Cocklecarrot said afterwards, 'I am hoping that my next case will not include these tiresome little gentlemen. I think I am about due for a bit of straightforward stuff, without all these distractions and fooleries.'

It is spring in the Southern Bloggisphere, and time to set out the Stupid Traps, in the hope of catching some fresh Stupid to augment the diet of preserved Stupid - dried, frozen, fermented and smoked - that has sustained us through the cruel months of winter.

And who should blunder into the trap but David Noakes, a reliable source of Riddled material on account of his GcMAF-related activities! Please enjoy this Daily Fail report from Southwark Crown Court, transcribed and edited by devotees of Beckett's dramaturgy so that each paragraph contains at most one sentence, transforming each peroration from Judge Loraine-Smith into a lengthy passage of dialog. Ideally it would have been written in the style of Beachcomber, with Loraine-Smith in the role of the long-suffering Justice Cocklecarrot, but FSM does not love us enough for that.

‘There are problems and Mr Noakes has problems,’ continued the judge, adding that he had seen psychiatric evidence that the defendant is mentally unwell.
‘The reason he is depressed is because he has these extradition proceedings. As I understand it, the French authorities are seeking to extradite Mr Noakes.’
The court heard that Noakes had sold vials of the blood product to customers in France and that investigators in that country were seeking to prosecute him.
The judge explained that further issues had also arisen because Noakes had refused to deal with his legal representatives.
The defendant said: ‘I have not been engaging with my solicitors.’
Judge Loraine-Smith replied: ‘I know and I wish you would, you have very real problems. You need experienced lawyers to deal with the legal system as it is rather than the legal system as others wish is was.’
He explained that he had received a document from Noakes that attempted to throw the case out of court.
The judge said the document contained references to ‘Deuteronomy, The Book of Malachi and The Stone of Scone - it has nothing to do with this case.
‘I am not going to say what I think about it, it would be impolite if I did. This, and I have carefully read it, does not help you - it is of no relevance at all.'
‘I think your case has been hijacked,’ added the judge.
‘It has nothing to do with an English court of law.’
Noakes responded that he did not think his solicitors were acting in his best interest.
‘Under duress, they got me to plead guilty. Three of them pounced on me with no warning'.

He fought the Lore, but the Lore won! Noakes' 50-odd supporters - some in the courtroom but mostly milling around outside - will have to stand in for the Twelve Red-Bearded Dwarfs (in these debased times they are the best we can expect).*

He appeared at Southwark Crown Court today flanked by roughly fifty supporters to face a confiscation hearing to allow the court to recoup his criminal earnings.
The hearing was delayed after supporters were stopped by security from entering the already packed courtroom.
Shouts of ‘If there’s a cure for terminal cancer in this room I want it,’ and, ‘There is a lot of rigour in the judging exams lack of justice in there,’ could be heard through the door.
Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith told the angry crowd: ‘None of you are doing Mr Noakes any favours.
‘Last year Mr Noakes pleaded guilty to some offences, I then took over the case and I had a lengthy Newton hearing in which I heard a lot of evidence about Mr Noakes.
‘I sentenced him to 15 months in prison and he has served that sentence.
‘The case is not about GcMAF. It is my duty to say what money can be got back.’
One woman in the public gallery walked out midway through the hearing, shouting: ‘I’m not listening to this bulls**t.’
‘Well, there we are,’ the judge replied, ‘I know a lot of people feel very strongly and sincerely about GcMAF.'

It is heartwarming that so many people will rally against Injustice, and for the worthy cause of "Letting a multimillionaire hang on to the proceeds of fraud". Our estimation at Riddled is that

• one third of them were Freeman-on-the-Land Common-Law-Court bumblefucks, hoping to see Noakes invoke their supra-legal theories and Ontological proofs and thereby force the consensus English legal structure to dissolve in a puff of logic.
• One third were raggle-taggle Truthers and conspiracists, knowing sweet-fuck-all about the background of Noakes' crimes but compelled by a gaes to support whatever the opposite of the real-world evidence-based perspective might be.
• One third had restraining orders preventing them from abusing their children any more, and their sympathy for Noakes springs from the fact that he, like them, is about to be deprived of his property.

They have all been herded together by Ian R. Crane, conspiracist impresario and aspirant Pope of Paranoia, who has a bona-fide stake in Noakes’ legal tribulations because if the Law can confiscate all of Noakes' assets obtained by fraud then no scammer is safe.

"CALL TO ACTION : GcMAF Awareness Day - 11th SEPT 2019"

Crane prefers to issue Papal Bulls to his audience from a field somewhere in England. I assume this is to protect himself from chemtrails and 5G mobile telephony. The additional roaming sheep in the background are not necessarily a comment on his opinion of that audience.

[H/t Dora]

* The court had to be cleared owing to the roars of ribald laughter which greeted the appearance in the witness-box of the twelve red-bearded dwarfs all in a heap. Their names were read out amid growing uproar. The names appeared to be: Sophus Barkayo-Tong, Amaninter Axling, Farjole Merrybody, Guttergorm Guttergormpton, Badly Oronparser, Churm Rincewind, Cleveland Zackhouse, Molonay Tubilderborst, Edeledel Edel, Scorpion de Rooftrouser, Listenis Younghaupt, Frums Gillygottle.
Cocklecarrot: Are these genuine names?
A Dwarf; No, m'worship.
Cocklecarrot: Then what's your name?
Dwarf: Bogus, m'ludship.
Cocklecarrot: No, your real name.
Dwarf: My real name is Bogus, your excellency.
(At this point the court had to be cleared)

Arbitrary and capricious punishment

Evidently the only man whom goats respect could not be contacted. Previous installment here.

It would certainly be unacceptable if Constable Pedersen had wasted public money by using more Taser shots than necessary.

That's the way you do it! [Riddled Book Club edition]

Isn't it always the same? You wait and wait for a detection / police-procedural novel deeply steeped in love for London, with the hunchbacked puppet Punch as the chief suspect -- in his role as Lord of Misrule and homicidal psychopath -- and then two come along at once.

Now Mr Punch is clearly a victim of his social environment. The other occupants of his fictive world are equally prone to stick-related violence, and it would not end well if the entire murderous menage followed him into what we laughingly call "reality".

Note also that Mr Punch has made himself useful to the agents of law enforcement, as an informant, which is probably why he escaped justice for so long despite his involvement as accomplice in crime. His career as a snitch goes back at least to 1837, the date of the events recorded "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance", when Toby the Dog was evidently a recent addition to the typical Punch dramatis personae.

Toby dogs, you know, are the last new thing in the shows. I have only seen one myself, but before long all the men will have them.

In that case the actual malefactors were [SPOILER ALERT] the Punch-&-Judy showmen (or so it would seem, as both die before they can incriminate the puppet directly). The Punch-booth is haunted... but before that, a dream nightmare sequence unfolds:

Facing me there was a Punch and Judy Show, perhaps rather larger than the ordinary ones, painted with black figures on a reddish-yellow ground. Behind it and on each side was only darkness, but in front there was a sufficiency of light. [...] There was something Satanic about the hero. He varied his methods of attack: for some of his victims he lay in wait, and to see his horrible face — it was yellowish white, I may remark — peering round the wings made me think of the Vampyre in Fuseli’s foul sketch. To others he was polite and carneying — particularly to the unfortunate alien who can only say Shallabalah — though what Punch said I never could catch. But with all of them I came to dread the moment of death. The crack of the stick on their skulls, which in the ordinary way delights me, had here a crushing sound as if the bone was giving way, and the victims quivered and kicked as they lay.

Anyway, Mr Punch is clearly a negative role model and not someone with whom minors should associate... as has been explored at length by McKean and Gaiman.



Of course Mr Punch is most relevant to our interests for his presence in the background and in the backstory of Riddley Walker, where the Punch-&-Judy show has an importance comparable to a medieval Mystery Play, being one of the few surviving vestiges of pre-Apocalypse culture.

So here at stately Riddled Towers and Highrise Parking Building, fierce debate has raged over his precise folkloric role. Some set him within the context of the old pagan traditions... along with Morris dancing and beltane fires and Maypoles and Wicker Men and Mummer Plays (which is to say, head-hunting human sacrifice and the Shamanic journey on the Hobby-horse). The corollary follows that Punch will feature in an unwritten novel in Holdstock's Mythago Wood cycle, existing in alternative realities if not this one, and the Library Pixies have been asked to check the shelves. The other viewpoint sees Punch as an urban construct, created by the pressures of unnatural high-population-density existence -- the repression of natural urges to cudgel people to death -- as a kind of embodied safety valve. In which case the non-author of the nonexistent novel was or will be J. G. Ballard.

No-one pays any attention to my own theory that the Punch-&-Judy booth is actually a form of Memory Theatre. The suggestion that Punch is merely a character from the Commedia dell'Arte --transposed into the medium of slapstick puppetry and elevated to the giddy empyrean of "Quintessential Symbol of Timeless English Tradition" -- was treated with the contempt it deserves.

There is always a relevant Oglaf

"Memory of Blood" and "Rivers of London" are both ripping yarns. The latter, though, has a shout-out to "Death Line" and the Russell Square tube station:

Russell Square lies a kilometre north of Covent Garden on the other side of the British Museum. According to Nightingale, it was at the heart of a literary and philosophical movement in the early years of the last century, but I remember it because of an old horror movie about cannibals living in the Underground system.

"Death Line / Raw Meat" is a great little movie, far too good to be a product of this reality, and I can only suppose that it found its way here by quantum-tunnelling from a superior time-line in which it was the pilot episode of a long-running comedy/horror TV series.

Then there was this passage. Published in 2011, it was clearly inspired by the notorious piracy of a publication in Gut, by hepatologists Finelli & Tarantino, in 2012 / 2014:

The modem was hidden behind a stack of Gut: an International Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology. A jaunty subtitle revealed that Gut had indeed been voted Best Journal of Gastroenterology by gastroenterologists worldwide. I didn’t know whether to be worried or reassured by the implication that there were many more magazines devoted to the smooth functioning of my intestines. The socket for the modem looked suspiciously jury-rigged and definitely not standard NHS issue. When I asked Dr Walid about it, he merely said that he liked to keep certain of his files secure.
‘From who?’ I asked.
‘Other researchers,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking to pirate my work.’ Apparently the hepatologists were the worst.

Police did not report at what point the burglars realised what they were eating

If this does not eventually feature in a Jemaine Clement movie I shall be very disappointed.

Gnumismatics

Bitcoin have been replaced by gnomes in the Flaxmere criminal economy.

That vanished garden gnome, all those photographs you received showing it in front of famous European landmarks, you thought it was a globetrotting Gnomad when all along it was stashed in a power-bill-delinquent Flaxmere meth lab.

When I write my novel about suburban desperation, in the style of early Philip K. Dick, it will totally be set in Flaxmere.

The Proverbial Creek

One is, of course, fully aware of the great advantages and boosts to the New Zild economy that have been provided by the industry formerly known as farming. For many years we rode on the butter boxlid and came away from the cream bowl with what can only be described as a self-satisfied smirk.
"But do things not change?" I hear you ask in your wavering revisionist voice."Does not the tide of history go in and out like a whatsit and the like" you conclude somewhat lamely having exhausted your marine metaphors.
And, yes, is the answer, unlike the raisin and mackerel slices in Mrs Miggins Pie Shop and Tractor Museum things do move on and up in a ever greatening arc of getting more gooder. Except maybe for dairying in this fair land where I have it on good Facebook authority 1/2 of the country thinks farmers want to kill them. This was news to me and startled many of my acquaintances who were unprepared for my accusations of "playing the victim card." As described on Facebook.
But now comes news of the Farming Fightback as 4100 good people in the area of the town known as Havelock North have fallen sick due to foolishly drinking the water that comes out of their taps or faucets as some "cheerful in their own way" folks call them.
Now, aside from the pros and cons of drinking contaminated water when you live in Havelock North due it being only slightly more exciting than cheesecloth, it is a very bad look to have so many people poisoned by their municipality. Bad form, what.
Gradually the story has unfolded. There are three bores for Havelock North (those of us who have been there frankly exclaimed "Yeah, right" at that) and two of them have never had any trouble in the way of hidden extras. Bore no.3 is, of course, the troublemaker and has had two former E.coli reports in 2012 and 2014. After each report the bores were chlorinated and BAD No.3 was not even used. "What's that?" you say thumbing through "Water Quality of Southern Hawkes Bay Towns: Why you should stick to straight Whiskey, 2nd ed." "Chlorinated? Surely this water is chlorinated all the time". There follows a long, embarrassing, silence.
 Er, well, you see, there have never been any problems before, except for those two times and er, well. Is that a squirrel?
But those good folks of Havelock North who can venture more than 3 metres away from a toilet have been carefully and seriously advised of what is going on by their local government representatives. Well, basically, told to boil their drinking water and it's really tricky finding out who is to blame for the contamination of the water. So tricky, with two councils involved and there being no way of communicating between them beyond wandering puppet shows performing allegorical plays. Luckily the central Government leaped into the breach and the local MP went on National Radio to say that "Frankly, I am angry". Golly Moses that showed 'em.
How has the contamination occurred? You might well ask, since the aquifer is way down in the earth and has a hard sort of cap over the top of it. Scurrilous people have pointed out the explosion in population numbers for dairy cows in the region what with dairying being more profitable than cocaine, in Havelock North anyway. These people will be laughed out of decent society and told to get a flamin' life you Commies because a bit of cow poop never hurt no one and anyway, who's to say it came from cows??? Naughty old Microbiologists is who, they have confirmed that the most probable cause of the contamination are ruminant animals. Disturbingly, there are no camels in the Havelock North greater metropolitan area otherwise we could blame them and their nomad owners and feel all white victim privileged.
And here one puts on one's lab coat, turns to the camera and says "I think NZ should get prepared for more of this. Local governments are being disbanded by the central government which doesn't give a rat's arse about NZ, much of NZ is being turned into Cowshit Creek and we, collectively, have the brains of a flatworm".
Disclaimer removed on smack my head advice.

Ram Testicle Palpation Explained by Prime Minister.

Four Why? Men. Picture Stolen from Metro magazine

Warning to all citizens: If these men come to your house do not let them in. Do not sign any papers they may present. Put headphones on and sing along with the music until they are gone.

These folks are (left to right) NZ Attorney General Chris Finlayson, Minister of Bribes to Saudi Arabia Murray McCully, Prime Minister "What me, worry" John Key and Minister for Up Your Nose with a Garden Hose Gerry Brownlee.

Finlayson is doing his best to control his temper at being asked to be in the same room as these morons whose three combined brains do not equal 1/4 of his super-intellect and steely resolve. Disturbingly he has done some good work on Maori land negotiations but has the most vituperative language when questioned about anything.

"What's the time Mr. AG". "You would ask that, you worthless piece of slime. Can't you see I'm busy?"

McCully has done sterling work in getting rid of excess money in trying to placate Saudi businessmen who just revealed last week that 1) They hadn't been going to take the NZ government to court and 2) Come and take all these dead sheep and bones away WTF is wrong with you people?

McCully seems to have bravely taken on the project of pumping money and sheep at the Saudis with no help, or even knowledge about the jolly wheeze, from the rest of the government. Murray may survive the unseemliness as the twitter verse swirls around what sort of photos he has that make him invulnerable.

Dear Leader Key is doing one of his classic deflections (it is always misdirection) as, perhaps, a journalist asks him a question that has an answer that hasn't been focus groped to submission by his PR firm and his minders. Ha ha, silly old AK no one asks those questions any more. Mr Key has taken to blaming the banks for the housing Not-a-Crisis in NZ at the moment  in a plaintive "What can I do" sort of manner. He is a prisoner of cruel fate just like all of us and if he didn't have a house in Hawaii he would be forced to live in NZ and that would be just awful.

Mr. Brownlee is doing his best Easter Island moai impersonation because that is less trouble than when he talks and all them words come out and basically It Is Not Fair. A couple of weeks ago Mr Brownlee informed a breathless nation that the new Convention Centre that the government was going to build in Christchurch in a partnership with a private firm was actually going to be on their own after all. We were just silly to think that it was a going to be a partnership after years of being told it was going to be one because reasons.
The government is looking a little shaky at the moment due to various inept or, in McCully's case, actual breaking the law cases. But I'm sure that will not be reflected in the polls due to John Key's a good bloke you'd like to have a beer with.

Distraction Watch

It was Friday, so I walked around the trapline to see if the Stupid Traps had snared anything. And oh yes, there was Stupid aplenty, enough for everyone, but of such a nature that I find myself working the Retraction Watch side of the street.

1. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?

RW blogposts have sometimes focused on the long delays between the appearance of a flawed paper and its eventual expulsion from the academic literature, and its transferral into the hands of the secular branch to be consumed in cleansing fire.

At the other end of the spectrum, one hears less often of negative delays, where the paper is criticised, condemned and withdrawn even before it appeared in press. If only because the Temporal Continuity Police look askance on that kind of chrono-anomaly and CODE PALIMPSEST dangling causality pointers (which require no end of temporal-continuum re-knitting and recompiling from the source code, and you wouldn't believe the paperwork, while the Temporal Continuity Accounts auditors are notoriously humourless on the concept of "overtime").

But none of this stopped one Jake Crosby, anti-vaccine campaigner, in the throes of a Category 4 Butthurt, from demanding the pre-emptive retraction of a paper that hasn't been published, and currently exists only in the fertile imagination of another anti-vaccine campaigner (who in turn claims to have heard about it from the author's lawyer,* because that's what lawyers are for).
In short, it is Schrödinger's Manuscript, in a superpositioned state of potential publication, and Jake wants to collapse the wave-function to a state of unpublication, for he is convinced that if it were written it would violate his belief system.

To that end, Crosby asks his readers to
(a) Stalk the potential author.
(b) Contact the potential author's employers.
(c) Contact the P.N.A.S. (which he believes to be the target journal IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY) and warn them not to publish the potential paper.
(d) Denounce the P.N.A.S. to the Committee Of Public Safety On Publication Ethics.**

Please write and call Dr. Thompson at the following numbers and email address and tell him to withdraw his “reanalysis” and that he will face ethical complaints against him due to the ridiculous nature of his claims.
[redacted]@cdc DOT gov
(404) xxx-xxxx (office) Liz writes: the number published is incorrect
(404) xxx-xxxx (cell) Liz writes: the number published is incorrect

Also contact the journal publishing his paper as well and tell them withdraw his paper and that they too will face ethics complaints for publishing it. Here is the email for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where the “reanalysis” will likely be published. You should let the journal know that it too will face an ethical complaint for publishing Thompson’s analysis and should withdraw it from press: [redacted]@nas dot edu, Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx redacted for charity

Also make a complaint to the Committee on Publication Ethics. Let them know you complained to both the author of the piece and to PNAS: http://publicationethics.org/contact-us

[h/t Liz Ditz and Respectful Insolence]

* "Mr. Richard Morgan, Esq. [sic], Dr. Thompson’s whistle blower attorney, stated that Dr. Thompson will be publishing a paper in May, 2016". Actual attorney is Mr Frederick "Rick" Morgan.

** Crosby is perhaps unaware that a key part of the COPE mission statement is "Do not criticise dues-paying members of COPE".

2. He who lies down with dogs should take a long spoon. And being smeared all over with peanut butter beforehand, turns out not to be such a good idea.

Dear Health Ministry people,
This is what happens when you go into partnership with the Police and NZ Customs to establish a National Drug Intelligence Bureau -- which with three bodies and a single head is going one step better than a T'ao T'ieh. You find your name signed onto a mendacious clickbaity 'report', stuffed full as a bad- taxidermy walrus with fabricated claims and numbers about social costs, gateway drug, dangerous potency of marijuana today, hospital emergency admissions. A report that served the police well back in 2008, when it was mysteriously though promptly leaked to the media and churnalised into editorials about the need to press on with the War on Drugs.

Then when the report's tendentious and self-serving nature comes to light eight years later, and you seek to retract it for fear that 'making shit up' will not reflect well on the joint agency's reputation as a source of impartial reliable information, the police will veto that retraction, for fear of damaging the NDIB's reputation. Remember, they come from a culture in which the only shame in fabrication or chicanery comes from admitting it.

Also (a) there is nothing to be gained from recriminations after so many years; (b) the report is long forgotten; (c) it was of little importance and was only used to dictate public policy; (d) the Drug Analyst who wrote it is no longer in the NDIB, after promotion elsewhere for a job well done.

In a letter dated October, 2013, national manager of intelligence Detective Superintendent Stephen Vaughan said the report had been removed from the police website and the internal police intranet.
He said the report was no longer referenced, "due to the fact that it is over six years old", there had been "significant changes" to intelligence practices and processes within the NDIB, and none of the current staff were in their roles when the report was released.
"The issues that you raise ... would not occur in the current intelligence system," Vaughan wrote, saying there was no need for further action.

Bonus T'ao T'ieh

This description of Stuart Dawson's five-year exercise in accessing the actual number of drug-related hospital admissions makes for interesting although repetitive reading, in which phrases recur about "file destroyed". Apparently the custom of the day was to maintain no hard-copy back-ups for crucial dispositive data, and only a single easily-corrupted electronic copy.

HA HA, "joint agency", you see what I did there?

3. He sounds nice.

Bonus Anti-Vax Loon: Christopher Savage!

These reports give the impression that Savage is actually in New Zealand, dispensing toxic prescriptions in person (rather than across the Interlattice), but this may be a misunderstanding of the District Health Board's warning. He only recently returned to Australia, fleeing Bali one step ahead of the Indonesian authorities. Indonesians were not well-pleased with the medical treatments he was offering there to treat autism and heart disease -- a form of homebake chelation, administering intravenous magnesium chloride to flush that heavy-metal 'calcium' out from blood vessels and bones and muscles.*

Savage has previously earned some notoriety in certain circles as an apologist for infanticide, popping up to defend the parents whenever a child dies of broken bones and internal bleeding, offering his trained opinion that these are really the side-effects of vaccination. Savage's medical expertise being the many years he spent as a police constable before leaving under a cloud when his truculence, incompetence and laziness became too much for the Queensland Police DON'T LAUGH. Savage is inclined to blame the QP themselves for the two weeks he took off work to spend in bed, for subjecting him to vaccination (against Hep-B) as a requirement of his continued employment.

Anyway, Chris Savage also turns out to be a homicidal gun-licker:

Savage declares that he wants his guns back, granting us some retrospective succour in the knowledge that, in 2012 at least, Savage was not in possession of firearms

...and an antisemitic, holocaust-denying, white-supremacist unabashed neo-Nazi. Nevertheless, he remains persona grata to the "Australian Vaccination-skeptic Network" and to the "Vaccine Resistance Movement", whose members flocked to the comment threads of Australian news-sites to condemn the actions of Indonesian authorities and the media who report those actions. If "flocked" is the correct term to use for groups of flying monkeys.

The idea that apparent cases of infanticide are really the sequelae of vaccines is not uncommon in anti-vax circles. Three schools of thought can be adduced. In one form of the theory -- this is Röver and Scheibner's preference -- the toxicity of any vaccine depletes the infant's bodily reserves of Vitamin C, causing a kind of instant scurvy or Barlow's Disease, with internal bleeding and fragile bones that break even under the lightest discipline.
OR the vaccine destroys the body’s reserves of Vitamin D (I am not so clear on the mechanism here), and therefore instant rickets and skeletal fragility. This seems to be Buttram’s preference.
On the gripping hand prehensile tail, we shouldn't forget Innis, who theorises that the particular micronutrient destroyed by vaccines is Vitamin K. No need to worry about the mechanism because it leads inexorably to the same end-point of internal bleeding and broken bones.

Don't worry, none of this will be on the test.

[h/t Reasonable Hank]

* Savage has progressed from his earlier on-line scam where he spruiks "superoxy" for curing cancer, i.e. "stabilized electrolytes of oxygen" -- "the extra Oxygen goes to work cleaning and healing the cells and indeed the entire body". That is to say, industrial bleach for oral or intravenous administration.

Am I alone in wanting a Sexy Fascist Octopus costume for next Hallowe'en?

4. Protraction Watch

Via Stat, here is the heart-warming tale of the Faithful Little Archive. A collection of data that languished in a basement for 45 years, mouldering away on punched cards and magnetic tapes, without so much as a 5-1/4 floppy disk in sight, and did it complain? DID IT BOGROLL, for it knew that one day when THE STARS ARE RIGHT the world would be ready to hear the message it contained. See, other neglected data, be of good cheer, your time too will come.

The message being that reducing the animal-fat component in the diets of a cohort of subjects lacking any choice in the matter -- substituting vegetable fats instead -- does not reduce their rate of dying by heart disease, contrary to the conclusion that the data were collected with the intention of proving. Also contrary to most dietary advice of the last half-century... for the animal-fat / heart-disease paradigm became Received Wisdom anyway, even without that expected support.

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/why-40-years-of-official-nutritional-guidelines-prescribed-a-low-fat-diet-that-promoted-heart-disease/76300/22
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin 

But Official Advice in its magisterial grandeur is too important to be swayed by the whims of mere empirical evidence. It matters more that official advice remain consistent, thereby retaining the childlike faith of the masses, than correct. We learn that the anti-fat genre of advice should remain in the official canon, for although the animal-fat / heart-disease link may lack for evidential support, nor have enough data piled up for overwhelming proof of the absence of a link. Apparently "not offering advice at all if the data are equivocal" is not an option.

Not only are the Basement Tapes not dispositive, they were collected a long time ago, under conditions of dubious ethicality, when confounders were not adequately controlled. One could say much the same of those studies which did support the link and the advice, but that's different, shut up that's why.

But the Stat story buries the lede, leaving this until the penultimate paragraph:

The coleader of the project was Dr. Ancel Keys, author of the Seven Countries Study,* Time cover subject, and the most prominent advocate of replacing saturated fat with vegetable fat. “The idea that there might be something adverse about lowering cholesterol [via vegetable oils] was really antithetical to the dogma of the day,” Bob Frantz said.

That is, Keys knew in 1970 that his public policies were empirically wrong, but he had invested too much in anti-fat crusading to change.

[h/t Retraction Watch for link to Stat]

* The Seven Countries Study started out as the 21-Countries Study, before the extraction of countries which did not support the desired relationship between diet and heart disease. Even for those seven data points, recent re-analyses that took confounders into proper account found the main dietary driver of cardio-vascular disease to be sugar.

Engram for Ammo Budy!

'Tyranical'? 'Goverment'? The camo-clad grifters squatting at an Oregon wildlife sanctuary are experiencing the woes of alphabetical privation. Or perhaps they are unclear on the concept of 'lipogram'.

Please send them all your spare 'N's.

UPDATE: I am beginning to think that these numpties are not the sharpest hammers in the sack. One of them has finally contrived to get himself arrested, though only by driving a stolen federal vehicle into town for takeaways, while out on bail on previous charges of squatting a National Park as his personal abode... the bail condition being "don't occupy any Federal buildings". Those previous charges do not bode well for Mr Medenbach, as they include a component of "protecting his stolen land with lethal booby-traps and landmines", and he has a moron for a lawyer -- i.e. himself -- whose goal is convince any courts of their illegitimate, non-constitutional status, in the hope that they will disappear in a puff of logic.

These personalised editions of the US Constitution seem to go hand-in-hand with the personalised spellings.

Dentistry not just theft, also sexual assault

A Wellington man accused of pulling out women’s teeth told a girlfriend he liked “gummy women” and said she was more beautiful when she was not wearing her dentures, his trial has been told.

Wait, what? Perhaps he said "L.A. Woman" and she misheard. It is an easy mistake to make, especially after playing the Clash's "Gums of Brixton" over and over all morning.

This woman, who also has had her name suppressed, said Hansen pulled four of her teeth out with pliers when they were in a relationship. 

WTF? Did the library pixies secretly switch my reality with a new John Waters movie to see if I'd notice the difference?

It is established fact that dentists are all wannabe surrealist writers, and possibly vice versa, but amateur dentists are another kettle of red herrings and a mare's nest of worms:

The first woman to testify against Hansen said that in the early 1990s he pulled out six of her bottom teeth with pliers and an oily rag when they had moved to the back seat of his car to have sex.

I know from weird foreplay, but that is a new one on me, as Lemmy said after counting his moles. The guy cherished his fantasies of toothless ladies but he preferred conducting actual tooth-puller cosplay himself to maintain tumescence and hasten the moment of happy release. This is an unfamiliar paraphilia with no name to be found in the usual catalogs of fetish.

Hansen's defense was that all tooth removal was by consent and that he was not in a position to dominate his partners, it is not as if they were indentured. Fortunately he was convicted on several charges (although acquitted on others)... this has spared us the unedifying spectacle of censorious conservatives prating on about the toothlessness of current legislation.

At Riddled we do not judge, and we take no position on aberrant sex. Although "standing up" is right out on account of the possibility that it might lead to dancing.

A Prince Among Men.

It is a well known fact among people who live under internet bridges that the Great Southern Land or Australia was discovered by Captain James Cook whilst looking for the remote down the back of the South Pacific Ocean. While carefully sailing his boat onto rocks near the current site of Sydney, Cook noticed that the rocks were connected to a larger mass of land which he had not noticed before.
Writing in his diary Cook noted "Hit a large land mass today, I think the helmsman was having one of his turns. he keeps shouting at someone called Mr. Turniphead. My uncle had a cat called Turnip. Have given orders for the Merchants and Providor "Riddled" persons to be keel hauled if they come around again. I wonder what happened to that cat?"
Aside from the slur upon the good offices of "Riddled Time Travelling  Merchants to the Discerning", the interesting fact is that Cook pays more attention to a cat than he does to the inhabitants of the Great Southern Land who were probably having a laugh at the Pommies stuck on the rocks. Thus was the stage set for Australia's  development.
This upward trending in an on going progressionary go forward manner has resulted in the current government who could loosely and possibly unkindly be described as "off the twig" in Australian parlance with its 300 ways of describing the effects of too much heat on the human mind.
The head banana in Australia is Tony Abbott (a name that has given Australian parlance 301 ways to describe the effects of too much heat on the human mind) and he has taken the obligatory step for a conservative government in these Great Southern Oceans of re-instating outdated methods of enforcing feudalism such as "Work Longer For Less Pay" laws and "We'll Spy On Who We Want To" laws and the very popular "Fuck Off If You Don't Like It" laws.
Similarly he has re-instated the Honours System.
This fabulous relic of colonial exploitation and repression gives the Gubblement of the day the power to hand out fancy badges and funny titles to whomsoever they wish to give them to and the rest of us peons can continue to kick a can along the road.
"Oh ho" people will say "the good burgers of the antipodes will not stand for this. They are very keen on egalitarianism and other eagles down there."
 Well, no. Most people saw the Honours system as a bit of a laugh a bit of a joke and now and then someone who had actually done something good managed to sneak in.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Abbott has managed to bugger that up with one of his appointments to the position of Knight of Australia. He has given this to the husband of the current Queen of England Prince Phillip Mountbatten of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. That's the Athens, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburgs
Now people are at first bemused by making the husband of the reigning Queen a knight since in the wacky way of such things that is a demotion. But then there is that "Who the fuck is that guy, anyway?" And that is where it gets sticky since the Prince is probably most well known for a looong series of racist or sexist statement he has made in the past. Quite the idiot.
Which is all by way of saying that Mr. Abbott is displaying the effects of too much heat on the human mind. In the words of a highly influential member of the twitterarti (me) Abbott has set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Which, while it bodes ill for the Great Southern Land, might be quite funny for the rest of us if we did not have a similar set of loons in charge of our country.
Anyway the World Cup of Cricket will be in Strailya and New Zild  shortly so then we won't have to worry about things too much  unless Abbott bites someone (probably a brown person) and orders the Aussie team to be crucified while our Dear Leader gushes to the Indian Prime Minister that he likes curry.   

Light the blue touchpaper and stand well clear.

Life continues to be a trial for Evangaline van Holsterin's owl, Destroyer of Worlds Raining of Carnage or, as he is known in the hootery, Gimpy. Firstly Evangelines idiot boyfriend tried to get Gimpy interested in point-to-point races for dogs. Despite protests and detailed explanations as to the actual non caninicity of Gimpy, the idiot boyfriend entered him in the 2kms Widdlepuke Street to Cockchafers Avenue (Wire Haired Terrier section). Here they are at Tubesock Road and as you can see Gimpy is hard out to win. Riddled is a family blog so we cannot show you the horrible wounds suffered by the idiot boyfriend but as Evangeline said "It has put some shine into Gimpy's feathers."
Then the Vietnamese chickens turned up.

They are lovely peaceful birds and do not wish to cause any trouble for anyone but, sadly for them, they taste nice to owls. This has caused trouble not the least for Mr Ho who lent the chickens to Evangeline's vile nephew Throgmorton for a Farmyard Pageant  he was involved in up at the hospital. Apparently the presence of hens and chickens calms the old folks there. Or would have if the fowlicidal hootery led by blood crazed Gimpy had not turned up
An artists inpression of the scene follows:

Gimpy was confined to the hootery and had his Ovaltine privileges removed after that.
However the Vietnamese chickens may have had the last laugh as Gimpy contracted an infestation of Binh Thnan ticks.

Fumigating the hootery did not go well as Greenish Hugh does not have good discrimination between "smoking nicely" and "We're all going to die!!!"

However by cunning application of mice marinated in ex-hospital brandy we managed to get Gimpy into a receptive mood for fumigating. Even though he appeared to be in the owl equivalent of  a "Hey pal, giz us a song, will ye!" mood, no one really felt like putting the fumigation bomb which had been activated and  was fast counting down, next to Gimpy. 
We were in a timing tick bomb situation.

Gorilla my Dreams.

"So" said tigris consulting her Memorex Executive Clipboard with sticky notes, " I see that the World Wildlife Fund movie 'Totes Adorb Babby Animules' is in the can, as we say in the movie mileu".
"Yes" I vouchsafed "In the can, though we could not find a mileu to put in it what with it not being the season, and all".
"Also" noted Smut Clyde, Senior Cameraperson and fingernail technician, "no bugger even knows what a mileu, is."
"It is not" I opined "one of them little furry, bitey things, from in the Riddled Evolvamat. I think they may be seagulls."
"Untrainable, those little bleeders" noted Smut Clyde "although they make a glider as soon as you put them in a prison cell, it's uncanny."
"Greenish Hugh got them to make a BBQ nook at Riddled Manor by telling them to make a stable for Louie the Carthorse" I noted.
"Why did they make it on the 3rd floor then?' asked tigris "he never goes up there... oh I see"
"I feel that we may hear more from the furry, bitey things after their negotiations with the Library Pixies. When they all wake up, I've never heard such singing" said Smut. "And carousing"
"Well anyway" said tigris "the babby animals movie?"
"Oh yes" I said "babby animals all over the place, being all cute and such"
"There aren't any, are there?" said tigris
"No" said Smut "the budget did not stretch to it after The Stimson Bros. Rusty Sythe Stout bill came in"
"Yikes" I said "it was vast, lucky we did not get the healthy version, with prunes. However we have a very exciting and heartwarming story about a gorilla and a dinosaur trapped on an island by invisible other monsters."
"Oh" said tigris "this accounts for the banana stains in the time machine and Throgmorton Portcullis Industries liver and bacon deliveries"
"The accounts department may be querying that bill since former Hospital meals do not constitute "Gourmet Delights To Your Doorstep" in my view" said Smut.
"That Gorilla is a bleedin' artiste" I said "always walking off and having to be soothed by Greenish-David Attenborough."
"Happy now, as parks and recreation officer for Upper Aramoho" said Smut "although shrieking at the clientèle has created some tension"
"People should learn to stand still as he charges and not show their teeth" I said.
"And the dinosaur?" said tigris
"I expect he's happy somewhere" said Smut "the time machine dials need resetting and the possibly even new lithium crystals"
"Good ones" I noted "Not ones from KMart. Even though the wrapping is purple, just like the good ones"
"Righto" said tigris "I shall fax off the standard denial form and we'll go back in time next week to not even enter the tendering process. All this time travel might cause problems"
"We are always very careful" said Smut "although the eggs in Margaret Thatcher's hair was very funny for a few weeks"
"She got got quite batty about it" I said.
"And then the dinosaur married her" said Smut "they were made for each other"
tigris ticked the project completed box on the project completion page, twice.
"I think we could use a stout" she said.
"We have been flat out like a lizard stealing eggs from a crazed British Prime Minister" I noted.

Away and Boil Your Head

Some competing blogs have become all brain obsessed and are going on about slice thickness and what-have-you in a teckernogicalamistic way, as is their want (wont, won't, wand, will-ye-no-come-back-again?)
Ha ha to those blogs as once again they are outplayed by the dancing woo hoo masters at Riddled. See the above charts and guides for slicing up of the heads, the results of 20 minutes of painstaking reading something else and seeing this by mistake.
Note the handy head cage which you can lower onto the subjects head to guide the bacon slicer or the vegetable peeler for delicate work. see how the rich and famous have flocked to the Riddled Clinic in sunny Majorca for the "No Skin Off Our Nose, All Off Yours" treatment that we offer. Yes that is  David MacCallum in the second before and after sequence whilst top is a man who went to the same school as David Beckham, for a while.
 Most currencies are accepted by the clever yet strangely anonymous Riddled staff although they have asked for no payments to be made in Goat's Cheese. 1) We do not own a goat and 2) farts. Someone had to say it.

BELATED SMUTDATE CUBISM.
High-resolution version:

Low-resolution:

Even littler eyes II

"Crikey" I vouchsafed as I sat down at the Riddled tea-room table "It is extraordinary how only the 'Dominion Post' shows the Queen with her beard and glasses. Are they the only paper that will tell us the truth?"
"I think so" said Smut Clyde as he put away his marker pen. With a hopeful look he took the lid off the biscuit tin and then, sadly, put the lid back on.
"I see" he said "that Al Quaeda (Hi NSA have a nice day) have their tentacles reaching into New Zild society and may even now be poised to strike"
"I never liked him" I opined " yes, he was a good goalie, but his brothers were all around better Hockey players" 
"What?" said Smut, once again outflanked by my tenuous grasp on current affairs. Thumbs, hah! Who needs them.
"Al Brider, Whanganui hockey goalie in the 70's. Good man in the goal but his brothers had a more tactical sense of the game".
"Ah" said Smut " I do usually discuss Whanganui Hockey history at morning tea but today I was referring to the announcement by the Prime Minster that New Zilders have been trained in Yemen by Al Queda"
tigris looked up from her 3 Dimensional Scrabble/ Sudoko Combo Quiz
"Yemen is a Middle Eastern country renowned for training terrorists" she said to me.
"I know that" I explained "it is nowhere near Taihape. I just think that if the PM made a official announcement it must be true"
"The official announcement on "The Morning Zoo with Gazza and Si"  you mean?" said Smut. (Sensational PM announcement at around 5 mins. in)
"Interestingly enough" I said "that radio station has quite a few listeners and many of them know whatever it was the PM was talking about , is"
"Yes" said tigris " occasionally one of them does indeed register that the takeover of NZ by various secret services is going as planned."
"All for our own good' I said "although even Mr. Key seemed a bit vague on what was happening. He just sort of talked without saying anything. I expect that's spycraft."  
"Undoubtably" said Smut "trained to wafflle, that man".
"I'm just wondering if we might have a security review at Riddled" I said.
"Tex and Mohammed Security do a good job" said tigris.
"Yes they do' I said but maybe we need internal security, passwords and that" I explained "with a cunningly chosen set of words only we would know"
Smut glanced up "It would depend on people remembering things" he stated.
"Ah" I said "there is that"
  

I'm not sure that cake would be good for the poors.

For your delectation from these lands of Economic Darwinism, where we are learning that, golly willikers, we are all FEELING THE PAIN!!
We have Shelley Bridgeman's column in which Shelley, who may or may not actually exist, pushes towards the Poe's law boundary as she struggles with the dreadful choice of what groceries to dump when she is caught short at the checkout. There is even a flash of humanity for the poors. Ha ha just kidding, she may not be so horrible to them when they are slow at the checkout. This new appreciation may last for a week or so , who knows?
Twitternz, have had a bit of a laugh, bit of a joke at Shelley's annoyance and opinion is divided as to whether or not she is a real person or someone writing "for exposure".

Hey! Hey! White people's feelings are being hurt over here!

Remember the good old days, my friends when New Zilders could walk around secure in the knowledge that brown people were funny, played the guitar and were good at rugby? Most importantly, they knew their place and it wasn't at the front of the line IYKWIM.
Then the blooming 1970's, 80's and so on happened and NZ got all PC and brown people took over the country and it's a cryin' shame.
Now, of course in the ebb and flo (the second album was wack, dudes) of history we have a right thinking Gubblement what has got it in for the poors and good show, we all say. Teach them for the pooring and the like. But some namby pamby socialimist Teevee folks got all bent out of shape because of poor people's idle and feckless children starving. They said the gubblement should give them breakfast at school. In the usual corporatist, product placement, under-the-table deal, manner in which this government works, this has been done.
Luckily a noble cartoonist has taken up the fight for poor oppressed tax -payers and had published two extremely racist and generally nasty cartoons about how the poors will waste their money on beer, cigarettes and gambling. Did you need me to say that most of the people in the cartoons have brown skins?
Google Al Nisbett racist cartoons iffen you want to see them in all their glory.
This has caused an outpouring of wailing and gnashing of teeth like we haven't seen since the Governor-General's tractor, Dennis, was found to be a girl tractor. Mrs. Cat was off her Mackerel Gnocchi in a White Wine Sauce for an hour!
Many, many words have been written on the intertron all about how terrible it is just because a bloke makes a stupid, racist, ignorant and largely pathetic couple of cartoons about how lazy and stupid poor folks are, he gets criticised.
As is my practise I sailed over all of this pretty serenely thinking that if there was anything important I would be informed by the proper authorities. But then, just this very morning we have a piece of shit  resistance by noted scribbler Colin Espiner  who proves beyond reasonable doubt that 1) Cartoons are allowed to be awful and 2) Maoris are awful and the real racists and 3) he's a plonker.
I particularly enjoyed these bonne mots:

But I reckon there was something else at play, too. A little bit of reverse racism,

You know, white people got feelings too and so there!
And I took to my fainting couch at news of:

Al's view - at least how he explained it to Duncan Garner - was that there are plenty of people in this country of all ethnicities who cry poor but actually aren't, at least not by world standards. "A lot of them are overweight and have wide-screen TVs,'' Al told Duncan. 

I'm an unemployed, overweight person with a wide screen TeeVee. Oh Noes!  Do I have to be all reverse racism too? You'd need a special licence for that I guess because you have to use the rear vision mirror. A man sent me an email saying that he could get me one for cheap from Nigeria (still waiting actually Alonso Bryant III).
But the snot on the icing of the cake is the comments on the article. Letter after letter of white butt hurt about "Maoris are being mean"  and "You are SO right, Colin, poors are awful."
 And all we have to do is look at the health figures, the incarceration numbers and the education numbers and we can see what a load of self-pitying wankers these people are; sitting in their white privilege, scolding brown people from behind their nylon lace curtains.
Not for nothing did noted NZ poet J.K.Baxter refer to this as The Pig Islands.

The restaurant's speciality is Steak Tartarus, which is very tasty and hangs just out of reach

This month at the Riddled Book Club we've been covering The Myth of Sisyphus to improve our understanding of Existential Threats. Discussion is thirsty work requiring any number of pints. One can only speculate who came up with the concept of making the book more memorable by re-enacting the whole uphill boulder-rolling business, with the last pint of Spiced Parsnip Scrumpy held in reserve for the winner of the race. Not a smart idea but arguably better than the time we were discussing Sartre's La Nausée.

As one of the worst offenders of classical mythology, Sisyphus is housed in the Tartarus Detention Centre. Other inmates there include Ixion, who slew his father-in-law in violation of the unwritten code of hospitality, and then had sex with a cloud while visiting Olympus...*

and the 50 daughters of Danae, who slew their husbands en masse on their simultaneous wedding night to in a protest against their forced abandonment of careers as models for J. W. Waterhouse. They may have hoped that the publicity about the slaughter would elevate them to stardom in a reality show.

Tantalus was mainly guilty of crimes against cuisine. The correct wine to serve the gods at a banquet when your own child is the main course is -- as any fule kno -- a dry white Hippocrene.

Another Kiwi reckons that he personally inspired Greek poets with the concept of Tartarus by telling them the Aristocrats joke, having dropped in on a symposium in the Riddled time machine to pick up some cheap ouzo. The vagaries of the automatic translator device are such that it's possible that in fact he was explaining to them about Guantanamo Bay.

But what the feck is Ocnus doing amongst those blasphemers and monsters and traducers of all the laws of decency? His crime, we read, was to maintain a profligate wife who spend money as fast as could earn it. This might well have caused embarrassment and status anxiety among his peers, but it seems an over-reaction to condemn him to an eternity of weaving a rope out of broom fibre while a donkey continually chews away at the other end of the rope.**

Moral: A diet of Jagdwurst
will make your ass look big

Instructional guides are available

In his position I would be all 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers; that sodding donkey can find his own sodding fodder from now on -- I'm outa here. What the feck do I want with a rope, anyway?"

Perhaps it was a clerical error and everyone accepts that Ocnus is an innocent man, but he remains in custody because the administration can't find any other afterlife willing to accept him.

Perhaps they've told him repeatedly that he's free to go, but his response is always the same: "What? And leave show business?"

-------------------------------------------------------

* Thereby begetting an entire species of annoyingly vague entities, half-human and half-cumulus.

Illustration of amorous dust-bunny cloud-creature misbehaviour.

** I am skeptical as to this part. If donkeys considered rope to be a food group it would be hard to hold them captive.