Rod Fleming | Rod Fleming's World

14/02/2024

River ferries, Pasig 2016

Originally posted 2022-08-06 00:30:16.

Pasig River ferries from Maybunga to downtown Manila.

Not many people know about the Pasig River ferries — which are really like floating buses. They’re not very fast but given that Manila road traffic is gridlocked most of the day, the river ferries represent an efficient transport alternative. There are numerous jetties along the river where passengers can alight and the cost was minimal. This journey took just over an hour but I have known the same one take over three in a taxi!

Poor Jelly was suffering. She was recovering from an accident and the seats on the ferries are basic, making her back injury hurt, But as always she just grinned and carried on. Smashing girl. We had a lot of fun.

The Terminus is at Escolta, on the other side of the river from the famous Intramuros, the old walled city. The day was very hot and Jelly was clearly in pain so we took a calesa ride and made like tourists. She had never been to Intramuros before and despite her sore back, really enjoyed herself.

The last ferry back to Pasig was at 1630, because the service only operates in daylight – there are no navigation lights! It was a fine day out though.

14/02/2024

Arbroath January 1972

Originally posted 2018-09-19 09:00:47.

Arbroath January 1972 . I was living in the house at 9 East Grimsby. My Dad had died the previous year and I was still struggling with it. But I had a few things going for me: music, a camera and my books. It wasn’t a lot but it helped.

Russ Black, the art teacher at school encouraged me to use its darkroom. I had lost my own a couple of years before when we moved house. This is one of the earliest rolls I still have from then.

The camera was a Leica Model III fitted with a Ross Xtralux 50mm f2, an excellent lens. I used the name ‘Xtralux’ for a band some years later, in Exeter. Film was Ilford FP3.

(Pictures after the Read More link)

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14/02/2024

West Coast Road trip with Charis

Originally posted 2017-07-23 15:55:47.

This was a crazy trip in which the weather did all but defeat us. But we still had fun.

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2010 West Coast with Charis

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14/02/2024

2009-08-14 Saint Andrews, Scotland

Originally posted 2017-07-22 21:46:30.

The botanical gardens in Saint Andrews, Scotland

To view the gallery, please click the ‘Read More’ link below.

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14/02/2024

2016-01-04: Arayat National Park, Pampanga

Originally posted 2017-07-22 16:22:39.

A day trip to Arayat in Pampanga with Azumi and Chin. The full story is here.

14/02/2024

Zionist: how I became one (and remain so)

Originally posted 2021-02-25 14:23:20.

Being a Zionist is usually thought to be restricted to the Jews themselves; but not in my case. So how I came to be a Zionist might be worth telling.

Once, when I was much younger, I took a train journey from my then home in Arbroath in Scotland, to Falmouth in Cornwall. The purpose was to join the crew of a new, semi-submersible oil-rig which had just crossed the Atlantic from Texas. It’s a long way from Arbroath to Falmouth.

In those days, trains had compartments and were comfortable. There was some privacy and one might even sleep. For part of the interminable journey, I shared a compartment with a young woman, blonde and attractive. We chatted about many things but mainly, as travellers do, about where we were going. My tale was easy to tell and seemed to me mundane, but hers was interesting.

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14/02/2024

Prostitution: why feminists hate it

Originally posted 2017-08-25 18:44:03.

Prostitution is, they say, ‘the oldest profession in the world’ and, as far as the historical record goes, it’s at least close to being so. The first mention of prostitution that we know of was 5,500 years ago, in the city of Uruk, in Sumer in Mesopotamia, where priestesses in the Temple of Inanna performed this service.

The religious connection with prostitution, of course, is one that has long since been lost — though we might discuss it in another piece; yet of course, the practice itself continues. Until recently, the major push to suppress prostitution was religious, coming from, in particular, the Protestant Christian traditions and notably the Anglican one, which has always been a pillar of sex-negativity and repression.

Of recent decades, however, the attempt to prevent women from engaging in prostitution has come from other women. Indeed, it has become a bastion of modern feminism. But this throws up a thorny moral question: do we or do we not have the right to do as we will with our own bodies?

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14/02/2024

Islam: Read all about it right here!

Originally posted 2021-02-23 17:43:03.

I’ve just refreshed my page that contains free downloads of all the major texts of Islam. For reasons that remain unclear, this page suffers frequent attacks. It’s almost as if Muslims don’t want people to read their texts…silly idea, no?

Actually, no. Islam does not want you to read the texts. Muslims go to great lengths to prevent you and condemn any version of the texts not written in Arabic. This, they say, is because ‘Allah’ speaks Arabic and so any translation of his words is blasphemous. However, a suspicious person, not me, of course, might argue that it sounds very much as if they don’t want we kuffars to read the texts at all. I wonder why that might be, if it were the case?

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14/02/2024

A Christening in the Philippines

Originally posted 2018-01-11 10:10:07.

Christmas 2017, Angeles City, Philippines. My girlfriend Sam and I were invited to a Christening and duly trooped along.

This is a gallery of more pictures from the day.

14/02/2024

Identity Politics — the secret oppression

Originally posted 2018-09-17 09:30:59.

Identity Politics (IP) is a product of Postmodernism, the corrupted thinking that gave us Political Correctness (PC). This operates by denying an opponent the language needed to present a case, and thus preventing that person from doing so. It is intellectually lazy and morally bankrupt, because it is directly contradictory to free speech. You cannot speak freely if the language you must use has been censored so that you cannot express yourself. However, the Regressive Postmodernist Left has never been very keen on free speech. It prefers that people toe the party line.

IP ‘identifies’ a hierarchy in society, which it defines as ‘relative privilege’. It suggests that there is such a thing as ‘the patriarchy’, which apportions ‘privilege’ to individuals according to their identities — white men, black women, and so on. It proposes to counter this by establishing a hierarchy based on ‘oppression’. It says that those who are awarded most patriarchal privilege should not be allowed to speak about matters that affect the less privileged. This applies even if the person speaking is a recognised expert quoting the best science.