and sleeping. I will get over this soon I hope but nothing is happening in my life for now

keep to the Fen Causeway

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.

Guardian

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

Anguish: Jacintha Saldanha was found dead after hoax

Nurse Jacintha Saldanha wrote three emotional notes revealing the anguish that led to her suicide after she was duped by two Aussie DJs into believing they were royalty.

In one, the distraught mum-of-two outlines how she struggled to come to terms with the prank call by Mel Greig and Michael Christian to the hospital where pregnant Duchess Kate was being treated for severe morning sickness.

But in another she ­criticises senior colleagues at the King Edward VII hospital over her ­treatment after the pair had pretended to be the Queen and Prince Charles asking about the ­duchess's condition. That note is said to have left her family furious.

the other shoe drops... i can well imagine the nature of the 'support' that oily spokesman from the hospital talked about.

Who Could Have Predicted?

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Restless (2011 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Restless is a 2011 British-American drama film directed by Gus Van Sant and written by Jason Lew. It stars Henry Hopper and Mia Wasikowska.

mia wasikowska a very fine spirit.

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

This is our news of the week end...
;-)

A free fox in a free henhouse!

"Growing up, I experienced unschooling as a compromise," I concluded, "the more appealing of the two extremes available in Georgia given my family's modest budget: staying at home and teaching myself, or going to public school and having my spirit crushed.

Hanky supplies have been wiped out. Civilization is toppling. The National Rifle Association is in emergency mode, but don't worry, in a few days the threats to legislators will all be in place, and nothing will be done, and we can return to ten-car crashes on the freeway.

Align culture with our nature.

Another new factor is bedevilling efforts to read the Italian runes: an acerbic, grey-bearded comedian called Beppe Grillo. An accountant by training, Mr Grillo, 64, became a comedian by accident and was one of the most bankable stand-ups on Italian television in the 1980s. But his political intelligence and knowledge of the world of money frequently erupted through the gags, and in a country where satire is a risky vocation he found himself banned from the airwaves after teasing the Socialist Party under its then leader Bettino Craxi about corruption.

Turning his back on TV, he built a huge new audience through live shows in which anti-establishment political content steadily elbowed aside the comedy. His obsessions were legion: polluting rubbish incinerators, freedom of speech, non-renewable terms for MPs, expansion of public transport and green areas of cities.

A senior police officer has broken ranks to describe how he and others were "appalled" at the behaviour of colleagues during the miners' strike as calls mount for a fresh inquiry into the policing of the dispute.

The former Cleveland Constabulary officer said he was so disillusioned with the behaviour of a number of police towards striking miners that he asked to be excused from attending picket lines during the 1984/85 dispute.

"I was appalled at the conduct of a number of officers, generally members of the Metropolitan police who we described as the Banana Squad - all bent and yellow," said the officer in a letter to Labour MP Ian Lavery.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, is facing new accusations of homophobia in his party over its links with anti-gay, far-right European politicians and claims that he has backed a populist Polish priest who describes homosexual men as "sodomites".

Farage - whose party has shot up to 14% in an Opinium/Observer opinion poll today - vowed last week to exploit Conservative divisions over gay marriage, while insisting that his party "respects the rights of gay people to have civil partnerships". Its poll surge is a serious worry for Conservatives ahead of the 2014 European elections, from which Farage believes his party can emerge with the highest share of the vote of any UK party. Ukip's support is now almost half that of the Tories, who stand on 29%, 10 points behind Labour on 39%. The Liberal Democrats are on 8%.

While Farage is keen to portray Ukip as tolerant of gay people at home, investigations by the Observer show that it is in alliance in the European parliament with parties containing politicians who have expressed open hostility to homosexuals. Farage himself has been linked to a campaign in Poland supportive of hardline Catholic media outlets that are strongly critical of homosexuality

I am confined to quarters, and may now have an honest reason for non-attendance of a movie premiere tomorrow, to which I contributed some biblical readings in hell and brimstone style - without knowing what the movie was about. I suspect it is scandalous and that a little bit of space between myself and its makers could be useful.

Having already professed to all and sundry that I am of the Druze Liberal persuasion, I can't really refuse to help someone who might have similar views to mine. He's young, passionate, and just about ready for some paradigm shifting intrusions in the form of self-created 'big mistakes' - but that's how we learn, after all. Who am I to interrupt his education?

You can't be me, I'm taken

Ever since I encountered my first example of a climate disruption denier I've wondered what kind of person could deny the reality that is industrial climate disruption. Over the years of writing on climate, however, it became clear that there were two groups of people who made up the majority of the serious deniers - libertarians and engineers of various stripes.
[.....]
But Iyer et al indicate that this moral good is not well measured by traditional studies of morality, writing that "standard morality scales... do a poor job of measuring libertarian values" and that "if liberty is included as a moral value, libertarians are not amoral." The flip side of this statement, however, means that libertarians do not share a common moral framework with either liberals or conservatives.

The data in Iyer et al demonstrate that libertarians have a similar profile (the relative order of importance of various values) to liberals on one test of moral values, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ). Specifically, libertarians rate fairness highest, followed by harm, and both groups value authority and purity the least. But Iyer et al indicates that libertarians don't think about fairness and harm in the same ways that liberals do - harm to a liberal often means injury to someone else, while harm to a libertarian means injury to the libertarian by others. Conservatives valued authority and being associated with the "in" group the most, above both harm and fairness.