What Have Those Idiots Done To Google News ?

The new keep-on-scrolling-down-the-page-and-hope-you-see-something-interesting-before-you-die-of-boredom layout is useless. You used to be able to take in a lot of information from the old multi-column layout. I've only used the single-column version for five minutes and I'm hating it already.

Friday Night Music - Six Days On The Road

Not exactly six days, but a week of 9-hour-plus days (plus three hours drive - 700 miles of commuting) might have something to do with my sparse blogging... nice to be home.

Not Dead, Just Sleeping

There is a wee post at Biased-BBC.

The Golden Age That Never Was ...

(right-click to open image in separate window)

And the Plastic Age of the last 30 years.

Note that the great "prosperity" of the Reagan and Clinton years was produced by

a) debt

b) women joining the workforce

I'd hazard a guess that the Thatcher, Major and Blair years would have paralleled this pretty closely.

Anything Going On In NY ?

My son reports that (a/c/t Twitter) there are protests outside the New York Stock Exchange which are not being reported in mainstream media.

Any truth in this?

UPDATE - well, Businessweek seems pretty mainstream to me. Maybe Twitter is just ahead of the MSM - as you'd expect real-time media to be.

Dubbed “#OccupyWallStreet,” the goal of the protest is to get President Barack Obama to establish a commission to end “the influence money has over our representatives in Washington,” according to the website of Adbusters, a group promoting the demonstration. Organizers want participants to “occupy” the area for “a few months,” according to the website.

“People have a right to protest, and if they want to protest, we’ll be happy to make sure they have locations to do it,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Sept. 15 at a press conference. “As long as they do it where other people’s rights are respected, this is the place where people can speak their minds, and that’s what makes New York, New York.”

As the demonstration began this afternoon, as many as 1,000 people congregated in the Chase Manhattan Plaza area and, after speakers with a bullhorn rallied the crowd, broke into groups to discuss the event’s goals. Some participants circulated trays of sliced white and wheat bread while others passed out jars of creamy Skippy peanut butter, and distributed apples, bananas and oranges from shopping carts.

Protesters waved red flags and toted cardboard signs with statements such as “represent the 99%.” Others donned white, mustachioed masks of the anti-authoritarian protagonist from the graphic novel and film “V for Vendetta.”

Sounds pretty much like the usual suspects to me - in the UK there'd probably be more drummers and fewer ukeleles. But I'm not saying they're wrong to protest - a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Atkinson Grimshaw Exhibition

It should really be in Leeds, but anywhere is good news. London Guildhall from Monday :

Over the last forty years, Atkinson Grimshaw's beautiful and evocative paintings of moonlit suburban lanes, gas lit city streets and docksides have emerged as some of the most popular works of the Victorian age. This touring exhibition is the first major show of Grimshaw's work for over thirty years. It includes more than 60 paintings from his earliest Pre-Raphaelite inspired landscapes to the Impressionist style seascapes of his last years. The show also includes drawings, manuscripts and photographs on loan from public and private collections and descendants of the artist.

The Grimshaw site is excellent :

Do You Remember The Days of Slavery

I commented a while back on the radical new "welfare to work" strategies allegedly being pioneered by the travelling community in Gloucestershire, Leicestershire and Derby, which were reportedly capable of transforming homeless alcoholics, one of the more intractable and challenging groups for any social worker, into dedicated Stakhanovite block-paving operatives working up to 14 hours a day.

It looks as though transformative work therapy is being more widely practiced than thought - and with characteristic modesty, the liberal mouthpieces of said community are neglecting the opportunity to more widely publicise alleged achievements which the publicly funded welfare to work agencies such as Atos could only dream about.

I must say this BBC report is very mean-spirited, and seems to show little understanding of modern labour market conditions and radical management styles :

"Twenty-four men suspected of being held against their will have been found during a raid at a travellers' site. Four men and a woman were arrested on suspicion of committing slavery offences in the raid at Greenacre travellers' site, Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, on Sunday. The men, who are English, Polish and Romanian, were found in "filthy and cramped" conditions, police said. Detectives believe some may have been there for up to 15 years.

Those arrested are being held on suspicion of committing offences under the Slavery and Servitude Act 2010. They are being held at police stations across Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. Weapons, drugs and money were also found at the site, police said."

I don't know. There's always someone waiting to trumpet an anti-business agenda - and more often than not it's the BBC.

Class hatred

It's odd. For the last 50 years the middle-class Left has bemoaned the absence of spontaneous working-class political self-organisation.

But when it happens, they suddenly discover how much they hate the working class. The people who get all hot and bothered about people being called "chavs" are the same people who in online debate will mock the grammar, spelling and logic of EDL contributors or interviewees. Say what you like about the publicans who put together this (IMHO amusing) video, they don't pretend to be defenders of working people.

But on the "left" ... from Harpy's "ugly and vile" faces, to the bright boys in the video below, they all seem to be piling in. Can't understand it ... can you ?





(hat-tip - Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph)

Any Techies Out There ?

Apologies for the lack of posts - 12 hour days still taking their toll, and last weekend I did a rare thing for a man of advanced years, lobbed a sleeping bag in the boot and took off for a party in the wilds of Wales, hosted by an old friend from way, way back.

It's all still going to hell in a handcart quite nicely without my running commentary, so what I really want to ask is - any of you built a fanless PC ? In my old age I'm beginning to resent the noise, especially as most of the PCs around the house are basically Web clients, music players and word processors - only a couple do serious work.

Ideally I'd like a fanless motherboard and PSU that can still cope with decent graphics, maybe a TV card, and a couple of full-size hard disks. What I see out there are devices designed to be crammed into as small a footprint as possible, whereas I'm happy for the box to be a decent size - indeed, it should allow for a more powerful processor and motherboard if you have big fat passive coolers and a passively cooled power supply.

Does such a thing exist ?

Wife Imitating Tart, or Tart Imitating Wife ?

I actually think Sally Bercow adds to the gaiety of nations* (and, hopefully, the gaiety of Mr John Bercow), but this one-liner by GeorgeJ in the Telegraph comments shows pretty wit :

"Sally Bercow - a case of tart imitating wife."

* and she has three children.

Quote Of The Day

In a comment on this Damian Thompson piece (discussing the fact that 25% of babies born in England and Wales were to foreign-born mothers) :

If Notting Hill produces its normal quota of stabbings, muggings, drug arrests etc, and not a huge riot, the liberal regime will be like a cock crowing on its pile.

But they won't be emphasising that this wondrous display of diversity needed to be policed by 16,400 officers.

This is about twice the number of British troops in Helmand. It is about half the number of the security forces deployed at the height of the Troubles. It is less than half of the current size of the PSNI, with all the sectarianism that continues there.

It is about the same number of British soldiers deployed in England, Scotland and Wales at any one time during the 18th century; when there was no police force to speak of - and we are told that England was a very riotous place indeed.

If there is no riot then what a triumph of multi-culturalism it will have been.

Now my info is that "only" 10,000-plus officers are being deployed. But I take the general point.

UPDATE - he's got the PSNI bit wrong way round. The PSNI is less than half the size of the force deployed for Notting Hill.

Friday Night Music - "Cold Be My Days In Shipston On Stour"

In 1969, the Bee Gees had split up, and Robin Gibb had retreated to the Warwickshire countryside to get his head together, producing some decidedly "interesting" music.

The LP, "Sing Slowly Sisters" was never released - and these lo-fi cuts seem to be all that I can find - sounding as if it was recorded in a tin can that was simultaneously being whirled round someone's head. A pity, as the title track is really rather lovely.

The Erne From The Coast

The Very Rev Hunter Farquharson, who breeds and shows birds as a hobby, returned to his cottage to find his prize-winning goose Beatrice dead, and a white-tailed sea eagle perched on a fence post nearby. The giant raptor, with a wingspan of up to 8ft, was one of 16 released recently in the east of Scotland as part of a controversial reintroduction programme.

Mr Farquharson, Provost of St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth, said he was "horrified" to find the goose, worth about £300, "ripped to shreds". He went inside to phone the RSPB, a partner in the reintroduction project, but then heard a "terrible noise" as the eagle chased his champion gander Bertie. When he tried to intervene the raptor jumped on his back, tearing his shirt, leaving a 4in wound below his shoulder and cutting his head.

My kids were up on the west coast of Scotland last week and saw a couple of sea eagles. Reminds me of this - T.O. Beachcroft's The Erne From The Coast - a rite-of-passage favourite of school short story anthologies "in elder days before the Fall".

When they saw Harry come towards them they waited, unmoving. They could hardly see at first who or what it was. Harry came up and dropped the bird at his father's feet. His coat was gone. His shirt hung in bloodstained rags about him; one arm was caked in blood; his right eyebrow hung in a loose flap, with the blood still oozing stickily down his cheek.

“Good God!” said Thorburn, catching him by the arm as he reeled.

He led the boy into the kitchen. There they gave him a glass of brandy and sponged him with warm water. There was a deep long wound in his left forearm. His chest was crisscrossed with cuts. The flesh was torn away from his neck where the talons had sunk in. The doctor came. Harry's wounds began to hurt like fire, but he talked excitedly. He was happier than he had ever been in his life. Everybody on the farm came in to see him and to see the eagle's body.

All day his father hung about him, looking into the kitchen every half hour. He said very little, but asked Harry several times how he felt. “Are you aw reet?” he kept saying. Once he took a cup of tea from his wife and carried it across the kitchen in order to give it to Harry with his own hands.

Later in the day old Michael came back, and Harry told him the whole story. Michael turned the bird over. He said it was an erne, a white-tailed sea eagle from the coast.

A Fly On The Wall ....

... passed me the transcript of a conversation between an unnamed UK media consultant and spin-doctor, and an internationally famous financier who's not been getting too good a press lately. I cannot vouch for its authenticity, but make it available, for what it's worth, in the public interest :

"Sir, what can I do to salvage my reputation with the liberal classes ? A bit of fun - I swear she consented - and the Guardian have published 348 articles attacking me! Even after charges are dropped they're still at it, with innuendo about class justice and the rich getting the pleasure while the poor get the blame.

It's getting my wife down - and it's doing my reputation as a Socialist no good either. Some people just don't understand the concept of 'from each according to her abilities, to one according to his needs!'"

"It's 351 articles, actually - another three this morning. Now I can help you - but you may not like what I'm going to suggest."

"Please speak - I will be forever in your debt"

"Unlikely, even with my fees. You want to continue your amours, your peccadillos, your ... er ... bunga-bunga - with whoever takes your fancy and whenever ?"

"Mais oui !"

"Even when the object of your desires is ... shall we say ... a little backward in her response to ... your ardent advances ?"

"We understand each other, m'sieu"

"And you want the Guardian to look steadfastly in the other direction and write nothing, perhaps with the occasional piece accusing your critics of being motivated by racism ?"

"As you say in your country, m'sieu - that will do nicely"

"If you can follow my advice you will never be troubled by the Guardian again. You will be able to do what you like, to whom you like, and they will write nothing. But the course I suggest involves, for you, great personal sacrifice."

"What is it, man - for pity's sake tell me what I should do !"

"You must change your name to something like Youssiff Ibrahim, and move to Greater Manchester"

"Mon Dieu !"

Welcome To England

Comment on this Ed West piece (on moral panic - thanks for the hat-tip, Ed) at the Telegraph :

"From time to time I fly to Stockholm from Manchester. On arriving at Arlanda, I'm greeted by giant posters of Stockholmers saying (in English), "Welcome to my town!" On return to Ringway, I'm greeted by posters warning me not to assault airport staff.

A few months ago I flew to Munich for the first time. On arrival I was greeted by a Bluetooth message from BMW, promoting their cars. Returning to Manchester, I was greeted at luggage reclaim by a giant poster offering me a test for chlamydia."

Breivik Massacre - The Hidden Hand

I'm not a terribly frequent visitor to Lenin's Tomb - the author, unable to emulate his murderous namesake in the real world, compensates by getting very abusive with commenters who stray from the Party line - and, like Neville Chamberlain, I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul.

But, as chance would have it, I was over there a week or two ago, in that short period between the Norway massacre and the UK riots, and was idly browsing his visitor stats - he's obviously a cheapskate like me who won't pay for the full, private version. What sort of people, I wondered, read this stuff - he gets between 3 and 4 thousand hits a day ? A lot of Septics, I noted - getting on for 50% of the traffic and seemingly somewhat biased towards the great universities of the West and East coasts. It figures.

Anyway, I idly followed a link to a site that seemed to be providing a fair few readers to the Tomb on that 6th August. In fairness to him, we can't control who links to us - and as I say when I reciprocate a link, that doesn't constitute an endorsement.

Hmm.

"It appears that Breivik was led on his way by, and probably financed by, that mysterious group that met in London in 2002. He would have been one of a number of 'sleepers' whose legend was prepared for when they were needed (they would also have set up the complicated legal structure to hide the source of financing). That is what authorities should be looking at (but of course won't, as they tend to shy away from real power).

Once you get over the 'lone nut' lie, anybody could have been using Breivik to accomplish their wicked ends. That's when we start to look at motive, and ask the very reasonable question of which group which tends to use covert means and false flag attacks had a big motive to send a violent message to the Norwegian political class at this time. "

Who could these mysterious, wealthy backers be, who might want to send a message to the Norwegians* ?

The commenters are in no doubt at all.

(Top rated) "9/11 and oslo/2011 came out of the same shop"


"There are few readers in the States who will make the connection between Oslo Accords, the assassination of Rabin and the emergence of this Breivik character, who attacks the very capital where it happened, from where the Peace Prize is given, and where the kids on the island were calling for boycott. This looks like an attack on the former broker of a peace process which conceded that Palestinians had rights."


"in all these attacks, there is never a single dead jew" (really ? LT)

"breivik thoroughly zionized. it would be mossad or some other part of jewry."

There's no doubt that if you go far enough round to the left, you end up coming back from the right. On the dark side they're pretty close.

"The point, like the point of the conspiracy behind the fertilizer bombing of the Murrah Bldg. in Oklahoma City, is to terminate anti-immigration, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic right wing nationalism"

Well, if Mossad really did set up the massacre for their own nefarious ends, they've improved their organisation since their last outing to Norway, when they shot dead a perfectly inoffensive Moroccan waiter under the impression that he was the Chief of Operations for the Black September terrorist group.


Still, call me old fashioned or lacking in imagination, but I still can't quite picture Israel setting up the slaughter of scores of kids, and car-bombing the Norwegian PM, in order either to give the UAF a stick to beat the EDL with, to teach those uppity Norwegians which side their bagels are buttered, or to discredit the (generally sober and reasoned) Gates of Vienna website. The means seems wholly disproportionate to the end, for starters - quite apart from the whole 'morality' bit.

But some people obviously can ...







* It transpires that the Norwegians were withdrawing their air contribution from the NATO force in Afghanistan, and that the Labour Party youth section had passed pro-Palestinian resolutions. You learn something new every day.


UPDATE - from one of the comments it seems that gentle irony goes straight past some people...

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man

I've been a fan of the educationist Tony Sewell for quite a long time - ever since he whupped Lee Jasper* in a Guardian education debate back in 2003. He's that rare thing, a black activist who believes that not every problem in the community is caused by racist whitey - that maybe, inter alia, black street and rap culture has a teensy influence on the youth, too - a bit of a UK John McWhorter, in fact.

I was pleased to hear him on R5 this morning, dismissing David Starkey's discussion of Great Enoch as irrelevant but focusing on, and agreeing with, Starkey's claim that white urban youth are taking up (as best they may) the black gangsta culture which has left so many dead on London's streets.

He's in the Mail, too :

"Despite the attempts of some apologists to dress up the looting as a political act against an oppressive Tory establishment, the fact is that the ethos of materialism — or ‘bling’ to use the street term — that pervades urban black youth played a major part in the widespread criminality perpetrated by rioters of all races.

That is why the looters targeted specific stores that are cherished in this culture, such as those selling mobile phones, trainers, sports clothes or widescreen TVs. Let’s face it, there were no reports of the vandals looting bookshops or public libraries.

What motivated the troublemakers was not genuine poverty but rather a raw acquisitiveness that is fuelled by so much in this black-led youth culture, from the imagery in rap videos to the lyrics of hip-hop music. The twin central themes of this world are sex and material possessions... young white and Asian, often middle-class, Britons — anxious for a bit of street cred — adopted the language and clothes of the culture, as Sacha Baron Cohen so mercilessly parodied in his comic creation Ali G, a white teenager from Staines who is desperate to be seen as black. And here, I think, we are getting at what David Starkey wanted to convey.

So prevalent is this ‘gangsta’ culture that, if you get on a bus in London and shut your eyes, you will often not be able to tell the ethnicity of the young people who are speaking, since they all use the tone, phraseology and language patterns of black youths."

Though like everyone else, he gets Starkey base-over-apex about Enoch. What Starkey said was that Enoch was wrong, in that the rivers of blood aren't one race fighting another, but :

"Black and white, unite and loot,
Smash the phone-shop front !"

* Jasper is, according to the now defunct BlacksandJews site "a Jewish-Zionist agent working in the Black Community, a man without honour, morals or common decency". I can't answer for the first part, but as for the second, even a stopped clock ...

BBC Presenters Against The Toffs

Kaye Adams, the BBC broadcaster, has been accused of being unfit to present a top current affairs programme after she tweeted in response to Boris Johnson's suggestion that rioters should face tough punishments, "P*** off back to boarding school, Boris".

Hmm. Obviously a toilet-mouthed working class girl supporting her fellow workers/rioters against the assaults of the fascist state.

The former presenter of Loose Women, the ITV talk show, who presents a popular Radio Scotland show, was on holiday in Tuscany when she made a series of expletive-filled Tweets about London's mayor.

UPDATE - Adams attended St. George's School for Girls in Edinburgh - boarding £5,800 a term! Oh, the hypocrisy!

Hitch Nails It ...

Say to David Cameron that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.

Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.

Yet he is ready to authorise the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on our streets (quite useless, as it happens, against this sort of outbreak) as if we were a Third World despotism.

Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance.

Here is an example of how little Cameron knows about Britain. He says that the criminals of August will face the ‘full force of the law’. What ‘force’?

The great majority of the looters, smashers, burners and muggers have not been arrested and never will be. Our long-enfeebled police were so useless at the start that thousands of crimes were committed with total impunity.

Now we know why they don’t call themselves ‘police forces’ any more. But they aren’t ‘services’ either, for they certainly don’t serve us or do what we want them to do, preferring to arrest us for defending ourselves. The criminals, who are cunning without being intelligent, all know this. They will wait for the next chance.

The loping, smirking, shuffling creeps who eventually appeared before the courts were the ultimate losers – the ones who came late to the looting and who were too slow or too stupid to run before they were put in the bag.

A good point about the arrests. The vanguard of the working class movement aka the first guys to actually smash the shutters down at PC World or Carphone Warehouse, were doing their deeds when the police had lost control of many streets early on Monday evening. I'd imagine the vast majority of these 'early adopters' got away with it (although CCTV may well nail some). An awful lot of arrests seem to have been of stragglers, people late to the party. And Little Miss Perfect, allegedly driving the getaway car with two other persons of pallor, was a lot safer stop-n-search for a couple of lone officers than a car full of Man Dem Crew. Say what you like about grammar schools, but we were taught not to shank the Feds.

Who's "we", Paleface ?

Henry Porter in the Guardian :

'We will wear the great shame of these riots for a very long time. A great shock has been delivered to England's sense of identity blah blah blah wibble ...'

It was interesting to see how quickly the BBC responded to Alex Salmond's taunting and changed the "UK Riots" heading into "English Riots".

I'm not sure the BBC will want to take that laudable principle of localisation too far, though - are you ?






I just get a feeling from today's Guardian and BBC that it's back to normal as far as our rulers are concerned.They're all going to try and understand a little more and condemn a little less, having used up about five years worth of condemnation over the last week. Business As Usual ? We shall see.



UPDATE - a comment :

I am a teacher of English and taught in England for 15 years before emigrating to Australia in 1987.

In 2000, 2006 and 2009, I returned to the U.K. and did Supply Teaching at five secondary schools, two in London, three in towns a few miles outside.

All five had many moments redolent of 'Lord Of The Flies' , but the saddest and most revealing experience occurred at a school in Essex in 2000, as I'd taught at that school for 8 years when I still lived in England, leaving there in 1983. Thus I had not set foot in that school for 17 years and, amazingly, two teachers were still there. Both, so sadly, and independently of each other, while over-joyed to see me, said don't let what you see spoil your happy and positive memories of the school.

I'm not being alarmist - it hadn't just declined, it had plummeted.

I still vividly remember voicing my first concern with a Deputy as when we approached the entrance, which I'd so many times gone through, it was now necessary to enter a code in order to get in. When I said that was worrying, the Deputy disagreed, saying you couldn't have parents just being allowed to enter the school and assault staff. I looked sharply at him when he said this but he didn't notice. It is so obviously nothing more than a short-term, band-aid solution that clearly reveals far more worrying, serious, disturbing and underlying issues, concerns and realities that long-term just simply have to be addressed.

To be honest here, while looking at the scenes with incredulity, especially those from Tottenham and Enfield because these areas are where I was born, raised and still stay in when over over there, I just could not separate what was happening with what I'd experienced and witnessed in those five schools.

In a way, as unbelievable as it all seemed, none were that surprising.