quite untrue… I can quite understand that this action of mine would not be popular in Germany. Indeed, it was not popular anywhere. I was told I was making ill-will between the two countries.”

When you point this out “the evidence is in front of you!” they scream…

Actually this quote was from 1937 but it was reprinted in 1939 – something else the poster hadn’t researched.  The first line had been crudely removed from the photograph of the page. 

He ran the same line that many others do that Churchill only changed his mind about the Nazis in 1939 … which would have been news to Baldwin, Chamberlain and Halifax – the latter two of which were still trying to strike a deal with Churchill well into 1940… when fortunately for the war effort Chamberlain popped his cloggs.

It’s easy to find neutral to positive things Churchill said about dictators in the 1930s because many European governments in that period were dictatorial – Italy, Germany, Spain… the former two had only been formed as countries in the 1870s… Coming out the 19th century dictatorship was the norm.  It's us who were weird.

The main line of attack of the Churchill-busters is to claim he didn’t act out of altruism or nobility but because he was a scaredycat who feared invasion.  This flies in the face of the fact that there was no actual reason the government couldn’t have struck a deal with Hitler in 1939 and we could have simply refused to come to the aid of Poland or France and sat it out like Ireland. 

It’s particularly galling hearing this preposterous argument from people in the USA whose country sat it out on the sidelines till 1942.  Where were you in Britain’s darkest hour? 

Then there is the Bengal famine for which one is repeatedly told once a week Churchill was apparently solely responsible.  I’m not an expert in WWII logistics but I know my grandfather spent most of 1942 driving from Egypt to South Africa and back as that was the best way to supply the troops because naval travel was so dangerous then.  But clearly it was ENTIRELY Churchill’s evil calculating mind that caused the starvation.

After one corners these people on their egregious lies and the implausibility of their arguments one is confronted with questions like – why are you defending a racist?  Well, call me Horace Rumpole but everyone deserves a defence… Mind you the presumption of innocence is probably out of fashion now … well, it is…  Objective truth matters.  Or it does if you’re not a propagandist using the techique of Dr. Goebbels’ – create a big lie then keep repeating it till no one questions it anymore.

The thing is if one wants to throw stones at Churchill there’s a large quarry available.  Ireland, Gallipoli, his military adventures, his admiration of Mussolini in the 20s, his threatening to gas uncivilised tribes, his hatred of Ghandi, Kenya* … so why do people feel the need to make stuff up?

Because …

Anyway who wants to look at a statue of Heath, Callaghan, Wilson, Major, Baldwin or dare I suggest it ... Thatcher…?  At least the last one has the claim that she was the first woman but although she has a statue it was felt that it wouldn't survive long enough on a plinth in London so she's been bought by the Council in Grantham who still don't have the bottle to put it up and are busy arguing over how high the plinth should be.  Maybe we should get someone like the late Henry Moore to do them all as abstracted blobs...

Still “who needs statues? – that’s money that could be spent on the NHS” replied one person when I asked who they wanted instead.

So there’s the future.  No public art at all – just ever larger NHS hospitals till we all become immortal.  Then there will be no more need for statues of the dead anymore because no one will die.  Ever.  Forever and ever.  Amen.

*the Mau Mau uprising took place from 1952-1960 and Churchill resigned mid 1955 so although he was PM at the height of the conflict we could shift some blame onto Eden and SuperMac.... 

There's been a bit of unrest in the USA

Looking at this graph that one looted from the Bloomberg website one suspects this is just the beginning of a larger trend.

 

As the world economy tanks and unemployment goes through the roof civil unrest everywhere will spiral, politics will polarise and we'll be lucky to avoid WWIII.

In other statistics it's noticable that when the government COBR spokespeople tell us all on the telly that the Covid-19 infection rate is going down in all areas ...this doesn't actually seem to be supported by their own graphs. 

While there has been a massive decrease in infections in cities ...out in the sticks it's a different story. 

In Wales the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 has crept up again (a fact explained by a "change in reporting methods") while in Northern Ireland the number of people in hospital beds with Covid-19 remains static.  

The South West and Scotland's data shows gradual declines but much shallower than in large population centres.  Could it be that people out in the sticks just don't take it as seriously?

Still we're doing better than the USA where the infections are going up linearly (oh well at least it's not exponentially)....

Click on the graphs to make them less blurry...*

* Warning this wont remove government fudge

Shapps and Khan play the trasport blame game...

Due to the unpopularity of the changes to London's transport system following the slow winding down of the lockdown - including 

Congestion charge extended to 10pm in order to annoy night time workers

Congestion charge extended to 7 days a week to hit pleasure users

Public Transport Discount removal for the young and the elderly

Road closures - including two major bridges and east west routes - to encourage cycling while PM insists that everyone should go to work but avoid public transport.

Mr Shapps the Minister for Transport and Mr Khan the unelected Mayor for London whose term ran out in March but wont face re-election til 2021 have been engaged in a battle to blame each other for the logistical and financial mess.

Mr Khan insists all these measures are needed because they were insisted on by Mr Shapps in order to fill the big financial hole created by giving everyone free travel and telling them to stay at home during the Covid-19 lockdown.  So Mr Shapps has responded by releasing the terms of the loan (see here) that he has made to Mr Khan that Mr Khan says make necessary all these unpopular changes.

The terms of the loan are on page 22 onward ...along with lots of graphs with lines going below zero.  However, what they don't say is:

1) The Mayor has to extend the Congestion Charge beyond 6pm to 10pm

2) The Mayor has to extend the Congestion Charge 7 days a week

3) The Mayor has to charge the elderly and the young more than he used to

4) The Mayor has to COMPLETELY close major through roads such as London Bridge and Waterloo Bridge to motor cars.

The terms of the letter which would seem to start on page 61 seem to simply require the Mayor to restart the Congestion Charge and ULEZ zones.  I can see no stipulations requiring the Mayor to behave like an idiot?