Final Evidence.

This is a David Brown agricultural tractor .The initials 'DB' were applied to the Aston Martin sports cars after David Brown bought the company.
The current Aston Martin is the DB9, but as it is produced by Ford, the 'DB' is rather meaningless.

A Week In Politics

The Great British Worker!

I believe the card game is called 'Crash'. Very appropriate for transport workers.

If you have a lisp, you might think that a Schindlers Lift is connected to Steven Spielberg in some way.....
Finally, an example of 'joined up government'.
This bridge is over what was the line from Leeds to Tadcaster and York via Wetherby and Thorner.
Note that Wetherby and Thorner are now dormitories for Leeds despite the closure of the line in the sixties; never mind that Tadcaster has three breweries.
What I want (as an engineer) to draw attention to is the bridge span.
It is newish welded steel, and must have been erected at some cost and difficulty when the line was already scheduled to be closed.
They could have just infilled the cutting.

Paper Scoops Saturday

I always regard software as a somewhat formalised type of invention, rather like Classical Music.
But it is a form of invention.
It does new things in novel ways, linking intellectual produce directly to results.

Not so, says the report in Saturday's Financial Times.
British courts have ruled that software devices cannot be patented.
Apparently it is allegedly all down to the European Patent Convention, which excludes 'programmes for computers'.

So I guess I'll publish the code for my inventions sometime, so that any bum can use them for nothing.

Also in the FT, the Lib-Dems may have to repay £2.4 million to Michael Brown as the electoral watchdog is considering information that will make his donation 'impermissible'.

Meanwhile in Saturday's Yorkshire Post there is a report that the government is arbitrarily seizing property belonging to relatives of Abu Hamza in order to recoup the £200,000 costs of his unsuccessful court action to stay in the UK.
Apparently, they can kick him out, but the guilt extends to more fortunate relatives who are allowed to stay.
Nice little earner.
About as rational and righteous as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
But not the Boston variety.

Building.

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See me and the boys we don't like it
So were getting up and going down

Hiding low looking right to left
If you see us coming I think it's best
To move away do you hear what I say
From under my breath

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
Some of us won't survive
See the boys and me mean business
Bustin' out dead or alive

I can hear the hound dogs on my trail
All hell breaks loose, alarm and sirens wail
Like the game if you lose
Go to jail

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So woman stay with a friend

You know it's safer

Breakout!

Tonight there's gonna be a breakout
Into the city zones
Don't you dare to try and stop us
No one could for long

Searchlight on my trail
Tonight's the night all systems fail
Hey you good lookin' female
Come here!

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be trouble
So woman stay with a friend

There Is Hope!

I've just seen a CTV-produced film called 'Plague City-SARS In Toronto'.

No punches were pulled.The ruling administration was portrayed as lying, incompetent, corrupt and deeply, deeply evil.
The health professionals( who were the biggest death demographic from SARS) were, fairly, portrayed in accordance with the facts, namely that they volunteered to go on working extended shifts against a lethal disease that nobody understood.

The chief nurse in Toronto Memorial was portrayed by one of my favourite actresses, Kari Matchett, who played many characters as an ensemble cast member on 17 episodes of Nero Wolfe.
My guess is she didn't need too much persuasion to represent the case of the health workers.

How anybody can seriously say that Canada is a sick culture when this kind of film is being produced, is indicative of a somewhat jaded outlook.
And an unrepresentative one at that.

The Calm Before The Storm.

I treated myself to a beer today.
I'd earned it.
Today I obtained some free time, and next week I will be taking four interviews, two of which are second interviews.
With a bit of luck, this beastly, beastly war will finally start going my way.

Oddly enough it's around the 64th anniversary of the Battle of El-Alamein.

The beer is an Archer's Autumn Mist.
The veranda of the pub looks out across Wharfedale; the River Wharfe is about a mile away.

Meanwhile....

A cold one was waiting for me in the pub close to paradise.

No.
It isn't Guinness.
It is an Archer's Dark Mild, a 3.5% Porter beer which relies on burnt malt flavour rather than alcoholic strength.
An ideal sipping beer on an Autumn afternoon miles from home base.

Of course, Guinness was copied from traditional English Porter-type beers by the Irish and always brewed in London until last year, when the West Acton brewery was closed in favour of concentrating in Dublin alone.

But Guinness, though tolerable sometimes, is merely a beer done in the style of porters.

Whoa, man, it's too much like EFFORT!

So.
On Friday I had yet another interview.
I was not looking forward to this one; I am a serious engineer, and the potential employer was a games company.
In fact, when directed to their website, I froze in horror, having never seen such a childish, facetious site.

But my agent has worked hard for me, so I did the polite thing, got into my rejuvenated car and drove down the motorway to the appointment.

When I got there, there was nowhere to park at first until I hunted around.
Reception contained about twenty or thirty takeaway pizzas and cans of coca cola.

Let's face it.
'Everybody knows' that to keep programmers happy you need to give them pizza and coke, right?

I mean, cowabunga, man.

So there were all these kids, being treated like battery chickens in tee-shirts, and I was supposed to join?
I think not.
I tried the technical test.
Frankly I have only ever used hexadecimal numbers as constant values in the implementations of C API functions going back to MFC 4.2, so I was not particularly inclined or able to demonstrate hexadecimal arithmetic.
Likewise I didn't feel like doing a C-implementation of RLE on a big number.
Especially on paper.
If god meant us to write programmes on paper he wouldn't have given us IDEs.

Then there was the usual question about Assembly language, which I have never claimed as a skill and so should never have been asked about.

The questions about which computer games were my favourites were hopeless of course, as I don't really 'do' games.

And so I came home laughing and rather wishing I'd hooked up with the beautiful mature blonde who was hanging around me in the hotel I'd stopped for lunch at.

But hey.
I had an interview to go to, right?

Talk about embarrassing. I felt humiliated to have considered it for even a moment.

Paper Scoops Saturday

In Saturday's Financial Times: The UK has the highest proportional property taxes in the world, at 3.35% GDP.

Oft complaining Canada comes in third, at 2.72%.
Oddly, the USA is second at 2.79%.

The Netherlands is way down at 0.86%, just a little more than Italy.

Austria is 0.24%.


And from the pages of the Yorkshire Post('Yorkshire's National Newspaper'), we have a column written by one Clare Beckett, a doctoral teacher of 'social policy' at Bradford University; she claims that 'Thatcher was the first woman prime minister in a Western Democracy.Ever'.

Were you to mention Golda Meier, Beckett would probably emit noises to the effect that Israel is not a Western Democracy but some sort of failed criminal state; so no surprises there, eh?

Needless to say that the subversion of reason is such that she can believe herself to be right when she is just spectacularly wrong.

China-Red In Tooth And Claw.

So what if 3000 Chinese Christian families pool their savings and build a church.
So what if the Communists send 500 police and a large paramilitary force and destroy the church on the day of consecration.
So what if the Communists are sending Christians to forced labour camps.
So what if Chinese journalists are punished for reporting these facts?
Never mind.
'China' says that they have religious freedom; especially since the 80 million persecuted Christians outnumber the Communist Cabal.
China says-because China silences anybody who tells the truth.

You've Got To Laugh,eh?

So this housewife is going out; she's been blissfully married for twenty years, and she goes out to do the shopping.
Opposite the supermarket is a trendy winebar.
Who does she see but hubby carrying on with a young blonde?

She keeps quiet.
She goes home.
Prepares the evening meal.
Along comes hubby.
She says nothing. He eats the meal.Has a couple of beers.Catches the game on TV.
He goes to bed and sleeps.

She goes upstairs in a white rage, with the carving knife.
She grabs his dingle in her left hand and swipes it off with one cut.
He wakes up screaming and shouting wildly.

She panics and runs downstairs and gets into the car and drives.


She goes past a Patrol Car doing eighty, and they set off in hot pursuit. She is still holding hubby's dingle.
They follow her onto the motorway.
"Doesn't look like she's going to stop sarge!"
"Don't worry son, we'll catch her!"

She notices she still has the dingle in her left hand, so she opens the Sun roof and throws it out. She sees it strike the police car's windscreen.

"She's still not slowing down, sarge!"
"Never mind that!Did you see the size of the prick on that fly?"

Feck! Arse! Gurrrls! Drink!

Hello Sorehead. A little feedback from the interview in Great Yarmouth on Thursday. They said you8 came across as a very clever guy....

Drink!

...but they had a candidate who had already done the job as a contractor.....

Arse!

....and they felt that you didn't quite gel on a personal basis....

Feck off!


...oh.Alright.


Feck!Feck!Feck!Drink!

What's This Look Like?

So U2 is performing in Glasgow;
Bono asks for absolute quiet.

He gets it.

Then, slowly, he starts to clap his hands.

"Every time I clap my hands a child dies in Africa!"

Somebody at the back shouts:"So stop fucking doing it then!"

On R&R From Keepin' Russia.

Work finished for the week;


So here it was. A pint of Theakston Best Bitter.
Followed by?A pint of London Pride.Fuller's London Pride, brewed in Chiswick on the South Bank of the River; I used to go walking along the river bank at low tide where you could see the occasional freshwater oyster, and the District Line trains crossing the Richmond Bridge.
This is what it looked like when it settled; the Theakstons hadn't been a particularly good one, but today's Fuller's was a winner.
Meanwhile, youth meets age when this gentleman petted the pub's baby dog.
The dog had a limp due to playing too rough with the locals.

Thought So...

As soon as I had heard that North Korea had set off an atom bomb, especially underground, I thought that the particular timing was too good to be true.

As with all Soviet-style 'propaganda coups', this was probably staged to create the illusion of 'surprise' progress into any particular field of endeavour, by hook or by crook.

As it turns out, it was by Crook!

The Fallacy Of Representative Government.

Who can say what the difference between a valid government and an invalid government is?
The 'real-politikers' would suggest that any group of people who could factually claim to speak for a geographical area would be a 'representative government'.

Hence they achieve the spectacle of allegedly valid, 'Western' governments actually sitting at table and talking with governments like the old Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Red China.

At other times there are governments which are declared 'outlaw', which is to say that they do not kow-tow to the majority views of other less harmful governments.
So Afghanistan and Iraq are invaded, and Iran and North Korea are (ineffectually) threatened.
Red China is always 'among the first to condemn'.
After all, they have a moral postulate to project.
Then they sell more arms and threaten more neighbours in the name of their oh, so sincerely held 'dreams' of reunification, ie victory by stealth.

But what is the consistency of these policies?
Why some and not others?
Well, the evil of Afghanistan was such that thousands of New Yorkers were murdered one morning in 2001.
Iraq had previously invaded Kuwait; the opponents of the Iraq attack took the 'causus belli' pretence as a decider for foreign policy, saying, as the 'West' had failed to do, that one 'needs to be in hot pursuit' to invade.

They did this, because, as they have for the past 75 years, they look for the apparent weakness in the intellectual positions of the defenders of civilisation.
That is to say, the nay-sayers have no actual position to project;like all parasites, they exist solely on the reflected energies and invention of other people, having no essential truth of their own, but simply a system of devices, devices which are supposed to act in the psyche of other people who really are trying to make a difference.

They await the day that they can feel their faggot hegemony made real by the surrender of millions, at which time they will finally try to get a life, fail, and take up killing sans-pretence.

But how did these people get a foot in the door?

Through the fallacy of 'representative government'.

The essential fiction that the creeps worked hard to feed(and it worked very well until 1980) was that a nation should be left to its own devices as long as somebody could claim to speak for it.
If there were a few problems, these would soon be ironed out if we welcomed Herr Hitler and Mister Stalin into the fold of nations.
And this is what led to the 1939-45 war.
This should have put an end to them, but they are there, like pus oozing from under the scab of an old wound.
And they will go on reappearing until we finally determine for once and for all to eliminate woolly thinking from our position on the status of government.

Government is secondary.
It doesn't speak for anybody; individuals speak, other individuals agree or not.
Government is not validated by the destruction of alternatives.
Government is singular, and every replacement should represent a revolution in the sense that there is no ship of state with alternative captains, but a new ship after every vote.

And until it is safely docked and can't take any of us to places we don't want to go, it isn't representative of any kind of peace or consent.

Out And Down In Cardiff And Bristol.

I've been to another job interview.
I thought my cousin had given me an Advil(Paracetomol) when I awoke in his Cardiff mansion this morning after a grand night of beery sleep.
By the time I got to Bristol(after buying some ridiculously cheap and smart shoes, an emergency pair, from Tesco)the goldfish-bowl effects of driving in heavy traffic, heavy rain and thick spray with clouds down to 100 feet, left me feeling physically dizzy.

I drove up the hill(or so it seemed) to Bristol, feeling as though it was getting ever steeper.

I got there in good time, studied the literature and tried to put up a good effort.
At least they gave me coffee.

God only knows what the pill really was.
Could it have been the 'Mystery Pill' from The Briefs' song?

Anyway, when I got to the forest of Dean on the way back, I parked up, ate some food, drank some spring water, and caught some shut-eye.

Back in Yorkshire by five.

Back with the giant rat upstairs, who immediately set to work to prevent me from sleeping.
Not that I was.

Incidentally-the picture is of a new arts building in one of Cardiff's disused docks.
Apparently all the steel is recycled from the Splott steelworks, and all the slate is recycled from various neighbourhoods that were previously redeveloped.
These things seem to be a risk of being a 'Capital City'.
Some people like the new areas.
Some more people only like them ironically.
As is the style in the UK.
Pathetic.

The Toohey Machine

Well.
After being woken for the fourth time in five hours by the life-form upstairs, I have decided to have another go at writing a planned article about an insight that flashed by while I was bathing; the 'chicken and egg' question.

Is the behaviour of these unfortunate creatures a consequence of the obliteration of self, or is it the chief agent in obliterating the self?

The creep tried the fatted calf approach by leaving me alone for a couple of days; then tonight.
Obviously it didn't work, but when you are on your guard for a behavioural violation which is more or less chronic, will the removal of the creature, or your own removal to another place of dwelling leave you with an inability to believe in whatever peace and privacy you then regain?

Or will you remain traumatised into alert, unable to exist in any moral sense?

The fact is, that these otherwise stupid creatures behave with a complication which is, on the surface, close to the brilliance of the savant, but only in the field of sadism.

They are the sword of Damocles, hanging over us in eternal threat, permitted and encouraged by the idiocy of law that forbids physical intervention.

Yet, in this country, after that fact, many paths to forgiveness are permitted, even allowing for the extermination of the object.
Sure.
But I'd only go to gaol for five years.
And of course, I'd be excluded from Canada.

Wouldn't it be a terrible country, this Britain, if there were people who exploited the abilities of bastards, even bigger bastards behind the scene, betting their Quatloo's on the outcome of a conflict that would serve to keep everybody down?

Can't have too much ambition, because ambition and knowledge are surely the arch enemies of good governance; and perhaps that is what goes on.

Progress Has Been Made.

David Cameron after 1 year as Conservative 'Leader':
"Substance is knowing what you believe."

Soreheaduk after his first sip of Tetleys:
"Substance is believing what you know."

Soreheaduk after his second sip:
"Knowing what you believe is the same as remembering what you said."

Soreheaduk after his third sip:
"Which is necessary for liars."

Hat Tip To SAMIZDATA.NET!

See this!
The use of violence to protest against violence at the expense of pacifists.

Red Wedge, The Death Of Music, And How They Tried To Murder The 80s

Back in the early eighties in Britain, a bunch of less important musicians got together and formed an umbrella group called 'Red Wedge'.
They tried to characterise the populist libertarian revolution of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party as some sort of old-fashioned reactionary backlash, and thus kill argument by defrauding people of the correct terms of reference.
What was honest about Red Wedge, however, was it's desire to adopt and promote the Soviet Union's cross-cultural samizdata techniques.
To these people, Maggy and her government were a threat which had sprung upon a hitherto defenceless society like some sort of unstoppable monster from the 'Unthinkable Zone'.

She really did cause dry throats among the reactionary clique to which these musicians belonged.
So they declared, openly, that they would politicise music by declaring it the fiefdom of communism.
The usual techniques were used; puff-jobs to create the illusion of fame and fortune; sheer bloody stubbornness to filibuster their tunes into the public awareness(how many songs were released and re-released until the public surrendered?)

The new twist was that when they saw their monolith disintegrate in the face and force of the gusting eighties optimism, confidence and material progress, they kept quiet about their roots but kept on preserving their commercial positions so that they would be in a position to 'mentor' those among the up and coming who might be open to influence; and ultimately navigate the culture away from those who weren't.

So people like Nik Kershaw, Kate Bush, Chris Isaacs and others were gradually left behind to become 'of a time' specifically of the eighties; bands like Duran Duran resisted heroically, but have now become a rather forlorn spectacle, bootlegging their undoubtedly accomplished pop into the modern day under cover of middle-aged attempts to appear youthful.

There are many, many people who still, rightly, cannot accept that the eighties were murdered by the virulent efforts of malfeisant demagogues, spluttering out in the early nineties(the last time that black and white people shared common popular culture within society as a whole), and finally fragmenting and destroying music itself to the stage where banality, mediocrity and a general absence of actual, unbridled talent are causing the industry to implode.

Still, if that's the price of halting progress, they're determined that we will pay it-and be grateful when these bastards deign to honour us with their previously second-rate abilities, now defaulted to apparent prodigy.

And commentators tell the young that the eighties were 'tacky' and 'brassy', while obscuring the culture of joy that existed and hiding the good stuff from the historically-minded public.


In other words, if everybody is faggotised, the real faggots look like he-men.