This'll make you feel better about yourself no matter how bad you think you look today!

 

 A Breakthrough

Unaware of these arrangements, Lucas felt uniquely placed to observe the PM at close quarters. He believed, like others, that this closeness endowed him with a power beyond his office. That was an illusion. One of Clive's strengths as a politician was the belief nursed by each one around him that their opinions weighed heavily with him. Even those who correctly perceived the obstinate core and the ego continued to believe that they had ‘pull' with the Premier. In truth, none carried more weight than another: except one who would eventually destroy him. Unlike his father, Clive did not surround himself with like minds or weigh opinions according to his affinity to those expressing them. He saw it as a strength that Angela held liberal views, as did her brother, and was happy to confront his relatives with people like Lucas, Wallace and Liddle. Another frequent visitor to the Deans' home was Saul Levi, the party chairman, but Clive was always careful about selecting other guests when Levi dined there. He knew that several cabinet members mistrusted the chairman and would be unhappy to see him at the dining table. However, like his father before him, Clive found Levi useful as a source of information about views and personalities in the party, and discounted much of the prejudice against Levi as racist. Levi was an excellent conversationalist, knowledgeable, sophisticated, and solicitous of Angela, who found him the most stimulating of their guests.

The capacity for giving an impression of closeness enabled Clive to win three successive general elections, keeping Phoenix in government for a further eleven years while gradually changing the party's direction. By 2042 it bore little resemblance to the organisation he inherited from Arthur. Few members of the original Cabinet survived the transformation, and Clive brought in people whom his father would not have allowed near the levers of power. The old guard was largely retired or eased out to be replaced by career politicians caring little for ideological niceties. ‘Folkism' was out, while professionalism was in. Cautiously and skilfully the PM moved the party from the political edge onto central ground. Change occurred by stealth in small, apparently unrelated moves and opportunistic steps. Though many old supporters were lost in the process the number leaving was lower than that of new members. Phoenix became broadly regarded as a mainstream political party, the press having long since ceased to call it fascist. Overseas it was seen as an honourable organisation of the moderate right. 

Throughout this period the police remained under constant pressure to find the rest of Red Commando. Clive gave the matter little attention, but Home Secretary Wallace took a close interest in the case and held frequent meetings with the team leading the investigation. This was in part because of badgering by Lucas who had assured Arthur's widow that he would never let the matter drop. Among his colleagues the otherwise laid-back Gerard came to be seen as obsessed with the case. The eventual breakthrough came about by chance. Commander Terry Baker of the National Police College visited Brighton police headquarters in May 2042 to talk about the college's work. On his way to the meeting he had to pass through the public area of the building, where a seated figure caught his eye. A well dressed man in his thirties perched forward on a bench glancing at his watch, enveloped in an air of anxiety. The thin, clean-shaven face was familiar, but Baker could not say why. It was Terry's boast that he never forgot a face and not being able to place the man troubled him. Pausing at the desk he was told by the duty sergeant that the man had come in to report his car being stolen. The Commander continued on his way to the meeting room, still disturbed.

The meeting had just begun when Baker gave an indecipherable cry, leapt to his feet and headed from the room. Reaching the public area he saw the man still in the same position. Baker buttonholed a plain-clothes officer whom he knew and in a muted voice advised him where he had seen the stranger before. It was over a decade ago when he was acting as a bodyguard to Jason Kitawa. On that occasion the thin, clean-shaven face had been staring at his charge over the bonnet of a car, through the sights of a gun. It was agreed to interview the man about his car in order to obtain personal details. He turned out to be Robert Page, an assistant manager with a Worthing company. He was thirty years of age, married with one child, and living in West Chiltington, a West Sussex village. His company car had disappeared that morning from a Brighton car park. Page talked freely and the interviewing sergeant learned that he was a graduate of Nottingham University. It was decided to put Page under observation for a month and to tap his telephone. The Home Secretary was informed.

The exercise drew a blank. Whatever Page had once been he seemed now no more than he claimed. Digging into his past police found that after leaving university he took a job in Horsham and married a local girl. His life now appeared to be innocent, not to say tedious. Had Baker not spotted him, Page would probably have continued to live beyond suspicion. As it was, when the observation period expired he was invited to the police station where he found himself under intense, aggressive interrogation. The police had already established that this man was never a hard-nosed revolutionary, but a middle-class youngster who probably thought it adventurous to become mixed up with Red Commando. Page broke after a couple of hours and admitted shooting Kitawa, claiming that he was assigned that task as a test of his loyalty to the group. Despite having passed the test, he was never drawn into the confidence of the leadership. He knew some names, but not those of the people directing operations. Offered the opportunity to escape execution, Page provided a list of names and whatever details he could remember. He was arrested and charged with Kitawa's murder.

Within weeks the police located everyone on the list. Some were politically active, but all were pursuing respectable occupations. Investigators watched, listened, and checked into backgrounds, friends and family. While sifting information on this last item Chief Inspector Bell, leading the investigation, became alarmed. The parents of one suspect were known to him by reputation. Further checks confirmed the family link. Bell rounded up the other suspects, but left this man under surveillance. Unsure who could be trusted, he kept the information within the team.

 

I have three tickets for Friday for Brad Paisley at the Grandstand State Fair. Section H, Row 21, seats 13, 14, 15.   $135.00 for the three tickets.

I had the dates wrong, leave for vacation Thursday, August 21.

Call 612-348-7560 to purchase and make arrangements to pick up by 4:00 today.

 

 

I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing here!  I've been reading the Daily Telegraph for a couple of months and wanted to start commenting there, but somehow ended up on this site and spent about 3 hours reading blogs. Wow! I've never seen anything like it, but I'd like to stick around and see some more. I guess you have some rules and such, but are there any serious customs or things to be avoided that I ought to know about? I'm not very politically correct, but that does not seem to be a great problem. I 'm looking forward to making a contribution and meeting some of you guys.

 

(Sorry, there seem to be a lot of "I"s. I'll try to avoid that in future.)

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La sexualidad humana no se reduce a la genitalidad. El sexo es un lenguaje de profundo sentido humano, con sus códigos y signos propios; es comunicación y forma suprema de expresión del amor a través del cuerpo.
Este fascículo se dedica al cuerpo femenino. Pero no se trata de conocerlo sólo desde el punto de vista de la anatomía y fisiología. Tanto la mujer como el varón son bastante más que sólo un cuerpo. La sexualidad afecta a la experiencia psíquica, las relaciones interpersonales y los papeles sociales.
La cultura de masas ha instrumentalizado el cuerpo femenino al que exhibe sea para vender un nuevo modelo de automóvil o anunciar cualquier otro producto.
Pero el tiempo actual está marcado también por la presencia de fuertes movimientos feministas y de cambios significativos en el papel de la mujer dentro de la sociedad. El conocimiento del cuerpo de la mujer está dirigido por el mismo objetivo de toda la colección: colaborar para una visión humanizante y personalizadora de la sexualidad.

With the competitive spirit of the Olympics due to be with us for another few days, I am delighted to hear news from what is the Olympics for political bloggers - Iain Dale's annual survey of the country's best political blogs.

Three Line Whip has been rated the third best media blog, beating some stiff and long-established comptetition for the bronze medal.

I am sure I speak on behalf of all my fellow Three Line Whippers when I thank everyone who voted for us and congratulate all the other blogs which have been listed in the top thirty.

Este 5 Octubre te invito a Caminar por la vida en la lucha contra el cáncer. La cita es a las 10 a.m. en el Jardín Botánico!! (STO DGO, REP. DOMINICANA)...Apoya esta campaña de Mercasid donde "Solo faltas tu"!!! Aquí esta el vídeo Oficial... Dale Play!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

Ye, please put on that shirt!! He needs to go see Nelly for a training session! LOL!

Dang Nelly...I ain't know you had it like THAT!! Ashanti, girl, you'd better watch yo back! These chix are watching Yo Man! LOLOL!

From Model to>>>>

Abused first Lady Diamond....Lisa Raye shows us her wounds.

All the way back to normal and out partyin' just last night! What the??? LOL!

Eye Candy for the FELLAS....and ladies if you like! :LOL! Hoopz!

Oh, I left this out of the couples page. Angela back with Bow Wow? They kicked it at her sister's party earlier this week.

 

How did the rumor get started about LL Cool J getting a  divorce from his wife Simone? Well I think it had something to do with him not wearing his wedding band.  For those of you interested, Todd Smith himself spoke out on the nasty rumor:

"I promise you, I'm not breaking up.  Kill that rumor. I'm getting [my wedding band] hooked up.  She's gonna get hers upgraded, too."

The couple has been  married 14 years.  LL's album Exit 13 will be in stores Sept.9th.

Celtics basketball star Ray Allen tied the knot with longtime girlfriend Shannon Walker this past weekend.  Congrats!!

It's a wrap for G-Fab couple Fantasia and Young Dro.  She was allegedly in the club making the DJ announce that she was SINGLE and LOOKING for  A MAN!! Wow. What happened to Dro? Oh well, he won't be getting anybody as popular as Tasia for a minute.  Maybe now he'll put out another song or something.

Celeb Bdays***August 20, 2008

KRS-One (43)

Al Roker (54)

Connie Chung (62)

Isaac Hayes would have been 66 today.

Don King (77)

I haven't done a personal view for a while so here is an update on what I've been able to deduce so far. It seems every new finding increasinsingly makes nonsense of AGW by a trace gas. Of course all of this type of information is not politically correct and never makes the news where the public could be swayed in the wrong direction, i.e. towards improving life as 21st century (train, boat, plane) mobile humans and away from mid 19th century (horse and cart) life.

On needless carbon (dioxide) capture and output reduction.
1. NASA has proved co2 is not well mixed. That makes the Hawaiian (gold standard of the alarmists) co2 measuring station redundant. In any case it was measuring the Pacific outgassing and flow to the Arctic sink as well as variation in local sea and volcanic emissions thus its presentation as a planetary average has always been false. That means all hypotheses based on co2 being well mixed are are baseless.
2. More co2 means more staple food. It is a FREE aerial fertiliser. The alarmist allegations that more bulk in plants reduces the average nutritional content is false because farmers are not stupid. They simply add more nitrogen, etc. and maintain or increase the nutritional content .
3.The fact that co2 emissions from whatever source (nature can't tell the difference) have risen virtually continuously since emergence from the little ice age and temperature generally has done everything except follow it, and now has the opposite sign (+ v. -) should be proof to anyone except those with interests other than climate, and the dumbstruck, that co2 at best sometimes follows or parallels temperature movement and is a strong pointer to a third causing both to vary, as is shown throughout the geologic record, (even dodgy ice core data!).
4. The oceans maintain the balance of co2 due to equilibrium. Equilibirum (as a reversible chemical reaction) means strictly defined concentrations in the liquid and air above it. E.g. El Ninos increase outgassing of co2, as a dramatic example check 1998.
(Tom Segalstad: In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. "The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium," explains Prof. Segalstad. "This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon-- it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world." )
5. The White Cliffs of Dover are visible evidence of nature's capacity via oceans to permanently sequester carbon dioxide. To say oceans can't cope with the tiny amount of human emissions, to imply our emissions are the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back is so far from reality as to strongly imply those that proselytise it are in the wrong institution.
6. The myth that co2 is a pollutant is a political scam supported, proselytised and propagandized by the now myriad businesses and enviro-extremist revivalism and growth built on the lie, not to mention political abuse of human ignorance. Co2 is as necessary as oxygen to life. Without it your lungs malfunction and biomass (including oceanic biota) dies.
7. There is overwhelming evidence that during warmer times with far higher concentrations of co2, planet-wide biomass was much more plentiful meaning greater variety of species as the availability of food is a major controlling factor. We are in a geological era of co2 poverty.
8. Trace gas (co2) capture and output reduction (already known to be futile) is proving increasing futile as a climate control mechanism not just because climate fails to respond to co2 variation but because the dominant factors for climate, as physical (real) scientists (contrasted with computer operators) have long maintained are solar variation mitigated by cloudiness, and ocean temperature. (Scientists like Hansen need to reverse their microscopes and use them as telescopes to see the real climate controllers.)
9. So many factors both known and unknown are missing from models due to ignorance and uninspired guesswork which leads to such as Hansen's spaghetti that started the AGW by co2 farce. E.g. deserts are a major carbon sink. (PC logic, let's create more deserts!).
10. Hello world, we are emerging from a major and a minor ice age due to solar influence, planet tilt position moving towards minimum, shape of orbit around the Sun, curently almost circular,  solar activity, and ocean response. Short of a super volcano or similar, anything else is a flea bite to a dinosaur. Ocean levels always increase when they get warmer due to deglaciation and water expansion. Outgassing always increases too. Ipso facto.

Science Mag.
CLIMATE SCIENCE: Cause of Death
H. Jesse Smith
During the mass extinction event that occurred 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic Period, around half of all extant species vanished. In the marine realm, about 20% of all families and more than 90% of the genera in some groups of organisms disappeared. What caused that catastrophe? One hypothesis is that elevated atmospheric CO2 was the culprit, but evidence of that cause has been elusive. Hautmann et al. present data indicating that ocean acidification, possibly caused by high rates of magmatic CO2 degassing and thermal dissociation of marine gas hydrates, was responsible for the burst of marine extinctions. They show that carbonate sedimentation was interrupted globally, and that organisms that had skeletons of aragonite or high-Mg calcite were preferentially affected. Thus, it seems that high concentrations of atmospheric CO2 were in fact the proximal cause of the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event, a conclusion that has direct bearing on efforts to understand what may be the consequences of the buildup of atmospheric CO2 that now is underway. -- HJS
Neues Jahrb. Geol. Palaeontol. Abh. 249, 119 (2008).
-----
Except co2 levels were ~1200-2200 ppm during the Triassic-Jurrasic, a level that is more than double the amount achievable by the addition of human production using all of every known and estimated reserve of oil, gas and coal. So in fact it has no bearing on anthropogenic production. If the man intended it to be understood as natural emission, where from and how? In fact, from mid to end of the Jurassic witnessed a fall in temperature that appears to have triggered the rapid decline of aerial co2 that led to the carbon poor situation today.

/Later :-)

Whew... Finally back in Stamford, CT, after chalking up 1,750 miles on my "Drive to SummerSlam" in Indianapolis. 

It was a fun ride across through six states to get to the "Biggest Blockbuster of the Summer" and see one of the most exciting pay-per-view events I've ever seen.  You can see my travels in the Google Map below

And thanks to everyone who took part in the SummerSlam Live Blog at the Conseco Fieldhouse -- Edge, Natalya, John Morrison, Michelle McCool, Joey Styles and Mike Adamle, as well as our host, Howard Finkel. You can read the transcript at the link above.

View Larger Map

Here's a couple of pictures from the road that I didn't include in the SummerSlam diary posts (Day 1, Day 2, Days 3 & 4).

** First off, if you ever hear a strange knocking and you think your engine is about to die, be sure to check your gas cap. I drove the first 300 miles Thursday with the gas cap off. I don't think I've ever done that before.

** In my hometown of Sharon, there is a huge chocolate factory called Daffins' Candies, where they make some of the best milk chocolate I've ever had. It's trademarked as the "World's Largest Candy Store", and its prized attraction are these Big Show-sized chocolate sculptures. The chocolate turtle in the center weighs 400 lbs. 

I took some Daffins' potato chip bark (chocolate mixed with potato chip pieces) and some jellybeans to the show for the Superstars and crew at SummerSlam -- both got rave reviews.

** Finally, being back home allows me to hang with our family dog, Crosby, who watched Raw with me on Monday night as I moderated the Raw Live Blog.  Good boy!

 

I saw this one one of my favorite blogs and thought it sounded like fun.

Here's what it is: The first theme begins today, August 20th, 2008. This week, we want to hear about YOU. The author behind the words. The Momma behind all the homeschooling kiddos. Just write up something about you, your family, and your home. How long you've been homeschooling and why you decided to homeschool. It doesn't have to be anything lengthy at all, but we'd love to hear it! You might include a family photo too!

I'm Tawnya, and I have been married for 12 years. My husband works like crazy for 6 months a year (spring and fall) and has most of the winter and summers off, so we have a lot of family time. I have 2 girls. One is 10 years old, and is in 5th grade this year. She loves to read, loves American Girl, and devours History. The other just turned 8, and is in 3rd grade. She loves Barbies, riding her bike, and making things in Art class.

We started teaching our kids at home when DD10 started kindergarten. She went to a "regular" preschool, but I was interested in the idea of homeschooling. One day, I heard an advertisement on the radio for one of the cyber schools. A little while later, I heard an ad for another one. When DH got home, I told him about it and we did a little online research. Then we found that both schools were having information sessions on the same day. We went to one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. By the time we got home that evening, our minds were made up! The materials were excellent and we knew it was a great choice. It's been bumpy at times, but I still believe it's right for our family!