Jamie123

I don't know if the LDS use this hymn by John E. Bode (or even if the sentiments would be agreed with) but: Oh, let me feel Thee near me; The world is ever near;I see the sights that dazzle, The tempting sounds I hear;My foes are ever near me, Around me and within;But, Jesus, draw Thou nearer, And shield my soul from sin. (Often the worst foes are the ones "within".)

I remember many years ago when I was a student (and rather rebellious about the Church of England) I used to go to an Evangelical Methodist church every Sunday. The pastor there was a funny guy: while having a lot of admiration for other churches (like Catholics) and how they "loved the Lord", he was also a Methodist of the old school, and nothing annoyed him more than the way (or so he claimed) Catholic churches had licensed bars in them. (I never actually saw one that did myself: I think he was referring to the university Catholic chaplaincy, which served Guinness.)

Yes I agree: a working assumption that prisons are filled by-and-large with guilty people is better than burdening ourselves with the possible innocence of every last inmate. Yet if we're going to talk about the goodness/badness of an individual I prefer not to rely on what the jury thought. Also there's another matter: legally a decision can be "correct" even though the conclusion that is reached is later shown to be ontologically incorrect. For example, suppose several witnesses testified about somebody committing a crime: these all seemed respectable people and the jury convicts. However, new evidence later shows them to have been a criminal gang who committed the crime themselves and conspired to place the blame on an innocent stooge. The "innocent stooge" will of course be freed by the appeal court, but the judges will place no blame on the jury or the judge who instructed them for "getting it wrong"; they made the right decision at the time. The trouble is that all jury verdicts - however flimsy the evidence they are based upon - are assumed to be "right at the time". I remember once seeing a documentary about the investigation of Sheila Bowler, convicted of murdering her aunt "for her inheritance": the evidence throughout seemed very circumstantial, but the last few minutes showed puff-chested senior detectives boasting how the jury verdict proved them to have been right all along. I don't think they were quite as swell-headed a couple of years later when Sheila Bowler was granted a retrial and found not guilty. I don't know how it is in America, but here in the UK (theoretically at least) a judge is not supposed to allow a case to go before a jury if there is no grounds upon which a reasonable jury could convict. This is not the same thing as a "finding of innocence" (this does not exist in British law) but merely that there is no reasonable way of proving guilt. This is what happened in the case of Colin Stagg, who was prosecuted for the infamous "Wimbledon Common Murder" - mostly on the basis that he was "a bit odd" and had written (at the prompting of an undercover policewoman no less) a fictional story about murdering some campers in the New Forest. The evidence was total garbage, yet judge suffered massive abuse from the press (just as this judge is suffering). And he turned out to have been right: much later DNA testing showed that well-known serial killer Robert Napper had been the real culprit, and that the police had missed numerous opportunities to discover this at the time. The judge had been quite right - history shows that junk evidence presented the right way can sway juries to convict, which is why we need judges to have the courage to say "no". But this gives rise to another question: if juries cannot be trusted to judge easy cases (where the evidence is clearly inconclusive) how can they be trusted when the evidence is less clear?

Absolutely! Who really ever does anything for the reason they claim they do it? I disagree. The machinery of state punishment certainly has to proceed upon that assumption, but you don't and nor do I. You, me and all other private individuals are free to make whatever assumptions we like.

This is exactly the debate that was going on at the time of David Bryant's original conviction and jailing. The judge had noted, just as this judge has done, the "glowing testimonials" of heroic service. There was public outrage at this (that whatever self-sacrificing service he had given to his community for 3 decades did not excuse what he "did") and Bryant's sentence was accordingly increased. If you look at message boards from that period you'll find anyone who dared to say "I doubt he did it" heavily down-voted and flamed as rape apologists, often with a subtle (or not-so-subtle) suggestion that they must themselves have "something to hide". I know nothing about this Vallejo case except for what I've read in these links, but I would like to know how strong the evidence was against him before making any good-man/bad-man assessments. Yes I know the jury convicted him and the judge accepted the verdict, but this has happened many times when the evidence was very flimsy indeed. I'm afraid I don't trust this "infallible crystal ball" that supposedly exists in jury rooms - I like to decide for myself. Sadly there are a lot of people who apparently do believe in this crystal ball, and who will reply to "I'm not convinced he did it" with "So he should get away with it? I wonder what skeletons are in your closet!" These people's opinions sadly carry weight. P.S. I'm not saying I think Vallejo is innocent - I don't know anything like enough to have any opinion - I merely note that juries have been wrong before and will be wrong again.

Or Anakin Skywalker (Sorry to be irreverent - I still have Star Wars on the brain from this past weekend!)

And yet there are some parts of England (particularly rural communities in the north) where you'll hear "thee" and "thou" used in everyday speech (though "thou" is pronounced more like "thaaa").

In the Church of England it was once the custom for priests to address their bishops as "my lord". I don't believe this ever happens now: bishops are usually addressed by everyone as as "Bishop [first name]" - or more formally as Dr. [Surname] (bishops nearly always have doctoral degrees) - or at most The Right Reverand [first name] [surname], though diocesan bishops are still formally styled "The Lord Bishop of...wherever". But in the LDS church, aren't bishops and presidents (and even young missionaries) still addressed by their titles? I know this is not intended to elevate them personally, but to show respect for their office, but couldn't the same be said about judges?

Interesting, but... 1. How often did ordinary peasant people talk to the king? I would guess almost never, and those who did talk to him would have spoken in Norman French rather than in English. There may have been the odd exception like Henry I (who I believe could speak English when he wanted to, though his mother tongue was Norman French). Things are also complicated by the fact that the Normans did not speak "French" per se but a language called "Norman French" (a mish-mash of the actual French of the time, Old Norse and various Germanic dialects from the East). In 1154 Henry II brought in a purer form of French from Anjou, but I doubt it was used anywhere much except in the king's palace. By that time the more common Norman French had evolved into "Anglo-Norman" - yet another distinct dialect, and "English" (i.e. "Old English" had mingled with French to become "Middle English". It wasn't until Henry IV came to the throne in 1367 that England had a king who was a native English speaker (which of course I mean a Middle-English speaker) and it was another 100 years after that before English (by now more-or-less Modern English) became the official language of the royal court. 2. I don't know very much about modern French (I learned it at school but have forgotten most of it) but I do know that German has "sie"=you plural and "du"=you singular except that Germans (proper Germans that is who use the language correctly) will often address individuals as "sie" depending on who they are. It is considered more respectful to address a stranger as "sie" - which sounds very like what Vort was saying about calling the king "you" (because he's worth many ordinary people). On the other hand, I've been told it's quite rude to call a person "sie" when you should call him/her "du"; it is considered a snub. Furthermore once you have called someone "du" you have to carry on - for life! It is considered an insult to start calling them "sie" again. My German teacher told me the safest route is to call everyone "du" no matter who they are. P.S. I've just remembered a meeting I had with a couple of Elders a little over 20 years ago: they were an odd pair: the more talkative one was an American - who for some reason seemed very interested in my bookshelves - and the other was a morose and mildly sarcastic Geordie. (I don't think his heart was in it to be honest.) At the end of the meeting the American wanted us to pray - which was fine - but he insisted we all knelt around the coffee table to do it (which irritated me slightly, though I went along with it). When he said the prayers he kept saying "thee" and "thou". At the time I took this for pretentiousness on his part, but maybe I did him an injustice.

Exactly - we need to remember that we are judged for our own actions and not for the actions of others. God will administer "absolute justice" - and that applies to us as well as to them. An obsession with "punishing the guilty" (which means in practice punishing other people we perceive to be guilty) can often be a way of distracting ourselves from our own wrongdoings. And that can include ranting and raving (as I have been doing) about the justice system itself. Jean-Luc Picard once said (quoting someone else whose name I can't remember) "Eternal vigilance is the price we pay". That includes vigilance of our own motives.

This is going to be a very long post, but its something that worries me deeply for so many different reasons. I thought about adding this to the thread Eowyn started about people trafficking. However, though this is connected with the things discussed already there, its wide enough to deserve its own thread. It really started a few years ago when Jimmy Savile died. No one who lived in Britain during the 70s and 80s will need any introduction to Jimmy Savile: he was a rather eccentric but much admired DJ, TV personality and philanthropist. People nowadays say they felt him "a bit creepy". I believe I've even said so myself, but I think we really only really feel this way in retrospect; to be perfectly honest I certainly always thought him "a little odd", but you could have knocked me down with a feather when the when the revelations about him emerged after his death. To put it bluntly, Savile was, for the last 30 or 40 years of his life, one of the UK's worse ever sex offenders - and that's if you believe only a tenth of the claims that have been made about him. At first his family tried to defend him, but as the sheer mass of accusations rolled in even they caved. The huge marble monument which had been set up in his honour was turn down, ground up and used to grit drives. The thing was that Savile had been a sacred cow. Almost no one had dared accuse him during his lifetime, and the few who had found the courage were laughed at or subjected to censure. But now after his death, with the accusations presented en masse, the matter had to be taken seriously. Public hackles were up (always a dangerous thing) and the authorities had to be seen to act - and act they did. Many (maybe even most) police forces announced they would henceforth "believe" all complainants; and in doing so they've created something as dangerous as what they had sought to combat. Take for example David Bryant, a retired fire chief from Dorset. He was accused by another slightly younger man whom I'll call Ernie Knight (he waived his anonymity so there is no problem mentioning his real name, but I'll be cautions all the same) - of raping him on a pool table in the fire station rec roon, on some unspecified day in the 1970s. Bryant was of course unable to provide an alibi (not knowing what year - let alone what day or time - the alleged rape occurred) or any reason why Day should have lied about it. It probably didn't help that another firefighter, whom Knight also accused, was later convicted of an unconnected sex crime, but that ought not to have been a factor. (This alleged accomplice was dead by this time anyway.) Dorset Police claim they carried out "a very thorough and detailed investigation" but considering the amount of information they missed (and was later uncovered by private investigators) it is hard to see how this can be true; it seems far more likely they were carrying out their pledge to "believe the victim" and leaving it at that. It seems that "believe the victim" was also the guiding policy of the CPS, who having received the "evidence" (such as it was) from the police, took the case to trial. The only real evidence presented to the jury (aside from glowing character references for Bryant who was well respected in his community) was Knight's accusations and Bryant's denials. The jury chose to convict. It's from here onwards that Bryant's luck began to change, though it can't have felt like it to him at the time. Bryant was sentenced to 6.5 years imprisonment, but Knight lobbied to have it increased. The Court of Appeal, while rejecting Bryant's original appeal upped it to 8.5. Knight was awarded £50,000 in victim compensation but demanded more. He sued the county (as Bryant's employers) for £80,000, claiming that he had been a champion boxer (with a record better than Muhammed Ali, if you please) who had missed out on the 1984 Olympics because of his post traumatic stress. This was discredited. Worse still, investigations by Mrs. Bryant, helped by a group of ex-cop PI's who offered to work for nothing showed that the fire station had been remodelled in the 1990s and all Knight's descriptions were based on the new layout. The pool table that he had claimed to have been raped on was not bought until the 1990s. As if that was not enough, Knight had been receiving psychiatric treatment for what an appeal judge later called (his words not mine) "chronic lying". Well once that lot came out, Bryant's conviction was pretty quickly overturned and he was released from jail. In fact he was released even before the formal appeal was held, with neither the police or the CPS objecting. Of course the prosecutors will tell you "Oh, we didn't know all that at the time. His credibility may no longer stand, but it did at the time." Really? At the time you had one story from Bryant and another Knight. Neither story was corroborated. You had no way of knowing which one was telling the truth and which was lying. You didn't know either way... ...and neither did the jury! In convicting Bryant, the jury had turned its back on "Innocent until proven guilty". They had chosen to go with "who was most convincing" and replaced proof with gut feeling. Also...and this is most worrying of all...with memories of Savile fresh in their minds they probably thought it was their duty to "believe the victim". (See why I'm not a fan of jury nullification?) Bryant of course was lucky. He had a wife who supported him, He had the respect of retired police turned private investigators who were prepared to work for nothing. Plus his accuser got greedy and careless in his lying. How many are not so lucky? How many heartbroken wives and families endure the abuse of their neighbours while their innocent menfolk rot behind bars, and their lying accusers batten on huge taxpayer-funded "compensation" payouts? So what should we do? Should we ignore the suffering of the genuine victims (and there are plenty of them) who cannot prove they were abused, for fear that a few innocents may get swept up with the guilty? Well no, We should not ignore them. We should listen to them and treat them with respect. But we must not allow the inability of a complainant to prove his or her allegations to become an excuse for removing the need for proof. We must accept that allegations of things that supposedly happened 30 years ago often cannot be proven, and invoke the principle of "innocent until proven guilty". If for any reason they can be proven then fine, the perpetrators should be punished. But if not...and if they are really guilty...we must trust to God the job of administering justice - not attempt to bodge the job ourselves.

My wife is visiting family in the US right now, so my daughter and I have been celebrating Easter without her. We went to Church (only just making it in time, thanks to my wonderful time management) came home and had lamb for lunch and then settled down to watch "Return of the Jedi". Now this was the first time I watched "Return of the Jedi" in about 20 years. And I don't remember if it had ever struck me before, but... EMPEROR PALPATINE SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE MR. GRAINGER FROM "ARE YOU BEING SERVED?" Don't believe me? Here is Emperor Palpatine: And here is Mr. Grainger: I rest my case. After a bit of Googling however I soon found I was not the first to have discovered this phenomenon: for example http://o-10.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/how-to-ruin-your-enjoyment-of-star-wars.html. As King David said: "Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago." Oh well - Happy Easter everyone!

Reminds me of when I was a kid. My father, before he retired, was a school principal. (Not of the school I went to I hasten to add - he had a lot more sense than to inflict that upon me.) But one of the teachers in his school [I'll call her Mrs. Morrison - though that wasn't her name] had a son who went to the same school as me. My father would come home in the evening and say "I've just been talking to Mrs. Morrison, and she says her son Steven [again not his real name] is going camping this weekend. Why aren't you going camping?" It was no use telling him that I didn't want to go - if young Steven was going, I had to too. I wouldn't have minded so much except for the fact that Steven Morrison was the biggest, annoyingest inverted snob ever. He had the idea that since his mother worked for my father, that made him and his family the downtrodden proletatiat, and me and my family (particularly my father, but me too) the oppressive bourgeoisie. Not that he used those actual words (we were both only about 11), but that was the essence of what he meant. So is it any wonder I didn't want to hang out at camping and canoeing trips with up-the-workers-we'll-keep-the-red-flag-flying "Che Guevara" Morrison - a boy who openly claimed to hate my father's guts? Looking back, I suspect what was really happening was this: Mrs. Morrison would come home in the evenings and vent off about her boss to her husband (the way most of us do when we're tired and cross) while her son was in earshot. Taking this ranting a lot more seriously than it was intended, he would feel it his duty to exact retribution on her behalf. And since my father was somewhat beyond his reach, he contented himself with spilling his "I'm a working class hero" claptrap on me.

I guess you thought it would be about "The Birds and the Bees"!

First guy who ever shaved? There's an interesting one. Did everyone above a certain age run around tripping over their beards before he came along? Turning into an ant. Actually no - at least not a regular-sized ant. But I did once have a vague worry about waking up as a giant cockroach, like Gregor Samsa.

Whenever I sit down to do some work, I always become curious about questions like "Are pigeons and doves the same kind of bird?" and "Do bumble bees make honey?" And the more urgent the work is, the greater the compulsion I feel to research these questions then and there. Well these are my findings: 1. Doves and pigeons are the same family (columbidae) but are distinct groups within that family. 2. Bumble bees do produce a kind of honey, but only in small quantities since their colonies do not survive the winter - except for the new queen who hibernates and forms a new colony new colony the following spring. (The old queen dies along with the workers.) But here are the amazing and unlooked-for facts uncovered during this research... 1. Pigeons (and doves), unlike other birds produce milk. Yes folks - it is possible to milk a pigeon! 2. There is such a thing as a "cuckoo bumble bee". It infiltrates the nest of another bumble bee species, kills the queen, and then masquerades as her by imitating her scent. It then lays its own eggs which are cared for by the workers. Aren't you glad I told you all this?

I was always fascinated with rockets too. At the age of about 8 I built a "rocket" which consisted of a yogurt pot filled with methylated spirit, upon which was balanced an upturned Vim container with holes cut in the sides for exhaust outlets. I fancy there was also a nose-cone to make it streamlined, and some fins to give it stability in flight. The theory was that once ignited, the fire from the methylated spirit would rise through the holes in the vim container, come blasting out of the outlets and propel the rocket skyward. Before the scheduled blast-off, I gave my parents a guided tour of the launch site. My father was less than sanguine about the "rocket"'s potential, but he didn't stop me lighting the fuse. Let's just say that the result was not quite what I had envisioned. So as the phrase goes, "I'm not exactly a rocket scientist".

Hahahahaha!!! Well spotted - I'm such a comedian I don't even notice my own funnies!

I drooled at them in catalogs and in shop windows, and in the adverts for them the sliced bread packaging. Eventually I scraped up enough money to buy one, but it didn't last long. They (and other such gizmos) were hopelessly unreliable back then - even the ones not made by Clive Sinclair. I think I got my money back from the shop, but I'm not totally sure. Quite why I thought a digital watch was a key to heaven's gate I'm not sure, but I don't think I was alone: consider what Douglas Adams had to say on the subject: P.S. Now I think about it, I reckon The Gemini Man had something to do with it. Remember him?

At the age of 13 I thought that digital watches were the greatest invention of all time and I would have willingly sold my soul if it meant I could have had one. (Perhaps I exaggerate slightly...but not much.) At the age of 15...ummm....I'm not even going to go there.

"We could go camping this summer," was Tom's tentative suggestion. "We haven't nearly enough slates to cover the roof," said Tom, realising the project was futile.

"I have a split personality," said Tom, being frank. "Oh no, I dropped the toothpaste again," said Tom, crestfallen. "I punched him right on the nose," said Tom, bashfully.

Right now I'm trying very hard to love you...

My sister bet me a thousand pounds I couldn't build a car out of spaghetti... ....You should have seen her face as I drove pasta!