Another other side view

Sexist remarks and wolf-whistles could become criminal offences
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The UK will sign up to Council of Europe's convention on violence against women, which could mean criminalising unwanted verbal remarks 
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Salacious whistles and sexist comments may fall foul of new laws against sexual harassment to which Britain is signing up.

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The pledge to criminalise "verbal, non-verbal or physical" sexual harassment is one of the commitments in the Council of Europe's convention on violence against women.

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Among the pledges in the convention, which has already been signed by 18 countries including Germany, France and Ukraine, is one to pass legislation or other measures to criminalise or impose other sanctions for: 
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"Unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment".

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Another clause would outlaw "psychological violence" 
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Defined as "seriously impairing a person's psychological integrity through coercion or threats", language which suggests serious bullying could be covered by new laws.

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Other measures Britain and other signatories would have to enshrine in law include compensation for victims of domestic violence.
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Eeasy annulment or dissolution of forced marriages.
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And punishments for carrying out or coercing somebody into genital mutilation, forced abortions or forced sterilisation.
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Another issue is stalking and the the British Crime Survey estimated that approximately 120,000 incidents of stalking occur each year. 
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Between 2009 and 2010, however, just 53,000 crimes of stalking or harassment were recorded by the police: 

2% of which received a custodial sentence, and a further 10% of which were given a fine or a probation order.
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The reforms are thought to be similar to those introduced in Scotland in December 2010. 
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Since the introduction of the stalking law in Scotland there have been over four hundred 400 prosecutions compared with an average of seven per year under existing breach of the peace legislation for each of the previous 10 years.
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Amelia Hill and Juliette Jowit

One side view

The Great Offensiveness War is about to enter a new phase. 

Something called "street harassment" is to be the subject of new laws, the Government announced recently. 

Street harassment is defined as "unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person". 

If you think that definition covers a wide spectrum of human behaviour, you would be right. 

A word, a whistle, a look could soon be construed as an assault on another's dignity – "psychological violence", as the statement puts it.

The proposed legislation has been welcomed by the many sincere busybodies who believe that there is too much nastiness in the world, and that it is the job of the state to do something about it. 

Nastiness should be banned, niceness legally enforced.

The Government, which once argued that there are too many laws, has embraced these new controls.

Aware that his party has a blokeish image, the Prime Minister seems to believe – in a typically patronising male way – that banning wolf-whistles will endear him to female voters. 

Cynically combining the announcement concerning street harassment with another covering the incomparably more serious crime of stalking, the Government's own niceness tsar, Nick Clegg, boasted that higher standards of protection for women would now be in place, with "greater support for victims".

There is something distinctly creepy about this plan to make disrespect a matter for the courts. 

As it happens, the vast majority of women are not in need of protection. 

If annoyed by someone who violates their dignity, they are more than able to cope with the situation in their own way without the help of the state.

Women who are genuinely victims are already protected by the law. 

In fact, making relatively trivial acts into crimes will have the very opposite effect of that intended: it will put women in the role of victims, cowering behind the protection of Nick Clegg and his niceness police.

Nor is it a small matter, putting yet more words and gestures within the reach of the law. 

Far from empowering individuals, it strengthens the grip of the state on the everyday life of its citizens. 

Once the idea is accepted that personal nastiness should be illegal, there is no end to the list of words, phrases, expressions and whistles which might upset someone somewhere.

These initiatives are seductive and an illusion of progress. 

They are an easy vote-winner for politicians, while granting yet more power to them and to the police. 

But they eat into our freedoms, bringing the law and the state into areas of behaviour that should be the responsibility of individuals. 

The niceness laws, stealthily extending their control over the way we behave on behalf of the offended, are a threat to us all, women and men

Terence Blacker

Any questions?

Thus to the church which affirms that the devil exists 
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The world replies with a terrifying logic 
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Then god does not exist 
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And it is vain to seek to escape from this argument 
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To invent the supremacy of a god who would permit a devil to bring about the damnation of men. 
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Such a permission would be a monstrosity.
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And would amount to complicity.
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And the god that could be an accomplice of the devil cannot be god.

Slaughter continues

The indiscriminate slaughter of vast numbers of turtles, sharks, albatrosses and other endangered marine animals that get unintentionally caught by fishermen as “by-catch” could be prevented by a radical proposal of mobile marine reserves, scientists said yesterday.
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Protected areas of the ocean where commercial fishing is banned would work far better if they were not static conservation areas, as they are at present, but moveable reserves that take into account the mobile nature of sea life, they said.

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The idea for migrating reserves has come about as a result of a revolution in satellite and tagging technology that has allowed scientists to routinely monitor the seasonal movements of marine creatures, which would have been impossible a decade ago.
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Scientists said that existing marine protection areas (MPAs), where fishing is controlled to enable wildlife to recover, frequently fail to do their job because the endangered animals simply migrate to unprotected regions where they get caught accidentally by nets and fishing lines.
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This is believed to be the main reason why populations of loggerhead and leatherback turtles, which are both critically endangered, have slumped dramatically in recent years as commercial fishing with nets and extremely long fishing lines has become more intense.
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Leatherback turtles, a species as old as the dinosaurs, have suffered particularly badly in the Pacific Ocean where populations have fallen by more than 90 per cent in just 20 years. 
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Sharks and albatrosses have also declined significantly as a result of being caught accidentally by fishermen.
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Creating mobile protection areas monitored by satellite and other high-tech systems would enable some of the world’s most endangered species to recover.
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As well as allowing fishermen to ply their trade in other parts of the ocean where by-catch is less likely, said Larry Crowder, professor of marine biology at Stanford University in California.
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It was thought 12 years ago that we would not be able to do this, but in the last 5 years the science has grown so quickly, at least in areas where we have rich data, we are on the cusp of doing this.
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Small, stationary reserves do little to protect highly mobile animals, like most fish, like the turtles and sharks and seabirds. 
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The only way to achieve conservation of these kinds of organisms is to protect them everywhere in the ocean, and that was the early approach.
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But we don’t need to close the entire ocean, we only need to close the place where they are concentrated.
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Where by-catch is particularly likely to be found, and leave the rest of the ocean open.
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Satellite tagging and other ways of monitoring the movements of marine creatures has shown that sea life tends to congregate near oceanographic features such as “upwellings”.
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Places where rising currents bring minerals to the sea surface, and “convergence zones”, where ocean currents collide.
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Those are the buffet lines where everything in the ocean goes to feed, and the fishermen understand that, and the things that they are fishing for understand that,” Professor Crowder said.
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These features tend to move, taking sea life with them. 
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One of the best examples is North Pacific convergence zone which moves more than 1,000 miles during the year.
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Today satellite technology, tagging and acoustic technology allows to look into the opaque ocean and figure out who is going where.
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The time is ripe for the idea of mobile marine protection areas and a good candidate to consider is the North Pacific convergence zone. 
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We know it moves seasonally. 

In the summer it’s about 1,000 miles north of Hawaii and in the winter, it is further south.
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Fishermen travel 1,000 miles to fish in this feature and for loggerhead turtles migrating back to Japan from Baja California, this is the interstate highway for them.
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The science is in place, both in terms of the tagging technology for the organisms you are concerned about and the underlying oceanography.
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So you don’t say that albatrosses are likely to be at 42 degrees north, but that albatrosses are likely to found with this particular moving feature,” he said.


Caught in the net: Threatened species
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The number of leatherback turtles in the Pacific have declined by 90 per cent in 20 years with by-catch a main cause. 
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The loggerhead turtle has been hit particularly hard by shrimp trawling.
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Albatrosses can become caught on fishing lines and drown. 
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The northern royal albatross is an endangered species.
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Sharks
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An estimated 50 million sharks are caught unintentionally every year. 
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The angel shark, vulnerable to by-catch, is now one of the five most endangered shark species.
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Charlie Cooper

Are they true or false?

1. Apples, not caffeine, are more efficient at waking you up in the morning.

2. Alfred Hitchcock did not have a belly button.

3. A pack-a-day smoker will lose approximately 2 teeth every 10 years.

4. People do not get sick from cold weather; it's from being indoors a lot more.

5. When you sneeze, all bodily functions stop, even your heart!

6. Only 7% of the population are lefties.

7. 40-people are sent to the hospital for dog bites every minute.

8. Babies are born without kneecaps. They don't appear until they are 2-6 years old.

9. The average person over 50 will have spent 5 years waiting in lines.

10. The toothbrush was invented in 1498.

11. The average housefly lives for one month.

12. 40,000 Americans are injured by toilets each year.

13. A coat hanger is 44 inches long when straightened.

14. The average computer user blinks 7-times a minute.

15. Your feet are bigger in the afternoon than any other time of day.

16. Most of us have eaten a spider in our sleep.

17. The REAL reason ostriches stick their head in the sand is to search for water.

18. The only two animals that can see behind themselves without turning their heads are the rabbit and the parrot.

19. John Travolta turned down the starring roles in 'An Officer and a Gentleman' and 'Tootsie.'

20. Michael Jackson owned the rights to the South Carolina State Anthem.

21. In most television commercials advertising milk, a mixture of white paint and a little thinner is used in place of the milk.

22. Prince Charles and Prince William NEVER travel on the same airplane, just in case there is a crash.

23. The first Harley Davidson motorcycle built in 1903 used a tomato can for a carburetor.

24. Most hospitals make money by selling the umbilical cords cut from women who give birth. They are used in vein transplant surgery.

25. Humphrey Bogart was related to Princess Diana. They were 7th cousins.

26. If coloring weren't added to Coca-Cola, it would be green.Now, scroll down for the answers...

They are all TRUE

Now go back and think about #16 !

Click here to Reply or Forward

A murmuration of starlings

Murmuration:  No one knows why they do it.

Yet each fall, thousands of starlings dance in the twilight above England and Scotland. 

The birds gather in shape-shifting flocks called murmurations, having migrated in the millions from Russia and Scandinavia to escape winters frigid bite.   

Scientists aren’t sure how they do it, either. 

The starlings' murmurations are manifestations of swarm intelligence, which in different contexts is practised by schools of fish, swarms of bees and colonies of ants.  

As far as we are aware, even complex algorithmic models haven’t yet explained the starlings’ aerobatics, which rely on the tiny birds' quicksilver reaction time of under 100 milliseconds to avoid aerial collisions—and predators—in the giant flock.    

Despite their tour de force in the dusky sky, starlings have declined significantly in the UK in recent years, perhaps because of a decline in suitable nesting sites. 

The birds still roost in several of Britain’s rural pastures, however, settling down to sleep (and chatter) after their evening ballet.  

Starlings are part of the British scene and like many others are often taken for granted

We do this at our peril

Without attention many aspects of British life have already disappeared

Many areas of nature have simply gone.

Now we are confronted by a disease that is attacking our ash trees

Ash trees are to be found throughout the British isles.

Millions of them.

It is said we may lose up to eighty percent of them

This disease has already devastated Denmark and now it has arrived on these shores.

Like our starlings we take so many things for granted

Time to pay more attention to the beauty around us

To appreciate it every day

Too late when they have gone

Slow down and appreciate what is truly an amazing world

Find the beauty every day around you.

Appreciate it.

Unlike so much of modern life nature gives us truly amazing sights.

Like a murmuration of starlings for example.

Have you ever seen a murmuration or were you too busy in the Mall?

Saying nice things

Many, many times we think of saying something nice.
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But then somehow we don't do so.
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Sometimes we even think we have done so when in reality we only thought to do so.
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Then again other times we were too busy.
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Other things came up in the conversation instead.
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As important as the spoken word is, the unspoken word can become even more important.
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How often have you regretted not telling someone how much you loved or admired him or her?
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How often have you regretted not thanking someone for a kindness? 
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How often have you regretted not picking up the telephone to congratulate someone or to express sympathy?
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If you were to add up all the times you could or should have said something nice it might be a rather large number.
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Life is made up of thousands of encounters. 
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Some are lasting and some are quick, but all of them are important. 
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No matter how brief the encounter, it leaves an impression. 
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A touch no matter how light is still a touch.
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Imagine if we all said nice  things to at least five people a day
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And if they all did the same.
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Exponentially we would soon have a happier planet
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So why don't we?
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Are we frightened to say nice things, like they are too dangerous?
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Living in a big city as many of us do smiling is something weirdos do.
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Time we started work on consciously changing this
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Make your start today.
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There is never a wrong time to do the right thing.
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A word of encouragement is always welcomed.
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If we really want the world to be a friendlier place, it starts with us. 
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We can change the world. 
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It is an opportunity open to all of us rich and poor the wealthiest among us or the poorest. 
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Don't miss the opportunity to brighten someone's day. 
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The return on your investment is really really quick. 
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You will feel better!

Thinking about your problems

Is something modern humans spend a lot of time on
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Our ancestors probably did as well however I cannot vouch for that here.
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What can be said though is that beyond a certain point it is a very debilitating exercise.
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Going round and round does not solve the problems.
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Constantly coming back to them does not help much either.
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What does help is the ability to let them be
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Letting them be once you have determined what if anything can be done about them.
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Letting them be can only occur once you know how to turn off your mind.
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To control it to the point where it will obey you.
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And that as we have said many times is not easy.
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Diversion is the next best thing to controlling your mind.
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And this modern man does very well.
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All that TV, those dvd's, internet, games, hours and hours per day for most.
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Drugs, sex, gambling, sport, shopping you name it.
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Myriads of avoidance mechanisms.
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Be aware of what you are doing.
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Decide to take back some time for yourself.
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Keeping your mind busy all day long every waking moment is tough on your system.

There needs to be some downtime.
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Some time without machines.
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Some time without thinking about your problems.
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Some time without endless diversions.
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Time where you are with yourself
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Time where you just are.
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To achieve this requires that you accept yourself.
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That you let go.
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Letting go of thoughts, problems the whole lot.
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Walk in nature and focus on what is around you.
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Turn off your thoughts push them away.
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Just be in the moment.
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Your problems are still there but they do not dominate as they did before.
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The act of giving time to yourself must be a conscious one.
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With the same intent as you give to washing your car or doing your nails.
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The act of respecting your system, yourself is more important than you might realize.
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When we are young we can and do abuse ourselves.


Around middle age nature stops us one way or another.
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Get ahead of the game, be nicer to yourself.
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Problems are a part of life, get used to it.
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How we handle them though is up to us.
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Get smart please.

Karma

Some people claim that karma is a doctrine of fatalism.
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Karma does not mean that everything is predetermined and that we should therefore just sit back and accept everything and make no effort to improve our lives or those of others. 
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If we find ourselves in a situation where we can help others and reduce some of the suffering and injustice in the world, that too is karma, and an opportunity to be taken advantage of. 
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Some people don’t like the idea of karma because it means that we can no longer regard ourselves as innocent victims and blame others for our misfortunes. 
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But it’s actually a very liberating and comforting idea, because it means that we mould our own future and that ultimately justice does prevail.
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If reincarnation and karma are facts, that would obviously have implications for the way we ought to live our lives.
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That’s why all the great spiritual teachers throughout the ages have advised us to rise above our feelings of separateness and to love one another and help one another. 
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The more we can control our restless brain-minds and still our fitful thoughts and desires, the more receptive we shall become to the inspiration and guidance of our higher, intuitive self.
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Is the human kingdom unique, or do you think that all entities reembody – including subatomic particles, animals, gods, suns, and galaxies?
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The ageless wisdom teaches that mankind is a microcosm of the macrocosm and does not occupy any special place in the universe, and that every divine monad or consciousness-centre has to gain direct experience in allthe kingdoms of nature, from submineral to superhuman, through repeated embodiments in many different forms.
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You’re saying that death is only relative – there’s always something that survives.
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Yes. 
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Our physical body dies when the inner forces that hold it together as an organic unit are exhausted or withdrawn. 
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It then disintegrates into its component elements, as do our astral model-body and lower animal-human mind or soul. 
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Our human-spiritual soul or reincarnating soul, on the other hand, is said to enter a dreamlike state of consciousness in which it rests and digests the lessons of the previous life. 
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When the time comes for it to reincarnate, its lower astral and physical vehicles are reformed from many of the same atoms used in the previous life, so that we get the body and personality we deserve.
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Every organic system, whatever its relative size, is an evolving entity, animated by inner energy-fields or souls, and subject to the same basic process of birth, growth, death, and rebirth. 
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Nothing comes from nothing, and nothing can be annihilated into nothing; energy-substance can only be transformed. 
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Every entity, every relatively self-contained individuality or monad, has existed before – in some form and on some plane. 
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And it will always continue to exist in some form, for every entity is the centre of an unbreakable chain of causation stretching from eternity to eternity.
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D Pratt