Director of Public Prosecutions ...................... The Elephant in the Bedroom

The Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders has issued fresh guidelines to police, on how they should regard cases of rape, shifting the onus of proof of innocence onto the accused.

As always, the jury still has to be satisfied that a rape was committed, but the modified lines of enquiry have been suggested in order to encourage more victims to come forward. Usually anonymously, sometimes maliciously, generally quite correctly.

The accused is named and shamed but the accuser remains anonymous, or so I understand.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the D.P.P. intrudes into the marital home. Bringing as she does, a set of requirements for tacit consent to the continuation of an  intimate relationship.
Even the married man may fall foul of the law for want of proof of his innocence, should his wife contest his version of events in the bedroom.

A notepad or tape recorder in every bedroom to prove each and every encounter, is not an idea that appeals to me. But doubtless there will soon be the gadget to do just that, overtly or covertly watching, within the recesses of the bedchamber. Every whisper, every squeak and squeal of delight or pain laid bare, for the jury to decide, innocence or guilt.

The Crown Prosecution Service has been criticised for staging a misguided FGM “show trial” – after a young doctor was cleared by a jury in the first such case brought before the UK courts.

Dr Dhanuson Dharmasena, whose medical career was devastated by a 1.5cm stitch he performed on the bleeding mother of a newborn baby, was acquitted by jurors in less than 30 minutes.

Pre-election Political footballs seem to be kicking around here which could so very easily result in miscarriages of justice.

Gilbert and Sullivan  where are you now !  -  This scenario is ripe for the Stage Of  Theatrical Nonsense .

Exmoor lightly dusted in snow

Leaving the North Devon link road at the Tiverton junction, Helen and I take the scenic road  north beside the River Exe and make for Simonsbath and Brendon for a lunch at the 17th century Rockford Inn.

Log fire and a friendly welcome are there waiting for us. But before settling down we stretched our legs down beside the swift flowing river across  the wooden bridge opposite.

Rapid thaw in bright sun sending water across the road

Now in need of a good hose down

The Rockford Inn

This super little Devonshire pub is tucked out of the way down some of Devon's quieter lanes sandwiched between the hills and the sea. Today the East Lyn river was gushing with plenty of snow melt-water under a clear blue sky. Mid winter and no leaves on the trees allows more light into this steep sided valley. 

Very wet and windswept all across the moor and even on this Sunday weekend the Exmoor ponies are scarcely seen.  

The East Lyn River

From here the footpath leads on down to Watersmeet and Lynmouth

Dartmoor at a distance / Fishing at Coombe Cellars

Snow dusting Dartmoor

Beside the Teign Estuary

From the Teign Estuary, Dartmoor is seen with a light dusting of snow today, but the roads are all salted and the Morgan just washed and polished. So rather than explore the moors, I spent an hour or so at the Yacht Club.  Wednesdays happens to be a social interlude for those of us with spare time on our hands to natter about not very much.

A group of fishing companions have gathered, each with twin sets of rods and foul weather gear.
There are reputed to be flounder about here, though only rarely do we see any being caught. I have stepped on one and liken it to stepping on a cold, slippery, hot water bottle.

Now, fishing is a serious business and I have to say I have enjoyed many a session in a small boat offshore, to bring back a bucket full for the freezer.

Freedom is no laughing matter.

We've been turning a blind eye to preachers of hate that have been coming here from the Middle East and saying things for which the rest of us would be arrested.
Nigel Farage

 "Enoch Powell, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change Britain irrevocably. He was right and immigration has changed the face of Britain dramatically".

In November 2007, Nigel Hastilow resigned as Conservative candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis after he wrote an article in the Wolverhampton Express & Star that dared to repeat those words. Toxic words no longer acceptable to the politically correct brigade.

Herein lies the clue to why the majority of Britain's voting public chose to turn against the EU.

Time - Distance - Speed

Time equals distance over speed. Without distance time ceases to exist.

Liken the cosmos to half an hourglass. Set within one sphere and opposite another sphere, spinning about the axis of a black hole through which nothing may pass intact. Everything has emerged from such a hole and will doubtless re-pass through another at some future distant juncture.
The black hole; an invisible heavy object, not actually a hole at all. More voracious predator of matter.
Familiar only with finite quantities, the prospect of the infinite is almost beyond our comprehension.

The midge flaps wings a thousand times a second. To land it must adjust each beat in milliseconds.
The hump back whale, lifespan near 200 years. He sings a song an hour long to attract a mate from over the horizon.  He waits for a reply in a month or two, not long to wait. No clocks or dials in his ocean.Whale calls from beneath Arctic ice

Time the artificial construct without equal. Take away speed and distance and time becomes a single moment, where the present is never present, the beginning a mere idea, and the end just hope.
If the cosmos is expanding outwards something strange occurs at the size of infinity which is what I imagine has already happened.

At initial size of one light year, the cosmos would increase in size by 100% the second light year.  At 100 light years in size it would increase in size by around 1%. because the speed of light is not exceeded.
At infinite size the rate of increase is zero because light speed is finite. Likewise if the cosmos of infinite size were to decrease in size at the speed of light no apparent shrinking would be seen.
Could such a preposterous idea be true ?

Debris : Treasure : Delight : Despair

Objects,  memories and the stuff we acquire.

For me the grandfather clock signifies, not because its valuable or beautiful, but because my mother polished it as a little girl, and I think of her work, that gave such a deep shine to the wood.  It stood in a miners cottage in the Welsh valleys, where black coal dust permeated everything - even inside the case.

It grieves me to think the clock may fall under the Auctioneers Hammer one day. No matter, tomorrow I may throw away what someone else will treasure, and someone else treasure what I once touched.

Now I am no preacher or bible puncher, but it has to be said that much wisdom has been hijacked by the Good Book. Build not Ye treasures on Earth, fits the sentiment I try to explain. 

Does a Morgan 4/4 qualify as one of these treasures.  Would I be happier without it?    No - not just now!
Petrol prices falling.  King pins greased.  Helen and I trawling accommodation options for Switzerland and with summer on the way.

Be Happy,  tomorrow could be wet and windy!

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When doing nothing is the only option. 

Now and again we all get a piece of news that knocks the stuffing out of us. It makes you feel wretched to the core, or worse. I have known what it means to be reduced to a level of despair, when help is a straw in the wind.  

A phone call from my brother telling of my mothers fatal car accident was one of those moments - the guilt - the grief - the awful recognition of losing someone so adored. My brave face became unrecognisable and my brave heart was nowhere to be found. Time was the only healer that ever helped.

______________________________________

Life choices are always to be made for good or ill and they demand attention. We lose some sleep, then ponder the impossible. Anyone can make a snap decision, that's the easy one. For the ditherer - from one who has dithered a plenty: If it's really what you want - make it snappy. If you don't know - sleep on it.  If it troubles you for more than a month or two - ask a friend to make the choice for you.

The blue Draper dribbles everywhere - The Wanner is an easy winner. 

When you don't make your mind up you don't get what you want. An occasion when its better to be happy with what's already to hand.

Now I have two grease guns, one is messy, heavy and leaks. The rubbish blue Draper.

The other is compact, effective,  and does not leak,  Swiss made by Wanner, found on E-bay at   £12.50 

Dark matter V Grey matter - LHC Update

Reading of new attempts to explain our Cosmos, I wonder if the quest for the God Particle is not just another wild goose chase. This innocent little speck of a wimp, too shy to show itself. Pursued by the Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland, it bolts down a rabbit hole labyrinth of magnets and maths beyond my comprehension.

Butterfly Nebula Courtesy of Hubble Telescope

However, there is a wider field of speculation to enjoy.

What is there beyond the stars?

My notion, for what it's worth, begins here:

The toy of five or more steel balls, hung from a trestle by string, demonstrates how wave energy travels along from end to end. Ocean waves do similar work in carrying energy across the face of the earth undiminished.

All manner of radiation is brought to our earth's surface from the sun and wider cosmos. The puzzle is to discover what the transmitting medium is between these motions.

Sound waves require air or a liquid to travel in. But a vacuum transmits no sound.

Therefore it seems logical to suppose that all waves, of whatever wavelength, require some medium, through which to travel.

Light itself is one of those wave forms and presumably requires a medium in which to propagate. The denser the  medium - the faster the travel of waves.  Light may be travelling through a medium that is the most dense of all, since it travels at the fastest known speed.

Now consider just what that medium could be.

Invisible, unyielding and unbroken across the whole of our cosmos.

Is this a weightless solid body composed of matter that  transmits light at a specific speed - the speed of light?

Our cosmos is criss crossed by light that shifts into the red spectrum the further it travels. Distant objects being shifted along the spectrum, supposedly indicates the distance of those objects from us. We are led to believe that because of the red shift observed in the wavelength of light, the distant cosmos is rapidly moving away from us and therefore expanding in every direction away from where we are, described as the Doppler affect.

I find it hard to accept the finite nature of an expanding cosmos - a specific big bang event.

I prefer the notion of an infinite cosmos, and dismiss the big bang theory. An alternative explanation for the observed red shift in the distant light spectrum could be the universal element carbon, which in water solution has the colour red. The cosmos may simply be tinted with an infinitely weak solution of carbon atoms which have the ability to shift light to the red end of the spectrum.  (2)

Another factor to consider is the quantum mechanics of minuscule matter in which every such particle has a twin elsewhere, to reflect its every move. I readily accept that idea because the infinitely solid, transparent cosmos may be likened to a weightless, solid block of energy transmitting fabric, once described as ether, subject to (the theory of) relativity.

I understand light not to be a parcel of something posted at one end and exiting at the other, but a wave front that arrives intact at the other end, just a little reddened in time. 

Most waves of radiation carried in the wider spectrum is not seen by our eyes at all, only the narrow visible spectrum of the rainbow.  The invisible spectrum covers a very much broader band width and also carries with it a high quantity of energy.

Gravity is the force holding together what is seen and perhaps this too is governed by the energy fabric just described.  Spinning objects include the gyroscope and a more forceful example is the spinning bicycle wheel - try to support it by each side of the axle in turn and it twists away to the left or right.

Imagine the spinning atoms of the wheel having to pass through the spinning atoms of energy fabric, which may align themselves according to the mass of the earth. The interaction between these two is what imparts the twisting force. Glen Turner of the Gyroscopes Forum tells me that it twists the same way whichever earth hemisphere we are in, ( Gyroscopes forum  ) which suggests that the earths' rotation and magnetic field have only a marginal influence on the spinning wheel precession. 

Recent discoveries indicate that waveforms can be manipulated to move objects in the tractor beam of science fiction. Might gravity itself not be a tractor beam effect, where the energy fabric ether is altered by the mass of all objects, such that they attract to one another by the relatively weak force we know as gravity. Watch waves attract.  Link here:  Water and the tractor beam

(1) News Flash 23-03-2015   New LHC quest will be to disprove the Big Bang Theory and search for mini black holes.  Telegraph report here:- De-bunk the Big Bang  

(2)  Cosmic Carbon 60 discovery

Happy New Year.