Well, This Is What I Think

In the 1930s and 40s, many ordinary Germans knew of the Holocaust horror about death camps. Details of the deaths of Jews and other groups in concentration camps were well publicised in the media and elsewhere, as a determined and deliberate effort to de-sensitise the German public to accept atrocities committed on their behalf. This is quite regardless of the fact that millions of ordinary folk must have seen Jews being deported to the camps.

According to a new research study, the mass of ordinary Germans did know about the evolving terror of Hitler’s Holocaust. They knew concentration camps were full of Jewish people who were stigmatised as sub-human and race-defilers. They knew that these, like other groups and minorities, were being killed out of hand.

They knew that Adolf Hitler had repeatedly forecast the extermination of every Jew on German soil. They knew these details because they had read about them.

They knew because the camps and the measures which led up to them had been prominently and proudly reported step by step in thousands of officially-inspired German media articles and posters according to the study, which is due to be published simultaneously in Britain and the US early next month and which was described as ground-breaking by Oxford University Press yesterday and already hailed by other historians.

The reports, in newspapers and magazines all over the country were phases in a public process of “desensitisation” which worked all too well, culminating in the killing of 6 million Jews, plus homosexuals, communists, prisoners of war and others, says author Robert Gellately.

His book, Backing Hitler, is based on the first systematic analysis by a historian of surviving German newspaper and magazine archives since 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. The survey took hundreds of hours and yielded dozens of folders of photocopies, many of them from the 24 main newspapers and magazines of the period.

Landmark

Its results, Professor Gellately says, destroy the claim – generally made by Germans after Berlin fell in 1945 and accepted by most historians – that they did not know about camp atrocities.

He concludes by indicating that the only thing many Germans may not have known about was the use of industrial-scale gas chambers because, unusually, no media reports were allowed of this “final solution”. However, by the end of the war camps were all over the country and many Germans worked in them.

Yesterday OUP said his study exposed “once and for all the substantial consent and active participation of large numbers of ordinary Germans”. Its head of historical publishing, Ruth Parr, called it a landmark study of the terror. “He asks and answers some very difficult questions about how much the ordinary German people knew about the Nazi atrocities, and to what degree they supported them,” she said.

A leading British-born Holocaust historian, Professor Michael Burleigh, said the book was “original and outstanding, genuinely important”. Another authority on the camps, Professor Omer Bartov, of Brown University, Rhode Island, US, described Backing Hitler as “path-breaking – a crucial contribution to our understanding of the relationship between consent and coercion in modern dictatorship”.

Conventional wisdom among post war historians has been that – as Lord Dahrendorf, ex-warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, says in his study Society and Democracy in Germany (1966) – “It is certainly true that most Germans ‘did not know’ about National Socialist crimes of violence; nothing precise, that is, because they did not ask any questions_.” A common explanation among influential modern German historians, including Hans-Ulrich Thamer in his study Wooing and Violence (1986) is that the Nazis “seduced” an unwilling or passive public.

But Gellately, professor in Holocaust history at Clark University, Massachusetts, offers a mass of detail to support the theme of an earlier work, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which caused an international sensation in 1995. Goldhagen’s theme was that “what the Nazis actually did was to unshackle and thereby activate Germans’ “pre-existing, pent-up anti-semitism”.

Gellately began his inquiry after finding a press report – published as routine – of a woman reported to the Gestapo for “looking Jewish” and allegedly having sex with a neighbour. “For decades my generation had been told that so much of the terror had been carried out in complete secrecy,” he writes.

His media trawl, with a research assistant, found that as early as 1933 local papers reported the killing of 12 prisoners by guards at Dachau, the first to be set up as a “model” concentration camp initially for communists.

On May 23 the Dachauer Zeitung said the camp was Germany’s most famous place and brought “new hope to the Dachau business world”.

By 1934 the main and widely read Nazi-owned paper Volkische Beobachter was reporting a widening of policy to other “political criminals” including Jews accused of race defilement.

By 1936 communist prisoners were no longer mentioned: in a photo-essay in the SS paper Das Schwarze Korps emphasised the camps as places for “race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals”.

This broadening mission, as Gellately calls it, was reflected in Volkische Beobachter photographs of “typical subhumans” including Jews with “deformed headshapes”. For the first time their detention was said to be permanent. In January, 1937 Berliner Borsen Zeitung reported the SS chief Heinrich Himmler as announcing the need for “still more camps” for “those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed, deformed half-Jews and a whole series of racially inferior types”.

In November, 1938 the anti-Jewish pogrom on and after “the night of broken glass” was reported countrywide in papers as heroic. The propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, announced that the “final answer” to the Jewish problem would be by way of government de cree, according to Volkische Beobachter

In late 1939, the year war started, newspapers acting on government orders announced a post-8pm curfew on all Jews in case they “molest Aryan women”.

That November the first summary executions of “anti-socials” by police without trial were reported. Papers were told to report these clearly and forcefully.

In March, 1941 the Hamburger Fremdenblatt reported the first mass auctions of possessions of detained or killed Jews. Hamburg became the wartime clearing house and Gellately says at least 100,000 citizens bought items at the auctions.

After this the focus switched. Most press reports about Jews were about those outside Germany. This was because the official but unpublicised final solution was being implemented.

But enthusiastic denunciations by ordinary citizens of Jewish and other “internal enemies” continued to be copiously reported. Backing Hitler discusses 670 cases. By the end of the war Hitler was still getting 1,000 private letters a week, many of them denunciations of Jews.

For more detail on the process of “Othering”, currently enthusiastically being employed by President Donald Trump in America, by the Liberal-National Government in Australia as regards refugees, and by many Governments around the world concerning religious minorities with which they disagree, click here.

We have restrained ourselves from commenting overmuch on the Brett Kavanaugh matter for one simple reason.

From a distance, one simply cannot, with any real confidence, parse the facts of the matter.

It also raises so many fundamental questions as to spin the mind.

The most important of these are: how does the system effectively adjudicate matters that invariably happened out of the sight of corroborating witnesses?

And how does the system balance the concept of presuming a woman’s testimony of sexual assault to be valid and worthy of the deepest and most serious consideration, with the concept of “innocent until proven guilty by a jury of one’s peers” – a concept so ingrained in our own world view that is assuredly deserves the epithet “fundamental”.

The short answer to these worrysome questions is that ultimately – and unsatisfactorily – the “facts” of any given matter will often come down to opinion. Opinion about the credibility of each party to the dispute.

And opinion, of course, whilst inevitably part of our decision-making process, is simply made up of the accumulated life experiences we have had, and the opinions imprinted upon us by others at some time or other, and although it is a key decision-making tool for all of us, in no way can it reliably be called empirical. Nevertheless, it is often all we really have.

In these things, therefore, we often rely on our gut instincts. Our “feel” for the situation. Indeed, sans identifiable facts we fall back on aphorisms and folk wisdom. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Recent research into “mob decisions” or the “wisdom of crowds” seems to tell us that the collective wisdom of large groups of people is more often likely to be right than wrong, born of some sort of collective hive mind experience that is not yet clearly understood, although much conjectured upon.

One such folk aphorism is “there’s no smoke without fire”.

This is the simple belief that when a quantity of controversy is in the air, something genuine must be behind it. And it is, indeed, a reliable indicator, to some extent. Over and over again investigations based on the appearance of smoke do, indeed, eventually reveal the fire behind it. The problem is that it also often amounts to nothing at all. Smoke can be manufactured by interested or malign parties, nowadays more easily than ever, to the extent that leads people to assume “it must be so”. This effect is magnified hundreds of thousands of times in a world where social media endlessly repeats “facts” that are not, in any empirical sense, facts at all. In a sense this is by no means solely a modern affair. For example the infamous Dreyfus affair from 1894 to 1906 divided France deeply and lastingly into two opposing camps: the pro-Army, mostly Catholic “anti-Dreyfusards” and the anti-clerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards. It embittered French politics and encouraged radicalisation on both sides for decades. But today, the effect is infinitely more powerful, and therefore infinitely more caution is indicated.

The Wikipedia article on Wisdom of Crowds is well worth reading. It reveals the pluses and minuses of this phenomenon. Ironically, one real danger is the desire to feel “connected”, leaving us at the mercy of our own emotions, urgently vacuuming up opinions and “facts” that confirm our world view. This goes way beyond mere confirmation bias, which is a well-understood phenomenon. It goes to what we actually believe to be happening around us. It affects our empirical view of the world. Our opinions become our reality. Doubt or rationality become dangerous to our mental well-being.

So what has the Kavanaugh case revealed about our ability to perceive truth? We would argue the following:

1. Whilst many men and women (and especially women) have become swept up in the outrage surrounding the accusations, many have also seen the entire matter as a political hit job on a decent man, or sought to downplay the matter “even if it is true”. Which way the opinion falls may depend on our personal backgrounds, or how we perceived the demeanour of the central characters.

2. U.S. President Donald Trump said he is “100 percent” certain that Christine Blasey Ford named the wrong person when she accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in testimony during his Supreme Court nomination hearings.

Yet Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she was “100 percent” certain it was Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted her in the upstairs bedroom of a home in a wealthy Washington suburb in 1982 when both of them were teenagers. Her testimony before the committee was steady, largely unemotional, circumspect and appeared credible. And for many, that testimony dredged up painful memories of their own experiences of sexual violence, that had often been privately endured for years. Ford’s manifest bravery in the face of those who were at times both hostile and disbelieving also empowered survivors; they felt that they were no longer alone and that they too had a voice. Many felt the urge to take action, both in support of those who had been affected but also to change societal attitudes to sexual harassment.

3. In stark contrast, the Judge’s testimony was at turn tragic, angry, (bordering on fury), and sometimes overtly political and partisan. If he was an innocent man wronged then his emotions could quite clearly be understood. If he was a guilty man found out, then it appeared he was erecting an ever-growing smokescreen of emotive blather, to obscure any matters of fact. Which it was will depend entirely on the pre-held opinions one brings to watching his testimony. For many on the right it was understandable, credible and even long overdue. A warrior of conservatism fighting back for his reputation and his life against a conspiracy involving the Democratic Party, left wing media and femi-nazi activism. For many on the left his speech epitomised male privilege and a machismo-drenched “winner takes all” mentality which betokened no opposition. The left’s response to the entire brouhaha is well laid out here.

So what can we conclude from this riveting but sorry matter?

For all that the President tries to spin it one way, the short story is that the Senate have now said they believe Ford to have been untruthful, whether mistakenly or deliberately.

This must inevitably be a huge psychological blow to women everywhere who may delay reporting sexual assault for all sorts of very good and well-understood reasons. At the very least, concerted efforts must be made to encourage women to speak up against sexual violence perpetrated against them, whenever it was. If the net outcome of this matter is that fewer women will seek redress, that would be a dolorous outcome indeed.

The new Justice of the Supreme Court may have revealed himself to be temperamentally unsuited to such a senior role, no matter the guilt or otherwise of his case, nor the level of his legal acumen, which is by all accounts very high. At least one former Supreme Court Justice and 2,400 law professors believe this to be the case. It may be that his intemperate testimony will haunt him even longer than the facts or otherwise of the accusations against him.

In any civilised society, there must surely be a thorough legal investigation into the two other complainants against the Judge, if only to dismiss their accusations. To leave their matters swinging in the breeze is merely to prolong the saga. Indeed, should the Judge himself not call for them to be investigated, to clear the air, even though he has publicly rejected them? And if he does not, why not? What does that say, if anything? And what if those people – or Ford herself, indeed – bring a civil case against the Judge? How would that affect his ability to carry out his role?

Last but by no means least, the case has shown the American political system, and society in general, to be in an even more toxic state than everyone already knew it to be, if such a thing were possible.

American today looks more than ever like it did in the war-fuelled and conflicted era of 1968 and its surrounds. People simply seem unable to listen to one another, or to debate politely. They choose what to believe based on their political allegiance and not a careful review of known facts. In the world’s most significant liberal democracy, that is a matter of active danger, as people may give up on the model altogether in sheer frustration. Indeed, there are those that argue that the political classes are already preparing to do exactly that. A confluence of power and money is taking place which threatens to ride roughshod over institutions and process – and which is utterly uninterested in pesky little matters such as facts.

An unhappy time, in short.

You also deserve, Dear Reader, to know what we think.

In our view, the performance of the Judge in cross-questioning revealed him to be unfit to hold the highest level of judicial appointment in America, perhaps in the world, in its impact. Not because of his opinions – he’s entitled to those – but because of of how he chose to express them. But one can make excuses for his brutalistic performance, call it a one off, or argue we all might fail when under such scrutiny. All of which might be true. Or might not.

So to make our own judgement, fraught with incapacity and uncertainty, we will rely on one last piece of folk-wisdom, using an aphorism popular in our home of Australia.

When it seems impossible to be certain on the rights and wrongs of any given matter, ask yourself, “Does it pass the sniff test?”

Like a piece of meat lifted to quivering nostrils, does it “smell” fresh or tainted?

And to our nose, the Kavanaugh matter simply does not pass the sniff test.

But then again, we might be wrong.

Fascinating stuff via Are you ready for this?

I saw him walking home

Fluoro yellow vest sun hat brown brogues neatly polished and a limp

His jacket cried out: Crossing Supervisor

And I had never spoken to someone charged

with Supervising Crossing. I was intrigued.

So I said to him, elucidate me please

Do I require supervision for just a small Crossing?

Maybe a passing annoyance? Something trivial?

Like when my skinny cafe latte is only warmed through and not hot, again?

Or can I manage that amount of Crossing on my own recognisance?

Maybe your supervision is required for a full-blown Crossing?

Like yelling at that suicidal office worker stepping off the kerb, eyes fixed on his phone?

And yes: I think you’d better Supervise me for when I next have to deal with that guy: the one who thinks the world isn’t frying slowly …

… this idiot on the radio, right now

I think my Crossing with him is heading towards incandescent. Supernova.

He glanced at me.

I don’t think he could hear me through the glass.

And the recycling truck was emptying bottles.

Turned and weaved onto a small path, and went inside the weatherboard cottage.

Bent. The cottage. And him.

So I drove on, unrequited.

And spent the day Crossing at everyone, back and forth, all unsupervised and somehow strangely anxious.

We all have friends who trot out the right-wing meme “OK the climate is changing but who can say that climate change is man made? Sure there is scientific consensus, but that’s not proof”.

With one, I tried an explanation, expressed politely. My next step when courtesy fails is always “get out of the way you fucking idiot, the rest of us will try and solve this”. But I thought I’d try courtesy first. It ran thusly:

“Michael, with all due respect, it’s not about scientific consensus versus scientific proof. 

Science is merely a process by which one observes natural events and then seeks to discover the causality behind them. A theory is then advanced to try and satisfy all the enquiries. This is true of all science – not just weather science but geology, ocean studies, ice studies, biology, and so forth. 

Then the theory is tested against predictions – if this is happening, then this should happen next.

That climate change is man made is argued because the FASTEST EVER rise in global temperatures coincides exactly with the beginning of the industrial era. QED it’s the industrialisation of the planet that is causing it. 

If this is happening, then it is predictable that more extreme weather events will happen, more often. Worse snow, longer droughts, more intense rainfall, worse (and more common) hurricanes.

It is also predictable that the oceans will become more acid, and species will become extinct, threatening the food chain.

In other words, a “perfect storm” for humanity, if you’ll pardon the pun.

Which is exactly what is happening, and will continue to happen. That’s why there is scientific consensus. The theory works when examined by all branches of science.”
The other argument that one tries is “Well look at it this way: if the climate change science is real it is very likely disastrous for humanity. If there’s only 1% chance the scientists are right isn’t the prudent thing to address the trend, and see what happens next?”

Then some waffle about economic growth is trotted out. Which is when I say “No jobs on a dead planet” which I once saw scrawled on a freeway bridge and noted. Then I get mildly abusive and log off.

Social influencers may play a crucial role in how brand perceptions are formed.

via Got a hospitality brand? (Or any brand that needs some good oil?) “Social influencers” are very important to you. — The Blog

Father takes his kids to a theme park before shooting them in the head, and his wife. And himself.

http://time.com/4452939/mark-short-murder-suicide-hershey-park/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook

Some Republicans remember their heritage:

Dear Members and Alumni,

In every presidential election since 1888, the members and Executive Board of the Harvard Republican Club have gathered to discuss, debate, and eventually endorse the standard-bearer of our party. But for the first time in 128 years, we, the oldest College Republicans chapter in the nation, will not be endorsing the Republican nominee.

Donald Trump holds views that are antithetical to our values not only as Republicans, but as Americans. The rhetoric he espouses –from racist slander to misogynistic taunts– is not consistent with our conservative principles, and his repeated mocking of the disabled and belittling of the sacrifices made by prisoners of war, Gold Star families, and Purple Heart recipients is not only bad politics, but absurdly cruel.

If enacted, Donald Trump’s platform would endanger our security both at home and abroad. Domestically, his protectionist trade policies and draconian immigration restrictions would enlarge our federal deficit, raise prices for consumers, and throw our economy back into recession. Trump’s global outlook, steeped in isolationism, is considerably out-of-step with the traditional Republican stance as well. The flippancy with which he is willing to abdicate the United States’ responsibility to lead is alarming. Calling for the US’ withdrawal from NATO and actively endorsing nuclear proliferation, Donald Trump’s foreign policy would wreak havoc on the established world order which has held aggressive foreign powers in check since World War II.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Donald Trump simply does not possess the temperament and character necessary to lead the United States through an increasingly perilous world. The last week should have made obvious to all what has been obvious to most for more than a year. In response to any slight –perceived or real– Donald Trump lashes out viciously and irresponsibly. In Trump’s eyes, disagreement with his actions or his policies warrants incessant name calling and derision: stupid, lying, fat, ugly, weak, failing, idiot –and that’s just his “fellow” Republicans.

He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.

Donald Trump, despite spending more than a year on the campaign trail, has either refused or been unable to educate himself on issues that matter most to Americans like us. He speaks only in platitudes, about greatness, success, and winning. Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated his complete lack of knowledge on critical matters, meandering from position to position over the course of the election. When confronted about these frequent reversals, Trump lies in a manner more brazen and shameless than anything politics has ever seen.

Millions of people across the country are feeling despondent. Their hours have been cut, wages slashed, jobs even shipped overseas. But Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan to fix that. He has a plan to exploit that.

Donald Trump is a threat to the survival of the Republic. His authoritarian tendencies and flirtations with fascism are unparalleled in the history of our democracy. He hopes to divide us by race, by class, and by religion, instilling enough fear and anxiety to propel himself to the White House. He is looking to to pit neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, American against American. We will not stand for this vitriolic rhetoric that is poisoning our country and our children. 

President Reagan called on us to maintain this, our shining city on a hill. He called on us to maintain freedom abroad by keeping a strong presence in the world. He called on us to maintain liberty at home by upholding the democratic process and respecting our opponents. He called on us to maintain decency in our hearts by loving our neighbor.

He would be ashamed of Donald Trump. We are too. 

This fall, we will instead focus our efforts on reclaiming the Republican Party from those who have done it considerable harm, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the conservative principles that have defined the Republican Party for generations. We will work to ensure both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands, continuing to protect against executive overreach regardless of who wins the election this November.

We call on our party’s elected leaders to renounce their support of Donald Trump, and urge our fellow College Republicans to join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man. The conservative movement in America should not and will not go quietly into the night.

A longtime student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” 

De Tocqueville believed in the United States. Americans are a decent people. We work hard, protect our own, and look out for one another in times of need, regardless of the color of our skin, the God we worship, or our party registration. Donald Trump may not believe in that America, but we do. And that America will never cease to be great.
The Harvard Republican Club

FEEL FREE TO SHARE WIDELY

An INDEPENDENT review, please note.

INDEPENDENCE DAY ROUNDUP

The UK’s first day of “independence” has gone just swimmingly, though, eh?

1. Nigel Farage went on the tele and retracted the (false) claim that we send £350 million per week to the EU that would now be re-directed to the NHS and said Vote Leave should never have made that commitment to voters in the first place. Yesterday, this commitment was on the side of Vote Leave busses across the country. Exit polling indicates additional funding for the NHS was cited as a reason for leaving by nearly 80% of leave voters. Voters ignored thousands of Remain spokespeople trying to explain it was a lie.

2. Daniel Hannan MEP retracted the (false) claim that leaving the EU will lead to drastically reduced immigration into Britain. Exit polling indicates this was the second most cited reason voters gave for leaving the EU. Would have been nice if Vote Leave had bothered to be honest with voters about both of these matters before today.

3. S&P, the only rating agency still giving the UK a AAA credit rating, confirms it has placed that rating under review for downgrade. It appears a downgrade is much more likely than not. Borrowing costs to fund Britain’s large deficit are set to increase markedly.

4. Sterling collapsed to its lowest level against the USD in three decades, the biggest single day drop in the history of the currency. It is the third biggest single day drop in any currency ever. It is currently $1.36, down an incredible 13 cents against the dollar in less than 24 hours from a high of $1.49 yesterday.

5. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, has said a second independence referendum is “highly likely”. Scots will likely vote on dismembering the United Kingdom in the next few years, which will fuel further uncertainty and economic turmoil. But who could blame them?

6. Sinn Fein and various others in Northern Ireland call for a border poll on reunification. The border with Ireland, which has all but vanished, will now need to be re-established.

7. Spain calls for co-sovereignty over Gibraltar.

8. More than £1.5 trillion in wealth was wiped out across global markets in just a few hours this morning, the single greatest wealth destroying event in stock market history. That’s 187 years’ worth of British contributions to the EU. Seems worth it to get that money back from Brussels though, eh?

9. The FTSE 100 (largely multinationals) fell more than 8% and the FTSE 250 (which reflects mostly British firms rather than multinationals) fell more than 12%. Both steadied after Mark Carney declared that the Bank of England would not hesitate to intervene to instil stability, the same sort of intervention that Mario Draghi had to make to save the Euro during the Greek crisis and that the G7 had to make to save the global economy after the collapse of Lehman. Brexit is an event that ranks alongside those crises in terms of effects on global markets. Anyway never mind, because the Bank of England will fix it. With your money, of course.

10. Ultimately, the FTSE 100 finished down 3% and the FTSE 250 down 7%. Hundreds of billions of pounds has been wiped off people’s ISAs and pension funds. Banks in particular have been hammered.

11. David Cameron resigned without mapping out any plan for implementing the results of the referendum. Boris Johnson is odds on favourite to be our next Prime Minister. In October. You heard that right. Boris Johnson. Clown mayor of London and never even been a Minister.

12. Labour MPs have moved for a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn which will be considered by the party on Monday.  

He’s for the high jump too.

13. The presidents of the European Council, Commission and Parliament told us to invoke Article 50 and leave as soon as possible and the settlement negotiated by David Cameron earlier this year is now void. The head of the Berlin Stock Exchange summed it up. “We’ll still be friends. But we’re not on the same side now.”

14. Nigel Farage, who earlier claimed that independence was achieved “without a single bullet being fired”, just called for UK gun laws to be relaxed, one week after Jo Cox was murdered on the street in broad daylight. With a gun. Slimeball.

15. Numerous reports of immigrants, and native Britons who happen to be brown, being told to “go back home” in the street and on the Tube, the vote to leave apparently having been taken by some as an indication that most of the country now thinks this sort of thing is acceptable, rather than profoundly un-British and utterly awful.

Lies. Madness. Insanity. Oh, England, my England, what have you done?

Meanwhile, those Britons who are horrified by yesterday’s events might care to note that a petition to Parliament calling for another election is already the fastest growing petition ever, with over 500,000 signatures, and will be debated by the Parliament. If you’re a British citizen and wish to sign you can find it here.

And also, don’t forget that Nigel Farage said that 52-48 wouldn’t be an adequate margin to settle the matter of Britain’s membership. 

Of course, that’s when he thought Leave was going to lose …

  
Here’s a few tips: for all those men who are confused by recent well publicised calls by a complete dickhead with a flair for publicity, calling for rape to be legalised on private property.

If you see a woman walking down the street, don’t rape her.

If you can’t trust yourself, use the buddy system so your friend is always with you to make sure you don’t rape anyone.Don’t enter through unlocked doors or open windows and go to a woman’s bed while she is sleeping to rape her.

Be honest straight up: when asking a woman on a date tell her there and then that after dinner you are going to rape her, otherwise she might get the wrong idea and think she is going out to dinner with you without ever thinking you are planning to rape her. 

Carry a rape kit at all times so if you get the urge to rape a woman who is getting into her car, blow your rape whistle until someone comes to stop you from raping her.

Take your mace can from your rape kit and spray in your eyes to blind you so you won’t be able to see any women to rape when the thought crosses your mind.

Hope these handy hints help. You’re welcome.

The Huffington Post on Friday reported on a new study out of The University of Alberta that shows that drinking a glass of red wine may have the same effect on the body as an hour at the gym.
  
A component in the wine, resveratrol, was seen to improve physical performance, heart function and muscle strength similar to the affect exercise has on the body.Principal investigator Jason Dyck says, “I think resveratrol could help patient populations who want to exercise but are physically incapable. Resveratrol could mimic exercise for them or improve the benefits of the modest amount of exercise that they can do.”

“It is very satisfying to progress from basic research in a lab to testing in people, in a short period of time,” Dyck said.

Right, we’re off to pour our third hour’s gym work for the day right now.

A-Board outside a new shop.

“24 Hour Gym. Open Now.”

Glad to have the clarification. Sadly, Ms Junior Wellthisiswhatithink was past the location before realising she should have taken a photo. But she assures your indefatigable correspondent that it was true.

Apart from the packet of peanuts that said “Warning, may contain peanuts” this may be our favourite F*** Up of some time. 

As always, to read the entire sorry catalogue, just put F*** Up in the search box top left on this page …