We can’t show you her face because she cried rape, but its fine to identify those she accused

And here we have yet another story of a false accusation of rape that has seen a young woman sent to prison but this time she has been given anonymity whereas those she has accused have been named shamed and humiliated by invasive forensic examinations.

Innocent: Alex Lewis, left, was falsely accused of rape He spent 36 hours in custody

by a 16-year-old girl (whose face is obscured for legal reasons).

Mr Lewis spent two months on bail before police finally cleared him days before his 21st birthday.

Mr Pugh said: ‘The reason she said she gave the false account was she was scared her boyfriend would find out she cheated on him and it would lead to violence.’

The girl pleaded guilty to trying to pervert the course of justice.

Alex Greenwood, defending, said: ‘This is as serious an example of attempting to pervert the course of justice as one can imagine.

‘The three men were subjected to a terrifying experience in the knowledge they were entirely innocent.

‘She is truly sorry.’

He said that once she made the rape allegation, ‘a juggernaut was set in train’ – and the girl was too scared to admit she was lying.

Judge Mr Recorder Jeremy Jenkins QC yesterday sent the teenager to a young offender institution for six months.

The girl sat with her head bowed during the 20-minute hearing at Merthyr Crown Court and showed no emotion as the judge sentenced her.

He told the teen: ‘When a woman makes an allegation of rape, it has to be treated with the utmost seriousness.’

‘Rape is an absolutely vile crime and it’s the duty of the police to investigate it thoroughly and carefully.

‘False allegations of rape can have dreadful consequences to the men concerned.

‘For innocent men to be confronted with an allegation like that, held in custody for 36 hours and subjected to intrusive medical examinations is a terrible experience.

‘The police spent many hours and there was a substantial financial cost in investigating your wholly false allegations.’

He added: ‘Every time somebody makes a false allegation of rape, the public has less confidence in the truth of other complaints of sexual abuse made by genuine victims.’

Barrister Mr Pugh said the girl should be named and shamed – despite her age.

There is something bigger than a silly girl making up excuses for her wanton behaviour evident here and that is a culture that rewards lies and deceit. I will suggest that the problem is very much the sort of thinking that allows the ends to justify the means, which added to a culture of promiscuity means that young women who are more than willing to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh may see being dishonest about it as no big deal.

Hmm am I the only one who can see some value in restraint? Am I the only one who thinks that being honest with the people that you have a relationship with has some value? Sadly it seems that such ideas do not have as much currency as would be good for society.

Cheers Comrades

Some of them may actaully be saveable

Normally I would not cite this fellow but when it comes to the Latte sipping set he is  a bit less inclined to just follow the usual hymn sheets than many of his fellow travellers although his real name is known to me he posts on the Net as “Cosmic Jester”. In his post about the recent arrest of Julian Assange he says:

I agree with whistle blowing, openness and accountability, I also agree that governments need to conduct some matters in private. There is not a clear line that can show where a piece of classified information. Assange’s opinion seems to be that exposing truth is justified in all circumstances and any attempt by government to keep certain things classified is akin to corruption. What about when it is government information on private citizens however? I dont think many of the Assange supporters would support a massive leak of documents of the Australian Tax Office, that could be private information about them. Whats that, you dont support a leak of government medical records, that could have information on you. Well what about the private citizens names in the hundreds of thousands of leaked documents in the recent embassy cable and Iraq and Afghanistan leaks? Its nice and easy to be all for openness and accountability when the spotlight isn’t shining on you.

A silly comparison you say? Wikileaks is about shining the light on corrupt governments. But of the quarter of a million cablegate leaks most are fairly mundane diplomatic chatter. Americans think Prince Andrew is rude, Rudd a control freak. Its hardly Watergate, its more Perez Hilton. Sure, there are more important leaks such as confirmation of US nukes in Turkey and the former opposition leader saying he would back the US in a China/Taiwan standoff and I would defend wikileaks goal’s and mission if its leaks were reduced to just things that exposed corruption and governments lying to the people. But that is not what wikileaks is about.

Julian Assange is a former hacker and he carries the hacker mentality into wikileaks. More and more the leaks aren’t about what they reveal but how large the leaks are and how secret. Its about getting what is hardest to get, what is most protected and what will give the biggest reason to boast. Journalists dont publish everything that is confidential, they use their judgement to publish what is in the public interest. There is never a clear line as to where the public interest begins, but Assange’s idea of public interest seems to be any government material that is private.*

Cosmic Jester

I don’t care where I find good well argued angles on the topics for consideration here at The Sandpit in fact I think that its examples like this that give us hope that anyone with the Latte sipping predilection can  be redeemed for the light over the darkness.

Cheers Comrades

* my bold

Christmas cards the Greens smart way

I learned this trick from the Greens. This year I am going to save money and think of the environment too. I have decided not to send Christmas cards to my huge list and instead I have mailed letters to my huge list that says:

Dear Friend/family member/distant relative who I dont even like,

Do you like saving money & trees? I do. That is why this year you wont be getting my usual Christmas card. No, I will send you one by email so that if YOU want to waste money and trees then YOU can print it out and stick it on your mantle … if you must.

BtW where is your Xmas card to me?

Cheers – The Sock.

And this is what they will get:

Merry Christmas from me and the girls.

Goodbye Sweden

Pat is right on the money here and this should be a warning for all countries who embrace political correctness and the Swedish model.

Deeply saddened  Comrades

Greens send a plague on both our houses – upper & lower

The Greens party is so pissed off with the recent Vic State election – in which voters avoided them like the plague - that they have called on their ‘goddess’ Lady Gaga to send us yet another natural disaster:

Gaia will not be amused, I can assure you. And She may punish the state with another natural disaster. So if there are more catastrophic bushfires this summer, well, it will be on your head, Ted!

And Lady Gaga has delivered !:

SWARMING locusts searching for green food could hit Melbourne parks and gardens as early as tomorrow as billions of the insects are expected to take to the air before a forecast midweek cool change.

Victoria has just experienced its most substantial weekend of swarming this spring and summer, with more than 50 sightings reported to the Department of Primary Industries. Most of the swarms were ”high density” and seen heading south.

This is just so typical of the wrongthinking hippocrats Greens supporters who cannot even see the irony of inflicting this punishment on the garden State when they are called ‘Greens’ and when they are supposed to be concerned about protecting our environment and green things.

This is punishment for the voters who do not live in the areas they do - there is not much locusts can eat in the inner city.

But at least it means that the Greens now know that the outer suburbs and country areas actually exist. 

Although I bet they couldnt find them.

Shoot the prick???? or has Julian been reading too much John le Carre?

Am I the only one who is utterly sick and tired of hearing about this sad little prick Julian Assange? While I don’t advocate that his actions deserve a capital sanction it seems that many in the USA would be happy to apply rule “303″ to the ex-pat Aussie.
What has surprised me is that only now has a whole mess of keyboard warriors swung into action to make Wikileaks a pariah of the internet. Frankly I don’t know why this has not happened sooner. The question is can this site be driven to the same sort of locations as that other most undesirable stuff of the ether? In other words how long will it be before this site has to share servers with the purveyors of child pornography? Which is just a little more welcome than the trivial trash that this site has been recently infesting the web with. My Latte-sipping™ friends are of course falling over themselves to offer fawning excuses for this idiot thinking that he is doing something good and noble.

There has been chatter in technology circles that the attacks are the work of governments displeased with WikiLeaks, though that is impossible to prove, given the anonymity of the web.

Someone portraying himself as an American patriot took credit for the first spate of disruptions to the site, a claim that security experts said was credible.

On Friday, the French government moved to ban WikiLeaks from servers there, saying it was ”unacceptable” that companies in France were hosting a ”criminal” website.

And the US-based online financial transactions service PayPal has said it will stop taking donations for WikiLeaks, a move that WikiLeaks blamed on ”US government pressure”.

As the cyber attacks increased last week, WikiLeaks sought refuge on the servers of the bookseller Amazon, only to be booted at the request of the US Democratic senator Joe Lieberman.

As WikiLeaks moved around the web, Mr Assange hit back at moves by the Australian government to aid in his prosecution.

”[The federal Attorney-General] Robert McClelland is a US suckhole, worse than [John] Howard on [David] Hicks, and needs to go,” he wrote on his Twitter account, which is followed by about 360,000 people.

On Saturday, Mr Assange said it was ”impossible” to return to Australia because of comments by Mr McClelland and the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who labelled his actions ”illegal”.

But yesterday Mr McClelland seemed to offer some concession to the Townsville-born former hacker, saying: ”Mr Assange is entitled to the same rights as any other Australian citizen.

”This includes the right to return to Australia and also to receive consular assistance while he is overseas if that is requested.”

Mr Assange also revealed that more than 100,000 people had downloaded an ”insurance” file containing an encrypted version of the cables, and the key to that code would be released if ”something happens to us”.

To the  Latte-sipping™ set he has become something of a hero but looking at the the bigger picture has he actually made any part of the world a better place? Has any thing so far revealed been a catalyst for some greater good? The last thing that made a big splash was that gun sight recording from Iraq and I think that the only thing that it ended up showing was that mistakes are made in the heat of battle. Well Doh! Like we did not already know that

 

The part that I have emboldened in the above should once and for all prove that this man is nothing but a self serving blackmailer who has been reading too many John Le Carre novels. Frankly there is only one thing to say to such blackmail and that is “fuck you!”. If he has a case to answer in Sweden then lets see him before a court there and if he has broken any US law lets see him swiftly extradited because I am sure that they have a vacancy in one of their  comfy federal prisons….

 

 

Cheers Comrades    

 

The power of Porn or Wankers have powered online inovation

My biggest fans are, to put it mildly, derisive of  my “defence” of Abby Winters but this is because  they were drawing upon the discovery of a newsletter in my email archive that they had accessed when my email and Blog accounts were hacked.   Simply put I think that grown ups should be able to produce and enjoy anything they please as long as all of the participants in the media are adults who are fully consenting. I have also long believed that rather than being a force for evil “porn” has in fact been a great driver of innovation and invention  and it seems there has been some  more scholarly research that has come to the same conclusion:

 

Patchen Barss.

Barss’s motivation for writing the book was simple. ”I thought [pornography] is this hugely powerful force that has given us all kinds of tools and toys that we use every day and it seems people are either unaware or wilfully ignore the fact of its influence.”

His priority, as such, was to take an array of innovations, from photography to VCR, cable television to video games, and trace their histories. He established a pattern with each.

”I was researching the origins of photography and with the first photographs the exposure times were too long; you couldn’t take photos of people. But from the moment you could, people took sexual, nude pictures. That’s interesting, it’s important, but it’s left out of many histories of photography. That story is replicated over and over with technology.”

To flesh out the bare facts of dates and data, Barss chased up names and clues that emerged from his research. Not the great stars of the porn industry – although he does land an interview with superstar Jenna Jameson – but rather people who work at the coalface of research and development. He attended pornography conventions in Las Vegas, Barcelona and beyond, where chance meetings led to conversations and introductions; if people in mainstream technology circles were keen to play down the role of pornography in their fields, pioneers in the adult industry were, by contrast, happy to sing their own praises.

In the midst of these vignettes, Barss pieced together the obvious and less obvious factors that make pornography and mass communication technologies such happy bedfellows – from pornography’s capacity to generate astounding levels of revenue and therefore fund further research and development, to the windows it provides opportunistic entrepreneurs to try out new ideas: strippers turned webcam millionaires, businessmen who combine existing technologies with new ventures – vending machines that retail USB flash drives containing adult content – and so on.

It has never ceased to amaze and amuse me that so many so called “progressives” are such sanctimonious wankers who rave on about “free speech”, individual autonomy  and personal morality but when it comes to technology  they fail to acknowledge   that it has been the the porn industry that has given them all of the techno toys and online media that they delight in.

Isn’t that just the most delicious irony?

Cheers Comrades

 

Sabrina Johnson lied about rape: goes down for twelve months

Like that tree in the forest if no one hears the consent did it really happen? Image ©Iain Hall

©Regular readers of the sandpit may remember that I have written about false accusations of rape before and my general feeling remains that rape is a most difficult and problematic crime. For those who have been violated it is a very difficult crime  to prove to a satisfactory legal standard and to those accused it is equally difficult to defend yourself against such a ruinous accusation. I am sure that in one of the rather heated comment threads that I have advocated that before having casual consensual sex that any man should use their mobile phone to record the woman in question giving clear and unambiguous consent (but I can’t find the particular comment). So imagine my surprise when someone has actually done precisely that and not only have they managed to use that recording to prove their innocence but also to ensure that the woman who falsely accused then is convicted on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Sabrina Johnson, 25, performed sex acts on the three strangers she had met  while walking home from a night out, Chelmsford Crown Court in Essex heard.

The following morning when she woke up, hung over and late for work, she told her boss that she had been dragged into a park by two strangers and forced to perform oral sex on them.

Horrified workmates urged Johnson to report the attack to police, and detectives spent 311 hours investigating the alleged crime, at a cost of some £6,753.

The investigation continued until one of the men involved came forward with a voice recording that he had made on his mobile phone of Johnson consenting to the sex game.

Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC jailed the three-months pregnant supermarket worker for 12 months after she pleaded guilty to a perverting the course of justice.

He said her lies had caused fear: ‘This was an allegation of a terrifying nature. There was heightened public fear of rapists, an atmosphere of fear that was created wholly unnecessarily.’

He added that it was only thanks to the mobile phone voice recording that the men were cleared.

He added: ‘You had sexual relations with them and played some kind of sex game. One of the males, a prudent gentleman, recorded your consent on his mobile phone, including your image. But for his doing so he would have been very likely in deep trouble.’

There certainly is some very clear value to mobile phones having the facility to record sound and vision so perhaps all of the blokes out there on the pull should take heed of this story and ensure that when she says yes that you record it because like that tree in the forest if no one hears the consent did it really happen?

Cheers Comrades

The partisan “snip” at Pure Playschool or trying to keep them honest

Dave Gaukroger with his arse in the breeze

This a post about how not to moderate your comments if you set your self up with a high flying mission statement about “intellectual dishonesty“.

And the winner is … NOT Australia

I can’t believe Australia has missed out on winning the right to host the FIFA 2022 World (Soccer) Cup. We had everything going for us. Look at the competition we were up against:

 South Korea: They had it not long ago and now they’re almost at war with the north. Too risky. No chance. Japan: They shared it with Korea in 2002. Go away. USA: They’re broke! Qatar: Where? What? …… they won!!!???!!!

What happened? How? Why? Everything was in our corner. We actually have stadiums, water and grass and mountains and beaches and stuff. And it never reaches bloody 50 degrees temperature like it does in that Qatar desert of a country. How can you play soccer over there?

We were right on track, going strong. We greased all the right palms. We said all the right things. And then we went to Zurich and made a presentation and then ……

And then we showed this video:

Oh. I see. 

Snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with another cringeworthy tourism ad. 

And an animated kangaroo!

How f*cking typical is that?

Sick of the rain….

As the sun rises we begin the second day of our summer with below average temperature and the wettest start to summer for 11 years :

Weatherzone meteorologist Josh Fisher said while the rainfall was not out of the ordinary for the time of year, it was an “unfortunate” start to the summer.

“Brisbane with 29 millimetres is the wettest start to summer in at least 11 years and it’s the coldest first day to the season also in at least 11 years, at 25 degrees which is four below the average,” he said.

“The airport also had 42 millimetres, which was their wettest start in at least 15 years.”

Mr Fisher said the rain would continue through the night, before it eased to scattered showers tomorrow.

So much for the dire predictions of a drier future!!! But  there is an obvious incentive in the change of the climate, I am now more than ever determined to make a removable hard top for my car.
Cheers Comrades

Pure Playschool Pundit Punch-Drunk over Posting Ethics

There has been an almost total irony bypass at the”Pure Play-school” site in the Crikey stable and one of the bee’s in the bonnet of our learned friend is the way that Authors at the “The Punch”  don’t always fully declare their affiliations

Hutt is right to be angry, and this has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with his main job as NSW Director for the Australian Christian Lobby, which must be why he doesn’t mention his links to the lobby group most self-interested in maintaining its stranglehold on education, and why the details are only available if you click on his name to read the bio (on a separate link). If you don’t think to check, you’ll never know. Anyway, it’s entirely ethical to omit critical details to misleadingly alter readers’ approach to your argument if it’s FOR JESUS.

source

OK that sounds like a reasonable exposition  of principle and you would have to think that a man of such lofty principle would try very hard to live them himself now wouldn’t you?

But look to the comments thread to the Punch piece and look what you will find:

Surely it is extremely hypocritical to complain about David Hutt not declaring his vested interest in propagating Christianity while he himself does not even declare his full name and affiliation when he comments on the pieces at the Punch?

But this is not the only time that our learned friend has done this sort of thing in fact if you check out other threads at the Punch and the chances are that if you find a comment  or three under the name “Jeremy”, like this one:

Then it is almost certainly our learned  friend  making precisely the same arguments that  he always does about the issues in question at his own blog or at Crikey but failing rather notably to declare just who he is and just what his affiliations actually are.. Funny isn’t that precisely what he is chiding David Hutt for????

Cheers Comrades

 

 

Spuds and Greens

This morning I considered writing about Sarah Hansen-Young* ludicrous opinion piece entitled A lesson for the majors where she says without a hint of irony :

Despite a decisive swing to the conservative side of politics, the Greens still managed to increase their vote in both Houses, even if it is unlikely to result in extra seats. If preferences had flowed similarly to 2006, the Greens would have won the Lower House seats of Melbourne, Richmond and Brunswick.

As a certain character in an Aussie film would have said “she’s dreaming” Perhaps the South Australian Senator is suffering Jet lag from her holiday* excursion to Thailand. the reality is that she is living in the past and trying to deny that the Greens have peaked

But no I thought to my self after Socky’s deep and meaningful post below I thought the need here at the Sandpit is for something in a lighter vein and what could be better than a story about a bloke who has lived on nothing but spuds for two months:

Chris Voigt, the executive director of the Washington Potato Commission wrote on his website that he took up the challenge to “remind the public about the nutritional value of potatoes,” and show it was possible to live healthily off potatoes alone for an extended period of time.

Beginning on October 1 and ending today, Mr Voigt ate nothing but 20 potatoes a day – the only allowance being cooking oil and a light topping of seasonings or herbs.

For Thanksgiving, he ate his holiday meal with a twist – mashed potatoes fashioned into a “turkey”, fake gravy care of a bouillon cube and potato starch and for dessert, fake pumpkin pie.

During his challenge, Mr Voigt said he lost 9.5 kilograms, his cholesterol level went from 214 to 147, and his glucose dropped from 104 to 94.

If ever there was a wonder food it has to be the humble spud.  In this house we have some popular culinary variations on the humble spud, like finely chopped parsley folded through creamy mashed potato or roast potatoes flavoured with fresh rosemary even the elegant simplicity of steamed spuds goes down very well. So dear readers what is your favourite spud variation?

Cheers Comrades

* The Raison D’Etre for this trip is for the senator to “inspect” refugee camps but you would think that a “Green” would be very much aware of how much Co2 this sort of junket would add to the atmosphere… Hmm that is obviously not the sort of clear hypocrisy that Hansen-Young cares about.

Road to hell? Or road to riches?

I dunno if this woman is an innocent victim, a schemer or both. I cast no judgements here.

I just have a suspicion that her claim of being sexually harrased for two “horrendous” years  as the only female on a road construction crew might have been a set up so she could make some big bucks from what her lawyers reckon is “the worst case of sexual harassment ever”:

A FEMALE road construction worker is considering whether to sue a Victorian contractor over claims she was harassed for two horrendous years. Kate Mathews, 37, the only woman employed in the company’s roadwork gangs, claims she was forced to endure countless remarks and questions about her sex life.

She says she was told she could provide pole-dancing entertainment for the men during work breaks. As well as comments about her breasts and behind, road workers allegedly subjected her to pornography and called her “princess, spastic, bimbo and retard”, a distressed Ms Mathews told the Herald Sun.

In documents before the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Ms Mathews alleges Winslow Constructors failed to do anything about the sexual harassment and discrimination she suffered during her two years at the firm until July this year.

The former labourer, who worked laying asphalt and building roads in new residential estates across the state, said she was now unable to work because of the treatment by some of her co-workers.

Ms Mathews said a colleague she had earlier complained to also turned on her, telling her “anything that bleeds once a month should be shot” and “laughing off” her complaints.

“I just wanted to go to work and do a job … I just kept saying to myself I had to be strong, but I felt like a nothing out there,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a whinger, I just wanted to work.”

Ms Mathews said she expected a level of rough language and humour in the all-male workforce, but the non-stop harassment, including a sex act being simulated behind her, was intolerable.

“I can take a joke but when they were all together, it was almost like they had to be macho,” she said.

Ms Mathews, who said she wanted to work on road construction because she enjoyed being outdoors and the pay was good, was unsure of her future but wanted to send a message that women should not accept such treatment.

“I’m just numb. I’m in disbelief. I don’t know what else to do in life. I feel like they’ve ruined my career,” she said.

Well yeah that was harassment for sure and no way to treat a lady. If those blokes did that over and over for 2 years then they are knuckle-dragging neanderthals and have no respect for women. Granted. But why did she join a road crew in the first place and why did she put up with it for 2 years? For a career? A career laying bitumen?

Now as a male I do not know what it is like to be sexually harassed by a large group of the opposite sex. Although I would like to find out.

BUT it is different for women and most would feel intimidated in the opposite situation – ie 1 female to 12 dirty numb-brain dickheads who all smell like tar. Not a turn on at all.

I know that some people will say “Well what did she expect? That’s what blokes doing blokes work are like. If she wants to be one of the boys she shoulda just copped it like a man.” But they would be wrong. It doesnt matter what the job is – women should not be treated like that. 

BUT#2: I am not one to judge a book by its cover but when I hear this story and look at the picture of Kate above I cannot help but ask her this:

• Did you report it to the company?
• When and how many times?
• Why did you wait two years to quit and take action?
• Did you really want a career laying bitumen or …
• Did you let it go on for so long so you could sue for big bucks?

You see I find it hard to believe that the management of a big company like that would not have acted if they knew how bad the sexual harassment was. Its pretty easy to replace road workers. Its not a highly skilled job. 

What do youse think? Is Kate an innocent victim as she claims to be? 

Maybe you think she should have taken the sex stuff in her strides?

Or is she a schemer trying to milk a goose that lays golden eggs for all its worth?