[tongue-tied tuesday] ...............................

Morticia

[tuesday laugh] today's comic lines

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!

Oh this is absolutely classic:

Meredith Whitney lifts Wall Street after urging clients to buy Goldman Sachs

Ms Pretty urges all those who lost out to buy the [alleged] profiteer's and [alleged] in-trader's stocks to do what? To buoy the market? Ah, I see - the new, post-crisis Goldman Sachs market.

How many billion people can see through this? The best part though is that the Telegraph reports it as "Goldman Buoys Markets", i.e. a fait accompli, already done, over with.

Here's another one to have you rolling on the floor:

Sotomayor vows impartiality if confirmed to the court.

"Honestly, I'll take back all [alleged] racist remarks and never do it again, truly ruly, please believe me [flutters eyes beguilingly]."
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[vive la france] 14 juillet, 1790-2009

Of greater significance than the content of the three volumes of Abbe Augustin Barruel's massive work [1797] on the underlying causes of the French Revolution and its goals was that it was a much superior work to Robison's, to the extent that it provoked angry reactions from the Masons and the philosophes of the time, instead of being ignored or mocked by them.

It threatened to throw the revolution, which had already lost its impetus by then, into a bad light by implicating Voltaire and others in a closely worded presentation of documentary evidence but much worse than this, it threatened to drag the true nature of the Enlightenment down and cramp the advance of humanistic theories which were set to sweep the world in the 1800s.

It didn't stem that onslaught because a single book by one now dead Abbe was hardly going to divert a movement which had been long in the planning.

Certainly it is now either accepted or rejected according to one's conservative or communist leanings and is still quite relevant to today's events. Commenters on this blog who dismiss Barruel would tend to be left-liberals, socialists, so-called 'rationalists', philosophes, atheists, humanists and other anti-Christians. Those who realize its historical significance would tend to be traditional conservatives and/or libertarians.

At the time, it was widely discussed and hotly argued over. In other words, it was taken seriously, especially by what would be called in today's terms, the radical left, who feared its effect.

Nicolas Sarkozy se prépare à célébrer le 14 Juillet le plus «zen» depuis son début de quinquennat.

Incidentally, you're aware, aren't you, that the 14th of July does not celebrate the storming of the Bastille in 1789 but the feast a year later to celebrate the founding of the constitutional monarchy and the official end of feudalism?

That moment, on July 14th, 1790, was France's best chance of achieving a smooth transition and although Louis' ill-considered flight did much to turn the tide against this solution, it was pretty well the Jacobins and those running them who realized that the melting pot they'd worked hard to achieve might just be snatched from under their noses and so became radicalized beyond the pale, which, incidentally, also brought Robespierre down in the end.

Enter Robespierre now and the Committee of Public Safety, financed by the same class of people who financed every other major social upheaval in the next 200 years, who financed the Russian Revolution and Hitler and are doing it yet again today.

Not for them the peaceful constitutional compromise.

Within two years, the blood was flowing in the streets and hatred and fear had swept the land, with very little material gain for the people who'd been turned from folk with genuine grievances into serial abetters of murder with a thirst for human gore. It's a measure of the ability of the enemy that people are hailed as heroes in France today who should be regarded as the same ilk as Hitler, people such as the traitor Voltaire who was in close touch with the European financial power of the time and had great influence within France plus the grandstanding opportunist Marat.

So this day today is a celebration of that shortlived constitutional monarchy which descended into savagery and butchery within the next year and a half. I wonder how many of the French even know this.

Vive la France!

[ageing boomers] care plan will be subsumed

Age care in Tibet

The first thoughts about the belated care plan being mooted are that:

1. Neither party has a clue how to tackle the issue;

2. It comes back to the generation issue - Boomers [or Joneses, whatever] retiring in huge numbers and the state already unable to cope because of:

a. Brown/Blair's cynical incompetence in plunging Britain into hock for two generations, a nation of welfare dependents who are beginning to see this as a lifestyle, public debt at record levels, other projected burdens on the public purse, not least the NHS;

b. A general malaise which socialist governments always produce, historically, in the long term. Conservative governments produce anger and political division, socialist governments produce a world-weary malaise across all sectors except the fat cats above who always do well but it's particularly noticeable under socialism because the middle class and poor are so much poorer off. It's no accident about Wilson's years.

Having said all that, the ageing population is no one's fault but their parents all those years ago. I don't think it's even the fault of governments here because the arithmetic is simple - too few in the workforce to pay for the burgeoning retirees.

Add to this the behaviour of the Boomers who've been largely spending and not saving against the inevitable day.

This is where confrontational politics and the adversarial Westminster system is hardly equal to the task. In times of emergency in the past, the system has always become all-party government and that points to the failing in the Westminster system in the first place.

The thing is, even though pundits have been speaking of this for years, no cross-party solution was ever seriously sought. Knowing the EU agenda of Major/Blair/Brown, it was hardly likely. Cherie asked me not to use the term socialist. Fine, a rose is a rose by any other name. For convenience, we can use the term globalist, international socialist, infighting specialists, whatever you like but they're not interested in a solution to this except in its political usefulness.

Think it out. Britain can't cope and nor can any nation. So what will we do to cope with the Boomers? Make them continue to work? But there is no work to be had any more - Britain's industry has ground to a halt. So there is the prospect of these people not just being poverty stricken but being on the street and in need of medical attention. Don't forget also that Brown robbed the pension funds.

It's a dystopia we're facing.

In steps the white knight, the EU, with obscene amounts of intergenerational old money, topped up by the drug, porn and prostitution racket and they propose a solution which will keep the old people off the street. Hey presto. Instant votes for the EU from the large Boomer numbers and the referendum can now be put.

Can you see another scenario apart from creating another war and killing most of the older Boomers off?
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[swine flu] personal reaction

I'm not having a compulsory jab no matter what the consequences. They'll have to find me first. When the thing's over, I might come out of hiding then and have one.

People react differently but in my case, every single time I've had an anti-flu shot, it's been two weeks laid up following it. That was years ago and I haven't succumbed since. You do as you like but I know what I 'll be doing.

Not.

You might like to read this by Devonshire Dumpling on her vicissitudes too, vis a vis swine flu jabs.

[I wanted to run the cat purring piece but that would make too many posts today.]

[reality] is paper thin

origami chair
by so takahashi
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