OK, you’ve read my thread on the Commonwealth. For those of us fortunate enough to live within its present or former extent, the British have given us the English language, parliamentary democracy, the writ of habeas corpus, Common Law and pretty much every sport worth playing. Democratic politics, both conservative and progressive, trace their roots to British thought. I would even make the case that the British Isles gave birth to positive libertarianism (but that’s another thread).
However, before you leave me pegged as an incurable anglophile, I want to canvass five of the very worst ideas the world has ever seen: ideas which, like weeds, have shaded out and strangled more noble ideas about them by sheer force, ideas which poisoned both mind and body as they morphed into religious cults, ideas which have resulted in the loss of tens, if not hundreds of millions of lives across the world, not to mention disease, starvation and human bondage and misery. Great, stinking, rotten, accursed ideas, every one of which were sown and took root in—England. Specifically, among its comfortably-off, middle-class, left-leaning, elitist academia.
The list is far from exhaustive (more on that later) but these five examples are linked by history, vectors of malevolence and subjugation and—most importantly—by their erroneous key presuppositions. Entire careers have been devoted to each one, and here is no more than a whistle-stop tour, together with what I regard as a common theme.
The Malthusian Theory of Population
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.
Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) came up with this little gem in his 1798 tome An Essay on the Principle of Population. For any of you unfamiliar with it, Malthus wrote that human populations, like those of bacteria or fungi, will tend to increase until the limitations of food supply precipitate catastrophic events which will reduce population back to a subsistence level. Clearly, Malthus presupposed a) there is a definite (if not strictly calculable) limit to food production, b) humans are happy to live at a subsistence level and c) humans are about as imaginative as the average bacterium. If Malthus himself is any example, that last one might just be true.
Anticipating social Darwinism, the good Reverend was an ardent opponent of England’s Poor Laws, or indeed any attempt at interfering with what he saw as a divinely-appointed natural order of human affairs. Clearly, he took Christ’s aside that the poor you will always have with you (Matthew 26:11) as a divine command, and did all he could to make sure that it was indeed so.
Malthus’ purulent conceptions of population have been so magnificently demolished elsewhere that I’m not even going to start on them here. History has proven him wrong time and again; yet the narcissistic urge to cull the human population of lesser breeds persists, zombie-like, among cliques of “elite” academics throughout the First World—nowhere more so than in England.
Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage
If Portugal produces wine more efficiently than it does cloth, and England produces cloth more efficiently than it does wine, but Portugal produces both more efficiently than England produces either, then Portugal should stick to winemaking, England should stick to weaving, and then just buy the other stuff from the other guys.
The arithmetic adds up, all right. But it buggers up everyone (except shipping companies, big business and international banking), and makes sure no nation can ever be truly independent. David Ricardo (1772-1823) was a contemporary and sometimes rival of Malthus. Blinded by the technological achievements of the nascent Industrial Revolution and having built an enormous fortune on the stock exchange (partly by betting, like Nathan Mayer Rothschild, against Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo), Ricardo was completely besotted with the idea that the ultimate goal was the numerical maximum global output of goods. Living in a nation which was a colonial power, his ideas were the sound of giant cash registers ringing to his government (in whose parliament he sat from 1819, as member for one of the original rotten boroughs), which promptly took his theory to India.
India at the time had a thriving cottage textiles industry. But the colonial government made sure that all the cotton and silk production was rounded up, exported to England where, in the steam-powered textiles mills of Manchester, it was “value-added” and sent straight back to the country from whence it came, where both weavers and rice farmers were forced to abandon the trades that had been in their families for generations, and grow cotton instead. The social dislocation was immense. Cotton production in India boomed, as did textile production in England, just as Ricardo predicted it would. The resulting food shortages in India, brought on by the re-allocation of agricultural land from rice to cotton, led to riots which were in no small part the beginnings of the Independence movement. It’s no coincidence that Gandhi himself proposed the spinning wheel as the centrepiece device for the new Indian flag. By law, official Indian flags today can only be made from certified, locally hand-spun cloth. The ashoka chakra Wheel of Eternal Law on the modern flag design is meant to hark back to Gandhi’s original upraised finger to David Ricardo and the government who took away the livelihood of millions of his countrymen.
Ricardian economics is still lurking about today, underpinning institutions like the World Bank and IMF, national specialisation being impractical without a global, top-down system of credit. Global credit means global interdependence and the impossibility of shielding any one country from a system which is the economic equivalent of a house of cards. As we all saw in 2008; toxic debt was the proximate cause of the collapse, but a system which allowed failures to cascade across national borders was the ultimate cause.
Interdependence is the sine qua non of Ricardian economics, but like Malthus, it treats humans objectively, reducing them to a few easily-manipulable parameters. And we just ain’t like that. Not to mention the idea that food is just one more commodity, no different to wristwatches or iPods. The results are predictable: in the end, global collapse; no goods produced, bankers jumping out of windows, humanity decimated, a barren, wind-swept, post-apocalyptic planet inhabited only by roving bands of naked Portuguese. And sober Englishmen.
Marxism
The value of my scribblings is exactly equal to the amount of work I put into them, not what the market is prepared to pay for them, Shakespeare be buggered. Publishers are capitalist exploiters, but I’ll take their money anyway.
Krackpot Karl Marx and his sycophantic sidekick Fast Freddie Engels were a pair of Germans who found their blatherings drowned out in a European marketplace overcrowded with revolutionary ideas. They needed a receptive audience, and they knew exactly where to go to find one. As a matter of fact, it was actually David Ricardo above who, in 1817, first postulated the labour theory of value (in England, anyway: Adam Smith wrote much the same thing in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations), which Karl in any case happily cut-and-pasted into his own tome exactly half a century later.
Krackpot Karl however, is not nearly as intriguing a character as Fast Freddie. The scion of a minor German textiles magnate, Freddie was sent at age 22, head stuffed with Hegel, to the Manchester branch of the family firm, from which he retired a wealthy man in 1869. He became well-known among London’s left-wing intelligentsia set for his gregarious and free-spending social life, sallying forth on fox hunts and becoming, according to his son-in-law, “the great beheader of champagne bottles”, hosting frequent parties at which “no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.” Having gained this kind of lifestyle as an exploiter of underpaid mill workers, Engels ranks as one of the modern era’s most significant hypocrites—as was the essentially unemployable Marx, by virtue of his having sponged off the Engels fortune for the last few decades of his life. There’s no polite way to put this: they can’t possibly have believed their own bullshit, or, as per George Orwell’s Animal Farm, believed their own theories at any rate didn’t apply to them.
Marxism went on to pollute every country on earth, divert a great deal of humanity’s efforts into a totally useless “cold war”, and provide the political framework for some of the greatest tyrants the world has ever seen. The way I see it, far more labour has gone into works denouncing Marxism than into works promoting it. What Marxist theory therefore has to say about its own utility, I leave for you to judge.
Post-Normal Science
For us, quality is a replacement for truth in our methodology. We argue that this is quite enough for doing science, and that truth is a category with symbolic importance, which itself is historically and culturally conditioned.
We live in a society which for two hundred years has become increasingly technologized. Virtually every aspect of our lives, from dawn to dusk, birth to death, is either completely controlled—or at the very least, inextricably entwined—with some aspect of science and technology. It’s easy to see how the appearance of radio and television, the progesterone pill, personal computers, microwave ovens, mobile phones and the internet have made our lives today unimaginable to someone from fifty years ago. This gives enormous power to science generally, and scientists in particular, themselves by their nature unelected and beholden to no political ideology, committed only to the uncovering of objective reality by means of the scientific method. Such independent empiricism has long been viewed as dangerous by politicians, and it was always going to be only a matter of time before politics made a serious attempt to colonize science.
And so it came to pass, in the form of one Jerome R. Ravetz. This American scholar, born into a family of communists (though never an official member of the American Communist Party himself, describing himself as a fellow traveller) went to England in the early 1950s on a Fulbright Scholarship, and spent the rest of his career there (his American passport was revoked in McCarthyist era, but later returned) promoting his own brand of science-in-the-service-of-a-political-agenda against the traditional empirical paradigm of Kuhn and Popper. For a guy to go to all the trouble of acquiring a doctorate in mathematics, only to declare that henceforth two plus two equalled whatever the Party Central Committee said it did, demonstrates a kind of bloody-minded determination at the very least.
Once again, it’s been thoroughly deconstructed elsewhere. But the post-normal paradigm not only paved the way for the final toxic idea in this series, but unwittingly attempts to shackle all future scientific endeavour to the fate of its own intellectual antecedents—and very nearly succeeded.
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming
If an international scientific commission were created today under the aegis of the United Nations, and given the brief of collecting evidence that the moon was made out of cheese, twenty years from now we would be witnessing an unassailable scientific case (with 90 percent certainty) for the immediate and forcible cessation of all dairying industry on earth, together with a multi-trillion dollar investment in lunar cargo ships.
In a real sense, CAGW is the logical outcome, indeed the reductio ad absurdum, of the first four ideas I have discussed here. Founded on a Malthusian conception of population’s effect on scarce resources, seeking a Ricardian global reconstruction of industry and attempting to treat CO2, a chemical compound essential for life, as simply one more trade-able commodity among many, justified by a scientific endeavour whose conclusions were written into its own mandate, and which takes the labour theory of value and substitutes energy for labour, came about through the exertions of a British government (a Conservative one!) for an essentially political purpose (breaking the power of the coal miners’ union). Never mind what the thermometer actually says. It’s getting warmer, and it’s your fault.
Like Marxism, those behind CAGW don’t really even believe their own B.S.—the science of it, at any rate. Ravetz again:
…climate change models are a form of “seduction”…advocates of the models…recruit possible supporters, and then keep them on board when the inadequacy of the models becomes apparent. This is what is understood as “seduction”; but it should be observed that the process may well be directed even more to the modelers themselves, to maintain their own sense of worth in the face of disillusioning experience.
Such monumental cynicism gives the lie to any pretence that Climatology, as it is practised today, is based in any way on the old empirical pursuit of truth. Their paradigm is probably best expressed by UEA professor Mike Hulme who, like Ravetz, essentially concedes uncontested the literal truth of his message is without foundation:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.
In such a milieu, all the Climategate shenanigans, peer-review rorts, silencing of dissent and worship of the projections of computer models over direct, raw measurements become suddenly “normal”. Jolly good show!
So…
From Malthus, to Ricardo, to Engels, to Ravetz, to Hulme, a straight line can be drawn.
All these ideas have several aspects in common. They tend to suffer what Joseph Schumpter called Ricardian Vice; that is, though they can be made to appear prima facie internally self-consistent, they do so in an artificial, closed universe, in which man is misrepresented, over-simplified, and whose individual desires are dismissed as irrelevant, and rendered a mere tool of the idea, a cog in a wheel. Factors such as quality of goods and services (as opposed to quantity), which cannot be reduced to a simple number or parameter, are left out of the equation. And without exception, they were conceived by men whose personal circumstances ensured they were comfortably shielded from the ultimate consequences of their ideas—that they themselves, in other words, were above the law.
No idea in human history was ever conceived ex nihilo, and the examples I have shown here are no exception. While promulgated in England, their progenitors themselves sometimes came from abroad, drawing on older intellectual traditions and norms. And of course, every society has had its cranks, charlatans and mountebanks. But it is in England, among one specific sub-class, where these ideas found fertile soil and took root. I’ve given five examples, but I am sure you could supply many others.
Why is this? That is the central question of this thread. Those of you who follow this blog will understand I’m not indicting an entire nation—just one small section of it. What is it about this particular sub-culture, the psychology of this little, self-satisfied society that allowed such evil to flourish? Is there some unique chemistry of, say, stiff-upper-lip stoicism masking a deep self-loathing, an unknowledge of self founded on a Calvinistic mistrust of contentment, together with a puritanical envy and hatred of anyone whom they suspect of being actually happy? The Cambridge Ring meets Basil Fawlty. To borrow from Brucker Bummer, the American Precedent, “it’s a question that’s above my pay grade”.
I’m hoping some of you might shed some light.
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
One common thread behind all these bad ideas is that these people are not Englishmen but foreigners, even if they had been born there. The only person who is right is Thomas Malthus and he is only correct in that it applies to the animal world or stagnant technological cultures.
Super, daring posting. Many thanks.
Is that not Alois Schumpeter to whom you refer, please, the economist who predicted capitalism would self-destruct owing to its very success in generating wealth to the extent it creates an intellectual class committed to its destruction? That is what we see now. That is all AGW mythology is a Potemkin village front for: guilt-addled Lord Fauntleroys and Lady Lard-Cottagers smashing and grabbing others’ wealth while pulling up the ladder providing the unwashed’s upward mobility, stripping and flipping a piece of the wealth for themselves, then giving the balance to kleptocratic oppressed nations of the Turd World.
I had to laugh when I reviewed the Commonwealth Secretariat website. There is not one conventional industrial development link for any of the listed countries linked ot the site. It reads like a Turd World dole scroungers’ tool kit for skeezing swag out of the non-insane, non-malevolent nations’ middle and working classes.
As for the victimhood of India, it need hardly be said that Indians could have said no, they could have gone their own way, they could have forfended from buying megatonnes of Manchester textiles, just as China can stop blaming uneconomic production and export dilemmae of their own making on others and attend to its own peoples’ needs rather than put the solution to their domestic problems onto other nations who are their customers. Never mind that they are robber nations redder in tooth and claw by far than the West to this day owing to their contempt for law and the almost complete absence of straight and regulated non-bribe-taking police forces.
It is all our fault, and we have while they have not, so pay up or they will kill us. That is the argument of the Turd World and of the Left in toto.
The atrocities and wars the Gandhi family have visited on India for no other reason than to satisfy ideological delusions and to line their own pockets beggar the imagination.
We were both right, Ozboy. It is Joseph Alois Schumpeter whom you reference.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Schumpeter.html
Very cuddly and not at all scary bear…almost half of India was never directly ruled by Britain and remained nominally independent for most of the Raj. all we did was have advisors temper the more extreme policies in those areas such as throwing a widow on the bonfire and ritual strangulation by followers of the Goddess Kali on the roads of India, if anything trade picked up during the Raj.
I don’t know what this guy is complaining about. I’d rather have the half-dead totally descredited lame duck IPCC soldiering on rather than having to start all over again undermining yet another strawman. And I want that venial railroad engineer to stay as its head too. Some people just don’t know when they’ve got it made …
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2010/07/18/97-of-scientists-do-not-believe-in-the-theory-of-catastrophic-man-made-global-warming/comment-page-1/
Pointman
We’re still waiting for the inevitabilities which Malthus & Marx thought they’d predicted.
How about adding Keynes to the list
Hi CrownArmourer
Prof Rummel at the Uni of Hawii only gave the Brits a score of 800,000 none war deaths at the hands of government in the 20th Century.
If he’d included those which Marx inspired, I guess the democide score would be closer to 180,000,000.
Sorry, I missed the “?” off including Keynes. it was meant to be a question, not a command.
Hello Luton Ian. Who’s Prof Rummel and what’s his score system? Do tell.
Pointman
Hi Luton Ian do I know you the words Baldrick mean anything to you?
Hi Pointman,
Prof Rummel is a US academic who’s research interest is quantifying mass murder by government. He has invented the name “Democide” to describe the crime.
The figures he has come up with are amazing. He’s likened the deaths by government in the 20th century to the equivalent of a full nuclear war.
Here’s a link to a summary of some of his updated figures:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
He has also correlated the figures with the political ideology of the murdering government, and pretty much all of the million plus are Marxian or nationalist flavours of socialism. 20th Century colonialism also adds about 50M to the figure.
Free democracies hardly ever kill their citizens.
Zellman, at Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership, has researched the enabling acts of civillian disarmament which made it safe for a relatively small number of state thugs to round up or contain vastly larger numbers of victims. With his co-authors, he documents the various firearms and weapons bans.
Playboy waster Marx, certainly has a lot to answer for, for making socialism marketable.
Von Mises, summarises Marx’s additions to socialism as:
1) the lie that “Socialism is inevitable”
2) Do not even speculate on what a socialist society will look like (supposedly we were incapable of envisioning it)
3) correct Proletarian thinking vs incorrect bourgois thinking (don’t worry if you are criticised, they’re not capable of understanding) this is a sort of cross between original sin and a stroppy teenager “You just don’t understand”.
This last one has recently been re worked again into:
Incorrect white male thinking Vs “Wise Latino woman” thinking
Hi Pointman,
Crownarmourer first, as it’s quick and easy
Baldrick was lucky there were 4 in the house, not three. I think I’ve grown up a little since those days. I’m even less tolerant now.
Prof Rummel is a US academic who’s research interest is quantifying mass murder by government. He has invented the name “Democide” to describe the crime.
The figures he has come up with are amazing. He’s likened the deaths by government in the 20th century to the equivalent of a full nuclear war.
Here’s a link to a summary of some of his updated figures:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
He has also correlated the figures with the political ideology of the murdering government, and pretty much all of the million plus are Marxian or nationalist flavours of socialism. 20th Century colonialism also adds about 50M to the figure.
Free democracies hardly ever kill their citizens.
Zellman, at Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership, has researched the enabling acts of civillian disarmament which made it safe for a relatively small number of state thugs to round up or contain vastly larger numbers of victims. With his co-authors, he documents the various firearms and weapons bans.
Playboy waster Marx, certainly has a lot to answer for, for making socialism marketable.
Von Mises, summarises Marx’s additions to socialism as:
1) the lie that “Socialism is inevitable”
2) Do not even speculate on what a socialist society will look like (supposedly we were incapable of envisioning it)
3) correct Proletarian thinking vs incorrect bourgois thinking (don’t worry if you are criticised, they’re not capable of understanding) this is a sort of cross between original sin and a stroppy teenager “You just don’t understand”.
This last one has recently been re worked again into:
Incorrect white male thinking Vs “Wise Latino woman” thinking
“I’m hoping some of you might shed some light.”
I’ve worked and lived in several of the countries of Western Europe and some other places as well. I started with that statement because if you really want to understand where you came from, you have to leave it, get the Hell out so you can look back in. It forces you out of the cultural day-to-dayness that blinds you to the obvious.
Within Europe, Britain is unique in only one way. It’s tolerant. That tolerance is periodically pushed to the breaking point but it remains its abiding characteristic. People fleeing across Europe for religious, economic or simply good old survival reasons get quickly shunted through Germany, France and all the others but they’re allowed to settle here. This has been true from the Huguenots to the survivors of ethnic cleansing in this our century and probably before that. This influx of “new men, new minds” at regular intervals, accounts for the uniquely inventive fertility of this country. Nothing else.
When you’ve a lot of ideas coming out of a place, there’s no guarantee they’re all going to be good ones.
Ozboy, thank you for an original and for some, an uncomfortable analysis of part of Britain’s contribution to the world of ideas. A brave and provocative statement.
Pointman
Does this site get slow to show comments?
If it does, I might have double posted.
Hi Pointman,
Crown Armourer first – ’cause it’s short
Baldrick was lucky there were 4 in the house, not three. I think I’ve grown up a little since those days. I’m even less tolerant now.
Prof Rummel is a US academic who’s research interest is quantifying mass murder by government. He has invented the name “Democide” to describe the crime.
The figures he has come up with are amazing. He’s likened the deaths by government in the 20th century to the equivalent of a full nuclear war.
Here’s a link to a summary of some of his updated figures:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
He has also correlated the figures with the political ideology of the murdering government, and pretty much all of the million plus are Marxian or nationalist flavours of socialism. 20th Century colonialism also adds about 50M to the figure.
Free democracies hardly ever kill their citizens.
Zellman, at Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership, has researched the enabling acts of civillian disarmament which made it safe for a relatively small number of state thugs to round up or contain vastly larger numbers of victims. With his co-authors, he documents the various firearms and weapons bans.
Playboy waster Marx, certainly has a lot to answer for, for making socialism marketable.
Von Mises, summarises Marx’s additions to socialism as:
1) the lie that “Socialism is inevitable”
2) Do not even speculate on what a socialist society will look like (supposedly we were incapable of envisioning it)
3) correct Proletarian thinking vs incorrect bourgois thinking (don’t worry if you are criticised, they’re not capable of understanding) this is a sort of cross between original sin and a stroppy teenager “You just don’t understand”.
This last one has recently been re worked again into:
Incorrect white male thinking Vs “Wise Latino woman” thinking
Sometimes. it goes into temporary limbo until ozboy gets a chance to review it and ok it.
Hi Pointman,
Crown Armourer first – ’cause it’s short
Baldrick was lucky there were 4 in the house, not three. I think I’ve grown up a little since those days. I’m even less tolerant now.
Prof Rummel is a US academic who’s research interest is quantifying mass murder by government. He has invented the name “Democide” to describe the crime.
The figures he has come up with are amazing. He’s likened the deaths by government in the 20th century to the equivalent of a full nuclear war.
Here’s a link to a summary of some of his updated figures:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
He has also correlated the figures with the political ideology of the murdering government, and pretty much all of the million plus are Marxian or nationalist flavours of socialism. 20th Century colonialism also adds about 50M to the figure.
Free democracies hardly ever kill their citizens.
Zellman, at Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership, has researched the enabling acts of civillian disarmament which made it safe for a relatively small number of state thugs to round up or contain vastly larger numbers of victims. With his co-authors, he documents the various firearms and weapons bans.
pointman a lot of native talent without outside help has invented an awful lot to make our lives better.
ok, sorry about the multiple postings.
Crown armourer,
Baldrick does indeed mean something to me, as did the sausage dog (banned from the house for reasons of hygeine
Pointman,
sorry, I wrote a long comment. must be held up. Here’s a link to Rummel’s site:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
crownarmourer July 19, 2010 at 9:50 am
Nothing that I cansee in my remarks indicated that the original ‘natives’, whoever they were, were less inventive than any other group. Look at the list of Olympic sports. How many were invented or codified in these shores?
Let’s discuss Ozboy’s observations and any attendant posts without getting into a nationalist bun fight.
Pointman
pointman, walt ozboy et al Luton Ian is a good buddy from my college days he is a fountain of information and can also shed light on AGW if he feels the need.
@Crown. Good to have Luton aboard!
Pointman
pointman he’s over in the British Isles so I’m sure he is in bed about now.
Death by Boombah and Boombah for UEA vis a vis Federal (US) funding, it seems. It is but the thin edge of the wedgie LOL Is UEA a British invention, too? Anglia somehow sounds like a good place to go fishing or something. Being East Anglia must mean it is a socialist enclave for retired fugitive Stasi.
Anyone who broadcasts concerning the topic of green anything except green eggs and ham a la Dr. Seuss ten years out is going to die the death of ten thousand tarantulas, if there is any form of communication left ten years out besides two tin cans and a string between them.
Amanda is a sneak teaser, got me good. I Gargled Gogglebear, and it patched me into the Gaia.com site. Curses, foiled again! That HAS to be the silliest site on the planet. It needs a makeover by the Marines or Aleister Crowley or Alice Cooper.
I think also whoever invented Zwinkies probably has their grandmother in bits tucked away in the deepfreezer in the basement.
Or maybe it’s me. I quite agree, in any event, that the UK takes a tremendous amount of unearned flak and off-the-wall criticism for no other reason but that they will put up with it and their critics know it. It’s really thick to read folks from Red China and the former Rhodesia calling Britons fascists and totalitarians. Right, be on the lookout for Dame Edna.
Wonder if Dr. Herr Profizzer Michael Unmanned will commit hara kiri with a sharpened hockey stick when the goods are laid at his door. Cuccinelli is warming up for the pugilistic punchitudinous disembowelment and cranial contusion fest down in Virginny re this matter. The festivities commence soon.
Afternoon All,
Hello Luton Ian, glad to see you here (unless Crown has any advice to the contrary..LOL)
Well Ozboy,
You’ve done it again – always giving us an interesting perspective to toss about.
My view is that any ideology has to have a “hook”. Much as we might challenge it, the basic tenet of human nature is “What’s in it for me?”. Just a survival instinct probably.
In religions of any colour, the “hook” is usually that following the doctrine will bring rewards in the “next life” if they are not too obvious in this one. It’s basic cause-and-effect, do this and you’ll get that, providing you cough up with those all-important tithes.
For all the examples you give, their theories would have simply remained notional unless there was a “hook” to satisfy the “What’s in it for me?” imperative. And as always, it’s Money. For that reason, as Luton Ian suggests, economists like Keynes have to be included in the mix.
As I see it, it’s only the second half of the 20th century, where ordinary people have been deluded into thinking that they actually matter. “The People”, and their health and happiness, have never mattered to any civilisation except as a source of labour to generate wealth for the Rulers. Wars have been relentlessly waged to protect/increase the holdings/territory/treasuries of the elite.
Democracy, as we have been persuaded it works, is dependent on the People being told what they want to hear. Anyone catering to the “what’s in it for me” principle while offering the “hook” of increased prosperity, is sure to win the day one way or the other, if not in outright numbers then by negotiating with their rivals to form Coalition Govts for whom no majority voted, but using the same tactics.
AGW ticks all the boxes. Instead of the forced labour for a subsistence living of the peasant classes of bygone days, the mechanisms are now in place to legislate to confiscate the earnings of the “great unwashed” masses (let’s call it tax) while convincing them that it’s all for their benefit using the Freudian/Goebbels proven propaganda principles of “create a sense of alarm, create a sense of guilt, create a sense of fear of impending calamity”. It’s worked a treat for religion for eons.
The challenges to AGW have been coming thick and fast in recent years, but NOT from the Global Legislators and their sycophants. They have just hunkered down, repeating the lie ad nauseam, relying on group-think suggestibility and the old tried and true carrot-and-stick method, (although as our old friend Norman Tebbit proclaimed, whacking the donkey over the nose with the stick and doing “unspeakable things” with the carrot at the other end…LOL).
I can’t see them ever “backing down” – they are going to have to be “taken down”, one way or the other.
As for why the English have been so receptive to these “foreign” influences? Weren’t the Brits living the simple life, bobbing about in coracles, before those master ship-builders the Norsemen popped in to show them a better way. Weren’t they living the simple life when the Romans turned up to show them feats of engineering and warfare never seen before? Being smart enough to benefit from “foreign” influences over the centuries, maybe gave them a more receptive mind-set.
As for old Marx, he got to live his dream, sponging off the wealth and industry of others, any Socialist’s end-game.
Blackswan the celts before the romans were superb metalsmiths and artisans they were able to farm the land to such a high degree of ability that the Romans coveted this and the chance to get at the freshwater black pearls coming from the area. The agricultural output was destroyed by the Roman invasions and only matched again in the 18th century. Gold was also a lure but the Celts hid the mines from them as did the Irish from the Norman invaders centuries later only today have they rediscovered the deposits.
Biden in the USA has just announced stupidly that the Dems will hold there own come the November elections which probably means a rigged ballot which would be extremely foolish of them as that’s when the trouble would begin.
Thanks Crown,
It always helps to “wise up” we iggorant old swans…LOL
Blackswan I’m sure you already knew all of the above but I’m a big history buff so I have to show off, I have made a point of reading all of the worlds history I could get my hands on so I can understand a culture and where it’s coming from and if necessary find it wanting. On a scale of 1 to 10 the British empire was as benevolent as an empire can get and still be an empire. We were still bastards though but you don’t build an empire by being nice.
Even the USA is just a splinter group of the British empire who went on to conquer it’s own empire which is really what the USA is except it had the sense to keep it’s conquered empire through ethnic cleansing and importing new settlers just the Romans on a scale of one to 10 the USA is a very benevolent empire as well.
Crownarmourer,
Otherwise put, “We’re Americans. Like us or we’ll kill you LOL!” or something like that. We are living proof that stoopid conquers all.
Crownie, where is OUR gold located exactly?
Radio Free W.A.L.T. will be non compos mentis from 21 July to 2 to 3 Aug. Let it so be written, let is so be done. I feel sure Luton Ian will fill the “void.”
After the carrot and stick observations, that doesn’t sound quite right :>p
Walt is really tickle me elmo bear, you don’t want Luton Ian filling your void his missus may object. As for the Gold it’s all been sold off illegally but you do have the largest collection of gold covered Tungsten on the planet as no one has audited fort Knox lately.
One of the reasons the North won the war was the large silver deposits found in Colorado which helped fund it, no money no troops or bullets or guns.
One of the strange outcomes of the war was that the UK decided to source it’s cotton from Egypt and India dirt poor peasants can produce cotton as efficiently as slave plantations in the South and at the same cost. I’m no fan of slavery in any form as it corrupts the owners of the slaves and stops innovation which is why the Roman empire did not undergo the industrial revolution, the ideas to use steam as power were already there but when it’s cheaper to use people there is no incentive to progress.
@ crownarmourer – from the previous thread….
My ego is flattered at your compliments on my literary style, and flattened by your critique of its content- or lack of it!
But the criticism is probably justified. Attempting brevity compromises lucidity and omits concrete examples. The excessive puritanism and associated hypocrisy of authoritarian governments of right and left, or the strange attitudes religions have to hair, female, facial and length could both be cited as the common elements that cross political labels.
But there is the problem with such political discourse, it tends to degenerate into sociological bollox and is one of the reasons why I tend to avoid the subject and stick to science where assertions can be refuted or confirmed.
One final comment however, the expansion of the European empires, especially the British empire, was driven by that then new and radical political trait which did embrace novelty of enterprenial capitalism. Trade had a long history, but within tradition, the new worldview saw opportunities in trade by opening new markets with new products.
Just one more bit of political bollox, the tolerance of otherness by the British has been forced upon them by history. Its a mongrel nation and culture, you only have to look at the language which is a pidgin polyglot of latin, french saxon dutch, scandinavian etc.
The success of the UK in many areas might be a result of this ability to adapt to difference.
A final deliberately inflammatory comment, in Georgian Britain there was a belief in the inate qualities of people. It was noted that the criminal underclass was a small percentage and the concept arose that if they could ALL be removed from society then the problem of crime as a response to poverty could be eliminated.
It was not socially acceptable to execute them all, and to costly to imprison them so the policy arose to export them to another island as far away as possible. Your point being?!? (snort) – Oz
Much to their disappointment it didn’t work, the percentage of the ‘criminal class’ seemed to remain constant, the numbers expanded to fill the void created by transportation because criminality is not inate in people, its inate in societies with poverty.
manonthemoor says:
July 19, 2010 at 3:33 am
….’Perhaps the AGW devotees can hire a sailboat or a rowing boat to get to Mexico
I believe Fenbeagle can provide some plans for ‘green’ sea travel. LOL’
….’Well, I can only suggest really, that they book themselves onto the new, echo friendly, green cruise liner ‘Free Whale’. The only cruise liner, were you can eat as much as you like, but be guaranteed to come back thinner. A little bit pricey, perhaps, but proving popular with the overweight.
The new concept involved greatly enlarging the gym, and then arranging it down both sides of the ship. The real breakthrough though, was attaching oars to the machines, extending outside of the ship for propulsion. It would perhaps have been better to limit it only to the rowing machines, but it was felt that a good mix of technology was probably better for energy security and users needs, and the resulting effects could be balanced out by a good ‘grid’ management system. The bicycle machines tend to cause the oars to sweep round in fast circles, while the ski walkers tend to oscillate the oars frantically up and down. Whistles are blown regularly, as a sign for passengers to leave their machines and jog to the other side of the ship, and resume efforts there. Fortunately, it was discovered that ‘grid’ balancing could be achieved by adjusting the speed of the running machines, from the bridge. Over use of this method though has caused some unfortunate incidents, and the running machines are now less popular.
The addition of pump storage which was to be achieved by pumping the water from the lower swimming pool deck to the higher deck, has been cancelled pending the high court judgement, following the disastrous trial run that was carried out without first warning pool users.
There have also been some complaints too, about the karaoke sessions, at the back of the ship with Igor, on the drum. He can only manage one note, but can increase the tempo.
Having the ships electrical system run from the gym, proved better in concept than in practise. The smart meter fridges, only work when the energy is available, so a request at the bar for ice in a drink, is usually met with groans all round, as the entire bar empties, to resume a two hour session at the gym. Everyone agrees though, that the tropical fish tank looks better anyway, with the new plastic fish replacements which look very life like, and don’t die every couple of hours.
fenbeagle says:
July 19, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Fen your efforts are masterly and beyond compare, by far the best start to my day for a long time. — Thank you
A warm welcome awaits you in the Rastech’s chat room which incites equal madness sometimes ,in a cosy format, from the regulars here. The system runs all 24 hours so we chat across the world USA, UK, Australia and China in this friendly environment.
Logging in can be a bit of a pain but rest assured the effort is well worth while. If yourself or any others care to join us and have problems getting in, there will always be someone available here I am sure to help you crack the ‘code’.
Best Regards
motm
Luton Ian July 19, 2010 at 9:48 am
Looking at Rummel’s figures, the correlation between a political system and the system murdering its own people is stark. Democracy as a system will always be criticised by those who live under it since it allows criticism. Totalitarianism allows no criticism and brutalises its own citizens.
Pointman
Brilliant post Oz…superbly written.
Fen’. He he…splendid stuff. Wonder if Igor can beat fast enough when the captain wants to go water skiing.
At the request of someone here, here is a description of a fairly lazy day.
I’ll wake up in the morning, usually to the sounds of the daily dance about half a k away. I really need to get a video of this, foreigners love this kind of thing. Under the bridge of the nearby junction, a three man band gathers every morning. One on drums, one with some kind of reed flute, with a much thinner, higher, well reedier sound than a clarinet, and a guy with some other instrument whose design escapes me. They play the same tune, upbeat, and the women, all middle aged, hold parasols in their right hand moving anti-clockwise in a squashed circle under this bridge, rhythmically thrusting the parasols in the air. They don’t sing, just shuffle in a strangely jaunty way if that is at all possible. I can hear them more than I can see them; the reedy beat helps my brain start.
The first thing I do every morning is check to see if I have any drinking water; I’ve been trying to train my housemate to use his initiative and buy when we are getting low, today, i’m out of luck. If I’m not too thirsty, I’ll just have a shower and pop down and buy some, if not i’ll have to boil some up.
My apartment is a couple of floors above tree level, it gives me a clear view of the traffic, which is useful. I’m lucky as mine is the only high rise in the immediate vincinity. This means I can walk around my bedroom stark naked in the morning without being able to see someone in another building walking around their bedroom stark naked. On second thoughts, maybe my luck could be better than it is… I’ll also, as a matter of course, check the pollution outside the window. If it is really bad, check the American Embassy’s figures to check quite how bad. If it is too bad, I will close my window and turn my air purifier on, and also say a few words of encouragement to my pollution eating plants.
My apartment is better than the average Beijinger’s, each room has air con, i have a biggish living room and heating lamps in my bathroom for winter. Chinese bathrooms are great for lazy gits like me, there is no separator between the toilet and the shower, very easy to clean, but any “Bog Quotes” book will be lucky to last very long.
Every since the problems with chinese milk products, every product i use, unless i’ve had it sent over from back home, a quick thought about its composition may enter my mind, but it leaves again fairly swiftly.
Owing to various disputes between the neighbours, the lift has been out of action for quite a while, so i take the stairs down. Chinese people never wait for you if you are coming down the stairs, they just come on up. Sometimes I’ll bump in to an old lady who lives on the top floor and must be approaching 80, i’ll stop and exchange a few pleasantries. She loves me, as I stop and let her climb the stairs before I go down, and offer assistance if she looks like she is struggling. She always refuses, but seems to really appreciate the offer.
The last few weeks every time i live the building, a flicker of annoyance will cross my face. Until very recently we had what must have been the only personal allotment within the city limits. I never ate what I grew, but it was quite nice to be able to attack the the ground with a spade every once in a while. Lots of people loved it, and spent all evening, as soon as they came back from work tending their tiny patch of soil, a few metres square at most. But those with cars who didn’t want to pay the monthly fee to use the under ground carpark were a bit upset, they had a dream. Where Mr Wang had his corn and undersized tomatoes, they could see their car. So they must have won whichever dispute I missed, and the diggers came, and in typical style took too much soil away, exposing the roots of the trees, and leaving the drains looking like volcanoes emerged from the sea. It’ll probably take them a couple of months to work out quite what to do.
I walk past the hotel and its beer gardens to my left, and the illegal taxis to my right. Everytime I walk past, a chorus of something approaching cat-calls comes from these drivers. They don’t like me, and I don’t like them. I refuse to use their services not only because the time spent haggling could be used to find a haggle-less taxi, but also because these guys set their prices too high, they don’t get very customers and are very bored, and quite poor. Riding with them means answering every question under the sun, when I’d rather just sit there and compose myself for the day. I used to use them a lot, had agreements with a couple of them to be my driver, but after a while they just get too greedy.
Behind the these men is a river, or rather was, it was quite nice before, but it is undergoing some rather lengthy work. The floor and the sides are concreted, and the upper part is now dry, and people walk their dogs along it. In the lower part, the water has become stagnant, and a disgusting breeding ground for mosquitoes. Sometimes this part stinks.
Somebodies not been doing their job properly recently, a refuse dump has grown up by the shop, when it is hot, and especially if i’ve yet to have something to drink, I make a conscious effort not to gag. It’s not so hot today, and has been raining a lot the last few days, so it’s bearable.
By the tip there is a door, usually open by this time, with several bunk beds in there, this is where the guards for the hotel sleep. Some of them are usually squatting on the ground between the door and some cars and the rubbish, playing cards with the bored illegal taxi drivers.
So I go to the main road and find a real taxi, when I get one, I try to remember to sit in the back seat, most taxi drivers are lovely, but there is nothing worse than being bathed in halitosis at the start of a day. I tell the driver my destination, and usually tell him the route I want to take, not because I’m worried they’ll rip me off, they know as soon as I open my mouth that there is no point, but because recently every taxi driver seems to be on his first day, and I have to patiently tell him the how to get to where I want to go, how to get there, traffic dependent.
I deliberately set my travelling times and working hours outside of rush hour, too much bother otherwise. The roads here are big, especially for an Englishman, the main arteries being 12 lanes across, 6 either way, with many flyovers over major junctions. Taxis, much more comfortable than when I first arrived, are spartan. The drivers usually listen to some melodramatic story, or stand up comedy, or if they are thoughtful souls, will put the foreign music channel on for me.
My trip usually takes between twenty minutes and half an hour, more if some foreign dignatory has arrived, causing the closure of some of the roads, and at somepoint I’ll arrive at the financial sector of Beijing, a bit like Canary Wharf, but with squatter buildings, and more of them. I teach English at one of the firms here, it pays good, so it subsidizes every thing else I do. Outside the buildings are security guards that I wouldn’t trust to safeguard a hamster. They are usually young, with hats that don’t quite fit, and haven’t quite learnt how to stand in a manner that looks more formal than loitering. They like me, as I chat to them on my fag breaks, they like going fishing at artificial lakes on the city outskirts when they have a day off. The owner of these lakes fills them full to the brim with fish, then undefeeds them, this way, the guards assure me, you are never disappointed, as you always land loads of fish. My students are good, fairly high level managers, friendly and with a good sense of humour. I tend to get them to talk about Chinese issues, whilst I feign complete ignorance, it gives them time to talk about the issues while I think about the best way to find out this and that. Sometimes they try and get me involved in a debate about my perceptions of China, a long time ago, I realized that this can be a big mistake, and an easy way to lose a cushy job, if I say anything at all, it’ll be highly positive stuff, at almost empty platitudes, to reconfirm their self perceptions, sometimes I may say a vaguely negative truism, such as, I get the feeling there is too much corruption here at the moment, to which everyone vigorously nods their head.
Their building is has a kind of empty airport feeling attached to it, my footsteps echo down the quiet air conditioned corridors. My blackboard is an extremely large touchscreen monitor, fantastic things, but the software doesn’t always know if i’m writing or rubbing out.
Those couple of hours will whizz by, i head out of the building and past the water fountains. There is a gaggle of teenagers maybe even uni students, 7 or 8 chinese kids and 2 or three white kids, all there bored, ocassionally they get up to do some half hearted flip on their skateboards, but mostly they sit there with a tidy girl on their lap with some crappy music coming out of their car. They look at me with the same kind bored but slightly hostile expression I might have looked at present me a decade ago. These are a new breed. Nobody ever looked at foreigners like that a while ago, they just didn’t have the time or the money to be that bored. But, also, and I’m jealous of them, I came at a time when Chinese people really were boring compared to us more sophisticated Westerners. Going out clubbing and taking your chinese friend along with you was more an act of sympathy, charity maybe than out of real desire for them to come along. Really nice people, but never going to be the life and soul of a party. Looking at this younger generation, things have moved on so fast in such a short space of time.
It’s hard to get taxis around that area for whatever reason, so i’ll walk to a for several minutes towards the mall and restaurants. This road could be anywhere, just your basic yuppy part of the city, found all over the world. I’ll try and eat at the chinese restaurants, before I used to love them, but now, I’m finding the food a bit too oily, maybe it’s the heat; otherwise, I’ll just grab a Big Mac.
I head back afterwards, the roads have clogged up by this time, I should get the underground, but am just too lazy. The trip back takes longer than the way out, and I arrive back home. If it’s late enough and the beer gardens have opened I’ll go sit down there, but first I’ll head in to the hotel to go to the toilet.
Like passing the illegal taxi drivers each day, going to the toilet in the hotel is a bit of a gauntlet; but in a fundamentally different way. It’s a slightly downmarket hotel, with fake plastic trees outside, plastic palm trees, not that Radiohead song, and inside… well. As soon as I enter the door, I receive a big welcome from a cacophony of female voices to my right, each girl, young and dressed in the Chinese Qipau, stood on a different step of a staircase that gently, though not elegantly curves up to the second floor. (1st floor). I’ve gone through this ritual for a long time now, and still haven’t found a good way to deal with it. Some junior manager stands just by the door, ready to greet me, help me choose the girl of my choice and lead me upstairs to a room where we can sing karoke, or whatever. But I’m just here for the toilet, so I just shuffle past them, not knowing whether I should look straight ahead, or look at them and thank them all, or just stare resolutely at the polished tiles in the floor. I head on to the toilet. Opposite the toilets is a hairdressers, with some girls lolling on the barbers chairs. I asked them for a haircut once, but they looked at me with a confused expression on their faces, before they told me that they didn’t know how to cut hair, but were fairly competent at private massage…
Eventually, moral dillemas all safely behind me, I find a bench at the drinking area. I order some kebabs, usually lamb or chicken heart, some noodles or rice and ale that is just about passable. I think that Chinese people learnt how to brew beer from the Americans, so most of their beer tastes like a crappy rip off of Coors Lite. There are lots of other kinds of kebabs on offer, some of my friends have a penchant for the goats penis, and testicles, good for virility they claim. I’ve had them a couple of times, chewier and chrunchier than normal meat, but don’t eat them anymore. Someone told me that goats get STD’s too, I haven’t bothered to verify this, but as I was only eating them out of politeness before, it wasn’t a big decision to stop. I’ll sit there, reading a book, chatting with friends, or flirting with the waitresses, who have usually just come in from the provinces to earn a bit of money and are endearingly innocent, in contrast to those dead eyed girls lolling about on the barber’s chair inside. Families sit around me, I know some of them, so it can be quite pleasant. The men take their shirts off in the summer, all have skinny arms and pot bellies from too much forced downing of pints of beer. They are mostly very friendly, and they sit there drinking and, and shouting over the din of the cheesy soap opera that the waitresses are watching on the nearby flatscreen TV. Eventually the families head home, as do some of the men, whilst others will wander inside the hotel for a sing song.
Blackswan Tasmania July 19, 2010 at 1:15 pm
The ‘hook’ is an essential part of all confidence tricks. See http://www.americanpendulum.com/2010/03/seven-stages-to-successful-sting-operation/
“Being smart enough to benefit from “foreign” influences over the centuries, maybe gave them a more receptive mind-set.”
I think as each successive wave integrates into the population, the new ideas come from the new demographic rather than the rump of the old one. Multiculturism, now a dead duck, stopped the integration of Muslims in britain and ghettoised them. 7/7 was the result and the end of Multiculturism as well.
Pointman
Locusts – That’s a wonderfully vivid impression you’ve given me of a day in Beijing……cheers!
Locusts July 19, 2010 at 7:30 pm
Wonderful stuff Locusts, wonderful.
Pointman
Locusts
Please please can we have more from ‘Our man in China’
Excellent stuff
Off topic
Radio 4 this morning and through my post box BT in the Uk are increasing line rental significantly “Because of lower traffic caused by mobiles” will this set a precedent to Electricity Co’s, Gas Co’s and Water Co’s as we save the planet and resources whilst they maintain there profits? Is this the capitalism of the Future?
Electric cars will go the same way very high uneconomic charges for the infra-structure.
Where will it all end, I have NoIdea
Following on this Express article seems to demonstrate my concerns via the MSM
http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/187749
We shall see? But never give up fighting AGW
Locust,
What a wonderful surprise to take us all to work with you for a day in the life of….
I bet you didn’t think we’d all fit in the taxi with you..LOL.
I have to tell you friend, I’m a fairly polite sort of swan, but manners would never see me munching on goat’s “bits”. You paint very vivid pictures with your keyboard – thank you.
Pointman says:
July 19, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Thanks for the “sting” link. What an eye opener to see it all laid out like that. How any of that scenario ever got to be remotely legal shows us just how corrupted this global finance/trade/politics has become.
As for multiculuralism, our major foreign influx post WW2 was from the displaced persons of Europe, particularly Greek and Italian and we are most grateful for the changes to our oh-so-British dietary habits. My Mum’s idea of seasoning food was pretty much limited to pepper & salt, and the riot of flavour and colour of European food was much appreciated.
In the 70s along with the Labor Socialists came the muli-culti ethos and the system of “entitlements” and “rights” and Welfare that has eroded our society and bled us dry, just like the UK. Where we once had newcomers working hard to become Aussies, we now have no-go ghettos and ethnic gang wars. Hardly an improvement.
Locusts
Can I echo other posts, in hoping you will keep us up to date on day to day details of China?
manonthemoor says:
July 19, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Hi MOTM,
In 2003 I was living in Canberra when wildfire swept through the place, destroying hundreds of homes with several people killed. It was a harrowing experience and in the aftermath, with our water catchments contaminated & pumping stations burned out, our water supply shortages were critical.
Authorities immediately drastically increased water prices with the intent of enforcing reduced usage and severe usage restrictions imposed. In the next months people took water conservation to heart and went to great lengths to save this precious resource.
Water prices then shot up again, the utilities saying that usage had dropped so dramatically that not enough revenue was being generated to maintain the infrastructure, let alone rebuild what was destroyed. Prices have increased ever since.
I can see the same scenario happening with electricity supply. Prices here have already gone through the roof, but people aren’t being told that it’s the subsidies for renewables that is so drastically inflating their bills. They are still being told that wind/solar is the only way to go and no other option is viable.
Moral of the story? Stock up on candles and make sure your BBQ gas bottle is full.
Fenbeagle,
Fantastic report from you earlier on your green-sea cruises. Great stuff.
Blackswan Tasmania July 19, 2010 at 10:09 pm
I often think that had Multiculturism been a fad hundreds of years ago, we’d still have a Huguenot ghetto here. Incidentally, the latest influx of people from Eastern Europe didn’t get a bean on the Multiculturism front. White and primarily Christian, if anything. Two deadly strikes against them.
They went to work doing the shit jobs straight away. In twenty years time, they’ll own the construction business, just like the Irish do now.
Pointman
izen says:
July 19, 2010 at 5:15 pm
/A final deliberately inflammatory comment, in Georgian Britain there was a belief in the inate(sic) qualities of people. It was noted that the criminal underclass was a small percentage and the concept arose that if they could ALL be removed from society then the problem of crime as a response to poverty could be eliminated.
It was not socially acceptable to execute them all, and to(sic) costly to imprison them so the policy arose to export them to another island as far away as possible.
Much to their disappointment it didn’t work, the percentage of the ‘criminal class’ seemed to remain constant, the numbers expanded to fill the void created by transportation because criminality is not inate(sic) in people, its(sic) inate(sic) in societies with poverty.//
Very snotty of you Izen to feel it necessary to be “deliberately inflammatory”.
“Criminality is not innate in people, it’s innate in societies with poverty”. How do you explain criminals from the upper classes who never wanted for anything in their lives except MORE wealth, MORE power, MORE control over those they consider to be beneath them?
Many of the convicts transported to that island far away, weren’t starving vagrants. There were artisans, masons, smiths, architects, lawyers, doctors and accountants guilty of fraud, forgery, murder or manslaughter. These were people perfectly capable of living respectable lives but their INNATE CRIMINALITY, regardless of their station in life, saw them banished to the Antipodes.
Many criminals from the upper echelon were never tried and convicted. Rather their privileged and well-connected families simply purchased a commission in the military and they came too, more than happy to get in on the “rush” for land grants whereby the slave labour of convicts was used to build them independent wealth in their own right.
Snotty, condescending, patronising and ignorant.
Pointman says:
July 19, 2010 at 11:07 pm
I was talking to a young fellow (about 30 yo) today about the British TV series “Grumpy Old Men/Women” and I laughingly said that if you were a Baby Boomer or older, grumpy old bastard sort of goes with the territory, along with the grey hair.
He asked me why?
I didn’t even have to think about it. It’s because we remember the world when it was a different place. Young people today don’t know what they don’t know. They have never known our country (or yours) any differently from what they see today.
He asked me what was different about younger folk today.
A sense of bloody entitlement is the difference. I think the social legacy we have left our kids is a poisoned chalice. Maybe it will take generations for them to find a moral compass and true independence again.
Meantime, I remain a grumpy old bastard.
Pointman says:
July 19, 2010 at 11:07 pm
Aye, and them pesky Jews as well LOL!
The bit the sh*tbreath do-nothing middle class “I don’t do sweat jobs” rotters don’t get is the only work that pays unless you have your nose up the politicians’ arse or are dealing drugs, both of which are entirely upper middle class “enterprises,” are the Man Jobs, as the wymyn’s lib factory smashers put it. There’s no way around it. Izen’s identified herself by her nasty posting as to gender. Guys don’t go off on tangents against the poor along those lines, it’s guys the poor approach for small change in the cities. It’s more likely a guy is destitute in gaytard communist America and Europe than it is for a female. They guys pay for it.
Blackswan, kudos on you for pointing out this basic reality. Eastern Canada and today’s smuggling culture is entirely a product of Lord Rakewells being deported to Bromont and Granby and Waterloo to run orchards and cattle farms after they’d lost it all at the gaming tables of White’s. Unlike the French who were happy to be there as what they got from Henri IV were competitively-obtained land grants and loans to develop La Belle Provence, for the English it was a dumping ground for the nastier variety of returned professional warriors from the European wars, sinecured corrupt clergy, and the Famine refugees from the Emerald Isle, not all of them bogstompers, but many former noble landowners of the Guiness/O’Brien/O’Neil bloodlines who were as inclined toward systematic micromanagement and raking off the top as the English Rakewells, which I call strip-and-flippers.
It’s just like a Red like you to defecate on the poor as if they were expendable garbage put on this planet for no other reason but to serve as your personal chamberpot, Izen. It’s because you have no more moral compass than you have a G_d, though I am sure you probably contribute to Christian Aid and other greentard modern slavemongers. You are either living at home with mummy at age 40-50 or making rent from trading on your assets.
I’ve never read a post in 10-15 years of blogging where the poor are were viewed in this manner, not even on the most brutally class-conscious butt-crack divorced alky rehab militia websites. You make racists seem socially acceptable by comparison, Izen.
Want to meet my neighborhood working male friends sometime? You’ll find them to absolutely gender-neutral in their dealings with skeezer state parasites as yourself. This neighborhood is up to its eyeballs in them, and the majority are downwardly mobile middle class on the dole as they’ve no marketable skills and have no desire to work. Most of them talk and write just like you, lady. They get to go to college for free, if they have a bastard or two to cover the rent. They’ll be HR or communications majors or social work majors LOL! Black and Hispanic and Native American and female to the front of the line, regardless of qualifications. The apartment which costs me 1200 a month they get for 75 buck s a month, utilities paid. And they are middle class, they aren’t up from nothing, hardly ever, in fact; up from nothing usually can’t even fill out the forms.
Not one of them are you, Izen? Betcha you are.
AGW is one of the topics on this blog, so I trust I’m not out of order in mentioning ‘Oxburgh’s Eleven’. Before you antipodeans get too excited, these are the eleven papers which Lord (Martyn) Rees of the Royal Society presented to Lord (Ron) Oxburgh proving the bona-fides of the CRU at the University of East Anglia.
Previously the name of the man who provided them to the Royal Society was ‘redacted’. It now turns out that it was a certain Prof Phil Jones (hat tip Bishop Hill)
Crownarmourer:
Very funny LOL.
I fink the key problem with the South possibly winning the war is they hadn’t a programme for post-war in mind anyone found to be palatable. The second bit was they weren’t big on spending what money they had on their own troops’ supplies and ammo. In that sense the South was the first of the “identity politics” ideology “cognitive dissonance festivals,” where the bottom line for their economic theories is “We hate you, everything is your fault, now pay us for being what we are,” which we did during Reconstruction. There were carpetbaggers and they are STILL there, and the South is STILL a bottomless pit from a Federal funding standpoint, even without Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, etc. etc.
Nice people in the South, bu their economies are entirely dependent on the largesse of Northern-based finances. If you look at the tables for which states get what percentage of their Federal tax contribution back in goods and services, NY state gets squat, whereas Georgia has a billion in reserve in welfare Fed money which it does not deploy, but instead uses as recourse collateral for loans AND the highest percentage of its residents on public assistance of any American state. Even Texas is a bit of a Fed skeezer dweezer, now more than ever.
If the South had won, Haiti would start at the southern Pennsylvania border.
PS I don’t like that state of affairs, either, I find the South much more culturally congenial, but that seems to be the way it is IMHO. Nice people don’t make megabucks of money, is maybe my point.
Blackswan Tasmania July 19, 2010 at 11:29 pm
The world as I see it now and the world I remember growing up in, is always a difficult thing for me to think about. I knew my parents grew up in difficult times but it wasn’t until I was a lot older and read some History that I realised that the times they grew up in were not just difficult but brutal. People who’ve ‘seen the Elephant’ rarely talk about it, to borrow a phrase from the Civil War we’re discussing here.
Experiences like theirs either poison your life or make you determined that your children will have a better life. Corny stuff I know but real. Some things are as simple as that. My upbringing compared to their times was idyllic and it was all their own doing. I’m sure they must have looked at me and wondered what sort of dilettante they’d raised. I do with mine.
Pointman
Walt guess where most of the Federal aid goes to and to which groups, for this you can thank Johnson for creating an entire underclass of people dependent for life on government largesse.
As for Northern finance that hasn’t exactly worked out well has it, people so smart they nearly destroyed the worlds economy and may still do so, they have taken a 500 trillion derivatives market in the last 3 years and turned it into a 1500 trillion derivatives market this can only end well.
The south has many faults and I’m not going to defend them too hard but beneath the manners lies a certain nastiness and hypocrisy you find rarely elsewhere. They will rob you blind while smiling.
Frightening post from JD blog
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2010/07/tim-yeo-mp.html
Tim Yeo wants personal carbon trading
Wonder where the money will go from that, more hit the pleb’s
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/18/strata-tower-london-green-architecture
What will they do about all the kids standing outside every day balling their eyes out pointing at all the dead seagulls?
Fen, click on the ‘chat’ button in Rastech’s
Pointman
Pointman
Did that, couldn’t get past AJAX. Having a senior moment, possibly
Fen, know what you mean.
Click on this link http://www.founding-sons.co.uk/SMF/index.php
Then you should see ‘Chat(3)’, just click on it. Hands over ears first though …
Pointman
crownarmourer says:
July 20, 2010 at 1:38 am
As regards the North, it is yet another case of hoisting themselves with their own petards, or in today’s case, thir own greentard.
I’ve worked in Charlottesville VA and Charlotte NC for 2 and 3 years respectively. I would be doing as well as my siblings if I had taken a pass on the South altogether LOL You can’t tell people about what robbers Southerners are who’ve not worked there, they think you are making it up until they’ve lived there and got robbed a few times themselves. Anything, any way but work. Crime stats there are still worse than here. I think half the motivation for the Civil War was the law enforcement angle.
Right you are about LBJ as well. Being a dole-scrounging victimologist is now the USA’s largest religious denomination thanks to him.
manonthemoor says:
July 20, 2010 at 1:58 am
Really great comments on the Yeo blog, too. will8ace in particular is bulldogging a lot of butts today LOL
Does Izen = …ism?
Working Bear,
is the central Govt funding part of the problem?
Going back to when we had to sit through human geography lectures, it was pointed out that the areas of Britain receiving regional assistance from central govt were the same in the mid ’80’s as they were when such assistance began in the 1920s.
Key observation being, the assistance had not helped the areas find new economic activities to replace their dying ones (coal mining, iron and steel makeing, ship and armaments building in the case of northern England, cotton, rice and groundnut growing for the southern US).
Speculation: the aid removes any incentive to find new economic activities.
It is not as though the north east of England lacked innovative individuals. It had many and attracted even more – before regional assistance and before the socialist ownership of the means of production began to look likely and removed any incentive to invest in business.
Luton Ian yes but tractor production is up in the subsidized regions.
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day, give a man a fish every day, and he can eat for the rest of his life!
Wonderful vicious nasty psycho bear…I suppose the different mentalities in the regions depend upon where most of the people came from, in the North it’s the English, Germans and Dutch originally, the South is more Celtic and french in flavour this explains everything.
Locusts give a man a fish n chip shop and he will die of cholesterol poisoning.
I wonder whether part of the reason for the English Enlightenment was:
England wasn’t France. Or, for that matter Spain.
Former colonies tend to identify themselves in negative terms, that they are NOT the old colonial power.
After Henry the eighth lost the Crown’s last French posessions, the court and aristocracy had to invent a new, English identity for themselves, and began speaking English.
The English must have been a particularly rebellious bunch, as the extremes of feudalism seen in France, never really lasted in England. Rights and liberties are never willingly allowed by those in power, so the English must have forced the concessions of political and religious freedom out of their rulers, and the rulers must have been wise enough to concede without letting it develop into a fight (unlike today, there was a balance in the capability to use violence, and therefore a great incentive not to resort to it).
Although the English had their parliament vs Royal civil war and the bloodless “Glorious Revolution”, they never had the “Purification” which sterilized Spain of any original thought, or the economically and socially disastrous French revolution.
True, Cromwell did try to prevent Catholics from exercising their common law right to keep and bear arms, but the courts generally did not uphold this.
England’s acts of toleration formalized the already current status of England as a safe refuge for persecuted minorities from the remainder of Europe, For example, Ricardo’s ancestors (Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain and Portugal), Marc Brunel (father of Ismbard Kingdom Brunel), a French Royalist. Karl Marx, a Jew escaping the Pogroms in Germany.
That and England’s own religious minorities; for example, The Baptists (e.g. Newcommen – inventer of the first practical steam engine) and the Quakers (almost all of British manufacturing and chemicals industry)
Even in the 19th century, when England was pretty much a supreme superpower. Some in England still defined themselves by lack of secret police and lack of the state spying on its citizens, lack of petty government restriction, and rule of law In contrast to Continental Europe, where all were rife).
I’m getting my quotes mixed up here. Was it FDR or Eisenhower? who said of Churchill. “He has hundreds of ideas each day. A couple of them are good”.
I think that the same used to be true of England as a whole, and it’s very successful offspring.
1950 Back to the Future
This post is for those who did not live through these times, around two generations ago, as seen through the eyes of a 10 year old.
We all recognise the words ‘industrial revolution’ and associate it with the mechanisation of industry by the use of machines rather than weak humans alone. This process continued from the onset of steam power in all its forms by a progression of inventions and applications up to World War II.
The World War II had the affect of accelerating the development process and we oldies from that point, entered a technology revolution.
The technology changes since that time are enormous and way beyond anything imagined in 1950, a vision of extended leisure and computers so powerful that only perhaps a dozen would be required, turned out to be pipe dreams.
Let me now describe some of the innovations and products which were non- existent in 1950 and are now considered the norm.
In the House.
Fitted Carpets, Double Glazing, Central Heating, Colour Television and an Audio system.
At this time a considerable number of houses had outside toilets and no bathroom.
In the kitchen
Fitted Kitchen and appliances, Stainless Steel Sinks, Running Hot water (except some gas geysers) Fridge, Fridge Freezer, Microwave, Cordless Kettle, Food processors, Front Loading Washers, Spin Dryers and Hot Tub Dryers
No plastic kitchen implements and only linoleum floor covering.
In the car
What car? – Those that could afford a second hand prewar car only used it for a weekend picnic treat.
Cars were BASIC –No heaters, no radio, no heated rear window, no servo or disc brakes, no radial tyres, no tungsten head lamps, no seatbelts and no airbags – All features we take for granted today.
Cars were invariably noisy, rusty and emitted blue smoke and required decarbonising and valve grinding after around each 10,000 miles. No hydraulic Tappets or Cam Belts.
Plus of course No MOTS.
On the Road
Lorries limited to 20 mph the rest open season, no speed cameras, no sleeping policemen, no congestion zones, free parking everywhere, no motorways, almost no dual carriageways, no road sign clutter, no number plate recognition, no written driving test and finally almost no traffic jams.
Public Transport.
Local Councils owned and ran the local bus services, with a few semi national operators for longer distances of 20 to 30miles. Most men worked close to home and cycling was a common transport for journeys up to 6miles each way.
It was still unusual for women to work although wartime had changed attitudes for ever.
Trains were predominantly steam engines with well worn pre-war rolling stock, much goods were moved by train however freight, being perhaps two times as much as passenger. Milk, Coal, Steel, Newspapers, Post and Parcel were transported in vast quantities daily.
Consumer Toys
Nothing digital, no CD’s, no audio cassettes, no reel to reel audio, no VCR’s, no mobile phones, no Wii’s, no colour tv, no digital cameras, no video cameras, no personal computers (IBM PC 1980) and no Internet.
In fact by today’s standards not much of anything.
Radio or more upmarket Radiograms were the norm, huddled round a coal fire in the winter, while Dad visited the pub for darts or domino’s.
So what’s the point of this diatribe?
Most of the changes above can be traced back to the utilisation of cheap available energy and resources, oil, coal, electricity, natural gas and nuclear energy.
Thanks to our AGW friends and their Co2 policy these resources in future are to be strictly limited where we rely on windmills, solar generators and wave generators. The theory is clearly flawed in ability to meet modern demand for domestic and industrial use and heavily subsidised to boot by Joe Public the user, numerous examples of this status have been exposed but as yet ignored by the AGW scammers.
Are these Green Watermelons or our Politicians or our EU masters going to give these things up and the subsequent developments — I think not!!!!
Clearly we cannot turn the clock back but any items or vehicles which rely on oil based fuel or electricity (renewable electricity is a miasma), could become so much recyclable junk.
This will be gradual process perhaps spanning ten years where redundant items become museum pieces and we progressively revert to a 1950’s lifestyle.
No Fly drive holidays, No out of season food loaded with Air miles, No global car or aircraft production. – Not much in fact of anything for the chosen few.—All in the name of an innocuous plant food gas Co2.
Have the AGW brigade thought this though?
Will replacement nuclear power be built in time?
Will UK in particular see sense and rediscover coal?
Will the populace accept price hikes associated with renewable?
Will IPPC5 ever b published?
Will technology come to the rescue?
Will the global financial and trade system survive?
In the next five years one way or another history will be made.
Now is not the time to give up, the truth will conquer the evil AGW
Man on the Moor
Luton Ian…After Henry the eighth lost the Crown’s last French posessions, the court and aristocracy had to invent a new, English identity for themselves, and began speaking English.
Actually he gained some possessions such as Borlogne, it was his daughter Mary who sold Calais off probably on the instructions King Phillip of Spain.
Oh no
It’s (it is)
The shame of it!
@Lutonian,
“After Henry the eighth lost the Crown’s last French posessions, the court and aristocracy had to invent a new, English identity for themselves, and began speaking English.”
The country was still recovering from being bi-lingural for two centuries. It still is. Look at the state of that fig leaf called English ‘grammar’ and the sheer number of words we’ve got …
Pointman
BTW “lost the Crown’s last French posessions”, that one is down to Queen Lizer numero uno, I’m afraid. Calais on my heart etc etc
Man from the Moon
I’m reading some of Kipling’s short stories at pres.
he describes a different planet with strange and alien concepts like responsibility.
motm thats crazy talk time did not exist before I was born as the whole point to of the universe is to serve me.
Old enough to remember outside netty’s and I do know toilet paper has gotten better my granny was the first in her village to have a washing machine complete with mangle.
All corrections welcome.
I re-discovered history in my 30s
I hated it at school as I could never remember names or dates.
Silly question for any historyologists who might be about:
How did teleological ideas in history (great men, destiny, progress etc) get given the name “Whig history”?
They seem the opposite of rational whiggery
Luton Ian says:
July 20, 2010 at 4:28 am
The main factors are availability of central public funding and the mill town mentality. Together with the reliance on unelected community “leaders” in the South is what does for them, including making of their educational system a “life is a box of chocolates” birdbrain factory of bible-thumping ideologues who can’t even read the Bahbull without moving their effing lips. (Grrr, grr, grr. Time to break out the Smasahy Bar Steward Angry –or if you’re Chinese–Angly–Bloggers’ Keyboard, where the keys are hammered with mallets or pounded with one’s forehead).
Methinks also the absence of innovation is entirely due to how likely it is for a student or person of skills and ambition to get murdered by the jealous or not. Crab-bucketing is a Southern term. I don’t know if you know what that means, but the term comes up in blues songs fairly frequently. BNP used to post a list with pictures of British “alpha” kids murdered by Muslims in the UK complete with the police report and the bio’s of the victims and perp’s until the Met made them take the postings down, so it happens in the UK too, to my knowledge.
When you go stringing for blue crab in Baltimore (or any Southern seacoast) harbour, your captured crab bucket doesn’t need a top to keep the live beggars in it. If a crab tries to get out, the other crabs grab it by its back legs and pull it back into the bucket.
Crownarmourer,
At one time historically there was a massive WASP and French population serving as the alpha class in the South, but at least in C-ville andCharlotte, it is physically dangerous to be Francophone now, and I met not one other person with O apostrophe anything in fron of their name th ewhole time I was there. I could have been a Fiji Islander to my neighbors and felt the same while looking the same in their eyes. Things have changed.
Charlotte is definitely German and Protestant now. Charlottesville is mega-diversity/perversity Futurama, but the alpha folks are Northerners or tony Euro-Rakewells.
Devo Bear… oddly enough that was just in a novel I just redded by Terry Pratchett.
As for the jealousy thing yep alive and well, get a new car it will be dented and scratch within 5 minutes of it being parked anywhere, keep very quiet about promotions pay raises anything even having children all will earn you an enemy who will go out of their way to stab you in the back. Hard work is never rewarded in fact you are punished for it as you show up the lazy sods around you. Kissing ass and wasting time gets you a pay raise every time.
I have not lived in the north so I’m not aware of it’s faults but I’m sure there are many, the West my missus tells me is as close to perfect if only they could shoot the californian hippy types who have move there.
Hammer swinging mouse organ playing Bear,
There’s a similar joke about chickens in a pen with a two’ high fence around it.
A neighbouring farmer asks why they don’t get out and is told that they are Irish chickens. If one starts to get above the rest, its’ mates pull it back to earth with a bump.
I think that is one of socialism’s chief weapons
Begrudgery and the hope of seeing successful people brought down is a lot more appealing to some than a financial reward would ever be.
Place of edjummicashone where a family member used to work, was full of trots. They never talked about the heaven on earth they were going to create. Only about which faceless group of class enemies to put up against the wall first.
Lovely people, trots. Just as well that they’re so full of s#it and never actually do anything.
MOTM,
Re:watermellons,
I suspect they are rotten watermellons.
Green outside, brown inside.
Brown is what you get when you mix green and red.
That twin brother of progressiveism that they never talk about, the one with unhealthy interests in vegan diets, anti smoking, eugenic euthenasia, central planning, race…
They’re simply the “useful idiots”; those behind them are seriously out to depopulate the earth
BTW LI we haven’t met – a warm welcome to LibertyGibbert – Oz
Luton Ian you mean the Democrats.
Luton Ian July 20, 2010 at 5:58 am
Mate, there’s something about this blog. Win, lose or draw, we’re saying what we think. You’re a perfect fit so God help you …
Pointman
Hi Oz,
I gather this is your place. Thanks for hosting a gatecrasher like me.
Pointman,
I mesh in pretty well with Crownarmourer. In the mid 80’s we used to sit up all night watching British By election results come in.
Lord Tebbit (Plain Norman back then), was usually on the TV studio panel. What a communicator that man is!
At that time the bit of the British Tory party which I admired, were not statist conservatives or the hand wringing new labour lite that we’ve got now, but Hayek inspired Whigs.
I’m afraid I don’t have Crownarmourer’s ability to come up with a completely new slant on something we’re used to looking at. I pretty boring that way.
I gather a lot of you guys are exiles from politically correct moderation at the Torygraph’s blogs?
my normal stalking ground is in gun rights blogs and forums, allong with occasional lurking in stealth mode in the constitutional militia sites
Do not confuse the constitutional guys with millenialists, identity (lovers of the turner diaries)or conspiracy theorists, the constitutional guys will chase out any racist or collectivist which they find.
I guess I’m a complete misfit for present day Britain?
Oz and other guys.
You’ve probably seen this happen already.
Saw a commenter on a blog pull another commenter up for leaving the abreviation :
“NITWH”
I’d just read it as nitwit.
Seems some of the letters stand for “In The White House”. We can speculate on what the letter N might or might not stand for.
The commenter who picked up on it seemed to think it was a collectivist troll trying to leave the racist equivalent of dog s#!t on the door step.
More reasons to be British and proud…
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/7/18/more-on-oxburghs-eleven.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/19/breaking-phil-jones-got-to-endorse-papers-for-oxburgh-inquiry/
…FFS!
Yikes! the dreaded N word. I’ll say it – Nigger. Nobody gets a free pass, irregardless of the colour of their arse but if that’s all you can say about someone else’s politics, then it says a lot about the dearth of yours.
Pointman
Fair point, pointy, but everyone – PLEASE – remember the ground rules (there aren’t many here). I don’t want any word, even that one, assuming “mythical taboo” status here, but if I see ANY race hate on LibertyGibbert, I’m kicking it and its author right out of here. We’re all better than that – Oz
The NITWH nitwit is why I don’t really fancy the Republican Party and hope that fellows like Otis Jennings, a true conservative and devout Catholic and construction contractor and politician and black man forms a Conservative Party for the USA based on the original Republican Party’s principles (BTW, my apartment is 150 feet and on the same property with the elm tree under which Horace Greeley formed Mr. Lincoln’s Republican Party; the Civil War started in Syracuse, the last US station for the underground railroad beofre Buffalo, Niagara Falls and freedom).
I wish also that Condeleeza Rice had run on the Republican ticket for Prez. We’d have a foreign policy to be proud of and be halfway toward a balanced budget while surrounded by dozens of former rich bankers and derivatives traders lined up at the homeless shelters for a bed for the night LOL!
There used to be a bronze plaque which had been there explaining Mr. Greeley’s great act on a marble pedestal, and some idiot crowbarred it off the day after Obama won. It had been there since 1898.
Sorry Ozboy,
I hate that ‘N’ word bollocks. Say the word or fuck off to another site. Don’t try to slip it in on a wink or a nod. Sorry. It just fuck’s me off
Pointman
The point Luton Ian is making is that there are trolls out there that deliberately target websites, so by leaving racist comments they can later turn around and discredit the blog. It’s a Leftie tactic so be good boys and girls, there are good and bad people in any group.
Pointman it is hypocritical where the group that hates the word uses it but we are not allowed to, next time anyone calls you a cracker or whatever get right in there face and yell.
Gnasher the Bear….funny Canada being the land of the free at the time.
crownarmourer July 20, 2010 at 10:21 am
It’s probably me Crown. I’m a simple man, even if I’m a Whitey. Me and a black man screaming racial insults at each other I can understand. I could do it. So could the hypothetical him. We’d probably both feel better afterwards and having got it out of our systems, go our own bloody ways.
What’s that got to do with dissing the highest officer (and his politics) in the USA because of the colour of his butt?
Pointman
Pointman it’s all about tactics none of us should resort to using racial slurs as that only allows the enemy who are total effing marxist scum the moral high ground. Of course I have no problems pointing out that the POTUS is a Muslim because his dad was and if he has renounced his faith 1.5 billion of them are obliged to kill him but since they are not he’s a Muslim that is a matter of fact and indisputable and not even remotely racist.
Of course the POTUS has said he’s a christian which would mean he has renounced Islam and is an apostate so either he’s a liar or 1.5 billion people believe otherwise.
I like this piece very much Oz, I didn’t realise that you were so eloquent and incisive. We Brits are very inventive and have devised many ideas and technologies, some rubbish and some good. (The Sinclair C5 and The Hovercraft), one has to take the rough with the smooth. Many of our ideas end up being exported and developed abroad. It would seem that we are not as good at development as we are at innovation. Also ideas over here often go unfunded, (Jet Engine anyone? Jolly good show). Unfortunately some of the bad ideas catch on. Such is the price of discovery.
G’day everyone,
Sheesh, I go to bed for a good night’s sleep and log on next day to find all the “good stuff” I missed. I might reset my circadian rhythm so I don’t miss out – perils of being a stickybeak.
Speaking of the differences between our parents’ generation, ourselves and our kids……
When I was little and we moved into a house we couldn’t afford curtains or blinds at first, so Mum mixed a paste of Ajax (remember that abrasive cleaning powder?) and “whited-out” the window glass. I thought it was nifty because it let in the light, nobody could see in and I got to draw pictures on it with my finger.
In the late 60s when I first fledged I couldn’t afford curtains either so I did the Ajax thing too. My friends thought it was a novel idea (they had newspapers taped on their bare windows), but they were inclined to write obscenities or dirty ditties on my windows (I used more Ajax fixing my windows than cleaning the shower..LOL).
We went to lunch with our Cygnet the other day, wandered through the shops and she bought a pair of ready-made curtains for the window at her new place…..and paid for them on her credit card.
Asking if she’d heard of Ajax only brought a quizzical look. Relating this story only brought a “Puleeease”. End of story.
Welcome SA…
Hi Crown 😉
Crown, we’re not at the DT. The kid with the talent has played and the discussion in this thread and on this particular topic has played out. Happy to keep bashing heads but it’ll be a yebbut sort of thing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1DMbWf0MrI
Pointman
Well Blackswan I was fortunate even in the worst of times my parents always no matter what saw to it that we lacked for nothing even curtains, we owned a house and a car at a time when most people did not. However nothing ever went to waste.
Hello Mr. Anomaly. Welcome to Ozboy’s Bar & Grill.
Pointman
Hi Sa,
Good to see you. Oz always gives us some interesting stuff to toss about. Sometimes we toss it right out of the ball-park. A referee is always a good thing…LOL
Pointman not going to butt heads on questions of tactics not worth it you are completely free to say whatever you want remember they don’t call this place Membawe for nothing.
Membabwe
Hi Everyone. Nice to be here, feels like home. 🙂
I’m glad your over here the more the merrier to keep pointman in line trouble maker that he is.
Just joking pointman.
Hi Crown,
The Ajax era didn’t last long I hasten to add, my point being that we used a bit of ingenuity to address a short-term problem while we saved up to get what we want. Today, credit cards solve everyone’s problems, or do they?…………..
Us Ockers down here are a bit picky Mr. new guy Anomaly. Do you support Oz or the whingeing Poms?
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Nothing wrong with pointy. I like his posts. He’s just reminding me that I’m not at JDs. Point taken pointy 😉
Blackswan…no cedit cards do not at 29% apr over here.
I suspect you’re a Pommie as well …
pointman who you calling a whinging pom
SA,
Unfortunately we seem to have attracted only one snotty-nosed troll over here, so “sport” is fairly restricted, however you do get to have some interesting chats about any/everything, sometimes even AGW…LOL
I’ll just have to go Nathan Bedford Forrest on you.
Swanny, they’re ganging upon us. We need to mobilise more than Tassie’s got. Call the mainland.
Pointman of Wallawoora.
SA
If you haven’t been lurking here long, take a quick scroll through previous threads and find the serialised chapters of Pointman’s novel, Line of Descent. It’s a fantastic read and we are all appreciative of his extraordinary generosity in sharing with us.
It keeps getting better Pointy, always looking for the next “episode”.
I’ll hold them off …
Swan
Only one troll? Strewth! Never mind.
I like to chat and I can get my troll walloping fix at the DT anytime I want. 😀
See even our childrens TV characters kick ass.
Pointy
If the mainland had anything going for it, we wouldn’t be in Tasmania. We’ve got all we need. Who’s picking on you? I’ll sort ’em out.
Corwn
What’s a Nathan Bedford Forrest?
Line of Descent, eh? OK, I’ll have a look.
G’day SA; welcome to LibertyGibbert – Oz
Brilliant American civil war cavalry commander for the confederates and errrrr sort of founded the KKK, we have a statue of him downtown in Memfrica.
Hey this is the South things aren’t simple not even the BBQ.
Swan, “What’s a Nathan Bedford Forrest?”. He’s the man. The one time he screwed up and had Union forces on both flanks and being asked what to do gave the immortal order. “Split in two, charge ’em both”. He and his men survived. I suspect he was more surprised than anybody else …
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Crown
What’s not simple about a BBQ? Didn’t ol’ Mick Dundee show youse blokes how to “throw another shrimp on the barbie”?
Pointy,
Ah, those were the days. Now he’d need a committee to decide his plane of attack and his rules of engagement.
Should be “plan”. Don’t type when people are talking to you swan.
Pointman
Us Ockers down here are a bit picky Mr. new guy Anomaly. Do you support Oz or the whingeing Poms?
I support whoever and whatever makes sense, innit? AGW for example doesn’t 😀
That’s the wusses in California, here we do good pig in a sauce to die for, the stuff Elvis ate. Mind you it helped kill him in the long run.
Swanny, I suppose we’ll have to tell them about Tassie just to keep them away. The efficay of the spiders and devils is fading. Whatja think?
Pointman of Wallawoora.
I’ve given up. My deadly spiders invention thread has run its .. eh .. thread. Help me out here. We must have something else nasty and deadly down here. Well okay, let’s leave the Sheilas out of it. Too dangerous for us. Think man, think.
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Everyone, I’ve added NoIdea, Pointy and Scud’s stories to the nav bar at the top (“Rare Scribbling”); you can’t comment on the individual chapter pages (that would quickly become too unwieldy), but you can on each story header page.
I’m really privileged to have such a fine array of talent contributing here at LibertyGibbert.
Enjoy!
Oz
G’day SA; welcome to LibertyGibbert – Oz
G’day Oz; thanks for the hospitality The DT is not working for me at the mo. Too much repetition 😦
Crown
Hogan was mercilessly “rubbished” down here for his “shrimp” thing.
In Oz we only ever have “prawns”. Banana prawns, tiger prawns – shrimp-sized ones are called “little prawns”..lol
A traditional Aussie BBQ involves the blokes standing round flipping steaks, chops and snags while downing copious quantities of beer, while the “girls” do the salads.
It took the Greeks and Italians to show us about spit-roasting whole pigs, goats, lambs etc.
Then the Kiwis showed us how to cook a “hungi?” (no idea how to spell it) whereby you dig a pit, line it with stones, make a fire, pop all the tucker in, cover the top with cinders and ash, then go fishin”, come back in a couple of hours and bingo! – a Polynesian feast.
Food is about the best thing our newcomers have taught us.
“in the long run” reminds me of the only time I ever agreed with Keynes. “In the long run, we’re all dead” but so what …
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Pointy
We have sharks, big white pointers that have confused divers with the sea lions that abound around our coast. Apart from that, there only the snakes.
I was reading a story the other day about a pioneer bloke in Tassie who got lost in the bush early last century, and all they found of him was his hat and one shoe. Our little devils have jaws like hyenas and eat “everything”, bones and all. They are only as big as a terrier so won’t bring you down, but break a leg and all they’ll find of you is your hat.
Pointy
Real Tassie women aren’t sheilas. They’ll put the kettle on and serve you a Devonshire tea with homemade strawberry jam.
The sheilas are usually found on the mainland. They’ll nail your bollocks to the barn door, then go “do” lunch.
Blackswan w e picked up the BBQ stuff from the Carib Indians, nothing like a good pit roast half pig takes 12 hours over charcoal went to a family reunion with my ex. Had a good meal of pig to eat pit roasted, however this being the South two of her cousins had married each other, one brought her “partner” a nice woman, another was a no show as he was in the witness protection program.
As for Hogan it was rather funny for Australia’s Benny Hill to do Crocodile Dundee, we got to see his stuff back in the 80’s. Still a bigger Kevin Bloody Wilson Fan.
Pointman and Blackswan we don’t need no animals to scare people off we have Rednecks by the dozen and all those nice chappies who live in da hood.
Okay. I give up. Nobody’s going to demean themselves by asking. I can’t stand it any more. I’ve gotta ask the question. They left the hat, obviously a local tradition with Devils, but what’s going on with the one shoe? I could understand if it was both (decent leather, smell, foot odour etc etc) but one?
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Crown
All we’ve got are chavs, hoodies and pikeys. Lol
pointman it’s a law of universal narrative if you find a mans hat you will ergo if he has been killed find one shoe to drive home the point the man was dead.
Crown, is this connected to the worm hole theory about why you always lose one sock when you go to the launderette?
Pointman of Wallawoora.
SA well I’m not from around these parts.
Pointman that is correct or the sock monster that lives behind the washing machine eats them.
SA another one from the South and this is down in Tunica…
Being a Celt, I’m sensative about these things. I overhear their whispered conversations in the night. Socks are not nice people. They hate us because we’ve got toenails. It’s as simple as that. The despise us because we don’t clip them regularly enough and they know who’s going to pay the price. We are where we are. It’s war against socks.
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Crown
Yee Haw! Hot damn boy, I sure do love that shit 😀
Bye everyone. Got to go and pack. I’m of to France (Brittany) for a few days. No internet, but nice surroundings; I’ll catch up with y’all when I get back 😉
Later
SA
pointman being a celt as well I have to resort to the time honoured method to drown out those voices, we drink only for this one reason. Whats moves your car keys at night the car key gnome?
Later SA Brittany is great.
Bye SA, safe trip.
Is that why Pommy blokes always leave their sox on in bed? They might sneak off in the night otherwise.
Pointy
I’m so naive and trusting…….
The historians put his disappearance down to the devils.
Most probably, on reflection, the bloke was some Pommy git who wandered into the boonies lording it over the locals and telling their grannies how to suck eggs.
Original Taswegians are very close-knit and don’t take kindly to outsiders.
A new light shines on Van Diemens Land’s dark history.
Crownarmourer:
You are rougly correct/slightly incorrect: we got the term barbecue/barbeque from the Taino Indians, who also gave us the word ‘maize’. I call them the Delia Smiths of the New World. They were savaged and enslaved by the Caribs, a nasty bunch by anyone’s standards, which just goes to show what can happen when you are creative and sensitive and open to life’s joys but not backed up by F16s, the Marines, and a liberty-loving constitution. This is all in my manuscript, of course, on the section discussing how barbecue is not grilling is not roasting (though they are all related).
roughly, I meant
Blackswan and pointy so your close knit eh, feeling kinda a sheepish are we.
Yeh amanda is back, settled sort of?
amanda well the Caribs did BBQ the Taino.
Blackswan we keep our socks on at all times it adds something to romance.
Crowarmourer: re things not simple in the South, ‘not even the BBQ’:
‘Most people think that food – what is cooked and how – is terribly important. But some types of cooking are actually controversial. For instance, one is ill-advised to start a general discussion, late of a Friday evening in a Southern American bar, about whether Carolina barbecue is better than Texas barbecue, or brisket better than pork. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mention Kansas….
According to the folks in the Barbecue Belt, barbecuing requires slow cooking over hardwoods or hot coals, which provide a low, dry indirect heat – and smoke. Grilling requires a nearly opposite technique: fast cooking over high, direct heat. There’s no smoke flavor, and no need for a “rub” before or a sauce afterward. Furthermore, barbecue is really about meat, whereas grilling can be done to pineapple or marshmallows, if you like. All that unites these methods is the absence of steam’.
From I don’t know what title to give this book about English: A Cultural Exploration of British and American Usage by me, Amanda Brenchley wot wrote it. Is it in print? – Oz
P.S. That isn’t the real title; only the subtitle is. I’ve never come up with one that really, entirely pleased me.
Crown: Oh, you are a hard man!
Well hers one for you guys….
As Mr A says, the secret is ‘low and slow’.
Heres another one just for the guys…
amanda the sox low and slow?
Crown, not settled: staying at my in-laws in Osprey on the Gulf Coast. Tomorrow up to Clearwater to look for a rental. It’s a nomadic life at present. Internet holds things together, though.
amanda look for an area where the cars are on blocks in the front yard and beer cans everywhere a sign of true redneck class in the south.
Oh god. Let’s please not discuss the socks. Socks grilled low and slow over woodsmoke are just … worse than ever!
Yes, one does not have to strain one’s eyes. Even Mr A, who is not exactly the Palomar Observatory, has noticed them.
Finally persuaded my geology buddy to visit this blog Luton Ian we even have Scientific anomaly pay us a visit.
I wonder if anyone has ever written a book “The Joy of Socks”.
The holes in the socks are helpful for sending Indian smoke signals, however.
Crown: Don’t ask me to write it! Though I would, if there were money in it. (Make it up!)
Well we could even get some of our downunder friends to knit some for us although apparently if we visit we will only need the one sock.
crownarmourer says:
July 20, 2010 at 1:09 pm
“Blackswan and pointy so your close knit eh, feeling kinda a sheepish are we.”
Nah, you’re confusing us with NZ Kiwis. We weren’t born here though the cygnets hatched here. It actually makes a difference, although so many mainlanders are coming here now, the “them & us” thing is fading compared to what it was 30 years ago.
Yes, great, Luton Ian finally is persuaded to turn up and what does he find…? Exactly. Sock pron and Shaun pron (I’m assuming, as you said it was for the guys).
amanda use it for your book title on different words used around the world in the English speaking world. We use bog or Netty meaning toilet or camode I think they call it the dunny downunder.
we will only need the one sock.
Is that advice only for the guys, as well?
Blackswan the first chance I get I’m on the first colony ship to Mars this planet is getting rather crowded.
Use what, Crown? What are you saying the title should be: ‘Use This As Bog Paper’????
Crown, may I recommend the planet Zorkon, especially if they decline to pick up Freewales and put him on it?
Darn it amanda you rumbled me I’m from zorkon and I’m here to observe you puny earthlings, freewales is a criminal from my home planet and when he is caught he shall his nurgles removed.
So who IS Freewales? Do we care? Old Toad seems convinced he’s Monbiot. I don’t think the latter would spare the effort (apart from anything else; I don’t read Freewales so my analysis is sharply limited). Writers that get paid for writing expect to be paid all the time.
amanda there was an author who wrote a book but was advised the best sellers were the second world war and cats somehow he combined the title it was a best seller.
Great. His nurgles are all that’s left, since quite clearly his dendrites and testicles have already disappeared….
Crown at 1:55:
Yes, funny you should mention that….
Crown,
Don’t “take the mickey” – our pre-school cygnets always had hand-knitted socks up to their knees and mittens (ever tried to keep socks on a baby/toddler?). As they grew the sox toes would get unpicked and a bit more knitted on the end. When we took to rural life on this island we went the whole hog, trying all the old ideas. Most of them worked a treat.
freewales claims to be a ww2 veteran living in Florida I’ve met a few of those guys and now they are old guys and most couldn’t give a rats about AGW they are looking to the next life by now and that is a bigger concern to them.
Dunny it is Down Under.
Nurgles?
they are looking to the next life by now and that is a bigger concern to them.
So what are they/he doing on James’s blog for Pete’s sake?
Amanda,
You should reserve a chapter in your tome for Aussie Strine. So much of our language has evolved from whichever region of Blighty the settlers came.
Blackswan,
I have no idea what ‘nurgles’ are. My dog does something we call ‘snurgles’, a low quiet rumbling sound of great satisfaction, like a dog’s version of purring.
Blackswan it’s a Zorkon term he will not be pleased having them removed I can assure you.
Amanda I doubt he is who claims to be he’s hiding behind that, guy would be in his 80’s not many 80 year old bloggers around and the ex military guys I have met are all no nonesense guys and despise BS.
That would be a lovely addition, Blackswan. Perhaps you could write for me and I’ll cut you in — when my WWII book about cats hits the big time(!)
write it for me, I meant
Amanda,
Old farts just can’t get used to becoming invisible, nobody listens and are generally ignored. A blog presents a captive audience. If they can pick a fight about anything, it gets the juices flowing again…LOL
Blackswan:
Sounds plausible. How do you explain the likes of us here at Ozboy’s, then? [Tip: It had better be flattering!]
Crown, he’s probably a 16 year-old twerp who’s been given eight weeks of detention.
Blackswan oddly enough my olde english village has a slight Australian twang to the accent, a throwback to 200 years ago, a slightly isolated place not much happening. so we retained a version of English the early Australian settlers willing and unwilling would have used.
American colonists from England came from East Anglia and the West country mainly you can still hear it up in Maine. The south was settled first by the Scots Irish and the influence is still there on how they pronunticate their words.
It’s like Fab-delusions its definitely David Dee in another disguise a paid troll, although when he’s on his own time a rather nice person got talking to him one night after we had both been chastised by the DT blogs for accusing each other of unspeakable acts. I was the sheep word that got us both the nasty letter.
You get a final warning crown?
Which is what I’m about to do. Assuming the dog has left me any room on the single bed I’m allotted at the in-laws’ house. I feel like Goldilocks with less wiggle space and without the exciting bears. Over to you, Crown.
Also back home my Dad still remembers the old folks still using thees and thous when talking, probably one of the last places to use those words. You had to be careful getting married and a careful calculation of whom was related to whom was always called for, which is why marrying out to the nearby villages and towns was always welcomed. We had one family that married in and making Jello in the bathtub for guests was uncalled for even if it was the social worker. Failing to chop up the tree while feeding it into the fire was another sign. I didn’t know a person could have so many extra chromosomes and live.
Locusts yes you get one letter to behave so grovelling was called for. Mind you considering what we had been accusing each other of in good fun I may add was jolly decent of them.
night Amanda.
Amanda says:
July 20, 2010 at 2:11 pm
” How do you explain the likes of us here at Ozboy’s, then?”
I think it has everything to do with our erudite and congenial host.
In Oz’s Bar & Grill you’ll find interesting people (did you find Locust’s day-in-the-life-of in Beijing earlier this thread?), humour, banter, serious discussion and the unique facility of a gathering from various points of the compass.
In other places, it’s like dropping into the wrong pub and finding the wrong look or word will get you “glassed” with a broken bottle. Loud, coarse and crude is not everyone’s idea of a “comfort zone”.
I’m really glad you pop in here for a chat.
Locusts I think Gay sheep was a move too far.
Blackswan: Quite so. And I’m glad you pop in, also. Love the charming talk of cygnets etc.
Crown: G’night. I’m an hour ahead of you now!
Not fair on gays, or not fair on sheep?
Hi Locusts,
You haven’t been to the hairdressers have you?
Night Amanda.
My in-laws were the same..lol Doggy “down” is always a good policy. It’s the shedding that always got me. I thought about a non-shedding poodle once but it wouldn’t have been the right “fit”. Bought a Belgian Shepherd from the Pound instead, and resigned myself to living with a clothesbrush constantly in hand. She’s gone to that kennel in the sky now and I’d love another, but reckon we are too old to take on a 15 year responsibility these days.
Missing canine companionship I’ve decided to take up being a voluntary dog-walker at the Pound instead. A neighbour, missing her late Labrador, has taken to baby-sitting her friends, neighbours and rellies dogs when they go on hols. She always brings her visitors over for a chat. Love big boofy dogs, the little yappy snappy sort just need swatting..lol
Locusts it was the Gay thing apparently the DT does not discuss this subject even if they are sheep. Cottaging sheep is a step too far. Not that I have anything against gay farm yard animals what they choose to do together is entirely up to them. It’s when farmer Giles gets involved it’s Jerry Springer time.
Blackswan
Fraid not, but i’m sure they do outcalls if you’re interested and willing to pay out for the return airfare.
Crown
You have to be careful with fab-sol when talking about gays, it threw a temper tantrum at me the last time i tried.
Then they’ve distanced themselves from other august journals of record – like this one
This is LibertyGibbert’s 4000th comment! Many thanks again to all who support it – Oz
Locusts it’s all an act paid trollism, which is why sometimes David Dee’s mask slips when I say something and he lets on who he is by the occasional LOL, don’t take him seriously I don’t I just play along. He doesn’t believe a fraction of the BS he espouses he’s paid to do it.
Ozboy that is wicked. The new DT is even more miserable now except on Damian T’s blog where I can get away with a lot more if I’m careful, even JD’s blog can be bad when the really bad moderator gets the shift, I have noticed a pattern and one of them needs firing or a good bollocking.
Locusts
When we were all crammed in your taxi on the way to work the other day, I noticed those people walking their dogs in the dry river-bed and I was surprised.
I read a story some weeks back about a Tongan man living in New Zealand. He cut his dog’s throat, skinned it and tossed it on the BBQ. Horrified neighbours called the police but apparently there is no law in NZ preventing the eating of domestic companion animals. The fact that it’s a prized delicacy in Tonga means that it was put down to multi-culti diversity and left at that.
At the time of the Seoul Olympics in ’88 I read a reporter’s account of stumbling across a dog butchery in a back alley. This wasn’t for a subsistence peasant trying to feed his family, it was a high-priced delicacy for the restaurants wealthy businessmen frequent. These poor caged creatures were garroted with wire as such a killing releases really tasty chemicals into the meat.
I just thought that it was the usual practice in Asia generally. Glad we have you to correct my ignorance.
I got post 4000!
Crown – sure, got to be less soul destroying ways to earn a crust though.
Blackswan – I’ll try and do a post about the current status of dogs as i see it here. But in short it is still lower that that of grey squirrels in England:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295883/First-case-kind-Man-told-pay-1-500-guilty-drowning-squirrel.html
Blackswan it is common throughout Asia to eat dog, and if you eat at a Chinese restaurant and the beef tastes a little funny it’s not beef, I always eat chicken. Even in the USA it is eaten.
Blackswan as my wife is Asian although brought up in the USA since a small child (in a white family) she has to be careful as they think they are pleasing her by serving the special beef.
Locusts if I read the news correctly there is a movement not to eat dog now people are wealthier and enjoy the companionship. I think there was always a distinction between pets and food animals, the former were only eaten in extremis.
Crown, broadly right on the eastern seaboard, always a good idea never to underestimate the power of ideology and frenzied groupthink however:
http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=225217
I should point out that that last link is no picnic, and maybe best opened with trepidation, if at all.
Locust
In the squirrel story, it’s OK to put the animal in a sack and hit it over the head to instantly kill it.
Question: If the squirrel is enfolded in a sack, how do you know where its head is?
Crown,
Rare hamburger is not sounding so good.
Mrs Crown must find it frustrating that her Asian appearance allows for all kinds of assumptions. Next time I order “beef and blackbean” I’ll check it out more closely. As for chicken, we were always told it kept the local feral cat problem under control…lol
I’m going vegetarian at the local Chinese in future.
Question: If the squirrel is enfolded in a sack, how do you know where its head is?
you put the sack behind your car wheel, reverse, and bingo!
Squirrel pancakes anyone? hahaha
Thanks Oz
I’m trying your suggestion but I keep mucking it up……I’ll keep at it.
Hi Guys
If you have a moment, I would really appreciate some help with the troll take over on GW’s blog site.
Two trolls, vaughan and bje have virtually taken over Gerald Warner’s excellent blog on the ‘toxic brand that is Prof Phil Jones.’ Gerald has been a long time supporter of the Anti-AGW lobby and although his hits are up on the blog, the trolls are out of control.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/..
Many thanks
RR
Locust not even the Soviets did such acts of barbarity, that was truly horrifying and if I could and had the power I would have these people tracked down and turned into dog food. In fact any maoist needs tracking down in the World and eliminated they are evil.
RR I dont see them you sure thats the right blog?
This of course was not the direct fault of Chairman Mao, but at the point where he knew the situation was getting dangerous, and he turned the people against each other, situations of this nature were on the cards.
If we do not have the choice, the opportunity, and the ability to think for ourselves, combined with the opportunity to cultivate all of the nicer human traits, then we become no better than dogs following the pack leader.
I heard today about people who go to hypnotists to erase their bad memories, whatever they may be, erasing the pain, and also the ability to learn from that pain. Erasing pain may be a fantastic thing if powerless in a “scientific socialist society”, but takes us further away from our humanity, I feel.
A Brave New World, the possibility of being able to eat your nearest and dearest, and then have no recollection of it ever happening…!
RR
Couldn’t see a Phil Jones mention in the titles either………..
Listen up folks………….
I’m truly a computer flounderer, and I’ve been messing about trying to establish a facebook page to share a little of Tasmania and Australia in general with you.
I’ve managed to put some pics in an album and so far I have Ozboy and Crownamourer as “friends”. I have no idea how they got there or what I should do to have more “friends”. The Cygnet was helping but today she’s not around, so anyone who has a clue might help me out………..
Blackswan whats a friend I don’t seem to have the knack…..wally to dilbert.
Well we asked you to be friends and you clicked yes. Arsebook sucks as Walt says…
Blackswan facebooks interface sucks and is not very intuitive, I have a sod of a problem trying to upload photos myself. Not of me but out West in the Rockies the Black hills and the Dakotas. I work with computers daily so that tells you something.
blackswan we could have our own community out there if i could ever figure out how.
Crown/swanny – I guess you mean a Facebook Group; I can set one up and issue invitations if you like – Oz
Crown
I wondered why you had a picture of a prairie dog on my facebooky thingy. It didn’t occur to me to click on it. I did, and found all your beaut pictures of Rushmore etc.
On Natural Habitat of the Blackswan I’ve managed to put in some pics, but only Edit Photos seems to bring up the captions I put on them. Beats me. See if you can find them.
@Swan
“Is that why Pommy blokes always leave their sox on in bed?” – It’s just the usual divide and rule stuff, under my toe etc etc. The stones even did a song about it
Pointman of Wallawoora.
Good morning all from the UK
Today as ‘Big O’ meets with ‘Small c’ to discuss/argue the fate of BP I offer my thoughts on ;Black Gold’
Oil
Or should we say “Oil Be Seein Yuses”.
There are many items and products that use the word OIL.
They fall into three approximate categories Black Gold Oil, Beak Oil and Snake Oil.
These categories are not exclusive however there are some Good Oils as the list below will show.
My usual encounter with oil however is with nasty black smelly stuff especially following the benefits of AGW Co2 production, after I have drained it out of my car, and difficult to remove after I have put my foot in the just drained bowl.
Examples of oil
Oil Oils:- Petrol, Diesel Oil, Paraffin Oil, Multigrade Oil, Gear Oil, Hydraulic Oil, Synthetic Oil, Semi Synthetic Oil, Aero Fuel Oil, Grease.
Domestic Oils:- Extra Virgin Olive Oil (loved this one!), Olive Oil, Sunflower Oil, Rapeseed Oil, Peanut Oil, Vegetable Oil, Cooking Oil, Whale Oil, Lamp Oil, Gas Oil, Vaseline and Levender Oil
Political Oils:- Snake Oil, Obama Oil, BP Oil, Gulf Oil, Iraq Oil, Iran and Falklands Oil.
Financial Oils:- Oil Futures, Oil Spot price, OPEC, Oil Tax (Domestic), Oil Tax (companies), VAT, Sale price elevator and carbon taxes.
For government Black Gold is an understatement, UK canal diesel costs £0.85 per litre and farm diesel is about the same, where as motorist pump diesel is £2.12 per litre – GO FIGURE!!
Over the last 100 years we have been blessed with an abundance of oil to the extent that these years could be described as the Oil Revolution which has followed the Industrial revolution.
Oil based products and products derived from oil play a massive part in our modern world for instance :-
All forms of manufacture, examples too numerous to mention!!
All forms of transport, examples too numerous to mention!!
All forms of plastics, the modern day wonder in households, medicine, clothes, consumer products and packaging.(modern supermarkets and self service stores could not exist without packaging).
Electricity generation, central heating, Agricultural Products etc. the list just goes on and on.
Dealing now with the three main categories above the importance must never be underestimated of Oil for the following reasons:-
Black Gold Oil because of its great importance in the modern world, leads to power politics and resource wars from Suez through Libya, Iraq and beyond to possibly Iran and the Falkland Islands. See the Tax and follow the money above.
Beak oil is not the province of a confused Indonesian Duck with dubious habits and friends, but should be correctly termed Peak Oil
Peak oil in theory has been around for over 40 years and it is claimed that it has yet to arrive, my view is that Peak Oil may be just the other side of the coin from AGW. The current spat between David Cameron and Obama demonstrates the concerns of these two nations over Oil with Peak Oil and AGW as a background. No government can afford to put oil revenues at risk, if Peak Oil theory takes hold or is valid. Thus AGW is the opportunity to milk the ‘golden goose’ just one more time before the total economic collapse of our non growth economy. Clearly Snake Oil and the financial Snake Oil salesmen are the means of collecting from the poor (again) and benefitting the (filthy) rich yet again.
Unfortunately the route we travel by either AGW or Peak Oil may be different, but the destination may be the same, back to the1800’s a pre Oil existence. No politician will admit this and with the financial wizards they are too busy feeding at the trough using carbon credits as well to gather even more joyous wealth and taxes, whilst the renewables strategy must be transparent even to a 10 year old.
Who knows where it will all end?
Will Obama takeover/nationalise BP?
Will the Gulf of Mexico recover and when?
Will the BBC ever get another Oily Pelican Picture?
Will good ever triumph over evil?
Will the world ban deep sea drilling?
SPOSE THE ANSWER LIES IN THE OIL (soil?)
WE MUST NEVER GIVE UP. AGW IS A SCAM.
Man on the Moor
crownarmourer says:
July 20, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Actually, Ozboy, Crownie and Swanee, what would REALLY kick some arse is to set up a thingie like InDesign, which not only has superb security built in (NI was telling me the chatroom is down WTF?) but also can be the cornerstone for developing as a group our documents and propaganda messterpieces for distribution as well as putting our cool stuff up there as files for all to review.
There are FREEWARE equivalents of InDesign and Project and suchlike. There is a thingie called Columbus and also Projity where you can store zilli0ns of easily accessible files and also maintain a dialogue between players almost like a chat room, again with industrial strength security.
ALL Arsebook clones are buggy and invadeable. Industrial-grade group tasking and project suites are not. We just have to get into the mindset that we are jointly making something, if only a commonality of purpose and thought. (Or rather, an anti-commonality: a Non-Conformists’ Union? LOL Someone shoot me and get it over with, the cognitive dissonances abound, I must have creeping socialist rashes developing on my nurgles).
Just an idea….
Bravo MOTM…….
Well said!!
However, you forgot Emu Oil and Goanna Oil.
Goannas are big nasty monitor lizards that inhabit Ozland (not Tassie) and are suspiciously similar to Komodo dragons. (Makes good liniment for muscle strains).
Playland Bear,
Are you off to Montreal again?
As for your suggestion, I have NoIdea what your suggestions are and I’m such a cyber-fool I have no idea how to do any of it. But it sounds good and if I had a clue I’d do it.
Can you access Blackswan’s Facebook site? I put some pictures up you might find interesting.
crownarmourer says: on July 20, 2010 at 1:59 pm
“freewales claims to be a ww2 veteran living in Florida”
From the GE@DT on the
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100046255/wikipedia-bias-jimmy-wales-does-the-right-thing/
Thread, we find this…
“On November 17, 2009, writing in the Daily Telegraph, Delingpole launched an attack on climate campaigner and World War 2 veteran Lee Bidgood Jr of Gainesville, Florida as a fraud. The attack backfired after the veteran came forward and confirmed his status to Newsweek magazine.”
Any connection?
NoIdea
Swan, can you post the link?
Pointman
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/editphoto.php?aid=9369
Let me know if that works………
Dogs in China.
Most Chinese cities have strict dog laws and licencsing requirements. In Beijing, all breeds, and all dogs whose height exceeds 14 inches are forbidden. That means that dogs in the cities are not allowed to be much bigger than cats. There are various reasons for this that are put forward, usually coming down to there are too many people, and dogs are dirty. The real reason is that Chinese people are scared of dogs, and many dogs are badly trained, as their owners are badly trained themselves. We all know someone who screams whenever a dog comes in to a room, if you don’t, try to imagine it, then multiply that by a few hundred million.
They are scared of dogs for two reasons:
1. They were banned for many years as a bourgeouise luxury, so quite a long time went by with no pet ownership.
2. Because they are wusses.
Now, getting rich is glorious, everyone wants a little dog, something just big enough for a small apartment. But as everyone knows, little dogs get little dog syndrome, treated like babies, they turn into tyrants.
There are feral dogs, alsatians and whatnot, in the countryside, these can be quite intimidating, as they are, more often than not, malnourished. Its’ usually fairly easy to deal with these – If you show fear, you get bitten – so stay calm. It’s amazing how many people can’t do that.
Lots of people eat dog soup in the winter, very warming and nutritious I’m reliably informed. I’m sure i’ve had dog meat sprinkled on something or other at some stage, I’ve been here long enough. But don’t worry, I’ve also been assured that they are all ugly dogs, with awful barks, and so are just asking to be eaten!
Nowadays, lots of people have little dogs that look something like the dog in this article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1295841/Kelly-Osbourne-says-life-worse-returning-home-Vegas-beloved-dog-Woody-dead.html
They are cute, the size of rats, and oh so human, these dogs really understand people. And nobody feels threatened by them. Gradually this trend is catching on, so it’s now considered a bit backward to eat dogs, and some provinces have even banned it, which caused a bit of a hoo-ha.
Pretty much every apartment block has a small feral dog or two, the old ladies leave food out for them and whatever. The one we have has a massive underbite, looks like a minature ogre, and has fallen in love with a massive yet beautiful illegal collie living on the 3rd floor. He sleeps on the doormat every night, waiting for the collie to come out, little knowing that not only is he incredibly ugly, but also poor and homeless. He has no chance.
Licensing fees, dog height restrictions, and inefficient neutering means that there are lots of biggish feral dogs hiding in every city slightly out of view. Some silly girl left her dog, that looked exactly like the one in the article, with me for a week. I took it for a walk, and it got eaten by a feral dog. I was stupid enough, and alert enough to beat the feral dog with a stick until it ran away, giving me just enough time to get to the thing vet’s. I won’t make that mistake again.
The police go on sweeps every once in a while, killing all feral, unregistered, and over sized dogs they come across. In Beijing, the last time that I’m aware of was 2 years ago, when 40,000 were swept away (and into the nearest restaurant?). Resulted in emotional protests, showing how much attitudes have changed, we are all dog loving hoi polloi now.
There is another thought that pops in to my mind, and that is, if I was in charge, I’d think it’s jolly conveniant that everyone is scared of big dogs. I think I’d ban big dog ownership, apart from in police stations and army bases; and would you believe it, the police do have quite a few alsations! But they seem to be more inbred that western ones, they seem to have weaker back legs.
giving me just enough time to get to the thing vet’s.
should read,
giving me just enough time to get the thing to the vet’s.
Locusts
Beagles, not really welcome then?
Hi Locusts,
Gee I never met a single person “who screams whenever a dog comes in to a room”.
If we are talking dietary habits and you have a strong stomach try..
http://www.trosch.org/lif/baby-eat.html
If not, give it a wide berth.
Just out of the height range I’m afraid. But you’d get away with it most of the time. You just have to be prepared to lose the dog one day. People with over sized dogs hide them in their apartment all day, then walk them either at dawn, when the police are still asleep, or late at night, when the police are drunk. I was thinking about getting a decent sized dog, but it is just one more thing to lose sleep over. I think I’ll end up getting an Italian Greyhound at some point, still far too small and wimpy, but at least it’ll be able to run rings around its opponents.
Chinese laws are like EU laws, there are so many, that people can’t help but disobey them. I’m fairly sure they do this deliberately. If you make it impossible for people to be happy without breaking the law, then you turn a blind eye to it, you always have the power to remind everyone whose boss when you suddenly decide to enforce it.
Blackswan
buried in my earlier horrific link was another horrific link showing pictures of your proposed meal, among others. I can’t be sure that the pictures are real, but they were shocking enough to cause me to go for a bit of a walk.
G’day Oz and everyone else
Before I leave for France, I’d just like to say.
My debut post yesterday was a bit of a rush job, a tad waffley and off target. Apologies to anyone who thought I was blowing an English trumpet.
Oz. Having slept on your excellent post I have had time to gather my thoughts. What I was trying to say is this …….
England is fertile ground for new ideas, both our own and everyone else’s. One has to expect some weeds to take root here. Some of them grow very rapidly and are buggers to get rid of , lol.
Bye and all the best 😉
SA
Hi Fenbeagle,
Our neighbour mate (another refugee from the Sydney rat-race) bought himself a beagle and young Basil rules the roost.
Locusts was right, it’s the owners that need training. Our mate doesn’t like to chastise his dog in case he gets his feelings hurt.
Are you a bossy beagle?
Bye SA and have a good trip.
All posts here tend to be waffly and off target so no-one noticed.
I didn’t think so anyway – look forward to hearing from you when you’re home.
Bonnes vacances SA.
Pointman
Locusts, next time you see that stuck up Collie, give it a boot from me.
Pointman
Pointy did you find the page with the captions?
The one with the spider?
Sure did Swan. I presume the spider was dining in that night …
Blackswan
Beagles are famous for it. (Serves them right for calling it Basil)
You can always check with the supplier to see if its fawlty?
Beagles have feelings too. Eating them, can spoil their whole day.
Looks like history is being airbrushed again over at the DT.
Pointman
Pointman
July 20, 2010 at 11:54 pm
Seems to me JD is moving towards politics and away from AGW challenge.
JD was Climategate surely there are other initiatives he could make or use rather than politics. A funding AGW slant could have been introduced but was missed/ignored.
Like this the JD blog becomes irrelevant!
motm: yep a missed opportunity.
“You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money… and you don’t know where the f*ck it’s going to take you. ”
Det. Lester Freamon: The Wire
Just looked at the JD site after 75 posts — A total irrelevance to AGW
Nothing more to add
And we thought the light would stay on until 2005
Lulu explains here:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7897330/Fears-for-road-safety-as-lights-switched-off-on-motorway.html
Why do we pay road tax and council tax?
I have another ‘bad’ idea from the English moneyed intelligentsia to use as a test for the factors that give rise to these flawed concepts.
Not of course that I would consider or concede that ‘post normal science’ is English, it has more to do with the European and specifically French school of sociological structuralism married to a heavy dose of Marxism.
And AGW is an international science, the idea was first suggested by Europeans and most of the science has been American for the last five decades…
But Eugenics as propounded by Galton, adopted by Stopes and traduced by Cyril Burt does qualify as another wrong idea from the English.
It certainly fits the pattern of a concept that was never considered to apply to its proponents. It also grows out of the strong class distinctions and the historical fear the upper class have always viewed the lumpen masses.
More Lulu
If we do not develop renewables, perhaps some bright spark might find we don’t need to!!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7898979/Britain-at-risk-of-being-left-behind-in-low-carbon-future.html
Someone, some where, may be doing a return on investment calculation.
Definitely got our favourite leftie moderator on the DT again, if I could I would put laxatives in his/her/it’s tea.
Oz,
We are overrun by a pestilence and it manifests itself in many ways.
Try this for a piece of blatant f***witted twaddle, it starts with:
Did the UK’s cold weather last winter make you wonder if climate change is really happening? Wonder no more. The period from March to May this year was actually the hottest, globally, since records began in 1880. The extent of sea ice melt in the Arctic is hitting a new high too. It’s all a timely reminder that we need urgent action to slow the carbon emissions that fuel global warming.
And in conclusion:
The main way to protect polar bear habitat is to do all we can to slow global warming – that means slashing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
Who just who could be responsible for this piece of puerile trash??
It has to be an organisation which enjoys the efficacy of cynical manipulation of minors. By using hyperbole as a tool to ‘frighten and cajole’ an organisation which is part of the global advocacy of boondoggling Post normal bollocks (or CAGW)!
……………………………………… Who can it be indeed?
Why none other than that bastion of fair play, cricket with a straight bat, exhibitors of that: ‘old Corinthian spirit’ and undoubted objectivity, with a world wide reputation for honesty, integrity and with it’s own ethical moral code!…………..Yes it’s……………….. the WWF.
WWF = Propaganda + Lies. Time the world woke up to their devious techniques and drove a stake through their rotten heart (and also take down the international trouble makers and agitators of AGW – Greenpeace – whilst they are at it)……….er why not eradicate all environmental advocacy’s…………………….Eg, Socialist UK government funded Eco-fascist nutters (similar to the WWF) all are interconnected.
The British council – http://www.britishcouncil.org/business.htm
-Who paid for young thugs to infiltrate meetings at Dopenhagen, to cheer and clap Chavez at one meeting and at another, heckle, spit at and threaten Lord Monckton, all paid for by you and me.
Of course the other great payer and encourager/taskmaster/slave driver/Agitprop…. of young ‘advocates’ is the EU…………………… (still bankrolled by the British taxpayer).
Why do we taxpayers (have to) pay for this filth? – because we have no choice, the Autocratic tyranny of the EU rules our lives -we are their obedient minions and cast iron’s Tories gleefully go about implementing and prosecuting the EU’s business in Britain.
An infestation of Blowflies.
Ed.
Ed – I hear ya, but…..the UK population as a whole keeps voting for this status-quo [albeit in different shades of blue/yellow/red] & seem drunk on the ‘lie of difference’.
How to change this?
Is it even possible for a populist Sulla to rise from the mire?
Crown sez: his/her/it’s tea.
Oh, so you think it could be Ewanme, do you? Nah, I don’t think you do. Ewanme is such a narcissist, he/she/it would have to put his/her/its signature on everything, e.g. Edited by a moderator ; )
manonthemoor says:
Why do we pay road tax and council tax?
Ans.: Because if you didn’t, you would only the spend the money on yourselves. :^]
Definitely not Ewanme who in my estimation is a tranny and will not look like the picture.
Probably somebody with the build to wrestle bears in a dress. Or possibly bothe wearing dressings.
Or even dresses if I could type.
JD’s BLOG and FREEWALES etc.
Most of you here are emigre JD bloggers who came over after the ‘rant’ which was well covered under ‘God-Emperor’,and the need for a bit of fresh air after the disqus fiasco. As you know the ‘immoderation’ is now at an all time high, with many loyal posters thoroughly pissed off. Damian is allegedly in charge of blogs there, but he can’t be on duty 24 hours a day, so who makes the decisions when he’s not around ? God alone knows. A paper that employs Geoffrey Lean and gives him a whole page twice a week must have a very twisted mind setting editorial policy. One can only assume that they do not care if their most successful blogger by far, is driven out.
It is James blog and if he chooses to discuss grey-fucking-squirrels at a time when Phil Jones is on the rack it’s up to him. I just wish he wouldn’t. The news that Jones had personally selected Oxburgh’s eleven papers is very much more important and that’s what we wanted to talk about.
No-one seems to believe that the Great Moonbat himself could spend his day making facile comments on someone else’s blog, but please realise that ‘freewales’ is not only intelligent but incredibly well informed. The idea that he’s some retired guy on the US East Coast doesn’t hold water. The times at which he posts rules that out.
Monbiot is having more than a spot of bother on his own Guardian blogs, which are well worth reading, as the respondents are now predominantly sceptics (skeptics). He is by nature a control freak and a meddler, so posing as the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent ‘freewales’ suits him fine.
Morning Bufo Nostra, always good to see you around. Has no-one picked up yet that it’s the Moonbats of the world at which I was taking aim above?
All very good points, and let me repeat LibertyGibbert isn’t here to harm JD’s blog. As long as the current Disqus format remains there however, all JD’s crew need an alternative forum; here and Rastech’s place fill that need – Oz
Just popping in, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave before I manage to catch up with all the comments.
Crown,
You’ll enjoy this:
http://www.authonomy.com/ViewBook.aspx?bookid=11394
Helena Duggan’s story of Seamus, a shoe who finds himself on the way to the dump. And yes, she is Irish. I haven’t asked her if she hears shoes talking to her at night, or whether sheneeds to take to the bottle for it though. I’ve just found out that she blogs, so perhaps I’ll drop a comment in linking to the socks bit.
Found myself giving evidence in court today (thought it was supposed to be tomorrow), cross examined by a nasty bitch of a collectivist solicitor.
Perhaps it’s time to get my barrow made up. I want to go selling roast chestnuts outside Leinster house (Irish Parliament building) for €50 a packet with free bucket of hot tar (to take home to fix leaky roof with) and free feather pillow (to rest head on after using tar in appropriate manner) with every packet of chestnuts.
Also optional extras of well oiled and pre stretched hemp rope, and castor oil by the glass (rope to hoist bucket up onto roof, castor oil to help remove tar).
There are instructions on tying a knot in rope at the bottom of Firehand’s Post here:
http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.com/2010/07/starting-with-dirtbag-sen.html.
Byeeeeee!
Oh, I won’t be specific about which village it was, but up to the 1980s, there was a family run filling station in a village in County Durham, with even wierder looking folks than the ones in the deliverence clip.
Crownarmourer: LOL
Old Toad: I actually typed a kind of defence of James earlier here but it didn’t take because I’m on a different computer etc. — but in view of your comments, I’ll say it again more succinctly: if he wants to post an occasional blog on something non-AGW, well, he always had more than one horse to ride, and I think he’s entitled to pick another from the stable now and then. Even THIS website is not exclusively AGW: not only do we chat off topic (wildly) but this is primarily a libertarian’s haven which happens to accommodate the obsessions of anti-Cagwers (= anti-Catastrophic AGW commenters). A change of focus keeps things fresh and makes some of the less dedicated (which I confess I am) stay in the mix.
I guess the point is that James doesn’t want (I imagine) to be personally and professionally hijacked by AGW themes to the point that he is somehow ‘not allowed’ to write about other subjects (correct me if I’m wrong, James, by proxy if you prefer). Not to sound like President Egobama, but ‘as I said before’, James’s blog got several of its current readers by NOT being a one-horse town, literarily speaking. I was a James fan before I was a (committed and vocal) AGW critic.
Dinner’s ready. One last thing: I don’t like the current thread; kindness to animals should always be shown if we can manage it, even if we have to control their numbers at times.
One other last thing: it turned out I wasn’t more succinct. Oh well.
Toad, are you really suggesting this Freewales joker is Moonbat? Do you have one fact to base that claim on? Two journos that most people haven’t heard of, handbagging each other would be a bit pathetic from everybody’s viewpoint.
Pointman
Hey Ozboy et al.
Sorry I have not popped over recently till now…… been hunting for pennies!
Just a wee addition to your wonderful two ronnies and cleese! 😉
I’ve been hunting for that one for a while
Wassap wi the Modz Man????
Pointman. Have you ever watched James & George ‘handbagging’ each other, it’s when they’re at their happiest. George can’t really snipe at Richard North, Matt Ridley or even Monckton all day long, but as George would say ‘it’s like shooting rats in a bucket’. Had ‘freewales’ posted last Wednesday when we were all at the RIBA for Monbiot’s debate I might have had second thoughts, but he didn’t.
FROG. As we know, James is a very good writer and can be quite witty, but he seems to have a low boiling point. He never got over being hauled over the coals by the RSPCA over the ‘hamster’ incident, so a red light came on over the Grey Squirrel.
His beef is not about animal cruelty or anthropomorphism, as he really is an animal lover. It’s really his anger over the way charities have been hijacked by left-wing activists and their ‘cuddly animals’ exploited e,g. WWF/Panda, AGW fraternity /the Polar Bear.
Plenty of possums who have molested my orchard have been known to um, suddenly become depressed and throw themselves into my dam. The water here is only a couple of degrees above freezing so death really is next to instantaneous. I then fish out the bodies and leave them in the paddock. Next day, they’re gone (tassie devils take everything – bones, fur, innards etc)
The way I see it, I’m taking one species in plague proportions down here, and feeding them to another one that is officially endangered. Doin’ my bit for the environment, I am.
D’ya reckon I could convince some PETA volunteers to come down here and help out? – Oz
Oz promise us they will get depressed I’m sure we can raise the airfare.
Murdoch’s Times loses nearly 90 percent of online readers, says report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100720/bs_yblog_upshot/murdoch-e2-80-99s-times-loses-nearly-90-of-online-readers-says-report
This says more about the content of the Times than it does about paywalls.
Pointman
I had a running spat with freewales the other day.
Old Toad’s right; he is well informed.
More to the point he said that he’s having a run in with North over an article he wrote in the Grauniad.
Fair chance it is Moonbat.
Attention All Brits…………..
As the UK is pushing to adopt “Alternative Voting” instead of “First Past the Post”, take a look at what’s in store for you –
“Devils inside hidden Green agenda”
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/election/devils-inside-hidden-green-agenda/story-fn5zmod2-1225894722878
“Labor is helping into power a party which demands we scrap our power stations and close industries that earn us at least $60 billion a year. Oh, and it wants us all to have more holidays, because hard work and making money really sucks.”……..
“you’ll be voting to “transition from coal exports”, which means ending a trade worth $55 billion a year . You’ll be voting to end “the mining and export of uranium”, worth $900 billion a year. You’ll be demanding farmers “remove as far as possible” all GM crops, which includes cotton worth about $1.3 billion a year. You will be voting to close down many other industries, including export of woodchips from old-growth forests, certain kinds of fishing, oil and mineral exploration in wildernesses, and new coal mines.”
This is how a Green Minority gets to wield the Balance of Power in any Govt and the end-game for WWF, Greenpeace et al.
Legislative Control is the issue, AGW is the thumb-screw.
Everyone – go up the top of the page and under “Rare Scribbling” is a marvellously illustrated article by our own Fenbeagle entitled Handy Green Recycling Advice. It’s a hoot!
Ozboy at 11:55:
Will do, but I just want to say in answer to Old Toad and ScouseBilly about Freewales’s being ‘well informed’: Yes, he’s so well informed he’s giving Hugo Chavez the Castro defence: people are killed and imprisoned and their lives wrecked for questioning the regime and for wanting self-determination and a modern hygienic standard of living, but at least the tyrants can claim ‘universal health care’, whatever that can possibly mean in thug-ridden hell-holes. My tolerance for such apologists is ZERO. My respect for such wilfull idiots is ZERO. The potential of friendship with such morally crippled people is ZERO.
Which just bolsters the point I was making slightly earlier. Whatever Monbiot’s position on AGW, the dividing line that separates friends from not-ever-friends-unless-they-get-wise is the dividing line between love of freedom and sympathy for tyranny. That is more fundamental (and incidentally I believe that Delingpole, of the James variety, would agree with me).
This blog itself takes liberty as its starting point: without that, no vigorous discussion of AGW or anything else would be possible.
The real snake is not the person that is confused about the planet’s causes and effects, its forces or elements. The real snake is the person that bats for misery, that stands up for the pointlessly cruel kind of misery that only bad politics can inflict.
Something to lighten the mood up.
Blackswan:
You would like my dog. Her name is like buddy only the English equivalent (I won’t name her just in case– you never know who’s earwigging etc.) and she is very boofy. Boofy but not goofy. I’m totally in love with her. Her eye contact (as people tell me, though of course I knew it) is terrific. She is love and affection in dog form. But she is no idiotic push-over. I like to think I take after my daughter!
Good god, Crownarmourer. Is that a picture of the American that we really want the world to see?????
Ever been to downtown Nashville.
Blackswan:
Forgot to mention: She is also very intelligent — quick, bright, with-it — and she is a very considerate bedmate.
I could drool all night about my dog. Must. stop. now.
Ozboy,
The contributions of Libertygibbert visitors you have wisely compiled in Rare Scribblings must be a source of great satisfaction for you after the trouble you have gone to in establishing this venue.
The depth of talent of our friends is astonishing, previously unknowable in DT blogs. Walt shared his talent with us then with his compboards and paintings, and surely inspired many to “have a go” with their own offerings.
Pointman has taken us aback with his great novel, Scud and NoIdea with their musings and flights of fantasy, and now Fenbeagle has really “done it” with his/her great story and brilliant illustrations.
Congratulations to all concerned.
Crown: No, but thanks for the hint heh heh heh
Blackswan: Maybe you’re fooling all of us, but you come across as such a nice (=good) person.
ScouseBilly says:
July 21, 2010 at 10:51 am
I had a running spat with freewales the other day.
ScouseBilly: may I congratulate you on your fortitude. I couldn’t put up with the fellow… whoever he is.
oo
That is what I so love about you, Crown: You really raise the tone. heh heh
One from Zorkon…
Amanda well I’m in a picture says more than a thousand words mood tonight.
Crown: You go, girl, as the saying is (was).
Zorkon Disco. Love it! At least the big ball didn’t come down on ‘Stayin’ Alive’ or ‘Jive Talkin’ ‘
P. S. If my sign-in name is annoyingly inconsistent and whimsical, blame Walt: he inspired me!
This one will get me banned for life from Ozboy but child hood memories…
Crown, you are a VERY naughty boy. The punishment will be having your balls plucked by your friend who’s only learned how to blow a pipe. Dear oh dear. I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s mate….
Did you ever watch rainbow amanda this may actually be a real episode British kiddies TV was very subversive, it had no effect on me whatsoever.
Oz, sorry if we’ve ‘lowered the tone’ too much: it IS 11:43 p.m. Eastern Time, U. S. A.
Crown, I would trust you with my Ladybird books and possibly even my life, but I do ask you this: how could children’s television possibly be so rude, darling? Your teledocumentary smacks so much of reality and of pull-the-other-leg at the same time. That’s why it’s so effective, of course.
Hi Froggy Amanda, (there’s no way you’re a Mandy)
Feel free to tell us about your Buddy, you guys put up with me chatting about my Cygnet (same same). I do love dogs.
When I was a 14 yo kid, I went to visit my country Dad on school hols. He had a pack of seven sheep dogs, border collies & Kelpies (an Australian breed of working dog) and I was enthralled as I watched him working those dogs to move a flock of thousands of sheep, using only whistles as his commands.
When I went home I resolved to properly train our own family dog, some big old mongrel breed. I was astonished at her intelligence and willingness to please and we worked together for many months. Before that, she had just been “our dog”. My new-found respect and admiration for her made her a real friend. Running my dog through her repertoire of cleverness became my “party-trick” and we both enjoyed the praise. Kids & dogs, same same.
For a 14 yo adolescent, such an experience has been of life-long benefit to me in many ways, the least of them being that “you reap what you sow” insomuch as treat people (or animals) with respect and courtesy and they are much more willing to see things your way…LOL
On that trip as a kid I learned another salutary lesson that lives with me today.
One of Dad’s dogs was a red Kelpie bitch, and in the heat (40degC) and dust of a fast moving flock, lay down under a spinifex bush and refused to come when called. Dad pulled up his horse, grabbed his rifle, walked over and shot the dog dead. As a city-slicker kid I was beside myself with outraged anger at such an act, but I learned the difference between city sensibilities and country pragmatism. If the dog refused to do its job, it wasn’t worth feeding.
Modern Governments see this approach in contradictory ways. If you’re young and refuse to work, Socialist Govts will pick up your tab because there are votes in it. If you are past your “use by” date, been in the workforce 50 years, paid your taxes and raised some offspring, then really you’re a bit of a nuisance.
What do they do with old farts like us when we haven’t been indoctrinated with Green/Socialist doctrines like our kids, have too much to say for ourselves, and become a thorn in their sides?
Maybe they could make power tariffs so high we can’t afford to keep warm/ cool as necessary. Create some hare-brained scheme to make all food and essentials more expensive and beyond our reach. Make fuel unaffordable that will restrict our ability to be so mobile. Reduce aged-care services and their regulatory standards.
The older I get, the more I think of that red Kelpie dog.
Anyway I believed until puberty that the term for what grown-ups did when they loved each other very much was ‘sexual intehcles’. Sort of like tentacles and just as invasive. My mother’s accent: she didn’t spell it out for me. You had to clean the intehcles after each time and put them away in the cupboard or they’d make the place look untidy.
and I was enthralled as I watched him working those dogs to move a flock of thousands of sheep, using only whistles as his commands.
Blackswan: It sounds like a Hollywood movie already. The Dog Whistler. Has it been done?
My new-found respect and admiration for her made her a real friend.
Yes, genuine respect works wonders with dogs. Some people treat them like potted plants with the capacity to wee outside. It’s all wrong.
Nah, just whispering sweet nuthin’s in your hoss’s ear.
amanda…It’s amazing where your sense of humour comes from, I used to come home from school and my mother would be cleaning upstairs, you would be hollering mam where are you, from upstairs “I’ve run off with a black man”. My mothers humour is very dry I inherited the talent. however it was many years before you realize what dearest mother was joking about.
treat people (or animals) with respect and courtesy and they are much more willing to see things your way…LOL
Exactly.
Crown: Well, you’re from the North and I’m from the South; you’re hoity-toity and I’m a question-mark in origins — and yet we enjoy a laugh most easily. On the other hand, nothing so strange in that when you consider that I have a friend from Kentucky who says EN-tire and likes bluegrass music, which makes my eyes water on a good day, and we laugh like drains (as they say: do drains laugh?)….
Also humour back home is what we call black and anything horrible is always the source of a joke especially if someone dies ironically or in a particularly stupid self inflicted manner and the humour can be cruel. When life was very hard and you were only a few meals from starving one of the things to keep you going is humour.
The other strand of humour verges on insanity how to make the mundane very very funny, throw in sarcasm by the bucketload and viola we were all smart arses.
On the flip side people were very generous to people worse off than themselves you may have had very little but there was always some poor bugger who had nothing. Which I suppose is why socialism has such a strong hold on the people in the area although originally admirable in it’s goals has been twisted and hijacked by the wealthy for there own ends. All people wanted was decent affordable health care, education, a social safety net when times were tough until things picked up again and decent wages for a hard days work and pensions for the working people when they were old and had what 10 years or less to live after a very hard life. Even then just enough to get by on.
It was never intended for people living 30 years after retirement or to provide welfare for life for welfare queens to live in a lifestyle my grandparents struggled hard for, or immigrants straight off a plane by the millions to live off the public teat forever.
Crown, Amanda,
As you are linguistics buffs, can one of you explain this?
As kids when we rushed through the door to see “what’s for tea?” Mum always said she was making “a wigwam for a goose’s bridle”. She said it about everything, and we just took it as a euphemism for “wait and see”.
Born and bred Tasmanians have a different set of local expressions not heard on the mainland, to which Oz will attest I’m sure.
Mates are “cobbers”, scallywags are rum’ns (?spelling) and so it goes.
I’m being way too serious on the subject of humour someone slap me. I always have to remember I’m in the south now when it comes to humour. When your colleagues are talking about a why someone can not get into a computer system and they wonder why it is never wise to say “because God hates them” they just don’t get it. Far too religious for my liking and I hate the hypocrisy associated with that.
As I always joke to my non southern friends if Jesus was alive today and was doing the “he who is without sin cast the first stone” speech he would get as far as “he who is” before someone threw the stone.
I love em all to death here but they sure is crazy people.
and viola we were all smart arses.
Crown: never knew instruments could be so useful. :^)
Crown,
We don’t have such a poor view of religious jokes, and one mate’s favourite in describing a long-term thing/situation is, “he’s been doing that since Jesus played full-back for Jerusalem”.
Another friend’s favourite, when he’s in a hurry is “Oh well, better rattle me dags”. That always cracks me up and for the uninitiated, a dag is a sh**p turd that tends to get stuck on rear end fleece. A running sh**p with a daggy bum really rattles….LOL
I’m telling you Amanda, you have to reserve a chapter for Aussie expressions.
I just luv ’em.
Violas?
Aren’t they little flowers in the garden?
Crown: but do you give them enough credit, dear? As Mr A said very recently: the believers of the South don’t try to tell you how to run your lives: that’s done by the liberals up north. In the South they quietly get on with it most of the time. Clearly our experiences differ.
That was my idea, Blackswan, but I think those are violets.
By the way, Swanny, on the subject of strange expressions: sometimes there’s no sensible explanation. Take for instance the expression ‘when donkeys wore high hats’ (i.e. a long time ago). When on earth did donkeys wear high hats? Why make that a marker? It’s just silly. But it’s also sweet and innocuous. As are most English expressions.
Blackswan,
An extremely elderly relative of mine has been very well looked after by the Gov, in England. Although the pension is too low, and she is fleeced by the local taxi service for the elderly, she currently spends half her life in hospital with one operation or another, and we are all very thankful for that. Here are two snippets from a well known book by an Englishman:
At the graveside Snowball made a little speech, emphasising the need for all animals to be ready to die for Animal Farm if need be. The animals decided unanimously to create a military decoration, “Animal Hero, First Class,” which was conferred there and then on Snowball and Boxer. It consisted of a brass medal (they were really some old horse-brasses which had been found in the harness-room), to be worn on Sundays and holidays.
Then later, after he couldn’t work anymore, pigs claim they will send Boxer to a hospital in the town for treatment
The animals crowded round the van. “Good-bye, Boxer!” they chorused, “good-bye!”
Fools! Fools! shouted Benjamin, prancing round them and stamping the earth with his small hoofs. “Fools! Do you not see what is written on the side of that van?”
That gave the animals pause, and there was a hush. Muriel began to spell out the words. But Benjamin pushed her aside and in the midst of a deadly silence he read:
‘Alfred Simmonds, Horse Slaughterer and Glue Boiler, Willingdon. Dealer in Hides and Bone-Meal. Kennels Supplied.’ Do you not understand what that means? They are taking Boxer to the knacker’s!
A cry of horror burst from all the animals. At this moment the man on the box whipped up his horses and the van moved out of the yard at a smart trot. All the animals followed, crying out at the tops of their voices. Clover forced her way to the front. The van began to gather speed. Clover tried to stir her stout limbs to a gallop, and achieved a canter. “Boxer!” she cried. “Boxer! Boxer! Boxer!” And just at this moment, as though he had heard the uproar outside, Boxer’s face, with the white stripe down his nose, appeared at the small window at the back of the van.
….
Abdicating responsibility for all of the main decisions in ones life to a Socialist Nanny State is probably not a good idea!
If anybody wants to borrow the complete .txt from me, just ask.
you have to reserve a chapter for Aussie expressions.
I would love to.
I will.
Right after I get publishable by doing my WWII thing (no kidding — in essence!)
amanda I’m in the buckle of the bible belt here and you would be amazed how much they think you and not them of course should be leading righteous life which involves an eye for an eye and they never got around to read Bible 2 the revenge of Jesus.
Then there are the folks that don’t go to church much and are just regular folks like me I like them although as far as sophistication goes I may as well discuss Platonian philosophy with a brick.
I can’t go to church as I have church tourettes rude words and thoughts keep popping into my mind due to the sheer boredom of it all. I always have the fear of telling someone what I really think of them.
Donkeys wore high hats when they got into Parliament or the House of Lords, or uppity merchants, or even worse tradesmen made too much money and tried to bedeck themselves in a manner above their station.
My greatest fear of entering a church is that I will say “you do realize this all total bollocks” that’s when they will burn me.
Crown, dear, I DO understand. Been there, done that, though not to the point of shouting ‘Mary never got her baby that way!’ I was greatly annoyed as a 9-year-old when I had to keep standing and sitting down and standing up again during the Christmas service, and when a stranger (lady) asked me whether I enjoyed it, I told her crossly ‘No!’ Which was not what she expected. Also as an adult I joined my boyfriend in his plain, boring, staid Presbyterian church (don’t know why; it only happened once), and his friend sitting in the balcony commented on my stiff and hostile-looking back!
So glad that I can respect religious beliefs without having to subscribe to them. Thank you, Enlightenment and the United States Constitution.
Crown
Best not to bite the hand that burns you.
Blackswan: No doubt you are right.
Must go in now, chaps. 1:04 a.m. Florida time. Cheers.
Locusts I long ago gave up socialism except in a very narrow sense for those times to keep the wolf away from the door in need and no more, bad shite happens to us all at some point or other. I also have no love for a CEO earning 600 times my salary when he needs an assistant to tie his shoelaces or fix his bloody computer because he has forgotten his password for the hundreth time. If you can’t remember a simple password then your not worth the money in my book. I bet bill Gates never forgets his, if you build a company from scratch then you are worth your money these people I respect.
Locusts,
Thanks for your Animal Farm excerpt, reminds me of Watership Down and its perspective on animal vivisection and experimentation.
Mind you, I’ll start to get twitchy if anyone calls me “Boxer”.
BTW Have you gone to Rare Scribblings at the top of the page to read Fenbeagles brilliant offering? Don’t miss it.
Yes I have, and it’s very good!
Blackswan the shooting the dog was a bit harsh back home the bugger would have been given a good beating but not shot or given some water, never waste a good dog they were hard to train enough as it was. Luton Ian told me about a collie on his farm back home in the hill country a sheep farm, it used to try and bite the tires of a moving landrover until one day it mistimed the bite. Apparently it was seen yelping off into the distance cost a lot to rewire it’s jaw apparently. I’m sure he can tell the tale better than me. I suppose good working dogs were hard to come by no matter how stupid.
Crown,
“earning 600 times my salary when he needs an assistant to tie his shoelaces”
I feel like that about a family who live in publicly owned luxury, but who need someone to put their toothpaste on a toothbrush, iron their newspapers (a crease in a broadsheet deemed offensive) whose more menial staff are required to hide from their presence, and there are a brace of women “in waiting”, agog to be summoned as and when required. Any other Firm gets to pension off their doddery seniors but not this lot whose accidental parentage renders them objects of adoration and entitled to suckle at the taxpayer teat.
I don’t geddit.
Blackswan when I was back home living in blighty I actually met women who got knocked up for the sole purpose of jumping the council house waiting lists and associated benefits so they would never have to work ever and a string of loser boyfriends to provide multiple sprogs who were generally neglected.
I also dislike the public government workers feeding off public largesse forever or so they think now, it’s looking like it’s time to pay the piper and everyone is broke and these people may finally have to face a cold hard future on pensions a lot less than they were promised.
Locusts my friend Luton Ian had some Chinese party officials over back home who naturally were inquisitive at how we did things and what people did for a living they were horrified the UK was more Marxist than China. He can fill you in on the details.
Crown,
The dog experience sure did make me “toe the line” when it came to making my bed and keeping the place tidy…LOL
When he said “jump”, we weren’t even game to ask “how high?”
Funny thing was, he was a quiet man – no yelling or bluster – and he never hit us to keep us in line. It was like the razor strop quietly hanging on the back of the kitchen door. He never used it but we always knew he would if he considered it necessary.
We never gave him cause, he never mistreated us. In those days nobody gave any thought to the emotional trauma caused by the death of the dog.
It was his way of saying “that’s life, that’s how the real world works, get used to it”.
Funnily, my Cygnet gets really cranky as my attitude is “Sh*t happens, deal with it”.
She has no idea where that might have come from. I’ve told her the story, but she was more interested in the poor dog than it’s effect on me and my siblings who saw it.
Kids really can’t see past the ends of their noses, that’s why they’re such ripe pickings for the Green/Socialists.
Crown,
You can only imagine what a “cottage industry” childbirth has become since the baby bonus is $5,000 a pop. Your run-down on the situation is really magnified here with instances of the boyfriends beating up their human-incubator girlfriends demanding the cash. Feral kids abound and more and more grandparents are finding themselves having to take their grandkids into their homes and raise a whole new family all over again.
Under this regime, if society isn’t imploding I’d like someone to explain what it is.
Crown,
I’d love to hear about it.
Locusts ask Luton Ian for all tales he has we are a tag team for ideas been discussing all sorts of non PC shite for ages as we both are trained scientists. No wishy washy rubbish.
He has more experience in some areas me in others we have honed some arguments very finely. Took us 20 years. He also has contacts I don’t and vice versa. Like my father in law is so well connected over here it scares me.
Blackswan as for strong silent types that’s my granddad never one for physical violence but like your father he would have shot the dog under similar circumstances. Used to raise foxes for the local hunt when he was a kid. Never said much but when he did you listened. My own daughter is spoiled and when you try to point out them how lucky they are you get a blank stare. They have no idea and I was spoiled compared to my parents, but I still remember the outside toilets and other assorted non luxuries. Toilet paper has certainly gotten softer.
The next generation is in for a shock I think.
Crown
So the moral of the story seems to be, always lead by example, and don’t bore people with stories that they aren’t interested in and can’t understand?
Gee Crown,
Say it isn’t so…….
Don’t tell me we’ll be back to cutting up newspapers in sheets to hang on a string on a nail in the outside dunny….LOL
I’m off up to the shops to stock up on my loo rolls……..
Locusts just ask Luton Ian he can answer your questions better than me first hand rather than me garbling them second hand. Also our talks are simply that and open to debate new minds are always welcome to shed new light on whatever we talked about hey you may may even point out we are talking bollocks we are open to that. The more data the better.
Blackswan when we get to the stage were loo rolls devolve we are in serious trouble.
Well folks get to the DT blog of our God Emperor James D to FREE MACK and petition, freedom of speech.
Crown,
Isn’t he already back there posting as MaireLloyd?
He has a history of exploring his feminine side …
Pointman
ps. Ozboy, I suppose it’s too late to enter the above in the poetry competion? Best not to I suppose. I can’t scan for rashers.
Scousebilly. Re Freewales. Thanks for that I think it’s a clincher. I’m sure ‘freewales’/Moonbat really does think he’s ‘scarlet pimpernel’/Sir Percy Blakeney, but what we have to realise is that this is not some 18 yr old activist who’s just scaled his first cooling tower, this is the man who has done more than anyone else to keep the AGW myth alive. His terrible dilemma is that he’s written off Jones but he’s still there, he’s condemned photo-voltaic but they’re part of gov’t policy. He desperately wants to get back in control but is still losing it. His dismissal of Piers Corbyn last Wednesday was just what he wanted. ‘I’m George Monbiot, and I’m in charge here!’
Locusts says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:48 pm
“Crown… So the moral of the story seems to be, always lead by example, and don’t bore people with stories that they aren’t interested in and can’t understand?”
Okey dokey……
BlackSwan
It was a genuine query!
Old Toad,
When I asked “freewales” what his own scientific credentials were, as in “let’s see your CV, George”. He went into some spoof Scouse along the lines of “Oy wot u fookin mohnin about”. Typical Monbiot when cornered I thought.
ScouseBilly July 21, 2010 at 7:39 pm
Billy, If I were posting at the DT, I’d be terribly tempted to address him as George when responding to his posts …
Pointman
Pointy, indeed. This was after a period of baiting him – as a refugee from his own blog after “spacedout” (Richard North) had been demolishing him and his acolytes there.
Haven’t had a chance to go to Rastech’s yet – too much time spent keeping HMRC at bay 😉
ScouseBilly says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Wotcha scousebilly, I’ve thought freewales is/was moanbot, since I first read his bilge.
“Haven’t had a chance to go to Rastech’s yet – too much time spent keeping HMRC at bay ;)”
It was ever thus with scallies (grin)!
Ed.
(yeah!…….. I know what I can do, may be a bit difficult at the moment:>))! – new seaso’ on way and new [“Fly by night!”] playboy too, can Hodgson bring it back?)
Hi Ed,
Lol. I’m pleased with Joe Cole signing and also Wilson the kid from Rangers.
At least, Hodgson understands the Paisley/Shanks pass and move philosophy – simple, in theory; hard to do at pace 😉
I’ve always had time for Roy. A proper man manager. Gerrard’s staying – will Torres and Monster follow suit? Wish Alonso would come back but that’s unlikely….
Less than 4 weeks to go – YNWA
ScouseBilly,
They are gonna do OK, if monster does stay…….. a big if though but they’ll be OK anyway!…………. if you could swap him for Xabi ….now that would be a coup.
Paisley was a canny manager, sharp as a very sharp thing and I liked him (a lot), loved shanks though!…….. even though I follow the whites.
Ed.
@Fenbeagle
May I add my congrats to your latest efforts, which Oz has rightly recognised.
a pleasure beyond compare, hoping we may see some sequels.
Thank you
Ed,
Did you watch the Clough documentary and the film on his Leeds days?
Took me back. Peter Taylor was Clough’s Paisley. Just too bad the pair of them didn’t go to Leeds – things would have been different, I’m sure.
Hi Blackswan Tasmania !
On July 21, 2010 at 2:35 pm
When Amerloque was a kid, he heard it in California (grin). Wigwam …
A wigwam for a goose’s bridle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A wigwam for a goose’s bridle is a phrase, once popular in Australia, meaning “none of your business”. A common usage is in response to an inquiry such as Q. “What are you making?”, A. “A wigwam for a goose’s bridle”.[1] The rejoinder was a code for “Mind your own business” and children acquired this pragmatic knowledge after repeated discourse with their parents ended with this response.[2] It was a common family saying.[3]
The phrase was also in use in New Zealand[4] and more generally by English speakers, for example in an 1836 magazine article referring to Calcutta and an exchange with a sailor.[5] …/…
http://tinyurl.com/32gkxav
Best,
L’Amerloque
Amerloque 20100721 13h20 Paris time (CET)
Amerioque, have you ever tried the wine from Montmartre?
ScouseBilly July 21, 2010 at 9:36 pm
Tried a hotel in Montmartre. Never again !
Pointman
Hi ScouseBilly,
I caught some, it was painful to watch, Revie could see the writing on the wall, Clough would have been great, the Leeds players should have laughed it off (Giles was a dirty bastard) Clough should have gone easy tho’ at first, it was a funny time and no one knew really what was going on, it was surreal, Revie shadow was everywhere.
“He was a piss taker and be-littler but if you gave it him back he respected that (Clough)”, this is a precis of comments (Larry) Simon Grayson (current manager) made about Cloughie.
I knew he would tweak noses at Elland road (and didn’t like him much but thought -OK lets give him a go) we used to go regularly to matches at Derby (when they played Leeds) – whom we didn’t like much either! But Clough and Taylor they were a team and only great together full stop……….. how good were McCartney and Lennon solo??
Yeo on radio 2 (at mo’) talking about tolls on motorways, God in heaven- will make A roads busy!
Ed.
Amerloque,
How astonishing that an expression I haven’t heard for 50 years should rate its own Wiki entry. I just thought my Mum had an odd way of talking…LOL
Thanks, evolving language can be intriguing.
New Scientist editorial – Without candour, we can’t trust climate science
“But what happened to intellectual candour – especially in conceding the shortcomings of these inquiries and discussing the way that science is done. Without candour, public trust in climate science cannot be restored, nor should it be.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727692.900-without-candour-we-cant-trust-climate-science.html
As candid as the NS is going to get for the moment. Disengagement from the mania.
Pointman
Pointman, care to expand?
Montmartre’s my favourite part of Paris.
I was given a (souvenir) T shirt by a French air stewardess whose apartment looked onto the Sacre Coeur. I even remember the street girls on the corners back in the 80’s. Last time I was there my companion managed to nick a fabulous carafe from one of the bars – no, she wasn’t Scouse but from Prague and could drink all night 😉
The Clos Montmartre is the only vineyard allowed by law to cultivate a grape that makes hallucinogenic wine. Hence my question to Amerioque.
Ed, yes I can imagine it would be painful. Can’t say I liked Derby much; that pitch was anti-football but Forest were good. Best Liverpool performance ever was against Forest in ’86 I think. 5 – 0 at Anfield. An almost perfect performance at speed with no let up over 90 mins. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
Happy days…
ScouseBilly says:
July 21, 2010 at 10:31 pm
Hi Billy, my palace tells me it was the first week in January ’78. It was bitterly cold and everything was covered in either ice or signs saying closed – causé la glace. The telephone box sized life rarely worked, food was terrible and like every small hotel in the area, it had a ‘spare’ room it rented out on a 24 hour basis. That was the room with the revolving door. After a few sleepless caused by all the ‘banging’ and I use that word advisedly, I moved southwards.
The area was pretty interesting in a Bladerunner / Mitte sort of way. A lot of good little restaurants at night and starving (as well freezing) artists selling their daubings in the day.
Pointman
ps. Ice-up hilly cobbled streets were a nightmare too.
Pointman
Hi ScouseBilly !
on July 21, 2010 at 9:36 pm
///Amerioque, have you ever tried the wine from Montmartre?///
Years and years ago (>30). There is only a very small vineyard there (on or near the rue Saint Vincent, I believe) and not too many bottles were produced then – moreover, generally reserved in advance to the locals. The trick back then was to go to one of the local bars where the French working classes frequented in the early morning and order a small (expensive) glass.
Nowadays, there are no more a) French locals and b) local bars. Gazillions of tourists, though.(grin)
Nowadays, too, from what I gather, there is much more wine being produced (2000+ bottles ?) and sold. I’m pretty sure, though, from what I’ve heard that the bottles of wine are reminiscent of the old saying about Corot, the painter. “Corot painted 2000 pictures, of which 8000 are in America.” (grin) Anything goes …
Supposedly one has to reserve the stuff beforehand and supposedly the waiting list is loooonnnng. If I were in need of a glass or a bottle, I suppose I would begin by contacting the public tourist agency on the Butte and then moving on to the vignerons who make the stuff. I sure wouldn’t hold my breath for a freebie, though. Last year the price of a bottle hit almost €50.
Another method would be to show a “carte de presse” and say you are doing an article about, for example, how “green and environmentally friendly” the plonk is “in such a dirty, polluted, capitalist city”. (grin)
The vineyard belongs to the City of Paris and all the monies are used for “social action”, i. e. paying entitlements. Way back when, such money went to help aged French men and women. The Socialists took over Paris about ten years ago and now the money goes to sponging immigrants who barely speak French and have a plethora of children. Wouldn’t give a penny to those people, myself.
Hallucinogenic wine from Montmartre ? That’s a new one on me. (grin)
Amerloque 20100721 17h00 Paris time (CET)
That should’ve been —which— the French working classes frequented
Sorry. It’s been a long day ! (grin)
Pointy,
Such experiences a man of you make…
Mind you, January in Paris is not for the fainthearted, though, for some reason, that’s when I usually spend time there. Now they’ve got a smoking ban, it’s even worse – last time with Julie, we literally ate outside all the time, even when it was below zero.
There’s a Montmartre connection in this:
Crown,
I wouldn’t be surprised if that episode of rainbow is genuine.
I’ve heard the black guy who used to present playschool recounting live broadcasts where they were so stoned they couldn’t stand up, and accidentally hanged little ted.
Ozboy,
Has everyone here heard of the “Overton Window” where the political centre is defined by the extremes?
There is a good write up about it here:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/13837.html
western rifle shooters (use a proxy to visit if you don’t want to be seen visiting constitutional militia sites) has a good post from June about the Overton Window, along with more links.
Billy, the only connection that springs to mind is the singing style echoes Piaf who was supposed to have been born on the pavement in Montmartre or Pigalle. Not sure if that’s an urban legend about Édith – there are too many of those.
Pointman
Speaking of whom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKgcKYTStMc
Pointman
This is war. A war in which the other side shows it has no scruples whatsoever –
Writes JD on his latest blog. This line seems very familiar… should I be happy, or upset at the lack of recognition?
Pointman, Piaf’s long time accompanist and composer was Francis Ley who lived in Montmartre.
He wrote “un homme et une femme” for the eponymous film. It’s quite funny that I asked the French music “expert” at the Megastore there what “daba daba da…” was.
He started opening drawers below the racks looking at “Michel LeGrand” CD’s before annoucing that they didn’t have it – “nil points, ami”.
Amerioque, I like the strategems offered. I’ve been busy trying to find out more about the grape variety to no avail. I saw a program only the other day where Griff Rhys Jones mentioned this and he was standing in the vineyard – hey ho. During my researching (Montmartre hallucinogenic) I did find this: http://www.420magazine.com/forums/cannabis-facts-information/76189-paris-smoke-report.html – quite interesting little piece.
I spent a lot of time in Paris in the late 80’s – mate of mine lived in the Marais. Our favourite bar (sadly no more) was off a corner of the Place des Vosges. It would have a lock in every night and you could only get in if they liked the look of you or knew you. Full of theatrical types, musos etc.. It was called L’Enclos des Rainettes. If you ever went there, you’d remember (big grin).
Locusts – imitation is the…..[well you know the rest]……or maybe JD found it in his subconscious…..I doubt intentioned plagiarism…..but take your pick.
Best,
OL
Billy, if you want a winter break somewhere try Belgrade. Cheap, superb food, still quite exotic and smokers welcome. Some interesting cruise missile damage courtesy of Madeline Albright too.
Pointman
Chapter 12
Moved to Rare Scribbling – Oz
This excellent link from Macks growing blog
Seems Australia is headed for lights out as well, how come the same orchestration and off tune as we see in the UK, where does the link come from?
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/07/lights-out
So now we are 3+1 thats 25% increase in a week well done DT and mack
G’day folks
New post here – this one’s getting a bit long
These links are for my benefit:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jan/09012609.html
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2001/dec/01121805.html
manonthemoor says:
July 22, 2010 at 4:24 am
Thanks MOTM for that excellent link…….shows what we’re up against here.
With the Greens set to seize power in the Senate and their first Lower House seats in next month’s Federal Election, there is little likelihood that the insane policies described in your link won’t be implemented to some degree.
I posted a link earlier this thread from Andrew Bolt, one of the few MSM journos who has anything to say at all on CAGW. Even Piers Akerman has focused on anti-Labor Party pieces, describing their deferring an Emissions Trading Scheme till 2012/13 as another Labor back-down and broken promise.
Green Senator Bob Brown (a Tasmanian I regret to say), has vowed to shut-down all coal-fired power stations while leaving gas-fired ones as a back-up for variable wind-generation, stop coal exports that pollute the northern hemisphere and shut down uranium mining.
There IS zero TV coverage of any opposing view on CAGW, and as most people get most of their news information from television, it’s hard to find anyone under the age of 40, who hasn’t swallowed this Fraud hook, line and sinker.
New Zealand has just implemented their Carbon legislation and already prices for everything have shot through the roof. We remain hopeful that the negative impact in NZ will demonstrate to enough people here that the Fraud will never be in their best interests.
We remain hopeful, but it becomes increasingly difficult.
OT but you have to read this
How nice that Twitter tells me to upgrade Internet Explorer 6. Quite right. How has it lasted so long?! God I’m a geek. 9:13 PM Jul 20th via web
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