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The ramblings of an old git

bloggoth Mission Statement:

We aim to never raise our sights above the gutter and preferably to stay much lower

Replace God with Bill Gates

It wasn't half as much of a hastle as I had feared getting my new PC as I wanted it and some things were remarkably easy. My ancient printer didn't work today when I wanted to print a footpath map but then I noticed the little "Solve PC issues" icon on the taskbar had a message about a printer driver, clicked on that, brief install and it was ok.

Pity we can't solve all the problems of humanity, cancer, disease, insanity etc quite so easily. Clearly the software that god installed in living things is not a patch on Microsoft's. If there are bugs or vulnerabilities in software, the major companies will soon issue an update to sort the problem. On the other hand, living things have to wait umpteen milllions of years for evolution to sort out their defects. Ok, I know that computers are nowhere near as complex as mammals but, after all, we have only been working on them a few decades, god has been messing around for billions of years. Give Bill Gates a few billion years and just think what we could have by now!

How about some reprogramming options? That would be good. Instead of being stuck with the personality that genetics and upbringing gave us, why can't we just pick up a remote control and select whatever character we would like to be?

Inanimate objects don't have feelings do they?

We have a crappy little collection of ornaments on our bedroom window sill. Some are recent acquisitions while others have an important place in our life. The ebony elephant and tortoise were both purchased in Cape Town in 1972 on route to Oz. Sent the former to the missus with letter "reminds me of you" and she was always called Phunty after that. The elephant at left was purchased in Kuala Lumpur a few years later on way back from a business trip in days when my job was often more interesting than just sitting in front of a computer. Think the two cheap little tortoises found in the shed were my kids' toys.

They were all equally spaced and facing forward but I am always bonking them when I pull down the blackout blinds so they get moved about and the results are very odd. All the elephants at left have turned to face each other and moved in close like a family, the tortoises at middle have also moved together for a natter and been joined by ebony elephant who is ebony tortoise's old SA friend, while the two at right have edged close like mum and hatchling.

In the top picture the ebony elephant was clearly slightly distracted from his old tortoise friend's conversation by the female elephant's bottom. The lower picture shows a couple of day's bonkings later and movements are small but significant. He has clearly given up pretending to listen and is considering making his move. How will my Kuala Lumpur elephant react to these designs on his village fair brought missus? It make take some weeks but we will see.

Karma not calmer

You are supposed to be over a death after about 2 years but not there yet. Still have some very low days. Read all the crap about what is supposed to help. Socialising - had some company Friday and it did not help at all, could not wait to be alone with a vodka. Keeping busy - yesterday I drove myself to tidy the garden and do various other things that I enjoy when feeling ok but that did not help either.

Started same today. Curtains in the lounge had fallen down and due to the steel lintel over the window I could not make the hole any deeper and first effort was a failure. They fell down again and knocked the clock off the fireplace mantel. Went ballistic! "Fuck, shit, arse, wank, cunt, bollox, balls, piss..." Turned it into a constant chant for the next 15 minutes until I'd finished the "Fuck, shit...." job . I feel much better now! My lord Satan is obviously pleased with me. Actually, maybe a release of anger is a proper cure. Not just swearing, maybe all those "motiveless" mass killers you read about feel fantastic afterwards.

Not quite loony enough to slaughter people just for belonging to a group and a bit too old to go to Syria and shoot ISIS fanatics. On the other hand, I could have great fun targetting local people who really annoy me. Let's see, the neighbours who start up their bloody motor mowers or strimmers just as soon as I relax in the garden, that squealy little girl up the road, the owners of that yappy little dog, the stupid Green local councillor who is always complaining about everything, the owners of all the f* cats who keep crapping on my lawn and flattening my plants, the idiots who park in the middle of a space big enough for two cars so my son can't park outside the house, the local works whose lorries make a loud noise every time they reverse and whose CCTV blocks out a channel of mine, the bloody steam railway with its whistles... I will make a full list. Where can I get a Kalashnikov?

PS I initially mispelt this as Kalma. She is a Finnish god of death and decay who smells of corpses apparently. Familiar with Norse mythology but Finnish mythology seems different. Must have a look. After my curtain rant I do suddenly feel interested in things again.

PPS And cyclists! And bastards who chuck litter on MY nice countryside... The list will grow. I have ordered my Kalashnikov from Amazon. Just you wait you bastards!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Parental controls

Got my new BT Home Hub 5 all set up in preparation for the new faster "infinity" Broadband service. All pretty easy, Windows and BT do most of the job for you. The BT pages presented on startup have a few options, click, click and you're there. One of them is to o set up Parental Controls. Of course I clicked no, #1 son living at home is 33, so it's up to him what he looks at online.

Then I set up two spare PCs and this option came up every time. Hang on a minute! That means that when #1 son started up his PC he would have got the same options. What did he click for parental controls? We assume it is for parents controlling what their underage children can access online but equally it could mean adult children controlling what their senile old parents can view.

Maybe he will fear that all my wanking over illegal pig porn will give me a heart attack and turn them on.

Over and over again

On TV, online or the printed press, when the BBC or others interview these F* illegals trying to sneak into Britain we hear the same things said over and over again. This one's comments in the DT are so typical it is almost like they are rehearsed:

Abdul Aziz, from Sudan, slipped out from underneath a truck at Toddington services on the M1 in Bedfordshire, and said: “England is good.”
After risking his life clinging to the lorry’s chassis during a journey from the Eurotunnel terminal at Folkestone, Kent, to the truck’s first stop at the service station, he said: "I love London, the people."
...
"I am a student and I want to learn. I want to go to university,” said the 22-year-old in broken English.

Yeh right! He wants to go to one of our universities to learn and who's going to pay for that? Not him I daresay. I suppose we should be grateful for the modesty of his ambitions at our expense. Only a week or two ago, another African interviewed on the BBC TV news was saying he wanted to go to Oxford. So much for the liberal/lefty idea that they only come to get jobs and work hard. Then there's all this stuff about England being so friendly, so tolerant compared to the likes of France or Germany. According to a poll of "refugees" in 2010 they are right and that's our big problem. Tolerance within reason is a good thing but we have taken it into the regions of idiocy by being tolerant of those who take advantage of our generosity, who are a burden, who threaten our safety or are not prepared to be tolerant of us in return.

Maybe we need to get a damn site nastier! The government should not be considering applications for asylum or leave to remain from any coming from or via safe countries and should be confining these illegals in the most basic accomodation until such time as they are sent back. We should not provide or allow provision of any health, housing, translation,advice or other services to illegals, including by charities, and should get really tough on those knowingly employing or housing them.

Others have a bit more sense:

Oh dear!

It seems that the arrest of General Karake, under a EUROPEAN arrest warrant initiated by a SPANISH judge for alleged war crimes is endangering UK-Rwanda relations according to the BBC. Oh dear! Mustn't jeopardize relations with an important trading partner like Rwanda must we? Why, that might lose the UK economy as much as , er, minus £66 million a year that we give them in foreign aid, dispersed via their dictatorship.

We could be wrong of course, a quick Google does not always reveals the full truth as these issues are not simple and people may distort the truth to suit their political agendas. A commonly accepted study (Dollar and Burnside) indicates that foreign aid is 50% effective in improving gross domestic product in well managed countries but has little effect in poorly managed ones. On the other hand, another working with the same data provide no support for the idea that aid works even in "a good policy environment" either. Rwanda's economy does seem to be improving but there is no proof that that is connected to foreign aid.

So come on Camoron. If you must chuck away 0.7% of UK GDP on aid to third world countries, how about some openess? Why not set up proper independent monitoring schemes and tell us in detail what the amount given to each country has acheived? If you can show that all the billions chucked at these nations actually improves their economies significantly and may similarly reduce the numbers of useless ~~migrants~~ illegals who burden the nations of Europe then even righties like we at bloggoth might support it.

Update. The power of bloggoth - 2

Just below the previous post that bastards who target old or vulnerable people should get increased sentences we reported the next day that new guidelines are to be introduced to do just that.

Now it's happened again! Yesterday, above, we demanded that foreign aid should be properly examined and shown to be effective. Today we have a report that the foreign office is to review the effectiveness of foreign aid.

Our next post must be about government provision of free prostitutes for wierd old blokes. We can't wait until tomorrow.

F* Bastards

Turned up to meet the great old ladies at at my writer's club on Friday and was appalled to hear that one had just had £50,000 stolen from her deposit account after her debit card was stolen during a distraction theft in town. Not quite sure how that gave them access to her deposit account but I'm relaying what she said and she certainly isn't senile. Others at the group have lost money and valuables to pickpockets in town. They hang around the charity shops apparently targetting older people who are easy pickings. Astonishingly, I can find no reports of these things in the local press.

Much worse things happen to the elderly. Cases of street robberies, burglaries, online scams, frauds by rogue builders etc are commonplace in the crime news. It is often reported they are targeted because they are easy pickings. My wife's grandmother had been fit and active but went downhill and died very quickly, just like this woman, after she was mugged in the street.

Sure we are on their old fart list. We regularly get cold calls from f* Indians called Peter or Jane etc trying to tell us they are from Microsoft calling about a fault on our computer. Fortunately we have spent most of our life in IT and are not likely to fall for that crap until we are totally senile. Others are not so lucky and some are scammed out of much more than £121.

Maybe they should make it a particular offence to target elderly or other vulnerable people and put these scumbags away for a lot longer.

These items were in the local newspapers just today:

Update. The power of bloggoth

We wrote the above yesterday morning about 11AM? Today we found a news item published yesterday at 7.34PM: Fraudsters face longer sentences if they target the elderly.

There you are! It now takes less than half a day for our governments to take note of bloggoth wisdom!

And another case

Today also has a story of an elderly couple being conned. The judge warns of naivety of the elderly. He isn't wrong. Look at the pictures of the crooks, especially the bloke. Maybe poor eyesight is a factor too. How can anyone who looks like that not be a crook?

What mass migration really gives us

In economic terms nothing at all. Said it all before, but if you expand GDP by x% and population by x% or more, nobody is any richer. There are some generally useful groups like the Chinese, Indians, Poles or Hungarians but their positive input is more than outweighed by the negative effects of other low performing groups whose most notable contributions have been gangs, terrorism and riots. As for the wonders of cultural diversity, they might indeed be wonderful if they did not include rejection of our major values and practices like FGM, honour killing and forced marriage. The measurable negative impact on resources such as schools, roads and infrastructure is huge. Some things, like the loss of social cohesion, are not easily measured but are certainly negative.

For me, the worst thing is the destruction of our country in the literal sense. Google "development 500 homes planning" and you see major developments planned all over the country to meet increased demand due to expansion of the population, 84% *Note of which is down to immigration. Not far from me a 500 home development has been approved which will effectively make a local village into part of the nearby town. In and around our own small village there are plans for up to 55 new dwellings which will ruin what are now pleasant wooded areas and a small pond.

Green belts are being built on all over the country but it isn't just loss of green belts that is a problem. "Brownfield" sites are not all horrible polluted muddy areas covered in rubbish or derelict buildings. They are often pleasant, sometimes beautiful, spaces with grass or wild flowers that add character and give a sense of space to the towns and villages around them. So many pleasant little areas have vanished beneath new developments around here.

Note: and that figure is 3 years out of date.

84% of population growth due to migration
The number of new homes being approved on greenbelt land has increased five-fold in five years

Topic: Mass immigration really gives us Comment here. Comments so far: 0

Be wary of statistics that "prove" racism

The Guardian recently reported that Black Americans killed by police are twice as likely are to be unarmed as white people. No reason to doubt the basic figures but is that headline really the relevant one, given higher black involvement in violent crime, especially gun crime? Why should law abiding people, of whatever race, who are never involved in any sort of encounters with the police figure in these statistics? Including them makes as much sense as including dolphins.

Surely the number of unarmed people of each race who are killed by police should be weighed against the number who are actually involved in potentially violent encounters with the police? Calculate in that more meaningful way and the figures look very different. According to the Washington Times:

adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
...
“Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” he said. “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

We can't find it now, (damn PC packed up and we lost the note) but another UK article indicated it is not entirely accurate to represent this solely as a racist white policeman vs black suspect scenario either, because black policeman were also more likely to shoot black suspects. That indicates it is also about police perception of danger.

Maybe before people blame problems in London on "institutional racism" they should look at where a disproportionate percentage of violent crime, especially gun-related crime, comes from.

F* computers!

My PC packed up some days ago so got a new one. Taking ages to set it all up as I like. When you are OCD that's hard, it's not just getting all the essential programs (like F* Microsoft Office!) to work. When you are OCD, like we at xoggoth, each desktop icon must be exactly in the right position. A few pixels over, no way!

PS And hyperanthropomorphic too. Mustn't remove an icon unless I absolutely have to, the poor little thing would feel unwanted sitting all alone in the dark on an unused disc.

PPS Wonder if Feng Shui applies to desktops?

PPS We have installed our bloggoth app which will automatically provide a regular posting of bollux on here with no effort on our part. Randomly generated words are filtered against a list to reduce those which are not swearwords, obsessions with bottoms or rants about horrible foreign/common/lefty people.

Sneaking into holes

At least the lovely green countryside is back and not too squelchy. Went walking from home for over an hour and a half yesterday. (OCD note: 1h 37m 25s according to my little pedometer) Probably threw away some of the physical benefit due to fags and vodka with my drinky neighbour when I got back but not the mental uplift of looking at all those meadows and trees and wild flowers.

Lots of footpaths round here but another nice thing is all the woods, fields and open spaces that, while they are presumably owned by somebody, do not have any fences or signs. Of late, having done all the footpaths and main spaces, I have taken to exploring all the little gaps created by animals even when the unfenced area they lead into appears very small. Amazing what you can discover. Sometimes just litter. Other times, as with this one just off the road, a fantastic view over the hills.

The lord is displeased

A few hundred yards from that Opus Dei place there was a remarkable incident during last week's thunderstorms. Heard reports that a tree had been hit by lighting and "exploded". It sounded a bit of exaggeration so is I went up to have a look. F* hell! They were not kidding! Huge pieces of the tree are everywhere, up to 15-20 yards away!

Poor little tree. Maybe the lord was aiming at xoggoth and got his bearings a bit wrong. Hardly surprising when all his records are still carved on stone tablets. He needs to get up to date a bit more. Surely there would no better time for the lord to send his message to mankind, the internet is a perfect medium. Why doesn't he do it?

I wonder.

Weirdies all around me

Totnes in Devon is supposed to be the new age capital of the UK but for religious nuttiness I think my own local area must be a close second. The flyer for a local village has far more adverts for psychic or dubious health services, homeopathy, dream analysis, spiritual healing etc than it does for builders and tradesmen.

Saint Hill Manor, the centre of Scientology, one of the world's nuttiest religions, is nearby and you don't have to go very far to find a Mormon temple either. Joseph Smith was almost as good a fraud as Hubbard although both have a long way to go to beat Muhammad who is still conning over a billion with his bullshit.

But there are places even closer. On my walk yesterday I remembered to note down the name of a Manor I often pass and check out what it is and discovered that a Saint once visited my village. Seems it is a centre for spiritual retreats by members of Opus Dei, an institution within the Catholic Church that some have accused of various practices including support of facist governents. That's disputed admittedly but what isn't is the practice of mortification of the flesh, including whipping the buttocks. That's to drive out evil? Hmmm.

Another nearby place is a Zion Centre. There are two Christian religions with Zion in the name, an African Methodist thing and a UK Baptist thing. I assume it's the latter. Zion Baptists are no worse than any other Bible Bashing Christians as far as I can see, it's just puzzling that, if it is some centre for their religion, I can find no indication whatever what this particular place is used for and I have been looking for a long time.

Almost right on the doorstep is a community inhabited largely by followers of Rudolf Steiner. It's a nice place founded on some very hippy communist ideals in the early 70s and still pursues the ideal of community living. Steiner, a decent and fairly sensible chap generally, sought a synthesis between science and spirituality. 50% bollux sounds better than most religions anyway.

The search for truth

In bloggoth's case the essential truth that lies behind everything is the behind. Checking out the late missus's camera today, wondering whether to give it to the cancer charity or keep it as a spare in the van for the numerous occasions I forget to take my own.

It's a Sony Cybershot and has "SONY" written in tiny letters just below the viewer. Turn it over and it looks like "ANUS". Excellent.

PS Where can you get revelations of such deep meaning except on bloggoth?

FFS Why?

I was invited by my nice religious lady friend to accompany her to Ibeza this week. Being today's F* stupid, logical "fact"-driven xoggoth, I checked it all out, did a Google street view of the hotel area that showed local beaches packed with loungers, checked all the travel times and costs to get to historic places that I'd really be interested in and turned the offer down.

F* idiot!!! Only F* idiots are rational. What happened to the xoggoth who would chuck a sleeping bag, a change of underpants and a plastic sheet into a grubby rucksack and set off to wherever chance would take me? Looking forward to being senile when I might make more sensible decisions.

A truly proportional system

Since the election there have inevitably been calls for proportional representation. All for it, as long as it is a real proportional system, not the flawed one proposed by the Lib Dems a few years back. There are a couple of obvious problems. Assuming we retain the constituency system, some marginal constituencies may not get the MP that had a local majority but that seems less important if that majority is marginal anyway. Another flaw is that we have 650 MPs and 42 million voters so the number of MPs could not exactly represent the vote.

My solution to that is to have a separate popularity vote. The least popular MP in each party would undergo surgery and the parts would be sown together in correct proportions to make a genuinely representational commons. Maybe if you took bits of Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and Ed Balls you might even be able to come up with an MP who wasn't a total *rse.

PS Although we rather doubt it.

PPS But maybe it would work if we discarded the brains and just used other bits to make up the weight. A headless corpse with three legs would make much more sensible speeches and vote much more logically than those three ever did.

Stay safe

It is usual these days for the simplest of products to come with pages of safety instructions but the leaflet with some clothes we brought the other day reached a new height of daftness, stating "remove hanger and all packaging before wearing". Does anyone really need such advice? Maybe so.

Stories

The Longest Day
Hyperanthropomorphism

PS A grown man cuddling a teddy bear. How pathetic is that Mr P? Fancy another vodka?

Yes please!

Odd experience

Went for a walk the other day and was standing in the car park looking at my map when a group of girls, probably 13-14 I'd guess, walked by and they were all staring at me. Heard one say "get his autograph". Then one came up beside me and said "Can I do a selfie?". While I was still going er, um, she stood next to me and took a photo of the two of us on her smartphone.

Trying to think who 13 year old girls would be interested in that they could have mistaken me for. I know I look fabulously young and handsome but I'm not quite Justin Bieber. Or maybe they were doing a "who can take a selfie next to the weirdest looking old bloke contest"

Fucking hell!

The main news item on the front page of the online Daily Mail is about the sodding royal baby and 14 of the next 15 items are also sodding royal baby related. The only exception is a thing about a kitten and I hate cats too. The whole idea of royalty, a group of people being handed enormous privileges purely by reason of birth, really sucks. It's an appalling example, how can we seriously criticise people who unecessarily rely on benefits when that is happening?

If we must have a token leader to unify our nation, why not have something a whole lot cheaper? Mr P, my little puppet parrot, would do a great job. Everyone with love him and he would cost very little. Adequate security to prevent him being attacked by terrorists *Note 1 and a decent supply of cheap vodka would do fine.

Note 1: He might well be a target for terrorist attacks. When you squeeze his beak it sounds very like "Allah, Neqbah, Blaxbah" In English that means "God is a total arse and does not exist anyway. Only irrational idiots could believe that crap."

Too far...

Most people would agree that we should make reasonable provision for those with disabilities provided the costs are fairly shared among all taxpayers. Unfortunately, small companies and individuals can, in theory, face legal challenges if they do not devote extra time, money and effort that is quite out of proportion to the contribution that these disabled people make to their income. This is quite wrong in principle.

It is not just shops, cafes and other business premises requiring physical access, the UK also has rules requiring websites to be accessible to the disabled and The RNIB *Note 1 has sued companies for failing to cater to the blind and partially sited.

The briefest browse suggest that this could require a good deal of work and money. Just trying to fully understand from the long documents what is required or how well your small business website performs would take days even before you make any changes. The "free" checker link on that first link takes you to a site in Spanish that does not work. Some other checkers and guide downloads mentioned require purchase, a significant outlay before you even start. As far as we can make out, our own small business website conforms fairly well because it's fairly simple and because some recommendations are good SEO practice anyway. We were quite surprised to find all the main pages can be accessed without a mouse by using the tab key and all the images have alt alternatives so may be identified by an audio reader but some may not be so lucky.

The chances of small businesses being the subject of legal challenges appear to be low in the UK but it may only take one disgruntled serial complainer to make a complaint. When lawyers *Note 2 see there is money to be made...

It is already happening a lot in the US:

The result: 24 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act became federal law, millions of dollars have changed hands in lawsuits -- likely raising prices to other consumers -- yet millions of small businesses still haven't complied. They remain vulnerable to the so-called drive-by lawsuits that, once mostly confined to Southern California and the Bay Area, are starting to appear in the Northern San Joaquin County.

"It's moving in. It's coming your way," said Julie Griffiths of California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. She has visited more than 1,000 hotels, shops and restaurants, many in the Valley, to document predatory lawsuits against blindsided business owners.

Note 1: Last time I donate to those bastards!

Note 2: Why do we worry about minor groups like ISIS when we have lawyers?

...and where will it end?

Reasonable efforts to help with those with disabilities, by all means. But the law is an ass. Look at the absurd way "human rights" are used to protect criminals and illegals while totally ignoring the rights of those they threaten or who have to pick up the bill for them. Never mind that a foreign rapist who has contributed nothing to our society is a huge risk to our citizens, all that is considered is his safety or right to a family life. Insane!

How long before the rights of the disabled are allowed to trump everyone else's?

Mass migration helps nobody

The news about all the drownings in the Mediteranean appears to have been drowned by even duller news about the election and the birth of a new privileged royal parasite but it will be back in a few weeks I daresay.

The EU needs to stop this flow, we cannot keep burdening our own societies and destroying our own cultures with a huge influx of people from Africa. There are statistics available that indicate that they are not going to be an asset and it is a PC nonsense to pretend otherwise. When their often ridiculous expectations are not fulfilled, one migrant interviewed on the BBC told us how he was hoping to go to Oxford University, this will just lead to more riots and a bigger criminal underclass. Taking in low paid workers will not help developed countries to compete with poorer nations where standards of living are much lower and there are few workers' rights and safety laws. This approach never saved the Lancashire textile industry and simply burdened us with some underperforming minority groups.

However, we also need to consider the long term effects of emigration on the nations that migrants come from because, if the economies of these nations do not grow, the pressures for migration will not cease. Whatever else you can say about these would-be migrants, they must be reasonably physically fit to travel such long distances and they at least have the willpower and organisational skills to get off their backsides and do something. If the fittest and most enterprising people in a nation are going to go abroad rather than try and build their own economy, how will that economy ever improve? Remittances will not help much, there are studies that show that remittances, like foreign aid, do very little for backward economies.

So maybe we should re-examine a host of policies covering trade, immigration and foreign aid. Instead of emotional responses we need well thought out schemes to boost trade to the advantage of both sides. For our part we need to encourage use of technology and reduce need for the low skilled, to concentrate on luxury goods and complex products and services. Third world nations should be helped to provide the labour intensive goods or services which are no longer economic for us.

Economies that complement rather than compete with each other make a lot more sense.

So boring!! No wait!!!

I'm sure I am not the only one totally bored stiff with this election and I avoid the news as much as possible.

Why anybody would base their decision on last minute promises or performance during debates lasting barely an hour I have no idea. The only sensible guides are long term policies and attitudes and, more importantly if applicable, their record while in power. Anyone who would trust the Labour party on the economy or immigration after their past failures, unless they are too young to remember, must be an idiot. Anyone who can read most of the Green Party policies and still vote for them must be stark staring insane!

Right, that's enough politics! TOOOO boring!!! Hang on a minute! The Duchess of Cambridge has just had another F* baby!!!! F*** Hell! That news will bore us all to hell for weeks to come!!! Let's have some more interviews with Ed Milliband. Please!

Confusing acronyms

Different but confusingly similar ones are IUD="intrauterine device" and IED="improvised explosove device". You wouldn't want to mix those up.

Never noticed it before, but STD stands both for "Sexually Transmitted Disease" and "Subscriber Trunk Dialling". Every number I look up in the BT phone book starts with an STD number. Checked an in-law's number the other day and now I have a big red lump on my cock. Sure it wasn't there before.

The Russian Threat

There is growing evidence of the Russian threat to Western countries. In the DE today there is news of attempts to turn MI6 staff.

Buying or blackmailing MI6 staff is serious enough but now the Russians are targetting the real influences in Western society. Over the past few days the bloggoth commenty thing has been inundated with inane comments like "Can I call you back?" and "Insert your card" originating from the Russian Federation. Clearly Putin is hoping to distract us so that we can no longer dispense our infinite wisdom to the many Western leaders who hang on bloggoth's every (now very occasional) word.

We have blocked them for the moment but doubtless they will find a way round it. Hang on, there's the doorbell. Cor! There's a lovely blonde lady on the doorstep. That's more like it!

Topic: The Russian Threat Comment here. Comments so far: 0

Suddenly a fan

Always liked opera but never liked Gilbert & Sullivan. Saw a bit tonight that changed my mind and been checking out some other stuff. Brill, they were the Morecombe and Wise of their time. This one is a revised version, I don't think Wikileaks or Britney Speers were around then, but there's nowt wrong with a bit of updating to make things more relevant to us.

PS. If the New Testament had mentioned Jesus Christ using his mobile phone and Ipad I might even take Christianity seriously. And why couldn't he have a mobile phone? He was supposed to be god after all!

I miss you little jumper

Is life made of coincidences or are there real factors at work that we don't grasp?

As a contractor I usually had contracts with companies that were sometimes hundreds of miles from home in a place I didn't know and I stayed at crappy B&Bs or cheap rented flats. In the initial stages at least I didn't know anyone at all and ate alone in restaurants and spent evenings in pubs where I knew nobody. I f* loved it!!! I really missed the late missus's lovely company but otherwise I just found it exciting in a way that I couldn't reproduce back home. New places, new things, new people, that makes life worth living.

I had a lucky jumper, navy blue, from the Sweater Shop. Still got it but it's now so tatty it's relegated to level 6 of the xoggoth sartorial scale, gardening and DIY. On several occasions when I wore this jumper at the pub, usually when I was on my own, I got approached and chatted up by much younger women. Love to say it was me, my handsome visage etc, but I have to bow to statistics, it was that jumper!

If only I could find another like it. Another one that isn't falling to bits like me I mean!

Far right? Wrong side

We keep getting this suggestion that the rise in anti-semitic attacks is down to the far right. There have always been a few who blame the Jews for eveything but true far right support is tiny in the UK. Why exactly would the number be rising and why would attacks by them spike during Midde East conflicts? Most sane right wingers these days have far more objection to Muslims so it is hardly likely that they would be angered by Israel defending itself against missile attacks from the likes of Hamas.

Most of this anti-semitism is down to Muslims and to left-wingers whose anti-Israel attitude spills over into anti-semitism. Look at the facts about where most violence comes from, the latest attack on Farage and his family is just the latest example it is the left who are usually responsible.

Story

Perchance to dream

Our governments are corrupt to the F* core!

As a retired IT contractor who did my own accounts I sometimes had to search for the legal position on various things, like what expenses one could validly claim. Often I would come across special exemptions for MPs.

Saw a CUK post to a Guardian article today which reveals that records of MPs expenses are destroyed three years after the end of the applicable financial year, making them immune to investigation for tax or other reasons. It is six years for the rest of us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. You fucking corrupt bastards!!!

PS Whoops.

Distorted history

What a washout yesterday's eclipse was! Was in the garden and, while it was too cloudy to see the sun, I did expect it to get very dark. Hardly noticed a damn thing, it was if the clouds just got a bit thicker!

On the BBC they were talking about how the event was viewed in history. Some believed the sun was being eaten by evil deities supposedly. Actually, unless they were stupid, surely any peoples could put two and two together and realise that the sun and moon would sometimes coincide as the Chinese and Babylonians did. We do get some misconceptions about history, that most people in the middle ages thought the world was flat for example.

Maybe those carvings of the sun being eaten by a big demon were not what people at the time really thought at all, they were cartoons! What if some catastrophe almost wiped out mankind and a future race had to figure out things about us from a tiny number of intact records?

Democracy - love it

Due to insurance restrictions I have to be a bit more careful about where the products of my and my sister's little company are sold and searched for a drop-down list of world nations for the website. There are three with "democratic republic" in the official title:

Democratic People's Republic of Korea. AKA North Korea. Don't think the non-existent readers of bloggoth need any comments from us on the realities of democracy in North Korea, unless they are earthworms anyway.

Lao People's Democratic Republic. Formerly known as Laos. One of the world's five remaining communist countries, it is a single party state run by a politburo dominated by military generals. It is an impoverished country with excessive reliance on export of minerals because, unlike China and Vietnam, it has not had the sense to liberalise the economy. It is one of the world's most corrupt countries and has a very poor record for human rights and a history of genocide against the Hmong population.

The Democratic Republic of The Congo. Formerly Zaire. Another nation with a history of conflict and extreme corruption. The last elections in 2011 had many irregularities, including impossibly high turnouts in some areas with all votes going to the incumbent president and results from thousands of pro-opposition polling stations going missing altogether.

Democracy still falls well short of what it should be in the UK due to an unrepresentative electoral system in which results in marginal seats having undue effect, excessive influnce of business groups and leftist unions and domination of the commons by too many with little experience outside politics or the wealthy who have no idea what impact their policies have on ordinary people.

Still, when you look at other "democracies", and let's not forget that Islamist states like Pakistan and the Maldives are "democracies" too, we have to be grateful for small mercies.

ISIS and the hippy movement

No denying the horrible nature of Islam or that there are groups in the West, some of them posing as moderate movements, who are spreading the more extreme versions of the creed.

But one has to question the common assumptions of what "radicalisation" really means. Are moderate young people being held in dark rooms and brainwashed? Are they being herded into halls and harangued for weeks by extremist Imams until they see the error of their decadent Western ways? It would not appear so. Mostly they are "radicalised" by internet sites that they themselves look for, by the views of those who company they themselves seek out. In other words, they are radicalising themselves, they have already made a decision in favour of extremist Islam, they are just looking for ways to join up. Why? This is where the hippy movement comes in. Many young people, and I knew a few, were similarly attracted to that movement and threw away promising careers because of their rejection of materialistic values.

Of course hippies weren't hacking people's heads off and I am not suggesting that Bob Dylan's influence was in any way as malignant as Anjem Chowdury's but there is one thing in common - the idealistic nature of youth and its constant search for "meaning" in life.

The unexpected guru

Always made fun of the late missus for her propensity to write lists. Most people put important things in their diaries but she would sometimes list trivia she did every day, like "have breakfast", "pack dishwasher" etc.

Now I have adopted her wisdom. When life is meaningless, when you can't find any real enthusiasm or interest, you need to keep going at anything and stupid lists really help. Otherwise, you spend your day thinking "what was it I was going to do?" and it's bedtime again before you get round to doing anything at all. Another day rushes by and there is bugger all to show for it. It ain't much but at least fixing the fence is better than bugger all.

Let's see. Time to plan my day. Finish coffee. Have shit. Wipe arse.

Story

Really made the effort the other day and wrote a story so I could go to the writer's club, most of the members of which are old ladies. Not sure how much longer some of them will be around but they are a great bunch. Who ever said old ladies are prudes? Most of the conversation between story readings soon turns to sex and it ain't me that does it. Sat next to the chairlady last time and she touched my leg three times while regaling us with story of her hip replacement. Anyway, back to the story.

Police, Camera, Action

Odd

Funny how the less depressed you get the sadder you can feel. Maybe feeling low, tired and uninterested in anything is a good defence against feeling anything else.

More classical

Lots of pop music is crap but it's really just a matter of style, how it's played. this Abba song sounds great with a symphony orchestra.

Can't catch me ya bastards!

A new law has made revenge porn illegal in England and Wales. This does not stop we at bloggoth posting a naked picture of a female who had the nerve to reject our advances recently. Here she is in all her glory. Coooor! Look at that lovely bumhole! It's just a totally normal picture of a sow. Sows don't wear clothes, officer.

Occasionally there's a big benefit from being a total perve!

PS England and Wales? Whatever happened to the UK? Still, at least we don't have separate laws for the Islamic republics of Tower Hamlets, Sparkbrook, Rotherham, etc etc. Yet.

The never ending scare stories

Hardly a day goes by without another scary news story about what causes/prevents dementia. May we suggest another major factor in this appalling disease?

"Worrying about dementia increases risk of dementia" scientists say.

This week's article we would have written if we could be arsed

At times the DT seems to be turning into the Guardian so it's nice to have a "right wing", AKA sensible and realistic, article about the nature of some Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities in the UK and the backwardness they have brought with them.

Is this really the UK in the 21st century? Or is it a brutish, zealously religious, feudal society (not unlike the Tudor England of Wolf Hall), imported from South Asia and allowed to flourish here unchecked because we haven’t had the guts to stand up for enlightened values?

When will liberal apologists stop making excuses for undemocratic, uncivilised and downright illegal behaviour in Britain?

Lax laws can make compassion impossible

The case of the Zimbabwean family whose application to attend their granddaughter's funeral was refused is in the news again. They have reapplied.

It would be nice if immigration rules could be appled a bit more sympathetically. It would be good if this couple could attend their granddaughters' funeral and stay a few months with their children before returning to Zimbabwe. The problem lies in the details of our, and the EU's, ludicrous laws which elevate one migrants's individual human rights above those of British citizens and taxpayers who may be affected detrimentally by their presence.

Given their age, their lowly occupation as street traders, the nature of the country they come from and the fact that their son is in the UK, the Home Office view that they may not leave looks very plausible. The petitioners have said they pose no threat to the UK and the local MP has said the parents have given a categorical assurance the grandparents would not claim asylum but what is any of that worth? The son entered the UK as an illegal immigrant and then spent a good deal of British taxpayers' money fighting for asylum status for himself and his wife so we should hardly be accepting his assurances on this issue.

Even assurances by MPs mean little when there appear to be no legal impediments whatever to this elderly couple claiming asylum. One would imagine that a statement of reason for visiting the UK on a visa application would rule out any asylum application unless there was a proven change of circumstance after arrival but it seems not. Our authorities are quite prepared to accomodate liars who make false declarations.

Does it occur to the bleeding heart liberals that, if we had less liberal laws, if a statement on a visa application was legally binding, we could afford to be much more generous and compassionate in practice, knowing that those laws could be readily invoked against the liars who try to take advantage of our generosity?

Getting back?

At last the ghastly bug appears to be gone. More importantly, we seem to be getting a reasonable amount of sleep at night without pills (which, like all medicines, hardly worked anyway) and don't dread going to bed.

Who knows? We might even get round to posting a bit of bloggoth bollox again.

The Paris Hegbo thing

Yes, our pennyworth is a bit late but we have been feeling crap.

Should we post cartoons of that backward, fraudulent prophet? Hell yes!

I don't think we should set out to insult simply for the sake of insulting but we have to be able to criticise and question political views that threaten our future. Islamism is not some relatively minor belief that we can afford to ignore like Scientology. Hardly a day goes by without some atrocity perpetrated in Islam's name and there are 21 officially Islamic nations, and several others that are Islamic in all but name, which impose the irrational claptrap of the Koran on their citizens, not just on non Muslims, but on Muslims of the wrong sort or the many who would prefer a more free society. While it is true that not all Muslims want to impose Shariah law on the West one has to consider the lessons from the Islamic world, it is almost never the moderates who end up in control.

Given these realities, the huge and growing number of Muslims in the West present a colossal threat to our future. How is it is possible for those who want rational laws to challenge the idea that the whole of society should be governed by the supposed sayings of an 8th century prophet without suggesting that the prophet was just a flawed man, that the Koran is nothing more than the work of mortal men?

Cartoons and comedy are necessary ways to do that. Dry, scholarly treatises are never going to reach all those we would wish to persuade.

The PC crap goes on

Fight real racism, yes, but real racism is being opposed to those of other ethnic origins regardless of their qualities. Much of what is branded racism is nothing of the sort but is valid objection to the presence of unsuitable people in the UK.

A recent case of Eastern European crime saw an academic brutally beaten by 4 Polish thugs. Naturally, we were soon told this had nothing to do with immigration. Oh really? The presence of such people has everything to do with our our lax immigration system. What checks were performed on these men before they entered the UK? None whatsoever, one of them had a string of convictions in his native Poland before he came to the UK. Since his arrival he has been convicted of sexual assault, possession of an offensive weapon, drink driving and affray. Why was he still here???

How is it racist to object to the continued presence in the UK of a piece of shit like that??

STUPID!!

It seems that scientists have managed to slow the speed of light, not just within certain substances, as is normal, but in a way that causes a permanent slowdown of the photons concerned even in a vacuum. Are they mad??? Have they learned none of the lessons from our own lazy, welfare dependent society? Once these photons have discovered they don't have to rush about at 299792458 metres per second, why would they bother to speed up again? What is to stop them showing other photons how to do it? What is to stop them all getting ever lazier until they are mooching slowly about the universe, even assuming they bother to leave the comfort of the stars and other energy sources that gave them birth?

What's the point?

No sleep for days. Usual cemetary here on bloggoth and the bloggoth 3Rs are dead. Rude requires some interest in rudeness and, with libido at rock bottom, I doubt if we'd be interested if Dawn French rang up and offered to park her lovely big bottom on our face. (But don't let us stop you trying Dawn). Rubbish, silly cartoons and stuff, requires imagination and we've lost it. Just leaves Rant and that ought to be doable when we are in a perpetual bad temper. But what purpose does it serve to comment on serious issues when most are quite incapable of looking at the facts?

Forage has been criticised for saying that the events in Paris are a result of our failure to control immigration or to ensure that migrants integrate and accept our major values. Who do they think these terrorists are if not the same low-performing Arabs and Africans who gave France the 2007 riots? We have seen the usual articles telling us that these people, who shout "Allah Aqba" while carrying out their atrocities are nothing to do with Islam. That makes as much sense as saying the Inquisition or the killing of heretics in Britain's past was nothing to do with Christianity. Other articles have stated that Islam is compatible with democracy and freedom. Do they ever bother to checkl the realities in some 20+ Islamist states and the many others where it is a state religion? We have even seen one headed "Islam is a Religion of Love". So who is committing these daily atrocities, the wholesale slaughter, the burning of towns, the murder and rape of women and children, the mass capture of schoolgirls, the defilement of cemetaries? Camels maybe? If they were simply saying we should not blame all Muslims we would agree, that would be counterproductive. If you make life difficult for more moderate elements, make it harder for them to get jobs, you may push those towards extremism too. But the PC idiots are not simply saying that, they are talking utter crap with no basis in reality.

On immigration too, these liberals are quite incapable of simply addressing what is actually being said. Does The Daily Mail or Express ever have a story about an asylum seeker in a modest flat? No, only about ones housed at huge cost in expensive areas of London. Do they do articles objecting to high performing migrants in successful careers? No, only about beggars and rough sleepers, criminals, the welfare dependant, the low paid putting pressure on our own lower working class and the real pressures on our schools and houses. Yet pointing out just these real and genuine problems which should be addressed is castigated as anti-immigrant rhetoric. Most UKIP supporters don't give a damn what race migrants are as long as they are useful, accept our values and are not coming in huge numbers that put huge strain on our resources, yet they get called racist.

Liberals are quite incapable of seeing the problems that their past errors have caused us all. It is not the White British who are the lowest performers in the UK but major ethnic groups like Afro-Caribeans, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis from the Kashmir region and Tamils. Any recent improvements have only come about at huge costs to the rest of us, the recent increase in GCSE attainments for example, is due to the fact that we are spending 3 times as much per pupil in high ethnic areas. Lax mass immigration of these groups has given us most of the terrorism outside NI since 2001, all of the major riots, and almost all of London's worst gangs. Yet now the liberals are lauding immigration of other low performing groups from Romania and Africa who will be our future burdens.

Until people are capable of looking at facts, arguing only against what is actually being said and stop thinking in idealistic terms there is no real point commenting on serious issues.

Hidden

We ought to know this, having done various interactive games in jscript and HTML, but it was still a surprise to find how much crap a routine peruse of a few webpages can cause to be stored on your computer.

We were trying to find where an email utility put its settings file so we could back it up and a search of most recent files included a mass of images just from a quick look at the online Daily Express and many did not look familiar. Most browsers (but not Firefox apparently) will download hidden images that cannot be seen on the page, so you have no way of knowing what is really on your PC unless you check the temporary folders. A peruse of what seems like a safe webpage could be putting all sorts of images on your hard drive and you won't know.

Nothing unsafe or illegal on xoggoth pages officer!

Has he gone? Good. After opening this page, the non existent readers of bloggoth might like to do an *.*/today search in Windows Explorer and scroll down to the temporary internet fles. You will find some fantastic pig porn!

A downside never counted

It is reported that one of the first Romanian migrants to enter the UK after restrictions have lifted has not claimed benefits and has been employed since he came here:

After starting by washing cars for £30 a day, Mr Spirescu now earns £250 a day in a construction job in east London.

His parents are looking after the money he sends back to Romania.

...he is saving up to return to his village in Romania in the next couple of years and live a “beautiful life”.

Let's ignore the many who are still washing cars and cannot possibly be paying for the most basic state provisions in the UK and concentrate on this chap. OK, he works hard for a living but, if he is sending all his spare money back to Romania instead of spending it in ways that support or boost our economy, how does this help us? The huge amount of money that migrants take out of our economy as remittances is just another version of foreign aid, without even the limited checks that apply to same.

Will you find this removal of UK wealth from British people in any study of the net "benefits" of immigration? Not in any I have seen. Of course, if much of this money was being properly invested in Romania, helping the country to build its own modern economy there could still be a long term benefit to us all. Fat chance of that according to this link. It is rather the opposite in fact:

Remittances promote consumption and undermine the local economy

In a nutshell, although remittances have had some positive impact on Romania’s macroeconomic development, capital accumulation hasn’t been put to any productive use (like opening up businesses or longer term investment), but has rather been diverted to seemingly mindless consumption, including unnecessary housing updates and purchases of durable goods.

A representative survey from 2006 for the typical small Romanian town of Huedin where one of three households has a family member working abroad indicated that 52 per cent of remittances were spent on covering daily needs and expenses while only 6 per cent were directed at starting a new business. Even more tellingly, with the orientation of remittances towards real estate investment, house prices rocketed in the small community, reaching the level of the capital.

From a macroeconomic standpoint, had it not been for remittances, the current account deficit of Romania would have been 50 per cent higher than it is (source: Eurostat). Since remittances have mainly been used to buy current consumer goods (56 per cent of remittances went on consumption according to the National Bank of Romania), with the lack of domestic products and Romanians’ marked preference for foreign goods, consumption has been mainly oriented to imported goods.

Consequently, the volume of imports has increased and the current account equalization has been undermined by the trade balance deficit which reached € 15.58 billion in 2007, 50% higher than in 2006 (source: Popescu, Juverdeanu). Moreover, despite people’s increased expectations of future income flows, when the economic crisis halved remittances, consumption (including outstanding bank loans) could no longer be sustained by present income levels.

Last but not least, our currency has appreciated, but unfortunately not because of any increase in domestic competitiveness. Remittances have basically driven up the inflation rate and forced our National Bank to introduce some aggressive monetary policies.

Romania is not an exception, you will find plenty of properly researched evidence on foreign aid which shows that money from abroad often has no positive effects on economic growth in the recipient nations. It is simply spent in ways that do not promote long term growth, goes mainly to the wealthy and those in power and can even have negative consequences by impeding democracy or increasing conflict. Some links below. Migrant remittances, like foreign aid, not only remove wealth and investment from our own economies, they often do nothing positive for the receiving nations. Just as too easy access to welfare removes incentives from individuals, so too can this flow of wealth from more developed nations and easy access to their economies induce a lazy dependence by recipient nations, removing the necessity to make the hard progress over many generations that the UK, US and other developed nations once had to do for themselves. If talented and hardworking people are always going to go abroad rather than stay and increase the prosperity of their own nations how will their economies ever grow?

That is not to say that richer nations should not help poorer nations to grow but rather that we need investment in their economies that will provide a proper return for the nations concerned, and ourselves in the long term. Real businesses making the lower technology or cheaper items that it is no longer economic for us to make ourselves perhaps. If a competent financial advisor with a long term view would not invest in it, then neither should our governments.

And neither should our governments continue to let migrants continually remove money from our shores without restriction. The government (thanks to UKIP) is finally pretending to address legitimate concerns about mass immigration. Maybe limits on foreign transfers by foreign citizens would be one way to reduce the incentive to come here.

Links

Link 1
Professor Wood said "There are no really clear and uncontested conclusions on the effects of aid on economic growth." Dr Evans agreed: "The broad global relationship between aid and growth will probably remain forever inconclusive."
Link 2
After carrying out a regression analysis on the model, the study establishes that aid causes a negative effect on economic expansion. The finding that aid has direct impact on growth in the structural model and that investments drive growth implies that aid is usually not invested but instead it is channeled to other expenses.
Link 3
However, this aid modality has had the unintended consequence of shifting power to the president and the finance minister, who make most decisions regarding GBS. Furthermore, the fact that GBS entails large amounts of funds sitting in unaudited accounts means it can be used to support corruption or as political finance. This form of aid has also detracted from funding that used to support civil society and other forces pressing for political reform.On the other hand, more aid has meant poorer economic performance mainly in Africa and Asia, although it is not directly realized
Link 4 This means that most aid does not actually go to the poorest, instead massive and grand strategies fail to help the vulnerable and in return the money/ grants finds it’s way to the famous and powerful politicians who instead use it to benefit their interests. On the other hand, more aid has meant poorer economic performance mainly in Africa and Asia, although it is not directly realized
Link 5
Their finding: following high production years in the U.S., regular recipients of aid experienced a jump in both the onset and duration of violent conflict within their borders.

Interesting facts

Half asleep the other night when we had an idea for a story and mumbled it into our little audio recorder. A brilliant scientist researching how the brain works is hired to analyse the memories of an Egyptian mummy and discover where an ancient treasure was hidden.

In the morning we remembered that brains were removed during mummification. Darn it! But this evening decided to check and it seems they removed brains during the new kingdom but not during the old and middle kingdom so the story is possible after all.

That isn't the most interesting fact in that link though, this is:

The Egyptians were so rough on the brain because they didn't realize its importance. They thought its purpose was just to produce snot!

Maybe those ancient Egyptians got the wrong idea because the only people they made into mummies were not ordinary people but leaders, the politicians of their time. Look at people like Vince Cable, Ken Clarke and so many others in politics with no grasp of realities and the view that brains are for production of snot looks like a very easy mistake to make.

Sob!

We at bloggoth only know 3 Americans.

Well, we don't know one personally, but an online member of the non-existent bloggoth readership is a brill bloke and has sent us a big memory stick with 32Gb of great tunes on it. Ta Mr Sheep!

Another is me sister in law in CA, although her new knee is a total stranger to me unfortunately. What was her name again, Rosella? Knees, like all body parts, need to be talked to and given lots of vodka if you want them to keep working. The only reason I did not need a single filling after recently visiting the dentist for the first time in over 15 years was that I stay friends with all of my teeth and they all have names beginning with T, Terry, Torrence, Theresa, Tammy, Tarquin, Teddy, Tessa etc, etc. Complete list available in request.

The other one is my little Lexmark X1190 inkjet printer. He is my best (only) friend and I loved its little Yank voice telling me "Printing started" and "Please load paper in the auto sheet feeder". Heartbroken today to learn Lexmark has gone out of the market and I may not be able to get new cartridges. Is little Lenny's time on Earth over? God! (atheist version) Does the list of funerals never stop?

The real James Bond

Watching "Tomorrow Never Dies" on TV last night. To enjoy any Bond film you have to be able to suspend all logic. The list of totally unbelievable things in this one includes:

The idea that anyone wanting to start a world war would involve the UK these days.
A passenger in a high speed motorbike chase can exactly target the latch on a skip and release drums into the path of the pursuers.
They continually outrun and outride massive machine gun fire. It never occurs to anyone to fire slightly ahead of moving targets?
Things they do to evade capture and destroy the helicopter must kill and injure dozens of innocent bystanders but nobody even mentions it.
Bond gets in numerous fights but his hair remains immaculately combed and his suit never has a trace of dust on it.

But those are minor flaws really. Surely the most unlikely thing by far is that a public servant would ever have such unselfish dedication to his job.

Herbal bollux and witchcraft

One thing that all herbal medicines have in common, those for insomnia, coughs and catarhh anyway, is that a) They taste horrible and b) they don't work. Ok, that's two things they have in common. Oh yes, and c) they are expensive for the little bits you get. Ok, that's three things. And d) They always run down the bottle and stain your bathroom shelves. All right! Four things!

How ever did people manage in the middle ages when medicine and surgery were inextricably linked to religion, AKA superstition when all the limited progress of the Greeks and Romans, like Hippocrates's recognition that illnesses have natural causes, had been largely discarded? Must have been a shitty time to get ill. At least we have left that behind. Or maybe not. From the lefty Daily Mirror:

Experts claim the voodoo medicine industry is booming with thousands of so-called “healers” in Britain luring tens of thousands of people into their net every year.
As well as making false claims about cures, they fleece their vulnerable clients of huge chunks of cash.
Criminologist and police expert witness Dr Richard Hoskins, said: “The money being paid by some people is eye-watering. We’re talking of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Isn't third world immigration wonderful? Oh well, makes me feel a bit better about wasting a few quid on crappy herbal remedies from Boots anyway.

Fantasist attacks a fantasy

A trainee vicar who told primary school children that Father Christmas did not exist has been criticised for spoiling the magic of Christmas.

Of course Santa is a nice Christmas tradition, along with all the others, but how many school children literally believe he exists? Recall conversations at primary school when I was 6 or 7 and I know I didn't. Or fairies either. Still, I would not tell other people's kids there's no Santa these days. If kids believe in him before they are old enough to be expected to have some grasp of science and reality, it's not a problem. Some of the crap that adults believe in, on the other hand... You can see the malignant effects of that in the news every day.

Hmmm. On second thoughts, maybe letting children believe in harmless things like Santa or The Tooth Fairy is not training their minds the right way. Perhaps we should drill it into all kids from birth that they should only believe in things which they have experienced or for which there is convincing evidence, that they should only follow or support ideas which have been found effective in raising human wellbeing.

Rational education will never happen of course, too many irrational idiots will oppose it, so maybe we should just concentrate on the issue here, poor little kids having their fantasies ruined.

Oiiii (trainee) Vicar! Santa makes as much sense as the bollux you believe in anyway!

PS Anyway, God and Santa Claus are clearly the same bloke. He just drinks and gets a bit more jolly at Xmas like the rest of us.

xoggoth Rules of Life - 1

The more ancient you get the more often you lose things. No, that isn't the xoggoth rule, that is a general rule that every knows. The xoggoth rule is as follows:

Whenever you lose something small, it is always the least valuable thing you have with you.

Lost something again today. Fortunately, it was only a comb, cost about 60p. Just think, if I had not had it with me, I might have lost my glasses that cost me a whole £2.75 from the local hardware shop. I lost a pair last week because I had not replaced my last lost comb. Not carrying the various cheapest things in turn could have cost me my Tesco £17 mobile phone, my scratched old £23 plastic strap watch, and finally my wallet.

PS Sorry little comb, I will go and look for you in the car park tomorrow! I am not made of 60ps.

Suicide - not being arsed

If people are suicidal how can they summon up the enthusiasm to actually bother to snuff themselves? Surely that takes a degree of determination that is incompatible with the desire?

Ring! Ring! Hello? Assisted suicide line? Can you send me a taxi to take me to the railway bridge please? What? I have to fill in an online health and safety assessment? Never mind.

Christmas - not being arsed

We at bloggoth could not be arsed to buy a Christmas tree this year. Bunged all the tree decorations in an old fish tank - much easier and cheaper.

Off to buy christmas presents tomorrow. Used to get them from The Pound Shop. What a rippoff! The 99p Store is much better.

Learning from nature

We at bloggoth are very selective about removing weeds from the garden as some are very decorative. Why waste money on cultivated plants when you can get wildflowers for free? This little daisy on our patio was rather nice so we left it:

One year on and daisies are spreading in every direction:

Bit like immigration really. Let a few useful migrants in from poor countries and it will not be long before you have hordes of them and parts of our nation become scarcely recognisable.

Stay out of my milestones, you bastards!

In student days, just a few times, we sang blues at a local club. Our favourite was "St James Infirmary" but, today, we cannot find the version we remember. We recall it was on the B side of a record by a singer of rather brief fame and can almost, but not quite, remember his name. Google brings up umpteen versions by famous performers, The Animals, Arlo Guthry, Cab Calloway, Van Morrison etc etc but FUCK IT! none of those are the version we remember.

Now we cannot find the singer of another song, "Ghost Riders in the Sky" It has been done by Marty Robbins, Duane Eddy, Johny Cash and many other famous singers but, FUCK FUCK FUCK IT, none of these are the version we remember.

Look, you bastards, those were milestones in xoggoth's life and you have no FUCKING rights to intrude on them without my permission! I bet Kim Jong-un will never have this problem.

Needs developing

Tonight's local crime news included a CCTV of a robbery in a jewellery shop.

Nowadays, one can even get fairly cheap CCTV for one's premises that allows you to use the internet and monitor your property remotely from your smart phone or other device in real time. One can control devices remotely too, one commonly advertised system allows you to control your home heating.

So why are we not taking the obvious steps, in both law and technology, to allow proper defence of our property?

Art ?????

Went to the Tate Modern art gallery with my weird religious lady today. Some good stuff there but there was also an awful lot of utter crap!!!

There were at least three "artworks" that consisted of entirely blank canvases. Maybe the first person who came up with the idea of a blank canvas as art can be credited with making an original point about the futility of life or some such bollux but how many times can this same bloody nonsense be regarded as meaningful? Surprised he/she is not suing the many others who have done it since for breach of copyright! Even when the artists actually bothered to do something much of it was utter shit, scrawls that looked like the work of infants, old car engines with shiny bits on them, rough lumps of clay that looked like big dog turds etc. One "sculpture" was this piece of galvanised steel ducting much like I have on my hot air central heating.

Wow! I didnt know I had a valueable artwork in my garage! Surprised we haven't seen an "artist" exhibiting bits of his used toilet paper yet.

Art !!!!!

Still, there is a plus side, if crap like that is the work of a famous artist it makes one feel much better about one's own crap. Here's a biro sketch I did recently at a U3A art session. Off top of head, not copied.

Topic: Art Comment here. Comments so far: 0

Mad

Have you read about that cannibalism case? Bloke caught eating a woman's face, how awful! If it was me I'd have been caught eating her bottom!

Seriously, why is insanity always such a bad thing? Even when they don't commit crimes, the insane are always a burden on others and are nearly always unhappy themselves. Wouldn't it be great to have a benign form of insanity? A form that allowed you to experience fantastic feelings and visions without taking any drugs but come back into the real world whenever it was necessary.

Nice sunny morning today so went for my walk early. Ducking under a Holly tree and a spikey leaf poked me in the eye so I said "bloody Holly!" If I suffered from benign insanity, all the Holly trees would have started singing "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" to accompany me on my walk.

Bloody Holly trees are still rehearsing, so Buddy Holly's version will have to do.

As bloggoth moderator I have to warn you that your comment about eating a woman's bottom is in poor taste.

Rubbish! Womens' bottoms taste fantastic!

Silly

Brought some cheap jeans at Sainsburies the other day. Took the label off the front but failed to notice there was a stick-on label low down at the back. Have been walking about in public for a couple of days with a large gold circle reading "With stretch" over my bottom!

Could have been worse I suppose, I could have been in Brighton and there could have been a stick-on price label that I also failed to notice. Oooooh! You don't get xoggoth's bumhole for £10 ducky! Cost you 15 quid at least!

Old age and cancer

What fun they are. Remember talking to an elderly lady up the club a few years ago who said, with a wry smile, that her main social events these days were funerals. Know how she feels, when you get to a certain age, funerals seem to be the main events in life. First the mother in law, then the missus, then my sister's husband, all in the space of less than two years. Not to mention an aunt and a cousin of the missus's that I did not know well. The late missus's brother just phoned to say his father has died so there will be another soon.

Oh well. At least I'm getting a lot of use out of the black suit I spent a whole £99 on at Burton's!

Sorta nothing

Darn it. When will I get any real sense of life back? Probably going out more than I ever did in the last few decades when it was so much nicer to spend time with the missus. When we weren't doing anything special and just did our own things she was around for those little meets over coffee, wine, vodka/whisky according to mood and time of day, in the garden, conservatory or in front of the TV.

I go drinking up the village club (me and Mr Pikey Scum actually exchanged a grunted hello the other day), spend time with various wierd women, wander the country for hours, do countryside volunteer stuff, force myself to go to choir or art sessions but none of that is really living in my view.

Just want to get back my imagination and some enthusiasm for the things I used to like doing, writing stupid short stories, cartooning, surreal paintings, posting bollux here, making wierd things out of junk or looking at bugs in my microscope but I just can't get interested. When not going out, I just work through my list of little DIY jobs, tiddle on the computer to no obvious purpose, watch some drivel on TV or read horror stories, finishing each with "What a load of crap". There don't seem to be any quick solutions, alcohol does nothing. When I'm on my own I think I fancy a vodka and don't always finish it.

Life starts inside. If that isn't there, the life around us is nothing more than a TV screen, a lot of dull Sky TV Channels that you idly flick through, only to find nothing that grabs you.

Talking of horror (?)

Brought a couple of collections the other day. Read about 20 stories so far and one or two are ok. The stuff Henry James or others of his era wrote were genuinely creepy because they stuck to the point of the story. Modern stuff is so full of padding that goes beyond just characterisation and setting the scene.

In the one I read last night a man had a car accident that killed his wife and also filled him with glass fragments that were working their way out. There is some sort of link between those and his wife trying to be free and and an undiscovered cave, erm, fair enough I suppose. But quite why there are two pages about him looking round his old school and remembering how it was and being asked if he had seen a missing child I have no idea, it has nothing to do with anything.

Ah, but maybe I am just being old fashioned, too stuck in the ways of a career spent writing concise technical reports. I need to learn that irrelevance. Let's see, this item is about horror stories, so er um. Did you know that a lightning bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than those found at the sun's surface?

Isn't religion lovely?

Who among the non-existent old fart readership of bloggoth does not remember "Rivers of Bablylon" by Boney M? The lyrics are from the bible Psalm 137. The part that was not included in the song was this:

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed;
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones

PS Oi! Moses! Sue em for copyright infringement!

Pluses and

Bit of a loose end last night, not in mood to be on me tod but getting fed up with the village club so went to the cinema club in nearby village. Fantastic! Film about a bloke dying of cancer! Didn't stay, then walked back to the van past two funeral directors including bloody Ballard & Shortall! On plus side it started with this bit of music I've never heard before.

Shoulda been me

Advice to the non existent readers of bloggoth who are not old farts. (The only two I know of are old farts!) Memory gradually fades. Think twice before you throw anything away, no matter how unimportant it seems at the time, it could be an important bit of your own history, summit to look back on when you're sitting drooling in the sun outside the care home.

I never watch anything on TV these days except the news and cartoons like The Simpsons but decided to try New Tricks tonight and it covered something from the cold war days when selected people were contacted with a view to them helping to organise things in Britain in the aftermath of a nuclear armageddon. I got an invite to be part of such a group *Note 1 and I ignored it, thought "how stupid" and chucked the letter.

Darn it! If only I had replied in the affirmative and the world had really been blown to smithereens I might have been one of the world leaders today! If I had at least kept the letter it would have been a great bit of my personal history. I've still got my post war ID and my Edward Heath petrol rationing book but they ain't the same.

*Presumably because I was one of the few in those days to get a first class honours degree. Sneer!
PS: Having an M.Sc (distinction), being more successful and having a much bigger conservatory does not come close!

Phil again

Shaming Britain?

The Independent reports on "the dowry violence shaming Britain". Don't blame me sunshine. The shame lies with the minority communities who bring this backward crap into Britain with them.

Of course our governments deserve some criticism for not outlawing this practice, especially given that it is outlawed in India and Pakistan, two of the main nations from which we import it into the UK. What our PC establishment constantly fails to grasp is that, when fear of appearing racist makes them turn a blind eye to migrant and minority problems like dowries, black gang crime, honour killings, FGM, the cast system, forced marriage, child beggars, abuse of children during witchcraft rituals or whatever, it is the members of those minorities who feel the consequences.

Given the reality of "the wall of silence", tackling these things comes at an immense cost to the British taxpayer of course, yet another cost which is never included in those estimates of the "benefits" of immigration. If our governments deserve blame for these problems, the biggest share of it should be for their failure to have firm immigration policies to ensure, as far as possible, that they never entered the UK in the first place.

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Update. The power of bloggoth

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Silly

Old age and cancer

Sorta nothing

Talking of horror (?)

Isn't religion lovely?

Pluses and

Shoulda been me

Phil again

Shaming Britain?

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