Suspected pedophile Oliver Shanti on his way to Germany

Damn, this is good news.

A new age musician and sect leader going by the name of Oliver Shanti has been arrested in Lisbon, Portugal and is now in custody awaiting deportation to Germany.  Born in Hamburg the 59-year-old is wanted in connection with more than 300 acts of molestation against six children - a girl and four boys from Germany, as well as another girl from Portugal. All of the children were between 10 and 14 years of age at the time.

Shanti, the object several months ago of my first and only Wikipedia edit, had been among Germany’s most-wanted list for several years. According to media reports, Shanti molested the children in one of the communes he founded in the Bavarian forest, another in Munich and again in Portugal. He was arrested outside the German Embassy in Lisbon last Friday after an embassy employee recognised him and alerted police. He had gone to the embassy to renew his passport, apparently on his way to Brazil to receive treatment for Leukemia.

I first came to hear about Shanti when I stumbled upon his Wikipedia entry while doing research for work. Stunned to see that the entry made absolutely no mention of the horrendous charges against him and the €3000 reward the Munich police were offering for any tip leading to his arrest and conviction, I signed up for Wikipedia and added that information. Not the most earth-moving of gestures, but maybe it helped somewhat in the hunt for him. Who knows?

In the meantime, there’s no shortage of drivel and slop passing for music by Oliver Shanti available on YouRube. On this one, notice the Viva music channel logo in the top-right corner. If they haven’t done so already, will someone please tell those people to stop putting this guy’s crap on the air?

BTW, if you didn’t click on his fan site, at least check out the guest page. Brutal stuff.

Obama smear campaigner Larry Sinclair arrested after press conference

My first plunge into the frothy cesspool of US politics the other day resulted in a rude reminder of just what lurks out there, so at the risk of once again having my entire post swallowed up and regurgitated with my name changed on the right-wing drivel and splog site Free Republic, it’s time to take a look at what happened yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

That’s where Larry Sinclair, perpetrator of one of the most vile smear campaigns ever thrown at a US presidential candidate, got his chance to blow 3000 bucks and state his case before an invited press.

Well, turns out the man with the long criminal record and outstanding warrant was arrested shortly after and is now in custody.

So far the mainstream press has ignored his claims, including this recent development.  Even Fox Spews - Fare for the Unbalanced - has ignored the guy.

Granted, the Globe - no not the Boston Globe, the Alien Headhunters Kidnapped Pam Anderson’s Unborn Teenage Love Child supermarket checkout Globe - ran something on him a few months back, but from the wires, the mainstream newspapers, tv stations, websites?  Nada.

Given that there is nothing to substantiate his claims, is there any other reaction more appropriate?

I think there is.  Publish!  Get him on Larry King!  Get him on Jon Stewart!  Tell the world!  Let everyone get a good, long look at the level to which the enemies of a good man are willing to sink in order to draw attention to themselves and maybe even make a few bucks in the process.

It’s like Scientology.  The more you read about it, the more you realise not only how crazy the inventor must have been, but how deluded his followers are.

 

Too bad we can’t just ignore the Larry Sinclair smear campaign against Barack Obama

Mark June 18th on your calendar.
That’s the day the National Press Club in Washington, DC will give centre stage to the man behind one of the sleaziest smear campaigns ever perpetrated against a US presidential candidate.
Larry Sinclair has for months been blathering on his blog and in a YouTube video that Barack Obama has a dark secret his supporters wish would just go away. He says Obama likes to sleep with men.
Difficult to do, but in case you missed it, here’s a little rundown of his claims:

• Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair had sex in a Chicago hotel room in late 1999 while Sinclair was on parole.
• Barack Obama supplied the cocaine and crack cocaine he smoked while Sinclair performed oral sex on Obama
• Donald Young, the gay choir director at Obama’s former church, contacted Sinclair in December, 2007 shortly before Young was murdered. Sinclair says Young told him he had a similar relationship with Obama.
• Sinclair now claims to be getting death threats; cancel the press conference or get shot.

With the possible exception of The Cleveland Leader which points out Sinclair failed a polygraph test, the mainstream press has completely ignored him. So has Barack Obama, but leading up to Wednesday’s presser and beyond, you have to wonder for how long he can hold off.

There have been so many rumours circulating about Obama and his wife - Obama’s a Muslim, Obama’s book contains racist remarks, Obama’s hiding his birth certificate, Obama’s wife has been seen on video calling people “whitey” from a church pulpit, and other trash - they’ve set up a website to fight the smears. They even ask readers to send in new rumours they’ve heard so they can address them.

What’s notable is they still have yet to mention Sinclair. But with more than 1.25 million hits on the Sinclair blog and hundreds of thousands having seen the YouTube video, they can’t deny nobody’s heard of it.

A number of prominent liberal blogs have said the National Press Club is simply feeding the troll by taking Sinclair’s 3000 bucks and booking his room. Thousands have already signed a petition asking the NPC to cancel the event.

I hope the press conference is held and I hope Obama does get around to Sinclair. There’s a risk that the ranks of Sinclair’s deluded fans and followers will grow in giving this guy the limelight, but if you’ve set up a website to counter rumours and allegations only to ignore the worst, it will be viewed as running away from the issue or pretending it doesn’t exist. Obama has to defend himself.

Besides, Sinclair may be renting a pulpit and floor space and hoping the cameras and scribblers show up, but he must know that going to the press is a double-edged sword. If they do decide to run with this story, playing up Sinclair’s dubious past is the most likely angle they’ll take. Sinclair’s police wanted poster on charges of theft and forgery will surely be included.

But if the world does turn out to be flat and Sinclair’s allegations somehow prove to be true, Obama should be shunned and banished from the stage forever, but not for taking drugs and having gay sex. What country on earth would want to have as its leader someone with such horrible taste? Have you watched that video? Surely if Obama was bent in that direction and could have his pick of lovers and rent boys, he could do one hell of a lot better than Larry Sinclair.

Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper runs photo of naked 13-year-old

It always bugs me how many hits I get on this blog from knuckle-draggers and mouth-breathers looking for kiddie porn, naked 10-year-olds and similar illegal content.

It’s a Google phenomenon, I guess. If you’ve built up a collection of posts with completely unrelated tags or words in the title that add up to a string of words one of these losers is typing in, Bang! Someone looking for naked kids comes to your blog.

But they wouldn’t even have had to have gone online had they been lurking around German newspaper stands on August 3, 2003. That was the day that Bild, Europe’s largest-circulation newspaper and world’s fifth-largest, ran a photo of a naked 13-year-old girl.

An excerpt from the Spiegel online article which translates what Bild wrote as a caption:

Hotsy-Botsy, this summer is becoming a catwalk for naked children.** The sun is stroking our beautiful women in their birthday suits more beautifully than ever before. Melanie from Leipzig, too, just can’t keep her clothes on in this heat. Do your clothes slip off in this desert heat, too? BILD is seeking the hottest summer girl. Send us your beat the heat photos.

The editors give a gosh-we-didn’t-know-she-was-underage excuse, which is funny because as the excellent Bildblog points out - in German - Melanie’s write-up that day was the only one in the series which didn’t mention her age.

I guess given the tabloid’s reputation for getting it wrong willfully or through incompetence it would be asking way too much to expect Bild’s editors to adhere to one of the guiding principles of journalism: when in doubt, leave it out.

But like the old line, Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, here they must have been saying Who cares? As long as our sales aren’t the only things that are firm.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

**Literal translation of the German Nackedei, which you call kids as they run around naked.

Blogging about blogging isn’t all that bad, is it?

Caution: 525-word ramble ahead.

A reader who sometimes emails in his comments rather than place them in the appropriate box had this to say about my recent post on how if I were to quit blogging, I’d do it My Way.

Not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.  However, I’ve noted in general that I’m not fond of songs about singing, movies about movie-making, and blog posts about blogging kinda fall into the mold.  To be good, a blog poster must have a unique experience to share with the world, and the greatest blogs are like that.  Your friend the psych nurse is about as unique as they get.  You, as an expat small-town Canuck are similarly imbued with a perspective that lends itself to insights no-one else will have.

Blogging about blogging seems somehow to be merely filling space.  On the other hand, one of your best efforts was the 20 commandments one.  Like I say, not being a blogger, I’m not really qualified to comment about the content.

I agree with him up to a point.  It’s true you will never turn on the TV News to hear the announcer say: Today at an editorial meeting this station’s editors decided to place the item you are about to see two items down from the item you just saw because… well actually we had to decide it by an arm-wrestle followed by rock-paper-scissors, and Susan won.

The media doesn’t like to talk about itself or other media because it’s generally seen as navel-gazing.  Still, most every newspaper and newsmagazine has a media page where the trivialities of news personalities and media trends are written up and discussed.  The media also makes the news when it’s a big business story, and editorial content there is often brought up.

Unless of course you’re talking Richard Quest at CNN, where getting caught with in the park with your pants down and your wing-wang out and tied to a rope while snorting illegal pharma products won’t generate so much as a burp’s worth of mention down in Atlanta. 

So when a blogger blogs about blogging when his blog isn’t mainly about blogging but about getting down what’s going on in his head while living this Canadian-expat-in-Germany life so that one day when they drag what’s left of him out from under the wheels of a bus his wife, daughter and people closest to him will be able to say, “yeah, I really knew him…”  is that such a bad thing?

I don’t think so. 

If you’re talking about the process of doing this very public and at times very thought-provoking hobby - and a hobby is all it will ever be to me - you can’t help but want to discuss the things you go through.  So many issues come up, be they about relationships, online etiquette, joy, frustrations, fatigue, the learning process and so forth.

I realise it could get a bit repetitious, so I try to pace myself, but there’s simply so much going on while doing this, it can’t be just ignored. 

So forgive me if sometime over the next couple of days I post the third one in a row about blogging.  It’s just kind of built up to it. 

Score one for Toytown Germany

Ever been on a forum for a while and notice that it’s always the same-old, same-old? The same people talking about the same things, usually pointless banter, often turning into infantile squabbles, name-calling, and other crap you thought you’d left behind before high school?

Sometimes, though, you run across a gem of a post. Like this one today on Toytown, a forum for English-speaking expats living in Germany. Seems a few women in Munich had been noticing that in the city’s main central square Marienplatz, they were getting hit on. A lot.

So one member - a good-looking 23-year-old woman who became suspicious after being chatted up three times in two months by German men all in the same small area of town - decided to test things out. Even better, she brought along a fellow forum member to take photos.

Hanging out on the square for a while, sure enough, a guy came up and started to chat her up, followed by his wingman. As the post says, both are members of the Munich Lair, an online club for guys who get together to try to pick up women.

Great stuff. A little investigative reporting, a little story-telling, photos to back it up. Brilliant!

Asking questions of beauty in Paris, city of women

Back in early February after our long weekend in London, I mentioned that we were headed to Paris in the Spring. A commenter who is also a poet pointed out that London is usually seen as a man’s city, Paris a woman’s, and that he was interested in seeing my take on Paris as opposed to London.

In the meantime - a week or so before we left - A Guide to the Pretty Women of Paris was published. Written by the French foreign minister’s speech-writer, it caused a bit of a stir in feminist circles because it points out where to find the city’s most beautiful women according to age, manner of dress, income level, where you might catch a good view up their skirts, where to find the best-looking legs…

That shred of the lingering adolescent in me was tempted to grab a copy as soon as we got there as a bit of a lark, maybe check out a quarter or two to see if any of it had any truth, but I’m glad I didn’t. Around noon on our first day there, I’d already come to the conclusion it must be more joke novelty than guide.

Unless you’re blind or have a fetish for the morbidly obese, it’s impossible to walk more than a block or two in Paris without coming across a woman who is worth much more than a passing glance. It is full of well-dressed, attractive women of every age and race.

So it’s perhaps fitting that a city whose reputation celebrates the ultimate in feminine beauty should be hosting an exhibition entitled Femmes du Monde - The World’s Women.

The artist Titouan Lamazou spent six years collecting photographs of women in some of the most remote recesses of the planet, using those photos as a basis for portraiture in pencil, charcoal, pastel and watercolour.

Like the life-sized photo of a Mongolian woman sitting in her yurt, the images tempt you to step in and learn more about who they are, what their lives are like, where they’ve come from and where they’re going. A Sao Paolo garbage-picker who became a fashion model, a lone female UN soldier on an African peacekeeping mission, an Australian Aboriginal artist, refugees, factory workers, strippers, prostitutes… All are given equal weight with not a whiff of judgment on their choices or maudlin pity of their circumstances.

Saving the best for last, the exhibition hall terminates at where the concepts of idealised feminine beauty, freedom of choice and the market collide: our mania for plastic surgery and the phenomenon of the Real Doll - made-to-order life-sized male masturbation aides which sell for $8,000 US apiece. If you’ve never heard of the Real Doll, I suggest you click on that link.

On one side, a collection of photos of about 20 women - some pre- and post-op - from Calí, Colombia, the South American capital of surgical silicone.

On the other, a wall-sized photograph of the inside of Real Doll’s factory, their lifeless, spread-legged, open-mouthed female effigies suspended on a curving track along the ceiling like so much quartered beef at a slaughterhouse.

The best for last because the questions are almost screaming at you: Is the Real Doll the pinnacle of beauty that every woman should strive for no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk to her health? Or are the silicone breasts, suctioned hips and trimmed-back labia these women carry around the ideal for Real Doll? Which is the model for which?

This photo doesn’t do the room justice and is actually a little blurry because I took it furtively. But if you’re headed to Paris and would like to see the exhibition in person, it is in the Musée de l’Homme just a stone’s throw across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Due to popular demand it has been extended several times.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

if facebook were real life

My Facebook usage has followed a path typical of millions:

Curiosity.

Sign-up.

Enthusiasm.

Disappointment.

Boredom.

Scrabulous.

Yep. After eight months, all I ever use it for is to play Scrabulous. Why? This will give you a clue. Enjoy.