[blogfocus tuesday] first of the new format

Warning to Bags Rants, Ingsoc, Ellee Seymour, Finding life hard?, Mutterings, Buckeye Thoughts, The Last Ditch, Two Wolves, Lord Nazh, Sallyinnorfolk, basswulf, Imagined Community, Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe and a selection of Blogpowerers who often don't get a mention that they're in my sights, along with some others, for the next few Blogfocuses.

I've decided on a new, leaner format. Three Blogfocuses a week, with eight posts each, all on the main page - this seems the way to go. Together with Firefox, it will be about twice as quick to prepare. So to the first of this new format:

1 Mars Hill's Paul Burgin is famous - he has a fanclub, so let me be the first to congratulate him by leading off the Focus this evening:

Recently I find I have been getting a lot of hits from the Facebook website, enough to wonder what is going on and if someone was using my identity.

So I joined in this morning and found that there is a "Paul Burgin Appreciation Society". It mentions me as a thoughtful future Labour MP. It's very flattering and rather kind of them, but, like 99.9% of everyone else on the Planet I am sometimes anything but thoughtful and people being predicted for high things in politics find that it is the kiss of political death.

2 Celia Green is referring here to a philosopher who was comparing freedom and social identity:

What makes her think that I would value ‘freedom’ more than a social identity? I might well choose to sacrifice ‘freedom’, if I had any, for the sake of social status. I never expected, or wanted, to have to live without social status, and I was deeply grieved and shocked to find myself thrown out of society fifty years ago, not only without the Professorial status which I should have acquired at about 15, but without any status at all as an academic on a career track that could ever lead to a Professorship.

3 Guthrum gives an overview of the next election and the question of independence:

Also somebody has also woken up to the fact that in the May elections the SNP are going to do pretty well, and may even start pushing for their ultimate goal of independence. Having given Scotland its Parliament back, apparently in order to scupper the Nationalists, (astute move Tony), they are taking full advantage of their independence of action and doing sensible things like not saddling their students with years of debt. Mr Hain has been given his marching orders by those two unlikely bedfellows Paisley and Adams, so that Ulster now has its virtual independence from Whitehall.

4 Ruthie Z has taken over from Welshcakes in the culinary department, all in the interests of her little one, you understand:

This week I made gnocci for the first time, and it actually was a big success... Little C loved it. The sauce is just a very basic marinara, and the chicken was marinated and grilled (it's just warm enough to grill outside now). Speaking of warmish temperatures, some of my neighbors are already mowing their meager, still-half-dead lawns. They're fanatics. Little C is going to be baptized next week, on Easter.

5 Sicily Scene is now into fashion and here is Welshcakes' take on the Sicilian hot collection for spring:

The new shoe collections are in the shops and I want some! There is still a lot of bright red about in accessories but the definitive look for spring seems to be shoes in gold and silver - predominantly silver. The toes are still rounded and the shoes are flat or kitten-heeled. [I hate these heels as they get stuck in pavement cracks.] The matching, sequinned bags are absolutely to die for, ladies and the ones I've seen have not been all that expensive. They are, however, small and this is a favourite party trick of mine - I buy a small bag to be fashionable, then have a fight with it and rearrange things to get them back in every time I open it!

6 Croydonian is less into fashion and more into the Water Board:

The Consumer Council for Water's tireless championing of the consumer continues. The quango which seems to do everything but promote the interests of consumers has moved from household water saving tips to gardening advice. Yes, really. Here is the ne plus ultra: "Reduce water loss through evaporation by protecting the garden from wind - fences and hedges will do the job well". Consider even a postage stamp sized urban garden. Is there anyone who in order to bring a thin smile to the lips of 'Dame' Yve Buckland would fork out for a selection of fence panels in order to reduce water evaporation? If there are any such, I think they deserve to be bracketed with the idiot super patriot who willed his entire estate to the state for making a small hole in the national debt.

7 Sinclair's Musings looks at China and what you really need to watch out for:

It is a cautionary tale of optimism coming to grief in the face of a culture that the investors could not understand. Despite this I am not convinced that Westerners are the ones who should be most concerned by this book. Losing even staggering amounts of capital like the amount sunk into China is mostly a concern for those who lost it and has little lasting effect on our way of life. By contrast, the effects that the culture of venality which the book exposes will be having on China will already be huge and could become catastrophic.

8 … and Theo Spark winds up this Focus with the issue we are all smarting from:

“Whatever else you might think about President Ahmadinejad,” said one British sailor under no duress, “at least he took risks to get us, and genuinely desires to keep us in his country; which is more than we can say for Prime Minister [Tony] Blair.”

The British prime minister, upon hearing of the defections, said, “We did all we could, within the bounds of diplomatic propriety, to request the release of our troops. We really were fond of them. I do hope that they’ll come back and visit us sometime.”

Yes it is a piss take, but following the Governments efforts so far who can blame them.

Another Blogfocus on Thursday. Hope to see you then.

[old poll down] new poll up

The old poll about whether women should be allowed into high risk zones is now down:

Yes - they knew the risks 76%
No - women are at special risk 14%
Other view 10%

[21 votes total]

The comments section turned these up:

Posted by Dave Petterson on April 3, 2007 at 11:00 am.

How about; No : Women should still be tending young and cleaning house. Yes : Screw them. They wanted equality.

Posted by jameshigham on April 2, 2007 at 4:44 pm.

I notice 2 'other views' on this. How can you have another view? I'd be interested to know what it was.

The new poll is about values. Try it.

[e-mail] sort of right, in a strange way

Boy, have there been some issues today! Human-wise: excellent day. Technica-wise: not so good. Had to go to the summer template header as all the others have proved unstable. This was my original header and it's nice, so I'll leave it on.

The source of the e-mail trouble has been worked out and it's not solved but at least we know where the problem is. At least it's accessible in a strange way. So, I'm with you in a manner of speaking.

[summary] ten points to put you off your breakfast

[Update: interesting little addition to this post. A few seconds after posting it, I went to the kitchen and reached for the ladle to scoop some soup into a bowl. The ladle has a hole at the end of the handle and embedded in this, by accident, was my carving knife. So, as I whipped the ladle out of the pot, the knife came too, it span in the air and the point went straight for my Crown Jewels. I jumped and it missed. Don't worry, I'm not relating it to the post below, of course. Even I'm not that crazy.]

Let me apologize in advance for this post. Basically, I've tried to catalogue the current direction of society and had to stop at ten points. I couldn't take any more:

1] The debt economy. We are in hock as people weren't in the 50s and 60s. This gives the financiers enormous leverage into every household. We are suckling piglets on a bloated mother pig and it's worsening. It makes the average household economics-sensitive. Half a percentage point change can tip the average person over the edge.

This was never the case earlier. Apart from the mortgage and car, that was basically it and banks were still friendly places one went to chat to the teller.

2] The credit binge, which CityUnslicker mentioned, is a component of this. Inch by inch, while the Fed [see my recent posts] artificially holds interest rates, as they've stated themselves [October 2006], until 2011 and other central banks [this is an assertion in the case of the New York controlled Fed] follow suit, the scene is being prepared.

3] The move to the tightening of security and militarization of society. Biometrics, fingerprinting, the surreptitious ID card. And for what? Fear of terrorists? I ran a poll where the vast majority of respondents said Blair knew before 7/7 and many claim to have evidence of the same in the US. The pollies can't have it both ways. Either it was gross incompetence in the face of an obviously developing scenario or else it was something else.

Then there is the increasing presence of troops on the street or newly armed police virtually as troops, at all points of access and egress, in shopping centres, in all public places. The people are becoming more and more used to it.

4] The introduction of seemingly insane legislation, e.g. in Britain with the 'schools lottery' and a host of others [just click on any website] impossible to even start to cover here. And all with the agenda to progressively control and direct more and more and to reduce choice.

5] The deterioration of health services, e.g. the NHS, the 'dumbing down' of education and the employment of moral relativists at all levels to ensure its ongoing deterioration, together with moves in social security which attract less press.

6] The descent into, not just tolerance of but an embracing of, porn, deviance and the raising of the high prostitute, e.g. Paris Hilton, to a place of pre-eminence and virtual adulation by the young. It happened with Tiberius, then Caligula, then Messalina; it happened in the French revolution when a prostitute was placed on the altar at Notre Dame. It's happening again.

The resigned tolerance of the middle generation for what youth is doing is galling and they're doing far more than we did, e.g. the Chav. The unprecedented smothering and extinction of the Cross and attempts to wean the average person away from a moral code and into the worship of wealth is a central tenet of this in western society, whose moral code wouldn't have tolerated these things 30 years ago.

7] The marginalization of dissent. Guido wrote on this phenomenon. Why so surprised? It has always been the way to go - marginalize, vilify, isolate and then spirit the person away. The laughable Petitions to the PM are just that. No one in his right mind thinks anything will come of it. Except for one thing - you're all now on file.

Posts such as this are a perfect example. They deny the blogger access to the Thinking Bloggers Club and consign him to the outskirts of the kook internetter.

8] The inexorable move to war. Merkel's recent comments underline this. No one had been openly talking of war but she introduced it into the European 'think space', in her bid for a German led European Army. Buchan's 'very dangerous people' [from below], who have never altered, it being inter-generational [see Jeckyll Island for evidence of that], are itching for a conflagration.

And why not? Defeated in the referenda, trying to get the constitution through the back door - it's immensely frustrating. But these are patient people who are acting a trifle less patiently just now and for what reason? Why at this time?

9] The open lying by Blair, Bush and the EU. Caught many times in lies, they're either incompetent, arrogant or both. The arrogance betrays the power behind them, rather than them themselves. The EU's attitude towards its auditing procedures is staggering [see Euroserf's articles on this].

10] The immense governmental wastage and the dearth of effective policy. No need to explain. The dearth of competence in leadership is related to this. Can you name a single competent leader, on either side of the Atlantic, who will not be marginalized or go the way Blair and Bush have gone? Transvestite Rudy?

This blogger asserts that there is absolutely no accident in any of this. Society follows the lead of the leaders, no matter how they might think otherwise, e.g. carbon dating, e.g. the Vietnam War. The people have no power - it's not been wrested from them - they never had it in the first place. democracy is a fear-dulling, calming delusion.

John Buchan, British MP and Governor General of Canada, in his '39 Steps', was introducing the character, Scudder, upon whose revelations the plot developed:

… [Scudder had] spent a year or two in South-Eastern Europe. I gathered that he was a fine linguist, and had got to know pretty well the society in those parts. He spoke familiarly of many names that I remembered to have seen in the newspapers.

… I read him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down to the root of things. He got a little further down than he wanted.

I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it out. Away behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people.

He had come on it by accident; it fascinated him; he went further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of the people in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears.

He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled me—things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from ...

Leaving aside the year, 1915 - an interesting year for such fiction to be published - what of the assertions through the mouth of Buchan's character? I'd have dismissed them as mere imaginings, if my wider reading hadn't turned up things which became more and more dire as the material went on.

In 2002, my friend was in America when the June 2003 withdrawal from Iraq was being mooted. Being of a pragmatic, military frame of mind, he didn't believe when I said there was not going to be any withdrawal, especially given the 1990 version of the same. 'Oil?' he suggested. 'Only partly. The agenda's to destabilize the region and set it by the ears.' I provided material to back this up.

When I later suggested that Abu Ghraib was no accident and that the infighting was only going to escalate and swamp the US, in the end he jumped ship and put it down to my fertile imaginings. He now says that it's not that he doesn't accept it but that it's too dire to contemplate, if it is so.

You can see from the blogosphere that everyone with a computer has his own 'take' on events and isn't really interested in anyone else's, except insofaras it supports his own conclusions. Also, there is a tendency to see events in isolation, even though they never ever are - there is always cause and effect, always an agenda behind them or at least behind their root causes.

And it filters down from above and covers us with its ordure.

Have a lovely day.

[Update update: now I've just gone to pour a little sauce into the soup. The sauce bottle slipped and the contents went into the sugar. Then the toast burned and the e-mail provider was down. I'm having a lovely day and it hasn't even started.]

[Update update update: regular readers would know that, though I might put strange interpretations on events, I never make them up. Just now I walked into the only cupboard door in the house with a corner on a line with the forehead. The bleeding's slowing but what the girls will make of the scar today I don't know. Oh, and the water supply has been cut off. Zilch. No water. This happened twenty minutes ago [now 09:34]. Later I am travelling to the centre to work and that should be more than interesting. Oh, the container of water I had has now fallen over and spilt. this is getting interesting. Who needs Final Destination?]

[apology] really so very sorry … no, really

... the next person who apologizes for absolutely anything or who denies the holocaust, that the grass is green or that the ice is melting, the next person who dares to call a spade an inclined, long-handled digging tool or who calls the eu a philanthropic society dedicated to the welfare of its citizens or who spells 'lose' as 'loose' when meaning 'not to be able to find', the next person whose ringtones are greater than 20 decibels or who writes 'everyone must have their way' instead of 'his or her way' or who seriously entertains the idea that angelina jolie or paris hilton are good role models, the next person who rabbits on about carbon trading or who quotes polly pendant or who wants to bed michelle malkin or who refuses to use capitals in his posts … oops …

[russia] foreigners banned from trading [part 2]

I've been talking to some Russians today about this issue and was surprised they weren't very forthcoming about it. When I asked if they actually agreed with the policy, there was some shuffling and then one explained:

This is about the Azherbaijanis and their mafia who keep prices up. It only applies to markets which sell 'producti' - vegetables through to cheap footwear and doesn't apply across the spectrum.

Both felt something needed to be done about it. So it wasn't really one of those sudden decisions, as I originally thought. There's been pressure for some time and the legislation was actually passed at the end of last year.