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Page 39The ramblings of an old gitbloggoth Mission Statement: |
Apologies for a wrong end
Pigs, Hippos, Sheep, now Llamas. Surprising how human the female parts of all these animals are. A lady Llama had its rear end towards us today and she had a fantastic fanny. Cooor, we would! Unfortunately, Missus bloggoth walked into the shed just as we were about to take a photo to delight the non-existent readers and we had to pretend to be interested in photographing the head of a different one.
Lovely teeth. Bet she goes.
And her.
Turn it around
We at bloggoth have felt very low for some months, not quite jumping off Clifton suspension bridge onto the Queen Mother low (why did the old cow have to die many years back and spoil our plans? Typical of royalty) but certainly a curling up in bed and not being arsed with anything low. Is it just the bloody wedding (not that one!), being without a van, all the continual insurance hastles, the disruption of a long drawn out conservatory construction? The significant but hardly problematic (yet) reduction in value of our savings? It doesn't seem like the sort of stuff that gets sane people down.
We are not alone. For anyone who has a mortgage and has lost a job these must be depressing times but those who are already on the property ladder and have secure jobs are actually benefiting from the lowest mortgage rates in living memory. Is it really just debt that is affecting everyone in the UK? The reduction of living standards due to a rising cost of living? That article refers to other factors playing a part.
Maybe it is the depressing nature of the world generally, the deluge of awful news that gets us down. Like the stupid and expensive wars that are none of our business and will end badly. The way our money is chucked away in Africa and Pakistan etc to no purpose whatever. The leftists and state employees demanding their "rights" to everything under the sun as long as they aren't paying for it. The strike threats by extremely well off hypocritical union leaders. The propping up of lazy/leftist Greeks/Portugeuse/Irish/whoever because they won't exercise the discipline necessary to help their own nations. The way our country is being changed, mostly for the worse, by massive immigration but we are not allowed to say anything. The threat to our values because a curious interpretation of "anti racism" demands that every backward Islamist and third world view that intrudes on our society is worthy of respect simply because of the holders' colour. The idea that every hostile parasite has rights regardless of how much they affect the rights and safety of those paying for them. The way that what little say we have over our own society is given away to suit the grandiose ideals of our lords and masters. Our corrupt politicians quietly rebuilding their privileges and perks as soon as the furore over the last lot has died down.
Maybe we are all close to cracking. Maybe a violent uprising, a purge of those who have abused us and taken advantage of us for too long is overdue. Maybe a massive cull would be no bad thing.
It would not be our fault, we are mentally ill.
Typical
The fact that the BNP is opposed to voting reform is being used by AV campaigners. According to them, just saying the BNP is against it is enough to make many in favour. So presumably these same people will be against tackling inflation because Hitler did it and against trains running on time because Mussolini did it. What utter fucking idiots some people are, real thought never seems to enter their heads. Not that it matters much which way they vote as it will not change a thing. According to that link:
However, Mr Clegg once described AV as a "miserable little compromise" because it is it not a proportional system.
Quite. AV has some advantages over the existing system but if people vote for it now there is no chance of ever getting a better system in the lifetime of most of us while if people vote against there is at least a possibility that the issue will rise again and this time they might go for a better option like STV. Not that proportional representation in itself will give us democracy, for that we need a secret vote in the commons, a written constitution limiting what government can do without an election or referendum and the right of the electorate to demand them. Fat chance of those.
It is a measure of the contempt our leaders have for us that our second referendum in 36 years (the first being over a fait accompli when the electorate was totally lied to) is not over anything important to any of us like EU membership, public spending, overseas wars or immigration but was arranged solely so that one leader in the coalition could save face.
UN workers killed in Afghanistan
Even assuming it was justifiable to kill anyone over an insult, would it not be reasonable to expect that those targetted would be those responsible for it or at least those who approved of it?
This was a UN compound, it was not full of US followers of Pastor Terry Jones or even Americans of any sort, these were Nepalese, Norwegians, Swedes and Romanians and none appeared to be doing anything apart from fulfilling their UN roles intended to help Afghanistan. The worst atrocities outside of war zones, deliberate attacks on innocent civilians throughout the world with no regard for their culpability and without the warnings that other terrorist groups often provide, mostly come from those of this religion. Any easy target will do, aid workers only trying to help, anyone who just happens to be on a plane or train, women, schoolchildren, innocent bystanders, who cares as long as they are mostly non Muslim?
Incidents from that region are especially relevant to the UK because it has people pouring in from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ever open door from allowing spouses to settle, the "asylum seekers", the illegal migrants in the backs of lorries, the hordes of phony students. Our safety is being put at risk from Islamic fanaticism and it isn't as though, given their rejection of integration, the statistics on crime, welfare and health and their views on issues like individual freedom and women, that there are any compensating positives for our economy or our society.
Ah yes, most Muslims are not fanatics, yada, yada. That is quite true but I am tired of hearing it. It is a rather like saying that most carriers of some fatal disease are not contagious. That may be true also but given the choice I would prefer that fatal disease carriers did not enter my house at all.
Watch out! it's those phony socialists again
They are up in arms about the idea that people in social housing, including those with disabilities, will not receive full payments to stay in houses that are too large for them.
As we asked a while back, how is this view socialist when it is not compatible with Marx's mantra? How is the Tory plan not socialist when it is pretty much in line with housing policy in Soviet Russia which allocated according to per capita living space? Most would agree with provision of adequate facilities for those with disabilities but it is quite wrong in principle for them to be provided with luxuries that many of those who pay for them cannot afford, that they should be funded to stay in large apartments long after their family have departed no matter how understandable their desire to do so.
This video shows a disabled lady in a large and rather luxurious flat. Maybe the BBC should also show one of a rented bedsit of a typical manual worker who doesn't quite qualify for benefit and whose taxes are subsidising her.
Update: And are there any better illustration of the defects in the current system or the hypocritical nature of socialists than this? If Crow wishes to be a man of the people it would be laudable if he chose to live in humble housing as they did but to live in housing that is subsidised by others on a far lower salary than him? That isn't what socialism should be. Socialism as it usually is maybe, this ugly bald piece of shit would have fitted in just fine as a privileged aparachnic in Stalin's Russia.
Respec', feuds, inbreeding, families, tribes and the lessons for the Middle East
Yet another gangland killing of an innocent bystander by black youths on the streets of London. Probably the intended victim had shown no respec'.
That sounds familiar, "I have been shown no respect today", said by that nasty bloke in The Godfather 3 before the helicopter starts machine gunning everyone through the skyscraper window. Men like The Outlaw Jose Wales "Lived by the feud and died by the feud". Hollywood films can be quite educational and both quotes gave accurate insights into those societies. Mafia feuds in Sicily killed thousands as recently as the 60s and blood feuds or vendettas, like that between the Hatfields and the McCoys, were a big problem for pioneer America.
People overreacting to perceived slights or taking revenge on other individuals and their associates is universal but some societies take it a step further, giving excessive importance to honour and respect and treating minor issues as a reason for violent actions. Family or tribal feuds can involve whole generations and there are examples from many areas and periods of history, from ancient Rome to Stalinist Russia but it still happens today. It goes on in Sicily, in Albania and Kosovo, in Indonesia, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Chechnya and in Sudan.
Such conflicts do not happen obviously in more stable parts of the Arab world since they are ruled by undemocratic and authoritarian governments who know how to keep order but here too the societies are essentially tribal and the loyalty to the extended family is paramount. Those authoritarian rulers are families who pass power from generation to generation and they appoint the members of their extended families, blood relatives or in laws, to the major positions of authority. There is no real distinction between the tribe and the extended family because the huge extent of intermarriage encouraged betweeen cousins or between uncles and nieces in Islamic countries makes them one and the same. There is an interesting article here on the extent to which these practices makes it difficult for anywhere in the Middle East to be capable of democratic government. Maybe our well meaning but foolish leaders who are interfering on behalf of "young people wanting democracy" should read it.
For a democratic nation to exist its citizens have to be capable of putting the needs of that nation and the society as a whole above more narrow allegiances and Arab societies are at least a hundred years away from that. At the present time there are only two options that our interference in the Middle East can bring about:
- More authoritarian rule, whether by an Islamic movement or a dominant family AKA tribe
- Endless blood feuds AKA tribal conflicts
Update: Looking accurate so far. An article on refugees from Tunisia has this quote:
I have come to look for work and a new life, Fathi Ben Ali, a 22-year-old Tunisian, said. Yes, there was a revolution in Tunisia, but it's just the same people in charge again.
April Fool
We at bloggoth got April Fooled by #1 son again this year and, yet again, by exactly the same silly joke; a huge stuffed penguin fell on our head when we opened the bathroom door.
Don't ask us why he keeps a huge stuffed penguin in his bedroom, he is extremely wierd as we have said, he probably uses it to practice his serial killing skills. It may seem trivial but it is the principle that counts and the bill is racking up. In the unlikely event that we actually remember April Fool's day next year we think we might hit back with something worth at least ten huge stuffed penguins, like a pallet of house bricks or a bucket of battery acid. (He is treating us with no respect).
Come to think of it, what we really need is Payback Day, a nastier version of April Fool's day when we get back at people we really hate. On Payback Day, you have legal immunity from prosecution for any single act of revenge committed before 12AM, provided it does not involve a direct personal attack and is reasonably funny.
Let's see, my uncle's Samurai Sword, some luggage elastics, sure we could rig up something to get MR PS when he gets into his truck in the morning.
Modern vomiting
There has been an internet-fuelled surge in Satanism according to the Catholic Church. And why not? Seems an improvement on other religions in practice. Have Satanists been blowing people up, attacking "batty men" or excluding women from their hierarchy? Are any demanding the introduction of Satanist laws in the UK?
Apparently those who are possessed by the devil vomit shards of glass and iron according to a Father Gabriele Amorth. This fact is quite clearly proved by a quick Google which brings up numerous references to Father Gabriele Amorth saying they do. We did manage to find one other reference, this rather large online book on witchcraft. The vomiting idea first appeared during the Renaissance and the possessed would sometimes vomit not only iron and glass but also live animals like toads, snakes and butterflies. One chap vomited a pair of shepherd's trousers and a jacket among other things. Those sound much more useful, although obviously they would need a good wash first.
This illustrates a major flaw in religious belief, the way that the behaviour of mighty supernatural beings who are supposed to be omnipresent and eternal is totally defined by narrow regional cultures and brief periods of history. We are told that the evil one existed before man and that he is just as active today in trying to lure us into the bottomless pit as he ever was. So why should he or his demons be only making people vomit things that were around in Renaissance Europe?
Why are the possessed of the present day not vomiting shards of polystyrene, copies of Nuts magazine or mobile phones? Perhaps Father Gabriele Amorth can tell us.
Topic: Modern vomiting Comment here. Comments so far: 0
The idiocy goes on
Mumra Ghaddafi Duck (and he hasn't even had to transform into Mumra the Ever Living yet) is doing ok again and now the daft arse Western governments are talking about arming the rebels.
WTF? How will it help to give a bunch of amateurs advanced weaponry? There is far more to producing an effective fighting force than that, unless the army recruiting ads have been lying to us for years anyway. There are going to be no solutions to this apart from either ending up with a permananently unstable and hostile Libya under his control or getting involved ourselves, becoming hated as occupiers by those who now want our help and ending up with a permananently unstable and hostile Libya under the control of some other bunch of Arab nutjobs.
Yemen next? Our governments are quite incapable of ever learning any lesson.
It was obvious this would happen, why are people so stupid?
Way back in 2009, when that stupid cow Joanna Lumley was campaigning for all ex Gurkhas to have the right to come to the UK, we said it would be a bad move. The main points in a nutshell:
- Ex soldiers make poor citizens and the good will towards the small numbers that had come previously would not survive
larger numbers and adverse publicity
- The idea that very few would want come from an unstable country, the world's 11th poorest, was absurd. This move would open the floodgates of immigration, legal and illegal, from Nepal.
And so it has come to pass. According to this article one town in Hampshire has seen those from Nepal rise from 620 to 2,356 households. Many are elderly, speak little English and are straining welfare services. The local MP has warned that local services risk being overwhelmed. As always, people go where they can be among their own and the influx of non-Gurkhas from Nepal has followed increased residency right for Gurkhas as this link notes:
However, since the Census the Nepalese population has grown dramatically because in 2004 retired Gurkhas won the right to settle in Britain. Home Office data has shown that nationals of Nepal have been increasingly settling and taking up citizenship in the UK. It appears that the change in the terms and conditions of Gurkha soldiers has been the cause of the growth of the UK Nepalese population. Aside from the migration caused by Gurkhas and their families, it is also important to note that Nepalese individuals have been migrating to the UK as professionals, overseas students, refugees and asylum seekers.
So, not all brave ex Ghurkas then! There has been a big increase in asylum seekers from Nepal and most of them are phonies as this Nepalese item notes:
That is Karki's story. The only thing wrong is that none of it is true. The 28-year-old is actually from east Nepal, he faked his residence in the insurgency-affected Gorkha district to buttress his appeal for political asylum in Britain. Karki (not his real name) is among hundreds of Nepali economic migrants in various European countries and Australia who have sold most of their possessions to pay middlemen, and are trying to get in by applying for political asylum.
...
British Embassy officials in Kathmandu told us there has been a sudden rise in the number of Nepalis seeking asylum in Britain in the past few years when there have been 30-35 applications a month in Britain alone.
As for "students" from Nepal those rose from 680 in 2008 to 8705 in 2009 alone. In 2010 the government had to suspend visa applications from Nepal after a sharp rise in applications and concern that the provision was being abused.
There is no indication so far that the Nepalese in the UK are disproportionately involved with other crimes as one might expect given that Nepal is a fairly low crime nation compared to many. Unfortunately, whenever you get an isolated minority in any society without the language skills or the education to succeed in it you will eventually get resentment and crime which in turn only leads to more rejection by the majority. This is the way that societies work and the world is full of examples, why will people not see them?
When it happens we should send the bill to that fucking stupid Lumley woman. Actually, that town in Hampshire should do that now.
F idiot
The stark contrast continues between David Cameron, the reasonably competent PM on economic and social issues and Drivelling Camoron, the PM on foreign policy issues.
The latter moron is opposed to Mumra Ghaddafi Duck going into comfy exile somewhere in Africa as Germany and Italy have suggested. Instead he wants another stupid, long drawn out, expensive and extremely boring trial at the ridiculous International Criminal Court, one of those stupid international bodies that should not even exist. Maybe he should drown a few of his ideals in some underage prostitutes, he might get more sensible then, like Bellusconi.
What will this do except give Mumra no option but to carry on fighting and what will that acheive except to prolong the conflict, bring more deaths, more destruction, more cost to the UK taxpayer and drive up the world price of oil?
Why the hell must our leaders put their stupid ideals before practicality at everyone else's expense?
Yeh right
Think we have covered the selective way that people use coincidence more than once before but this one was too good to pass up. We took this genuine photo of missus bloggoth's peppered steak in the frying pan. Neither the steak nor the photo was tampered with in any way except to rotate the latter through about 70'. Naturally we had England and left Ireland and Scotland to the missus
We each see hundreds or thousands of new things every day. We see old things from different angles, in different lights, in different arrangements. Of course there are going to be times that we see things that remind of something else and, given the frequency of our sightings, the numbers of humans and the massive numbers of things to see in the world it is hardly going to be that unusual if the resemblance is sometimes uncanny, much better than our peppered steak. It would be more surprising if that was not so. We also have a knothole in our cupboard door that looks a bit like Lenny Henry.
Yet people still think these occurences mean something, like this recent "image of the Virgin Mary" for example. Big deal, out of umpteen views of cliffs in the world one looks like a woman carrying a teapot. The idea that it resembles the Virgin Mary is pure invention because nobody knows what the Virgin Mary actually looked like, even assuming she existed at all. That looks more like Florence Nightingale to me. And why would the Virgin Mary be in a cave on a beach in Newport anyway?
There is another problem indicated by the photo on this page which shows the cave and the suspension bridge above. Either the council is in serious breach of health and safety laws by providing a dangerously low handrail or, and this appears to be confirmed by some others showing people on the beach or the building above, this Virgin Mary is about 15 feet tall. It is possible that God made his mother to be very impressive (he did make Adam about 30m tall after all) and sent her down to visit Newquay beach for some mysterious reason.
It is slightly more likely that too many people are credulous idiots.
Update: A jelly bean that looks like Kate Middleton
Hypocrites and parasites
In the wake of the London protests that saw violence and damage the TUC has said that the activities of a few hundred people should not detract from the main message of the official protest. Quite, as we at bloggoth have said before, you should not reject a viewpoint simply because some support it as a small step on the road to a much more extreme goal. On the other hand, leftists always condemn entirely the arguments of groups campaigning against extremist Islam or for proper immigration controls because of the activities of skinheads or real racists, so they have no right to complain.
That typical hypocricy aside, why on Earth do so many public sector union leaders have the gall to call themselves socialists? Karl Marx said "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". What is there in those words that can justify people paying for others to have what they cannot afford themselves? That some should get final salary linked inflation-proofed pensions that other taxpayers without them have to pay for? That the unemployed should get housing benefits to live in expensive areas while wage earners have to live in areas they can afford?
What is there that supports the idea that people should not do what they can for themselves before they get support from the rest of us? That everyone has a right to free higher education no matter how little it benefits society? That everyone has a right to have children that they themselves cannot support? That people should be able to continue in jobs that are not necessary or financially viable? That workers like London's tube drivers should be paid generous wages for trivial tasks that could be performed at lower cost and more safely by machines?
What we call socialism in the West is not socialism at all. It is a malignant creed based on class envy and hatred, an excuse for laziness and a way of disguising the same greed and self interest that motivates capitalists as something noble.
The invented enemy
Mumra Ghaddafi Duck has called his enemies Cockroaches. The term has been applied to the hated throughout history, including to the Jews by the Nazis and to the Tutsis by Hutus.
The six legged version sounds like a big problem, soiling your house, causing a whole range of illnesses, damaging books and leather goods and leaving a horrible smell. Trouble is, while there are species of beetle known collectively as Cockroaches, we at bloggoth have never once, ever, seen this nasty domestic version and it isn't as though we are excessively houseproud or hygienic. They are not tiny, they are supposed to be large insects between 17mm and 30mmm long depending on species, so how can they be so elusive?
Look at that link again. Does that look like a photo to you? And why have the web designers mispelt cockroaches as cockraoches? Could that be due to a subconscious realisation that there was something not quite right here? Google Cockroaches and check out the items on the first page. Why do those that cover the supposed pest species mostly only have drawings or no picture? Why are the few photos arranged compositions against blue backgrounds with no clue as to size? Why not a single untouched photo of one having a pooh on a Christmas cake so that we could see how big they are? Why are most pages by exterminators and jobsworth local councils rather than anyone who even appears to be a serious entemologist?
Our research has revealed the truth. This large repugnant house-dwelling type was invented by the Nazi propoganda minister Joseph Goebbels purely to compare Jews to. Lice are real but a bit too small and people couldn't really see how nasty they were without magnifying glasses. He did consider evil baby-buggering monkeys but eventually rejected the idea as not credible. A large fast-moving nocturnal insect that ate your bible and covered your food with disease-ridden faeces was perfect. The fact that nobody ever saw them was easily explained by them hiding instantly in tiny crevices when you turned on the light.
Do not be fooled dear non existent reader of bloggoth. Yet again, what we think of as reality has been exposed by us as being an invention, a fiction perpetuated down the ages by those with a vested interest.
Well done
It seems that young people in Moscow have a craze for a craze for Metro-surfing in which they cling onto the outside of tube trains and the craze appears to be spreading here.
In principle, we at bloggoth heartily applaud their sense of social responsibility in setting a good example. Lethal activities should be encouraged in an overcrowded world although bright students are not really the sort that we most want to get rid of. Surely if the government puts its mind to it and spends our money properly it should be possible to encourage self extermination among the useless - the perpetually unemployed, the drug addicts, the criminals and the terrorists. There are already some useful trends that could be promoted to the advantage of the rest of us.
Gang warfare for example. Innocent victims are sometimes tragically killed in error but for the most part young gang members kill other young gang members or similarly useless sorts whose loss is a boon to society in general. More often than we are led to believe because nobody likes to speak ill of the dead; "gifted young footballer" or "promising athlete" are codes for a school dropout; how many actually go on to make a career from either? What the authorities need to do is infiltrate these gangs and influence them so that they knock off more of the right people. Spread tales of other gangs encroaching on their patches, stealing their hos and engaging in disrepec′ generally. It would be the perfect apprenticeship for young MI5/MI6 agents, providing valuable training at minimal cost to the taxpayer.
Terrorists too. One frequently reads of Islamic extremists "radicalising" young men. Does it not occur to the authorities that if these young idiots are so easily influenced then ANYONE can influence them? A mind open to one load of irrational bollux will be equally open to another load of irrational bollux. MI5 should put fake Imams into Mosques and convince one lot of "alienated" youths that some other lot of "marginalised" youths are blaspheming heretics. Encourage them all to set up terrorist training camps in remote areas of England and then let on where the other lot's training camps are. Marvellous, lots of mysterious explosions in isolated valleys of the Lake District and fewer suicide bombers to threaten the rest of us.
HooraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
We at bloggoth have a VAN AGAIN!!! Life is almost back to normal. Well mostly anyway, the missus has a terminal illness, but compared to having no van that's a minor point.
PS She doesn't really. Would we joke about a thing like that? Well, she probably doesn't anyway. We have a VAN, that's the main thing.
Again
Whenever we at bloggoth post something typically brilliant you can be sure a senior political figure will parrot it a few days later. At the weekend, just a few items back we said aid to Africa was misdirected, concentrating on emotional headlines rather than practical economic measures with the result that the populations outgrows the economies. Obviously Peter Mandelson has been reading bloggoth and his comments on aid to Africa make the same points.
It would save a lot of time and money if most ministers and civil servants were sacked, who needs policy making departments when all the government needs to do is read what we at bloggoth write and implement it? The savings would far exceed a few billion of taxpayer's money spent on providing jam for waspies.
Buy now, freaks
It is a well known fact that left handers are better at tennis. They are also crap at cooking, apparently because cheese graters are designed for normal people. And DIY. You may be a big tennis fan but never go to a party at Rafa Nadal's place as the food will be utter crap, full of great big cheesy chunks that have not been grated properly and you will probably be injured by falling bookshelves that aren't properly secured to the wall.
We at bloggoth are always looking for ways to help our fellow man so if you are one of these horrible freaky left handed people, fear not, because your DIY troubles are over. Here are a bunch of great products just for you:
A great range of nuts, bolts and screws with anti-clockwise threads, starting from only £9.99 each.($300)
An electric drill for drilling anti-clockwise holes, only £426.($6700)
All cheques to xoggoth Towers, usual address
Talking of screwing
What a misnomer as a slang word for having sex. As you just bang it in without turning it should more properly be called nailing. A fairly loose nail too as you don't need pincers or a claw hammer to get it out again. If it was a screw you would have to put it in very slowly while moving round and round.
Freaky, big and randy
There has been a snow white bird hanging around the garden this year. We assume it must be a Collared Dove because it hangs around with the other Collared Doves although it is noticeably larger than the rest. It also tries to hump every female in sight, chasing them around and doing that puffed out noddy dance thing that doves and pidgeons do. We haven't seen it score yet, so maybe females don't like freaks even when they are rather impressive.
Or could it be that it is not quite sure what species it is and has geussed wrongly? Is there some automatic instinct in animals that tells them that another creature is the same species or is it purely learned? If the latter one has to wonder about creatures reared in different environments. Maybe that explains why dogs like to hump legs, they grow up with people and think that human legs are just another sort of dog. This is a taboo subject never touched on. Did Mowgli get to hump lady Wolves? Did Tarzan bonk lady Chimps?
Of course they did! if you take fiction and make up fictional bits that were not in the original fiction you must end up with
reality:
NOT TRUE(NOT TRUE) = TRUE
Simple boolean logic that is! Lucky bastards. Some fictional characters have all the real luck.
A truly international effort
As we said a little while back we at bloggoth do not approve of any Western actions in Libya. However, as usual, it all seems to be happening again. On the bright side, just think how dull the world would be if the rational opinion of xoggoth determined everything, constant perfection would get very tedious after a while. For once the Froggies appear to have beaten us to it. Well done Froggies!
We happened to hear La Mer by Charles Trenet on the American program The Simpsons. Bobby Darren did it in English as Somewhere Beyond the Sea. Darren was brill but we like the original too. Anyway, choose for yourselves, non existent readers, just don't expect a bilingual bloggoth lyricy thing.
PS Or play them simultaneously for a real international effort!
PPS Actually, if you do Darren almost competely overwhelms Trenet. Froggies defeated again!
Red Nose Day is well intentioned bollux; we need less emotion and a lot more cold sense
It was Red Nose Day yesterday just in case anyone missed it. Well intentioned, and let's be honest, much nicer people than we at bloggoth, devoted a lot of time to raising money. Many people donated and most of it went to black Africa. Ah yes, money well spent most would say, many children saved from dying of Malaria, having cataracts removed. But look at it another way, if you only help more people to survive and have children without advancing their society or their economy, does it actually reduce the numbers who eventually die of disease or poverty?
Compare the way people live in the shanty towns of Africa today and at the way that many townspeople used to live in the Middle ages in Europe. They are many similarities, people living in rat-infested dilapidated shelters next to open sewers and with no access to clean water, beset by hunger, starvation and disease but there is one very obvious difference and that is population growth. Charity was very limited for those Middle Ages Europeans and they lived very short lives. Many of today's shanty towns are getting bigger and bigger, which means that more and more people are living squallid lives and more and more are dying. In the long term those lovely compassionate people who donate so much are actually causing more children to suffer and die than if they had done nothing.
Some Sub Saharan African economies have grown significantly in recent years, albeit with a major dependence on foreign aid, but unfortunately economic growth on the continent has been outpaced by population growth:
Sub-Saharan Africa faces serious political, economic and social challenges. With an annual rate of growth of 2.2 per cent, its population is expected to increase from 906 million in 2005 to 1.1 billion in 2010. Twenty years of an almost 3 per cent annual population growth has outpaced economic gains, leaving Africans, on average, 22 per cent poorer than they were in the mid-1970s.
This trend is likely to continue:
Africa has joined India and China as the third region of the world to reach a population of 1 billion people, and it is expected to double its numbers by 2050, the UN says. By then, there will be three times as many people living in Africa's cities, and the continent that had fewer than 500,000 urban dwellers in 1950 may have 1.3 billion.
22% poorer? How did that help them exactly? And how are these trends helping us? We are frequently told that it is to our long term benefit to help poorer nations but if our aid increases their population at a faster rate than their economies then this is a clear nonsense. More and more poorer people are going to require ever more in the way of aid and already high immigration will become a flood that will destroy our own economies and societies.
The emotional approach based on alleviating immediate suffering as tipified by Red Nose Day is misguided. If people want to help then they should look beyond harrowing pictures of big eyed children and first look at providing a future for them. Concrete and practical measures to seed and support self sufficient economies that do not depend on aid, like roads, trade deals, and encouraging export businesses for raw materials, food and manufactured products that have a market here. Alongside that we need to make sure that ordinary people actually benefit rather than let all the wealth go to a corrupt elite as in Nigeria.
Don't save lives out of sympathy, save them because African economies needs more workers. Don't provide education out of some vague impression that it's a good thing, provide it because African businesses are looking for educated people. Don't provide aid to countries just because they are poor, provide it only to those whose governments are taking the right decisions to benefit all of their citizens.
If this all sounds very cold to the non existent readers, they are right, it is. On the other hand, if anyone is seriously concerned about the future of Africa or anywhere else in the third world it is the way we need to start thinking.
Wronging Rights
Righting wrongs. Sorry, but is righting really a word? Whether it is or not, it is a well used phrase, there is a film called Righting Wrongs, societies and groups called Righting Wrongs and it is the favourite hobby of many Superheros.
If righting is a word then wronging is a word too. Life should be about balance and nobody should have everything go right for them, it makes them lazy and complacent. In the end they just eat a lot of pork pies and get fat and die of heart disease.
What we need are some anti-Superheros. These should not be confused with Supervillains who, as we all know, hatch terrible plots that look promising but are always thwarted by the Superheros 5 minutes from the end of the film. Anti-superheros are as noble and successful in their mission as Superheros, they act to restore a bit of balance to people's lives, to show them that there is no guarantee that things will turn out ok if you just sit on your arse and call for Superman.
Usual double standards on race
We at bloggoth are totally against multi culturalism, a common culture and shared beliefs are very positive things for any nation and we should be doing everything possible to bring them about. We have enough divisions based on class and politics without encouraging the existence of more. On the one hand we should stop making allowances for and concessions to minorities while on the other we should not be deliberately excluding those who are prepared to assimilate.
However, if we must have this ridiculous tolerance of separate development, should we not implement it impartially? If the BBC can provide an Asian Network at public expense should the white British not be equally entitled to have channels or at least the odd show to which they can relate? Are there any white artists on the Asian Network? If there are we could not find any referenced on the website.
So why the feck should Midsomer Murders be obliged to include minority characters?
At least we are inclusive
Indeed. I am a manky BLACKbird skull after all.
Books and covers
Sky News at the gym had a long interview with Senator John McCain. They asked him a lot of questions about the Japanese nuclear catastrophe, Libya and UK defence plans.
He comes over rather poorly, lacklustre and lots of hesitation. On the other hand, he immediately answered the questions asked and what he said was to the point and seemed sensible. On his opposition to excessive regulation of the nuclear industry for example, he was not against safety but the sort of enquiries that took years. Indeed, how much time does it take to reach the most sensible decisions, that spent material should not be densely packed next to the reactor as was done in Japan, that reactors should perhaps be sited below sea/river level so they can still be cooled if the pumps fail?
Obummer would have been much more impressive. Asked the same questions he would have spent 5 minutes, that head swivelling left and right, mouthing platitudes about "our hearts going out to the Japanese people at this difficult time", "sharing aspirations with the people of Libya/<placeholder for whoever here>" and at the end of the interview we would have had no fucking idea what he intended to do about anything.
Well actually we probably would - zero, but it would have sounded much better.
More fodder for the irrational
The nuclear power station problems in Japan, even though there is no prospect of a similar scenario here, will be used by the greeny loonies as ammunition to sway an ignorant public and it will be to our detriment if the government takes an ounce of notice.
Although there is a great deal more we could do to save energy, there is no real alternative in the UK to nuclear power for its generation. Our economic coal fields are gone, gas and oil are becoming increasingly expensive and much production is in the hands of potentially hostile nations. Current green "alternatives" are not alternatives at all, being immensely expensive, unreliable and/or very damaging to the environment.
Nuclear power is also among the safest source we have. As Max Hastings says in this excellent article, it has killed far fewer people directly than the oil and coal industries have. He does not mention the indirect effects on health but we should perhaps consider that in the UK air pollution due to burning fossil fuels in the UK is estimated to cause 50,000 early deaths every year. This article on nuclear generation in the US puts the health risks into perspective.
There is another health hazard of the green approach and it may actually be the most important. The impact on the health of the nation caused by economic decline if our industries do not have reliable power. That will start happening in a decade or so unless this government acts soon to secure our energy supplies.
PS That US article mentions the worst ever air pollution incident in London, 1952, that causes 3500 extra deaths in one week. We remember that, our dad opened the front door and this great curl of thick yellow smog rolled in. We survived.
PPS We at bloggoth are 42 miles from the nearest nuclear power station. Over that way, er, um, where that great curl of thick grey smog is coming from.
All that matters is now and the future
A disaster team from the xoggoth locality have flown out to Japan to help with locating victims of the recent earthquake, having recently returned from a similar mission in Christchurch, New Zealand. Quite right too, we should always be most ready to help those who do most to help themselves.
Not on basis of need? Sorry, dear non-existent reader of bloggoth but maybe you should go and find yourself a lefty blog to not read. Being proper engineers, ie total psychopaths, we at bloggoth are more concerned with the long term progress of societies and their impact on the world as a whole than with the fates of their citizens. Having been born (slightly) after WW2 we really don't give a damn about the history of the Japanese. Today's reality is that Japan, like Germany, is a democracy which contributes disproportionately to the wealth of the world. They are economically less important nations but Australia and New Zealand too are also socially advanced and self sufficient countries. What a pity therefore that all of them have been hit so hard by recent natural disasters.
We have sympathy with the citizens of Haiti, Ethiopia and the like but whether aid for countries like that acheives anything much in the long term is questionable. Until societies start to control their own destinies the problems just keep recurring. We felt even less concern during the Pakistan floods because of the awful nature of that society and what immigration from it is doing to our own.
Resentment of what threatens us is a fact of human nature. The solution is not to rail against it but to address the problems.
Human rights or progress?
Let's be logical here, if the direction of a society will eventually deliver prosperity does it make sense to be so concerned about rights which in practice are largely academic? In many countries it is illegal to criticise the government but in the UK we are free to do so. Whoopeee! All together now. CAMERON IS A CUNT! Wow! So where did that get us? Did it change anything at all? Of course not, unless we have a very rare talent at leadership AND the drive to devote our life to it we ordinary people have no influence on anything at all.
Take the example of the USSR and China. By reforming too quickly the former threw out the babies with the bathwater. East Germany was the world's 11th economic power, not bad for a communist state. They had some quaintly old fashioned but saleable products like the Trabant and the MZ motorcycle, we at bloggoth had an MZ and it was brill. After the fall of the wall East German citizens rushed to buy western products and most of their industry collapsed although it didn't have to. Their products could have been improved but that would have taken time. Contrast this with China where the progress towards a free society is far slower. This is likely to be the world's major economy in a few decades and all of its citizens are benefiting.
Theoretical human rights or real prosperity? Difficult.
So how about YOU do it this time?
Wherever you have former colonies there are certain sensitivities and Black Africa has the sense to appreciate this. African troops now play the major role in UN peacekeeping operations on the continent.
Add resentment over support for Israel and West-hating Islam that will distort any outcome to it own ends and and there is nothing to be gained by our direct involvement in Libya. The idea that the West should get caught up in the Libyan fighting, whether imposing no fly zones or in any other way, is barking. Yet it is looking more likely given the news that the Arab League is backing the idea. Ah yes, the idea that NATO countries supply the planes and bear the cost presumably. AND take all the flack when civilians get killed as they inevitably will and have it used against us by Islamists in the region.
How about they do it? Egypt has over 430 modern combat aircraft and Saudi Arabia has over 130 of the latest type. More than enough there to deal with Libya's embargo-hit outdated force without even looking to the other Arab countries and it's not as though the Saudis or the Gulf states are short of money to fund the action either.
Update: The Government of Oman has called for Arab states to intervene to avoid unwanted foreign intervention. According to the US State Department, while far from being a democracy, Oman is the only Islamist state in the world to provide something like a tolerant society as we would understand the term so maybe the opinion deserves to be taken seriously.
PS And why exactly did the UK end up providing the transport aircraft to ferry Egyptians out of Tunisia?
We demand a thousand year guarantee on everything
We at bloggoth hate throwing things away so how dare manufacturers not support products for ever?
Found a really neat old Epson Scanner in the attic and wanted to use it with a USB to parallel port converter that Maplins were selling off cheap but could find no up to date drivers. Bah! Bastard Epson! Why are you not supporting a Win95 scanner on 64-bit Windows 7? We paid good money for that only 16 years ago! Call that support? We have a good mind to send it back.
It's all a frigging con! Manufacturers take loads of our money for products and stop supporting them in less than a decade. They should be forced to provide support while there is even one potental user left. Not only that but they should be obliged to supply upgrades so that those wanting to use old machines should be able to take advantage of all the latest interfaces and control methods.
This 1894 steam engine has been reliably stamping out television components since it was fitted with an electronic
control panel in 2000.
Once upgraded to the latest operator interface it will be used to manufacture mobile phones.
It will also be upgraded to colour.
Arsenal
The rest of the family are watching some crappy Man U. vs Arsenal game. Not being Northern Neanderthals they support Arsenal. We at bloggoth are not into watching sport but would support Arsenal too as, apart from being called ARSEnal, they have a manager called ARSE N Venger and have players named ARSE Shaving and Fabric ARSE. Something like that anyway.
Lambs popping out
Spring is really here. Running past a field of sheep yesterday and there was one on its front knees with its bum in the air and a lamb lying there. When we came back 50 mins later the proud sheepy mum was grazing and two little lambs were fighting over the drinks cabinet. There was another hugely pregnant ewe close to the hedge with its rear end towards me and a big swollen pink fanny and it was quivering! If we at bloggoth were a bit pervy, which of course we are not, we might have watched a bit longer.
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Let's see shall we?
We at bloggoth think that "hate laws" are too widely used and that maybe some should grow up rather than react violently to mere words or symbolic gestures. There should be a specific incitement to violence or discrimination against others or a prolonged harrassment of individuals, a person responsible for a comment or action should not be blamed because those hearing it have no self control or sense of proportion.
So, unlike 99% of the non Muslim population, we do not necessarily think that the Muslim scumbag who burned poppies should have been fined more or even fined at all. However, if we are going to enforce the law in this daft way it is essential that it is enforced on all in an even handed manner to avoid increased resentment. A man in Carlisle has been charged over burning the Koran. Will we see a similarly paultry fine in this case or will we see the usual pandering to irrational Muslim sensitivities?
Three geusses.
Quite right
MPs have called for a a cull of ministers. Quite right. It won't be nearly so much fun as it would have been with people like Harman or Prescot around but we at bloggoth can't wait to get our hunting rifle out. Bags we Kenneth Clarke.
Bastards, execute them.
Even though retired and there is nothing to stop us doing things whenever we want, we at bloggoth and the missus bloggoth still prefer to work at our tiny businesses in the week and have weekends off, it makes them special.
Really annoyed therefore, for the second weekend running, to have spent a lot of hours sorting website problems for our tiny business that brings in bugger all money. Last weekend we had to fix the site feedback (based on the brilliant bloggoth commenty thing) when we found over 27,000 comment spam items on it. We had assumed it was far too obscure a link on an obscure site to need spam protection or email notification but it seems there is nothing too obscure for these fecking bastards to pick up on. Then this weekend we found that email notifications from the shopping cart were not reaching us and spent ages trying to track down that problem before they all started arriving en mass up to 18 hours late. The hosters say this is usually down to high traffic and a major problem can occur when another site on the same server is being spammed.
Fighting this war costs business an enormous amount of money and the environmental costs are huge too. What we really need are far harsher penalties that reflect the true costs of the crime and the true costs of one spam message or one bit of malware is not what a business spends to delete it or remove it but what it has to spend to try and prevent or contain the problems of that and all the others like it.
Setting up spam channels or writing malware requires time, expertise and deliberate intent and should not be compared with, say, shoplifting that costs similarly huge amounts to prevent because leaving a shop without paying for goods may not be premeditated and is sometimes genuinely unintentional.
That being so, 2 years in jail for a first offence is proportionate to the scale of the problem and might make many think twice. The costs would be far outweighed by the savings for the world economy.
And them
Although the cost to business of spammers is insignicant compared to the cost of FUCKING GOVERNMENT with all their bloody red tape, all the excessive and overcomplicated taxes, all the form filling and dodgy submission systems.
We did a quick fix to the above late email problem by saving the customer data to a MySQL table and then had to waste time checking the government's fucking long PDF to see if that was allowable under the fucking data protection laws. We think it's ok under exemptions clause 781 sub section c clause iii tucked away somewhere that says that companies with a g in the name are not exempt.
Now we find the FUCKING EU has passed some ridiculous directive that use of cookies to track visitors will require the user's approval. In theory this does not apply to use of cookies for logging what people have put in online shopping baskets so will not affect we at bloggoth but that's just the theory. This whole bit of nonsense has, as usual, not been thought through properly. Nobody knows how it will be implemented as users will get fed up with having to click on a consent box on every site they visit. Some users, probably the majority, who have no idea what cookies are or what they are for, will probably just turn them off altogether and then our shopping carts won't work. Yet more fucking weekends wasted trying to implement alternative and implicitly less reliable solutions.
All these FECKING ill thought out laws just hand businesses to competitors in the rest of the world.
Bluddy ell that's my dad
It seems this modern world cannot stop directly interfering in the affairs of every state and the latest interference is in Belarus. The excellent moustache only bears out the bloggoth theory that all the best dictators have stupid moustaches.
He's got a little fuller in the face but we swear that under that moustache that's our dad. We thought he died. Our family keeps turning up in unexpected places but at least Belarus is not such a strange place as a peat bog where no 1 son was found.
Topic: Thats my dad Comment here. Comments so far: 0
That makes sense, oh, but what about, maybe it's, no, hang on a minute
Sometimes you read an article on society and and it initially looks very convincing, like this one for example. One can certainly see how extreme inequality has its downsides, not least the costs of drug addiction, alcoholism and crime by a significant underclass.
Hang on a minute. Didn't the US grow to be the world's major economic power while having extremes of inequality greater than we had in Europe? Didn't the British do the same thing over a century earlier, becoming the inventive manufacturing power house of the world when the impoverised working classes were slaves in all but name?
So the idea that inequality stretches people was "dismantled" by tycoon John P. Morgan was it? One report is hardly proof and we at bloggoth just do not recognise his conclusions. As an employee and contractor we have worked at companies where there was very little salary differential and those where merit rises were a major part of pay and the latter all performed far better. I think this observation would be backed by no 2 son and many others who work in high power jobs and profit from their abilities. In the unionised public sector where merit plays very little part in reward and where people are almost unsackable the levels of sickness and strikes are much higher and productivity is generally lower than in the private sector.
So Kate Picket and Richard Wilkinson "empirically prove" that in very unequal societies negative symptoms overwhelm the entire society? Again the US and British experiences do not support that. Neither the huge, predominantly black, underclass in the US nor the famously gin-sodden British underclass prevented the economic surge in those countries. In the third paragraph we are told that an unequal society has many more prisons, that in the US the number of prison inmates quadrupled between 1977 and 2002. Hang on a minute, wasn't that period immediately preceeded by major advances in civil rights for blacks and a big increase in wealth distribution under the Johnson and Kennedy administrations? Surely if inequality is bad then the Civil Rights Act, programs for the long term unemployed, federal aid to schools, Medicare/Medicaid, foodstamps and provision of welfare support should have reduced the prison population not increased it.
That is not to say that this leftist article is totally without merit and some European countries seem to have got the balance better than we have but it is over simplistic. It is not simply equalising wealth that matters but how it is done. Once people can cater for their material needs it is not a relative lack of money that leads to hopelessness and crime but rather a lack of self worth and simply doling out welfare does not help. The poor need to feel they are a useful part of society and requiring them to do all they reasonably can for themselves before raiding the wallets of others is surely an important part in raising their self esteeem. If the better off can see that they are doing that they are far more willing to finance a reasonable standard of living for them but if they feel their money is spent on those who do not make an effort they feel less willing to bother earning money that is only wasted and the economy as a whole suffers.
Spooky
Cold but sunny today and very little wind so went on a jog through one of our usual routes. Coming back through a rather dark and gloomy area of pine trees and there was a hiss to one side that I first took to be the local steam train. As it got louder it became evident it was the wind but it was all in one direction. I was standing there on a path in complete calm while it grew to a roar. When it struck, trees were tossing all around and there was massive noise. Less than a minute later it had gone. No more than a slight breeze all the way home.
And ANOTHER RANT! says Zebedee
Insane
Two bits of news yesterday. One is that Pakistan's only Christian minister has been assassinated for wanting reform to the country's blasphemy laws. The culprits are said to be "extremists" but this sort of thing is encouraged and approved of by many clerics and by many citizens. The assassin of the last governor to publicly oppose the laws was hailed as a hero by a large section of a population which is growing ever more conservative. The authorities are complicit at all levels. According to The Independent the Christian minister was denied protection. The government does nothing about these barbaric laws and the police and other authorites sometimes refuse to act when minorities are attacked.
This Christian minister had risen as far as a non Muslim can go in government. Until fairly recently there was a separate voting system for all non Muslims and the Ahmadis are still excluded unless they convert to mainstream Islam. In practice the only role non Muslims can have is in minor positions dealing with non Muslim affairs as the constitution requires ministers and elected members to take an oath to preserve Islamic Ideology and all laws must be consistent with Islam. Would we call the UK a democracy if all our MPs and ministers had to take an oath to uphold socialist principles and if socialist policies and laws were the only one allowed? Of course not. The treatment of minorities is just a part of the human rights abuses in Pakistan; we have covered before the laws relating to women that effectively legalise rape and the attitudes that allow a blind eye to be turned to serious domestic abuse.
Russian and Chinese leaders get lectured on every state visit despite the possible adverse effect on important trade links. The Christian country of Uganda has been threatened with a halt to aid, quite rightly, as a result of its intention to make homosexuality a capital offence. What laws a nation passes are its own business but that does not mean we should subsidise them regardless of what they do. Yet we seem to hear nothing at all from the government about human rights abuses in Pakistan.
The other piece of news is that the government is going to double aid to this Muslim cesspit of a country. Insane! If any aid at all is given it must be on the condition that the rights of minorites and women are greatly improved. If they will not, the only money spent on that nation should be whatever is necessary to keep its citizens and the repulsive attitudes they bring with them out of own.
Update: An RC cardinal thinks so too.
TIME FOR A RANT! says Zebedee
OFFS stay out of it!
Given the realities of a coalition Cameron has not done too badly so far on the domestic and economic fronts but it seems all the old insanity is still there in foreign policy. Billions thrown into the bottomless pit of foreign aid to little effect and now proposals to interfere militarily in Libya. Presumably he would consider the same actions when the rest of it blows up.
What does it ever acheive? Intervention by the West never brings any gratitude from Islamic countries even when, as in Kosovo, there are no obvious advantages for us. It will be used by those who hate us to claim we are trying to recolonise, to grab their oil or to establish new leaders favourable to us. We could spend billions and it is doubtful that the long term stability of the region will be helped one iota. Societies and nations take generations to evolve and imposition by outsiders acheives nothing for their people.
Keep the money. If we must pick up a bill for the world's problems then spend it on proper border countrols to prevent the continual flow of its broken societies into our own.
Immigration is great - the fantasy version that is
If all migrants were the huge asset we are told they are then being a minority in your own neighbourhood might be a small price to pay but the realities of much low skilled economic migration from the third world are poverty, crime and backward beliefs.
On occasions we check what is happening in the area of South London we grew up in. There are muggings and street crimes in familiar parks and streets that used to be unheard of. Our once white, middle class, high-achieving primary school is now 75% black and has a high proportion of pupils on free school meals and with learning difficulties.
The growth of third world religion, not just Islam but Evangelist forms of Christianity, is dragging our society backwards from the tolerant and rational future we had once hoped for. Just one example is here. Sane people want a cinema but there are fears that the building, owned by the Kingsway International Christian Centre, will be used for religious purposes even though planning permission was refused. The church has a mostly West African membership and believes in the prosperity gospel, yet another nutty Christian import from the US. Encouraging material success does not seem such a bad idea in principle but the practice, in this case at least, is perhaps illustrated by the fact that the Charity Commission ruled that its pastor should repay £200,000 in benefits including a Florida timeshare that he awarded himself and others from a registered charity. What? A corrupt Nigerian? That can't possibly be true! Cry the Politically Correct non existent readers of bloggoth.
Maybe it is time we stopped the pretence about some migrants, about the nature of the societies they come from and about what they are doing to our own.
Don't write him off yet
The papers and TV are all saying that the expulsion of Mumm-ra Gaddafi is just a matter of time. We are not so sure. He just hasn't got annoyed enough yet.
Age failing bits
Apey Logies to non existentish readers. Despite vow to post deluge of crap here, weekend contributions missing due to health scare.
Standing by the cooker Thursday evening shovelling nosh onto the plate and got attacked by lighting. Bright diagonal flashes every time I moved my eyes and the next day it was a complete ring and my best eye had floaters. Went to the doc and immediately got sent to the eye hospital. Oeer. Turned out it was some detachment that "can happen as you get older" and no need for any treatment unless it gets worse. Should clear up on its own. Phew!
Missus blogggoth is always rather intolerant of her elderly mother, insisting that she could do a lot more for herself if she tried. Dunno, nowhere near 90, but there are times that we feel like lying on a sofa and not bothering. Give us an attractive Polish nurse to change our nappies and we will be happy. And, if we must have floaters, give us some interesting shapes. Hard core porn floaters would be great.
Something beautiful comes from every corner of the world
Now beheaded corpses are being left in public squares, can Mexico go any lower? Given the constant flow of illegals over the border taking their poverty and crime with them who can blame any sensible Yank for loathing them? Still, at least this man provides a positive perception. He's not just a great singer but a bright and delightfully silly chap too.
Well, almost
So where are the positives like that from Muslim countries? Where are the world acclaimed Muslim singers, artists, poets, authors? Culturally, this creed seems to reflect its origins - a desert.
Do Muslims affect anyone outside Islam in a positive way? Do most actually give a damn about anyone else? The briefest of checks on Christian aid sites will immediately find prominent campaigns for Pakistan, Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan and Egypt among others. A longer check on Islamic aid sites will find a similar list except that non Muslim others are mostly missing, although there do appear to have been fairly significant donations for Haiti. A brief search is not proof but a look at international aid by Muslim states fits the pattern. Of the donated £49 billion in international aid to 2006 donated by Saudi Arabia, one of the richest nations per capita, all of it went to Muslim nations. According to this source the bias in bilateral aid from all the oil rich Gulf states was towards Islamic populations.
Muslim charity, like Muslim tolerance, (as we would understand the word) seems to be in short supply.
Addicted to love
The Corries - Peggy Gordon
The words are very clear on this so no need for the bloggoth lyricy thing. Just as well 'cos we can't be arsed to do one.
Women are like fruit
Some people are just nuts but women's perceived figures resemble fruit apparently.
Some 27 per cent claimed to have a coveted butternut squash figure (small waist, larger hips and bust) while 21 per cent said they had the slightly less iconic pear figure (small waist and bust but larger hips). Only 21 per cent of women said they believed themselves to be the dreaded ‘apple’ shape – plumper around the middle and bust.
We at bloggoth really have no idea what a butternut squash looks like but as long as the butter is in the correct Last Tango in Paris place it sounds ok to us. Still, it all seems a bit limited for us oldies who may need a bit of extra excitement to get into the mood so why can't women resemble other items of fruit? The Blackberry has a lot of separate seed containers called drupes and is the perfect model for a woman's body, the chief fault of which, as anyone knows, is that it is not equipped with nearly enough breasts and buttocks.
A Blackberry Bush showing the drupes
A Blackberry Woman hiding her bush. You won't get any droops with her!
And why stick with fruit? Why not other food stuffs generally? Baked bean can women may not sound very attractive but just think of the sense of anticipation as you get out your can opener.
Right wing economics and wrong wing social policy
Why must we elect single governments? We have to make ridiculous compromises by voting for a single party because most of us are not one party animals, we may prefer the social policy of one, the economic policy of the other and the foregn policies of a third. Vote for sane economic policy based on small government and the free market and you are stuck with conservative social policies substantially based on Christian dogma. Avoid voting for the BNP because of their unpleasant and very impractical policies on British minorities and you have to put up with massive levels of poorly controlled immigration and the sidelining of your own culture.
Wouldn't it be great if we could vote separately for ministers of every department and policy area? We might get the sort of government the majority want then.
The right leader at the right time
Following on from the above it would be even better if we all got to elect temporary leaders to take charge on specific issues.
Like many, we at bloggoth feel that the foreign policy of the US has too often been counterproductive in the past. Too many ill-thought out interventions, invasions or long stand offs, huge costs to the US taxpayer, usually followed by ignimonious withdrawals with few of the objectives acheived and a lasting negative effect on political relations. The failures like the Iran coup, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, outnumber the successes like the bombing of Libya and er, um.
Nevertheless, given news of the capture of Americans on a yacht, don't you wish they had Regan, George Bush, Rumsfeld or Palin in charge of tackling the Somali pirate problem? We might get the sort of action we need on this one issue, the progressive obliteration of every port, area and township engaging in or supporting piracy until it stops.
They might not say so but one suspects that such action would be popular with a host of nations and not just allies of the US.
Who knows? but seems right
White parents are to be allowed to adopt ethnic minority children under new rules. With this and some other recent decisions by courts, on prisoner voting rights and <other things we can't recall the details of and can't be arsed to find>, are we actually beginning to see some sense instead of the politically correct claptrap that has ruled us for decades?
Being entirely logical, it made no sense at all to create mixed race societies because piously insisting predudice should not exist does not stop it happening. It happens on both sides; there may be exclusion by the majority but equally the minority tends to blame them for failures for other reasons. We can't find any study but we suspect that if you surveyed a bunch of white British people with low grade manual skills who had emigrated to other countries you would not find a very large percentage of success stories among them or their children either. There are obvious reasons for low social mobility in any society but add racial differences and you get resentment. That in turn makes minorities less willing to bother, leads to crime and other problems and the resulting negative perceptions lead to even more exclusion.
We need to stop perpetuating this same error but as far as British citizens are concerned it is water under the bridge. We also need to break down these barriers and adoption and mixed marriages seem to be steps in the right direction. Not that it will help as by the time we are all pale brown and getting on well again they will be bringing in low paid people-eating Green Alligator people from Alpha Centauri to increase the profits of space ship cleaning companies.
However much our society changes, two things remains constant, the impractical idealism and self serving policies of the arseholes who rule us.
The wisest man
Not sure if all the attributions are right but according to this here are some quotes from John Wayne or his characters.
If you've got them by the balls their hearts and minds will follow.
If everything isn't black and white, I say, "Why the hell not?
Talk low, talk slow and don't say too much.
A horse is a horse, it ain´t make a difference what color it is.
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
This is so clearly a man of genius that the less reasonable stuff, such as Indians selfishly keeping their land for themselves, is obviously a plant to discredit him by some other film star serving the dark lords, probably Jack Palance. It is a little known fact that the struggle between good and evil has often been played out in reality in Hollywood films as it's much cheaper than doing so in real life because the ticket-buying audience foots the bill. Those of who saw "There Will be Blood" should be ashamed of yourselves, you helped fund a major victory for Satan!
Anyway, we at bloggoth are about to found the Church of John Wayne. It will be brilliant and there might be some illegal activities in
the name of sacred ritual, fnaar, fnaar. Why should Satanists have all the goats' bottom fun? Only £50 ($3502) to join.
Sacrilege - execute the bastard
Hardly news that the so-called intelligence upon which Bastards Bush n Blair started the Iraq war was phony but what we never knew until today was that one the main lying bastards was a chemical engineer. What is more the bastard actually had a copy of Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook, which as non existent readers will know is a sacred text for we at bloggoth.
This man was clearly not really a chemical engineer but a heathen imposter, probably a graduate in social studies or some similar non engineering evil.
Superheroines - Balloon Bum 'N Boobs Woman
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BBNB Woman is watching TV when a |
She immediately inflates |
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And drifts rapidly across the landscape to cheers of |
Seeing the town below she swiftly |
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And falls safely to the ground, bouncing |
Before venting all the gas. Unfortunately |
Because the wind was in the wrong direction she has landed in the wrong town, which is just as well as her inflatable bum and tits shenanigans were of no use in tackling hostage takers anyway.
Hurrah for Balloon Bum 'N Boobs Woman!
Mild failure and punishment
Electronic tags allows an offender to be located to within 2m. They are about mobile phone size but could be made much smaller. We at bloggoth have a thumb end sized tracker that we use for jogging and most of the size is due to the need for a button and USB port. Small implants can send electrical signals to releive pain so it should not be that difficult to arrange them so they cause pain. It seems to us that all the necessary technology exists, or can soon be developed, for an implanted remote punishment device.
One of these devices should be implanted in everyone. Society works below par because there are few consequences for failure. So why not publish online the responsibility of everyone for every single thing they do in the workplace? Then if we are dissatisfied we just enter a number and the miscreant gets an hour of pain at that level. Anyone out of work and on benefits for more than six months has their device set at max all the time.
We at bloggoth have been unable to renew our library books because the local authority renewals webpage has been out of action for over a week. Take that you bastard! How dare you mildly inconvenience we at bloggoth? We hope you die!
More superheros
Some superheros are based on animals, the only ones that spring to mind for we at bloggoth are Batman, Wolverine and Spiderman but a longer list is here.
We were planning a bunch of silly animal-based superheros, like dormouse man who spends 6 months of the year in hibernation etc, but while looking for the above list discovered another blogger has beaten us to it. Slug-man, Sloth-man, Naked-Mole-Rate-man, Poodle-man and others. Good stuff, although obviously we hate the bloke for nicking our ideas. So what if he thought of them first? The trivia of time means nothing to we at bloggoth, we roam back and forth through it at will.
Still, at least he did not do any nasty ones, so here is one, Giant Flea Man who jumps on people from 200 feet away and sucks all their guts out. That's not a superhero, that's a supervillain! cry the non existent readers. Not so, as he only attacks those whom all sane people loath, like {Lying Scottish C* ... Brownstuff} as here, The Mad Messiah, Bob Crow, The Prince of Daftness, Cliff Pilchard, Abu Hookhand or The Arsebishop of Canterbury. Plus lots of horrible common people obviously.
PS You will notice that Flea-man is wearing shoes, a tea shirt and the remains of denim jeans but has a huge bare arse. Like everyone else we got sick of that nonsense where everthing tore off the Incredible Hulk except his trousers - it was probably why they called him incredible. When bloggoth superheros tranform into bigger and differently shaped creatures all their clothes stay on except for those that cover their naughty bits. Most bloggoth superheros go around with enormous arses, cocks, balls, tits and fannies on display. This is not really a problem as the sensible bloggoth superheros never rescue prudish religious sorts anyway.
TIME FOR A RANT! says Zebedee
Why psychopaths might make the best leaders
It must be difficult being a politician, there is not a single policy that is not going to be opposed by some and the mass of vehement abuse they get from an unbalanced proportion of those must be quite hard to handle.
It must also be difficult at times to find any sensible policy at all. Take the issue of welfare for unemployed mothers for example. It is easy for those on the right to say don't give them any further benefits but then what are the consequences of that for crime in Britain? We could see a return to Victorian days where hordes of the feral poor made a short living any way they could and that would impact us all. There is only one practical solution, forced abortion as happens in China.
So why don't we do that? Because we are too obsessed with narrow morality and individual rights. One thing is rather apparent in China, the society as a whole is working well and maybe there is a greater "moral principle" here, that we should provide the greatest benefit to the largest numbers. Does it really make sense that welfare should provide for a minority who will not assume responsibility for their own actions when the direct costs and probably greater incentive-destroying effects impact our economy to the detriment of all of us?
The obsession with the individual when applied to rights is oddly reversed when it comes to responsibilities. We need reasonable rules on safety to protect us all from unforeseen consequences with additional safegaurds for the vulnerable but why on earth should we feel it our duty to protect normal adults from consequences of their own actions when the risks are clear? An obvious answer to illegal Mexican migrants in the US would be a mine field. Put up fences and huge warning signs in Spanish with graphic images for the illiterate and then if they get killed crossing what is the problem? They are thinking adults, they must make their own decisions. If we at bloggoth ignore the warning signs and barbed wire and climb up our local radio mast for the view, whose fault is it if we fall off and get killed?
Another big impediment to rational thinking on the welfare issue is the Hitler effect. Because his particularly narrow and nasty version of eugenics involved exterminating those of non Aryan races or with genetic disorders we insist that everyone has a right to live in reasonable comfort and breed as they like regardless of the immediate or future costs for the rest of us. Any other view is denounced as Nazi.
Maybe what we need is a sort of queen ant who makes decisions for the survival of the colony and does not give a shit about its individual workers. If that delivered a greater number of happier ants how is it wrong?
Misreading headlines
When we are in a hurry or not that interested we tend to skip though the home page of news sites and misread the summaries. It actually does make news far more interesting.
A man accused of murdering his wife in a car crash made a woman feel uncomfortable by watching a film with his head on her lap. Oh! His head on her lap! I got his/her mixed up and had a mental picture of a man sat watching telly with his murdered wife's severed head on his lap and his female geust sitting there mildly embarassed. In this one about a Grenade ′could kill 10m away′ for a split second I was thinking it was some brilliant rocket-propelled grenade until I realised 10m was meters not miles.
Wouldn't it be an interesting world if our initial impressions actually created our reality?
PS Missus xoggoth has just shelled out another fortune on a huge HD TV. It's great, much bigger and fuzzier and you can flick through even more channels to find out there is nothing worth viewing. We really don't know why we mentioned that. It is obviously shear coincidence that both the above news items are about wife murder.
All together now
The Arsebishop of Canterbury is mouthing bollux again. Why the hell should serious criminals have rights to determine the direction of our society until such time as they are back in it?
It isn't the first time an Archbishop of Canterbury has made a nuisance of himself. It was the words of a king that got the last one put down and even in a democracy (ha! ha!) the rest of us don't add up to one king. Still, if we all shout in unison and make it loud enough... All together now, one ,two, three.
Who will rid us of this turbulent priest?
Hmmm
We started a comment on the Birmingham Central Mosque threatening to sue David Cameron over his comments that some there were peddling conspiracy theories about the 7/7 bombings. The thrust of it was that they would have no luck suing since, if this and this are accurate they clearly were.
But are they definitely false theories? Some of the stuff in the film is unconvincing or irrelevant, so what if a faked claim of responsibility for the incident showed up in the US?, false claims of responsibility follow many incidents. However, it is curious that such limited CCTV footage of the bombers exists and one thing is really wierd and appears undoubtably true. That a training exercise in terrorism was being run on exactly the same day and in the same places. But then if someone was faking an Islamic terrorist attack surely the last thing they would do is involve a reputable firm who would mention that? Maybe coincidence is the better explanation.
In the end, in the absence of detailed inside information, it boils down to judgement by generalities. Islam is a reactionary and often violent political creed and hate filled preachings and suicide bombings elsewhere in the world are so common that the standard version is most believable. Numbers matter here too. The standard version required the activities of four men, the comprehensive cover up alleged would have involved a number of people at every level and in more than one organisation. Is it really credible they would all be so dedicated to the masquerade? One has to wonder too if the planners would be quite so incompetent. They would not have people checking that the framed bombers caught the right train? They would not have a plan B if they did not, like postponing the explosions? There was no urgency after all.
A fellow Muslim has accused the Mosque leader of inciting hatred among the community. Probably, but if he was Abu Hamza or even Slimy Bin Liner himself that would not make everything he said wrong. We make a mistake when we think that only one enemy ever exists or that those on "our" side are always honest. Recall that Blair was in charge, that he lied to get us into Iraq, that he was desperate to bring the public behind his so-called "war on terror". Most importantly, if any incident surely required a rapid and completely open public enquiry this was it but we never got it.
We find the official version more credible but when men like Blair govern can we rule anything out for sure?
Atilla the Humdrum
What if the great drivers of history got bogged down in petty little problems as most of us do?
Flight paths 2
The number of planes will have been reduced as nobody is going to Egypt to see the pyramids. Let's get our priorities right here, who cares about stability in the Middle East as long as we at bloggoth get quiet and a nice blue sky over xoggoth Towers?
Those going to Egypt will be a small percentage of all tourists so what we really need to do is to make other destinations unsafe for Brits. It might be a bit difficult to trigger uprisings in every tourist destination but another way is to make the British so hated that they face indiscriminate attacks from outraged citizens, then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will advise people against going. Top Gear made a great start at offending the Mexicans but we need to go a bit further to stop people travelling to Acapulco. Fortunately, our secret sources in government have been able to get hold of a transcript of David Cameron's comment on the affair:
I deplore the comments made in Top Gear which, in fostering outdated stereotypes, do not paint an accurate picture of the Mexican people. They are not simply lazy and flatulent, they are also a bunch of criminal, violent, drug pushing people smugglers who like to drink from toilets. The biggest ommission in Top Gear's comments, as any schoolboy will know, is that Mexicans are also EXTREMELY GREASY!
Great! that's Acapulco sorted. Where next? Ah yes, lots of tourists go to the Carribean. We have also got our hands on a government report on the nature of Jamaica:
Jamaica is largely populated by....
Continued on page 2
Flight paths
It's been a fantastic day, quite warm for 8th Feb and not a cloud in the sky. Except for all the fecking plane trails of course.
Still, let's look on the bright side. At least the flight paths are closely regulated, just imagine if airlines had the freedom to fly anyhow they liked!
