>> ^swampgirl:
Porn in a children's library... along with Dr. Seuss, The Railway Children and the Little House series?
Gorillaman that is sick. I'm sorry, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. In what possible way could that edify the mind of a child other than to make them curious into experimenting in ways they are not ready for?


I've never seen a single piece of evidence to suggest porn might be bad for children. It's rare for anyone to even specify the kind of damage they believe it would do. All of my experiences with pornography, childhood and otherwise, have been entirely positive and as far as I can tell so have everybody else's.

Seeing porn at an early age would educate children about their bodies and their function; if the child is old enough to feel sexual desire it would identify and perhaps relieve that urge; and by providing explicit knowledge of sex at an early age it might immunise the child against some of the bullshit with which our society has surrounded that simple act. Your concerns for the child's safety are misguided - it's always safer to be enlightened than ignorant.

I believe you are ignorant of the maturation process of your own species. For example you are astonished and indignant that twelve year-olds engage in sexual display behaviour, which is wholly normal and healthy at that age. Children have an ever-developing sexuality, and they both enjoy and benefit from the opportunity to understand and address it.

Porn in a children's library... along with Dr. Seuss, The Railway Children and the Little House series?

Gorillaman that is sick. I'm sorry, but that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. In what possible way could that edify the mind of a child other than to make them curious into experimenting in ways they are not ready for?

There's nothing bad about the naked human body being displayed tastefully in works of art.. but porn???

You are a fool. I'm not insulting you, I'm sorry.. I'm just plainly saying you're a foolish man.

Approximate translation of the French article:

Astonishment aboard a train a few days ago that was on the trip between the cities of Zwolle and Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The passengers were surprised by the announcement which was, to say the least erotic, from the loudspeakers.

The driver of the train, during a full-on masturbation session, had forgotten to turn off the microphone. Suddenly, loudspeakers interposed, travelers were able to hear a live orgasm on the railway. A pure moment of happiness and laughter. All could not believe their ears.

The thirty minute-long session could now be shared with all would-be passengers when a little voyeur had the indecency -- the villain! -- to record the moment and post it on the most famous of video-trading websites, Youtube. At full steam ahead!

I used to love rts/strategy type games (C&C, Dune II, Civilisation, Railway Tycoon, Syndicate etc. etc.)

However now that I have a job, and a family etc. time is seriously limited for game playing, so I've turned to games that give instant fun and can be picked up and put down quickly... so FPS is where it's at for me. Bioshock and the Half Life 2 games are my current lot.

The Crysis demo was pretty awesome too, but seeing as I've owned the orange box for months now and haven't even started HL2 ep2, I can't justify buying that... or Gears of war for the PC for that matter.

So I still do love an RTS and other such games (in my youth I LOVED adventure games, not so much now)... but time somewhat dictates what I can play.

@MINK:

"Military growth is a good way to jumpstart your economy? oh lol, you lost me there. I guess Hitler was right after all, right? Fixed the railways didn't he!"

...Yes?

I wouldn't say he was right about EVERYTHING he stood for, but he did 'fix the railways'. And I believe I've already mentioned why I believe in such ways on my posts above.

I think we have a very fundamentally different outlook on things here, like a religious debate. And I don't think we'll get anything solved here...just like a religious debate. Let's just say legacy is a crazy fool. End of argument.

P.S. oh and BTW you guys, recently I've had a chance to see what real Russians (at least who they claim to be) via the web. Turns out, they do like what Putin has to offer. Maybe that popularity poll wasn't such a rigged nonsense after all.

russia needs an ex-KGB despot for a leader like she needs a hole in the head. I don't see how you are going to transition from some guy who models himself on Hitler, to a democracy. Putin's propaganda is that democracy is chaos... while all around him chaos reigns without democracy.

How you can be patronising enough to sit on the internet and tell the world's largest country they are not ready for democracy and should continue to suffer under an autocrat, i do not know.

Military growth is a good way to jumpstart your economy? oh lol, you lost me there. I guess Hitler was right after all, right? Fixed the railways didn't he!

Not my words but damned salient:

I already said my piece about the decaying infrastructure in this country - the situation is way beyond critical. And nothing will be done about it, because building bridges and overpasses doesn't buy votes. Giving the money that should've have gone to that enterprise and was mandated by law for that enterprise to 'poor' people, after school programs and all the other feel good wastes of money those scum suckers in Washington can dream up, buys votes. By now, you've already heard that the collapsed bridge was deemed 'deficient' several years ago. And yet, it was not due for replacement until 2012 at the earliest. You should have also heard that there are at least 80,000 other bridges in the same, or worse, shape. But let's put that aside.

I am no expert on demolition or explosives but I have had experience in both. I can safely say with no doubt, that I could have brought that bridge down with two backpacks of the appropriate explosives. Next time you see a wide shot from the scene, look closely and you'll notice that there's a very heavily wooded area UNDER and adjacent to the support structure of that bridge. Perfect cover for two guys with backpacks. And, this is not unusual across the land. Do you realize that fifty 2-4 man teams spread out across the infrastructure could destroy enough bridges and tunnels to bring commerce to an immediate halt. Such an action would effectively shutdown every major freeway and railway in the United States. The damage would be so wide spread that crops, meat, health products and all the things you take for granted would be nearly impossible to deliver.

Meanwhile, Congress is concerned about wiretaps. cameras, Miranda rights, freedom of information, 'comprehensive' immigration and the like. Do you see where I'm going with this? While those idiots in DC are arguing about the trappings and the trivial - this nation is so vulnerable that it boggles the mind. You may say that they're all the same, and you'd be almost right. But there is absolutely no doubt that the Democrats will do nothing about anything of substance as regards YOUR security. The Republicans at least go through the motions.

Listen to me very carefully. Republicans brought this nation out of WWII and built all the infrastructure you take for granted. They also established all the intelligence networks you count on for security. And yes, all that building and construction made corporations like Halliburton and Morrison Knudsen filthy rich. Then the Democrats took the reins in 1960, and not a godamnn dime has been spent on the infrastructure since AND they gutted and emasculated the entire intelligence network AND the military starting with the end of Vietnam. They spent all the money that should've gone into Social Security, infrastructure, intelligence, and the military on crap like after school programs and bi-lingual education. And if they win in 2008, they will continue that waste PLUS spend even more on national health care and the like. And they will raise your taxes to do so. That is the truth. There is no denying it. And do what you will with it.

But you think about THAT the next time you drive across a bridge.

This is actually a ride on the Japanese Maglev train at the JR Railway Technical Research Institute's Yamanashi Maglev Test Line.

I sifted the full vid here: http://www.videosift.com/video/Riding-Japans-Maglev-Train-502kmhr

Not sure it quite qualifies as a dupe, will leave the judgment up to the rest of the sift.

I'll add support to k8's explanation. See those bent rails between the tracks? I do enough mountain biking on trails that run parallel to railway tracks arround here to know that you see those on railway bridges.

Great post!

I have friends who helped with their legal fight for return. The case really exposed a very nasty, cruel and uncaring side of the British government.

Paradise Cleansed by John Pilger 10/11/04 - 'The Guardian'

"There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie. To understand the catastrophe of Iraq, and all the other Iraqs along imperial history's trail of blood and tears, one need look no further than Diego Garcia.

The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible. A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty, and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: "American B-52 and Stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan)." It is the word "uninhabited" that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: "There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation."

Diego Garcia was first settled in the late 18th century. At least 2,000 people lived there: a gentle creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation. Watching a film shot by missionaries in the 1960s, I can understand why every Chagos islander I have met calls it paradise; there is a grainy sequence where the islanders' beloved dogs are swimming in the sheltered, palm-fringed lagoon, catching fish.

All this began to end when an American rear-admiral stepped ashore in 1961 and Diego Garcia was marked as the site of what is today one of the biggest American bases in the world. There are now more than 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course. "Camp Justice" the Americans call it.

During the 1960s, in high secrecy, the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with two American administrations to "sweep" and "sanitize" the islands: the words used in American documents. Files found in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London provide an astonishing narrative of official lying all too familiar to those who have chronicled the lies over Iraq.

To get rid of the population, the Foreign Office invented the fiction that the islanders were merely transient contract workers who could be "returned" to Mauritius, 1,000 miles away. In fact, many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness. The aim, wrote a Foreign Office official in January 1966, "is to convert all the existing residents ... into short-term, temporary residents."

What the files also reveal is an imperious attitude of brutality. In August 1966, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote: "We must surely be very tough about this. The object of the exercise was to get some rocks that will remain ours. There will be no indigenous population except seagulls." At the end of this is a handwritten note by DH Greenhill, later Baron Greenhill: "Along with the Birds go some Tarzans or Men Fridays ..." Under the heading, "Maintaining the fiction", another official urges his colleagues to reclassify the islanders as "a floating population" and to "make up the rules as we go along".

There is not a word of concern for their victims. Only one official appeared to worry about being caught, writing that it was "fairly unsatisfactory" that "we propose to certify the people, more or less fraudulently, as belonging somewhere else". The documents leave no doubt that the cover-up was approved by the prime minister and at least three cabinet ministers.

At first, the islanders were tricked and intimidated into leaving; those who had gone to Mauritius for urgent medical treatment were prevented from returning. As the Americans began to arrive and build the base, Sir Bruce Greatbatch, the governor of the Seychelles, who had been put in charge of the "sanitizing", ordered all the pet dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. Almost 1,000 pets were rounded up and gassed, using the exhaust fumes from American military vehicles. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked," says Lizette Tallatte, now in her 60s," ... and when their dogs were taken away in front of them, our children screamed and cried."

The islanders took this as a warning; and the remaining population were loaded on to ships, allowed to take only one suitcase. They left behind their homes and furniture, and their lives. On one journey in rough seas, the copra company's horses occupied the deck, while women and children were forced to sleep on a cargo of bird fertilizer. Arriving in the Seychelles, they were marched up the hill to a prison where they were held until they were transported to Mauritius. There, they were dumped on the docks.

In the first months of their exile, as they fought to survive, suicides and child deaths were common. Lizette lost two children. "The doctor said he cannot treat sadness," she recalls. Rita Bancoult, now 79, lost two daughters and a son; she told me that when her husband was told the family could never return home, he suffered a stroke and died. Unemployment, drugs and prostitution, all of which had been alien to their society, ravaged them. Only after more than a decade did they receive any compensation from the British government: less than £3,000 each, which did not cover their debts.

The behavior of the Blair government is, in many respects, the worst. In 2000, the islanders won a historic victory in the high court, which ruled their expulsion illegal. Within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a "treaty" with Washington - in truth, a deal concealed from parliament and the US Congress. As for the other islands in the group, a "feasibility study" would determine whether these could be resettled. This has been described by Professor David Stoddart, a world authority on the Chagos, as "worthless" and "an elaborate charade". The "study" consulted not a single islander; it found that the islands were "sinking", which was news to the Americans who are building more and more base facilities; the US navy describes the living conditions as so outstanding that they are "unbelievable".

In 2003, in a now notorious follow-up high court case, the islanders were denied compensation, with government counsel allowed by the judge to attack and humiliate them in the witness box, and with Justice Ousley referring to "we" as if the court and the Foreign Office were on the same side. Last June, the government invoked the archaic royal prerogative in order to crush the 2000 judgment. A decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home. These were the same totalitarian powers used to expel them in secret 40 years ago; Blair used them to authorize his illegal attack on Iraq.

Led by a remarkable man, Olivier Bancoult, an electrician, and supported by a tenacious and valiant London lawyer, Richard Gifford, the islanders are going to the European court of human rights, and perhaps beyond. Article 7 of the statute of the international criminal court describes the "deportation or forcible transfer of population ... by expulsion or other coercive acts" as a crime against humanity. As Bush's bombers take off from their paradise, the Chagos islanders, says Bancoult, "will not let this great crime stand. The world is changing; we will win." "


Finally in 2006 Lord Justice Hooper and Mr Justice Cresswell ruled that orders made under the royal prerogative to prevent the return of the Chagos islanders to their homes were unlawful. They described as "repugnant" the action to exile the population of the islands. "The suggestion that a minister can, through the means of an order in council, exile a whole population from a British overseas territory and claim that he is doing so for the 'peace, order and good government' of the territory is, to us, repugnant," the judges said.

But the government are appealing (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southern_counties/6333223.stm) and the right of return is still being denied!

(sorry for long post - but this one really gets to me!)

Anybody read The Shadow In The North? (Phillip Pullman)
Fiction, but there was some company in the book with plans to build such a machine, mounted on the railways. Never thought someone would actually make it though... Scary!

I've heard about this race; I climbed Pikes Peak in the little cog railway train. Cool trip. V. cool vid. On the way down there are mandatory stops where they check the temperature of your brakes! Welcome nosro

I just thought id share where i volunteer at the weekends. No, im not a train spotter, it just lets me practise my coursework.

The spa valley railway is a small heriatage railway in kent. It runs for 3 and a half miles from Tunbridge Wells To Groombridge, and a closed part of the line continues further to eridge. The main aim of the railway is to reach eridge station.

I have worked on all the locomotives in that video. The front two engines are "33065" and "33063", and are known as cromptons.

www.spavalleyrailway.co.uk

My dads dead actually. I work a a heriatage railway.

"Throughout 6,000 years of recorded history, the Black African has invented nothing. Not a written language, weaved cloth, a calendar, a plow, a road, a bridge, a railway, a ship, a system of measurement, or even the wheel. (Note: This is in reference to pure-blooded African blacks.) He is not known to have ever cultivated a single crop or domesticated a single animal for his own use (although many powerful and docile beasts abounded around him). His only known means of transporting goods was on the top of his hard burry head. For shelter he never progressed beyond the common mud hut, the construction of which a beaver or muskrat is capable.


I suffered through 20 minutes of "Escape from LA." That's what became of ole Snake? Ha ha ha.