Wednesday, December 31, 2008

[new year] wishes for you


С празднечкам вас всех!! C Новым Счастьем! Тут можно поздравлять и дарить подарки. С наступающим новым годом! Здоровья и удачи всем!

Buon capodanno a tutti felice anno nuovo! Allora...buone vacanze...all'anno prossimo...una bellissima fine anno e un inizio felice 2009 !!!

Je vous souhaite une très bonne année et que tous vos désirs se réalisent. Je vous adresse à toutes et à tous, ainsi qu'à ceux qui vous sont chers, une très bonne et heureuse année 2009. Puisse cette nouvelle année vous apporter ce que vous en attendez mais surtout la santé et le bonheur.

Gluecklichen Rutsch ins Neue Jahr! Ich wünsche Euch geruhsame Festtage und für 2009, alles, alles Gute, viel Gesundheit, Glück und Zufriedenheit, Erfolg und alles was ihr Euch selbst am meisten wünscht.

Feliz Ano ~ Nuevo, bliadhna mhath ur, bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit, blwyddyn Newydd Dda, Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkamanyen, l'Shannah Tovah, kul 'am wa antum bikhair!

Happy New Year and may your most constructive resolutions come true.

[blogfocus] last gasp before new year


Gallimaufry charts the changes in this definitive piece on ordinal numbers.

Nick's bytes had a piece on Hanukah, which I didn't know was from December 21st to 29th.

Andrew Allison asks whether bishops should get involved in politics. Should psychatrists get involved in medicine too, I'm also wondering.

Blogrightreading asks why he is working on December 30th and has a chart to illustrate his point.

Angus asks if the New Year's Honours List is really necessary.

Cherie brings us the vital news about the leap second tonight.

Flip chart fairy tales asks are HR managers ready for the recession.

Hookie has discovered that Hamas has legalized crucifixion.

Mark Wadsworth asks what do "other public servants" do all day long?

The Quiet Man has come to the conclusion that aliens are dicks.

Vox Day says that "Unless your degree is going to lead directly to a six-digit salary, it's almost definitely not worth going into debt to buy it."

Tom Paine thinks that "elderly Christians probably feel the need NOT to lie, but they are being old-fashioned."

JPT tells us that all the gold ever mined would fit into two swimming pools.

[morning chinwag] over a cup of tea


We were having a chat by the fire just now and what came out of it was:

1. There should be rigidly defined areas where central government can interfere and many where it cannot.

2. Some things government could handle, they're not, e.g. if there was a problem in some part of the country which was depressed, resources from the rest of the country could go in there to get it back on its feet, as long as the resources were from within the country.

3. Let's face it, Britain was great as Britain but the intransigence of the Scottish and Welsh politicians has skewed the landscape. Nothing wrong with an assembly and England also needs one badly but the fragmentation of the nation as a whole is not good for any constituent part of Britain. The EU is the other culprit in this. Take them out of the equation and the home countries will think twice.

4. Why is it that whenever things go wrong, governments start printing money, nationalizing and people blame Keynes? Keynes had a whole theory but governments take one small part of it and distort it out of all proportion.

5. We aren't producing anything. We're big in the tertiary areas but secondary industry is dead in the water. Not many are plunging national capital into national manufacturing - it produces no short term profits and no one wants to be burnt in a government policy inimical to manufacturing. cottage industries are similarly affected.

That's as far as we got because a phone call interrupted it.

[2008] a short retrospective


Health of the blogosphere

It does seem to be waning. So many blogs we knew from two years ago have fallen away and even top bloggers [1] have been taking extended rests. Of course, new bloggers come in all the time to replace them and small blogs which persevered have become more mainstream and better known.

Regulation, which reared its ugly head last year, together with the two tier system, will become the norm, most like.

My personal world

Coming into 2008, things were not at all disastrous on the personal front, at least visibly. Real life work was going on swimmingly and friendships were being made all the while. In my corner of the sphere though, there was a major eruption which peaked in January, March, July and November and that’s been catalogued and can be read even now.

It’s a matter of record that Moscow decided that all foreigners who’d been “hanging about” for too long, according to them, were to be given the boot and in my case, I was ill-prepared to cope at that particular time and still am now, despite advances.

The public sphere

You've read the blogs across the blogosphere and have seen the MSM. Other pundits have recorded the fall, the long designed, unsustainable madness which drove the debt-based economy and now here we all are, with worse to come in 2009.

The good news is that there’ll be apparent recovery, led by messiahs but it will be as hollow as the bubble which has now burst. People will be so hell bent on believing it though that it will have a temporary effect until the real desolation and bankruptcy beneath become finally apparent to all.

The debt which the socialists have and will have yoked us with is actually only a concept. Countries are not individuals – for a start, they have limitless credit, despite Moodies and can unilaterally withdraw form a debt. The joke is that while we are heading for the hard-worked-for socialist panacea in society, the governments continue to embrace the capitalist concept of national debt.

2008 saw the education of the more intelligent and open-minded pundits who are now publishing what should have been published two years ago.

And so it came to pass

Many soothsayers now appear to be wise men in retrospect, at least to substantial portions of the sphere. David Icke’s lizards still remain David Icke’s lizards and yet some posts [2] now don’t seem so far-fetched, even finding their subject matter in Wiki and accepted as facts of life.

One of the major advances is how many people now are prepared to at least listen to the possibility that the social ills, the recessions and the wars are not a matter of accident. Appropriately, it took fantasy films like Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace to entertain the notion of “we are legion”.

The next step will be for the inspired pundits to show that there is real William Blake insanity [3], banal desolation of the spirit and a twisted notion of the ideal world, behind the decisions of the movers and shakers. It’s still too early for the common man to take this one on board and he’ll still fall for the pronouncements from above, as he always has.

How many times have we heard, “Well I never could have believed it until I saw it with my own eyes.” You’re never going to see it with your own eyes [4], which doesn’t mean to say it isn’t happening.

The slide to feudalism

Ain’t no doubt about it, folks.

Whether we accept the economist’s model and observe the upturns and downturns of history, trying to predict the bucking bronco’s next move, which historically has meant recession, depression, war and recovery or whether we accept the apocalyptic scenario, the slide to ignomony, the road to hell, the trouble is that education, medicine, the law and the arts have all been crippled by a progressive occupation of key posts at all levels by a certain type of mindset.

Common Purpose is just one manifestation of a morally bankrupt mindset we are now in the grip of. Government has intruded so far into our private lives, even down to our rubbish bins, that a great inuring of people is taking place – inuring them to armed officers, to bizarre degrees of checks and balances, inuring them to militarization of civilian lives, inuring them to the incompetence and wastage, together with the destruction of the old parameters of national identity, religious persuasion, the family [under particular assault] and a feeling of self-worth in the old model we lived under.

This is the crime which has been committed by all who’ve aided and abetted this slide and even now, these PCers will swear blind that they are doing it for the good of society. Yeah? Look at society.

Hope springs eternal

It’s not for me to say. People will discover for themselves from where genuine comfort and solace can be found. We’re still too early in the process in 2008/9, some still have their homes, mortgages, cars, travel and jobs and so the traditional fallback of the have-nothings, the destitute and the rudderless will not kick in for a couple of years yet.

People could, if there was any Charismatic of an altruistic nature around, rather than a false prophet, a black noble, be pointed in the right direction. A kind act a day by each and every one of us, to someone outside our circle of family and friends, would be a start and would go a long way to breaking down the coming climate of suspicion and turning in your neighbour to the authorities. For a start, it would help with a sense of community, now increasingly eroded.

It seems to me that we can come out of this and stall the forces driving us ever onwards but it’s not going to come by us putting up the shutters and acting each man for himself.

That’s the divide and rule principle.

The refusal to assist a neighbour is as bad as those neighbours expecting that they have the automatic right to help themselves to someone else’s resources, someone in the street who made hay whilst the sun shone. That sort of attitude leads to guns mounted on front porches.

Any recovery is going to involve two things – ridding ourselves of [or at least emasculating and marginalizing] the elite who always fear the people and the second aspect is at the micro-level – rediscovering sanity, putting aside the consumer madness and rediscovering old values which always stood us in good stead before.

There are some I need to personally thank for their kindnesses and friendship. I do thank them very much. There are new blogfriends and that's always a delight. This blog wishes all with constructive and kind hearts the very best in 2009.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

[mystery town quiz] round the world


1. The name stems from Dwrgwyn, from the Old Welsh (also a Brythonic language) dwr or "water" and gwyn Brythonic for "white" or "clear". Thus the name may mean "clear water".

2. It's a capital and is closer to the capitals of five other countries than to the capital of its own. The region has a tropical climate, with a wet season and a dry season. It receives heavy rainfall during the Wet, and is well-known for its spectacular lightning.

3. The navigational head of the Missouri River, this town is located very near to the centre of the North American continent, far removed from any major bodies of water. It has hot, humid summers and cold snowy winters.

4. The town with the highest elevation in the country, it is near Lake Louise, was named by a Scot after his birthplace and has given its name to a crater on the surface of the Planet Mars.

5. Situated between the Buffalo and Nahoon Rivers, it is the country's only river port. Originally called Port Rex, it is home to the Xhosas and has an unusual double-decker bridge.

Answers

Darwen, Darwin, Sioux City, Banff, East London

[realpolitik] asking a terminator to be gentle


Yeah, right.

If little boys bait and taunt a rottweiler on a leash and that leash breaks, all the resolutions in the world calling for dog control will not save those boys. Those boys are in real trouble and unfortunately some of the little girls hanging around with them are also going to be mauled.

It's tragic, the whole thing is better not to be - but that is realpolitik.

[post-feminism] back to the stone age ... or to reason

.



It's official:

The housewife is back, with younger women embracing domestic crafts in droves, according to new figures. Sewing machines have rocketed off shelves in the past six months with Lincraft reporting a 30 per cent increase in sales.

"There has been a definite trend happening and we have also started to see an increase in dress fabric sales," said Lincraft spokesman Jeff Croft. "Demand for sewing classes has increased and one of the biggest growth areas has been knitting yarn, with a 10-20 per cent increase in sales compared to this time last year."

Feminism - wherefore art thy victories?

Save the women, I say, before they deconstruct into Stepford Wives. Save the women before they spend all day in the bath. Women didn't achieve their victories, they didn't become harder than the male, doing everything much, much better than he ever could, only to lose it to a spurious rise in homecrafts and other productive but rubbish activities.

Down with sewing, knitting and gourmet cooking, down with improving your mind with world literature - you should be narrowing your focus with Beauvoir, Walker, Greer and the Vagina Monologues. You must understand that the male truly is to blame for everything so get back to Wollstonecraft and Lydon right now and immerse yourself in orgasm.

That's an order!


[best posts] swift work, jon


Jon Swift has done a massive job putting together Best posts of the year for 2008. If you get a chance, get over there - there's a lot of reading to be done.