[mindless vandalism] no joke when it was your livelihood

It's a very small incident and a short post. I go to McDonalds on a Friday for breakfast because it's near the office and today, the lady who runs it came over and asked if I'd heard what was just being said about some man's bike.

What it came down to was that last night he left his bike chained to the porch pillar of his house [why he didn't take it in I don't know - maybe rule of the house]. He came out this morning and the wheels had been almost torn off and bent over, they'd bent the frame and all the spokes had been kicked out.

This was more than vandalism, which tends to be hit and run. This was a concerted attempt to put the bike into a completely irreparable state. He apparently uses it to go to work in a nearby town and for everything else - shopping and so on.

It scarcely needs comment from me.

[macintoshes] sheer class, detested by pc users

It's smooth, it's beautiful and as the review begins:

Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard has landed. This time around, Apple goes light on the glitz in favor of some heavy work under the hood.

I have the Tiger:

In June of 2004, during the WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs revealed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger to developers and the public for the first time. When the finished product arrived in April of 2005, Tiger was the biggest, most important, most feature-packed release in the history of Mac OS X by a wide margin.

Yo! Sheer class! Now, the new Mac with ... wait for it ... no new features. Ummm - pardon?

That's right, the next major release of Mac OS X would have no new features. The product name reflected this: "Snow Leopard." Mac OS X 10.6 would merely be a variant of Leopard. Better, faster, more refined, more... uh... snowy.This was a risky strategy for Apple. After the rapid-fire updates of 10.1, 10.2, and 10.3 followed by the riot of new features and APIs in 10.4 and 10.5, could Apple really get away with calling a "time out?" I imagine Bertrand was really sweating this announcement up on the stage at WWDC in front of a live audience of Mac developers. Their reaction? Spontaneous applause. There were even a few hoots and whistles.

Don't forget that this is a complete look at the new Mac, 23+ pages of it, in fact. Check it out.

So many PC users pooh-ppoh the Mac and detest Mac users, the serene lot of bstds. They say it's not what the real techie uses. They might even concede that it does what it does. What the PC users don't see is that Mac users love their Macs.

Surely that's enough recommendation in itself?

[global warming] no, it's not happening, really truly it's not ... please?

Verbatim:

Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals.

Changes to the Earth's orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.

Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.

Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.

The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region.

The result is a "hockey stick"-like curve in which the last decade - 1998-2008 - stands out as the warmest in the entire series.

"The most pervasive signal in the reconstruction, the most prominent trend, is the overall cooling that took place for the first 1,900 years [of the record]," said study leader Darrell Kaufman from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, US.

"The 20th Century stands out in strong contrast to the cooling that should have continued. The last half-century was the warmest of the 2,000-year temperature record, and the last 10 years have been especially dramatic," he told BBC News.

Kaufman is wrong? Doesn't know what he's talking about? Will someone please provide the data refuting the claim Mr. Kaufman is making? The charts and the scientists who are interpreting them please. Is he a government spy or working for Them?

[icesave] and the principle of taxpayers subsidizing the speculators

Thank you Iceland Review for pics and info

As in the UK, so in Iceland. The tab for ineptitude and corruption is picked up by the taxpayer.

On August 19th, the Icelandic Prime Minister, Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir, announced plans for Icesave:

“Once the Icesave agreement has been approved by Althingi the dispatch of the loan from the International Monetary Fund can be worked on,” the PM told reporters. “When these matters have been completed we can step across a large threshold which has stood in the way of the restoration [of Iceland’s economy].”

In a nutshell, the Icelandic government, in their ignorance and greed, offered investors in the UK and the Netherlands a nice return for their money. Councils across the UK, for example, invested in Iceland's Landsbanki and then the whole thing went pear-shaped.

Most people know the story of the fiasco and all those out of pocket. Where councils invested, they were, by definition, investing our money. The UK and the Netherlands, naturally, want their money back but how to get it? Simple - force the Icelandic government to take a loan from the IMF.

Interesting how the IMF keeps popping up all over the place, isn't it?

Now, for the Icelandic government to do this, they must commit to stringent conditions and who pays for this for several decades? Of course - the Icelandic people. So the people here and the people there all pay. And what of the criminals themselves? They get away with rap over the knuckles.

The parliament, Althing, colluded with this of course and so a series of squabbles over amendments took place, to make Icesave [if ever there was a misnomer, this is it] more acceptable to the people:

The disclaimers that were added to the agreement between Icelandic, British and Dutch authorities on Icesave include that economic growth determines the annual down payments of the loans from British and Dutch authorities and that no payments will be made if economic growth is halted.

... and here:

The Icesave agreement, signed by Icelandic, British and Dutch authorities in June, states that the Icelandic Depositors’ and Investors’ Guarantee Fund will not start repaying the loans until 2016.

The Budget Committee also discussed how it could be implemented that the state guarantee would only be valid if British and Dutch authorities agreed to the disclaimers introduced by the Icelandic parliament.

The committee referred to this item as the “InDefence-disclaimer” after the InDefence campaign group, which has presented ideas in relation to the Icesave case.

Naturally, the Icelandic people take a dim view of this and here is the result:



The Icelandic way of demonstrating is quaint:

Frosti Sigurjónsson, managing director of travel search engine Dohop, has promised to reward the loudest protestors at today’s demonstration against the Icesave agreement with ISK 1-2 million (USD 7,700-15,400, EUR 4,900-9,800).

But it turns nastier:

Sigurjónsson explained that the purpose with all the noise is to protest the fact that the Icelandic nation will have to pay for the debt of gamblers and their private banks.

“We have suffered enough already. It is in breach of all laws and ethics to make us pay. Both native and foreign specialists have pointed that out. The nation should not accept such injustice without making noise,” Sigurjónsson writes.

And so to the call for a referendum on the proposal, which will put every Icelander in hock for the rest of their days:

Representatives of the website kjosa.is, where more than 8,500 people have signed a petition demanding a referendum on the Icesave legislation passed by parliament on Friday, will formally hand the petition over to President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson today. In the petition, the president is challenged to enforce a referendum by vetoing the legislation, Fréttabladid reports.

Now, contrast this situation with my portrayal of Iceland in my earliest posts. Let me quote from one of those posts:

The heatwave from Europe may not exactly be here, but the weather in Reykjavík has finally turned sunny. It was rainier this June than it has been for many decades. July has been worse, that is until today.The heat is now 17 degrees centigrade, which is excellent for Reykjavík.

Many people have taken the day off. This explains why not much is happening in the country, as you can see from the lack of news.

... to which I received the reply, from EU Serf:

In the middle of a hectic day of a hectic life, Iceland seems somehow peacefully inviting doesn't it.

Oh how that innocence has been lost.

Small bikkies, peanuts too, you might say, compared to the massive losses in Europe and America but Iceland is such a clear country, in the sense that the dirt in Europe is hidden beneath all the otehr things going on there but in the little island of the north, the dirt shows up in stark relief, for all to see.

A bunch of greedy people saw a chance of a massive killing on both sides of the sea. Result - the people pay for that greed. Same story wherever you go. Question? Will the greedy really get away with it?

UPDATE: September 8th from Iceland Review:

I like your post but there is one thing I think you misunderstood. Icesave was Landsbanki's online savings scheme in the UK and the Netherlands and at the time of its launch, Landsbanki was a private bank. It was only nationalized after the economic meltdown of last fall, which is why the Icelandic tax payers have to suffer the consequences. Therefore it isn't fair to say that the government is to blame for Icesave's blunders, although the Icelandic, British and Dutch governments should probably never have allowed Icesave to operate the way it did.

What's her future now?

[bitch, i have no mercy on you] neither should we

The NY Times contrasts the British and Californian way:

California is not Scotland. That’s the message one British newspaper took from Wednesday’s decision by a California parole board to turn down an application for compassionate release submitted on behalf of Susan Atkins, who is serving a life sentence for her part in the 1969 killing spree carried out by followers of Charles Manson.

In London, The Daily Mail contrasted the decision with one taken two weeks earlier by the Scottish regional government to free Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of murder for his role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Mail’s headline suggested “Scotland Take Note” of the fact that Ms. Atkins lost her bid for parole “DESPITE Being on Her Death Bed.”

Quite right too.

Of those who took part in the killings, certain of them were beyond the pale and certain of them went along with it. Leslie van Houten was one who was told to "do something" and stabbed someone who might have been already dead and her degree of guilt is no less for that but she always struck me as being into the other aspects of the family more than this gruesome thing.

Again, it's not excusing her but when she's placed beside Susan Atkins [Sadie Mae Glutz] and Tex Watson, there is a stark contrast. Those two not only initiated the murders but added embellishments and Atkins pursued a fleeing victim, already stabbed, across the lawn and finished her off. Her words at the time are in the title of this post.

There is a distinction and in a state with no capital punishment [they were lucky it changed], then "for the term of her natural life" is the correct decision. Heat of the moment, crime of passion - this was not. This was planned, cold-bloodedly carried out and most importantly ... with relish.

[late evening listening] cherie presents ravel and grieg

Ravel trivia:

Ravel is perhaps known best for his orchestral work, Boléro (1928), which he considered trivial and once described as "a piece for orchestra without music."

I'm not sure if Cherie means the 2nd movement of the string quartet but this is the 1st movement:



This is the sung version of Solveig's Song, with [possibly] Solveig Kringleborn. The vid itself is superb:



The orchestral version is here.

[music programme] so much for laura norder

This music listening programme - I made a comment to Cherie [whose selection comes up this evening] that I was going to try to get some order into this thing.

Fat chance. Already it's booked solid until Sunday, none of it mine although I do reserve the right to respond to your piece with one of mine beneath it. :)

If you have a favourite piece you'd like to see played and you don't plan to run it on your blog, send it along - you have my email. In the meantime, here's an especially poignant vid I saw today around the blogs.

[sequence quiz] put them in order

1. Can you put these in the right descending order: straight, one pair, highcards, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, three of a kind, flush, royal flush, two pair?

2. What points do you get in Rugby Union for: try, penalty goal, field goal, conversion?

3. GDP per capita - put these in descending order, as agreed by the WB and IMF: Luxembourg, Ireland, Sweden, United States, Germany.

4. Put these in order of speed: backstroke, freestyle, breaststroke, butterfly.

5. What is the generally spoken of order of the importance of pieces: rook, king, pawn, bishop, queen, knight?

Answers

Royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house, flush, straight, three of a kind, two pair, one pair, highcards; try - 5 points, penalty goal - 3 points, field goal - 3 points, conversion - 2 points; exactly that order - Luxembourg, Ireland, Sweden, United States, Germany; freestyle, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke [at world record level]; king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, pawn

[thoughtful thursday] from on high

[rogue bankers] and old photographs

1 Quite important article, by Nick Drew, over at CAW, on the bankers. Check it out if you haven't already done so. Just how to stop those who are wrecking it for everyone else? I say we can't until we execute Them - they will keep our noses to the cycle of ups and downs which simply perpetuate their world agenda.

Harry Hook says we are in a special time right now:

We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a "metamorphosis of the gods," i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.

2 The photo above is by Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, one of my three favourite "artists", the other two being Shishkin, from Russia and Millet, from Barbizon. I'll steal another of Cherie's shots for a post soon and include some of those other two as well. All of their stories are interesting - how they went about their art, what they faced, their life and times.

3 He's retired once already and he's too good to retire. Please put him back on your reading list.

4 Tread carefully at Scott's Thesis because he makes fine distinctions and you have to read carefully if hoping to refute the assumptions. I'm still reading.