Alan McDougall

I have been silly nit picking about totally irrelevant things, sorry it will stop pronto

I think it takes a higher intellect to lie and difficult to perpetuate that lie without slipping up and been caught out and embarrassed to the point of feeling like a caged animal trying to escape If you tell the truth, you are on safe ground and don't need to repeat it as it becomes self evident. A guy went to his dentist and just before the procedure said seriously " Do you promise to pull the tooth the whole tooth and nothing other"?

You stated in this post that statistics shows a pretty steady decline since the abolishment of capital punishment in South Africa in 1995, in this you were wrong or your citations were inaccurate.. http://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-south-africas-official-crime-statistics-for-201213/ The facts about the increases in interpersonal violence are as follows: Incidents of murder increased from 15 609 murders in 2011/12 to 16 259 murders in 2012/13. This means that there was an increase of 650 murder cases or a 4,2% increase when comparing the total numbers of murders with the previous year. This works out to almost two additional murders per day on average during the 2012/13 financial year. Consequently, our murder rate increased from a total average of 43 murders per day to 45 murders per day. Using the correct census data for 2011, the murder rate in 2011/12 was 30.3 per 100,000 population and not 30,9 as reported by SAPS in the last reporting period. The murder rate for 2012/13 stood at 31.3 per 100,000 population which reflects an increase of 2.8% in the rate of murders (not 0.6% as presented officially). South Africa’s murder rate is therefore about four and a half times higher than the global average of 6.9 murders per 100 000. Attempted murder cases increased from 14 859 to 16 363, an increase of 10.1% Attempted murder rates increased by 8,7% in the past year. Sexual offence cases increased from 64 514 to 66 387, an increase of 2.9%. Sexual offence rates increased from 125,1 per 100000 to 127,0 per 100000 population an increase of 1.5%. There has also been an increase in robberies in 2012/13, which is a crime that the police can directly reduce through employing effective strategies. Robberies pose a particular concern as they occur when armed perpetrators directly threaten or use violence against their victims in order to steal their belongings. This can result in severe trauma, injury or sometimes death to the victim. The total number of aggravated robberies reported to the police increased from 101 203 cases to 105 888 cases (an increase of 4 685 cases) or 4.6%. The aggravated robbery rate increased by 196.2 per 100 000 people to 202.6 per 100 000 people of which represents an increase of 3.2%. Carjacking, house robbery and business robbery) increased substantially. Between 2004/05 and 2008/09 business robbery had increased by 319%, house robbery by 96% and hijacking by 20%. These crimes drive fear and insecurity as they affect victims in their homes, vehicles and places of work. - · Residential burglary increased by 6.8% (an additional 16 582 cases) to a total 262 113 incidents in 2012/13. This means that each day on average 720 households were burgled. · Business burglary increased by 5.1% (an additional 3 589 cases) to a total of 70 041 incidents. This means that each day on average 193 businesses were burgled. · Theft out of and from motor vehicle rate increased by 7% (an additional 9 183 cases) to a total of 130 475 incidents. This means that each day on average 358 vehicles are broken into and property stolen. · Commercial crime incidents (which include a range of crimes including fraud and corruption) increased by 4% (an additional 3 019 cases) to a total of 91 569 incidents. A single incident can involve tens of millions of Rands. R1O = $1 Explaining crime in the past year 2012/2013 The crime statistics presented for the 2012/13 financial year (1 April 2012 to 31 March 2013) reveals that South Africa experienced one of its worst years in a number of years from a crime reduction point of view. This is because for the past eight years between 2002 and 2011 there have been notable decreases in most crime categories. Some of the largest decreases were recorded in 2009/10 when the football Confederation Cup year was held and in 2010/11 when South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup. However, since 2011/12 it was already apparent that the decreases previously recorded in several types of violent crime had slowed substantially while other violent crime categories (such as business and house robberies) had stabilized at relatively high levels (I accept this as fact my comment Alan). Driving under the influence of alcohol showed by far the smallest increase during 2012/2013 compared to any other 12-month period over the past decade. Drug related crime on the other hand increased by a substantial 13,5% It was the single largest annual increase in the past decade. This indicates concerted police action against drug crimes. However, it is not an indication of the amount of drugs being used or sold. If the police are having a positive impact in removing drugs then the best indicator is that the street price should increase because demand will start to outstrip supply.

I knew that the precession of Mercury orbit had something to do with curvature of spacetime, but sadly I just used my faulty memory instead of checking out my facts before posting on the topic at hand. Sorry guys I am only frail old man!

I don't believe your near death experience was just an hallucination, also we do somehow get a peek into the future, especially in our dreams. Like you I have had both a near death experience and an out of body event. The out of body experience was very scary, I felt as if a malevolent dark entity was hovering over me.. Here is an odd experience I had during the 1970's with a friend of mine by the name of Tony The day my friend Tony Martin and I saw a vision in the clouds When I worked at the Vereeniging Branch Office at Eskom I took a friend Tony Martin by car with me on a visited to a Power Station at Newcastle in Natal province. On the way back home, Tony perplexed kept looking out of his side of the car window, and finally said to me “Look at that very strange cloud”. I stopped the car and, pulled to the side of the road and we got out and looked up into the clouds above. To our amazement, one cloud was stationary, while all the others moved in the usual way as the wind blows them across h the blue sky above. What was really almost beyond belief was the fact that the inner part of this very strange cloud was bright green, and surrounding with a bright skirt or edge of beautiful pink in its luminosity. Neither Tony nor I had ever seen such a beautiful cloud or object in all our lives. Tony just stood there in amazement and wept. Over the years I have tried to come up with a rational explanation of what we saw that day. I said to Tony, “that no one will ever believe us when we tell them, when we arrive at home". He was right Denise, my wife just said we had both just mistook an ordinary cloud for some mysterious object. I am not sure what Kathy Tony’s wife said, but I think it was something similar. But we both saw the exact same phenomenon for which up to this day I have been unable to explain rationally! ©Copyright Alan McDougall 2013

If you had taken the time to read through my opening post, I made no mention of capital punishment being a deterrent of criminal murders, they will murder her and to hell with the rest of humanity. I wrote this in my post 1 I never said anything about capital punishment being a deterrent, the purpose of this thread was to generate dialogue, such as capital punishment bringing closer the the victims family, instead of knowing that a depraved serial killer is being kept in prison at the cost of the state.

They were not kids but the figment of someones imagination, he should have imagined a better way of changing the spaceships direction, surly there were other objects in the spaceship that could have been used for the same purpose?

You are right I am baffled by my fixation on the planet Mercury Stars, which had absolutely nothing to do with the event?

Tell us about it, an experience is an experience? Maybe but isn't what we cant explain rationally, supernatural?

Your link to Wikipedia which supposedly reflects South African Police statics is just an example of our police lying to the public,to bolster their pathetic efforts to limit crime over here. Unlike you I live in SA and exist in this reality, it is easy to post statistics of a corrupt organization, but have you read the book " How to lie with statistics" that link is a perfect example! Do you think that Wikipedia is a reliable source? Police brutality is a common event in SA. The comparison made between the annual murder rate between that of South Africa and that of the USA was just that, the whole of USA which with a population of some 300 million people, have less murders in a year than South Africa with a population of 50 million. That is a statistic that should speak to you!I In South Africa it is the criminals that have easy access to illegal guns, in the USA nearly everyone, get a gun legally by going to the nearest gun shop, surely you can see the contrast between these two countries. The USA has millions of citizens with guns, in South Africa we have millions of criminals with guns, that is a huge difference in my opinion.

But why use kids?

Shooting kids out of a spaceship is an intellectual exercise ?

http://www.space.com/24207-dark-energy-galaxy-map-aas223.html The new results, presented by Schlegel and his colleagues here today (Jan. 8) at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, also provide one of the best-ever determinations of the curvature of space, researchers said. In short, the universe appears to be quite "flat," meaning that its shape can be described well by Euclidean geometry, in which straight lines are parallel and the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees. "One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite," Schlegel said. "That means — while we can't say with certainty that it will never come to an end — it's likely the universe extends forever in space and will go on forever in time. Our results are consistent with an infinite universe." BOSS astronomers use a spectrograph on the Sloan Foundation's 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to make their observations. "On a clear night when everything goes perfectly, we can add more than 8,000 galaxies and quasars to the map," Kaike Pan, who leads the team of observers working with the spectrograph, said in a statement. The team has presented other results from the galaxy survey. However, the new map extends the survey's reach, more than doubling the size of the examined area and thereby allowing for more precise measurements. The newly presented data also include earlier results that surveyed nearby galaxies, BOSS officials said. "Making these measurements at two different distances allows us to see how the expansion of the universe has changed over time, which will help us understand why it is accelerating," explained University of Portsmouth astronomer Rita Tojeiro, who co-chairs the BOSS galaxy clustering working group along with Jeremy Tinker of New York University. The new results should help lay the foundation for even more-precise measurements in the coming years, Schlegel said. "Future surveys will be doing more of this, both filling in this map of the universe, [and] the enormous volume of the universe we have yet to map out and doing this with even higher precision," Schlegel said here today at the AAS meeting. Interesting!

That is a very difficult one, no one really knows for sure how brave they would be in a life or death situation. There is a saying , "No greater love is there when one lays down his life for a friend" I do know, however I would lie to save those very close to me, like my wife , children and grandchildren. But for strangers that is debatable, of course the reality of the Nazi situation if you tell the truth that you had hidden Jewish people in your home, your fate would become be the same as theirs, and you would most likely perish in the death camps. Thus, I would lie, hoping against hope that I get away with it. What would you do ? I am sure that I have been married much longer than you, at my age everyone is younger than me. There are some people that are terrified by this awful truth, so I do not think it can be generalized like you suggest It is not as simple as that in the real world! You are a mere spring chicken, share nearly all the same interests .

Start a separate thread under speculations, I am interested in any new theory, who knows you might be the next Einstein Alan McDougall, on 07 Jan 2014 - 4:43 PM, said: Do I get it right yet, I will in future not trust my memory but get first if what I think is correct ? I did mention Ellington's Eddington and his test with the position of the planet "Mercury during an eclipse" Mercury appeared from behind the moon Sun before it should have

Can you elaborate , we might find then very interesting? Some of your experiences remind me of my bipolar disorder, I recently started a thread in the psychiatric sub- forum tilled "The Brilliant Madness" I am not suggesting that you suffer from any mental disorder, but the similarity of some of your events, to that of mine are interesting

Thank you It has cost me so much pain in my life, effecting my family friends and ruining my career leading to early retirement long before my goals in live had been achieved The profound mental pain of a serious mental disorder can be much worse than a physical problem, I know this because I have experienced both in my life time.

Should you tell an otherwise happy person, that they are going to die of cancer, a fact their doctor told you, and said it was up to you to decide, because he could not bring up the courage to tell her himself?. He has being treating her for many years and had always given her hope and assurance that in time she would be cured

You should tell her the truth, then maybe she will work out get in shape and increase her self esteem.

So you think my statement about rampant crime in SA is a fallacy, call it what you like come and visit us and the reality of it might hit you very hard South Africa has become a place where both black and white citizens have erected huge up to 9 foot walls, with electrified razor wire like a maximum security prison .This is not a philosophical topic but an awful reality that my family and I have had to live through. Crime in South Africa after free elections in 1994 By Alan McDougall You are right about SA and crime, below is a summary that I have altered to reflect the real truth and reality we have to exist in South Africa South Africa is now the most violent country outside a war zone. The country, writes Scott Baldauf of the Christian Science Monitor, has “the highest recorded per capita murder rate in the world—with 62 homicides per 100,000 people. The US, by comparison, had 6. In 2003, South Africa had 21,553 murders (population 44.6 million). In comparison, the “high crime” United States (population 288.2 million) suffered 16,110 murders in the same year... The last true statistics available,” showed that between April 2011 and March 2012, about 32,793 people were murdered in South Africa, an average of about 90 a day in a nation of 50 million.. There were 40,516 attempted murders, 300,369 assaults with grievous injury, and 90,114 rapes of unimaginable brutality, sometimes gang rapes by twenty men or more on a young teenager, and even the unspeakable horror of tiny babies as young as three months of age, been raped by adult men, often killing these little children in the process? The crimes are committed almost exclusively by black men, in the cities in equal proportion on innocent whites, blacks and Asians South Africans. Most of South Africa's farming community have been murdered because they are considered to be the hated Afrikaners Boer or farmer. Thus these reprobates are biting off the hands that feed them, like some savage jungle animal. South Africa previously the bread basked of Africa might soon have to import food from abroad due to uncontrolled rampant crime. The South African Medical Research Council claims there are approximately a third more murders in South Africa than the official police statistics reveal. A discrepancy of over 10,000 murders a year, shall we say a huge margin of error. So in reality about 45, 000 or more innocent people were murdered in South Africa, during one statistical year and by comparison with USA, which had during the same period of time, only 16, 500 murders, with a population six times the size of that of South Africa. Yet Westerners, conservatives included, praise the new dispensation in my old home. According to a columnist for The American Conservative, South Africa represents “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter.” “It’s not perfect,” this flaccid fool effuses, “and crime is at an all-time high in South-African cities, but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.” False!, few people know that during the decades of the repressive apartheid regime, only a few hundred Africans perished as a direct result of police brutality A horrible injustice, indubitably, but nothing approximating the carnage under “free” South Africa, where thousands of Africans perished every few months. Let us not beat about the bush; crime in South Africa is black on black and black on white. Not to bring up the racialist card again , but why is it that nearly all serious crimes in South Africa are not done by whites , but is nearly always done by black men on black men , woman and children and is always done by black men on white men, white woman and children. The same goes for other ethnic groups in South Africa; it is always black criminals murdering other groups and never the reverse Alan McDougall 1998 A South African Citizen Writes Take the travails of my extended family. Ordinarily, a one-case study does not a rule make. But not in this instance—you’d be hard pressed to find a family in democratic South Africa whose members have not been brutalized by barbarians. Mine includes a sister-in-law suffering permanent neurological damage after being assaulted by five Africans; a brother burglarized and beaten in his suburban fortress at 2:00am by an African gang (wife and infant son were miraculously spared). My father’s neighbour was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. My husband’s cousin and uncle were hijacked; aunt beaten within an inch of her life and raped. Two of his colleagues (that we know of) were murdered; one shot by African taxi drivers in broad daylight, as he left his girlfriend’s apartment. Despite the oppressive, undesirable, political aspects of apartheid, law and order was maintained and common criminals were pursued and prosecuted, to the benefit of all. To appropriate the gallant words of Gen. Sir Charles Napier: Before 1994, when African men raped infants and tiny babies because the “practice” is considered a traditional salve or cure for AIDS, South African policemen followed their custom: they tied a rope around the rapist’s neck and hung him. Yes these beasts’ rape babies as young as six months old! The policemen who did this were mostly from the outraged black community. Since the near-total collapse of law and order, the conviction rate hovers at 2.96 percent! In conclusion Alan McDougall writes The above reflects my daily reality, we have to live behind barbwire, electric fencing, and burglar bars like that of fort Knox and pay huge amounts of money to private security firms because the corrupt police cannot cope and are mostly criminals themselves. My own daughter Alison has been accosted in her own home by these thieving criminals, her home was violated by these intruders, while her husband was away, and they stole nearly every item of value in her home , while as Alison and her children watched helplessly, fearing the worst was still to come. It was only Alison’s intelligent foresight in engaging one of the criminals in conversation, relating to his personal struggle with poverty and finally getting him to perceive her as a fellow human being and not an object to be sexually violated. In fact one of these reprobates had begun to stroke her hair to the great distress of her daughter Daniela, before Alison got him to inform the others to leave her alone and just take the valuables from the house. This was a very close call, and I am sure Alison suffered from post traumatic stress and flash backs for years after the event and if I had been my normal self when this happened I would have insisted she went to counseling. I thank God that her husband Dave was not at home when this happened, because all of them might have all been murdered by these thugs. I live here and have access to the real truth of the matter. © Alan Grant McDougall 2003

Do you mean the "eye for an eye" justice of the Old Testament?

South Africa has extremely strict gun laws that make it almost impossible for the average citizen to obtain a gun legally. But you can go down to a street corner and obtain AK 47 for a few dollars, a pistol is even easier to get. It seems to average South African citizen is being held hostage by the criminals. People here are being shot for their cell phones,murdered for a dollar, we have the unimaginable crime of men raping little babies because they think it is a cure for aids, or even worse as depraved pedophiles. A Saturday evening group fun activity is the famous South African pastime of necklacing, here groups of so called vigilantes roam the streets, grab an unlucky person , put an old care tire around his neck, pour gasoline on the horrified, terrified victim and watch him burn alive, until all that is left of him, is charcoal.

Have you had an experience or an event during your life, that you cannot explain rationally? I have had a few very odd moments over the span of my somewhat protracted life, but will not write about them, unless other members show interest in the topic.

Must a person always tell the truth, I will bounce the topic with that question?

The Death Penalty by Alan McDougall This is an ongoing subject but in my country of South Africa where the death penalty's been abolished from law crime is now rampant and risen to unimaginable heights South Africa my country has discontinued with capital punishment against the wishes of the majority and crime has worsened unimaginably. I believe only Colombia has worse crime statistics I think there is a point in that, one of the arguments pro-capital punishments being deterrence of future crimes. Personally, I'm more of a 'murdering a murderer isn't justice, just more murder' kind of guy. Life was indeed ended, and as it warranted murder in the first degree then it was probably with malicious intent, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it makes it okay for anyone to kill the murderer. Then what separates us? Capital punishment, be it moral, immoral or amoral is responsible, in theory at least: those that enable execution take responsibility for the life or death of a convicted criminal. Also, it is a human system and thus fallible. Thus an innocent person in a society having capital punishment may be killed and the responsible parties are responsible for that death. I would not call this legalized murder, but it is legalized manslaughter. Some may write this off as collateral damage, but to what end? One need not assign moral value to state executions unless one can show that they are required in some way: only then does this become a question of the lesser of two evils. Capital punishment has been an important issue for as long as I can remember, and I have always considered and reconsidered the issue and my stance on it, and never have I heard of realized the justification for its requirement. I think this is because people either start from the point of view of it being right or wrong, never of whether it is necessary. For instance, the banning of capital punishment in South Africa appears to have a clear correlation with increased crime, but one must have some idea of what this correlation is before one could sanction its reinstatement, or else you're sponsoring execution 'just in case'. Why doesn't life imprisonment do the same trick? Both are strong incentives to obey the law. In conclusion the death penalty, in my opinion would/did give a real sense of closer to the families of the victims of hideous serial killers like the cannibal, Jeffrey Darhma , or Ted Bundy or our particular serial Killer Joseph Setoli who raped and then murdered 38 woman Alan Grant McDougall 1998