[thanksgiving] and the space shuttle

The Thanksgiving feast shuttle astronauts will eat in space is displayed Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008 at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Clockwise from upper left: green beans and mushrooms, candied yams, cranapple dessert, cornbread stuffing and smoked turkey. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Thanksgiving for the astronauts is a little different. The food needs water injections first, before heating and then the crew floats, presumably strapped to the seats, with fire extinguishers at the ready and other emergency equipment.

I'm interested in what the sole Russian there thinks of it all. His big holiday is New Year.

[thanksgiving] who'll be thanking whom for what

Thanksgiving Day is today.

Traditionally, it is a time where family has flown in from all parts, they sit down to a grand meal and give thanks for being part of America.

Behind the scenes, this year in particular, is the retail price war. Last evening, BBC news ran an item on the "sales ambush", the tendency this year for firms like M&S and others to put on sudden sales with huge discounts, sometimes, 60-70%, on selected items.

In America, the retail chains are in such heavy competition for the dwindling dollar that they can't afford to let Thanksgiving Day slip by and so are opening late on this very day, hoping to catch the bargain shopper who is looking to Christmas shopping at bargain basement prices:

At stake is the ability for many retailers, from department stores like Macy's to specialty chains such as AnnTaylor Stores, to keep their loyal customers and eke out a profit as rivals cut prices up to 40 and 50 percent. With times this grim, some are willing to sacrifice more profit rather than risk losing clients for good.

"It's the retailers in the middle who are trying to avoid losing customers," said Anderson. "Macy's is worried about customers who have never spent a lot of money at Wal-Mart trying out Wal-Mart and liking it."

Driving this is the fear that:

Some consumers said they are putting a different emphasis on celebrating the holidays, focusing on time spent with family and friends rather than purchasing the latest hot toy or gadget. They may even choose to craft presents by hand or swap goods gathering dust in the attic to save money.

From the consumers' point of view, it is a bit galling to go in and buy a toy now for, say $50, when the regular price is $70, only to find that on Black Friday, the price is $35. This is the gist of the "sudden sales "resentment in Britain, as customers purchase items at a certain price, only to discover that next week the price has dropped substantially.

It's not that people are greedy but that they face Christmas without the cash or with the threat of redundancy and they must find a solution. Thus there is a scenario of people rushing about, hearing about a vast discount at some place, a discount which could be gone tomorrow and yet they feel no option but to down tools and get over there. This is third world stuff.

These are unsettled times.

Jon Swift has an excellent piece on Thanksgiving today.

[private finance initiative] mechanism for concealing debt

The Spectator, not so long ago, ran this, about the days when Nu-Labour was just coming to power. There was apparently a dinner and Gordo explained himself this way:

As the conversation turned to the inevitable Labour victory, Mr Robinson said how much he was looking forward to turning the government spending tap on again, putting an end to what he saw as the years of Tory parsimony. Mr Davis was bewildered. ‘You can’t do that,’ he replied. ‘You’ve promised to keep within our spending plans.’

The future Paymaster-General smiled broadly. ‘We’re going to do it as capital,’ he said. ‘And then put it on as PFI.’ Davis was understandably baffled. The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was a controversial, but little-used mechanism established by Norman Lamont to privatise specific construction projects. But it meant something much more to New Labour.

Officially, the scheme could be a beacon for the Third Way: a means of injecting the ethos of the private sector into the sluggish public sector, and an opportunity to get projects completed quickly and efficiently. Unofficially — and this is what Mr Brown grasped from the off, and what Mr Robinson was hinting at — PFI was an incredibly convenient way of concealing the true extent of public debt.

Therein lay the ethics, the agenda and the manner of operation of Nu-Labour. Now, as for what it was meant to do, here is an excerpt from an article on how the PFI related to the NHS:

We began this series by arguing that the private finance initiative, far from being a new source of funding for NHS infrastructure, is a financing mechanism that greatly increases the cost to the taxpayer of NHS capital development.

The second paper showed that the justification for the higher costs of the private finance initiative—the transfer of risk to the private sector—was not borne out by the evidence.

The third paper showed the impact of these higher costs at local level on the revenue budgets of NHS trusts and health authorities, is to distort planning decisions and to reduce planned staffing and service levels.

So, even within its stated purpose, it seems not to have been as efficacious as was first supposed.

H/T Jailhouse Lawyer for yet another fisking of Nu-Labour. Well spotted.

Major news story leading to Major disaster for the economy

Major news story leading to Major disaster for the economy

Do You Know What it is Yet?

First clue.

Second clue.

UPDATE: 12.16am All I know is that a fellow blogger is well on the way to cracking this story...

UPDATE: 02:12 Bombs Away!

Watchout for Cherrypie's post from another angle later today...

[baader meinhof] ideology - nah - it's the joy of violence

I wasn't going to post again tonight but Tiberius Gracchus has come up with an excellent post on the theme I touched on earlier about the sympathy for the perpetrator and today's post on the political quadrant. Tiberius makes this point:

A film like the Baader Meinhof complex tells the story of the terrorists- in that sense it invites you to sympathise with them and it disregards the pain of their victims because that is not what it shows mostly on screen. The danger is glamourising terrorists and turning them into heroes- furthering the myth of their own creation, that they are in some sense the only principled ones standing against a society of compromise.

Tiberius does not think that this film is wholly guilty for that but he goes on to say, about the group itself:

They were convinced totalitarians - in a way the communism seems to me to have been less important to some of them (Mahler, Baader) than the violence it allowed them to commit- many of them could easily have gone the other way to the extreme right and quite a few (Mahler, Ensslinn) had flirted with it. Dispositionally as well as ideologically there may not be as much to choose between the extremes as we sometimes think.

[thanksgiving day] best wishes to the americans

Ruthie's pic

Not a great time to be a turkey, I should have thought. It's Thanksgiving tomorrow in the U.S. and I'm getting in early to wish everyone the very best of days and don't die of consumption.

Things to be thankful for - you still have an unaltered constitution, there's still a great sense of nation below the elite level, you still kick butt in sport and you are still, for the moment, the possessor of a political system that has basically worked well.

You're also a friendly people. To you also, the world hegemony of the English language is largely due.

So, best of luck with your day tomorrow.

[woolies go bust] welcome to the winter of our discontent

You've probably just seen it on BBC 1 or elsewhere about Woolworths going bust today but it really has been on the cards for some time for these possible reasons:

According to Independent Retail analyst Teresa Wickham the group is being squeezed "three ways" in its key toy, confectionary and entertainment markets, leading to lower margins.

It's like the pubs going out of business - everyone regrets it but no one wants to buy there any more. Still, this is a major shock for Britain, all the same. And 30 000 jobs at risk.

[the unloved] all it takes is eight years

Pop over to Aaron's site, Tygerland, and look at the youtube of George Bush going up on stage. Everyone else is shaking hands but no one shakes his. This cannot be, as there are protocols, no matter what one country feels about another. It's quite surprising, this.

Actually, Aaron's updated the story but it still seems a strange way to do it.

[bloody word verification] again

Whilst I applaud the wise people who have dispensed with the cursed, visitor-hostile monstrosity of word verification, nevertheless, with less people now doing it, there are leaner pickings for this recent collection:

GOOMAC, as in, "Hand me the Goomac to put on - baby's spraying again."

SURBENT, as in polite request from a lady of the night, "Excuse me, is Sur bent?"

PRETIOS, as in "beautiful Australian".

PREGIVES, as in "Darling pregives budget details."

OURGALLY, as in "Our gally just graduated from her fine arts course."

ROVETREE, as in the one Karl p--s up against.

[distractions] more problematic for the aged

This was quite interesting at the BBC today, concerning the brain tests on old and young subjects:

The older subjects did worse at the tests, and their brains responded more to the background buzzing and banging from the scanner itself. Other researchers have suggested that mental decline may be due to a decreasing ability to "tune out" irrelevant information from their senses.

This blogger would see himself as halfway between those two positions and the emergence of distractibility, whilst not yet an issue, could well become so fifteen to twenty years down the track. Other things which seem to go along with aging are a greater desire for peace and quiet, a slower response time but more positively, a greater capacity, possibly through experience, to make more reasoned decisions.

[political spectrum] quadrant is the best model

Cherry Pie commented on the socialism post:

The problem with our current government is they have moved away from their left wing stance and are actually now right wing authoritarians which is why the rich are getting richer etc.

I don't wish to put words in her mouth but Cherry is one of the "utopian socialists", one of the "old labour trade unionists" I was referring to, who wants a better deal for workers and families and as such, she is not far away from my stance, except in the implementation.

The linear left/wing divide is increasingly irrelevant in this day [and I suggest but don't insist - in all days] and many people have set up circular models, which are better - an American variant of that is above.

Perhaps a quadrant is more accurate than a circle. In this quadrant below, statism is seen as control oriented and includes religions where one has a self-imposed rule not to act out one's hedonism. Something like satanism purports to be libertarian but actually it is complete control by the dark side. So this is centred horizontally.

It would have been nice to put in the "politics of envy" which says "woe is me, I have very little, he has a lot, I want the state to take it from him and give it to me", that's close to our current situation in Britain.

From the quadrant, you can see that Cherry's statement that Nu-Labour has become "right wing" translates into Gordo's mob becoming more extreme statist rather than moderate statist.

As for the Libertarians [many of my blog friends], I would suggest that they were, some years back, possibly to the right of the classic liberal in this quadrant but with events of 2007/8, have moved up vertically to a more extreme position.

[thought for the day] tuesday evening

.

Just where does the time go?

.

[terrible beauty] destroyer of worlds

You've probably had nuclear submarines on your mind all day and the least I can do is bring you some.



Not sure if I fancy the idea of staying for weeks inside one with a lot of sweaty men and besides, I understand they smell a bit, the submarines, I mean.

[socialism] and the myths we're fed

.

Treaty of Rome

Leon Trotsky [of icepick fame] was reported to have said:

"throughout the whole history of the British Labour movement there has been pressure by the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat through the agency of radicals, intellectuals, drawing-room and church socialists and Owenites who reject the class struggle and advocate the principle of social solidarity, preach collaboration with the bourgeoisie, bridle, enfeeble and politically debase the proletariat.”

Leon, get knotted. You can talk, having been smuggled into Russia with the collusion of Morgan associates.

Now the Higham confession. When I were a wee lad, I went by the old adage that:

Anyone who wasn't a socialist in his youth had no heart. Anyone who is still a socialist in his old age has never grown up.

... and I was a paid up member of the Fabians. At university, I was on the secretariat of the Anarchist Revolutionary Students in Education [ARSE] and we sent all our demands to the Vice-Chancellor on loo roll. Then followed a stint as secretary of the Apathy Club, members being on pain of excommunication if they ever attended our irregularly scheduled and then postponed meetings.

Davignon

It took me two years to wake up and become a signed up member of the Young Conservatives, which ushered in an era of really fabulous knees-ups, private swimming luncheons and bonhomie. Flushed with the success of my new bourgeois, imperialist-running-dog, exploitative capitalism, a group of us set up and registered Truly Ruly Enterprises Ltd, a company limited by guarantee and hosting wonderfully liquid board meetings, where it was wise to conclude the main business about fifteen minutes into the exercise.

The trouble is, there are two kinds of socialists - the vicious, nasty, enslave-the-world head honchos [Mandelson, Sutherland and their lackeys] and then a second type.

This second type you find among our blogfriends at this site, at your site, generously sprinkled about and the thing which characterizes them is their niceness and genuine love of humanity. Every time one of us writes a scathing post on socialism, they are genuinely hurt by it and wish we could see that it is the only fair way in the world, that so many people are in dire straits and the state needs to, nay, must help out the less fortunate and that there must be a safety net for the incapable, the disabled and so on and so on.

This love of humanity manifests itself in multi-culturalism, i.e. the right of all people, white, black and orange to have a say and a vote, the right of all people to free speech, the right to state assistance with their family and the right to a slice of the national pie. That's about as far as the usual socialist political consciousness goes.

What is not in their consciousness is that their sweet utopianism is susceptible to the carrot used by the hardliners who really do not have the love of humanity at heart one little bit and who know, cynically and full well, what certain policies lead to and what they enable.



Here are some quotes from hardliners:

Abolition of all ordered governments, private property, inheritance, patriotism, the family, religion and the creation of a world government [1776, Weishaupt]

Far from this being the rantings of one isolated kook, George Washington commented, in 1798:

"It is not my intention to doubt that ... the principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more satisfied of this fact than I am."

Jefferson added [in 1816?], concerning the control of the means of wealth:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."

Friedman

British Illuminist [the name did not then have quite the worldwide connotations of the current day] Frances "Fanny" Wright, in 1829, gave a series of lectures in the United States, where she announced that various subversives and revolutionaries were to be united in a movement that would be called "Communism." She explained that the movement was to be made more acceptable to the public by professing to support "equal opportunity" and "equal rights."

Marx continued the deception but what most don't know is that he was a member of the League of the Just, which supported the Weishaupt principles above.

John Ruskin, in 1870, was named Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford University and taught his students that the government should take control of all means of production and distribution, and that he was prepared to place control of the government in the hands of a single man:

"My continual aim has been to show the eternal superiority of some men to others, sometimes even of one man to all others."

This is the constant error small "s' socialists make and have always made - they really believe that, in a redistributed utopia, they will be empowered.

Er ... quite the opposite, in fact.

Cecil Rhodes, on Feb. 5, 1891, combined his group from Oxford with a similar group from Cambridge headed by William Stead. Rhodes and Stead were members of the inner "Circle of Initiates", there also being an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers." Their agenda was the same.

Balls

Lord Alfred Milner, from 1909 to 1913, organized the "Association of Helpers" into various Round Table Groups in the British dependencies and the United States.

Around the same time, Congressman Charles Lindbergh Snr charged:

"This act [establishing the Fed] establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this act the invisible government by the monetary power, proven to exist by the Money Trust investigation, will be legalized … The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency Bill."

This placed real power in the hands of twelve banks and those present on Jeckyll Island three years earlier , to set it up, were a Who's Who of the same Weishaupt/Wright/Rhodes/Ruskin political outlook.

This is the mammoth lie believed by the "nice" socialists of my acquaintance - that it is the Capitalists [and this includes, in their minds everyone from the giant internationals to the chains of stores across the nation] who brought on the crash and the new depression of our current era.

The deception is that while it is impossible to defend the outright and indefensible greed of speculators and futures players, they are still pawns in a game induced by the international socialists, people such as House and Warburg who understood the power contained within human ambition. The aim has never altered and always comes back to the first quote above.

Lamy

To continue:

In 1921, Colonel House reorganized the American branch of the Institute of International Affairs into the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Since that time, the only President to have not been directly affiliated with the CFR was John F. Kennedy. Kennedy Special Adviser John Kenneth Galbraith said:

"Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people."

Incidentally, regarding Obama, a Paulist supporter recently stated this:

Barack Obama may not an official member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nevertheless, he and his presidential campaign are incontrovertibly affiliated with and supported by numerous (corporate) CFR members. His wife, Michelle Obama, is a member of a branch of the CFR in Chicago. The Obama campaign has taken major contributions from corporate CFR members such as:

JP Morgan Chase & Co - $282,387
Goldman Sachs - $474,428
Lehman Brothers - $274,147
UBS (ag) - $298,180
Citigroup - $247,436
Google - $192,808
Time Warner - $190,091

Back to the timeline

Concerning the Great Depression and the country's acceptance of FDR's New Deal, Congressman Louis McFadden asserted, around 1931, before his unfortunate demise:

"It was no accident. It was a carefully contrived occurrence. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so they might emerge as the rulers of us all."

The "Plan for Peace" by American Birth Control League founder Margaret Sanger was published in 1932. She called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all "dysgenic stocks," including Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and Catholics. The American Birth Control League eventually became Planned Parenthood.

Not many are aware of that.

The appropriately named Faust

HG Wells proposed, in 1939:

... a "collectivist one-world state" or "new world order" comprised of "socialist democracies." He advocated "universal conscription for service" and declared that "nationalist individualism is the world's disease."

He continued: "The manifest necessity for some collective world control to eliminate warfare and the less generally admitted necessity for a collective control of the economic and biological life of mankind, are aspects of one and the same process."

He proposed that this be accomplished through "universal law" and "propaganda".

Moving on, the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee introduced, on Feb. 9, 1950, the Senate Concurrent Resolution #66 which began:

"Whereas, in order to achieve universal peace and justice, the present Charter of the United Nations should be changed to provide a true world government constitution."

The resolution was introduced by Senator Glen Taylor (D-Idaho), who later stated:

"We would have to sacrifice considerable sovereignty to the world organization to enable them to levy taxes in their own right to support themselves."

This guiding principle was neither more nor less than the current NAAC proposal for the NAU, due to begin on March 23rd, 2009. It comes to the same erosion of national sovereignty.

They never stop, these people:

The World Federalist Movement stemmed from The World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government [set up in 1951] which drew up a map designed to illustrate how foreign troops would occupy and police the six regions into which the United States and Canada would be divided as part of their world government plan.

Strong

Rowan Gaither, President of the Ford Foundation, told a Congressional commission investigating tax-exempt foundations, in 1953:

"We at the executive level here were active in either the OSS [forerunner of the CIA], the State Department, or the European Economic Administration. During those times, and without exception, we operated under directives issued by the White House. We are continuing to be guided by just such directives, the substance of which were to the effect that we should make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union."

That's on the Congressional record. It's not made up - check for yourselves. Norman Thomas, who six times was the candidate of the Socialist Party for President of the United States, observed, in 1959:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name Liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until America will one day be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened."

And so it goes on:

"The Future of Federalism" by Nelson Rockefeller, in 1962, claimed that current events compellingly demanded a "new world order." He said there was:

"A fever of nationalism...but the nation-state is becoming less and less competent to perform its international political tasks...These are some of the reasons pressing us to lead vigorously toward the true building of a new world order...Sooner perhaps than we may realize...there will evolve the bases for a federal structure of the free world."

A document entitled "Marriage and the Family" was published by the British Humanist Association, in 1969, stating that:

"some opponents of humanism have accused us of wishing to overthrow the traditional Christian family. They are right. That is exactly what we intend to do."

Sutherland

President Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote a book in 1970 entitled "Between Two Ages." He stated:

Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief...Marxism, disseminated on the popular level in the form of communism, represents a major advance in man's ability to conceptualize his relationship to the world."

In his keynote address to the Association for Childhood Education International in 1972, Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, proclaimed:

"Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being. It's up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well by creating the international child of the future."

Observe the result today. You think that was a one off by a fruitcake? What about this? Catherine Barrett, former president of the National Education Association, wrote, on Feb. 10, 1973, that:

"dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling. We will need to recognize that the so-called 'basic skills,' which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day. When this happens - and it's near - the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. We will be agents of change."

On May 18, 1972, Roy M. Ash, Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, declared that:

"...within two decades the institutional framework for a world economic community will be in place...and aspects of individual sovereignty will be given over to a supernational authority."

Pottering

The Club of Rome issued a report, in 1973, entitled "Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System." This report divided the entire world into ten kingdoms. Now this is a supposedly high-capitalist money lender. What would they be doing drawing up world boundaries? Their brief is purely fiscal, surely?

Did all this end in the modern era? Not a bit of it.

In 1981, Congressman Larry McDonald called for comprehensive congressional investigation of the CFR and Trilateral Commission. In 1983, he was killed, along with 268 other passengers on Korean Air Lines (KAL) flight 007, shot down over Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan.

More recently, CBS reported:

Under the classified "Continuity of Operations Plan," which was first reported by The Post in its Friday editions, high-ranking officials representing their departments have begun rotating in and out of the assignment at one of two fortified locations along the East Coast.

The Post said the first rotations were made in late October or early November, a fact confirmed by a senior government official late Thursday. Officials who are activated for the duty live and work underground 24 hours a day, away from their families, according to the Post.

The shadow government has sent home most of the first wave of deployed personnel, replacing them most commonly at 90-day intervals.

When quizzed on this, George Bush replied:

"I have an obligation as the president and my administration has an obligation to the American people to put measures in place that should somebody be successful in attacking Washington there is an ongoing government," Mr. Bush said. "That is one reason why the vice president was going to undisclosed locations. This is serious business. And we take it seriously."

Very serious business indeed - ensuring the survival of the leadership while the population is left to fend for itself. This can go on and on, quote after quote.

Mother of Darkness

In summary

There are two kinds of socialists - the dangerous type, quoted at length above and comprising ostensibly GOP and Democrat, Conservative and Labour supporting pollies, along with CP, Demos, Mandelson, Sutherland and their ilk, who are pursuing a policy of the impoverishment and enslavement of the people under the lure of spoils and their own "personal safety" in the coming disintegration ...

... and then there is a different type.

These are the "lesser people", like you and me, some having swallowed the Marxist guff from the "great thinkers" who permeate every aspect of life from schools to the law, to medicine, to the media, film and literature, from the greens to the "isms" of the current day and who see a better world of fairness and justice ..

They're not far away, in their basic sense of humanity, from the small "c" conservatives who believe in free enterprise, the right to make of oneself what one can, the values of family and faith, of freedom of speech and a sense of real justice.

The small "s" socialists, good people at heart, just cannot see, in those hearts, that the ideal they aspire to is an impossibility, for the same reason as in 1917 Russia and everywhere else revolutions have taken place - namely that there is an organized, all-pervasive network of people across the globe, with a financial and business leadership in charge, who hijack any socialist agenda for their one world purposes and use coercion and clandestine planning to achieve it.

No one I know who comes under the misnomer right wing would not support care and assistance for the needy or wouldn't help out a friend in need get back on track; no small "t" tory I know is not compassionate. No one I know begrudges a certain amount of tax to help out with these things.

The U.N. meditation room - the relativist religion of the new order

The small people are people, after all and in this respect, we're not so far apart.

Where the enormous difference is, is that those who vaguely label themselves socialist have swallowed the notion that coercion and legislation by government can produce a fairer society, that you can force someone else to give up what he has worked for and give it to people who have no intention of working.

They've crossed the line, these small "s" socialists, the moment they feel that coercion and the big stick, that the enforced redistribution of this mythical and static "wealth", the so-called National Pie, is fair in itself.

You see, there is no National Pie.

The national pie is no more than the sum total of workers producing things and selling them and everyone works best when it is for his own family and there is a personal goal in it.

You can't legislate away people's incentives and force people to accept that state of affairs because lurking behind the principle of enforced redistribution is also the principle of enforced restriction on freedoms, on the right to free speech on the freedom to associate and also lurking behind it is the gathering of the means of sustenance into a central place to be meted out as, when and how the secretariat sees fit.

Not only that but the ability of people to produce for themselves is actually then outlawed and dissent is taken care of through the latent criminalization of the citizen by means of the explosion in new laws.

Yes, the small "s" socialist decries the greedy bankers and speculators; yes the small "s" socialist cries that there is no social justice. Yes, yes and yes - you are correct in this. We totally agree. But going the path of Big Brother and the coercion route is the road to hell, the road to the elite concept of the world as outlined in the quotes above.

Please wake up and realize that the war is between the internationalists who are using the naivety of idealistic people and people with genuine grievances, e.g. the women's movement, using them, hijacking and twisting their agendas

... and the ordinary people, homo sapiens, will be the sufferers. That means you and me.

.o0o.

UPDATE: Fortuitously, Ian Parker Joseph also posted on this matter and brought my attention to Postman Patel's post, pointing out that where I wrote this:

The World Federalist Movement stemmed from The World Association of Parliamentarians for World Government [set up in 1951] which drew up a map designed to illustrate how foreign troops would occupy and police the six regions into which the United States and Canada would be divided as part of their world government plan.

Postman Patel wrote, in his post:

He predicted that the U.S. will break up into six parts - the Pacific coast, with its growing Chinese population; the South, with its Hispanics; Texas, where independence movements are on the rise; the Atlantic coast, with its distinct and separate mentality; five of the poorer central states with their large Native American populations; and the northern states, where the influence from Canada is strong.

Ian rightly points out that that is a very large coincidence to swallow.



This report has also been covered at All Voices. H/T Kevin.

It Gets Me Every Time!

I looove this commercial and always laugh at it!

[thought for the day] monday evening

For all you budding writers out there, advice from the sage:

"I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils: 'Read over your compositions, and whereever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.'"

The greatest difficult with 50% autobiographical novels is the Mary Sue factor. To deal with this, I'm now rewriting mine in such a way that another 3D chap with a background can do the heroic things and the character who can be vaguely construed as me can trot along in his own way, winning some, losing some.

What's your solution?

[this britain quiz] identify the six places if you can

Answers here

[the lexx] manhattan size kaboom

The Lexx is a bio-engineered, Manhattan-sized, planet-destroying, bioship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly, or to the remotely Freudian eye, a phallus. It was grown by ingesting organ collections from the protein bank on the Cluster, the seat of the Divine Order, for use by His Divine Shadow.

It was originally intended as the ultimate deterrent: the threat of a weapon that could instantly obliterate any planet would keep the remaining "Heretic" worlds of the Light Universe in line, and those that refused to capitulate would be summarily destroyed to reinforce the point. This plan was foiled when the crew commandeered it to escape from the Cluster.

The most important function of the Lexx is its ability to destroy entire planets with a single, high-powered blast. Its primary — and only — weapon is initiated by command from the captain only, followed by a highly dramatic sequence when the Ocular Parabola found on the surface of its eye tissue flips from a smooth surfaced dome into a complex array of satellite dish-like structures.

Huge amounts of yellowish-orange particles are released en masse from the array and focused by Lexx's nervous system to a point just above its mouth. Once focused, the particles burst into a massive, forward-moving, planar wave which expands ahead of the Lexx exponentially until colliding with an object of sufficient mass to disperse it, usually a planet.

The wave instantly vaporizes smaller ships without losing momentum. Though the Lexx is designed to destroy entire planets, it can fire less intense blasts to hit smaller targets; however, the smallest area it seems capable of destroying is roughly the size of an entire city.

So there!  :)  

H/T: Bag

[the haves] and the have nots

If you're having a particularly bad Monday, you might want to skip this post.  Can't remember what I was looking for in youtube but up came the Twilight Zone and one episode was called "The Best Ever" so of course I had to watch it. Part 2 of 3 is above here and if you can put up with the atrocious acting and 50s noir [which I sort of like], it's quite topical today.

In a few paragraphs - some neighbours are celebrating a birthday when, on the radio, the President announces a crisis - alien bombs and missiles are heading their way. Everyone helter skelters to the shelters. The birthday boy, a doctor, has made hay while the sun still shone and has a bunker, food, water, medicine and a trickle of air to breathe plus ... space for just his family and a steel door to stay behind.

The neighbours, of course, who just minutes earlier were drinking toasts to him, now start to come back over to his house - they haven't bothered building anything for themselves so they want to share his one family shelter. Trouble is there are three or four families.

One nasty piece of work turns on another and says that immigrant Americans have no right to food and shelter like real Americans and he attacks him, all sorts of proposals are put, proposals, naturally,  which will result in their particular family getting into the bunker; they argue about whose family has more right to live and then another nutter urges everyone to help him get a battering ram to break down the doctor's bunker door.

All pretence of civilized behaviour has disappeared.

Of course it raises interesting questions for this current day, in a recession, with resources slowly running out or their prices going sky high and the have-nots greedily eyeing the haves and saying the latter came by what they have immorally.  

In any societal breakdown, it's not only the Marie-Antoinettes, Tsars and Gordos who get bumped off but anyone else who actually worked for what he has.  Suddenly, all bets are off and neighbours become enemies, as in some William Burroughs novel.

What do you do in this situation?  What if you were the one who had the bunker?  What if you were one who'd never planned ahead and now wants it all?   Would the doctor have been justified in using a shotgun on his erstwhile neighbours, in order to protect his family?

[rough justice] and the european arrest warrant

The case of Andrew Symeou has been covered in the media and I read of it in the Eye's current edition.

In a nutshell, the 20 year old student was holidaying in Zante, Greece and then came home to Britain. Meanwhile, two of his friends were taken into custody and there seems evidence that they were beaten and pressurized to sign a statement in Greek that they had seen him punch another young man so that he fell off a nightclub stage and later died.

I don't want to get into the rights or wrongs of that but there is a principle for all Brits in the matter of the EAW or European Arrest Warrant:

The magistrate at the preliminary hearing on 7th July at the Horseferry Road Magistrates Court made it plain that he had no power to consider the evidence against Mr Symeou, or the methods by which it was obtained from the witnesses, before agreeing to extradition.

The EU now has a system in place whereby you can be accused of a crime in another member country of the EU, let's say one of the Eastern European countries [and imagine if Turkey got in], automatically extradited and during that time, you can be incarcerated for up to a year, depending on the country, with no guarantee you won't be tortured as Mr Symeou seems to have been and with no rights vis a vis the process.

The current Frederick Toben issue is another case in point.

A friend of mine recently said that these days you should not mention the words British and Justice in the same breath and yet - which process would you prefer to be subject to? Neither, you say. Well yes, but what if you had to decide? It's fairly clear, one would have thought.

The issue is also one of vague grounds for arrest:

The new regulation has been significantly simplified in this regard: when the suspected crime is included on a so-called "positive list of criminal areas," then the criminal can be extradited.The problem however is that the list is too vague.

Then there is the problem of a crime in one country not being a crime in another. Wiki says:

EU law has direct effect within the legal systems of its Member States, and overrides national law in many areas, especially in areas covered by the Single Market.

Yet it doesn't, for example, in Italy. The Italians use the local police HQ, the Questura, for matters of sojourn in the country and have criminalized staying outside the visa. This means that not only are you subject to deportation, the normal consequence but you are also subject to criminal proceedings and penalties. The law even applies to Brits on British passports remaining after three months without a stamp - it is not automatic that you can go over there, work and live.

What many don't know is that when you cross the Italian border, you should obtain a stamp in your passport but if that stamp was obtained in another EU country on the way, the EU is satisfied but the Italians aren't. Further to that, the Schengen states on the Euro are treated differently to those which are within the EU but on their own currency.

In short, it is messy. One can go even further and question whether the EU even exists as a state able to make and enforce laws of its own. Lisbon was not ratified in Ireland and is in suspended animation right now.

So where does that leave the humble Brit, in his own country? Where does it leave the humble Englishman within Britain?

[employment] will balance ever return

There has been a trend towards the four day week gathering momentum and the schools are one area where this is manifesting itself:

Bucking a nationwide trend toward bulking up school calendars, dozens of rural school districts are actually paring back their work weeks, cramming more academics into four days. The trade-off: School days are an hour or more longer than in most schools.

In rural areas, where pupils are required to help out with the farm work, this might make some sense but for them to hang around malls, doing nothing? Especially with ASBOs and chavs on the increase? I wonder what justification is given for this:

The South Carolina Department of Transportation rolled out a pilot program this week that offers four-day work weeks in exchange for longer work days. "Secretary (Harry) Limehouse felt that this was a very important thing to do for employees because we have a number of employees that commute," said Mary Gail Monsts-Chamblee, the department's director of human resources.

The justification is that gas prices are now $4 a gallon. So, in an induced economic crisis, people are to work less? An eight hour day [including lunch] will now become a ten hour day? Or will it be a nine hour day, with the net effect a 32 hour week?

The point is probably moot anyway, as more and more firms are employing people as temps or part-time, with the slant towards women:

She added that women returners who wanted part-time work were preferable to those who were seeking full-time positions as they were more likely to remain in their job when the economy recovered.

There are more and more cases of overqualified people trying for less qualified positions but firms are wary of that, as they don't believe they will retain those people after times get better. Against that, the qualification hike [in the UK - NVQs] is getting to a ridiculous stage. The tick boxes are exponentially expanding, often demanding irrelevant skills for that particular position. This comes close to expressing it:

This comprehensive skill set, once required only of managers but now applying to all levels of employment, appeared in several employer surveys, with an additional emphasis on communication and computer/technical skills.

What will be the immediate and medium term future for employment? If things do improve, has the wheel of change irrevocably moved to a mobile, part time and temporary, expendable workforce? More than this, as an article in the Asia Times states:

President-elect Barack Obama is the only man in town with a checkbook, and by virtue of the Treasury's near-monopoly of financial power, will take office as the most powerful peacetime president in US history. Faced with the collapse of private pension, health care and financing systems, Obama will have every reason to use his mandate to socialize medicine, pensions and many other aspects of US economic life. The American economy may be hard to recognize afterwards.

I think not only the American economy will transform in this way.

[comment moderation] during the trolling hours

This post was modified at 23:39 by request and in the interests of goodwill:

I'll switch to comment moderation until the morning to avoid a repetition of last night.
Better be safe than sorry. Until tomorrow then, readers, sleep tight.

[shakespeare] five of the best

Couldn't resist the Telegraph's little exercise today - rating the "best" of Shakespeare's plays. In compiling it, I tried to take into account the writing quality, the issue, the popularity and whether I like it or not. Lear's a great play but I don't like it, so I didn't have it in the top five. So here are my five:

1. Hamlet

2. Romeo and Juliet

3. Twelfth Night

4. The Merchant of Venice

5. Macbeth

Hoping you'll be as opinionated as I was on the Bard, what would your top five be?

[blogfocus] a sunday scan

Teething troubles?

Methodius writes of moving back to Blogger from Wordpress.

Does Liz have hubby trouble?

Trixy shows that there is more to life than shoes. There are teeth as well.

Chris Dillow writes: "I’ve never seen the attraction of prostitution. If a man wants quick unfulfilling sex with a woman who despises him, he should get married." Read the rest of it, if you haven't already done so.

Mr. Eugenides informs us that Mr. Dillow's opening line blockbuster is no fluke.

Ross Fountain puts you straight about herpetology.

The Quiet Man thinks you should check your children's homework.

Hooky's at it again with this video.

Need to know about a US diner at Battersea? Charon QC fills you in on his new job.

Gallimaufry and Chips introduces an angry blogger who is making waves.

Angus Dei is a newer blogger to check out.

How about the Domestic Goddess's thick broth on a cold, blustery day?

... and lastly, the Valleys Mam writes of high heels and a woman's sex life.

[sunday calm] except for the weather

.

It's a bit like this photo over our way today. It's howling in off the Irish Sea and the rain is lashing the windows. I went out for a boat trip a few minutes ago and this is the shot I took from the deck. Don't you just love wild conditions? Here are some more shots:

Above - the state of the sea at this moment

Above, a passing ship making heavy weather of it

Finally, me taking a well earned break on the way back to shore.

[sockpuppet] cedric surpasses himself

When I woke up this morning, I saw 92 comments on the rock post, which you can wade through by clicking on the above link or you can see the abridged version which gives you the general idea here. [And yes, I do have the isp addresses, despite it showing up in Sitemeter as "not known".]

I thought something was strange for a blogger who's never had more than 40 comments.

Reading down, the first thing which struck me was that it was quite funny at the beginning. Then it went on and on and on. Suddenly it turned nasty and I've left enough comments up for you to get the general idea.

If you read the unabridged version [click on the first link], you'll see it starts at 22:07 and ends at 02:14. That means that this man sat at his computer and left comments on my post for around four hours, commenting every few minutes, sometimes once a minute. I'm trying to imagine sitting at a computer for four hours commenting on someone else's blog.

Nah - can't imagine a sane mind doing that.

It's always possible I am wrong in this but the ladies seemed to be sure about it. In the interests of fairness though, it might have been the Fantasy Fight Club who did it, on his behalf. He is close to them apparently. This is a link to another site he set up in 2007. [Disclaimer: please don't click on the link unless you are absolutely sure you want to.]

I've deeply apologized, on his behalf, to the ladies he was saying those things about but perhaps now someone might take my warnings more seriously.

UPDATE 12:47: If you go to this archived post, scroll down to comments and look at the comment by Ms Smack. Now go to the original post here; you'll see it has been deleted this morning. Why would Ms Smack wish to go in and delete her own comment on a 2007 post on a Sunday morning in November 2008? Read the comment she deleted in the archived version again. Why would she be looking at a post of mine on a Sunday morning anyway when most people are just waking up? Check the time of my post below.

My brain hurts from all the thinking. :)

UPDATE 21:20: I understand that a certain gentleman is now claiming he was at the pub from 10:04 p.m. for one and a half hours but then realized it was between 10:04 and midnight. No doubt there are close friends to corroborate that exact time he arrived and swear on their grandmothers that it was so. Yeah, right. He just shouldn't let his isp address be used by others then, in his absence and continue the comments in exactly the same way when he returned. And then there is the little matter of his sockpuppet site.

[silent saturday] more in the rock series

Captions please!

[clear as mud] necessary note

If I was enigmatic in the wee hours of this morning, Saturday, I'm even more so now. Pleased to say we have made progress, in fact even since the emails went to a few people this evening. It's a bit unfair to those not in the know to pass messages this way but this will be the last on the matter. It's only so people can sleep tight and not worry too much now.  By the way, every time something happens, another drinks offer comes along.  It's going to be a cheerful company when we meet up.