Page 57

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

The world to come

Went for a walk through a field of cows today. Nice to see all the little flies are around munching the cow poo. Called in at the supermarket on the way back and it occurred to me that, in a few million years time, mankind may be gone and flies could have evolved to be the dominant intelligent species. Maybe, way in the future, flies will be shopping in supermarkets.

Not to say their tastes will have changed though.

Up the bum

Dunno what's going on with we at bloggoth. Up and down like a yo yo. No idea why. Yesterday was awful, tired and low. Ok today, driving along in my little van singing Elvis in style of Muddy Waters.

You can't ignore time

We are always seeing news stories about ethnic minorities being underepresented in this, that and the other. Because they make up 15% of the population there should be 15% ethnic minorites in everything, all the top jobs, politicians, police etc. They should even be equally represented on British banknotes.

Probably a good thing to aim for but we can't ignore the realities of time. The vast majority are either migrants or descendants of migrants who arrived in the last few decades. You can hardly expect to find a similar proportion of famous scientists, authors etc. among them as we can find in British people when we are looking back over several hundred years. Anyone think of the black equivalent of Michel Faraday or Winston Churchill? Anyone?

Most also came here to do low paid, unskilled jobs and children of manual workers are much less likely to acheive major success in their lives than those from a more privileged background and the disadvantages do not disappear in a generation. If your father was a taxi driver or shelf stacker it's unlikely you are going to be Prime Minister, chief of police or a top scientist whatever your ethnicity.

Rather than indulge in this silly box ticking, perhaps it would be better to focus on improving the prospects of those from poorer backgrounds in general. There are plenty of poorer white kids in the UK, especially in areas where all the old industries like coal mining and iron production have disappeared or in coastal towns that are too dependent on seasonal tourism. How is it racist to treat people equally?

Not taking in so many low grade workers in the future would help to raise social equality too. If we took in more scientists and other high value people we might get more ethnic role models to give hope to those of the same origins.

More role model stuff

Another problem is the fact that "ethnic minority" is not some single group. Why would Mary Seacole mean anything to a Bangladeshi? Maybe that's the solution! Instead of £5,£10,£20 and £50 notes why don't we have £5, £5.10, £5.20, £5.30....... etc notes. That way we could have a note with the face of somebody that nobody else had ever heard of to suit every one of the numerous ethnic minorites in the UK.

Sounds a bit rude!

Couple of interesting articles about the pope this week:

Good to see the pope is learning from the one sensible religion, Satanism. If they have a lady pope I might rejoin the Catholic church.

Bring back donkeys

We at bloggoth generally think religion is bollux but maybe there is one rellgion that would benefit the world. How much better it would be if Amish beliefs became the dominant religion in every country. Just think how many of our current problems would be solved by having no machines or technology of any sort:

Wars and conflicts would be far less serious. With no internet or other communications our only enemies would be people much more local to us and spears and clubs would kill far fewer than guns, tanks and missiles. There would certainly be no prospect of a nuclear armageddon.
Without motorised transport there would be a huge reduction in immigration generally. We'd get a lot fewer illegals from Calais as it's much harder to hide in a donkey cart than a big lorry and few would want to row across the channel, especially when they couldn't dial 999 and get our coastguards rushing to escort them to their tax payer funded houses.
Kids would get out and about again. No more sitting at home playing online games all day, self harming because of being upset about what somebody said on Facebook or Twitter.
Supplies of harmful drugs would drop hugely without easy transport and new ones would stop being invented. There wouldn't be recreational drugs at all apart from magic mushrooms.
There would be no more plastic or harmful chemicals being produced to mess up our environment. Nothing but paper and other simple things that people could make by hand from natural materials.
With no more factories and power stations producing CO2, global warming would start to decline. The decline would be even quicker if we only had vegan Amish to reduce the production of cow poo.

PS. Of course a massively less productive society would cause an enormous drop in food supplies, there would be no effective medicines, no advanced medical or surgical procedures. Starvation and middle ages style plagues would probably cause billions to die in decades and the human population would see a massive decline. GREAT! About time all the nice little animals had their fair share of the world.

How long will these ridiculous denials go on?

The UK is becoming more and more of a total mess everyday. So many problems - shortage of housing, shortage of school places, overcrowded roads etc. and it is utterly absurd to say they are nothing to do with huge levels of mass immigration over the past several decades, with the foreign-born population now at 14%

Then there's the big surge in violent crime and there's no doubt where much of that is coming from although the link isn't as simplistic as the real far right would have it. If you look at the government's travel advice on some poor African countries you will see that some are fairly safe. It isn't so much poverty that causes crime but inequality and taking in millions of low paid workers to increase the wealth of employers is hardly the right route to creating a more equal society.

A big problem in the UK is lack of, and diminishing, social mobility. Migrants may be happy to take low paid jobs that are better than anything they could have found in their home countries but their children are going to compare their prospects with those of others in this country. Hardly surprising if they feel left out and race is a factor here. If youths see those of their own ethnicity overrepresented in the poorer areas of rich cities like London some will inevitably think racism is a major cause, that their prospects are poor whatever they do, and turn to the alternative world of criminal activities.

And then there is the negative feedback effect. If there is a significant problem within any ethnic community that will inevitably increase prejudice against it, that's the reality of human nature. That in turn impacts the prospects of those with high ambitions so they may be more likely to resort to crime, which increases prejudice and so the spiral continues.

We don't need a high population, low wage economy country, we need to aim for the very opposite. A green and pleasant land to live in with a focus on high performing industrial and service sectors making the best possible use of technology, not a vastly overcrowded one with a plethora of fast food shops and other low productivity businesses and with ethnic divisions for which there are no easy solutions.

Raising the immigration bar greatly and only taking in the very highly skilled people who will help achieve such an economy will also provide the extra wealth we need to tackle the inequalities and resultant problems that decades of laxity on immigration has landed us with.

Save money

We at bloggoth must revive the saving money page that we started years ago and could not be arsed to continue.

Anyway, for those suffering from the embarassing problem of constipation, no need to splash out on expensive laxatives, just swallow a glass of drain unblocker.

Much cheaper and works great!

Disclaimer: xoggoth accepts no responsibility for advice given on this blog

Why not burden monsters?

Spent a boring hour or two yesterday going through my finances, insurance etc. Cheered meself up watching a zombie film later. It's pure discrimination that zombies never have to do these boring things that us living people have to do, they just wander around eating brains without a care in the world. Time the government brought in some legislation to make zombies and other monsters conform to laws and regulations. I bet space aliens would not keep invading the world if they had to spend lots of time and money applying for visas.

Sensible chap

Went to the Tate Modern art gallery a couple of years ago. Bits of galvanised ducting, huge lumps of clay resembling giant dog turds, umpteen blank canvases, so much of it was utter crap. This bloke says it much better.

PS back in my student days I used to do stuff like that, recall an old black radio with nails stuck on the top. Darn it, why didn't I keep it? Might be worth a fortune today!

Gettin' old

Eeeeh. Hate getting old. Did a sketch off top of me 'ead of an old fart at my little art group the other day. Not what I look like yet fortunately but heading that way.

And bloody older women. They never want a bit of nudgy wink. At a lady friend's flat the other day and asked her if she fancied one. She might have paused a bit before saying no! It's not just still incredibly handsome me. From various conversations, it seems that none of the women I know are up for it with anyone.

It's been in the news that increasing numbers of older people are getting STDs. If around here is any guide must be blokes getting together. Maybe I'll have to move to a flat in Brighton Kemptown!

The Begum Thing

This Shamima Begum thing. Personally I would be quite happy if a bomb drops on her and other scumbags like her. Good riddance. However, if that does not happen, I think any nation should take responsibility for its own citizens as a matter of international law, otherwise some other nation will get lumbered with them. The nations that refuse to do so should face international sanctions.

Despite the downsides of taking back IS fighters, I think the Western nations would see a net benefit, given the numbers of other illegals we have here. Iran is on that list and look at all the Iranians who have started arriving across the channel recently. Somalia too. Why the hell are we giving £100m to these people if they refuse to take their citizens back?

The lefty liberal dream world

Hardly surprising that an Independent article about Shemima Begum says that her radicalisation was due to a Litany of failures’ by local council, police and school". No blame must be attached to her, to those who radicalised her or to anyone else within her own community obviously.

Said it all before but here's a summary of the chief liberal idiocies on immigration that one sees over and over again.

Cultural problems within migrant or minority communities, like FGM, forced marriage or Islamic terrorism, are due to failures by our own society to tackle them.
Lack of integration, poor performance or crime are due to white racism and rejection. Minorities are never to blame.
Only the white British are xenophobes and racists, other groups would never prefer to mix mainly with their own kind or put them first if it was not for our rejection of them.
All migrants are perfect human beings the moment they cross our borders. Asylum seekers never lie to escape poverty.
Any similarities in performance, attitudes or behaviour of migrant groups to those of the nations they come from are mere coincidence.
Any suggestion that stricter immigration checks could prevent us having to deal with some of these cultural problems is racist.
Problems like Islamic extremism, FGM etc. within ethnic groups that previous migrations have given us are British problems and nothing to do with immigration.
The increase of far right sentiment in Europe is a totally irrational hatred. Nothing to do with problems immigration has given us, like the Islamic terrorist attacks that have killed hundreds.
One must never ask why some groups face more prejudice than others. Why there is "Islamophobia" but no "Sikhophobia" or "Hinduophobia". Couldn't be what some Muslims do, that Sihks and Hindus don't, could it?
We should be ruled by high ideals, not realities of human nature. Dismiss predudice against a group as irrational racism rather than tackle any real problems within those minorities that are driving it.
They will not learn from events past and present. Look at many of the worst conflicts in history and all of those today, they are not about race but between those of different cultures, whether religion, tribe or heritage, looking to control their own destinies. Yet the liberals think they can wave in huge numbers with disparate cultures and they will live side by side without problems.
They are incapable of learning from the realities of economies. If you bring many low-paid unskilled workers into a well-off country that is not socially mobile, it can take generations for their descendants to acheive equality. Inequality is a major cause of crime.
They are incapable of learning from the realities of human behaviour. Social mobility is a problem for many at the lowest levels of the economy but, if those who are struggling are ethnically different, some are bound to see it as a result of prejudice and this can cause tensions.
Their views on racism are simplistic and they blame one side, the Met Police have a racist culture for example. But look at what they have to deal with in London today, scarcely a day goes by without another black on black stabbing. Could you seriously deal with that and remain unbiased? You would have to be a robot. In most human conflicts there are faults to tackle on both sides.
Multi-culturalism is lauded as a great thing. Most cultural practices are harmless enough but some liberals defend the idea that groups should remain separate from mainstream society. Interaction with others is important and the best solution to prejuduce against a group is getting to know and respect people from it. Failure to integrate does not help job prospects for minorities either.
An end to real racism would be great but we won't acheive it by shouting about it for decade after decade. The liberals refuse to look at sensible solutions, like proper controls to ensure we only take in really useful migrants we can respect and who are willing and able to mix with the rest of us.
Any examples of errors when carrying out checks on immigration status or eligibility for NHS treatment are reasons to abolish those checks altogether. Far better to wave everyone across the border and provide free healthcare, funded by British taxpayers, to anyone who wants it.
Maths and statistics have no room in any discussion on immigration. Around 14% of the English population being foreign born is nothing to do with the lack of housing. Migrants increase the GDP, so what if that increased wealth is simply being shared out among a similarly increased population leaving the average citizen no better off?
Studies show migrants make a net contribution to the public purse. But many costs, like educating British born children, remittances, effects of an increased population, provision of interpreters, higher rates of some health issues, impact of an international dimension of crime and the culture of silence in tackling it, are not factored in.
There is no shortage of money to fund asylum seekers. Caring for child migrants, free health care, welfare and social housing, interpreters etc. No problem, the magic money tree takes care of it. There's no reduction in the help available to our own needy citizens.
Immigration is normal because we are nation of immigrants. Never mind that recent centuries have not seen migration on a scale and with such a disparity of cultures that we have seen over the last few decades.
And don't mention that major migrations that we have seen in the past, like that of the Irish during the potato famine, caused considerable tensions.
Migrants are all hard working and useful and it is racist to suggest otherwise. However, it is fine to suggest that we need them because British people are too lazy to do the jobs they do.
And how can massive competition for low paid jobs not impact hard working British workers too?
British workers should have to compete with those from low wage economies so that bosses can rake in increased profits. Funny sort of socialism, that!
Blame everything on austerity. The big rise in rough sleepers is down to Tory failures to provide enough housing. Never mention that in some areas a significant number, 60% in London, are foreign born. And the pressures on low cost housing due to migrants wouldn't be pushing up the number of British rough sleepers would it?
In articles about on any problem, never mention any reason that is immigrant related. The increase in type 2 diabetes is nothing to do with the fact that those of South Asian origin, almost 7% of the UK population in 2011, are 6 times more likely to have it. And other BME about 3 times.
Checks on migrants must never take account of the realities of nations from which they come. Despite the prevalence of HIV in some parts of Africa it is racist to suggest that migrants from them should be tested.
Migrants' human rights should trump those of British citizens. If criminals have family in the UK they should be allowed to stay regardless of the risk to the public.
Migrant rights even trump those of British minorities. We all tend to find friends, lovers and enemies within our own groups. If we take in a criminal or someone with an infectious disease, who are they most likely to affect? If we take in a terrorist, who will suffer from the rise in prejudice?
If anyone cites problems within a migrant community, they will counter by citing various problems within the British community. They never ask themselves the obvious question. How are our own problems a reason for taking in more problems that we do not need to have?
They act in the same simplistic way as the far right by treating any discussion about immigration as a race issue. A lot of lonely, hormonal young men with no women will cause problems of expoitation, rape and abuse, whether asylum seekers in Germany or aid workers in Haiti. Such problems need addressing, not dismissing.
And, of course, anyone who says any of the above, suggesting we should have immigration policies based on facts and realities, proper checks on individuals and put the interests of British citizens and tax payers first, is "far right", racist etc.

Main Story

The Last Men

Shortest Horror Story Ever

A little boy was throwing stones into the lake and saw something floating. He shouted "What's that in the water mummy?"

A hideous Egyptian mummy lurched up behind him and put a rotted hand on his neck.

"It's your mother's body boy, I threw it in there earlier."

Time Wasters

How much do online scammers and spammers cost the world economy? It isn't just the money they take by successful scams, the cost of trying to prevent them must be enormous. Big IT companies must splash out a fortune on dedicated staff. Even tiny companies like my crappy little business get targetted, I've had to spend days in the past enhancing security due to hacks.

They cost individuals a lot of time too. Particularly annoying are these damn Captcha things to prove you are not a robot, you have to click on a lot of boring pictures with traffic lights or store fronts. If we must keep doing these captcha things, can't they make them a bit more interesting?

PS Yes, why should ALL the pictures not be of ladies' bums? Those robots won't know that.

PPS Lack of ethnic diversity there, blame Wikimedia Commons for lack of any good pics. We are definitely not racist about black ladies' bottoms! They are chewy.

Pest Control

On my walk yesterday I passed yet another big van with "xxx Pest Control" logos on the sides. I expect they had been called out to deal with some poor little rats, mice, pigeons, flees, bedbugs, moths, woodworm, wasps etc.

Bastards. The world's main pests are humans. Look at all the things our ghastly species is doing to the world with global warming, hunting of endangered species, plastic pollution, forest clearance, littering and massive destruction of the environment generally.

If I had lots of money I'd set up a charity to help all the nice little creatures being threatened by horrible people.

Fucking Hypocrites

Hypocricy rules the world. There are many examples but one very relevant at the moment, with all the EU crap going on, is the Spanish position on Gibraltar, a whole 6.8 km2, which they recognised as a British territory under the treaty of Utrecht. Yet, on the north coast of Morocco are the autonomous Spanish cities of Melilla (12.3 km2) and Ceuta (18.5 km2). The Spanish government have repeatedly rejected claims by Morocco to these territories. Sure, you could argue our possession of Gibralter was about British exercise of power but the Spanish occupations of Melilla and Cueta were equally about exercise of Spanish power, over the Moroccans and the Portugeuse.

As Brexit goes on and on, with any solutions barred by the idealistic unelected zealots at the top and the hypocritical self servers in national governments, I am sure I am not the only one who feels increasing loathing for more and more of them. Let's get the fuck out!

Personality dysphoria

We are supposed to have respect for every human being regardless of race, religion, gender, disability, sexuality, nostril diameter etc. etc. Not against that, just not so sure that the rest of us should always have to pick up the bill to cater for other people's preferences.

Gender dysphoria is where people are not comfortable with their biological sex and they can get hormone treatment and surgery under the NHS. Maybe lots of us are not entirely comfortable with what we are, but where's the money for us? We at bloggoth are a smallish bloke, why can't we get a body transplant to make us much taller and give us huge muscles so we can go round beating up the people (almost everyone) who annoy us?

If we are going to be a fully liberal society, maybe we should stop being so predudiced against people with a "mental illness". How utterly disrespectful to say people with split personality have Dissociative Identity Disorder! This is discriminatory. We at bloggoth are starting a campaign to allow those with split personalities to have a second head grafted onto them with their brain cells distributed according to identity.

Update: Gordon Bennet! now we have Transracialism

Mustn't click spam emails

My email address has been pwned and I get loads of spam emails at present. Fortunately, beng tech. savvy, I just delete them and am not likely to click on any links. Or so I thought anyway. Got one today and clicked delete, got usual prompt:

Are you sure you want to delete mail...

Then looked a bit closer at mail in question:

Hey -myemail- do you want to receive images of my naked butt?

eeeeeh......What a difficult choice!

What happened to Ren and Stimpy?

Art group today

Did usual sort of bollux.

Vegans

Interesting articles in the news today that Vegans are more likely to get colds and flue and other minor ailments and take twice as many days off work. In the interests of political balance here are links from the righty Daily Mail and the lefty Daily Mirror. Perhaps not surprising, our bodies are adapted to meat eating, you can't just turn back 200,000 years of human evolution. Still, as someone who prefers animals to most people, I can understand the vegan point of view.

Maybe the solution, one that respects the rights of animals while providing adequate meat in our diet, is legalising cannibalism! There are too many people in the world and too many useleless/ghastly people among them. Serial criminals, long term benefits scroungers, let's eat em! The public should also be allowed a vote to pick loathsome people, bastards like Ken Clarke, for frying.

It could also be a way to avoid expensive funerals. I'd bet I'd taste great with some roast potatoes and carrots! Roast fat lady's bottom would certainly be my meal of choice.

No need for vaigra

Think necrophilia is more of a male thing but, if there are any ladies who are into it, presumably they wait until rigor mortis sets in.

Globular warming and poo sticks

It's a long time ago but I used to do mathematical modelling of cement kilns and furnaces so do (rather did) know quite a bit about thermodynamics, heat transfer etc., and generally find the theories behind global warming pretty convincing. Due to the huge complexities of global weather patterns, it does not mean everywhere is going to be warmer than usual, like the UK at present. Some areas, like Greece currently, can experience abnormally low temperatures.

That said, I think many of the measures we are taking in the West are a f* waste of time when the effects are largely cancelled out by the activities of the coal burning Chinese and developing countries. It's pretty much the same with plastic pollutuion, what is the point of the West trying to tackle this issue when China and Indonesia are the main sources?

Still, maybe we ought to do what little we can, perhaps a reduction of 0.05'C could mean the difference between survival and extinction.

PS I have a great idea to reduce use of synthetics. I intend to set up a small not-for-profit company to make underpants out of recycled dandruff and toenail clippings. I trust the non-existent readers of bloggoth will help fund this worthy project.

How can anything be different anymore?

Was reading the news about Ed Sheeran's supposed copying of a Marvin Gaye song.

I suppose the background strum has a similar note sequence, although I doubt most would ever notice given the very different styles. That said, it's just 5 notes, something a lot of musicians might come up with without any deliberate copying. Should Sheeran have checked through umpteen million songs for similarities before releasing it? Makes you wonder how it's possible to come up with anything new at all. I daresay, if I could be arsed to look, that most of the xoggoth Tales have already been done.

Blog posts too, somebody's bound to have posted something very similar before. Fortunately, I have a solution. I will no longer blog in normal English but will use an incredibly complex encoding system similar to that used to create bitcoins. Chances of inadvertently duplicating someone else's blog comments will be less than 1 in 36 billion. So here's my latest post:

+p$`WU0bSrvLFghcVYrYlYwYmLuX2U0b1IkYmQwXlQlK1Qvaf++`WU0bSrvLFghcVYrYlYwYmLuX2U0b1IkYmQwXlQlK1Qvaf++Y1shPVghc VYrYlYwYmMlaR8jbB81a@++YVInbF7/LSb3dWAn`GA0`P++NSHwS0oBT/0BUP++S2AycVjgbFbgP2AuYVngP1YhYFj+Lin5Lv++UW@gc GUhXxEUbF85HTMsXloybVk1a2Uw`WYucP++SmAucWMvcFX+NBEIXmokYl7gPmcla2YlLin4Lv++VFkhcREpcBE0`VXga1ItYhEvYxEtdhEm`m M/cRE/YFkvbF/+P2MvXlUtYlIkY2A4`WAsYmP+LyT1M@++LiTxLyT2LSL2Nf++L14va2UybGQlMRD+MSXwLv++LiLwMyT4LSL3Mv++Q2A4dh EDQ@++Q2A4bGUoYjMlXmL+NSD4Mv++YWYu`GAuNSD2N@++YGMvdlUvav++X1ona2A/Yf++Q0MBS/QJUDIIQjISSyP+/p$

Isn't that the wisest blog post ever?

Do ghosts have ghosts?

All the major religions say there's a single afterlife - heaven, hell etc, or a reincarnation, you return to this world as another living creature. Maybe there's actually an infinite series, you go from here to an after life, then you die in that one, go to the next and so on. Which means that ghosts could be haunted by ghosts.

And what if there is an occasional glitch and dead people entering the next life accidentally get sucked into the next one by mistake? If they are all very different that could be embarassing or scary as you end up living among a load of life forms that don't resemble you in any way.

PS. Crap

Yeh - I like ghosts and things

Even though I think they are mostly bollux I find such stuff interesting. Strange things too. Mostly coincidence I daresay but you do seem to get some "cursed" places, including one near me. I will leave it to the non-existent readers of bloggoth to do their own Googling in the unlikely event that they are remotely interested

Recently in the news was that case of a care home being shut down due to the residents being in serious danger of death. It used to be a school where, according to a number of previous pupils, there was some horrible abuse. Just a short walk down a footpath is a retreat of Opus Dei, an institution of the Catholic church which has been accused of many nasty things. Just over the road is the house where Virginian Wolf was, according to some accounts, held against her will and force fed.

PS And not far away, of course, is the insane xoggoth

Grunt

Happy whatever, some bloody thing. Grunt. Typical BBC text news for London today, stories:

Stabbing
Shooting
Stabbing
(other news)
Shooting
(other news)
Stabbing
Stabbing
Knife in court - stabbing trial
(other news)

Rest of comment auto deleted by xoggoth PC AI PC controls.

PS Nearly forgot my new year's resolution. Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

Bloody books

Just read a crime novel that was bit better than most, actually finished it. But even good novels rabbit on about irrelevant details too much, how dark somebody's living room is, how it's full of books, there's a big TV in the middle, how it reminds them of somewhere they used to live etc. etc. Crap like that can fill half a page before you get back to the relevant stuff, but it won't be long before there's more crap.

That's just people I suppose, heads full of crap. Unlike animals, they just stick to the essentials of life - growing, hunting, eating, drinking, sleeping, pissing, crapping, mating, dying. I bet an octupus could write a really good novel, it would be nice and to the point. "Adventures of Enteroctopus Megalocyathus" would be much better than "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" Although an octopus would come up with a much more succinct name. "Tentikle Tales" would be brill!

PS. It is the new ambition of bloggoth to pack "crap" as many time as possible into each thread.

Right!

Some people have such simple solutions to things. Feeling tired and disinterested in everything? Just be positive!. Yeh right!

Worth a try I suppose. Have a cup of tea. Wonderful! Change my socks. Oh yes, takes one to a new place! Fart. Fantatic!!!! Can life get any better?

Not Little Old Wine drinker me

Don't drink much these days. (No, really! Mr. Sheep). Alcohol doesn't really do anything.

Not the C2H5OH anyway. Must be other things in alcoholic drinks. Odd that a small glass of wine has much more effect than a glass of vodka with significantly more alcohol. Other people I know say the same. Vodka does nowt but a couple of small glasses of white wine make me feel so sad. The missus used to like white wine, ordered a crate of it regularly. In the summer we used to sit out on the patio with a big glass and talk bollox. Not just wine, places too. Dropped into a garden centre I used to go to with the missus today. Really hit me. I never buy wine anymore but sister gave me some last week and had three small glasses tonight. SAD!

Sad is bad? Not really, sometimes it's nice to get some feeling instead of the usual nothingness.

Anyway, time for one of my heros:

Is that you?

Heard this on "The BBC Dynasties Playlist:

Not just great animation, I like that moooosick too. Another good one by Puscifer:

Old Favourites

Do you ever bung things in your favourites list and then never look at most of them again? Bet most of us do. Been cleaning out the crap recently, including all the old blogs where bloggers haven't posted anything for years. Found that CaptainRanty.com is now worth $3495!

Gordon Bennet! Why do I have so little commercial sense? When I can't be arsed to post crap on here anymore, I am hardly going to get a small fortune for a domain name like xoggoth.org. Should have called it something more in demand but too late now to find a domain name that suits my character, Checked grumpygit.com, grumpyoldsod.com, themoaner.com. All gone and in use!

PS Watch it Mr C, yer on the nearly removed list!

Story

The last post, Prediction, was made as a taster for this story. Fortunately, for me that is, not for the Turkish people, it did not come true. So I am not a prophet, unlike the story's character.

Nostradamus returns

Prediction

The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be shot dead by a renegade security guard this Friday, 21st of December at 16.43 UK time.

Evolution

Animals rely on their natural senses, sight, hearing, smell and feeling, to survive. Some birds even use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. These abilities have evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

Assuming mankind has not wiped them all out, some may evolve over the next million years or so to use all those energy forms man generates - satellite signals, phone signals, WIFI etc. It would be great for all those migrating Wildebeests or Gnus in Africa if they could access live satellite images to see where there's still plenty of green growth.

Attibution. Modified section from
Haplochromis [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Desirable disabilities

There was a story in the BBC TV local news today about a youngish deaf chap who had had his hearing restored with digital hearing aids. He was so pleased he could hear his young son.

What? Squealing kids are a good reason to want to be deaf! Same with lefty twats, people going on about Brexit etc. Then there's things you may not want to see. Maybe you are afraid of spiders or don't want to look at ugly people like Juncker on TV. There may be events you don't want to go to, boring family dos perhaps, but you can't think of an excuse not to.

Maybe there's a way to link your brain reactions to your senses to give you an instant disability that allows you to avoid whatever you don't like but goes away again once the problem disappears. Kids squeal, you go deaf, ghastly people on TV, you go blind, boring things you don't want to go to, your legs are paralysed.

Torture me!

Not feeling as crap the past couple of months but still have little enthusiasm to get some things done. I have a reasonable social life and get out quite a bit but, apart from walking, I don't get round to doing something unless I am sorta forced into it, it's something Ive arranged to do with someone else. I used to like doing ME stuff, silly cartoons, daft stories etc.. A life that's just about going out and socialising is life outside yourself, if there's nothing inside, it's a hollow life.

Forced into it - hmm. Maybe that's what I really need (apart from vodka) to restore my enthusiasm for xoggoth stuff. Talking therapies, counselling - pointless probably. Torquemada! He was the sort of therapist I need!

Real life should do that

Try to find new places for walks and often use Google Street View to see if there's anywhere to park near footpaths of interest. Rather gloomy autumn day here. Now go forward and it's summer!

Missed me!

You read about these unfortunate accidents in the papers, somebody being hit by a falling wall, being on a balcony when it collapses etc. but you never think it could happen to you.

It ain't yet, but came close the other day. Was doing one of my volunteering things making a dead hedge in a local nature reserve. Heard a load bang and a tree came down nearby, right over the footpath I'd walked along less than 5 minutes before.

What a shame we can't control these chance events - trees should always fall on ghastly people like Ken Clarke or Juncker or Tony Blair.

At least fake news is free

Obviously ads don't do it anymore. More and more of the online newspapers, the more serious ones anyway, are turning towards subscription only. The Times went that way years ago, The Daily Telegraph over a year ago and now The Independent is asking for contributions.

Trouble is, this may result in a narrowing of focus. Although we at bloggoth consider ourselves a righty on some issues we also browse the more left wing papers and sometimes they do make valid points. We are also a meany and certainly won't be subscribing to them all if they all require payment so it will probably just be the DT. Swing right! Or maybe we will give up on them all. Most of their "news" is not based on verified facts and statistics, it's selective reporting that suits their particular bias. How can The Telegraph and The Guardian both be right on Brexit? It's impossible!

Why do we need them anyway when we can read "fake" news for free? It's probably at least as accurate as anything the major papers peddle. Let's broaden our minds by looking at other sources of news, dig up whatever we can find on the net. Ah yes! The EU is ruled by giant lizards. I find that rather believable when I look at Juncker. Think he's just about to shed his skin!

Image attributes:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/eppofficial/ [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
https://morguefile.com/creative/Bexster

PS The idea has already been proven 100% about Merkel!

Why are horror films such bollux these days?

Started watching some crap film, supposedly a supernatural thriller. After about 15 mins of some geeky sort wandering around setting up CCTVs while talking to himself and telling a surly bloke to put his head cam on I gave up. Mind you, it wasn't as bad as another I tried to watch recently, about a vengeful god who sends angels to destroy mankind. The first angel turns up - in an ice cream van! Then the others come, driving cars across the desert. FFS! Surely a vengeful god could do better than that!

Still, if that's the standard of horror films these days, maybe I could get out my cheap camera and make my own movie. I could earn a fortune! My little puppet parrot could play the evil villain with a dastardly plan to entrap the whole of humanity in my garden shed. He is finally thwarted by next door's cat who removes a screw from the diabolical world-enslaving device made from old bits and pieces I keep there.

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The secret of St Hillary's

Religion - can we switch?

There are so many religions in the world and so many different divisions within these religions. You'd think a real god would make a better job of informing us what his true message was. The variety of religions is one of the best proofs that it's all bollux. Still, even one of such supreme intelligence as we at xoggoth could be wrong, one can never totally prove/disprove anything.

Who knows? Maybe ALL these gods exist. In which case how can we decide which offers the best afterlife? I quite like Islam's offer of 72 virgins, assuming the resurrected me has his necessary functions fully restored, but do I want to be a miserable vodka-free git in this life? Not sure about Hinduism and Buddhism. Do I really want to be reincarnated and have to pay for all the cockups I made in this life? On the other hand, at least I get another chance, unlike with Christianity where I could burn for all eternity. Judaism is a bit better in that there is no permanent hell, but everyone gets stuck in a dark lifeless place for a year to learn the errors of their ways. Then there's all the old religions, Greek for example. As I don't blog in Greek, the gods may not recognise and reward my genius with a place in Elysium and I could end up in the crappy Asphodel fields with crappy ordinary people. If I was a Satanist, I might get to fulfil my lifelong dream of kissing a goat's arse but the downside is that Satanism offers no afterlife - when you're dead, you're dead.

It's very difficult to decide. What we need is a comparison website, similar to Go Compare or uswitch. Surely making a choice regarding one's future afterlife is a bloody sight more important than deciding on insurance or energy suppliers?

Never too far back!

Political correctness is driving sane people mad. Objecting to intentional racism, sexism, whatever, is fair enough but it's just gone totallly over the top. What is really daft is judging people in history by today's standards. Nelson, Churchill, Kipling, are among many we should stop honouring due to their supposed attitudes. It would be different if they were mainly famous for being racists or supporters of slavery etc. but they are not. They are rightly honoured for what they did, defending our nation, writing some darn good fiction, or whatever.

Trouble is, there seems to be no time limit on this idiocy. Students have even demanded that philosophers such as Plato and Kant are removed from the syllabus because they were white. Makes you wonder how much further this will go. Dippy the Dinosaur is currently on tour round the UK. Let's hope they don't discover something about him.

Peace and love! Sorted! War ends!

Lots of events commemorating the end of WW1 in the last few weeks. It was suggested as a subject for our art group, so knocked up a crappy cartoon.

Lefty twats

Some immigration rules do need revision, it seems daft to me that a competent doctor who has worked here for 16 years should be removed from the UK because of a marriage breakup. Is it really so difficult to take account of someone's value? On the other hand, no system will be perfect. We cannot use errors, as some lefties love to argue, for a blanket relaxing of immigration rules.

It would be great if we could never have tensions, but I loathe the tendency of some lefty liberals who seem to think that all the problems of humanity can be sorted by running around holding up placards while ignoring the real causes of them. The growth of the "Far right" in Europe is a reaction to real problems caused by mass immigration with inadequate checks that has given us huge problems, including a growth in organised crime and terrorism. Marching about shouting "No to racism" will solve nothing, the real solution is to have far more rigorous checks that ensure we only have the people who benefit our nation.

PS One of the daftest lefty articles in recent months is on the Independent

Strict government controls on immigration drive up the number of people entering a country illegally, a new study has found. While visa restrictions cut overall migration, academics said they can be "ineffective and counterproductive" because they force more people to find unlawful ways to cross borders. ... The findings are likely to be seized on by campaigners demanding the government relax its immigration rules.

Ah yes! That wouldn't result in much higher numbers of immigrants would it? To prevent illegal migrants just wave them in legally! Sorted! Why doesn't the government apply this sensible solution to all crime! Gang killings in London? Just make stabbling and shooting people legal, then all these useless gang members will be law-abiding members of society!

PPS. Another bit in that sensible article:

The study found that restrictions on low-skilled and family migration cut total immigration by 21 per cent and 32 per cent respectively but also drove up illegal immigration by 14 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.

Ah yes! Let's politely gnore the fact that the percentage cut in total migration is still around 50% higher than the rise in illegal migration and ask the question that should be obvious to any but a total idiot. Per cent of what? Illegal migration, including overstayers etc, is probably around a third of total migration. Basic maths seems to be a problem for liberal lefties, so often they trot out figures showing the net benefit of immigrants but not mentioning that it's a much smaller figure then the increase in population.

Hmmm

Not sure about all this Phillip Green stuff as these issues have so many problems. Is it reasonable that the subject of serious allegations should be revealed before there is any actual conviction, given the enormous damage done to someone who may turn out to be innocent? On the other hand, not revealing his name is damaging to others who fit the general description.

I know what would be a bloody good idea though. Why can't we buy tickets to be members of the house of Lords for one hour? Then we could go and make all sorts of allegation against people we don't like, knowing we can't be sued. Let's see, 8hhrk7Y?0£@, he's a kiddy fiddler, X&hhw89k3k#, she's a serial fraudster, q'Yu37/s$fO3, he bonks pidgeons.

A small charge of £50 is required for sofware to decode the above and reveal the true identities.

WTF? Going backwards!

Some good news today, Irish voters have overwhelmingly supported the proposal to remove the prohibition on blasphemy from the Constitution. I don't suppose we'll ever have a rational world free from the unsubstantiated bollux of religious dogma but this is a welcome step in the right direction.

Now the bad news. The European Court of Human Rights has upheld the convition of a woman for insulting religion after she called the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile. WTF?? If she had been deliberately inciting hatred of Muslims that would be a different matter but she wasn't. She was attacking the basis of a religion by suggesting that Muhammad was, like all so-called prophets and messiahs, just another ordiinary flawed man. How can we have any argument on a religion if everyone is supposed to treat the founders of it with the same respect as its followers?

Thanks a lot f* EHCR. The Irish intend to take Europe forward by rescinding prosecution for blasphemy laws and you have just taken us all backwards by effectively reimposing them.

PS What's the betting, if someone had made similar allegations against Ron Hubbard or Jesus, that would be considered of no consquence?

Topic: WTF? Going backwards! Comment here. Comments so far: 0

Why is the public sector so crap?

Had a letter from the council a few weeks back saying that, due to increased demand, we should put both waste and recycling bins out every third week starting on 4th October. But when I checked online using the address on the letter I found no mention of this change. So which is right, the website or the letter?

So Fucking typical really. Do a few volunteer things including footpath/repairs inspections and police search and get various emails from public authorities. Often an email is followed by another apologising for errors in the first one, that have been brought to their attention. Think all public sector jobs should be outsourced to hamsters. They'd be much more efficient.

Brain test

We forget things as we get older. Lying awake last night, I was trying to remember various things from Greek mythology. Managed a few. There was Herpes, the Greek God of thingy, Gonorrhea the wife of some god, the hero Siphilis and sea nymph Chlamydia.

Reassuring that I did quite well.

Farty Arty

Suggested subject for today's art group was Quentin Blake, famous cartoonist who illustrated books by Roald Dahl, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Of course I did not do an exact copy of Blake's stuff as others did, I do not copy from works that are inferior to my own, but style is similar.

PS Line down the middle is due to sticking scanned A4 parts together. Shoulda kept the missus's A3 printer.

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The end of rubbish

PS Yank geniuses with an interest in Zero Point/Dark Energy etc. are not permitted to point out the numerous flaws in the above. It is a story for us idiots whose knowledge of such things comes from science fiction movies.

Good news

Links from lefty Mirror and righty Mail just for political balance:

Sounds great, reduction of population is exactly what we need! All the global warming, pollution, habitat destruction, wildife extinctions - the basic cause is too many people. Most of them are crap anyway.

PS I prefer the DM headline Spermageddon, reminds me of one of those cheap horror films. After undergoing radiotherapy on his prostate, a man wakes up to find that Megasperm has swallowed his wife!

Where to next?

Mr Sheep's FAG school post has a link to a website of a British School where they teach PHSE - all the modern crap about equality, diversity etc. Little kids who can barely write are writing essays like "Is it ok to be gay?"

I'm all for equality and freedom of choice but this whole LGBT equality thing seems to have gone beyond common sense in that children who are way too young to be interested in sex are being taught all this gender awareness stuff. When we are little kids we are just ourselves, these issues are irrelevant. I wonder whether it may actually be harmful in that children might start worrying about things they don't need to worry about for some years. If you are seen by other kids as bit of a cissie or a tomboy, you may start thinking that you have a real problem to face up to. Quite unjustifiably in most cases, a girl who likes playing cowboys and indians is not necessarily going to turn out to be lesbian or a woman who yearns to be a man.

One wonders how far all this crap will go?

PS I recall, when I was probably 12 or so, having these recurring fantasies about this girl who kept me imprisoned in a cage. She used to feed me as though I was a hamster or something. It did not seem to spill over into my sexual tendencies, never been into bondage or stuff like that.

Eeeeh 2 (or is 3, 4, or 200? Forgotten

Spent couple hours in bed as so tired. Then Mrs Drinky called, so went next door. Mr PS turned up and spent a while talking about really important stuff, like positive displacement pumps. He's had an interesting career working on sewage farms! I spent time working on oil refineries but , when it come to the technologies involved, there is not a lot of difference. Everything is shit when you view it dispassionately. Hate to say it but, when one does not have a conflict with the bloke, he's a nice, interesting chap.

Of course, three gins helps to create a posiitve assessment on anything. Gordon Bennet! GIn seems a lot stronger than vodka!

Eeeeh!

Waddya do now? Lost it in the last few years.

By it, I mean interest in anything. Now the winter is coming and I can't spend my time messing about doing pointless things in the garden, I am not sure what to do with much of my spare time. Sure, I do various social or volunteer things, I am not a recluse. Got art group today, was at Mrs Drinky's soixante-neuf birthday party yesterday - me and Mr PS are talking again, went wandering with my usual loony lady day before, did writer's group previous day etc. etc.

All very well, but it's always been the free me time that used to matter most. Had various obsessions that filled my waking hours my whole life, microscopy, electronics projects, blogging, cartoons and wierd artwork, writing silly stories, reading, DIY projects, playing guitar (or attempting to) ... *Note. Now, just seem to have lost interest in everything. Have to force myself to do things.

Hmmm. Oh well, perhaps this is good preparation for what is to come. Sitting in an armchair at some old people's home, watching TV all day, when I'm not having a pee. Actually might be quite fun.

Note: And trying to persuade the late missus to take it up the arse obviously. Never succeeded

An unusual consistency of loathsomeness

The liberal lefties who claim to oppose "bigotry" are often in denial of some real problems. On the other hand, even when real problems exist, the views of the real far right, as opposed to the "far right", ie those who don't live in a PC dream world, are equally as nutty. No matter how widespread a problem may be in a group, whether defined by religion, race, politics or whatever, it generally does not apply to all in the group.

There seems to be one exception - NUNS! My personal experience of these awful women, mercifully a short one when I stayed with an aunt when my mother was ill and got sent to a Catholic primary school, was awful. Vicious, bad tempered women who shouted at and slippered us little kids at every opportunity. Not just my experience, everyone I have ever met who has been at a school run by nuns has told the same stories of unecessary cruelty.Talking to another two just last Friday. Another yesterday. Try a simple Google of "nuns ireland" and see the scale of some other abuses. Just one typical pretty one here

"They were called the Sisters of Mercy, but for what they did to poor unfortunate children in the orphanage, they were Sisters without any Mercy, she said. "

Nuns. Yech - EXTERMINATE!

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Creative heaven

HMRC are vampires

Spent umpteen hours over the last two weeks doing company accounts due to looming deadlines for Companies house and CT. Takes an eternity due to huge complexity, we take online orders and have 6 accounts - bank, cash, Paypal, Worldpay, Google, Amazon, which I have to reconcile with my sister's F* awful book keeping, There's all sort of stuff she never bothers to put into the accounts sheets, I have to send her great lists of things in the bank reports and ask what they are, and some of them are nothing to do with the company!

Mind you, it's not all my F* sister's fault. Why do accounts and CT submissions need to be so F* complex for a tiny company that has a turnover of about £15k and a profit of less than £1000? Why do we need to bother with debtors, outstanding payments, creditors, bad debts, the complex treatment of stock and breaking of down expenses into various categories? Why can't we just put two figures? 1) Amount paid to directors and 2) Net receipts into bank accounts. All the debts, write off etc. all even out sooner or later. As for stock valuation, we can deal with that when the company is wound up.

Everything that governments do are too F* complex. They just exist to annoy us. They are so f* stupid! Parasites! Leeches!

Judgements

People love to comment on incidents in the news as if they were experts with amazing insight. They just read a couple of paragraphs and they can decide whether the defendant was guilty, whether it was a terrorist incident or what the sentence should be. What would the police who have extensively examined the facts, or juries who have spent days, weeks or months hearing the evidence, know about it?

Of course even juries are not as well suited to make judgements as xoggoth. Rolph Harris? We like old Rolphy, so he was innocent of all charges! Transfer the charges to some ghastly lefty person - Vince Cable, he'll do! Hang 'im.

Demons under the bed

Grabbed a couple of boxes of old horror stories on Freecycle a couple of days ago. Brill! The old ones were the best, modern horror, like nearly everything modern, (yeh, I'm a fossilised old fart!) are boring crap.

Bunged the boxes under my bed and my loony lady friend said it was a bad idea due to the "negative vibrations". Feng Shui is mostly nonsense in my opinion. It is logical enough to think that appearance of things can affect our mood or that movement, sounds, smells or light can affect our sleep, but some old horror books in plastic cases? Bollox! What can they possibly emit that could affect us?

Hmmmm. Dunno though. She's got me worried now. Is it possible that all those fictional ghosts, monsters, demons, zombies etc. could slip out from between the pages and start infesting my bedroom?

Or maybe the ghost of the previous owner? The lady who gave them to me said they belonged to her late mother who was an avid horror fan. She also said that a number of people wanted them but she chose me because her Irish mother would have preferred they went to someone of Irish ancestry, presumably she inferred mine from my email.

Blogs

Whatever happened to them? It isn't just this site that is a desert, very few get many visitors these days, hardly suprising few bother with them much anymore. It's the same with once popular forums like Contractor UK, even the more "popular" posts go for hours between comments.

I suppose it's because all this Facebook, Instagram and Twitter crap have taken over. Once people posted longish articles now it's just a couple of sentences or a picture with a caption. Whereas we used to have proper arguments now it's just abuse.

Makes you wonder where the world is going.

Me wall, cats and stuff

Coming on very slowly as having enormous trouble getting the bits and, mainly of course, I can't be arsed with it. Still, have to say it looks a lot nicer with son's GF's cat sitting on the pillar. Can't expect it to sit there forever but maybe when it snuffs it, the GF wil let me stuff it and cover it with some waterproof varnish.

Not out of keeping with my macabre nature, got a collection of deer and sheep skulls down the garden. Things like that are quite decorative, it is a shame they don't put bones of famous people up for auction. It would amuse me up no end to sit on my patio with a vodka and sneer at Ken Clarke's skull on my wall pillar.

Preparing for xoggoth world dictatorship

Often when I go walking in country places there are benches with memorials on, eg: "Dedicated to Henry Whatsisname who loved walking in this place" Nice to be remembered! When I get to be world dictator I am going to make it the law that every single place I have ever been to in my life has a plaque dedicated to the fantastic xoggoth!

Far too many places in the world I haven't been to, of course so that won't be enough. I shall also make sure that every person in the world is reminded of the great xoggoth on a daily basis!

We much prefer nice little animals to crappy people but even other life forms won't be allowed to do what they like without the say so of xoggoth!

I wanna be rich!

Started building a wall between my new oil tank and my bin store new to conform to all the F* fire regulations. Looks crap at mo but think it will be ok when I've finished it.

Went for a walk today down a private road to a nice little Woodland Trust woodland near me and a householder was in process of having a new wall done. Bit more expensive than mine I reckon!

Rarely seen anywhere where the houses are quite so posh! The next picture just shows an average one . Many are barely visible or invisible as they are down long private tracks or have huge wooded gardens Some of them have granny annexes that are bigger than my house!

The most fantastic thing is that the whole road is nestled in hundeds of acres of gorgeous woodland. Don't think I'll ever afford to live there even in one of the smallest places but if I win the lottery (sod, missed it by 45mins again!) that's where I want to go!

PS Hang on though. Saw this at the roadside. Maybe I could afford that!

Oh Marina. Have I finally cracked it this time?

Thought I'd found the solution to being tired/depressed most of the time once before when I started taking some iron tablets. The improvement lasted all of 3 days. Feeling better for about three weeks now, so maybe I have finally cracked it this time. The problem may have been that occasional fag with Mrs Drinky! All the time I felt so crappy mentally I also had problems with constant catarrh and rhinitis that was always much worse when I got up in the morning. I knew it wasn't hay fever as it had no correlation to time of the year.

Wise Google said it can be an allergic reaction to various substances, including occasional cigarette smoke. In turn, allergic reactions can affect the quality of sleep which obviously can cause fatigue, which in turn causes depression.

I am always wary of publicly (ha ha) saying such things in case the Great God Sod wants to make me look an idiot again. We shall see.

PS Only the UK visitors will understand the Marina bit. Old episodes of Last of the Summer Wine are about the only thing worth watching on TV these days. Why do most of them run away from her? Wish I was being pursued by a randy lady like that!

Fucking government/EU rules

I need a 1.5m concrete fence post to ~~stick up my bum~~ to shield my new oil tank while complying with all the FUCKING new safety rules. Easier said than done. Thanks to GDPR EU crap you have to go through a FUCKING popup about cookies/privacy etc. when you visit any website now. There are some crappy websites around with serious errors, one for a major company I just visited gives a not found messages when I try and click on the pdf catalog link. Doesn't stop them finding time to add a whole load of bollux about privacy and security.

But maybe I'm being unfair to the wonderful EU, perhaps they know what they are doing. After all, what could possibly be more effective at increasing our internet security than ensuring that people give up visiting websites altogether!

Quick crap

Only had about 20 mins, minus chatting/coffee slurping time, at art group yesterday due to another engagement so did a quick cartoon of a lady there who flogs us eggs.

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The Reunion

Ah get on with it!

Must get back to farting around on this load of crap that almost nobody ever reads.

Need to escape from the cats anyway. Son's GF has moved in with two of the little buggers. Well behaved as cats go, no crap on the sofa yet, but not sure I want miouwing outside my bedroom door first thing in the morning Made the mistake of letting it in once to stop it scratching the carpet, thinking it wanted to sit on the windowsill as usual, but it came onto my bed and starting nuzzling me and licking my face and rubbing itself all over me. Had it not been neutered I would have been afraid for my virginity!

Pity they can't make pets more useful, if they had little battery powered vaccuum cleaners stuck to their bellies, I wouldn't have to hoover.

Ex Crete

An appropriate title. Got back from holiday in Northern Crete a couple of days ago. What a shithole! Crowds of people, beaches covered in sunbeds, masses of shops and cafes, constant loud music. Ok, fairly typical S Europe holiday destination, I know. I don't mind that as long as I can leave the loony lady to it and escape into the country but in Crete all the nearest "country", if you can call grey scrubby crap covered in olive trees that, was fenced off and there were almost no footpaths. I shall certainly do a lot more research before booking the next holiday.

Makes you appreciate Britain's wonderful variety of scenery. We just need a greatly reduced population and it would be heaven. How do you bring back the black death?

Why is my "art" so sexually fluid?

I obviously have a bunch of poofy paintbrushes. At last art group session I was painting a young woman and it ended up looking like a bloke. Started painting an oldish man today and somehow it ended up looking like a woman. Too much eyelash, lips too red etc. In the end I decided to change it into a zombie. That's the good thing about zombies, they never look gay!

Hmm. Dunno though.

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Haven't We Been here Before?

Bah! You LGBT lot have it easy

Us blokes who prefer to bonk woman, even when they're as handsome as xoggoth, usually have to work hard to get our way. Not too many women want to have sex straight away with every bloke they meet, we are expected to charm them, date them for weeks, take them out for expensive meals etc. etc before we stand a chance. Gay blokes, on the other hand, just have to go to a gay sauna or similar and bingo, arse all sorted!

Another problem for straight blokes is finding any clothes to wear. Went to two towns today looking for a few things for my holiday next week. Many clothes stores cater for women only. Those that cater for both sexes have umpteen aisles of lady's stuff and a little corner with men's stuff and they all sell exactly the same crap. Want a long-sleeved T shirt or an informal jacket that doesn't look like an anorak? No chance.

Before my next holiday I am definitely going to have a sex change operation and dose myself up on estrogen. Then I might have a bit more choice in my wardrobe.

Cor! Don't I look lovely!

Age and authors again

A few posts back I mentioned how a novel unrealistically described the feelings of a depressed bloke in poetic and lyrical fashion. Have been reading a much better book for the book club this time, Death's Disciple by James Whitworth, about a series of murders by somebody obsessed with Dracula, much more my kind of story. Whitworth also has a better grasp of how such people think:

And now I have nothing. No drive, no goals, nothing interests me. The only time I am ever animated is when I'm shouting at the television or complaining about some fool's driving.

Sounds so familiar! Not just me either. (Eh teeth?)

Life without broadband

A neighbour backed her car into the telegraph pole over the road and tore out our phone line, so without broadband for 6 days. Not into Facebook, Twitter and similar crap but still found it hard to live without the internet. I think I'll just check my emails, oh, hang on, not got internet! I want to print a map for my next walk, or I'm doing summit technical and need a bit of code, or want to look at the online news or a forum, or want to watch something on catchup TV, oh hang on, not got internet! Sod it!

Opened a browser and a router fault page came up with a link "try to fix the problem". I clicked on that but it didn't the pole back to the vertical or put new cables in! Crap software Microsoft!

PS SEXIST COMMENT: Yes! A woman driver!

Today's moans

Started watching a zombie film the other night but soon gave up as all the zombies looked far too fresh! I like my zombies rotted! If they ain't rotted they ain't true zombies!

Canned laughter! Don't you just hate it? You can be watching a sitcom in which the characters are outside or in a small car and yet this huge hidden audience is guffawing away at even the most unfunny predictable bits.

PS On the other hand, couldn't we be encouraged to conduct our lives better if everything we did was subject to scrutiny from a huge audience who would make their opinions known? It should be possible with modern technology, we just need to be mounted with miniature cameras, microphones, video screens and speakers. Everthing we said and did would be live streamed to the internet and those watching would be able to express their opinions on it.

Every solution has its problems

Brian is a keen DIY enthusiast but his little workshop has some issues....

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Coming Back

PS And how come, given the relatively high percentage of people who snuff it sitting on the loo, there are no haunted bogs?

When did the UK become such a crappy straight laced place?

Just one example, a massage parlour that was stripped of its licence after being accused of offering "red light services"

WTF? It used to be the case that, unless it specifically excluded such things in its adverts, any bloke visiting a massage parlour would be offered "extras". The police knew and never did anything about it. At one time lots of people used to go to "dogging sites" too, now anywhere suitable for such things is monitored and any car parks are closed early.

The UK is turning into a f* nunnery!

Update: Maybe I spoke too soon on this one. Link here

Police are choosing to allow brothels to operate providing they create a safe environment for women, one former detective - now a brothel owner - has told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme.

Democracy that suits them

The usual suspects keep calling for a public vote on the final Brexit deal between the UK and the European Union. Well, we do live in a democracy so I'm not against the idea, just as long as the question respects every citizens' rights to decide. This should be the question on the ballot paper:

Having considered the final deal between the UK and the EU do you wish to:
1 Accept the deal ?
2 Reject the deal and remain in the EU ?
3 Reject the deal and leave the EU?

What's that you say, pro-EU "democrats" ? You only want the first two questions? Well, there's a surprise!

A human's worth is subjective

Following a petition, a council has decided to create a safe buffer zone outside an abortion clinic to prevent women being harassed by religious nutcases. Excellent! Birth or abortion - it should be entirely a woman's decision. There is no soul. A foetus with little or no brain development is no more a human being than a slice of elbow.

Does a human life have any intrinsic value? Not in my opinion. Maybe there is a meaning to life in general, evolution is one observable thing that may suggest there is some grand purpose behind it all, but the lives of individual creatures start and end pretty much at random. Maybe they serve that grand purpose but their individual value is negligible, they are like pebbles in a stone wall. If there is a god, there is no evidence that he gives a shit about any of us personally.

Does human life have any value at all? Subjectively, of course it does, because we matter to ourselves and, by association, so do others who share and contribute to our happiness. "Do as you would be done by" pretty well sums it up, we don't need tens of thousands of pages of philosophy and we certainly don't need the bollux of holy scriptures. Who needs the ten commandments when we have the instincts and feelings that nature has given us? We already know that being robbed or hurt or cuckolded makes us unhappy.

The only meaningful measure of human value is what we contribute to life. Those whose net contribution is wholly negative have no value at all. Like that piece of shit burglar who got stabbed.

The better the author, the worse some books get

Was ~~pursuaded~~ pressured by a lady I know to join her book club. Big mistake really, who wants to read a book chosen by others? Book clubs are for ladies!

Hate this one, The Eyrie by Tim Winton. Not finished it yet but keep reading another chapter to see if it improves, it never does. So far, apart from recollections of past events in vague form, it's largely event free, it is all about the feelings of "a divorced, unemployed and disgraced" individual who drinks, takes pills and wanders about feeling sorry for himself.

Winton is not a crap author and that's the problem! He's very lyrical, the character's feelings and memories are expressed in great detail with no repetition and that's why it's so unrealistic! People who are depressed don't go around looking at the world, fantasising of what their life should be in imaginative and poetic terms! On the contrary, they are more likely to be devoid of imagination, to be uninterested in the outside world, to think the same repetitive and negative thoughts over and over. Imagination and perception are the prerogative of the normal.

Just looking at one page of my cheap old Kindle, this chap misses his father's gigantic presence, feels that he models himself on memory, no longer feels there is a grand striding towards justice and equality and is in a new managerial dispensation where change was incremental or purely notional, big gestures were extinct and, even on Youtube, messianic figures rose and evaporated in hours. Pardon? Say again?

Here's my more realistic book about the life and thoughts of a failure: "Right, another vodka. What do do? Fuck knows! Back to bed. Flick the news first. More crap. Who cares? What a load of shit. Fucking bastards! Bollox to the lot of 'em! Shoot em all! Maybe I should... Ah bollox! What's the point? Where's the vodka? Need a wank....." Continue in almost identical vein for another 200 pages.

Right, it's always our fault

Sure I'm not the only person to get pissed off with the PC slant on many issues.

Actually, it's worse than that, it's a sort of inverted racism. According to the PC dream world, migrants leave behind any cultural problems as soon as they cross the border. High crime, organised crime, corruption, low economic performance, beliefs and practices that are incompatible with Western laws and ideals, all gone. If they don't succeed it's down to our racism, every problem within an ethnic group is our fault. Why does forced marriage or FGM happen in the UK? According to the lefty press it's because we are not doing enough to tackle these issues. Any suggestion that stricter immigration controls could have avoided having these problems in the first place is deemed racist.

It's the same with the rise in violence in London, largely due to gang killings by black youths. It's because white affluent cocaine users are driving demand or because we not investing enough taxpayers' money to improve the prospects of black kids although, when you compare the amounts spent on schooling per pupil in high ethnic areas compared to the national average, that claim is dubious. They blame a policy of austerity meaning kids have less access to allowances, support service or benefits, but surely these cuts affect all of us? If this is all about racism and rejection by white society, how is it you don't get these gang problems among other ethnic groups? Muslims are hardly the most popular group at the moment and yet most South Asian Muslims live in stable families and many run their own businesses. If it's all about poverty, why are there no waves of gang killings in some other very deprived areas like Blackpool?

In 2016 there were 1616 murders in Jamaica. In the UK, with a population nearly 23 times as great, the figure for the same year was 571.

What has that got to do with anything, xoggoth??? Racist!

Let's celebrate somebody important

Went on my volunteer thing at a local nature reserve yesterday expecting to be doing some hard work, clearing and repairing footpaths, removing fallen tree from ponds etc. Unfortunately, the bloke in charge had not been able to contact the council to find what needed doing so we ended up just wandering about clearing litter, including bags of dog poo.

Lots of people get honoured for various things, like Martin Luther King who has been in the news recently on the aniversary of his death. Fair enough, but why haven't I been honoured for my major contributions to the environment? Surely clearing up other people's dog poo is up there with winning civil rights for black Americans? I certainly hope I will be recognised as being among the outstanding world figures when I snuff it.

Story

The Bio Tattoo

Age - bloody hell!

The xoggoth 3r's (Rude, Rant and Rubbish) at left has a Rude content of 0%. A few years ago I would never have gone more than a few posts without fantasising about pervy sex. Now nowt!

F* 'ell! Doesn't that say it all about age! If you aren't obsessed with fat ladies' bumholes or bonking pigs, what's the point of going on?

Politics, AI and video games

Lots of violent video games out there, many seem to involve heros fighting off a zombie or alien invasion. Not into them myself but I might change my mind if there was a tech breakthrough that allowed me to superimpose faces of the people I loath onto those zombies or whatever.

If there was an easy way to change the video I could really enjoy shooting all those utter scumbags. Should be enough people I'd like to kill to mask an entire zombie invasion - Vince Cable, Ken Clarke, Jean-Claude Juncker, Michael O'Leary, Steve Coogan, Gina Miller, Gary Lineker, Richard Branson, Ken Loach, John Bercow, Lily Allen, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, John McDonnell, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tony Blair, ... and that's just the British/European ones that spring to mind, plenty of ghastly Hollywood lefty luvvies I could add to the list, George Clooney, Cher, Michael Sheen, etc.

Yeh! I would be just like those millenials, spend most of my days playing video games. Who knows? If I also spent any spare time looking at Facebook and Twitter, I might get to be as wise and informed about the world as they are!

Once is enough

Apart from adverts, covered a couple of post down, the other things that annoy me on TV are previews and reviews in the news. I can understand that people without the sense to record a program and skip through it may want to see news headlines to decide if they want to watch the whole thing, but do we really need various breaks during the program to tell us, yet again, what's on a bit later? And, even worse, what has already been covered - "Our main news story this evening" Look 'ere! If anyone did not watch the program from the beginning that's their f* problem, don't bore the rest of us!

In real life we get bloody reviews as well. If somebody snuffs it we hear all the details of their life at the funeral, obituaries or in the news, depending on how famous they were. Ah well, at least we don't get previews of their life when they are born. - Yet!

Stories

The Warning

A Personal Therapy

Yeh right! Renationalisation is the answer!

John McDonnell, Labour's Second Loony in Command, says Nationalisation will cost taxpayers 'absolutely nothing' although the actual cost would be at least £176billion or ten per cent of the national debt, maybe even as high as £306 billion. Loony 2 says there is no real cost as the government will own the assets. Hmmm. So if I borrow half a million pounds to buy a second house I won't really owe anything? Doubt the mortage company will see it that way and, more to the point, I would still have to greatly cut back on my standard of living to repay the amount. The government certainly won't be able to take over any foreign owned companies for less than their value. Whether they will rip off savers and British pension funds remains to be seen.

As I've said before, I would have preferred that some public sector organisations, like the CEGB, had stayed in public ownership rather than ending up in foreign hands. I was involved with various contracts for the CEGB and, while salaries there were very high, at least they gave the UK some technological independence. In those days we could build and maintain our own power stations without going cap in hand to the Chinese, French or Germans. But just spending vast amounts of taxpayers' money on renationalisation is not miraculously going to restore that independence. The lack of technical prowess in the UK is a much more fundamental problem that involves a whole range of issues like poor education, excessive welfare and an over reliance on cheap imported labour that benefits numerous low value, low tech. businesses that we really don't need. Some of the denationalisation has also worked fine, The Post Office and what is now BT are efficient and profitable British owned industries that compete in the private sector. What would be the point of renationalising those?

There may also be a case for some core companies, in building for example, being in public ownership so that they can deal with normal demands and have the expertise to control larger projects that need to be outsourced. But it makes no sense to bring so much into public ownership that the employees are going to be sitting twiddling their thumbs in between big projects. That is the obvious advantage about the free market economy, we only need to pay for what is actually being done.

The main problem with public ownership is that it is notoriously inefficient because the managers don't have to watch the books closely. Private sector companies have to be careful that they make a profit and can pay back any loans or they will go out of business. In the public sector it matters less because the taxpayer is always there to provide any extra funding. In my previous occupations it was usual to raise the quote of any project for a public sector department because we knew there would be extra costs involved in dealing with unplanned changes due to ill thought out plans. Not to mention ridiculous wastes of money - on one project for a Trident submarine training simulator the main control had to be made of the same very expensive Titanium as the real thing although it made no difference to the training value. In the public sector people are paid more for the same jobs, have index linked pensions, are practically unsackable and there is less connection between ability and salary. Then we have the powerful public sector unions that are going to get even more power if Loony 1 & 2 get their way. Look at those "inefficient" train and tube companies, so many of the problems are caused by all the strikes by ASLEF and the RMT.

The recent collapse of Carillion has fuelled the idiocy of calls for nationalisation. So what would have happened differently if Carillion had been part of a public sector organisation? It is highly unlikely there would have been any greater efficiency or that financial scrutiny would have been better. Sure, it would not have collapsed but the the taxpayer would have just ended up paying more to fill the gulf in the finances!

Soon you'll be an advert

I only tend to listen to the radio when I'm driving or relaxing in my little greenhouse. It's relaxing until the fucking adverts come on anyway! As soon as you hear the word "Next" you know you are going to get 5 minutes of crap about Plusnet, Trust a Trader dot com, Vonage or some other company whose services I am not remotely interested in. You would think a BBC channel would be the solution but the DJs spend so much time drivelling about trivial crap, I'd sooner put up with adverts.

Online adverts are a pain in the arse too. It's fair enough that free services should make money through advertising as long as they are not over intrusive but some ads make the page load slowly and you get annoying popups. Links can be highly dubious too, some of these ad companies are not much better than malware. Hardly surprising people use ad blockers.

One day there may be no escape. It's going to happen that the government will start micro-chipping us from birth so it can monitor our thoughts. I'm sure they won't be able to resist making some money by giving big companies access to our brains.

Enough ranting! Says the moon

Too grumpy! Let's post some nicer crap in the crap that nobody ever reads. Er, nice, what does that mean? Oh yeh, thanks Google. Erm. Ah yes! It's a blue super moon tonight, blue cos it's 2nd full moon in month and super cos' it's at closest approach to earth, so appears bigger. And it's a clear night, so got a good view of it. Just took a photo. Hmmm. Looks much like any other full moon to me and the photo was pretty fuzzy. Using flash didn't seem to help, don't know why.

Let's try again. Ah that's better! A proper super moon. Maybe it will save us from the looming geomagnetic reversal.

Who puts these twits in charge?

Today's total idiot is Britain's Road policing chief who has called for motorists to be penalised for going 1mph over the speed limit!

How F* ludicrous! 1 mph over 70 mph is 1.4%. Does it not occur to him that speedometers, and probably speed cameras, may not be that accurate! This could result in huge numbers of motorists who intended to keep to the speed limit being penalised and, possibly, huge numbers who actually did being penalised as well! Another problem is that most speed indicators are dial types and a quick glance might not be enough to ensure you are observing the limit. Drivers nervously checking their speedometers all the time are likely to have more accidents, not less.

Maybe he thinks we should spend billions upgrading all cars and speed cameras to the required visibility and accuracy and millions more every year doing checks on them. He's probably a Corybn supporter. The magic money tree should be the answer!

And why does he think that a legal limit of x mph is the right balance between safety and the need for drivers to travel and maintain our economy? When the current speed limits were defined, they presumably took account of the necessary allowances to allow for innacuracies in speedometers. He's not just a F* idiot, he's probably got OCD.

Update: A leading lawyer make same points as above. I rest my case m'lud.

A deluded man and the deluded people who support him

A subject that appears in the news a lot these days is homelessness. Hardly surprisingly, fantasist Germy Corbyn plans to solve this problem by providing them all with homes. As usual, they will get lush, publicly-funded properties while low paid people who just manage to support themselves live in poor quality rented properties. More destruction of incentive that will drive the percentage of welfare dependents higher still. If you were a low paid worker who could get a higher standard of living by not working at all, would you bother to keep working? Not sure I would.

Wonderful sounding pledges are easy to make when you're in opposition, when you don't have to worry about what other services will have to be cut to or how much more tax ordinary people will have to find to pay for them. Oh, of course, tax the rich Germy! Trouble is, the wonderful globalism that the leftists embrace pretty much makes that impossible. The rich and the international companies are just going to fuck off elsewhere where they can keep their profits.

Venezuela, here we come. This is the country whose Socialist policies Corbyn is such a fan of, where working class people do not have enough to eat, where human rights are being violated, whose President is accused of purging rivals to consolidate his own power.

This is how every single Communist/extreme socialist regime throughout history has turned out. Wake up Corbyn supporters before it's too late!

The unmentionable cause of so many problems

And why is homelessness rising so much? Here comes that big elephant in the room we are not supposed to mention - immigration!

Statistics show that 52% of rough sleepers in London are foreign citizens. Another fairly recent report, in the lefty Independent, puts the figure even higher, at almost 60%. And is the increase in rough sleeping by British nationals unrelated to immigration, given that it places huge pressures on lower cost rented housing and makes it more expensive? Another report by the lefty Guardian shows there has been a huge increase in the population of London, mostly driven by immigration, that has caused the price of housing to rocket.

It is a PC idiocy that mentioning every real adverse effect of mass immigration is denounced as racism - the shortage of school places is nothing to do with immigration even though English is not the first language in 1 in 9 of them, the increasing congestion on roads and public transport in the UK is nothing to do with immigration even though 14% of the UK population is foreign born . Shortage of housing, pressures on the NHS and prison system, etc. - what a funny coincidence all of these things have become such a problem at exactly the same time as a greatly increased population due to mass migration to the UK!

Many think that the problem will be sorted by leaving the EU but migration from within the EU is actually a lot less than migration from outside it and, frankly, Poles are much more of an asset than those from some Commonealth countries. What we really need is a national government with some grasp of reality that makes British citizens, of whatever ethnicity, their first priority.

News about Fake News is fake

Sure fake news is nothing new. I expect Ug, leader of the Ug trube 50 million years ago, was handing out fake stone carvings accusing his arch rival Ug of all sorts of unsavoury things. Lying in one's own interests is part of human nature.

Actually it's probably not just humans. I daresay scientific research will soon emerge showing that, when bees wiggle their bottoms to guide others in the nest to food, they will deliberately wiggle their bottoms the wrong way so that bees with different political agendas go in the wrong direction.

Look at this research here. Funny how the Labour-supporting bees bees marked with red and the Green Party bees marked with green are going to different places. There are clearly no Tory Bees (marked with blue) in this nest but if there were they would probably go to another different place. Who says political division is a human failing?

What do we do with dead people?

It's incredibly expensive to get buried these days, so few places available. Why is the government so obsessed with building new homes for the living and ignoring this issue? We need some solutions before the "ageing population crisis" becomes a "decaying population crisis". Cremation is hardly environmentally friendly with all the energy it wastes. Lots of people donate their bodies to research or for surgical training but, according to something I read on a forum earlier, (I can't be arsed to check obviously) more are donated than are actually needed and they still have to be disposed of afterwards.

Maybe we should legalise cannibalism. There is a risk of transmitting disease but surely that could be prevented by proper pre-cooking or soaking the corses in chlorine, US style. Maybe we could also make better use of corpses before they go to the butcher by legalising necrophile brothels. All those religious sorts who think sex is sinful could vent their frustrated desires on them instead of kids.

PS Yes I'm in a bad mood! Missed having use of my little van and having to stay in all day!

Virtual world needed ASAP

Got a problem with my little van and the garage can't fix it until Thursday. Not having your own transport is a major problem when you live in an out of the way village with almost bugger all in the way of public transport. Buses from here only go to two towns and only every two hours during most of the day. If I went by bus to a meeting I want to go to tomorrow, I'd have to hang around beforehand for over an hour and a half. To get to something I want to go to on Thursday would take over an hour unless I use a taxi, costing £30-£40 for the round trip. I can see how the old chap next door feels now he's lost his licence. Must be awful being old or disabled in a place like this.

Remote villages are very limiting places even if you know a lot of people in them. There's are some people here who rarely seem to stray outside it and seem content. You see them whenever you go to the village club or pub, whatever the day of the week or time of the day you go, but I don't think I could be content with spending my non-home time drinking and smoking fags in the same place. I like my solitary walks, my walking groups, writer's club, art group, canoing etc. plus meeting my small collection of wierd ladies.

Maybe technology will make things easier. A virtual reality device, like the holodeck in Star Treck, would be great. I could just switch it on and do whatever I wanted, fly to the moon, go deep sea diving, visit the Sidney Opera house etc. etc. without getting out of my chair, Bring it on!

PS In the meantime I will just have to sit around for two days twiddling my thumbs and talking to my little puppet parrot.

Partial recall

Even when we get old, we never totally forget things, all the memories are in there somewhere, it's just retreiving them that is the problem. The process is very hit and miss, sometimes you can't think of a name and another time its just pops into your head.

A topic for the story at my writer's group is Bog Man. Was trying to think of a story based on that title while walking today (something a bit more exciting than a story about a chap cleaning lavatories) and a Mad Magazine item that I'd read decades ago popped into my head, about a creature in a swamp made of mud and rubbish. Think it's the one on this page here from 1973.

Why did they have to stop publishing Mad magazine in the UK? Best silly magazine ever, funnier than Viz which is the nearest you can get in the UK today, even though not as rude.

PS Although it looks as if it's turned into lefty bollux these days with most of the recent stuff attackingTrump. I want good old MM silly crap, not politics of any sort. If it was still published in the UK it would probably be banging on about Brexit.

Racism or reality?

It's a bad idea for a major politician like Trump, assuming he actually did, to use an expression like "shithole nations". It hands the Liberal opposition more ammunition so they can bounce up and down crying "racist" without having to address real issues.

But is it truly a racist expression anyway? It is not a slur on any race as such but a comment on the nature of many third world countries. We should not be in denial of the appalling problems many have with high crime, corruption, dismal economic performance, beliefs that are not in accord with our own core principles and some awful cultural practices that are not in accord with our laws.

It isn't about race as such but the state of development of these nations, you would have found many of these same problems back in Victorian England. If race was the main issue then all African and Carribean nations would be much the same, all South Asian nations would be much the same, all Eastern nations would be be much the same but they are not. In reality there are huge differences between the performances and development of nations with similar ethnic makeup.

In the context of immigration, it is irrefutable that the performance of migrants generally reflect that of the nations and sometimes the places in those nation that they come from. Compare the performances in the UK of those from China with those from the likes of Vietnam, from India with those from Bangladesh, from African nations like Nigeria with those from Somalia.

Forget about calling racism, let's have a little realism. There is nothing that can be less racist than acting impartially on facts and statistics and that is what we should be doing.

In deciding whether we should encourage or restrict immigration from any nation let's first look at the performances of past migrants from those nations and decide if it's a good idea to keep on doing it without much more rigourous screening of individuals.
Let's have far stricter controls so that we only admit those whose likely contribution significantly outweighs any problems caused by increasing population. We should not be having to deal with infectious diseases like HIV or other serious health problems, criminality, abhorrent cultural practices like FGM or forced marriage, or low performers who are within a million miles of needing welfare or social housing.
Let's not be in denial about how the cultures of of some countries differ from our own and ensure that would be migrants understand our laws, embrace our core principles and are prepared to integrate to a reasonable degree - a diverse society is a divided society.

A fact that the liberal left never grasp is that it is the very real problems caused by failure to exercise proper controls on immigration that is driving the rise of the far right. If I have to choose between them and the "racists" like Trump I will go for the latter. In the long term it is policies of those like him, people who grasp the realities of human nature and will tackle those real problems, that will reduce real racism.

A Retraction

After liberalising myself with a glass of vodka I have seen the error of my ways, how terribly unfair my last post was to "people with people with health conditions or impairments". Of course disabled people, sorry, people with disabilities, should be able to go to war in any role. They would do us proud. How difficult would it be to provide suitably adapted military facilities? I bet wheelchair access to all of our submarines would only cost a few billions.

Submarine by Björn Hamels Hfodf 11:55, 10 January 2007 (UTC). (Photo shot at SAIL Amsterdam 2005.) [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Ta Björn! Couldn't be arsed to draw a cartoon sub!

How much dafter will our society get?

I suppose we should be grateful that the defence secretary has blocked a change to the Army slogan "Be The Best" because it was "dated, elitist and non-inclusive". Only after they has spent over half a million of taxpayers' money though. All for trying to empower disabled, old or other less able people but we would hardly win a war by pretending they are as suitable to be soldiers as fit young men. Let's have a little bit of sense!

More PC lunacy

It seems that the government may be forced to exclude foreign students from official immigration figures. This is quite idiotic as many students will be here for 3 or more years and clearly match the definition of immigrant.

We should not be considering whether or not any particular group of migrants do overstay or what their value is before counting them. The whole point of monitoring is to ensure that we have an accurate assessment of the consequences of immigration. Only when we have accurate figures can we make any proper judgement on overall value, balancing any addition to the GDP against the pressures on our society. Excluding any particular group from the statistics inevitably makes them meaningless. What if there is a big rise in student overstayers? It would not be detected. And, if it is actually true that the majority of students do not overstay, why would anyone be concerned about including them in net migration figures anyway?

The left, and businesses leaders who act solely in their interest of their own company's profits, have no grasp of what facts and statistics are for. They are just out to mislead the rest of us.

PS There's a distinct ratty smelll here. Are the claims that most students return actually true? Past government statistics (no longer online) have stated that up to 51% from some countries overstay for 5 years. Given the big rise in illegal immigration from poorer countries in recent years it would be highly surprising if more people from those same countries, those who are among the lowest performers in the UK, are not using the student route to gain access. We need accurate numbers but, once we have those, it is the quality and usefullness of any overstayers that we need to consider.

Hoorah for Old Bloke

He's still going on his constant walks back and forth to town. This one taken on my only trip to town this past week. Also saw him in town on my only trip there the previous week. Grubbiest cap I've ever seen!

PS It is so unusual to keep seeing the same person over and over I did a Google to see if anyone else locally had spotted him. Nowt reported. Maybe he's a road ghost.

PPS Ah! Maybe it's Tom Cruise. He lives nearby.

Space Aliens

Scientists may have awoken an ‘alien intelligence’ inside asteroid ‘Ouamuamua apparently. Sounds like one of those daft ideas but you can't rule it out.

Given the vast numbers of stars out there, intelligent life is highly probable as there is no reason to suppose there is anything special about our planet. However, the existence of intelligent aliens does not mean that they are likely to be searching our solar system any time soon for rather obvious reasons. Could they really travel vast numbers of light years? There is no evidence that warp speed, as in the Star Trek movies, is actually possible and, if not, could any biological creature survive in space for decades, hundreds or even thousands of years? Would any of them want to even if they could? If all parts of the universe came into being at about the same time, is there any reason to suppose that aliens would be significantly more advanced than us?

If an alien invasion ever does happen, we tend to agree with Stephen Hawking (someone almost as intelligent as we at bloggoth) that it may not be good news. Acting in the interests of one's self and one's own species is how nature works. They may see us as we see rats and wipe us out.

But mankind also has a better side, many people love animals, they try to protect wildlife and pamper their pets like crazy. Who knows? An alien invasion could be great for some of us! We wouldn't have to go to work, we'd get free food and medical care, little treats, get taken for walkies twice a day and spend the rest curled up on the sofa or having our tummies tickled. Bring it on!

Scumbag Police

Damian Green should be sacked for being a liar but he's hardly the only politician to match that description and it isn't as though he lied about anything that is really of great importance to the average citizen. Misleading promises during elections, or false or selective claims about the effects of government policies are things that affect us a lot more.

The more important problem is the actions of those policemen. Confidence in the police is already low for so many reasons, including their recent failures to provide information relating to rape cases. Who the hell is going to trust them if they start revealing information to the press about things that are not illegal or pertinent to an investigation? Especially when it is deliberate and appears to be motivated by malice as in this case.

I doubt it will happen but I would like to see these scumbags stripped of their lavish public sector police pensions and ending up on the streets.

Odd

As I'm sure I've said before, BCBATC, coincidences make themselves in our minds, we seize on the few events that appear to be linked and ignore the vastly greater numbers that aren't. Still, must admit that sometimes (usually after a vodka or two) I doubt my own logic.

Just before going on holiday to Malta last week I was watching Tony Robinson's "Hidden Britain by Drone" in which he explored Imber, a village on Salisbury plain that was commandeered by the military during WW2 to serve as a training ground. The villagers were promised they could return when the war was over but they were never allowed back. F* governments! Never trust the bastards! On the first evening in the hotel I was having a look round their little shop and the first paperback I opened at random was Neil Spring's The Hidden Village a creepy ghost novel set in Imber.

BCBATC = But Can't Be Arsed To Check

PS Neil Spring has a recent book called The Watchers. Wondered if he'd plagiarised one of my xoggoth Tales. No "The" darn it, so I can't sue him.

Wierd Perves

The xoggoth obsession with fat ladys' bumoles is a bit pervy but it's almost normal by comparison with some. Manga porn, basically pornographic cartoons, is a favourite with some people, especially the Japanese. Hmmm. Marge Simpson or Lois Griffin are ok I suppose, but not really sure I could get turned on by them. ***Note

Now the distinction between real and Manga porn is getting a bit blurred with news that AI could be used to create whatever sort of porn people want.

Could be interesting I suppose. Soon you will probably be able to buy an 18+ version of the Amazon Echo and say "Sexalexa. Make me an explicit porn film of a giant zombie octupus being shagged by six multi-sexual Brontosauruses". The big plus side of course is that, if all men only become turned on by really wierd stuff like that, it will cause a very welcome reduction in the human population.

***Note: Miss Piggy from the Muppets is a different matter of course. Cor! She is REALLY hot!

Topic: Wierd Perves Comment here. Comments so far: 0

YouTube up yer bum

For the two non-existent readers of bloggoth, here's a page with links to xoggoth's favourite YouTube music. Pages get blocked on Youtube for various reasons and you may get a "not available - sorry about that" message. If so, just use the search link. There are nearly always other pages on there with the same song.

Quantum Theory TV Remote needed

Reading news headlines on BBC text service while slurping breakfast this morning as usual. Pity the text doesn't cover the whole screen like the old Ceefax service did and I have to put up with TV crap like the Andrew Marr Show. Gina Miller, who keeps trying to block Brexit, was on this morning.

The Quantum Theory says that we cannot observe things without affecting them. People on TV are being observed by millions so the effect must be much greater. Surely it should be possible to have a kill button on our remotes. If one person is currently on screen and enough people press the button, their head explodes! Great!

Gina Miller, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable, Jean-Claude Juncker... Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!...

Spending our money

I have always wanted out of the EU whatever the initial economic costs. The main reasons were:

The lack of democracy - never knowing what is going to be inflicted on us next to suit the grand plans of zealots like Juncker and the selfish interests of other nations.
The mass influx of low skilled people who do nothing to increase the wealth of the average UK citizen while driving a huge increase in population that is making the UK a less and less pleasant place to live.
The imposition of laws that are not in the interests of British citizens and tax payers, like those that prevent the removal of foreign terrorists and criminals.

The financial contribution seemed a lesser issue. After a holiday in Malta last week, one of several in recent years to Mediterranean countries, I've changed my mind on that having seen first hand the absurd way that EU funds are lavished on other European nations. In Malta we saw a number of roads, with little traffic compared to the UK, funded by the EU. It was the same in Spain, they have had massive levels of EU investment to build huge new coastal motorways. Now similarly huge amounts are being spent in Eastern Europe.

Why? They are not poverty stricken nations and charitable reasons hardly apply. Some of the places where these magnificant new roads have been built looked better off than some Northern regions of the UK. Even here in the South East, some major roads are in poor condition because the authorities don't have the cash to fix them and pothole damage is commonplace. We also saw EU funded water production facilities in Malta. Roads account for only a part of the money that British taxpayers are handing to other nations. We subsidise trains, research centres, farming, tourism, technology, the list is endless.

There can be a good case for some shared expenditures, to improve tackling of crime and terrorism for example, that will benefit all of us and it is reasonable that nations should contribute according to GDP, but WTF should we be paying for things which, even assuming they are not a waste of money, only benefit other nations and may damage the UK economy by helping them take trade away from us?

Story

A Fate Already Sealed

The Autumn Budget

Gin-Clod Junkheap

Satnav

Brought a Satnav last week. Only tried it once but it seems really good.

I don't think technology like this is used as widely as it should be. Maybe if one could create and save maps of much smaller areas, like a house and garden, it would be really useful for senior citizens who are losing their memory.

PS No I didn't draw her right hand the wrong way round. We never make mistakes. She is suffereing from a rare condition called Senior Hand Reversal.

Chastity

These days "sexual abuse " seems to include a light touch on the leg. Going by that definition, I've been sexually abused three times in about the last three years.. Oh! The trauma! Calling the police now. Or maybe I should leave it for about 15 years.

Maybe we need to protect people by bringing back chastity belts. And add chastity knee pads, chastity hats, chastity shirts , chastity shoes, chastity gloves ...... etc. You get the picture.

Jimmy Zombie

Got no Trick or Treaters again this year, leaving us with a box of chocolates to scoff. Probably parents tell their kids to stay away from our house because they don't like the look of that creepy old bloke.

Halloween is getting rather boring due to lack of variety in the monsters, the vast majority of people dress up as zombies. With so many corpses wandering around eating brains they have stopped being scary. Yet us creepy old blokes still frighten people. We need to bring back the creep factor and I have a great idea for next year! A Jimmy Saville zombie mask! I think it will be really popular.

You want a grasp of reality at the moment? Ask the "far right"

I don't mean the real far right, the loonies who blame everything on the Jews or think that anyone who can't trace their white British ancestry back at least 300 years is not British, I mean the far right with inverted commas, ie anyone who doesn't live in the PC dream world.

Was watching "The Betrayed Girls" on the sexual abuse of young, vulnerable and mostly white girls in Rochdale by most Pakistani men. There had been reports of this in Rochdale and several other towns for many years but, out of political correctness and fear of being seen as racist, our authorities turned a blind eye to it. Even Labour MP Ann Cryer was called a racist by some when she had the guts to speak out. One would think that these idiots had learned their lessons given that this abuse is now an established fact that has resulted in numerous convictions and has been the subject of a BBC program but no, just a couple of months ago a Labour MP was forced to resign from the front bench for mentioning these realities. The only people shown in the BBC program who had any sense were the EDL protesters.

When will these PC idiots ever grasp that it is they who are fuelling the rise of the real far right in the West by refusing to acknowledge and act on real concerns by denouncing anyone, including Labour MPs, as racist for daring to mention them?

A solution to global warming

Using red button to browse news headlines while munching breakfast as usual.

One article in the science section was a UN warning that we are nowhere near meeting our CO2 emission targets to reduce global warming. Another was about how dinosaurs suffered a catastrophic winter after an asteroid hit the Earth, throwing 300 billion tons of sulphur into the atmosphere. Temperatures were below zero for years.

Surely that's the answer to global warming! Just detonate some nuclear missiles loaded with sulphur in the atmosphere every year to cool us down!

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The ramblings of an old git

The world to come

Up the bum

You can't ignore time

More role model stuff

Sounds a bit rude!

Bring back donkeys

How long will these ridiculous denials go on?

Save money

Why not burden monsters?

Sensible chap

Gettin' old

The Begum Thing

The lefty liberal dream world

Main Story

Shortest Horror Story Ever

Time Wasters

Pest Control

Fucking Hypocrites

Personality dysphoria

Mustn't click spam emails

Art group today

Vegans

No need for vaigra

Globular warming and poo sticks

How can anything be different anymore?

Do ghosts have ghosts?

Yeh - I like ghosts and things

Grunt

Bloody books

Right!

Not Little Old Wine drinker me

Is that you?

Old Favourites

Story

Prediction

Evolution

Desirable disabilities

Torture me!

Real life should do that

Missed me!

At least fake news is free

Why are horror films such bollux these days?

Story

Religion - can we switch?

Never too far back!

Peace and love! Sorted! War ends!

Lefty twats

Hmmm

WTF? Going backwards!

Why is the public sector so crap?

Brain test

Farty Arty

Story

Good news

Where to next?

Eeeeh 2 (or is 3, 4, or 200? Forgotten

Eeeeh!

An unusual consistency of loathsomeness

Story

HMRC are vampires

Judgements

Demons under the bed

Blogs

Me wall, cats and stuff

Preparing for xoggoth world dictatorship

I wanna be rich!

Oh Marina. Have I finally cracked it this time?

Fucking government/EU rules

Quick crap

Story

Ah get on with it!

Ex Crete

Why is my "art" so sexually fluid?

Story

Bah! You LGBT lot have it easy

Age and authors again