John Simkin

Going by the videos, Gabrielle Giffords seems a sensible politician. It is interesting that at his press conference, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik seems to be blaming Sarah Palin for the shooting. Statements from the police also suggest that they don't believe this is the work of a lone-gunman.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12143774

Has anyone got James W. Douglass' contact details? Someone has contacted me about a possible book deal.

He has been a friend of mine for years. I will call him and let hm know. He may still be on tour. He is also not online. I can email you his snail mail address if you like.

Dawn

I have forwarded the email to you for James Douglass.

Has anyone got James W. Douglass' contact details? Someone has contacted me about a possible book deal.

This story is based on the release of official documents as a result of the actress, Sienna Miller, suing Murdoch's News Corporation. The documents clearly show that senior officers in the police invistigation of Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, were fully aware that another senior journalist at the News of the World, Ian Edmondson, was involved in the illegal phone hacking of famous people. Yet he was not even interviewed by the police. Another example of the control that Rubert Murdoch has over the police and the British government. David Cameron is unable to sack Andy Coulson, the prime minister's director of communications and the editor of the News of the World during the phone-hacking scandal, because he is Murdoch's man at 10 Downing Street.

The problem would be the expense of defending the forum, since it hosted in and most of the DPFers live in the US presumably that is where they would bring suit which would be quite burdensome for John.

JOHN - IIRC Gratz got booted for threatening legal action against the EF, should the Gang of 5 be given the same treatment?

The reason that Tim Gratz was stopped from posting for a short period (he did return but left on his own accord later) was that he threatened to serve me with a writ the next time I stepped on American soil. As a debarred lawyer he knew that even though he had no real case against me, he could make life very difficult for me next time I was in America.

I have invited Barb Junkkarinen, Bernice Moore and Bill Kelly to become moderators.

Barb Junkkarinen has said yes but Bernice Moore and Bill Kelly have said no.

I have invited Barb Junkkarinen, Bernice Moore and Bill Kelly to become moderators.

Several hours before his death, Huxley's wife Laura gave him a shot containing LSD, telling him to "Go toward the light."

That is another thing that JFK and Huxley had in common, they were both taking LSD. JFK's was supplied by Mary Pinchot Meyer.

On 16 December 1910, a gang attempted to break into the rear of a jeweller's shop at 119 Houndsditch in London. An adjacent shopkeeper heard their hammering, and informed the police. When the police arrived, the robbers burst out, shooting three officers dead. The gang leader, a Latvian, Poloski Morountzeff, was accidently shot in the back by another gang member, and died later.

Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, immediately announced that the police was looking for a gang of Jewish anarchists. It was also important to the government that the incident did not cause anti-Jewish feeling and the coroner made a point of stressing "in justice and fairness to the Jewish community" that he was uncircumcised.

Acting on a tip-off, police surrounded 100 Sidney Street in Stepney on 2nd January 1911. Churchill hurried to the scene in order to direct operations. He was greeted by cries of "who let them immigrants in?" Churchill authorised the deployment of 124 soldiers. The Manchester Guardian reported: "The firing came in spurts. The murderers would shoot first from the ground floor, then the window above … then there would be a barking of rifles in reply. Close on one o'clock an especially sharp fusillade rattled like a growl of exasperation …. a little feather of smoke curling out of the window below the point of attack. We thought at first it was gun smoke and then with a thrill we saw that the house was on fire."

Churchill refused to allow the fire brigade to douse the flames until the firing from inside stopped. When it did and the police were allowed in, only two bodies were found. One historian, Stephen Bates, has argued: "The lesson the police took from the siege was not that they had overreacted but that they needed better weapons. The lesson the press took was that the Liberal government was soft on immigrants."

The two dead men, Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow, were petty criminals, and not anarchists. However, the government leaked the story that the gang had been led by Peter Piatkow (Peter the Painter) who had managed to escape from the burning building. There are doubts that Piatkow ever existed. Even so, he is still being named on the Wikipedia website as being the leader of the gang.

As you have probably noticed, this event took place a 100 years ago yesterday.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRchurchill.htm

In summer 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World. It was an international best-seller and established him as Britain's best-known novelist between the wars. Translated into twenty-eight languages, the novel was inspired by Men Like Gods, a utopian novel by H. G. Wells. However, George Orwell argued that the novel "must be partly derived from" We by the Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Huxley denied that he had ever heard of this book.

David King Dunaway has pointed out: "The novel, the first about human cloning, is a dystopia set five centuries in the future, when overpopulation has led to biogenetic engineering. Through computerized genetic selection, social engineers create a population happy with its lot. All the earth's children are born in hatcheries, and Soma, a get-happy pill, irons out most problems."

Time Magazine saw it as an attack on the culture of the United States with Henry Ford as the new God (worshippers say "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord"): "Huxley's 1932 work - about a drugged, dull and mass-produced society of the future - has been challenged for its themes of sexuality, drugs and suicide. The book parodies H.G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods and expresses Huxley's disdain for the youth and market-driven culture of the U.S. Chewing gum, then as now a symbol of America's teenybopper shoppers, appears in the book as a way to deliver sex hormones and subdue anxious adults; pornographic films called feelies are also popular grown-up pacifiers."

Beatrice Webb was also highly critical of the book: "I have been reading Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and pondering over this strangely pathological writing, pathological without knowing it. The febrile futility of the particular clique he describes reminds me of that far more powerful book The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann. Far more powerful because Mann is describing a society of sick people ... Huxley's group do not know that they are sick and are presented as a sample of normal human life. What with their continuous and promiscuous copulations, their shallow talk and chronic idleness, the impression left is one of simple disgust at their bodies and minds.... And the book, apart from arousing a morbid interest in morbidity, is dull, dull, dull. In a few years' time it will be unreadable - it represents a fashion. In this characteristic of fashionableness Aldous Huxley is like his maternal aunt, Mrs Humphry Ward; also in his tendency to preach."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jhuxley.htm

Instead of the costly legal tribunals and inquiries into various incidents during the war in Northern Ireland e.g. Bloody Sunday, Finucane, Hamill etc. alongside the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) set up to investigate generally unsolved murders during the period - it has been proposed that historians could be used. I see many problems with this.

Whilst this is undoubtedly a pure money saving suggestion,could it work?

Can historians be relied on to be impartial?

Where would the influence, necessary to release documents and information, on the UK and Irish Governments come from?

Ultimately, could the work be free from political influence and create a true history?

I know there are many here with backgrounds in history. Has this worked effectively before, and/or do you think it could work?

It could be argued that the release of documents that showed how different governments gave secret support to the illegal activities of the para-militaries, would actually increase conflict in Northern Ireland.

Aldous Huxley died on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As a result his death was hardly mentioned in the media over the next few days. Huxley is an interesting figure. Although he was born in England he spent the second-half of his life in the United States. His book, Brave New World, published in 1932, was banned for many years in the United States. Time Magazine reported that the book was still banned in some places in America as late as 2004.

David King Dunaway has pointed out: "The novel, the first about human cloning, is a dystopia set five centuries in the future, when overpopulation has led to biogenetic engineering. Through computerized genetic selection, social engineers create a population happy with its lot. All the earth's children are born in hatcheries, and Soma, a get-happy pill, irons out most problems."

Time Magazine saw it as an attack on the culture of the United States with Henry Ford as the new God (worshippers say "Our Ford" instead of "Our Lord"): "Huxley's 1932 work - about a drugged, dull and mass-produced society of the future - has been challenged for its themes of sexuality, drugs and suicide. The book parodies H.G. Wells' utopian novel Men Like Gods and expresses Huxley's disdain for the youth and market-driven culture of the U.S. Chewing gum, then as now a symbol of America's teenybopper shoppers, appears in the book as a way to deliver sex hormones and subdue anxious adults; pornographic films called feelies are also popular grown-up pacifiers."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jhuxley.htm

In the summer of 1925, D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda stayed in Spotorno. Their landlord was Angelo Ravagli. Frieda began an affair with Ravagli, who later claimed that Lawrence discovered them "flagrante delicto". Lawrence's biographer argued that he responded by having an affair with Dorothy Brett while she was on holiday in Italy. This affair also inspired Lawrence to write Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1926.

The highly explicit sex passages in the book meant that Lawrence was unable to find a publisher for the novel. With the help of the Italian bookseller Pino Orioli, Lady Chatterley's Lover was printed in and distributed from Florence. The book made him so much money that he could now afford to live in expensive hotels.

As Time Magazine pointed out:

"In 1930, after Lawrence succumbed to tuberculosis, Ravagli wrote to Frieda: "I am waiting for you." She came. Ravagli abandoned his wife and three children for Frieda and lived with her for nearly 20 years before they were married in 1950. When Frieda died in 1956, Ravagli inherited one-fourth of her estate, which included accumulating royalties from Lady Chatterley. In 1959 the bans on Lady Chatterley were lifted, and for a time the novel's sales skyrocketed, making Ravagli rich from the book about his adultery."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JlawrenceDH.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JlawrenceF.htm

You also have my email to you, whichh states basically the same thing. I have sent this to my atty. as well, an expert in patent/copyright law.

Things that are said in confidence are expected to remain that way. I refer you to the "ps" in my email to you, of which no one is aware but the people to whom it pertains. I removed it from those to whom I resent the email; I expect the same from you John.

Thank you, and nice to see the forum back up.

Dawn

Was this an attempt of blackmail on your part? I have no idea what you and Andy communicated by email.

John,

I'll be happy to remove any post that you conclude puts you in an uncomfortable position.

My recent posts are just a subset of the larger body of evidence anyway, and that is being assembled at My link [deeppoliticsforum.info].

Notice they don't dispute the legitimacy of the emails however. In fact they indirectly confirm that the emails are 100% authentic.

And they had absolutely no moral qualms when their admin Magda Hassan posted--under a pseudonym unknown to 2/3 of her colleagues--hundreds of names and addresses, phone numbers, email address, etc. of presumably real people labeled as "Fascists" and "Nazis."

Just let me know which posts to remove and I'll do so.

Then Drago can threaten me instead.

I'm accustomed to that because he's been doing it for years.

Myra

It seems to me that they are deeply embarrassed by what they have said to you in the past. I doubt very much if they have any legal case against the Forum but it will probably be a good idea to delete the emails.

I have had these two emails from Jan Klimkowski and Charles R. Drago. Do members think we should delete these postings?

To John Simkin

Myra Bronstein has published details of private and confidential emails at the Education Forum.

This is to inform you that the Education Forum does not have permission to publish details of my private email correpondence, and I hereby request you to remove all such emails, and alleged excerpts of emails, immediately.

Jan Klimkowski

Dear Mr. Simkin,

Please cease and desist from publishing my private-emails. You are doing so without my permission on the Spartacus site, of which you are a co-owner.

Be advised that, should the practice continue, I shall seek all remedies available to me under international and other relevant statutes.

Further, you do not have my permission to publish copyrighted material owned by me. Again, should you do so, I shall seek legal remedies.

Sincerely,

Charles R. Drago

cc:

Dennis J. McCarten, Esq.

I would highly recommend Ethel Mannin's first volume of autobiography, Confessions and Impressions (1930). Written when she was only 29, it is an amazingly brave attempt to write about women's sexuality at the beginning of the 20th Century.

In the first volume of her autobiography, Confessions and Impressions (1930), the 29 year old Ethel Mannin praised D.H. Lawrence banned book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as "one of the truest and most beautiful and moving books the age has produced, there will be no more taking truth's name in vain, for truth will no longer be regarded as an indecency, and men and women will live and work and love and beget each other in the sun and wind and rain, cleanly and decently and simply as the animals do... who do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, nor make one sick discussing their duty to God, nor are demented with the mania of owning things."

However, in her book, Young in the Twenties, published when she was aged 71, Mannin described Lady Chatterley's Lover as "a very silly book". I agree that read today, Lady Chatterley's Lover is a very silly book. However, in the context of the 1920s, I believe that Mannin was right to praise Lawrence's book.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmannin.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JlawrenceDH.htm

According to Wikipedia, Hérita N'Kongolo Ilunga was born in Kinshasa on 25th February 1982. I wonder if the Congo record births of its citizens? Rumour has it he is really 38 rather than 28 years old. I must say, that since he signed his four year contract with West Ham in April 2009 he looks and plays like someone at the very end of their career. One wag has suggested he should be carbon dated? Is it possible to work out accurately how old someone is?

However: to keep the issue alive : I'm impressed by Bernices moderating evenhanded influence and regular precense, I've always found Sherry likewise with that special wisdom regarding dealing with conflict inspiring, ditto Barb, and that's just a minority of women who participate, so there are plenty to choose from (by the management) and I think as a balance is over time worked towards more will feel like being involved and the forum itself will gain a status, in a patriarcial world, as a positive influence.

The moderators are currently voting on your suggestions.

Stephen Tomlin also had sexual relationships with Julia Strachey and Dora Carrington. Carrington's husband, Ralph Partridge, strongly objected to the relationship, "fearing he (Tomlin) was someone more likely to destroy than to create happiness." Frances Marshall agreed: "One side of his character was creatively gifted, charming and sensitive; the other was dominated by a destructive impulse (fuelled probably by deep neurotic despair) whose effect was that he couldn't see two people happy together without being impelled to intervene and take one away, leaving the other bereft. Or it would take the form of a direct bid for power over others - whether male or female, for he was bi-sexual - which he was well-equipped to exert. The sequel would be a fit of suicidal depression and guilt-feelings."

Julia Strachey married Stephen Tomlin in July 1927. The married couple rented a stone cottage at Swallowcliffe in Wiltshire. Carrington was a regular visitor: "Really its equal to Ham Spray in elegance and comfort, only cleaner and tidier." Carrington was in love with both Stephen and Julia. She told Gerald Brenan that she was strongly attracted to Julia and that she was "sleeping night after night in my house, and there's nothing to be done, but to admire her from a distance, and steal distracted kisses under cover of saying goodnight." In October 1929 she sent a letter to her complaining: "Julia, I wish I was a young man and not a hybrid monster, so that I could please you a little in some way, with my affection. You know you move me strangely. I remember for some reasons every thing you say and do, you charm me so much."

Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf established the Hogarth Press. Over the next few years they published the work of Virginia, Flora Mayor, Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Robert Graves, T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell. In 1932 they published Julia Strachey's Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. Virginia Woolf's biographer, Hermione Lee, has argued that the novel was "an eccentric and witty story of a single difficult day at a wedding in Dorset, shows us what Virginia Woolf's tastes were in contemporary women's fiction."

Julia Strachey separated from Stephen Tomlin in 1934. During this period, Julia made a living by writing short stories for magazines. In 1939 Julia Strachey began a relationship with the artist, Lawrence Gowing, who was seventeen years her junior. Gowing, who was a conscientious objector during the Second World War, married Julia in 1954.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTstracheyJ.htm

Stephen Tomlin is one of the most interesting members of the Bloomsbury Group. Frances Marshall described Tomlin: "The two sides of his personality were fused together as it were by an excellent brain inherited from his father the judge (Lord Tomlin), shown in his enjoyment of arguments with a distinctly legal flavour.... Tommy (Tomlin) was on the short side, squarely built, with a large head set on a short neck. He had the striking profile of a Roman emperor on a coin, fair straight hair brushed back from a fine forehead, a pale face and grey eyes."

Tomlin became a regular visitor to Ham Spray House, the home of Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and Ralph Partridge. According to Strachey's biographer, Stanford Patrick Rosenbaum, they created: "A polygonal ménage that survived the various affairs of both without destroying the deep love that lasted the rest of their lives. Strachey's relation to Carrington was partly paternal; he gave her a literary education while she painted and managed the household. Ralph Partridge... became indispensable to both Strachey, who fell in love with him, and Carrington." However, Frances Marshall denied that the two men were lovers and that Lytton quickly realised that Ralph was "completely heterosexual".

Michael Holroyd, the author of Lytton Strachey (1994), has argued: "Tomlin, being bisexual, for a brief spell occupied a virtuoso position in the Ham Spray régime... The mercurial Stephen Tomlin who, greatly attracting Lytton and repelling Ralph, spiralled round the Ham Spray molecule causing shock waves everywhere." " Tomlin began an affair with Henrietta Bingham, Carrington's lover. In July 1924 he took Bingham to Scotland. Carrington wrote to Gerald Brenan complaining that "Henrietta repays my affections almost as negatively as you find I do yours."

Tomlin began an affair with Carrington in 1926. Carrington's husband Ralph Partridge, strongly objected to the relationship, "fearing he (Tomlin) was someone more likely to destroy than to create happiness." Frances Marshall agreed: "One side of his character was creatively gifted, charming and sensitive; the other was dominated by a destructive impulse (fuelled probably by deep neurotic despair) whose effect was that he couldn't see two people happy together without being impelled to intervene and take one away, leaving the other bereft. Or it would take the form of a direct bid for power over others - whether male or female, for he was bi-sexual - which he was well-equipped to exert. The sequel would be a fit of suicidal depression and guilt-feelings."

Tomlin was also having an affair with Carrington's friend, Julia Strachey. His affair with Carrington came to an end when Tomlin married Julia in July 1927. The married couple rented a stone cottage at Swallowcliffe in Wiltshire. Carrington was a regular visitor: "Really its equal to Ham Spray in elegance and comfort, only cleaner and tidier."

In July 1931 Tomlin began working on a bust of Virginia Woolf. Her biographer, Hermione Lee, argued that being sculpted by Tomlin "made her think of herself as an image, a thing: she hated it, even more than sitting for her portrait." Quentin Bell added: "For somehow Virginia managed to forget, in agreeing to the proposal, that the sculptor must inevitably wish to look at his sitter and Virginia should have recollected that one of the things she most disliked in life was being peered at. A very few friends had been allowed to make pictures; some were made by stealth." Despite this, Bell believes that it was a successful work of art: "It is not flattering. It makes Virginia look older and fiercer than she was, but it has a force, a life, a truth, which his other works (those I have seen) do not possess."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTtomlinS.htm

The most shocking part of Myra's explanation is the part about Drago and Bevilacqua not always seeing eye to eye. Shocking!

Myra's point is surely correct. You cannot have moderators posting abusive comments about other members on the forum. I can understand her frustration when she was outvoted, but that is the way democracy works.

That's not how the DPF democracy was supposed to work. When deciding something as substantial as a staff change (e.g., firing Drago from the moderation team or inviting David Guyatt back into the team) a unanimous vote was always required. For 2.5 years. No exception. Until Jan posed the vote to bring Drago back from purgatory. Even though I voted "no way no how" it was clear that he'd be coming back anyway.

It was the pre-coup.

They ignore rules when the rules hinder them from doing what they want: dusting off the abusive Drago, using pseudonyms, whatever.

If that was the case, you were clearly in the right.

The most shocking part of Myra's explanation is the part about Drago and Bevilacqua not always seeing eye to eye. Shocking!

Myra's point is surely correct. You cannot have moderators posting abusive comments about other members on the forum. I can understand her frustration when she was outvoted, but that is the way democracy works.

The quality of any forum is determined by its members being willing to post. It seems that Myra is currently having problems persuading members to post on the Deep Politics Forum. Therefore, I expect in time, the new forum, created by five of the original six, will provide a source of information similar to the original forum.