Newsthump might be on to something...

From Newsthump (30/12/21):

After being found guilty on five of six counts of child trafficking and procurement, Ghislaine Maxwell faces six months in prison – or life, whichever comes first. Prosecutors said they’d asked for a whole-life tariff, and in pursuit of that result, they’d asked for the security cameras to be turned off.

“The sentence is a good result for both the innocent and other implicated parties,” we were told by a court spokesman, ”Maxwell and Epstein’s victims know that she will receive the full force of the law, and the people in that little black book can be confident she won’t.”

This doesn't seem that unlikely:

From Wikipedia:

On August 10 2019, guards found the American financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein unresponsive in his Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges...

After initially expressing suspicion, Attorney General William Barr described Epstein's death as "a perfect storm of screw-ups". Both the FBI and the Department of Justice's Inspector General are conducting investigations into the circumstances of his death. The guards on duty were later charged with multiple counts of record falsification.

From iNews (19/2/2022):

Jean-Luc Brunel, who allegedly procured women and girls for the convicted sex offender, was in detention awaiting a trial on charges of rape of a minor and sexual harassment.

Prosecutors in Paris confirmed Brunel, 74, was found hanging in his cell in La Santé, in the south of the capital city, in the early hours of Saturday morning. Video cameras in his cell were not running at the time.

See also, The Mirror: (20/2/22)

Jeffrey Epstein's pal, Jean-Luc Brunel was found hanged in his prison cell in near-identical circumstances to the convicted paedophile - now the family of Ghislaine Maxwell say they are shocked this could happen.

Daily Mail on top form

Spotted by Pyotr Wasik (who I still assume is Flashman) in The Daily Mail:

[Complete and utter bastard] Andreas Lubitz was signed off by two different doctors for the day of the Germanwings disaster but failed to tell his employers, it has been reported...

It also emerged today that his parents only discovered that their son was a mass murderer just minutes before the bombshell press conference by prosecutors in Marseille. His mother, a piano teacher, and father, a successful businessman, were understood to be in the French city at the time of the announcement, but kept separate from the victims' relatives...

The couple's £400,00 two-storey detached home in Montabaur, a town 40 miles from Bonn where Lubitz is thought to have grown up, was also searched by detectives.

Oscar Trial

From the BBC and the BBC

The Oscars have pleaded not guilty to killing an awards ceremony about cinema by throwing awards at self-righteous films that no-one watches.

The Oscars awarded the best film to 12 Years a Slave this year and in previous years gave awards for pandering to Oscar-bait "issues" films such as Crash and The Hurt Locker as well as giving acting awards for Philadephia, The Accused and Dallas Buyers Club.

Critical prosecutors allege the killing was premeditated, but the Oscars claimed they had just been picking the best films rather than trying to slap themselves on the back for being wonderful people.

The ceremony is televised live. Media interest is high.

Fun Online Polls: Age of consent & JFK assassination cover-up

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

If it were up to you, what would the age of consent be?

None of the government's business - 24 votes
14 or younger - 4 votes
15 - 5 votes
16 - as at present - 40 votes
17 - 3 votes
18 or older - 11 votes
Depends on the age of the older partner and the age difference - 34 votes
Other, please specify - 2 votes

I perhaps didn't make it clear enough that you could choose more than one option, i.e. you could choose an age but then caveat it with "Depends on the age of the older partner and the age difference". Only about 8 people chose this a well (including me).

So there we have it. Broadly speaking people are happy with 16 and the fact that the law turns a blind eye when both partners are under-age. I suppose it's impossible for a government to get everything wrong.
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The whole JFK assassination thing and what happened afterwards, how it was explained always struck a lot of people, including me, as a little bit fishy. There was something not quite right about it.

Personally, I would dismiss all the rumours about the Russians/Communists organising it (they wouldn't dare; the backlash if they'd been found out would be unthinkable); about the military-industrial bloc doing it (JFK was firmly in their pockets and a massive warmonger); the FBO/CIA (ditto);the Mafia (ditto); the Teamsters, Freemasons etcetera etcetera.

But they showed a TV programme on Channel 5 this week which seemed perfectly plausible to me, they reckoned that a trigger happy secret service agent in the following vehicle shot him by mistake while swinging his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle into position. So there certainly wasn't a conspiracy in advance, just a massive cover-up afterwards by the secret service, because admitting that one of their men had shot the President by mistake would have been career suicide for his superiors and made the USA a worldwide laughing stock.

This is not a conspiracy theory, it is just a theory, and of course there are plenty of articles saying it is piffle, which it might well be, but usually on the basis of a lot less evidence than was presented in the programme itself.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll.

"Who shot the shot which blew JFK's brains out?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Great templates of our time: [Something you don't like] is a vile product of [something else you don't like]

From The Daily Mail, choose your own storyline:

"Vile product of...

A.
• Welfare UK:
• Paralympics:
• Right to inherit from your parents*:
• Warehouses:

B.
• Man who bred 17 babies by five women to milk benefits system is guilty of killing six of them
• Man who ran in Paralympics for South Africa murders girlfriend
• Man who stood to inherit a quarter of a million pound guilty of murdering parents
• Forklift truck driver guilt of murdering five women in Ipswich area

C.
• Mick Philpott treated his children like cash cows generating £60,000 a year in benefits
• Oscare Pistorius treated his Paralympic status as a cash cow generating millions a year in sponsorship
• Stephen Seddon treated his parents like cash cows to land a £250,000 inheritance
• Steve Wright treated his forklift truck as a cash cow to earn tens of thousands of pounds a year

D.
• He plotted to set fire to the family home with his wife Mairead to frame Philpott's former live-in lover Lisa Willis
• He shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp who was hiding in the bathroom
• He killed his parents Robert and Patricia Seddon with a sawn off shotgun
• He strangled his victims with the same hands he used to steer a forklift truck

And so on and so forth.

UPDATE: Nick Drew has identified a fifth candidate for the Daily Mail treatment.

* See also: Newsthump

Things which happen in every community

Raping young girls

A Muslim community leader has said there is a "problem" of British Pakistani men thinking "white girls are worthless and can be abused". And the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) said it was "investigating why there may be a majority of Asians in these particular kinds of offence".

But police said grooming was "not a racial issue" and MP Keith Vaz also said "no particular race or religion" tended to be involved.

Sex-selective abortions

Dr Tony Falconer, president of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said: "Anecdotally, there are social and cultural reasons for preferring one gender over another and we need to know more about why these occur. The issues are complex. For instance, women may be coerced or threatened with violence into having an abortion. The priority would be to identify who these women are and to provide them with support."

Forced marriages (1)

The charity said it wanted to help overcome "the mistaken assumption that the problem is a cultural one"... Ms Sanghera said: "It is not a cultural problem, it is abuse. The sooner people start to regard forced marriage in the same way they do domestic violence the better it will be for those affected by it."

Forced marriages (2)

"It's uncomfortable for people to think about, but it can't remain this hidden any longer. It's not simply about Muslim families; we also found that it happens among Chinese and African communities too, such as the Somali families. Nor is it something that comes across with new immigrants."

Honour killings

Happen to white girls too, of course.

I'm still trying to track down articles from the BBC or the Guardian in which somebody says that female genital mutilation, marrying your cousin, blowing up Tube trains and postal voting fraud happens "in every community".

Really irritating politically correct crime reporting

From The Metro:

Children in Britain are increasingly at risk of being branded as witches and tortured, police are claiming, following the high-profile case of Kristy Bamu - tortured and murdered by his brother for being a kindoki witch.

The threat comes from the rise of the West African belief, which states children can be possessed by evil spirits, according to a specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft. It is thought to be widespread among some immigrant communities, fuelled by a growing number of small fundamentalist Christian churches.

The belief is not confined to the poor or ill-educated and many cases of children being abused may never be uncovered, the officers fear...

Hang about here, can you see all the buzzwords they use to cloud the issue: "Children in Britain", "at risk", "the threat", "belief", "immigrant communities" etc? Wouldn't it it be more accurate to say something like this:

"Immigrants from central and west Africa, who are followers/members of certain religious sects which are widespread in those countries, have a tendency to torture and murder children in their care"?

Having done their profiling (call it 'racial profiling' if you will), the police can now get on with the job of tracking down the culprits. See also: female genital mutilation; murdering young women (and possibly some young men?) who refuse to enter into forced marriages; gender-related abortions; Roman Catholic priests; etc.

Finally: WTF is a "specialist unit set up to investigate witchcraft"?? There's no such thing as witchcraft, and even if there is, it is not illegal as far as I am aware. It's torturing and murdering people (for whatever reason) which is illegal and needs to be investigated.

Fun Online Polls: Make up your own question & How much money is there in the world?

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were:

Make up your own question...

Kim Jong-Il - 40%
Osama Bin Laden - 12%
Donald Neilson 12%
Colonel Gadaffi - 8%
Other, please specify - 28%

The winning questions were:
UKIP Webmaster: Who is no ronger ronery in herr?
John Pickworth: Whom would you like to marry?

And the winning 'Other' was:
Richard Allan: Justin Bieber
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Just to see whether everybody was paying attention (see recent posts here or here), this week's Fun Online Poll asks "Taking assets and liabilities into account, how much 'money' is there in the world?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Honeymoon Tips

If you had some pre-marital difficulties and your new husband takes you on honeymoon to South Africa, then remember to politely decline the offer of a taxi-ride through the rougher townships.

MONA

Most news outlets mentioned the fact that there had been a fatal shooting on a nuclear submarine in Southampton, but so far I haven't found anything which tells us the perp's name, his background or possible motive.

I can only assume that we are dealing with a Man Of No Appearance (^TM Tim Blair, as far as I can make out), who presumably was also a Man Without A Motive.

UPDATE: Quiet Man links to an article in the Daily Mail, so he's not a MONA at all. Ah well.

Another one bites the dust

Via EU Referendum, it appears that the fairly nationalist/authoritarian Polish president has died in an air crash.

Is it just me, or do these things tend to happen to right-wingers, e.j. Jörg Haider, Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, or going further back, Wolfgang Schäuble who was shot in the back and has since been in a wheelchair and Airey Neave? And of course the IRA had a pop at the whole Tory Cabinet back in 1984.

The only leftie I can think of who was assassinated/murdered in recent times is Anna Lindh.

UPDATE: Dearieme adds Olof Palme to the list, also in Sweden. Maybe the rules are inverted in that country?

The Righteous let their guard slip

Damn and blast!

I was looking forward to a nice bit of Victimhood Poker in this this article on the BBC website about the staggering levels of rape and murder in South Africa, but it appears to split the blame three ways between "The legacy of apartheid, social deprivation and corruption within the police force...".

Wot? The "legacy of apartheid" only has to take one-third of the blame? This just isn't up to the high standards of an article from three months ago:

South Africa has the highest number of reported rapes in the world. Most experts say this is a result of its violent past and the legacy of apartheid, which often forced men to live in single-sex hostels away from their families.

But to be fair, as well as the dig at apartheid, which ended in, er, early 1994, today's article sneaks in the inference that it was racist for that white guy to be granted asylum in Canada, so that's a 50/50 split in the blame stakes. Phew! Can't have those poor downtrodden South Africans being asked to shoulder too much responsibility, can we?