Thursday, 4 August 2016
Monday, 1 August 2016
The Vanishing Abandoned Citroen
Informing the council about a nuisance never does any good. They need you to establish a “history” of the bad activity and that can take months. I called the animal people out one evening many years ago because of a dog that had been left alone in a house two doors up and would bark non-stop all night. Two people turned up and promptly said that they were not going to knock on the door as the dog was clearly dangerous and would I keep records of how often this happened so they could talk to the occupants. Gee thanks. I’m paying taxes to feed and house you guys?
Anyway, the other week I got fed up of the heap in the photographs bringing the tone of my street down and more to the point taking up a parking space, so I trotted out, took some photographs, and filed an online report with the Council. I expected to hear nothing, or possibly to be told I would be arrested for a hate crime as the owner was Diverse, or something. Indeed, the next day, a Man From The Council called me and said mine wasn’t the first complaint about the car, he had finally located the owner who lived locally and had dropped a card through his door. Abandoned cars mostly get crushed, so I get that the Council doesn’t want to be hasty, but my caller was talking about “building up a history” and when bureaucrats do that, I assume nothing will happen for at least a year.
The next evening….. it was gone. The owner must have moved it. God alone knows what value they attached to it, but clearly it as enough to make them move it before the Council crushed it.
Miracles.
Anyway, the other week I got fed up of the heap in the photographs bringing the tone of my street down and more to the point taking up a parking space, so I trotted out, took some photographs, and filed an online report with the Council. I expected to hear nothing, or possibly to be told I would be arrested for a hate crime as the owner was Diverse, or something. Indeed, the next day, a Man From The Council called me and said mine wasn’t the first complaint about the car, he had finally located the owner who lived locally and had dropped a card through his door. Abandoned cars mostly get crushed, so I get that the Council doesn’t want to be hasty, but my caller was talking about “building up a history” and when bureaucrats do that, I assume nothing will happen for at least a year.
The next evening….. it was gone. The owner must have moved it. God alone knows what value they attached to it, but clearly it as enough to make them move it before the Council crushed it.
Miracles.
Thursday, 28 July 2016
Castro, ISIS and Weaponising Fake Refugees
Can you keep count of how many young Arab men are killing Europeans? I can’t. And more and more they aren’t suicide bombers, but berserkers. Driving a truck along a crowded Promenade des Anglais is not a political act, but the act of a mentally unstable person off his head on drugs. The same with axe-killers. These people are crazy, as in, psychiatrically crazy. Where have we seen this before?
In the 1980’s and 1990’s Cuba generated hundreds and then thousands of “refugees”, all of whom gained sympathy from well-meaning liberals who would never have to live next to one of them. It didn’t take the US long to realise that Castro had been clearing out his jails, dumping HIV carriers and packing off homosexuals and other people he didn’t want. In addition, Cuba was short on food, so letting a few thousand people go not only cured some political and social-order problems, it exported Castro’s food shortage problem as well.
Oh. Wait. Where else has had terrible harvests for the last few years? That would be Syria. And probably any other Arab country be-devilled by civil war and insurrection. Got a problem feeding the people in your Caliphate? Take a lesson from Castro.
I’m betting that ISIS, the Taliban and others emptied out the jails in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else they took over. And not just the jails but the mental hospitals as well. After all, what’s more dangerous than a bomb you know when it’s going to go off? A bomb you don’t know when it’s going to go off. They sent large numbers of hungry, and therefore angry, young men off as well. So they exported their food problem, and their social-order problem.
Everyone at the time remarked on how strange it was that the “refugees” from the Arab / Muslim countries seemed to be vigorous young men who were strangely well-informed about where to go and what to do on arrival. Those vigorous young “refugees” groping Europe’s daughters are uneducated farm-boys, so where did they get the money to pay for the people-smuggling bit of the journey? Um. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the smugglers got paid by the boatload by ISIS, and everyone was told to say they had to pay the people-smugglers, because the dumb Europeans would believe that and give them lots of money.
The equally dumb German politicians thought they were getting the fleeing Syrian middle-class on the cheap. No so much. They were getting the low-skilled, the insane, the criminal and probably the AIDS carriers as well. If that’s not an invasion, I don’t know what is.
Look for a wave of "political refugees" from Turkey as Erdogan empties his jails, addicts and asylums into the open arms of Germany. He will dump them off the shores of Greece for sure, and the Greeks will fire them at the Germans.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s Cuba generated hundreds and then thousands of “refugees”, all of whom gained sympathy from well-meaning liberals who would never have to live next to one of them. It didn’t take the US long to realise that Castro had been clearing out his jails, dumping HIV carriers and packing off homosexuals and other people he didn’t want. In addition, Cuba was short on food, so letting a few thousand people go not only cured some political and social-order problems, it exported Castro’s food shortage problem as well.
Oh. Wait. Where else has had terrible harvests for the last few years? That would be Syria. And probably any other Arab country be-devilled by civil war and insurrection. Got a problem feeding the people in your Caliphate? Take a lesson from Castro.
I’m betting that ISIS, the Taliban and others emptied out the jails in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else they took over. And not just the jails but the mental hospitals as well. After all, what’s more dangerous than a bomb you know when it’s going to go off? A bomb you don’t know when it’s going to go off. They sent large numbers of hungry, and therefore angry, young men off as well. So they exported their food problem, and their social-order problem.
Everyone at the time remarked on how strange it was that the “refugees” from the Arab / Muslim countries seemed to be vigorous young men who were strangely well-informed about where to go and what to do on arrival. Those vigorous young “refugees” groping Europe’s daughters are uneducated farm-boys, so where did they get the money to pay for the people-smuggling bit of the journey? Um. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the smugglers got paid by the boatload by ISIS, and everyone was told to say they had to pay the people-smugglers, because the dumb Europeans would believe that and give them lots of money.
The equally dumb German politicians thought they were getting the fleeing Syrian middle-class on the cheap. No so much. They were getting the low-skilled, the insane, the criminal and probably the AIDS carriers as well. If that’s not an invasion, I don’t know what is.
Look for a wave of "political refugees" from Turkey as Erdogan empties his jails, addicts and asylums into the open arms of Germany. He will dump them off the shores of Greece for sure, and the Greeks will fire them at the Germans.
Monday, 25 July 2016
Thursday, 21 July 2016
Here’s What the Brexit Negotiations Are Really About
In case you’re not clear. EC <> Europe <> EEC <> EU <> Euro <> European Parliament. The EC is a sort of activist Civil Service that thinks it runs the EU. The EU is 28 countries who send MPs to the European Parliament. That’s the thing that can be “ever closer union-ed”. The EEC is the free trade zone and the EU is part of that. So is Norway, which is not in the EU. Trade negotiations between the rest of the world and the EEC are done by the EC.
Brexit is not a divorce. It’s a business deal that must be settled by politicians. Until Brexit hit the fan, the EC thought that it would lead the negotiations if any country did invoke Article 50. Greece tried threats and the EC stomped on it. Greece was in the Euro and could not implement a Grexit unless it first re-invented the drachma. Britain is not Greece and never lost the Pound Sterling, and Brexit is simply too large and serious for bureaucrats.
Because they are not negotiating with Britain. They are negotiating with the 28 countries of the EU about what leaving the EU looks like.
Whatever Britain gets will be what any other country will get on exit from the EU. This puts the other 27 in an interesting position: in negotiating with Britain they are negotiating the conditions they will get if they want to leave. Would you put locks on that door? The negotiations are not between Britain and the other 27, but between the 28 and the European Commission. Guess which way this is going to go?
Brexit is not a divorce. It’s a business deal that must be settled by politicians. Until Brexit hit the fan, the EC thought that it would lead the negotiations if any country did invoke Article 50. Greece tried threats and the EC stomped on it. Greece was in the Euro and could not implement a Grexit unless it first re-invented the drachma. Britain is not Greece and never lost the Pound Sterling, and Brexit is simply too large and serious for bureaucrats.
Because they are not negotiating with Britain. They are negotiating with the 28 countries of the EU about what leaving the EU looks like.
Whatever Britain gets will be what any other country will get on exit from the EU. This puts the other 27 in an interesting position: in negotiating with Britain they are negotiating the conditions they will get if they want to leave. Would you put locks on that door? The negotiations are not between Britain and the other 27, but between the 28 and the European Commission. Guess which way this is going to go?
Monday, 18 July 2016
It’s Not the One Percent, It’s The Stupid, Stupid
In the 1950’s to 1970’s British Trades Unions were astonishingly effective at organising strikes, marches and cross-industry support. Way too effective for a bunch of Brits. Everyone knew that the organisers had been to one or other of the Eastern European countries or even Mother Russia, where they were trained in industrial disruption. It only stopped when, under Gorbachov, the Russians gave up on worldwide sponsorship of industrial sabotage.
This makes me wonder who is behind Black Lives Matter, the various feminist organisations, the complete collapse of common-sense in American universities and all those other groups that seem to be able to organise large marches and press coverage more or less at the drop of a hat. Who organised the pro-Remain march for Saturday 2nd of July when the vote was only known on around 06:00 on Thursday 29th? 30,000 people were there - transport alone would be substantial - in forty-eight calendar hours. Um. This is odd, because march organisers have to give the Police six days' notice. And somebody printed all those pamphlets and posters for the “Syrain refugees" telling them to get to Sweden and not get caught in Denmark.
Who’s organising this? And no, it’s not a grass-roots Facebook / Twitter co-ordinated thing. That works when you have a tight, cohesive society with shared values and experiences. Tunisia, say, or Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco and other Muslim countries. We’re talking about the Anglosphere. That has nothing like the culture needed. It vanished when they closed all those mining and steel towns and valleys.
The current tin-foil hat theory is that a lot of this stuff is funded by Governments who hate right-wing / Republican voters and are importing foreigners who will vote left-wing / Democrat and give the Government an excuse to tax the ingrates to the hilt to pay for all the social security the immigrants and people with useless degrees need to claim. It’s a war on Decent White People and the immigrants are the canon fodder. And I grant it must feel like that sometimes to many native-born folk.
Angela Merkel importing over a million unskilled, unsocialised and angry young men in less than a year was a decision of such monumental stupidity that the only possible explanations involve drugs, temporary insanity or a side-effect of the menopause that needs to be researched with urgency in case it happens again. Either that or she never stopped being an East German communist dedicated to the overthrow of the West.
I voted Remain, but I embraced the Brexit within a day once it became clear that and why it was the new reality. That’s what private-sector people do: we follow our customers, legal rulings, and adapt to whatever idiot legislation comes from Government from time to time. We are realists, even if a lot of money goes on senior management’s pet projects. Politics is usually not about realism, so much so that when it was, it got a special cynical-sounding name: realpolitick . The opposite of science, said someone much cleverer than me, is not art, but politics. In science, if Nature refutes your theory, your theory is wrong (somewhere). In politics, if the People reject your policies, the People are wrong. In Politics, ideology comes first, there are no facts, only data spun as needed.
Angel Merkel let in all those girl-gropers, not because she wanted to “elect a new people”, but because she was guided by ideas that made sense in a different world. The UN UDHR is the foundation document of a civilised world, but it was written in 1948, when millions of people simply could not get to Europe, and anyway, the difference between the standard of living of French and Tunisian peasant farmers might arguably have been to the favour of the Tunisian. Writing a UDHR today, practicalities would trump ideals. The right to asylum would be restricted to political refugees, not economic migrants, farmers fleeing drought, or people dodging war lords. Merkel was blinded by an ideological principle to the facts, and the poor girl wanted to believe the best of all people. Really. It was that dumb.
So let’s talk about the activists. The activist movements are made up of people who don’t have STEM degrees, a 132+lb deadlift, or anything else that demonstrates self-discipline. As a result they are always going to be under-paid and haunted by a daily sense of irrelevance. They were lied to by their teachers, professors, parents and politicians. Nobody told them they had to study maths and science, stay away from drugs and junk food, play actual sports, and that being a better person isn’t a lot of fun. Nobody told them that life is not supposed to be fun, or even enjoyable. Nobody told them that self-discipline is way better than happiness, and self-improvement is way better than self-esteem. Nobody showed them how to live with insecurity, doubt, self-loathing, shyness, sexual frustration, and all that other neurotic stuff. In fact, very few people can do that, unless they have an entire culture dedicated to supporting it. White men have had that culture for centuries. When people grow up in a culture that praises living in the moment, feelings and happiness, they are pretty much screwed when they try to compete with the elite self-deniers, self-improvers and trained test-takers. Those activists want revenge. They don’t want to be taught how to live right, lift weights, cut code and identify and cook nutritious food. They want to mess up the people who lied to them.
The people who fund these misfits have money, so almost by definition are older. They think these activists are suffering the same institutional problems that the activists’ parents and grandparents suffered. Which would be awful if it was true. And the activists try to identify their problem (of being duped and ill-prepared for life) with those of their parents and grandparents (who were generally not duped and quite prepared for life in the very imperfect world they were born into). In that conflation lies the money, and a way to avoid accepting the horrible truth that they have been taken, had, took, bamboozled, mislead, waylaid, led astray, run amok and treated like dupes, and weren’t smart enough to spot it. Their teachers in turn weren’t doing it deliberately but were fighting the last war: they were fighting for pride and self-esteem when the real fight was for self-improvement, discipline and living without any fun. My generation did that standing on our heads - and it turned a lot of us into a bunch of neurotics, drunks, addicts, co-dependents and self-focussed people who weren’t sure about the value of the values we had been brought up with. See why the teachers did what they did? So those activist organisations are being funded by misguided people as well.
By definition, anyone who can fund a high-level legal action, cover the media with astroturf, or fund a movement, is rich or a corporation. But they aren’t always funding it to protect their rich-iosity and profits. Often it will be vanity, an incorrect understanding of the exact political and social realities, or just plain cussedness.
This leaves the virtue-signallers, the well-meaning, the bien-pensants, and politically naive who side with these movements because it irritates their parents or older siblings, or because leaving flowers with “Love” and a heart at the site of a suicide bombing is their idea of getting involved, whereas in fact it is a narcissistic indulgence. The other word for them is “useful idiots”. And even Black Lives Matter are telling them to get lost.
That’s what I think is happening now. It’s a bunch of people who were lied to by their parents and teachers, who have no chance in a tech- and service-based economy, who have a huge grudge and are being funded by people with money or institutional influence who think they are still fighting the last socio-political war (which was a Good War), and being seriously duped by the people they are funding, and by their own mistaken analysis of the current situation. (I'm looking at you, Mr Soros.)
It’s not a plot, it’s just the stupid. Stupid, however, can drive a truck on a seafront just as much as a plot can.
This makes me wonder who is behind Black Lives Matter, the various feminist organisations, the complete collapse of common-sense in American universities and all those other groups that seem to be able to organise large marches and press coverage more or less at the drop of a hat. Who organised the pro-Remain march for Saturday 2nd of July when the vote was only known on around 06:00 on Thursday 29th? 30,000 people were there - transport alone would be substantial - in forty-eight calendar hours. Um. This is odd, because march organisers have to give the Police six days' notice. And somebody printed all those pamphlets and posters for the “Syrain refugees" telling them to get to Sweden and not get caught in Denmark.
Who’s organising this? And no, it’s not a grass-roots Facebook / Twitter co-ordinated thing. That works when you have a tight, cohesive society with shared values and experiences. Tunisia, say, or Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco and other Muslim countries. We’re talking about the Anglosphere. That has nothing like the culture needed. It vanished when they closed all those mining and steel towns and valleys.
The current tin-foil hat theory is that a lot of this stuff is funded by Governments who hate right-wing / Republican voters and are importing foreigners who will vote left-wing / Democrat and give the Government an excuse to tax the ingrates to the hilt to pay for all the social security the immigrants and people with useless degrees need to claim. It’s a war on Decent White People and the immigrants are the canon fodder. And I grant it must feel like that sometimes to many native-born folk.
Angela Merkel importing over a million unskilled, unsocialised and angry young men in less than a year was a decision of such monumental stupidity that the only possible explanations involve drugs, temporary insanity or a side-effect of the menopause that needs to be researched with urgency in case it happens again. Either that or she never stopped being an East German communist dedicated to the overthrow of the West.
I voted Remain, but I embraced the Brexit within a day once it became clear that and why it was the new reality. That’s what private-sector people do: we follow our customers, legal rulings, and adapt to whatever idiot legislation comes from Government from time to time. We are realists, even if a lot of money goes on senior management’s pet projects. Politics is usually not about realism, so much so that when it was, it got a special cynical-sounding name: realpolitick . The opposite of science, said someone much cleverer than me, is not art, but politics. In science, if Nature refutes your theory, your theory is wrong (somewhere). In politics, if the People reject your policies, the People are wrong. In Politics, ideology comes first, there are no facts, only data spun as needed.
Angel Merkel let in all those girl-gropers, not because she wanted to “elect a new people”, but because she was guided by ideas that made sense in a different world. The UN UDHR is the foundation document of a civilised world, but it was written in 1948, when millions of people simply could not get to Europe, and anyway, the difference between the standard of living of French and Tunisian peasant farmers might arguably have been to the favour of the Tunisian. Writing a UDHR today, practicalities would trump ideals. The right to asylum would be restricted to political refugees, not economic migrants, farmers fleeing drought, or people dodging war lords. Merkel was blinded by an ideological principle to the facts, and the poor girl wanted to believe the best of all people. Really. It was that dumb.
So let’s talk about the activists. The activist movements are made up of people who don’t have STEM degrees, a 132+lb deadlift, or anything else that demonstrates self-discipline. As a result they are always going to be under-paid and haunted by a daily sense of irrelevance. They were lied to by their teachers, professors, parents and politicians. Nobody told them they had to study maths and science, stay away from drugs and junk food, play actual sports, and that being a better person isn’t a lot of fun. Nobody told them that life is not supposed to be fun, or even enjoyable. Nobody told them that self-discipline is way better than happiness, and self-improvement is way better than self-esteem. Nobody showed them how to live with insecurity, doubt, self-loathing, shyness, sexual frustration, and all that other neurotic stuff. In fact, very few people can do that, unless they have an entire culture dedicated to supporting it. White men have had that culture for centuries. When people grow up in a culture that praises living in the moment, feelings and happiness, they are pretty much screwed when they try to compete with the elite self-deniers, self-improvers and trained test-takers. Those activists want revenge. They don’t want to be taught how to live right, lift weights, cut code and identify and cook nutritious food. They want to mess up the people who lied to them.
The people who fund these misfits have money, so almost by definition are older. They think these activists are suffering the same institutional problems that the activists’ parents and grandparents suffered. Which would be awful if it was true. And the activists try to identify their problem (of being duped and ill-prepared for life) with those of their parents and grandparents (who were generally not duped and quite prepared for life in the very imperfect world they were born into). In that conflation lies the money, and a way to avoid accepting the horrible truth that they have been taken, had, took, bamboozled, mislead, waylaid, led astray, run amok and treated like dupes, and weren’t smart enough to spot it. Their teachers in turn weren’t doing it deliberately but were fighting the last war: they were fighting for pride and self-esteem when the real fight was for self-improvement, discipline and living without any fun. My generation did that standing on our heads - and it turned a lot of us into a bunch of neurotics, drunks, addicts, co-dependents and self-focussed people who weren’t sure about the value of the values we had been brought up with. See why the teachers did what they did? So those activist organisations are being funded by misguided people as well.
By definition, anyone who can fund a high-level legal action, cover the media with astroturf, or fund a movement, is rich or a corporation. But they aren’t always funding it to protect their rich-iosity and profits. Often it will be vanity, an incorrect understanding of the exact political and social realities, or just plain cussedness.
This leaves the virtue-signallers, the well-meaning, the bien-pensants, and politically naive who side with these movements because it irritates their parents or older siblings, or because leaving flowers with “Love” and a heart at the site of a suicide bombing is their idea of getting involved, whereas in fact it is a narcissistic indulgence. The other word for them is “useful idiots”. And even Black Lives Matter are telling them to get lost.
That’s what I think is happening now. It’s a bunch of people who were lied to by their parents and teachers, who have no chance in a tech- and service-based economy, who have a huge grudge and are being funded by people with money or institutional influence who think they are still fighting the last socio-political war (which was a Good War), and being seriously duped by the people they are funding, and by their own mistaken analysis of the current situation. (I'm looking at you, Mr Soros.)
It’s not a plot, it’s just the stupid. Stupid, however, can drive a truck on a seafront just as much as a plot can.
Thursday, 14 July 2016
Spa Fields, Islington
Hidden behind Exmouth Market is Spa Fields. Been to Exmouth Market lots of times, only on the last trip, for supper at Moro before seeing Hofesh Schecter's Barbarians at Sadler's Wells, did I venture into the park.
That block of flats is visible from my office. I'd see it looming in the middle distance and wonder where on earth it was. Eventually I looked in the right direction when leaving Exmouth Market to go up the hill and saw this sodding great lump of a building.
I've also realised why Sis takes better pictures. All I want to do is take photographs of sunshine-y ambience. Like this park. I don't really care what's in the foreground. Sis is much more interested in the, you know, foreground.
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