Here Comes The Mirror Man.

Had to laugh today.
The Daily Mirror is officially on the side of the Labour Party.
First they create the myth of the Tory Press, then they release the Mirror onto an unsuspecting populace as the 'counterbalance' to this.
Except the Mirror is real.
They also have the Guardian to the Tories' Telegraph.

Anyway, the Mirror led today with a story of 'bullying'.
Apparently 'bullies' are making a young lad's life 'hell'.

How?

By creating a website that says bad things about him.

Aaargh!Mummy!Mummy! I can't change my homepage, and it's stuck on the bullies' site!

Seriously, though, they are making a move.
They want to get their grubby, censoring, restricting socialist hands on the internet, and they are using the old method of creating a complaint, leading to a perceived 'problem', which has to be 'solved'.
By more bad law.
And so destroying everybodies fun and freedom.

Oh, and the Mirror doesn't show boobies like the other national tabloids.
Because the Mirror is for 'respectable' people, socialists with standards(and rods up their arses).

Lord Preserve Us From Amateurs.

More shit happenings; on Monday as I was passing out of the front door a man ostensibly working for NTL asked me whether I was already with NTL.
I told him I wasn't, and I told him who I am with.

"Do you know, do you have a static IP address ?"

Yeah, right. Why do you want to know sonny?
Talk about waving a red flag.

Anyway, ten minutes later in the car I see a similar youth in a phone box on Dewsbury Road, looking right at me as I come down the road.
Shouldn't he be talking to somebody?
On the phone?
I mean, that ploy is so old it just was bound to make me suspicious.

Anyway, I'm in a town South of Leeds today, driving my truck, and who do I see but Pinky, walking up the road, trying to cover his face.

Coincidence?
Yeah, right.

Maybe he was trying to finger me like the little Judas he is, so some 'chums' can give me trouble.

Well now that I've published, he'd be very, very stupid to proceed.
Suicidal in fact.
Sorry Pinky.
And no, I won't lump you one so that you can lose me my job.

Happening Shit And The Hope Of Control.

So what do we have?
A fairly secret army?
Possibly.
The fellow I used to work for threatens to sue, but he has no money and no case.
I tell him and his flunkies where to go.
I get bitten by a dog. Apparently under control.
At the same time and as these events unfold, I report on them in general and in particular.

My upstairs neighbour of fourteen years suddenly takes to slamming his doors at regular intervals, a psychological trick related to those used against Noriega in the eighties.

It's happening now.
But I'm concentrating and writing now, so it isn't working.

My ankle and hand have healed since I was tripped.
No more troubles there, although my entire collection of route notes was stolen from my truck.

Obviously, it's all random. It just 'happens' to be 'happening' now.
Oh, and e-mails promised to me have failed to materialise. Another oddity.
But I don't care.
I've got a job, for now, I might yet get a better one, and if I don't I 'happen' to be winning anyway.
And if I am fired, I have debt insurance which would mean I was still winning.
But it won't happen, because there are a few good guys left.

Also, the Landlord sent a letter to everyone recently, with contact details for enforcement officers concerned with antisocial behaviour-such as slamming doors.

So maybe I'll get my upstairs pile of crap put out on the street?
Laugh?
I nearly shat!

Now to business; I have just bought the first album by 'Arctic Monkeys', a Yorkshire band that won the Mercury Prize. They are authentic; when I first saw their video on TV without knowing who they were, I swore they were a 1977 Punk band.
One of their songs includes references to '1984', which can't be a bad thing today.

The government, meanwhile, is urging us to squeal on businesses that 'don't pay tax', a heinous crime, publicised by a TV ad campaign which is reminiscent in it's portrayal of 'criminals', of Nazi portrayal of Jews.
The crude, absurdist characterisation of the non-payer as a sneering, swarthy lout, is exactly the same as Nazi propaganda against Jews in the 30s.

And it passes unnoticed.

Fear For Fear's Sake.....

The British really are as immature as they appear to be. It's the stamp of authenticity in the drive to control each other. Except only a few actually control. The others(boyishly or girlishly)bow out of conflict and head for their 'private places', where they spend a moment(but only a moment!)in reflection over the injustice of the world.

Then they go back to being childish.

The British are taught to be children by phrases such as 'schooldays are the best days of your life'.
They are actually the worst, since you are being forcibly confined with a collection of unsavoury people and indoctrinated, for a period roughly equivalent to the penalty for murder, but it is in Britain that the inculcation of moral cowardice has reached the ultimate degree of advancement, with 'respectable' professionals aspiring to the level of football hooligan.

They are taught from the very beginning that growing up requires the abandonment of childish notions of 'integrity' and adopting the level of maturity dictated by 'society'; that society fails to dictate any level is merely taken to show the benevolent liberality of our 'betters', and of course, we are all being left 'enough rope to hang' ourselves with, that is to say, freedom is a trap which we will be tricked out of at any time, so that we, having made our ways, may be shown the error of them.

So the British tend not to suffer from such overt notions of maturity as inform the social climates of other countries, for if all our progress is to be rescinded at the whim of some secret conformity, some wind blowing through the minds of our peers and sweeping us away, what is the point?

So, we must all grit our teeth, and keep our heads down, and drink our beer(until inevitably, that, too is taken away), and bow to the fear we may or may not feel, hobbling ourselves at every opportunity, being like Tim Henman in the Wimbledon of the life of the world.

Essentially, anything goes.
As long as we are not serious.
And, unlike the countries where life is real, fun here is never serious.

Who Do You Trust?

The top picture is of Boris Savinkov.
The bottom is of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Boris was responsible for a lot of trouble in Bolshevik Russia. As a White Russian guerilla he was very effective in coming to the attention of the Bolshevik leadership as a dangerous individual.

Felix Dzerzhinsky created the Cheka, forerunner of the KGB.
In the mid twenties, the USSR was in great danger from the White Russian emigre organisations all over the world, so Dzerzhinsky set up the 'Trust', a fake centre of resistance to Bolshevism, which was designed to draw out the sting of world sympathies and make it appear that something less than total domination existed under the Bolsheviks.

Leading opponents of the regime were drawn in, and in a clever inversion of 'show trials' which punished fake enemies severely, these punished real enemies leniently.

The motive was two-fold; first, to destroy organised opposition by bringing it under Bolshevik control.
The second, to make good public relations with the rest of the world.

The methods?
The methods were subtle.
White leaders were surrounded with clever, plausible operatives who possessed deep loyalty to Bolshevism without ever showing it, and by every psychological means they harnessed the emigres back into the fold, by appealing, for instance, to notions of 'Mother Russia'.

Recalcitrants who were unrepentant were dealt with by the usual methods, such as those used against Trostky in Mexico.

Boris, however, was persuaded. He was sentenced to ten years in prison after returning to Russia in peace.

Some say that the Trust was brought down by Polish Intelligence.
Others say that it was the example of Sidney Reilly, who offered the Bolsheviks too great a temptation, which exposed it.

The fact is, Dzerzhinsky cleared the way of internal opposition and this led to Stalin's endless holocaust. Even after it ended, the Trust led to such public relations triumph that it was not until 1980 that a critical mass in the West recognised Bolshevism's true nature, Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech notwithstanding; after all, when Stalin died he was ablatively rejected to prolong the tyranical reality for another generation.

Much of this was brilliantly portrayed in 'Reilly Ace Of Spies', the 80's TV series.

Savinkov always reminded me of Chris Tame.
But of course, the Libertarian Alliance is not an emigre organisation.

London And The Brown Market.

There always seemed to be just three types of people in London; the Honest Poor, the Honest Rich, and the masses of Crooked Bums.
In suburbs of London are many, many people who live in large, comfortable houses, maybe tatty and run down, but large and comfortable nonetheless.

And nobody knows quite how they got there.

Some did it by honest hard work-such as working twenty years of 16 hour days in the City financial district.
Some inherited.
Some bought cheaply, a long time ago, when sudden windfalls were not unknown, such as breaking a leg at work or being forced out of a heavily protected job.

Some just won't say and nobody knows.They aren't big-time crooks. They are just in the right positions to 'do people a favour', a little at a time for many years.

There are an awful lot of these.
They believe in 'looking out for number one'. Guiltily, of course.
Their children are lawyers or doctors, with greasy palms and the immunity from suspicion that grants their crooked parents the carte-blanche of reflected respectability.

These are the people whose cynicism is beneath detection, chronic and endemic, picking up every lost wallet, screwing every advantage.
Time was, when large areas of London were resistant to these people, the honest working people watching every penny and keeping prices down.
But since the honest (idiot) rich came on the scene, more and more people have joined in the feeding frenzy, jacking up the price of everything from a plastic cup of cafe tea to a renovated council flat.

The honest poor didn't want to join the crooks, but since the crooks took over(in the name of protecting the working man), there are fewer and fewer places to hide.
You can't work in the docks.What's left of them.
All the local industires have been moved out of town in the financial pogrom.

Goods no longer come through London, except to be consumed.

So they sell out and join the 'service' economy, selling rubbish to the moneyed in an orgy of parasitic pretence.
And huge swathes of the urban landscape become the cold, alienated bolt-holes of the people who no longer smile or shake hands or talk, people who have no joy, only the desperation of another day's safety torn from the ant heap.

Society disintegrates.

And in the gaps where people used to meet grow the ambitions of gangsters, while all the while those just above the threshold of desperation block out their senses in a frantic denial of all the wrongness around them, with a seemingly 'macho' assertion that suffering is strength.

Well, it isn't.

It is just suffering, and every minute wasted in evasion of the obvious is lost forever.

I Thought Hunting With Hounds Was Banned.

Dr. Frank Ellis is a former SAS soldier who lectures in Russian and Slavonic studies at Leeds University.

He remarked to a student newspaper that he thought 'black people are intellectually inferior to white people'.

The man is clearly an idiot and a racialist, confusing culture with some sort of genetic excuse.

He is now being persecuted for his beliefs, by student organisations and the fascists of the 'anti-fascist' organisations.
They are calling for him to be sacked.

The administration is bending over to accommodate this bigotry:

The university's secretary, Roger Gair, has said it will be seeking to establish whether the lecturer has breached its equality and diversity policy or undermined its obligations under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000. -Yorkshire Evening Post report

A Yorkshire Evening Post editorial, in the otherwise impressively straight paper, even made the ludicrous statement that 'Universities are no place for controversy'.

So what sort of shit are they for then?

It is shocking that the law allows for the public immolation of individuals without recourse to criminal court, or even much burden of proof.

The state has not only instigated repression; it has delegated and privatised it.
If you want to feel sick, read the University's own report

First Blood.

This is my first picture and second sighting of the new, 'Porsche Cayman' sports coupe, based on the Boxster but with uprated engine, suspension and brakes.

I quite like it.

Mister Chris Tame's obituary has been added to my sidebar.
Apparently it is deficient in details about his admiration of Ayn Rand, which in this miserable, blinkered, head-up-ass apology for a country can only be deliberate.

However, There Were Some Good People In London

Chris Tame, co-founder of the Libertarian Alliance in Britain.













Died 2006.

The London-Machine.

London. Capital of England. Capital of Britain.
London.
Once the biggest city in the world, it sprawls sixty miles across and top to bottom, with a 'gravitational field' effect across huge swathes of Sothern England, turning entire counties into dormitories whose people wouldn't feel safe laying down their heads too close to the Capital.

London, that grandest of grand endeavours, the living, breathing organism of six million inhabitants, with everything needed to keep them alive.

Except, it's running out of water.
Except, the docks that launched it's people across the globe are mostly destroyed.
Except, the spirit of the pioneers has changed so that Red Ken's council spent 400 million (in 1980 money)on keeping the water out. Once every fifty to eighty years, that was.

And of course, the danger is getting worse. So they will have to start again.

Except, the fish market is a shed on waste ground, with no more connection to shipping, and the wrought iron Billingsgate is something else now.
Except, Covent Garden fruit and flower market has moved out many years ago, even though the population has declined, because it couldn't fit into Covent Garden any more.

Still, you know where to go if you want to see a clown.
A licensed clown, that is.

But this is still true; a walk through the streets of London exposes you to the forms and Earthly remains of greatness.

I don't know whether the London of Dickens was real in the 19th Century. I wasn't there. But I think it is real now.
Vast expanses of squalor greet the eye in every direction; whole neighbourhoods of spacious, dignified dwellings covering square miles, are, apart from a few super-rich enclaves, chopped up like corpses among savages, uncared for, shabby, practically falling down, impoverished, shuttered and poorly adapted into the dwellings of creatures that appear(I can't say 'thrive') and stay amongst the decay.
There is a banal uniformity in the houses converted to 'hotels' that struggle to be different.
All around is the death of joy, the lack of happy, bustling families living in bright, well-appointed and well-kept homes.

It is all the more miserable because for most areas (unlike, say, Brick Lane-bargain paradise), the poverty is voluntary and man-made.

It's like all the decent people have died, run away or otherwise disappeared, leaving behind life-forms who never cared enough to give up in the first place and whose sole attempt at the induction of guilt(by way of 'proving' they are still alive) is to feed off each other in a deadly-boring no-life no-death struggle, raising futility into an art form.

And of course, there are people who see even this world as an aspirational opportunity.

Outside the bolted doors, that stone-face the delights and horrors within to the world?
The hunting grounds of the urban savage.

And so concludes this lesson.
Apart from this message from the Mayor.
Sieg Heil baby.

When An Interview Is Just The Job.

Ah, come in. Take a seat, I'll be with you in a moment. While you're waiting.....

.......here is a questionnaire; well, a little technical test really.
Don't worry if it is a little too difficult.
No?
Well, we have a spare computer in the corner-just show us what you can do. We've had quite a few people take our little test.
What? You don't know how? Well, it's a special technique-afterwards you can do all your recursive loop and pointer manipulation stuff, don't you know, but this is what we really need you to be able to do.

or, how about.......

this is how we do it. Yes.
But how would you go about doing this?
Yes, but how?
Yes, but how?
Yes, but how?
(2 hours later)
And how would you do it?


In other words, these bastards don't know how to do their jobs.
They aren't prepared to admit it.
They aren't prepared to pay for it.
So they advertise a 'job'.
With lots of different agencies, so they get to 'interview' loads of talent.
And each time they get a little bit more of what they need(they hope), so that one day they ring up all the agents and tell them that 'some other' candidate got the 'job'.

This has happened to me twice. It is a fact that there are some filthy scum out there who want to rip you off without you ever receiving a wage or even an offer.
Is it any wonder there are people around who want to put the bourgeoisie up against a wall, when this is how the 'vested interests' protect the status quo, by fraud, lies and theft?

Why Did The Turkey Cross The Road?

To prove he wasn't chicken.

One day an Elephant, a Lion and a Chicken were discussing who was 'hardest'.
The elephant said:"When I scream, everybody gets out of my way."
The lion said"That's nothing. When I roar, the whole jungle trembles."
Then the chicken speaks.
"Forget it boys. When I cough, the whole world shits itself."

No,Really...I'm No Daisy!

This message appears courtesy of my 'vintage' 1997 NT4 workstation.
First I downloaded device drivers for the PCI ethernet adapter it inherited, using my main W2k computer..
Installed that.
Connected to my router.
All okay, so I downloaded SP6 for NT.
Installed.
Tested my precious VS97 installation.
All worked.
Downloaded IE6.
Installed.
Re-tested VS97.
Okay.
And now I'm posting from another part of the house on a computer which cost £10, using an OS no longer supported.
And I'm getting LAN speeds.
Not bad eh?

Courtesy of Ethernet.

I've just reconnected to the newtwork through my router, using an Ethernet connection rather than the much-in-demand USB ports.
Anyway, for those who want better quality images of Salamander's beer sign, here it is again.

PS-I meant 'Network', but as I'm pissed as a newt and talking about Salamander beer, I'll leave it.

Call Me Mellow Yellow.

the view from the seat...


in my safe, warm, beery castle.

Yellowcake Ale, 4.8%, brewed by Salamander in Bradford.
A clear, golden beer, reasonable flavour, much maligned; they couldn't sell any due to the off-putting name.
So they fished the pump-label out of the bin, gave it to me as a souvenir, and gave me a free pint from 'out the back', flat and decanted from the (new) barrel, which they are throwing away.
Scandalous waste.
Fritz the dog looks lost for a moment(because he can't lick my ears from down there),
and I get a picture of the long bar.
Cheers!

I Forgot To Take My Camera....

and I didn't notice until I was on the limit, so I didn't drink any of the 'Yellowcake Ale' I found in a pub today.

But I may well go back tomorrow, assuming I don't crash my car.
Two near misses in two days.
And I'm not even driving!

In Nooks And Crannies....

the Underground rumbles on!
Today I decided to take beery consolation in a street called 'Briggate' in Leeds, Yorkshire.
This used to be the main drag in medieval times, with coaching inns positioned in the side alleys leading to private courtyards, once upon a time safely behind the walls of the hamlet.

Today there are still several such inns positioned up side alleys.
One such is 'Whitelocks', established on the site of a coahing inn in 1715.

Since I last visited they have dragooned at least seven or eight new beers into their selection, and today I tried a 'Wentworth 1000', a reasonably strong ale with a hoppy, fruity flavour and pale, clear appearance.
Delicious.
Fell in with a bunch of ancients, the old men that are the oozing underground life-blood of the city at lunchtime; and 'underground' they were.

Conversation turned to Islamic Terrorism.
And then it was said.
England is done for. We are like the Jews in 1930's Germany.
(He pointed to his head)
Got to keep this down.
(He pointed to his mouth)
Got to keep this shut.

We could be arrested for having this conversation.

And I realised it was true.

Ani ehad Evrit!

Anyway, I headed back towards the bus station North, and passed the Kirkgate Markets; favourite fishmonger with the lobsters(rubber banded claws to stop them fighting) and bought a quarter Pound of Green-Lipped Mussels to eat on the way home.

Sometimes....Only Sometimes......

I think I'm good .
Like tonight.
The 'help' files don't help.
The documentation drew a blank.
COM(Component Object Model) programming used to be tough.
I decided to use a Visual Basic .NET 2005 front-end on a C# library function rear, and build a fully functional Picture Viewer.
Well, it isn't finished yet, and now is 1230 am.
But I cracked COM 2005 and I get pictures.
I realise COM is much easier than it used to be, but I also realise that when it comes to programming, I'm no daisy.

Things are going to change, I can feel it.

Public Employee-Man....The Package

Entertainment.
Popular, harmless, amusing entertainment.

The diversion of the masses?
Nothing so innocent.

Today, more than ever, it is the tool of the committees; those collections of beerless, smokeless, man-less men, who have survived like a dormant desert flower the ages of change since they forged their opinionation in the torture-chambers of seventies and sixties universities.

These closeted Marxists have hung on for bitter death, throughout life, until they have shed all labels and all identity, save the urge to do harm, to continue doing harm, to gain the destruction of simple joy for all time, leaving the 'masses' blinded and confused and pliable, ready and willing to accept the dictat of the entertainers' friends in the shades of non-debate that sink politics in similar fashion.

And so the dirge echoes across the airwaves, the dirge of nobility in public duty; endless soaps about earnest constables, ambulancemen, firemen, doctors, doctors and more doctors.

We are supposed to be grateful as a result of this soft-sell communism that owes more to the ideals of Marx and Bismarck than any notion of good and evil.
Whenever the dirty flame of British drama flickers toward extinction, they allow somebody to do something real; Doctor Who is thus resuscitated and becomes the 'saviour of BBC drama', and will soon be subverted to adopt the company message and re-induct the newly returned viewers.
The Bill was an honest police drama for years, but the commercial channels have started to fight fear with fear and so it has been subverted and now preaches soapy 'right-on' sentiment till it creaks at the tearing seams.

And this particular clique of 'powers that be' cruises through society like a tug towing a supertanker to oblivion.

The Teach-Police and Composite Public Employees

I can't claim to have read the Wycliffe Mysteries, so I don't know whether the original stories were any good.
But the photo shows what happens when the dredgers-sorry, UK mainstream television channels-went around looking for new 'drama', and came up with yet another derivative of a story-book.
Oh, and yet another 'Police' story.
The people in the photo look (and sound) like a couple of smug, whining, truculent schoolteachers, and we are supposed to suspend disbelief to the point where we (god help us) actually think that a couple of people who might make a meal of a single pint once a Sunday-month in an artificially quiet country pub are also capable of restraining savage murderers with nought but a flash of their 'authority'.

In real life such characters would be hopelessly outmaneouvred and violently abused by the criminals, and rightly despised by their colleagues, never having a hope of drawing their pensions.

But, for the comfort-food of stultified imaginations that the TV companies peddle, this is ideal, since the lame, inbred producers are not really able or willing to do more than regurgitate half-digested school memories where the scruffy patches on the corduroy jacket were the police badge of authority which to this day aids and abetts their own delusions of safety.

In case anyone fancies trying to get a real idea dramatised, the television companies have a cast-iron rule; you must have had it published somewhere else first.

Unlike:
The Avengers.
Danger Man.
The Prisoner.
Z-Cars.
Softly Softly.
The Professionals.
The Sweeney.
Only Fools and Horses.
Minder.
Porridge.
The Champions.
The Strange Report.
Space 1999.
Blake's Seven.

To name a few.

How The West Was Lost.

Most people think that the Moslems who claim that we will all be living in an Islamic state by 2050(or whenever), are crazy.
"It'll never happen here."
No, of course not.
But what the radicals understand, and most people do not, is that the Western states already operate on the same basis as the Islamic states; they all arrogate to themselves the rights and means to impose sanctions for actions which are not actually crimes, merely acts of which it is presumed the majority disapprove.

So when a Moslem in Britain says that Drug Dealers should be shot, he is no more radical than Alf Garnet (late of the London Docks) was in the sixties, and is precisely the sort of person the politicians seek to appease when they steer their crooked line between the Scylla and Charybdis of Rights and Repression.
When Islamic states actually start shooting drug dealers, then they are only shocking in the degree of their punishment; but they are being more honest than the Western politicians, they are acting on their beliefs.
The West will appear dishonest and weak(as so often), until it either capitulates entirely,(which is happening under the guise of 'fighting terror'), and joins the blood-fest, or until somebody, somewhere, has the guts, and the success, to be able to lead from the front, to kick the West dragging and moaning into the future.
Forget about the 'new Dark Age' of Winston Spencer Churchill, this Dark Age is the same as the last one, growing from desert strongholds and ignored wildernesses, clawing its way back into the 21st century by the skin off our backs and the teeth of its weapons, dragging us out of daylight like some childhood nightmare come to life after dawn.

Don't let it happen.
And don't let Pym Fortune be the last, murdered gasp of the West.

Funeral In Leeds

Here are the horses and the hearst; I don't know who they were supposed to be burying today, but it may as well be integrity.

Why?

Today I discovered that the two people in the upper echelons that have done the most to support the disadvantaged, that have always earned, not demanded, respect, and that have built a business which is a part of Yorkshire culture, are losing their jobs.

The 'suits' have spoken.

They are to be replaced.
Of course, the pair have an unrivalled knowledge of the trade, the trade I am a beginner in, and to replace these people with some 'Parachute Pete' is something of a joke.

Whoever gets the job will have to be special, even better at it than the originals- or they won't stand a snowball's chance in hell of doing it.

Then again, perhaps Mr. Suit doesn't want them to do the job; after all 'ParentCorp' is investing heavily elsewhere, and the first step in destroying a business centre(so that it can be shut) is to destroy the business it does.

Last Ever West Wing?

Now we know that the usual suspects are practising the usual techniques.
When John Major's Conservative government had been buried alive, 'Spitting Image', the puppet lampooning series, found it advisable to end lest they be forced to lampoon their client government, the imminently arrivving Labour Party under Tony Blair.

So now we have the 'final' episode of the West Wing, now that Demopratt 'Bartlett' must ultimately retire, since it is 'inconceivable' and definitely 'unconsciounable' that a Republican (shock horror) be portrayed as president.

But Hollywood's fit of pique is self-defeating, since it merely admits it; they will produce a backlash against the democrats, that centres around the fact that they have the support of phoneys, and cannot count on any gratitude from the Republicans should they try to fake them too.

This spite backfires because it makes Bush look even more real.

Shot Down In Flames!

Shot down in flames....
Ain't it a shame......
To be shot down in flames!

British Minister of Education (sorry, 'Education Secretary'-when did that little change happen?)Ruth Kelly looks, talks and dresses like a stage lesbian.

But she is actually the mother of four children, which shows just how deceptive appearances really can be.
Sorry Ruth!

Another Cute Little Car.

Yes. Another 'Smart' car, the For Four(ie 4-seater).
I'm told it shares common components with a Mazda(I think), but I can't see much of a similarity between this and other small cars.
I just love the honesty of design, the way the body-cage is distinct from the panels in this (apparently) unitary design.
The colour scheme picks out the difference from other brands in a genuine 'form-follows-function' style.

The engine is a 1.5 Litre, and the handling is said to be excellent, although it seems to be stuck with the disastrous paddle-operated semi-automatic gearbox, which is said to ruin the possibly excellent driving experience.

Confirmed....

Confirmed; the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul 2nd in 1981 was ordered by the KGB, using Bulgarian agents.

The fact that the KGB used the Bulgarians as foot-soldiers for dirty work is an age-old cliche, first brought to my attention when reading the Ian Fleming James Bond novel 'Casino Royale', published in 1954 and a worthwhile read for the sober yet stylised realism that he was soon to abandon.

Evidently this fact was absolutely true; Marcov was assassinated in London by a Bulgarian agent with a compressed air gun hidden in an umbrella.

But this time, it is an Italian court which has confirmed that the KGB tried to kill the pope.

Confirmed.

The FSB(inheritors of the KGB-no archives liberated here) has called this nonsense.

Which means that they are part of a long game.

Confirmed.

Credit Where Credit's Due

A few years ago, the Labour Government 'launched an initiative'.
They said that all terrestrial TV in the UK would be digital by 2010.

Obviously it was nothing to do with them, except that they have the legal power to shut off the power to the analogue transmitters to act as protectors of the airwaves.

Anyway, digital is happening, has happened, and I now have forty channels, including four ITV's, four BBC's,an ITV children's, two BBC children's,BBC24 news, Sky News, Sky Sports News and many others.

My favourite channel is ITV3.
Last night it showed Due South at 7pm, and at 9 pm?

Reilly Ace Of Spies.

So many childhood programmes lose something later on, but this is one which actually improves.

For example:last night we were in Moscow in 1917; the Social Revolutionaries are upset with Lenin and want to bring Russia back into the war against Germany.

They keep on trying to provoke Germany.
So.
An alleged agent of the Checka turns up on the doorstep of the German Legation.
He has information regarding an attempt to be made on the life of the German ambassador.

They show him in.
The ambassador says "You have information about an assassination attempt?"
"Yes."
"When is it to occur?"
The agent pulls out a pistol.
"Now!"
Bang!

I've been laughing about it all day.
Brilliant.
From before the age of PC.

The Language Of Freedom

What is an Operating System?
It is the basic software for the functioning of a computer system.
But in social terms, every country has an 'Operating System', one which promotes or prevents the activities and prosperity of different individuals, particularly different types of individual.

There are certain data-types and programme functions that are inimical to the OS(or Culture), and so these are rejected, suppressed, even erased.
The anti-viral software of every country first tries to 'fix' the faulty files, before deleting them as a last resort.
Most are simply quaranteened.

But what if the OS is at fault?
What if the OS is inimical to the production of useful 'objects', non-representative data or programmes it doesn't have a wizard for?
What if the OS allows only a few, fixed types of application to reside in folk-memory?

What if we, as individuals, yearn to make sense of all the different systems, to integrate freely into a truly international OS, one which allows, strives to allow, for all types to function, as long as they respect the conventions of essential human hardware?

Inevitably, massively successful software will arise from producers keeping close to the species/hardware essentials.

Thus we get Microsoft.

Those who lead the attack on Microsoft do so for one, unspoken reason.
Because they want global power, and the American Message spreading into the Operating Systems of the world threatens them with Global Freedom.

This is why they will stop at nothing to pervert, bury, slander, libel and hopefully destroy Microsoft.

All Microsoft can do in response is come up with better products than before.

And this is what they get.