Apparently Not.

I have a few sites at the moment; monitoring all of them is something I can't do for nothing, so OwlsArentWise is once again monitor-free.

Style? It Had To Be..

From the New York Times today- the truth about wealth.

Traditional Sunday-I Got Roasted.

Er...wait on....'Stopped into a church, I found along the way....'



'Well I got down on my stool, and I began to drink.'
I guess Bugs Bunny wouldn't enjoy this corner of Yorkshire.
The beer was fresh, tasty, cheap and came from an Oak barrel. The siren behind the bar sang a song of how good the rabbit pie was, but I was saving money and anyway, Sunday Lunch was already arranged.

Just Because I'm Paranoid....

....doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
Sorry to harp on about it, but the IPCRESS File really isn't complete fiction.
It is an allegory, cut startlingly close to the bone.

As I have already stated, I have been somewhat tested by weirdness for the past 18 months, after movement in neighbouring accommodations produced an entirely new and previously (at least for 15 years) unknown set of trials and challenges.
I have told you about the things that go bump in the night- night and day for that matter.
I have told you that I'm over a barrel, as executive action to end the trouble would lead to unacceptable risk, namely a criminal record that would prevent my emigration.

But hey, they'll settle for insanity, right?

I mentioned they kept sending letters from the 'council; repeatedly asking who the 'additional male tenant' was after I left my radio on talk shows during the day when I was at work.
Then the 'electrical safety inspection' demands when I mentioned I was using them with timers.

Last week, I won a contract.
On Thursday afternoon I had to see the client after doing a full days work; on Thursday morning, at 535am, I was woken by somebody trying to open my front door.
I looked out of the peep hole just in time to see somebody urinating in the hallway.
I got some clothes on and looked again.

Now there was three of them.

Came the knock on the door and I opened it to see some scrawny scumbag asking if his mother was in.
I told him no, and closed the door.
He kept knocking and ringing the bell for two hours.

I rang the police three times.
The final time I told them I was going to work in ten minutes, and if the guy was still there things would 'kick off, so if they were coming at all they had better hurry'.

Oddly enough, the creep disappeared, wasn't there and didn't come back.
Neither did the coppers.


But now, three days later, I find that there has been a certain degradation of my concentration(IPCRESS) when studying my Python PGL.

And I have to wonder at the claw-back they have achieved; they are trying to break me down before I start my new contract.
They will fail.
Now I'm going to do a bit of SQL Server connection protocol.

As 'Cyrano De Bergerac' stated 100 years ago, 'could it have been an accident?'

The Middle Class Invention.

When a whole bunch of undistinguished (and barely distinguishable) people of a certain prosperity level wanted to set themselves aside and above from people(real people), they invented 'Class'.
They themselves were in the middle.
Like any subterfuge, when you attack with cold, calculating cowardice, you don't appear at the head.
Yet you don't identify yourself too strongly with the hoi-polloi, as that would be unpallatable.
So you are 'middle class'.
You don't like John Major, because he wants to abolish class; you love Tony Blair, because he says everybody is 'middle class'.
But the really vicious hatred is reserved for the real people.
These are the people who actually do everything(anything?) and keep everybody alive in some sense of non-crofting.
You call these people 'working class', and praise them to the heavens!
Just like the BBC re-wrote the reality of the East End with Eastenders, you seek all the while to utterly destroy these people.
Everything done in their name is justified; the illusion of justice at last is created, when in fact it was you who destroyed the justice-that-was.
Observe- go into a poor area of old terraces, and you will see people old and young on first name terms, looking after one another, on first name terms no matter what the alleged 'divide'.
Then go into a modern ghost town and see the wretched ghosts.

Actually the East End was a good example.
What the Germans didn't rearrange with bombs, the bulldozers finished off.
And still they survived, so then the bastards of rule invented 'decanting'.
The claim was that these people being 'decanted' would be set free in the fields and meadows(Arbeit Macht Frei) of Essex, there to lead lives of health(strength through joy) and productiveness; whole sciences were perverted(new Dark Age) to create the myth that open space would lead to industrial efficiency and prosperity.

This was a caucus of fiends, set loose by the self-congratulatory Middle Classes, to destroy those annoying people who were actually useful; when cowardice prevented them from outright murder of the industrialists who seemed to be creating everything, the Armstrongs, the De Havillands, then they tried to destroy the people who worked with them, in the factories, and hope that by some sort of miracle-inversion they would hold them to ransom as the protectors of both sides in the fake conflict of the classes.

After all, that is what being in the 'middle' means, right?

And the New Labour/New Tory/Old Radical SDP alliance is nothing more than the culmination of 100 years work, minus the embarrassing trappings of honesty;
Labour had its 'Clause 4' moment.
The British Middle Class had the betrayal of Margaret Thatcher.

Step by step and hand in hand.
Welcome to the hell they dreamed of.

The Jobs-Today Tup-Tups Are Caught!

These splendid little machines are locally made.
In the Far East!
That's right.
We are now importing Asian-built, Asian-designed, Asian concepts.

And using them to advertise employment.

Does anybody see anything wrong with that?

Back To The Future

Part 1.
I've just put in a website monitor.
Obviously it is invisible; I'm using Google Analytics.
Information will be released at my sole discretion as Emperor-Incarnate of Owls that Aren't Wise.

Excuse My Icon.

Patriotism.
Once upon a time it was possible to feel an unalloyed respect, admiration or even 'love' for Britain.
Today, fewer and fewer people have less and less reason to feel anything but disgust or contempt for this benighted land.

And the politicians and the BBC go on tugging at imaginary heartstrings, playing on the emotions that they presume still exist, using cynically paraded totems of what used to induce patriotic pride;
the truth is we have next to nothing to feel proud about.

Every day is a struggle for survival(diving for dear life when we could be diving for pearls-Elvis Costello), with any joy we do achieve the target for the legions of the disapproving, if they can find us, which they can't always; in any case the victories are small and personal, and to confuse them with any Britishness for which we could be grateful is an grotesque inversion of the truth.

But hey. It works for our masters, eh?
Now, as ever, it is our mates and family that we seek out to share this alien land with, when we are allowed.

But the parade goes on. 'Royal' Ascot; Henley Regatta; Wimbledon.
All excuses for pretentious fools to 'aspire' their way to being permitted onto the hallowed ground, there to wave their little flags for the cameras and contribute to the noxious delusion, so inducting more generations of the young into the service of the blank-eyed zombies of approval.

The Republican

Revealed to me by the Yorkshire Post (Porkshire Roast) last week:
Honor Blackman is a member of Republic.

Yorkshire Calling. Yorkshire Calling.

Citizens of the British Empire will be happy to hear of the progress being made here in Yorkshire.
The news.
This morning at 9 am I started out for work in my splendid Dutch car.
The journey of five minutes took half an hour, as far as I could tell due to three factors;
1) It was raining and everybody on the roads seemed to have lost the ability to drive due to some sort of spontaneous de-generation.
2)The trunk routes South and West were blocked by accidents, breakdowns and flooding, and
3) Some very high-profile villains were being transported through the city centre.

As I reached the railway station, I stopped to allow a convoy to pass. The convoy was a full-on, sirens wailing, blue lights flashing affair consisting of four police cruisers and an armoured transport van.
The police cars were all 'City of London Police', which isn't even the Metropolitan Police, but a separate force in the Square Mile.

Considering that we were in the centre of Leeds at 9.30 am, this was unusual.
They headed off South.
Anyway, when I saw the Yorkshire Evening Post(Wakefield Edition), it suggests that the 'butcher of Liberia', ex-president Taylor, will be incarcerated at Wakefield Prison.

It could have been connected.
More likely, the connection was with the news reported on the radio, that six Al-Quaida operatives who planned outrages in Britain and the USA have today been sentenced to 136 years of prison(not each unfortunately).
As the City of London would have been a target it is highly likely that they were responsible for security around these swine.

Don't get me wrong; I'm no lover of the established order, but blowing up innocent people in office buildings when they are trying their hardest to make ends meet is the action I would attribute to total scum, not freedom fighters of any complexion.

And that concludes the news.

Are You Serious?

On TV at the moment is a scientific documentary which mentioned that a 'mantle plume' which erupted in India produced enough lava to cover the entire US to a depth of one kilometre.
It then pointed out that the landscape of Iceland was the result of a plume, and that this one had actually modified the motion of the plates leading to a whole new set of characteristics such as ridges and ranges.

At this point I saw that the Earth is constantly in the grip of competing thermodynamic and gravometric influences, which all lead to the fact that our presence here is an amazing piece of luck.
Which could end at any time.

This led me to the conclusion that the religion of enviro-worship-ism is a load of conceited codswallop; the thought that we are as yet relevant in the immense(and proven-to-be-immensely stable) ecosystem of Earth, is a ridiculous fiction, and even if it was true it would be a ridiculous absurdity to suggest that we 'owe' anything to subsequent generations of ant-like humans that will soon, so soon, replace us.
To suggest that I should give up my next beer, next flight or next car to the faked 'responsibility' of action for alleged reaction(as opposed to the benign real one), is nothing less than an attempt to kill joy via guilt.

The enviro-fraud is the most massive attempt to enslave that the Earth has ever seen, and considering that the USA could be buried to a depth of a kilometre under molten rock with all the dust and gas that would accompany it, by a mere accident of nature, then the thought that the grubby guilt-games of environazis could be regarded seriously, is utterly fantastic.
Especially as the Earth's ecosystem survived, even prospered.

Pathetic.

Raise A Glass. Go On!

Today is the 25th anniversary of victory.
It was victory in the Falklands that told the world that Maggie wasn't joking.
Victory in the Falklands told the world the Britain was a leader, somewhere to be watched for what was coming, and boy, did it come, for the whole of the eighties.

Maggie is still here, contrary to baby Hague's proclamation, and she spoke today on the British equivalent of AFN, to military personnel all over the world.

But victory in the Falklands set the style for the decade and the trend for 30 years, up to today when any creep can 'fear' a problem and using force is 'okay' to solve it.

But the Falklands War really was 'okay'.
It was about Freedom, and Life.
And we all won.
Thanks to the thousands of men who travelled thousands of miles and fought the forces of tyranny, the forces that felt emboldened by decades of surrender and support from every quarter.

Forces that found themselves knocked on their ass, by one woman who was not a tyrant.
And by a country that 'got it'.

Help Is At Hand.

For those of us wondering what to watch now that Ugly Betty has closed for the next year, help is at hand with the new series of 'My Name Is Earl'.

Excellent.

This Is Great!

The New York Times tells the story of a Chinese writer I would be proud to shake hands with.
The man lived under the heel of the Chinese state all his life, being forced to write confessions to totally inventions which were what amounted to 'crimes' in those days.
As he said, 'but I am incapable of writing what people want to hear'.
A real hero.

Media-Blair Is A Beast Tearing People To Bits

Thanks To 'Deleted By Tomorrow'

aka 'Resiste!Resiste!'

Bolshevik Bulwark Corporation

I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the BBC; my favourite show on any channel at any time of the week has been(until the end of season 1) 'Ugly Betty', a superbly scripted, acted and produced drama, based on Latino productions which actually own the franchise.
But this weekend the BBC showed the latest episode of 'Doctor Who', and I have to say, it was absolutely fantastic.
The story behind this episode placed the doctor and his assistant well outside the action, stranded in 1969 no less.
The chief agents were a sensible girl and an internet nerd in the present day.
They had these DVD's of the Doctor, which predicted their conversations so accurately they thought they could talk to him.
Plug in an internet conspiracy theory and a romance and time-line theoretics, and the result would have been fabulously interesting enough.
But factor in creatures that killed you by sending you to the past, and turned to stone statues when you looked at them,( but not if you blinked-then they would get you!) and you had the recipe for a wonderful, spooky, scary, exciting and intelligent adventure.

Quite, quite excellent.

This Has Never Happened Before?

In the early years of World War 1 when the USA was neutral, it is a fact that the US armoury and docks in New York were destroyed by German insurgents using powerful bombs.
How many Americans were killed by this is unclear.
The Germans were welcome to buy American supplies, except the Royal Navy was blockading them.
Still, they used American neutrality well, for smuggling terrorist insurgents into Russia along with funds(dollar funds) to destabilise Russia.

Eventually the mounting American death toll was sufficient to goad the USA into declaring war on the rogue, terrorist state, Germany.

25 years later they were again attacked, not by Germany, but by Japan.
A number of Americans equivalent to the Twin Tower outrage died at Pearl Harbour, and this was again enough to lead the darling of the Left, Roosevelt, to declare war on Japan.

The Japanese insurgents didn't blow up tanks with suicide bombs.
They used 400 mph planes as suicide bombs and took out entire ships.
Meanwhile the Germans declared war this time, as they were being loyal to Japan.

These were (obviously) also defeated.

This time America finds itself at war with a terrorist movement.

This might require different methods and the abandonment of fascist anti-drug policies, but they will win this one also;
that is, unless the traitors in America are allowed to score easy points over the next duly elected government.

President Bush Speaks in Prague.

"I never doubted you fer a minute!"

A military official said the Pentagon disagreed with the ruling, saying it had always been “implied” that Mr. Khadr was an unlawful combatant. The official said the Pentagon planned to appeal Colonel Brownback’s ruling. “This is just a semantic decision, is the way we are viewing it,” the official said.

From the New York Times today.
Apparently the US government seeks to override its own legal experts when checked by law or the interpretation of law.

On the basis that these laws are just a matter of semantics and guilt was 'implied'.
So never mind the actual meanings of words in laws, we 'kinda always knew they were guilty as this had been implied by the act of accusation'.

God bless America?
God help America!

Swings And Roundabouts

And I do so like to play!
Today I went from serving up my new website on Linux to finding that the only approved Dynamic DNS provider for my router type(that I could reach) was only (apparently) supported on windows. So I set up a client on Windows.
Tough.
Then I set up Apache2.2 and PHP5 on windows using their MSIs.
What a dream! Fully automatic set up and it all worked together straight out of the box!
Much nicer experience than I had with Linux.

Then I discovered that there is a generic DNS client for Linux; this was easier again to install, much nicer than the windows experience.
So now I have two complete server systems, and we can transfer the web files by Samba network link-up.

As I said, swings and roundabouts, and it's a lot of fun.
Obviously, I want the final edition to run on Ubuntu, as it is a Server outfit from the start.
And has a higher associated 'Kudos' factor; within 4 months of Linux arriving in my house, I'm doing an international interview for a European contract which requires experience at any level.

And that is my second.

So it is certainly worth knowing, eh?

How Much?

How much is incidental? Coincidental? A symptom of the social environment?
And, how much is still a symptom, but under direction, delivered with deliberation and malice in mind?
How much of what?
I'll tell you what.

The pressure.

The pressure to conform?
Hardly.
The pressure I'm talking about is the pressure to apologise for being good.

Yes.
And I don't just mean the people who can't take a moral position on evidently simple matters of right and wrong; this is understandable, as these matters are no longer simple and it is the complication by government and society that makes them ambiguous.

No.
I mean the times we actually do something we know to be good, and the holocaust of social approbrium closes around us and tries to make us apologise, regret, feel sorry, with threats that neither disappear nor ever end, like the bars on a mental cage placed with care by the footsoldiers of the repression.
But do they know what they do?

I think so.
I think that there are more people with more secrets in this world than can ever be determined so long as a shred of ignorance persisits, and it does.
So these bastards look and learn.
They try to remember the one thing, if anything, that has given us pause, and they use this, over and over and over, not just against you or I , but against hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people who may have shown an instant of rebelliousness or true loyalty to their consciences; these bastards are fighting a war against us, the freedom loving peoples of the world!
It is undeclared, and the front line can be anywhere from our front door to the face we show the street.
Fact is, sometimes they are organised.
Not by name, but by nature.
Into loose associations.
For example, a 'neighbour' started aggressing against me the instant he moved in.
I didn't know him.
He knew me.
And when I fought him electronically I received repeated demands from a Southern electric company to come into my house and perform safety checks; they didn't even know my name.
Enquiries at the council reveals they aren't allowed, and if they were, they would know my name.

Now I may still be proved mistaken.

But that looks to me like organisation.

Now That They're Out Of The Way

Good.
Now that's over with. Do you really think I went to public school for all those years so that somebody could come along and set people free?
Everything's back to normal.
We've got Blair - or Cameron - and Putin is in his Kremlin, the poor man at his gate.

Of course, 'Maggie' was invaluable in showing that the class war was all an imaginary thing, a persecution by those indecent socialists and their camp-followers, a supremely effective obfuscation which swallowed up any genuine desire for freedom and set it up in opposition to common sense itself, something which chopped the head off any possible movement towards liberty.
She did very well for us, but of course once we found out that she was one of them, she had to go.
Think of the damage!
We go to school, we learn our place in the world(well, the country anyway), and we rule.

That's the natural order! That's what we're for!
These useful bastards have to keep us solvent! They have to keep on promising us the means to continue.

In return we promise them a slice of the British Dream. Sliced? Thinner than Truffles!
But the scent is enough.
Stroppy councillor? Golf club membership here, speeding ticket there.
Outright revolutionary? Beat him up, beat him down, let him become a pillar of populism-as long as he knows he's beaten. You can watch it on TV.(Always wanted to say that! What would James Bond be if he wasn't loyal to us?)
And the funny thing about it is, literally millions of them are loyal to us. They know the score. And they sell there brothers, mothers and children into our hands for a sniff of Truffle - or Methadone - or whatever, and we're laughing!

Rule Britannia everybody!

Playing With My Trainset.

Playing With My Trainset.

Got to work on the lighting.
Of course, if you really want to touch, just get into the box before the barriers lower and reach out your hand.
This train was on the way to York.

Everybody Else- Don't Be Silly.

No suitable pictures today.
Just to say, have you ever noticed what appears on TV screens under the ridiculous title of 'Royal Expert'?
Usually there is some dull, deferential git. He manages to look 'engaged' but not in a vulgar way; he presumes to pique our interest with his ditchwater-dull 'insights', all the while congratulating us with his body language on our prurient curiosity, while remaining aloof in an amused, indulgent sort of way.
Underlying this is an air of urgent sincerity, such as is appropriate to somebody who is useless, has nothing to say, and doesn't want to be found out.

Then there are the styling cues.

Suits are vaguely expensive-looking, but not too good as these creatures wouldn't know how to choose; essentially they are country-solicitor chic, which is good enough for them as it implies an Oxfordshire or Dorset town and an air of understated respect rather than a Chelsea bedsit.
Hair?
Usually too neat, a male bouffant to suggest public school, or better still, a grammar school imitation of a public school, which lends the pundit the competitive populist edge without actually being common anymore.
Besides, now that the age of grammar schools is ending, this engenders additional sympathy for the suspected Chelsea bedsitting room.

Enjoy your Royals, now y'hear?

Don't Be Silly Pietr.

Don't be silly.
I conducted a little research(by which I mean I performed observaitonal experiments, not google), and I discovered that my computer now runs two versions of Ubuntu, -15 and -16.
Apparently the upgrade broke the support for my hardware; the CD-ROM was forced to record at 11-15 X speed by 16 and refused every time.
The previous version stuck to sleepy 2.5-3.5 X speed however, and works reliably.
I like that the booter gives me the option, too.
Ubuntu is anything-but 'solid as a rock'(sorry Ubuntoids), but it is fascinating and free.
And works mostly.

Thanks To 'Deleted By Tomorrow'!

This is rather jolly.

Imagine.

Imagine all the people; the people who resent.
The people who wish to belittle, in the name of an ever-changing 'cause'.
Imagine that you become relevant; that you are 'noticed'.

Then imagine that they suppose that they represent a 'new order', a world government by cajole in waiting.
Once you are noticed all hell breaks loose. By stealth, by psychological coercion, by threat; the maelstrom is designed to break you down.
Where you don't exactly break, they search for any weakness to add to their ungoverned, illegally held, 'hearsay' database, anything which they suppose may have had an effect.
You have to be very careful what you say, and to whom.
Because they listen, and once you are noticed, as somebody who represents a threat, an obstacle, an-other, they will pay attention.
They will watch and wait, and when you say or do anything wrong, they will attack, through music, words, thugs, all forms of weirdness, to knock you down.
They regard themselves as pacifist, like the communists, which means murder is on their minds, not yet their consciences.
They are a minority, but they are everywhere, and they are real.
Of course, while murder is rare, they are quite accomplished at the intolerable, in order to drive people mad; of course, once 'mad', anything you learn about them is 'paranoia'.

And no. It isn't a conspiracy theory. It is the ineluctible deduction of meaning where there should be none, violence where peace is the norm, and doubts where there used to be certain knowledge.
They are the fruit flies of civilisation, and they like to think they are unnoticed.

I Understand.

One of the delights of the 'Ubuntu' Linux system is the fora for the discussion and solution of what appear to be 'problems'.
I left a whole lot of comments there, and when I went back to look I found that they had been deleted.
By the 'moderators' presumably.
So anyway, I mentioned that I would be transposing my music collection to my Linux server, and this comment was deleted.
Seems that the Ubuntu folk don't like it when you point out that they have 'upgraded' all the systems in Feisty Fawn so that nothing less than an MP3 file with 128 kbps will run in the music players;
tonight my 'Sound Juicer' cd copier failed.

Far be it from me to suggest that the Social Fascist dogma of 'Ubuntoids' would influence them to exploit back doors they had left in their systems.
Far be it from me to suggest that Linux folk are not wondrous, magical, noble folk that do everything for the common good.
Let's face it, they are.
And the 'common good' has masked every crime for centuries past.

Something stinks, and the smell is coming from Ubuntu.

I Understand.

I understand why some genuine Englishmen go misty-eyed and all pathological, like, over the mere mention of England.
Around sundown yesterday I found myself in rural Oxfordshire close to the brewery village of Hook Norton.
This was the 'Black Boy', an ancient inn buried off the main road with ample parking in landscaped bays and a few good beers inside.
As my friend and I sat outside in the low light near the churchyard, the loudest noise was the songbirds and the air barely moved, a magical forerunner of those Summer nights to come.

I felt as peaceful as a monk and as safe as a Spitfire pilot back on the ground.

The beer was Adnams, from Kent.

Never Mind The Bollocks.

Interesting series of programmes on the History Channel; especially radar.
They just explained the 'Wild Weasel' technique of radar defence system destruction.

No biggy.

Just make all your CCC radars passive, and use them to read signals from chains of disposable transmitters.
These will be cheap and easily replaced.
The receivers will be even 'dumber' than the Wild Weasel drones.
Now will some cunt finally give me a job?

No Room For Sentimentality

I have been taking a look at PHP.
It looks okay, but C#/ASP.NET is a lot more intuitive and fast.
It's like comparing steam-power with diesel-electric.
So, soon, now that Mono works, I'll have a new personal website, running on a Linux server but written in ASP.NET and C#.
This ought to be a lot of fun.

New York Times Reports

The New York Times is a communist-infiltrated organ of the MSM.
However....
This is bloody interesting!

The IPCRESS File and the Minefield

I still haven't read Len Deighton's 'IPCRESS File', but I have seen the excellent Michael Caine film several times.
Noting my own reactions to the possibility of sudden and total escape from the conditioning fields of England, mainly by obtaining work in Europe, I detected feelings of paranoid dread and dangerously physical tendencies towards reaction against my situation.

In the IPCRESS File, powerful intelligences are conditioned by continual and unpredictable violation to collapse when previous normality reappears.
So the scientist about to resume giving lectures collapses into incoherence for example.

We are literally assailed with similar trickery, from White Noise (boasted of by MI5 in the seventies as their 'only form of interrogative coercion'), to the chronic attacks of the vicious poor, those who have made a psychological investment in protecting themselves from the image and reality of other people's self-made success.

In other words, Britain (and elsewhere) is awash with a peculiarly stylised intellectual stressing force, one that is supposed to channel our mental processes and prevent us from ever recognising anything outside.

Thus we are rendered 'British', confined to the slave-pens of futile stupidity which kills talent in this country.
For a real example, H.E.Bates was a great cartoonist. He wanted to be a serious artist, but when he tried he had a nervous breakdown.
I for one am tired of people trying to make me 'more rounded', knocking 'off the sharp corners' and generally using every means up to and including clenched fists and boots to beat me to a compliant pulp.

So I have to say that Len Deighton was a rare exception, a Penny Dreadful popular novelist with something extremely and excellently insightful to say about life in Britain, whether consciously and deliberately or not.

Meanwhile, I have to follow my awful dread to its source and find the answer to the question I've been faced with;
will I go to Europe, where I don't even speak the language, in order to break the stalemate of life here?

I think so.

Paranoid's Breakfast.

Irish eyes aren't smiling.

A Gesture From The Resistance.

According to the Saturday Financial Times, the Yukos headquarters building in Moscow was expected to fall to the mean bidding of the State, as it destroyed the corporation and regained control of all of its assets.

However, for appearances sake, this didn't happen without a Show Trial, sorry, Public Auction.

And this is where Putin's plans came unstuck.
A company called Prana outbid the state-controlled company Rosneft in the bankruptcy sale, bidding a total of seven hundred and seven times to pay $4 billion dollars for a $430 million property portfolio.

This is resistance on a grand, quixotic scale, which should serve as a beacon to the freedom-loving peoples of the former Soviet Union.
And to us all.

We've Been Expecting You......

The funniest thing on the radio news yesterday was the story of thousands or millions of people who have been 'over-paid' tax credits.

For the uninitiated, tax credits are supposed to be a way of boosting low incomes when people start a family or if they have a family and don't make a lot of money.
They have resulted in an estimated 50% of the population relying on some form of government hand-out, ie of their own and other people's money.

Apparently there is 'incompetence' in the administration; many people received 'too much' money and now the government wants it back.
So a struggling father might now find that far from being helped, he now owes several thousand pounds of debt which he cannot possibly afford.

The point I wish to make is this; debt turns us into clients.
Owing the government money makes people into the government's bitches, sorry, clients, and leaves them totally at the mercy of the civil service(which takes £450 per year from each working adult in Britain to pay for it's pensions).
I want to ask: was this situation incompetence?
Or was it deliberate?

How Did We Let It Happen?

In the seventies towards the end, there was a general movement; it led towards a feeling that something big was brewing.
Some of us, more than you might think, were attuned to this surge and felt it beginning to surface in the General Election of 1979.
We were ready to see what came.

And what came was so good that we were none of us disappointed.

But a different type of person was 'attuned' to the swell also; these people were not friends of Freedom.
They were 'upside-down' people with a problem for every solution, a catch to deflate any victory and a pin to prick any bubble of happiness.
They went to work right away.
Realising it would be a long and thankless task, they played the long-game.

At every turn they were outmaneouvred, outclassed, out gunned.
But only in the broad strokes.
They were happy, but not content, to pick up the details, the wreckage, the flavour of the smaller parts of the changes that progress caused, and turn these to their purpose.

So, when the 'wobblies' looked for new examples ('paradigms') in the social atmosphere, these were supplied.
Their ingenuity was such that we all thought, indulgently, that they were actually with us when they created the new stereotypes with which to illuminate the age.
But they were crafting, carefully, an image of impotence with which to anaesthetise us for the ages to come, a way of inducing an intellectual and critical coma, a world which screams at us to be considered 'realistic' while all the time stretching beyond all comprehension the bromides of the 'heroic' chattering classes projected onto the unlikeliest scenarios, like-you guessed it- Amanda Burton playing a 'Police Chief' at Scotland Yard.
It doesn't matter that she is 'sleeping with the enemy'.
It doesn't matter that she is using the 'gun' that none of us is allowed(instead of a 'Jagged Edged' knife).
No.
What matters here is that the universal Tofu of British dramatic characterisation is projected into the situations we are expected to thrill to.


And it is at this stage we realise that the thin, grey master race of Camden Town and Islington is being foisted on our consciousnesses as a drug, a drug which brainwashes us into the delusional belief that these nobodies are possessed of potency and effectiveness.

This isn't the 'girl next door' taking over the world.

This is the tongue-in-cheek fraudster doing it, finally out of the box we put him in during the eighties, and triumphantly ramming his post-post-post everything corrupted irony down our throats and into our front rooms.

And they wonder why audiences are collapsing?
Will votes follow?

And This Reference Work via Uncle Djo(mama).

Splendid!

The Delights of the 'Boys'(In Town).

They came up recently with this.

Kudos, Buddy.

I was watching that soon-to-become-perennial amusement, 'Scrubs'.
Who was that?
I couldn't believe it.
It was Michael J Fox, looking older, looking ,well, like MJF, back from the precipice.

He'd retired from Film, retired from TV work in the late nineties, due to Parkinson's Disease.

Sadly, he was gone.
But here he was again in 2006-7, alive, undimmed and acting again.
If, like me, you are curious about the battles this man has won to be there, read on.

Thanks To Samizdata!

The Younger They Come, The Harder We Fall.

Getting a job in today's busy world is easy; you just have to know how to play the game.
If you are lucky enough to have evolved a turtle-necked instinct for self-negation, then you will have a little reserve of emotion somewhere that gives you a focus for hiding from the slingshots of the powerful, whether they be great, old and mighty, or more likely casual, vicious and cheap.

If you play the game, the pecking-order is established at the interview stage, by little hints and surrenders, with a possible tooth-baring at significant moments to give the impression of having betrayed something under the feint co-option which passes for aggression in this weird world of sniffing arses.

If you don't, they will quite likely turn blindly towards you at the next intersection and write you off as a dead loss, a loser in every sense of the word.

Not for them the outrageous heights of talent, ability, and the blue-sky.
They only tick the 'blue sky' box and the 'thinking-outside-the-box' box when conducting a coerced peer review on the orders of senior management.

Beware the charming interviewer.
If you meet one, explore the possibility of humour; if they have it, this can defuse the rictus offensive; or if they lack it entirely, that is also a good sign, since seriousness runs hand in hand with conviction and convictions can be convinced.

No.

What you really have to watch out for, is somebody who has a little cunning, and an educated ease of manner which vaults any real or imaginary obstacle with a contempt which humiliates the generations of people who have fought against them.

The worst fool is a young fool, and young fools are equipped by colleges to be acquisitive of souls, minds and dignity.
Other people's.

The problem as the interviewee at this juncture is that involuntary paralysis of your mind will engage in order to protect it from the exploitation into which it is being lured.
They in turn will conclude that there is nothing there for them.

Then they will advise against giving you the job.

It's a Long Way to the Top If You Want To Rock 'n Roll!

Been To Shee Thosh Crashee Dutch!

Safe and snug on our lovely 737 at Leeds/Bradford airport;

Up....
Up....
and away!
A sea of clouds beneath us in the morning Sun


Busy Schipol airport; the rustic charms of a strangely fake village- they knock down most of the original houses, then build 21st century replicas. A bit like the British obsession with bricks.
Regimented trees.

Superb roads and transport systems.
Back to Schipol, and this (badly photographed) desk caught my eye; with a sinister-looking logo right out of U.N.C.L.E., the blueish poster in the middle is selling the 'Afghan skilled person return programme'.

They open at 530 am, so if you want to join the CIA you know where to go.
BA is flying a Canadian type here.And I set off into the sunset.

Springtime Blues? Not A Bit.

When I walk Down The Street Where You Live....
You must be called Nelson Muntz.
This neighbourhood is really pulling itself up by it's bootstraps.
Looks a little like an alien invasion.


Meanwhile, close-by was this delightful little motor; obviously a Bentley, and obviously usually far too commonplace to note, nevertheless this one (belonging to a shop-keep) had gloriously low-profile alloys which set off the entire design to a 'tee'.

By the way, although not standard, they are a Bentley original rim.

All Right.Buy This Man A Drink?

Buy The Man A Drink?

The scum had something to say about Tony today.
Apparently they said that The Sun said he deserves 10/10 for the years since 1997.
You can tell from the furrows in his elastic brow that he has suffered for his principles; the tough choices, the hard calls, the outright gambling with our country and our futures, extended just as much as he could possibly manage to our world, all for the sake of his imaginary friend in Washington and his imaginary friends in the Labour Party-the latter keeping the New Faith all the more because they were given a place on the Gravy Train.
Our gravy.
All for the sake of an entirely self-serving putsch which put nobodies into positions that need somebody, like a bunch of unwashed teenagers rushing the doormen at a debutant's party.
The fiction was that they could 'grow-into' these positions, and a few of the more innocent (less culpable) believed they could do this; but the truth is most don't give a damn as long as Saint Tony is there to preserve the fraud from prying intelligence, something these people have spent lifetimes defeating.

Lifetimes so productive that they are almost a new kind of intelligence in their own right.

But Tony is going.
And the Scum is trying to preserve a legacy illusion, something to sustain the believers of The Lie through the collapse and disaster to come, something to create a myth of equal potency to the truths they have tried to kill.

As Stormin' Norman might have said, "It Doesn't Take A Muslim".