posted May 17, 2005 09:41 PM            

I wasn't commenting on your practicality/internal conflicts or making any comparisons.

I liked the original Linda Goodman site better than Conscious Evolution. Had a lot of fun there as I have here. The original site is gone and Conscious Evolution took it's place. Crystal Bush owned the rights to much of the Linda Goodman name and underwrote the site. Greg ran the original site and carried over to the new site, new then, called Conscious Evolution. Randall can tell you more of the details if you're interested. Greg passed away late last year but some of the members are keeping the site going. All the old threads from the original site are still there in Conscious Evolution...in the archives...or they were.

Guessing signs may be fun, but I noticed you didn't attempt to guess mine

I have a lot of history with Aquarius Suns and strong Pisces placements. One of my most favorite combinations.

posted May 18, 2005 06:15 PM              

For Jwhop for being an idiot.

And for Pidua...for being so damn nosy and sticking her big head into conversations that have nothing to do with her.

Jesus christ. I don't even remember my past screen names anymore.

Well...guess that just shows who actually keeps a list.

posted May 19, 2005 12:59 AM              

Jwhop I should check out Conscious Evolution again...last time I skimmed through it, but never really got a chance to read...possibly because the posts were too long there. This summer I hope to have more time. So why did they do away with the original site?

I did guess your sign, and I was right. Was I supposed to tell you? You didn’t ask!

posted May 19, 2005 05:05 PM            

You'd already guessed my sign and just wanted *edited-*conformation*?

posted May 19, 2005 05:19 PM            

So here is my post to you:

TP, AM, whoever the hell you are today, I think it is time for you to get banned again. You can't seem to grasp the idea of being civil with other people. You post profane infantile posts and when you don't like the responses you lash out with an even cruder method of addressing others.

What is your deal? Is the world so bad that you can't participate in this forum without lowering yourself to wallow in the gutter with things like "go su*ck blank" or "blank you"?

There have only been a handful of degenerates like you here that have been as hateful, but they had enough class that once they were banned they left the site alone - YOU on the other hand have changed your user name at least 5 times - AM, Perfect Circle, TP, Mystic Dreamz...get a life lady or at least learn to deal with people like a human being instead of resorting to snarling like a damn feral animal.

posted May 19, 2005 06:39 PM              

Lmfao. I rather snarl like an animal than look like one.

we all know your true colors and I for one, would LOVE to see you banned again, as you bring nothing to this forum but anger and hate

We ROFL. You mean you. You swear you speak for everyone on this forum.

posted May 19, 2005 08:13 PM            

Thank you for the compliment that I look like an animal. Most of our furry species are more beautiful than many humans -present company included (I will dumb that statement down for you..it simply means that most animals are more beautiful that YOU).

Calling me a retard...ouch..I am so sad...(please note the sarcasm).

Maybe you could learn to debate effectively so that you won't have to resort to the childish behaviour that was obviously reinforced during your formative years. Let me ask you this..did your parents scream and yell alot? Did they make it a practice of calling you names like stupid, retard or to go "blank" yourself? I actually feel some pity for you because you are obviously a product of your upbringing and environment - so much for you being surrounded by open-minded culture conscious people.

posted May 19, 2005 08:55 PM            

quote:

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You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this bulletin board to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, insulting, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise violative of any law.

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quote:

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You are free to speak your Minds about anything, but please, use no profanity or personal insults.

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As members of this site we are obliged to follow the very simple rules and guidelines of this site. Posting here is a privilege, not a right. TranquilPoet, you are severly out of line ... again. You have been banned before for you behavior ... behavior which you continue to repeat with every name change. Far be it from me to attempt to fathom your reasons for returning to a site you have been banned from repeatedly (YOU have been banned, not just your various names) but to behave in the same manner every time you return is surely a sign of a dis-eased mind. You are responsible for your posts here. It does not matter whether you feel attacked, intimidated, hurt or whatever else ... there is no excuse for your posts. No one makes you post the way you do. You choose to be vulgar and belligerent and that is simply unacceptable on this site and it will continue to be unacceptable regarldess of how many times you or anyone else attempts to slip by with that sort of behavior. You create your own problems here. Perhaps you would be better off elsewhere.

posted May 19, 2005 11:21 PM              

Awwww....there feel better now?

posted May 19, 2005 11:58 PM              

TP do you consciously try to create and encourage people to become your enemies on purpose??? You should seriously try to look into yourself and understand why you try to instigate fights?? I know you want to be loved (secretly)...and yes even by the enemies you make!

It takes a strong person to look inside themselves and make the changes they need to help themselves...you owe it to yourself...and you need it for any love to enter your life. You have to stop doing this to yourself! You know you have no other choice.

posted May 20, 2005 12:07 AM              

It goes both ways...Aquas are also attracted to Leos. And Pisces also makes me more dreamy and idealistic, and add my Venus conj Neptune in Sag in the 7th to the list of influences. But I'm not as gullible as people think I am.

posted May 20, 2005 12:09 AM              

are you around???????

posted May 20, 2005 12:26 PM            

quote:

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JWop. Plenty of heads have rolled since this thing began. Most of them innocent. But the judge did not say not credible. Just disagreed on a tiny legal detail. The BBC not credible???? That's not credible. We're are talking oldest, finest, radio news reporting in the world, bar none.

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Btw maklhouf, it's jwhop, not JWop. Given the ethnic slur against Italians, I would advise you to not make that mistake again....or you will find out what funny and magical things I can do with your screen name.

I don't know what planet you claim to be on maklhouf but this story, along with it's findings and facts, which are true were widely reported....on earth. Hello, Earth to maklhouf!

Perhaps you just had your head stuck so far up somewhere it doesn't belong that you missed it. There are others like you.

Perhaps you and TP should link up and form your own club. Obvious club name is "Heads Up".

The BBC Debacle
February 3, 2004
FOXNews
Jim Pinkerton

Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. That's a lesson in every sphere of life, but it's been learned, most spectacularly of late, by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The case in point was the recent investigation of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's handling of evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Those who pushed hardest for the investigation were hoping to see Blair painted as a liar, perhaps even run out of 10 Downing Street. But they have now discovered that investigations can cut both ways; this particular investigation left Blair unscathed, causing, instead, the resignation of three BBC officials.

Here's the background on this extraordinary reversal of political-media fortune. On a radio news broadcast airing at 6:07 a.m. on May 29, 2003, BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan announced that information about Iraq's WMD program had been "sexed up" by the Blair government, as part of a scheme to make the case for "regime change" against Saddam Hussein seem more compelling. Gilligan was specifically critiquing a Blair government dossier released in September 2002 which stated that Iraq could launch WMDs on 45 minutes' notice. But, Gilligan said, "The government probably knew that that 45-minute figure was wrong before it decided to put it in." Gilligan repeated the allegation several times more during that day, and published an op-ed in a London newspaper in which he named Alastair Campbell, Blair's communications director, as the fact-distorting "sex-upping" culprit. The Blair government was furious. It had, after all, been accused of lying in the course of taking Britain into war as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March; it demanded a retraction from the BBC. (The BBC, of course, is state-owned, but like PBS and NPR in the US, it often enjoys a hostile relationship with incumbent politicians.)

For its part, the "Beeb" stuck by its reporter, Gilligan, dismissing Blair's complaints as "drivel." And so the battle between pro- and anti-Blair forces raged, stoked by the British print media, always eager for a paper-selling rumble. On July 10, a mid-level official in the Ministry of Defence, David Kelly, was identified as the source for Gilligan's report. Five days later, Kelly was called before an investigatory committee in Parliament. By all accounts, it was a rough session: Blair's people, led by Campbell, came down hard on Kelly. Three days after that confrontation, on July 18, his body was found hear his home, a suicide.

In the uproar that followed, Blair's critics demanded a full investigation of the story of what came to be known as the "dodgy dossier," from its origins in 2002 to its becoming a political football in 2003. A distinguished jurist, Lord Brian Hutton, was named to lead the investigation. In the next few months, everyone involved in the contretemps — from Blair and Campbell on the government side to Gilligan and his BBC superiors — were called to testify under oath. In addition, Hutton reviewed thousands of pages of notes, documents, and tapes. During this time, Campbell resigned his post. Blair's press point man said that his decision to leave had nothing to do with the Kelly case, but Blair's critics thought different. They hoped that Campbell would just be the first of many Blair dominoes to fall.

On Thursday, January 28, Hutton issued his report. It was a shocker, all right, but not for those who had pushed so hard for the investigation in the first place. Instead of condemning Blair, it condemned the BBC. Hutton labeled BBC procedures as "defective," adding that the BBC had failed to "investigate properly" the government's complaints of factual error in Gilligan's reporting. Moreover, it had failed to retract "unfounded" reports. In addition, Hutton concluded that the WMDs-in-45-minutes claim was a genuine artifact of the intelligence-gathering process.

Finally, he concluded, "I have considerable doubt as to how reliable Mr. Gilligan's evidence is as regards what Dr. Kelly said to him." For his part, Blair was gracious upon hearing of the Hutton findings. He said all along that he merely wanted an apology from the BBC, and that he would be satisfied upon receiving one.

Of course, it was obvious to many that the Corporation had been gunning, ideologically, against Blair and the Iraq war all along. But the impact on the BBC was seismic. Gilligan resigned his reporter's job, as did Greg Dyke and Gavyn Davies, the BBC's #1 and #2 officials. In the wake of those resignations, the reeling media giant issued a statement regretting the "mistakes" and "misjudgments" that it had made over the previous eight months.

Three lessons can be learned from this sorry story: First and foremost, reporters have an obligation to be accurate, to have ample documentation for everything that's reported We may never know exactly what the late Kelly said to Gilligan, but it's safe to say that Gilligan should have done some more digging before he went on the air. As he said in his resignation letter of January 30, "We deserved criticism. Some of my story was wrong, as I admitted at the inquiry, and I again apologize for it." Second, news organizations must be prepared to admit mistakes, or at least to begin a process of self-inquiry when mistakes are alleged. As Greg Dyke, the ex-BBC hierarch, explained afterwards, "What I should have done, was say, 'No, let's stop, let's do our inquiry.' Instead I felt the attack on our journalism as such required a quick public reply." In other words, Dyke thought it was more important to kneejerkily defend the BBC than to get the facts straight. That's always bad policy. Third, observers should understand that in the news biz, there's usually another twist to the tale. The final irony of the whole Iraq WMD saga is that as of this writing, nobody really knows what was going on with Saddam's weapons program.

The Hutton Commission concluded that Blair & Co. acted in good faith, but that's not the same as saying that the intelligence reports about WMD, cited by Blair, were accurate. And so on Monday, just hours after the Bush administration announced that it was launching an investigation of faulty WMD reports, the Blair government revealed that it, too, would launch an inquiry into its own intelligence procedures and methods. In other words, the same ground that's been fought over for the past year or more — did Iraq have WMDs? did they pose an "imminent" danger to other countries? — is going to be fought over once again. Only this time, one presumes, the BBC will be more careful in its reporting.

Comment: BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan was known for his blatantly anti-American bias during the reporting of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, separate from his "sexed up" allegation.

Bumbling Broadcast Corp
*Note...or perhaps Bungling Broadcast Corp
February 4, 2004
Washington Times
Helle Dale

Whatever happened to the venerable British Broadcasting Corp.? The BBC used to be known the world over for bringing you the truth, as told by gentlemen. But it has fallen, and fallen hard. The case of the BBC vs. the Blair government reminds us why the world has moved beyond state monopolies. They are inefficient, can be blinded by arrogance and often have an exaggerated sense of their own power. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of media, a profession that is crowded with big egos in any event. Last week, the independent inquiry into the BBC's reporting, which claimed Prime Minister Tony Blair's government manipulated the truth about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in order to sway the British public, found the allegations entirely unfounded, vindicating the government. Lord Hutton, the judge who presided over the inquiry, further found sloppy editorial practices and a resistance to accountability among the BBC's directors. The report also vindicated the government of having any part in the suicide of scientist David Kelly, who had been the source of the BBC allegations.

The report precipitated the resignation of BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies, Director-General Greg Dyke and the reporter responsible for the debacle, Andrew Gilligan. You can say this about the British, at least. They know when to fall on their swords. Mr. Blair has enjoyed every minute of it and may have received a boost that will carry him into a third election victory. Last week, he survived not just the Hutton report, but also a massive mutiny among left-wing members of the Labour Party, who were protesting his plans for raising university tuition. In a long statement, Mr. Blair went after the BBC and demanded a public apology, as well he might. "The allegation that I or anyone else lied to this House or deliberately misled the country by falsifying evidence on WMD is itself a lie," Mr. Blair said. "And I simply ask that those who made it and those who have repeated it over all these months, now withdraw it, openly and fully." For the BBC, the report and the investigation could not have come at a worse time.

The corporation's 10-year charter is up for renewal in 2006, and the government is about to launch a debate on the subject of its funding mechanisms. The BBC is a non-governmental entity, with its own board, and funded through radio and television license fees paid by the British public. But in a world of independent media, it is surely time to revisit the role of state broadcasters like the BBC, and the Hutton report makes an excellent case why.

Based on an over-drinks interview with Mr. Kelly — from which his note keeping was careless — reporter Andrew Gilligan last May claimed on the BBC Today show that Downing Street had "sexed up" the dossier on the information about Iraq's WMD. The following week, on June 1, he further wrote in a newspaper article that the responsible party was Alistair Campbell, head of government communications in Downing Street, and Mr. Blair's closest adviser. In response to the Blair government's denials and charges of bias on Mr. Gilligan's part, the BBC leadership refused to back down. They ignored the fact that other reporters had raised red flags and took to the offensive without as much as taking the time to review Mr. Gilligan's story.

The story was raised to a new level by Mr. Kelly's suicide in an Oxfordshire wood on July 17, in the midst of a parliamentary inquiry in which he had been named as the source for Mr. Gilligan's story. The British government had been accused of treating Mr. Kelly in an underhanded way, which had somehow pushed him over the edge. Not so, according to Mr. Hutton. "I am satisfied that no one realized or should have realized that those pressures and strains might drive him to take his own life," he writes. All of which should call into question the BBC's reporting during the Iraq War. It was unrelentingly hostile toward the allied forces and became known here as the Baghdad Broadcasting Corp. Of course, this was not an unknown phenomenon here in the United States. But in Britain, the BBC has a unique lock on the power to shape public opinion. A shake-up should be focused on getting the corporation back to basics — through competition and privatization. After all it is the job of the media to report the news — "get it right and get it first" as this newspaper's editor in chief, Wesley Pruden, likes to say — not to promote its own agendas.