What a vile species we are. Not satisfied with mistreating and murdering one another, we let other species die in our pursuit of entertainment and spectacle.
The overworked term tragic is used to cover all contingencies, the slaughter of civilians, the rape of children, and the untimely deaths of two magnificent animals, Admire Rakti and Araldo, after yesterday’s Melbourne Cup. Or as the Guardian reporter puts it, “the race was soured” by these deaths.
What is sour as a barrel of lemons is the sight of animals enslaved for human gratification. I loathe bloody horse racing, and I especially loathe the Melbourne Cup. I was unfortunate enough to be passing a television when a close up of Admire Rakti’s last collapse appeared on the screen. The horse was clearly distressed in his stall, then slowly his poor legs buckled, and I watched, sickened, as he sank to the ground for the last time. It was fucking awful.
There’s something badly wrong with us. Sadly, this isn’t news, and on the continuum of bloody awful things people do, a dead horse isn’t at the high-end.
You look at the Melbourne Cup spectacle and you think, Christ, these humans, their stupid little “fascinators,” their ugly, ill-fitting clothes, their spine-destroying heels, red-faced men squeezed into suits and tight cravats, drooling and drunk, all of them screaming at horses running round in a circle, what the fuck?
All that was missing was Gerry Harvey ranting about how many horses in the Melbourne Cup aren’t Australian anymore, and damn me if we didn’t get that as well.
My friend included me in a sweep. My horse? Unchain my heart. Fucking bloody Jesus, I said. Kill me now.
No Place For Sheep 
Yesterday I made my position perhaps ambiguously clear by tweeting this on Twitter:
Note the timestamp on the tweet, well before the race. I have no connections to Protectionist, and had no idea he was owned by a predominantly German consortium. I had no idea two horses were going to die in connection with the race.
Like Schultz, I knew nothing. First hint that he was a German horse came when I saw another tweet that said “Melbourne Cups 1, World Wars 0”. Where would the world be without John Cleese?
But I have been preparing to put the opening bars of ‘Wohlauf Kameraden, aufs Pferd, aufs Pferd’ on my new mobile phone as its ring tone.
And I have had the privilege of listening to the six or so hours audio recording of ‘The Story of Bill the Bastard’, who was a WW1 war horse.
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This is the YouTube version of ‘Wohlauf Kameraden’ I like best:
It has to be satire, hasn’t it? It couldn’t possibly have been put together as a recruiting video, surely? LMAO at the opening sub-titled scene, and at the sleeping sidecar occupant in the monochrome footage at the start of the second stanza!
Can’t wait to get it onto my phone.
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Was Gerry Harvey drunk? It sounded like the ravings of a lunatic. The sport is cruel and barbaric in nature, never mind that it funds an industry that thrives off human misery.
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I’m sickened by this culture of using animals for entertainment too. When will it stop? I’m very saddened by Admire Rajti’ death. That poor horse. Breaks my heart. I never went to the celebratory events at work because I’m just not a believer in being entertained this way. Sickens me.
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Dear Dr Wilson,
It would be preposterous to think anyone could unchain your heart in the circumstances described in various posts under your blog category ‘The end of the affair’, https://noplaceforsheep.com/category/the-end-of-the-affair/
“She lies on the kitchen floor and
howls. What else is there to do?”
You have already started doing it.
Again.
That which you do best.
Writing.
In doing so I suspect you have begun to defuze an unexploded bomb lodged at the core of your being that at the least stood to paralyse your talent (as we have already seen over the last few months), if not utterly destroy you.
IMHO* you need to much more consciously acknowledge yourself as a person who has indeed, maybe even trans-nationally, come to be taken most seriously as a social commentator and/or blogger, one who lacks any pretentiousness as a scholar of human rights with your PhD from Southern Cross University, and check the chronology of the facts and context that has culminated in this betrayal. I suspect you don’t think of yourself as a target, and if correct, that you are wrong not to do so.
“….. you can’t write fiction, ….. ,
when you think the details don’t matter.”
I don’t strive to write fiction, but rather to propose speculative narratives that are capable of accounting for all the observable facts that may surround any issue. One of the first things needed in constructing such a narrative is an annotated timeline. There are a number of details in your recounting of this affair, and elsewhere in your blog archives, that I found quite disconcerting.
Here is my annotated timeline of blog posts I sense may be of relevance.
‘Out of MTR’s defamation jail! The Streisand Effect, & conduct that offends’, posted 13 January 2013.
The affair commences some time after this date, initiated by the other party.
‘This does not feature female nipples, or, go ahead, suck my toes…’, posted 21 March 2013. The picture of the toes. Odds on the request for a sexted selfie was made some time after this date:
“As a delaying tactic, I asked
him what he actually wanted to see.
You know, he replied. Not your toes.”
‘Dance me to the end of love’, posted 25 March 2013.
‘Reist, Devine & sexually suggestive tweets.’, posted 12 May 2013.
‘Housekeeping’, posted 24 June 2013. The taking of a blog break.
‘Love. That is all’, posted 20 July 2013.
‘Black Dog’, posted 10 August 2013.
‘Dark vision: the world of Melinda Tankard Reist’, posted 24 September 2013.
‘Stranded in the shit field’, posted 30 October 2013. References ‘falling in love’ “earlier this year”.
‘On infidelity’, posted 10 November 2013. “[Bill] was the smartest man I’d ever met, …”. A disconcerting echo of words from paragraph five of this post is:
“He told me you are the
most intelligent woman
he’s ever met, she says.”
Especially in the circumstance of:
“His wife tells me later that
she knew all along, he only
thought he was deceiving her.”
‘The house of widows’, posted 23 June 2014. Refers to the then recent demise of Arnold Lawrence Goldman, two days after which fell the second blow:
“He rings her and tells her
he’s leaving her two days
after her husband has died.”
“… later when his wife tells her
the same thing she realises he’s
been given a script with which to
end their affair.”
All of which, taken together, suggests to me the possibility that somewhere, someone may have seen all this coming in real time. Orchestrated it, even.
*IMHO stands for In My Hitler Outfit, on the authority of a recent retweet by Mike Godwin on Twitter.
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Have you written about this on any other blog?
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Not a word elsewhere, other than the signposts to it on the @NoPlaceforSheep Twitter timeline.
Feel free to take the post down if you consider that that may be to your advantage. I will not be offended. (After all, you kindly tolerate me posting tangentially, and sometimes even off-topic, all over your blog.)
The post was rendered in the spirit of that timeline analysis I did on the Mindy/Mandy article at the time of the #MTRsues tweetstorm.
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Yes, I know.
Are you aware of any identities? Yes/no will suffice!
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None other than those you have provided in your own narrative, which I think is limited to that of your late husband.
The generality of the putative technique of orchestration would be most likely found in the toolkit of an intelligence community, be it one with however so many eyes.
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Speaking of tools and toolkits, something I found while tooling around on the timeline:
https://noplaceforsheep.com/2013/09/24/dark-vision-the-world-of-melinda-tankard-reist/#comment-78371
And, vale Jacintha Saldanha, another suspected victim of orchestrated events:
https://noplaceforsheep.com/2012/12/13/the-hospital-and-the-radio-station-when-management-fails-who-pays-the-price/#comment-126537
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Interesting that this tweet does not show up in Jennifer’s @mentions Twitter timeline ‘All tweets’ display:
That could mean any of the following things: that there was a glitch in Twitter’s operation in just this case; that deliberately or inadvertently Jennifer has herself blocked my tweets from henceforth appearing in her timelines; or that one of the GCHQ-style conversation disruption tools has been deployed against either, or both, of us in just the last day or so.
We were warned of these tools by Michaela Bannerjee (@LaLegale), who has herself been the victim of an orchestrated warrantless attack upon her employment disguised behind false claims as to harsh anonymous online criticism of government policy whilst being a public servant. See: https://noplaceforsheep.com/2014/06/25/should-uthman-badars-talk-honour-killings-are-morally-justified-have-been-cancelled-by-the-festival-of-dangerous-ideas/#comment-114901 , and scroll, & surf about a bit, for background.
I mention all this in the context of the speculation that Jennifer and/or her blog may have been a target of orchestrated attempts to suppress her writing and disrupt interaction with her audience. It must be remembered that Jennifer has posted on, and hosted discussion in relation to, Julian Assange and Jacintha Saldanha, to name but two subjects of trans-national interest with whom her erstwhile nemesis MTR seems in some strange way to be on occasion connected in online presence.
For the record, I have only ever posted as Forrest Gumpp on OnlineOpinion (& Graham Young’s associated personal blog, Ambit Gambit), No Place for Sheep, and the Ubuntu Linux Forums. My Twitter userID is ‘@ForrestGumpp’. Any other uses of the pseudonym ‘Forrest Gumpp’ are not me. I am not on Facebook.
I tend not to post on any other comments threads under my own or any other name, but only where I am confident of the blog hosts’ maintaining as much confidentiality within the law as possible with respect to my communications and associated metadata that may be in their possession. It is a trust and character issue.
I would be most interested to hear from anybody discovering posts elsewhere than above under the name ‘Forrest Gumpp’.
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This is what Mike Godwin retweeted:
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Forrest I haven’t ever blocked your tweets. Just to eliminate one possibility
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Thank you for clarifying that, Jennifer. I didn’t really think you would have blocked me on Twitter with any hostile or dismissive intent, but it was not unimaginable that for reasons knowable only to you in your present personal circumstances it may have become expedient to do so, given the potential closeness to the bone of some of the suspicions expressed in my posts.
I first noticed this little online oddity in connection with the visibility of the Twitter conversation I embedded in the first response in this thread. My tweet in reply to that of Lana Hirschowitz (one which had been re-tweeted by Michaela C, @FiveFrogsBlog, who thus automatically also became an addressee) did not show up in her @ mentions timeline when I checked some time after having tweeted it. Yet Michaela C saw it, for she ‘favorited’ it, and I know my tweets to her show up in her @ mentions timeline.
Given that use of GCHQ-style conversation disruption tools has been effectively acknowledged elsewhere, I believe it constructive to document instances where such use is reasonably suspected. Their very use could constitute a back-handed recognition of the potential significance of the users and/or sites against which they are deployed.
Here’s hoping I am not being ‘too forensic’ in noting these things.
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