Two or three of our geese have been laying in a cosy spot in a flower bed. Unfortunately, that means the whole aggressive bunch has to be chased away before I or the dogs can safely go out of the door. When they’re not around, one of the dogs removes eggs. He’s eaten one, but I think he’s buried the others – hope we don’t find rotten eggs when we start the spring planting.
I missed the chance to film what amounted to a gang rape the other day – one poor goose underneath a pile of about 4 others of unidentifiable sex – but I caught this little bit of aggression. Did they think she had pinched the missing eggs?
Over the past couple of years or so, I’ve probably been typical of the average owner of a ‘consumer’ camcorder and various other cheap devices that can create video clips.
I grabbed very short clips of things like dogs, family or interesting places
I did very little editing, other than trimming off the worst bits
I recorded commentaries with the camera’s own microphone as I went along
This was for my granddaughter:
I also made a couple of attempts at recording myself talking to the camera. Here’s the best one:
Recently, with more confidence than skill, I decided to create and post a video as part of a Facebook conversation about tying knots, because it was the best way to illustrate my point.
Last year, I drove around Scotland with a bunch of French friends and acquaintances, then offered to edit nearly 1-1/2 hours of video footage one of them took. That’s when the fun started. I’ll talk about that experience, and how it goaded me into learning more about both using a camera and editing the resulting footage, in another post.
Over two years ago, in one of my earliest forays into making videos, I tried being deliberately rude to my potential audience – not something that is in my nature.
Not surprisingly, I got one or two rude comments back – but I also got a couple of useful comments. What surprises me is that the video has now had over 2,000 views. Was this just becausae of the subject, or did the attitude cause people to pass it on?
Here it is again, with a new trick that I have learned – theLinkedTube widget for adding an active link to a URL outside YouTube:
In general, I share Matt Ridley’s optimistic view of how civilisation is progressing. But for decades there has been a trend that I believe is counterproductive – quite apart from the fact that it annoys me intensely. This is the move towards excessive normalisation – forcing groups to conform closely to standards imposed, from outside the group, by more powerful groups which do not share their values. Even worse is the increasing tendency of authorities within closed groups to misuse guidelines from other groups, mostly to stifle innovation and adventure.
Let’s look at a couple of lead articles in the Daily Telegraph for yesterday, Wednesday January 19, 2011.
Amending the Act of Settlement, because it could be considered discriminatory
Of course it’s discriminatory. That’s the whole reason for its existence. It defines who inherits the crown when the current incumbent dies or abdicates, and currently it gives precedence to a male heir even if he has one or more elder sisters. Those involved in the discussion say ‘this may be discriminatory’, meaning it could be open to challenge under UK laws against sex discrimination. Similarly, the disqualification of Roman Catholics could also be challenged under religious discrimination laws.
Those are the wrong reasons for considering changing the law. The monarchy is part of the Constitution of the UK and the Commonwealth, and stands well above the level of anti-discrimination laws internal to any of the countries involved. If it is changed, it should be for reasons relevant to the monarchy as part of the constitutiion. Parliament should debate the effects of any changes and whether these are desirable, not whether they conform to legislation which was introduced for a different purpose.
A homosexual couple in civil partnership won a court case against B&B owners who refused to let a double-bedded room to them
The boarding house, run by a Christian couple, had published rules saying that they only let double rooms to married couples, but had not stated them when accepting the booking. The judge ruled that a commercial undertaking did not have the right to stipulate such rules.
I believe that commercial undertakings should be allowed to target specific customer sets, and live or die by depending on how well they serve that customer set. Otherwise, one day we will end up with such nonsenses as insisting that the Apple Centre also sells and repairs PCs.
Parliament is about to debate allowing prisoners the vote
In this instance, the motivation is fear of EU courts fining the UK for breach of ‘Human Rights’.
The debate should be about whether prisoners’ votes could influence society for the better. If the consensus is ‘No’, then the UK should stand up for its decision.
Groups are for people with a common interest
I join a sailing club to be with people who enjoy sailing. If someone applies to join the club and says he hates the water and wants to play golf, the committee will refuse to admit him to membership, and will suggest that he join a golf club. However, if club members decide among themselves to extend the non-sailing activities of the club beyond running a restaurant and a bar, they are at liberty try to persuade the others that it would be a good idea. If some members hate the idea but get voted down, they may leave and form a new club.
That’s the way common-interest groups are meant to work, and the only ones that should be banned are those whose goals include inflicting harm on other groups. Also, it is minority groups that give birth to new ideas. Stifle them and you stifle progress.
Unfortunately, there are also minority groups that try to reinstate codes of conduct that society has long rejected. These should not be stifled, but they should not be given extra rights to protect them from dying out, either.
There’s been a fair amount of digging into the background of the two women who have accused Assange of rape (as defined in Swedish law). One blogger comments:
‘Assange is in IT, right? and he’s got groupies!’
Well, the one in the pink sweater does seem a bit like that, but the first one is not. She’s a tough feminist cookie, and could well have been setting him up – but not necessarily on behalf of anyone else.
I don’t have to be old-fashioned to have little sympathy for the girls, or for Assange. If your aim in life is to stay free and pop up all over the place as the mouthpiece of your creation, isn’t it advisable to take care of more vulnerable things than leaving a trail with your credit card? Like keep your xxxx in your trousers, for instance. And how (if it’s true – it is pretty difficult to validate some of the tales that are doing the rounds) did someone manage to get hold of text messages from Assange to various female targets, which are in more opaque language but otherwise on a par with Shane’s chat lines for ‘Elizabeth’.
I admire his Wikileaks role, but not his way with women. Forget moral arguments – it’s just very bad for business.
They made it. Around 16:20, Guardian live blogger Haroon Siddique took over and told us that the court would stay open until all the bail money was counted.
At 17:45, Vikram Dodd was in the chair and noted that the deadline was running out, because the rules of the bail say that Assange must be indoors by 22:00 – in Norfolk, a long drive from London. At that point, there was still a problem with some of the surety payments.
At 18:01 Julian Assange appeared on the steps outside the court and made a short speech, thanking
all the people around the world who have had faith in him and his lawyers, sureties “in the face of great difficulty and aversion”, also members of the press “who were not all taken in” and finally the British justice system. “If justice is not always the outcome, at least it is not dead yet.” [Guardian news blog]
Because two of those offering surety were out of town or otherwise unable to register in time, the court allowed two substitutes – solicitor Geoff Shears and Baroness Tracy Worcester – to register on their behalf. Could that have happened in a High Court in any other county in the world? Assange’s tribute to the British justice system was probably heartfelt.
When I was in my naive and innocent twenties, I went to a pub frequented by Fleet Street journalists, because one of my work colleagues was married to a reporter. She was a tough cookie. He was fond of his booze, but she could drink him under the table easily – and many of her colleagues were from the same mould. What struck me most about the Fleet Street crowd was their cynicism, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned enough about the characteristics of the majority of people who wield power in the world that I understood the reason.
I doubt whether those who have the most control and influence in the US government and its instruments are any more ruthless than their opposite numbers in other countries – they just wield more power. Luckily, the US has a noisy and free press – but the mainstream is still pretty conservative and constrained by commercial pressures. See this Al-Jazeera article by Jillian York, on how concern about the magazine’s circulation figures may have influenced Time Magazine to choose Mark Zuckerberg as their 2010 Person of the Year rather than Julian Assange, in spite of the fact that readers gave Assange 382,026 votes (compared to Zuckerberg’s mere 18,353).
I’m pretty sure that the current participants in the legal battle are just playing by the rules and doing what they are obliged to do, although the size of the bail bond and the severity of his treatment both seem wildly out of proportion when he has not been charged with anything yet.And there is still a lot that is unclear about how the whole thing got kicked off in the first place. Take a look at this article in a Swedish English-language newspaper
So it could be that a little personal prejudice at police station level encouraged the girls to plead that they had been raped. According to the article, one of the girls is beginning to realise what she’s letting herself in for and has left the country.
But there’s a different story going around, that it was the lawyer representing them who encouraged them – and that could just be US-style ambulance-chasing by a lawyer who saw a way to make himself a reputation and a lot of money. Or somebody may have influenced the lawyer…
I reckon Wikileaks will soon be receiving some nice tidbits on the subject of what looks like being a long drawn out case against their leader and mouthpiece. That could stir things up more than the current discussions about letting journalists tweet from inside the court…
The UK’s Crown Prosecution Service appealed the magistrate’s court decision to grant Julian Assange (Mr Wikileaks, for those of you who have managed to miss the global furore over his arrest) bail. The High Court has upheld the magistrate’s decision, so Assange should be freed once his bail bond is received.
However, in practice this is likely to mean ‘not until tomorow’. Even if the bail bond of £200,000 (half of which is reputed to be in cash) is produced today, various forfaitable ‘sureties’ must also be registered by people at their local police stations – and some of these have limited opening hours. Paperwork reigns supreme.
There still seems to be some confusion over who appealed – the CPS say that they did, and it was normal procedure for international cases like this, and the Swedish prosecutor concurs, saying she does not have the right to appeal in the UK. However, recent reports say the High Court has required Sweden to pay costs. We’ll hear more during the day.
Well, here’s one prominent US politician trying to calm the hysteria.
Representative Ron Paul is not the most impressive of speakers, so here are his points again:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
It doesn’t matter whether or not you support Julian Assange’s behaviour and the goals of Wikileaks, the real issue is about powerful people in many parts of the world behaving like a bunch of rednecks from the middle of the last century – or the one before that.
