mistermack

Well, I find the idea that nobody's lying even more ludicrous. But that seems to be the PC position I should be adopting to please some people. That's the silly place the Rep. Senators are at. Maybe the thread should be entitled "Ooh how awful" and it should be made clear that it's only for tut-tutting, and suggesting any other possibilities is not allowed.

I'm just making the point that nobody knows. I clearly said "could have". She says one thing, he says the opposite. Either one could be lying. Or both could be lying. It's a relevant third possibility, and stuff like that happens all the time. There are other possibilities too. I was just responding to Ten Oz taking exception to her being a labelled a shill. It didn't need to be that, is what I'm saying. You tell one little lie, and it gets out of hand. I know, I've SEEN Fawlty Towers.

As far as Ford goes, she certainly became a pawn in a game of chess. Only she and Kavanaugh can know how it came about. It doesn't have to be either attempted rape, or a pure invention on her part. It could have started out harmlessly. Every day, in the USA, there will be teenage boys trying it on with teenage girls. Probably thousands a day, or more likely tens of thousands. And vice versa as well. I was groped by girls loads of times, and raped once (if no means no, which in my case it didn't). The vast majority are just a nothing, nobody threatened, hurt or scared. Ford could have had such an encounter with Kavanaugh, and thought no more about it for 34 years. Then, her marriage is in trouble, she's in an emotional marriage counselling session, and she brings it up for sympathy. Embroidering it a bit. And the ball is then rolling. The little lie gets bigger as events take over. That's just as likely, as the complete fabrication story, or the attempted rape hypothesis.

Burn down the Reichstag and invade Poland. I tried it but only got as far as Belgium, so I stocked up with cigarettes and came home again.

You're funny.

They found Mallory about 20 years ago. I don't think they've ever found Irvine's body. I don't think Mallory was in a glacier, and if he was, it I doubt if it would be much affected by warming at 8,000 m. But it's actually in the nature of glaciers that they will eventually spit out their contents, warming or no warming. But glaciers certainly are retreating, there's no doubt about that.

The idea of demanding an investigation was to delay the appointment till after the election, when the voting balance might be different. Of course, Kavanaugh didn't want that. That explains the timing of the claims as well. They were only thwarted by the quickie nature of the investigation, which defeated their objective, and that's the reason that they were screaming so loud about it. Cunning plan dashed.

Another strategy might be to throw your sample in a glacier for five thousand years. Ötzi the ice mummy had intact dna, they were even able to determine that he was lactose intolerant. And there was meat in his stomach that was dna tested as Ibex meat.

Hair contains one form of dna, but it's mitochondrial dna, which only gives limited information. The roots contain nuclear dna as well, which is the one that is wanted for identification purposes. A friend of mine had a dna test done recently for paternity purposes, and it was done by just taking swabs from the inner cheek. If you want to store it for five years, I would say, get a commercial kit, then get full hair samples, with the root, or cheek swabs, and put them quickly in a good freezer that runs at minus 20 C. You would be better off getting lots of dna material, because it gradually degrades over time, especially if it's warmed to room temperature.

Rubbish point. Firstly, you're assuming she's unable to return to her home. Taking her word for it again. And secondly, the publicity is not as a result of her allegations. It's as a result of her choosing to go public with it. In the Washington Post. If you want your moment of fame, you have to deal with the consequences. When I said it can't backfire, the context made it clear that I was talking about the legal consequences of the allegations being proved untrue. Nobody can disprove your story, if you are the only two people in the room. (but I'm sure you got that first time around, and were just strawing it up)

I'll happily ignore any request from you for citations in future then, as time-wasting. I changed my mind, when I saw what a nasty bunch Brussels became, when they saw a cash cow slipping through their fingers. There's no way that I'D be paying their pensions, if I had a choice.

The thing about guilt by accusation is that everybody knows that a simple accusation can't backfire. If they were ever alone at any time with the target, nobody but them can actually know what happened. And even if they did by some miracle have witness evidence to clear the accused, decades after the event, that testimony would look as suspect and shaky as the accusation itself. Kavanaugh is lucky that he's not a mega-rich celebrity. If he was, you would have had far more accusations by now. The chance of a huge payout, for just saying "me too" would be too good to miss.

What proportion of murderers who get executed are actually innocent? Probably about 2 percent or less. So should we allow the present situation to continue, where the 98 percent guilty ones are allowed to live? That's the same argument. As far as I'm concerned, it's a ludicrous argument. You don't countenance false convictions based on probabilities. I can't believe Ten Oz is actually writing that stuff. We all know and accept that some guilty people get away with crimes. It's a sad fact of life. If there was a simple way to stop it, it would have been done by now. The phrase "reasonable doubt" is the best we can come up with, to try to define where to draw the line. It means that some innocent people get convicted, and a lot of guilty people get off. Anybody who can actually do better than that will be doing the world a great service. Maybe in the future, there will be a truth drug, or lie detector, that actually works. Till then, we're stuck with what we've got.

I never said sovereign, so you're kicking your own straw man. Yes parliament is sovereign, but to EXERCISE that sovereignty, and defy the ECJ etc, we have to leave. Thankfully, the British public have decided to do just that. ( I didn't vote in the referendum, I was exactly fifty fifty so there was no point. I'm now fully sure that the voters got it right. ) There's plenty of material here. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/22/the-eus-court-is-picking-apart-our-laws/ Good luck with that.

talkorigins might be a good place to start. Lots of links on it, and crazy stuff is kept off. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

That's a great idea. You could call it, "The accuser's charter" . I'm sure it wouldn't get abused.

The problem in the US is the written constitution. If the judges want to destroy a law passed by the legislators, they just have to interpret it as "against the constitution". In the UK the supreme court is (or was) simply there to interpret laws passed by parliament. Their guide was "what was actually meant by the legislation", so they don't have a written constitution to use to defeat that legislation. That was the case, although now, they can say, "this kind of law was ruled against by Europe" and override the express wishes of Parliament. To put the UK Parliament back in charge of it's own country, they would need to fully leave the EU and depart the European convention on Human Rights.

Since in the vast majority of cases, only the two people involved know exactly what happened, any figures on falseness or truthfulness of rape reports are just snatched out of thin air. They're meaningless. In any case, a lot of these encounters are not black and white, and consent is often a very grey area, a really difficult thing for juries to decide, having heard a case argued over for days. That makes the attempt to concoct figures even more ridiculous. Anyway, the figures are totally irrelevant to this episode. Unless they have figures for the truthfulness of reported attempted rapes that are reported 36 years after the event, when one of those involved is up for a pivotal job that affects the politics of the nation for years to come. Show me that study, and their methodology, and I might be interested.

The most likely explanation is their diet. They eat big quantities of lower quality food, so they need a big gut to hold it and digest it. A big gut needs a big body to match. There's no reason that an ape shouldn't grow big, if there's a food niche to exploit. There was an extinct huge ape that lived alongside early man called Gigantopithecus. Estimates of it's size are up to nearly ten feet tall and half a ton in weight.

Obviously in the lovely sweet "real world" that you live in, women never make false claims of sexual assault, and dirty tricks are never used in politics. It must be great in there. Back in the real world, one of the two is lying. That seems to have escaped your notice. Either she's lying or he is. So your above statement is ridiculous. You're effectively saying it's really offensive to prefer his version. I find it ludicrous, the way the senators are performing cartwheels so as not to actually say she's lying. "I'm sure something happened to Prof. Ford, but don't believe it was Kavanaugh". The world has gone PC bonkers. They are all VOTING that she's a liar, but they're not prepared to say it out loud. It's like the Emperor's suit of clothes.

Firstly, I've made it clear that I don't believe Ford is a victim. Taking into account the timing, delay and obvious motive of her accusation, to me she's not a victim, she's a liar. As far as genuine victims go, I'm not blaming them, I'm pointing out the real-life consequences of not reporting rapes, or delaying reporting for long periods. Like it or not, a rape not reported often means another and another. I've seen enough FBI files programs, and the like, to spot the pattern. A woman gets attacked, doesn't report it, and ends up feeling terribly guilty when more women get raped and murdered, which she could have helped to prevent. But it's too late then. This is what wiki says about the Yorkshire Ripper's very first attack : "Sutcliffe said he had followed a prostitute into a garage and hit her over the head with a stone in a sock. According to his statement, Sutcliffe said, "I got out of the car, went across the road and hit her. The force of the impact tore the toe off the sock and whatever was in it came out. I went back to the car and got in it".[9] Police visited his home the next day, as the woman he had attacked had noted Birdsall's vehicle registration plate. Sutcliffe admitted he had hit her, but claimed it was with his hand. The police told him he was "very lucky" as the woman did not want anything more to do with the incident – she was a known prostitute, and her husband was serving a jail term for assault.[9]" Sutcliff was eventually convicted of murdering 13 women, and attempting to murder 7 others. I'm saying that the MESSAGE should be to report it immediately. And all of the downside of not reporting it should be made abundantly clear to all. It's up to the individual what they actually do. But people should be aware of the consequences of not reporting. Not live in this imaginary ideal world where the world turns cartwheels at every accusation that comes 36 years too late. People who are not in the limelight will get a nasty shock, if they think that they can do what Ford did, and get taken seriously. Professor Ford took 36 years, and then imagined that the world would treat her as if she was reporting something from last week. She seems to EXPECT that the world should drop everything, and treat her allegations as true. You can't have it both ways. Report it and get taken seriously. Don't report it, and trot it out just before your target is up for the big job, and you risk NOT being believed. As I said before, actions have consequences. Her actions led to the present consequences. In the tiny chance that she IS telling the truth, if she had followed what I'm advising 36 years ago, he probably wouldn't be getting the job now. So if it's all true, she's effectively helped him on his way.

I agree that the scientific method is a lot more fuzzy than the name implies. It sounds like a mathematical formula that you can just roll out, put in the figures, and wait for the answer. But really, it's more an evolved strategy, using the best principles of common sense, and the lessons from the past. So it's an evolving process, rather than a rigid framework. The power of statistical results is one example of the evolution of scientific method. In the end, the acid test is "does it work?". And the answer is generally, "yes it does, better than anything else". For example, the religious method might be likened to Noah and his Arc. Never having built a boat before, Noah solved all of the problems of a gigantic floating structure, when prompted to by God. All straight off the bat. Very different to the way that the Jumbo Jet was designed and built. A lot more science went into that. They could, I suppose, have got somebody with no experience or knowledge to build it, and then pray to God that it would fly. I personally prefer the MORE scientific method. Maybe that's what they should call it. It's not pure, it's not finished, but it's the best method we have available.

The reason that other animals have not evolved a persistence hunt strategy is probably the level of intelligence needed to carry it off. Bushmen of the Kalahari can read signs that most of us would think of as invisible. And they can tell what animal made it, how fast it was moving and whether it was stressed etc. It would take human levels of intelligence, and many years of experience to fine tune those abilities. I was also struck, in the example that I saw on tv, by the fact that the runner was wearing modern trainers. Probably a great help if you're going to be running for many hours across rocky and thorny ground. One thing we humans have that aids the process is the ability to cool the skin by sweating. Having no fur helps a lot, as the sweat can evaporate directly off the skin, and make a real difference to body temperature. The prey animals on the other hand are likely to overheat, if they are forced to run for a longer length of time than they evolved to cope with. Human marathon runners get regular water bottles, and they can drink and pour the water over themselves without stopping. It makes a big difference, but it's something that's not available to other animals.

Why reply so quick then? Leave it till 2054, you might be feeling better. If you think 36 years is reasonable.

This thread should be moved to the silly section. I can't believe you wrote that !! I think this whole thing is doing damage to women, but not in the way that's being trumpeted. By sending out the message that it's ok to wait 36 years to complain, you are doing genuine victims real harm. The truth is, for anyone out of the public limelight, they should be going straight to the police as fast as humanly possible. REAL rapists would just LOVE people to not report it straight away, because in the real world, it multiplies their chances of getting away with it many times over. It also means, if women out there follow her lead and don't report it straight away, that the rapist is still out there, roaming free, probably raping again and again. This Dr. Ford, if her story is true, let a man that she knew was a would-be rapist carry on his evil way, presumably doing the same thing over and over, all because she didn't report it. Not very public spirited of her. His wicked ways could have been nipped in the bud 36 years ago, if she's telling the truth. The safety of other potential victims doesn't seem to be something she ever cared about. The message ought to be, "report it straight away, if not for yourself, for the sake of other innocent victims".