The Coffee House Wall 10th/16th August

Posted on August 10, 2015

This is the Coffee House Wall for this week. I won’t say that it is your chance to communicate with us, as we are all in this together. It is, nevertheless, the Conservative Blog post that has no particular theme, and where everything is on topic. Let’s just remember that we want to avoid ad hominem attacks on others. We don’t want to engage with trolls. We want to moderate our language ourselves as responsible and mature adults, choosing to use fruity language only where it is necessary. This is our opportunity to show what the Spectator Coffee House Wall could have been like.

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205 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall 10th/16th August”

  1. @Baron 9th – 23:28

    “(The poorly educated Slav is as bad as the Guardian when it comes to correcting errors).”

    The difference is that the peS recognises his errors, offers a mea culpa and attempts to correct them. 🙂

  5. Watching an episode of Dad’s Army. Captain Manwaring says…

    Bloody cheek! Damn foreigners. They come over here and then have the cheek to fire at us!… Time they were taught a lesson. They’re up against us this time. People with guts.

    We could do with such a calibre of folk now.

  6. Peter from Maidstone @ 14:26

    They may still be around, the people of the Manwaring mould, they just don’t shout about it, Peter.

  8. Ostrich (occasionally) @ 10:32

    Thank you O(o), you’re too kind to the poorly educated Slav.

  10. Peter from Maidstone @ 15:14

    One mustn’t push the analogy too far, but had there been even a single German bullet fired in any of the many episodes of Dad’s Army either at the good captain or at all?

    However, the point you’re making, Peter, is valid. It may be the ‘healthy core of Englishness’ Baron believes in (still) may have been cut to the bone, who knows, but talking to people of age group 20 plus, one can sense a lot of suppressed frustration, anger as well as impotence to change things. A release valve may appear somewhere or the system will blow up.

  11. EC @ 13:46

    Donald’ missed a trick, he should have handed the blonde a piece of paper saying ‘please turn over’ on each side. That would have kept her busy for the duration of the debate, she wouldn’t have asked any dumb questions.

  12. Baron, many actually, And in this episode I’ve just watched. There are many very moving incidents in the whole series. One is where they all think that they are in occupied France. They take off their jackets, and prepare to try to all get to the coast in pairs. The Captain takes the elderly Godfrey to one side and says… Don’t worry Godfrey, I’ll get you home! In another episode it is discovered that he has no rank and Wilson is put in charge, but he turns up to parade anyhow, dressed as a private, because it is more important to him to fight for England than stand on his dignity. And in another episode they think the Germans have landed and throw up a barricade. He inspires his men to fight to the last bullet to hold up the Germans for just long enough to allow the regular army to counter attack. He speaks about the fact that they will probably all be killed while doing so. I am often moved to tears by Dad’s Army.

  13. It the first six months of the current year, all taxes on oil/gas accounted for 45% of the Russian Federal budget compared to 52% in the same period last year. This is according to the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, and contrast sharply with the Kremlin saying that it’s done down to just 20%.

    Not that anyone is interested, it’s for the record only.

  15. If we didn’t have abortion we wouldn’t need immigrants.
    We destroy our own and import our enemies.

  19. Bad news for Russia and the Kremlin strongman all round.

    Pew Research Centre has asked people in 40 countries what they though of both, 30% see Russia in positive, 51% in negative light, two years ago the Washington based company measured 36% positive, 39% negative take on the country.

    The countries that dislike Russia most are Israel (74%), Japan (73%) and France (70%).

    The KGB colonel scores much worse – 24% for, 58% against in aggregate, the countries hating the man most are led by Spain (92%), followed by Poland (80%), France (85), Ukraine (84).

    Countries where the number of polled people liking Russia exceeds that who dislike her are China, Vietnam and Ghana.

    This was widely publicised in Russia, Kremlin disagrees of course, but a commentary in Gazeta ru says ‘one way to interpret the findings is to disagree, the other is to consider why the animosity’.

    Go figure.

  20. John birch @ 16:21

    Spot on, John, abortions have joined condoms, the pill, the diaphragm and whatever else as a morally acceptable way of preventing or terminating unwanted pregnancies. Over 185,000 in the UK, around a million in the US.

    And not only do we have to import people from afar to fill in the gap, we also know not who may have been aborted. Did you see a girl born to a gypsy family in Essex with an IQ of 162 at the age of 12? Who else might we have lost amongst the cumulative tens of million abortions so far?

  21. The country ranking has surprised Baron.

    The World Bank says today there are already over 250mn people who live outside their home country, the top countries for migrants are (in that order) – the US, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the UK.

    Vast majority are economic migrants who search for better life, often send money back home. Last year, ‘global remittances’ reached a massive $583bn, more than twice the amount of money all governments spend on official development aid.

    In the next 15 years, Africa’s working age population is set to rise by 435mn (roughly seven times Britain’s population today), many will be leaving the continent because of poverty, global warming, better opportunities elsewhere.

    In his column in the DT, Gerard Lyons commenting on the Bank’s findings says: With one in eight people here born overseas, there is little doubt we gained from immigration in economic and cultural terms’. Later in the piece, he suggests however that an open border policy may not be the best way dealing with the future increase of immigrants, but staying in the EU would mean we have no control of our borders.

    Here you have another confirmation that for the middle classes (of which he one) immigration isn’t seen as a threat, it should be if for anything than because it irrevocably destroys the traditional way of life here.

  22. Baron at 16:36.
    I’m no friend of the state of Israel, but I can certainly understand why the Israelis have such a dislike of Russia, (or perhaps just Russians).
    I have seen many comments and occasional articles which state that the Russian Jews who have immigrated into Israel over the past decade or so now have a stranglehold over organised crime in the country, greater than even the mafia used to have over southern Italy.
    That won’t turn out for the best (for anybody) in the long run.

  23. Chris Morriss @ 19:14

    Yes, Chris, the problem with the Russian mafiosos in Israel is well known, some of them are in jail (in Austria out of al places). Israel has an ambiguous policy on immigration, the Ukrainian President Poroshenko holds an Israeli passport, as do some other Ukrainian ministers, how did he obtain it and why?

    The surprise for Baron was Russia as the forth favoured destination for immigrants, it can perhaps be explained by an influx of people from the surrounding countries along her southern and northern borders, formerly in the USSR.

    When the USSR folded up in 1990, many Russian companies closed business in the Baltic republics, moved to Russia, some of the locals also moved south.

    Example: The Latvian republic has today around 1.2mn inhabitants, of which about 20% are Russian passport holders, but there’re over 120,000 Latvians, i.e. about one tenth of the republic’s population, living and working in Russia, the same applies to the other two small republics but not to the same degree). The other popular country for the Latvians is Norway, many have jobs there because in Latvia there’s virtually nothing to do, and if it were not for the EU money the country would be genuinely impoverished.

    The MSM in the West doesn’t talk about it, it goes against the official propaganda).

    The Saudis have had to deal with many illegal immigrants, too, and have recently taken to deporting them in their thousands.

    http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/saudi-arabia-deport-one-million-people-anti-immigration-crackdown-1471035

  24. The real skinny behind the Trump v Fox dustup:

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/us/politics/titans-clash-as-donald-trumps-run-fuels-his-feud-with-rupert-murdoch.html?referrer=

    Megalomediamania; Megyn-egomania;
    Bret Baier b.s. and Chris Wallace waffle. Fox blew it big-time and will lose a big chunk of its regular ratings as a result, once the dust settles. Their punters feel betrayed. For all its commercial bluster, book-selling, smart-ass bimbos and O’Reilly’s bombast, it was the antidote to the Alinsky inspired MSM Stateside – Gramsci gremlins on this side of The Pond.

    Trump is not the issue, really, he is just the messenger and Fox shot him. That’s why the social media have taken against the Fox ‘moderators’. Rupe shouted “Shit!” – and they jumped on the shovel – it was a personal vendetta. Fox and the GOP will live to regret it.

  26. Roger Ailes has just shown the white flag; Hannity has given the Trump outfit the floor.

    “Mr Ailes and Mr Trump have spoken on the phone and they have reached an accommodation”.

    Megyn has been told to cool it. Game set and match. 🙂

    They are lining up to fawn over him. Rupe must have seen the light and called off the dogs. Now he’ll just wait for The Donald to self-destruct. Which he probably will. 🙂 🙂 🙂

  28. In my impressionable teenage years I remember posters crying out
    “Edward Heath Man of Principle”
    I then watched him disprove this week on week after the heady days of June 1970
    *
    So began my cynicism with politics
    *
    Since then I have seen few who one could believe such an epithet in relation to
    Enoch Powell perhaps
    Keith Joseph possibly
    Tony Benn intermittently
    *
    However now we are going to witness something almost unique
    If we believe The Times we are about to see a major political party led by a True Man of Principle

  29. So what are the Right who walk hereabouts to think of this
    *
    Is it good for the cause
    Will it lead to the final demise of the Left as a political force in our Sceptered Isle
    *
    Could it be on the contrary that folks are getting fed up with a political class so bent on serving themselves that Jeremy will lead his troops to a famous victory
    That this Great Country will for the first time achieve the dream of the great Victorian reformers and see social justice for all
    There are many who now believe this

  30. What telemachus sees in general on the right wing blogs is a profound cynicism that the current political system can deliver anything akin to their aspirations
    Could it be that they will turn to someone with belief and delivery

  31. Some time ago, years even, alongwith dear Verity whom I miss greatly her comments here and on other blogs, I vowed never to respond to Telemachus. But madness has obviously taken over as I actually agree with him.

    Cameron is proving to be as adept and cunning as Blair. Blair transformed the Labour Party into a ‘you name it we wil do it party’ as Cameron has done to the Conservatives. Neither man was a true believer in their party’s values. Both are as shallow as each other. Both close their eyes and ears to the change mass immigration has brought to our nation and both are anti English. Each promises the people policies they have no intention of fulfilling and both are deeply wedded to the corrupt EU.

    I was hoping that UKIP was the answer but having involved myself with them and enjoyed the workers greatly Farage is just as bad as Blair and Cameron. He loves the cameras etc , makes great speeches , as do Blair and Cameron, but I would not trust any of them.

    Labour under Corbyn, who I have met and whilst could never share his beliefs. I admire a man who sticks to his beliefs. You cannot say that about the other three can you?
    Perhaps a true Social and Democratic Party may emerge from the ashes of the Labour Party. Perhaps a true Conservative Party will emerge from the demise of this present farce of a party. As for UKIP I agree with the Australian it will whither and die. What have they done to build up membership since the General Election? They have gone to sleep, perhaps never to wake up!

  32. Chris Morriss, August 10th, 2015 – 19:14

    “I’m no friend of the state of Israel”

    The only democracy in the ME?
    It has full blown proportional representation too. Imagine that in the UK, UKIP would have 50+ seats, and we’d be rid of the Cameroons!

    A small town in SW Germany, near where a relative lives, was “taken over” by Russian “refugees” at least 20 years ago. The following article makes Germany look like a law ‘n order basket case!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Germany#Russian_mafia

  33. Baron,

    Exciting news!

    My copy of Steyn’s latest book, “A Disgrace To The Profession” arrived today!
    Mark has gone “all in” with this one 🙂

    THE WORLD’S SCIENTISTS – in their own words – ON MICAEL E MANN, HIS HOCKEY STICK, AND THEIR DAMAGE TO SCIENCE
    Compiled and edited by Mark Steyn – Volume 1 🙂 🙂 🙂

  34. Pol Pot stuck to his beliefs. Slippery PR men who say anything and ideologues like Corbyn represent polar extremes.

    A meme for the polarisation of politics in the UK.

  35. Frank P, 01:41 et seq

    Thanks to FOX’s hostile attitude Trump is now polling at +30% which may be a factor in Rupe’s emergency command to “Reverse Ferret.”

    The same polling effect happened with Nigel Farage earlier this year. The more the UK media attacked him and UKIP the higher they polled, resulting in 3,881,099 votes!

    Here’s something that Trump posted earlier – before Fox backed off:

    http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/megyn-kelly-howard-stern-sex-talk-donald-trump/2015/08/09/id/669255/

    Megyn Kelly is all over Howard Stern by the end of that interview! No problem getting down and dirty brazenly talking about her sex life.

    Compare and contrast with the demure, blushing Selina Scott succumbing to the (imagined) gallic charm of Alain Prost – whilst attempting to conduct an interview on BBC1 “Nationwide.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCHeACT4oZg

    Much classier, but see what you think…

  36. EC (11:21)

    Excellent! Great googling, thanks. Order the popcorn. It’s a media marathon!
    Wouldn’t it have been great to have been a fly-on-the-wall during some of the office meetings at FNC during the post-debate furore. Better still to have had the hot line between Rupe and Roger bugged. I’m amazed that O’Reilly
    hasn’t interrupted his hols to get in on the act. He must be straining at the leash.

  38. Strapworld – 10:17

    I don’t think loving the cameras and making great speeches makes anyone as bad as Blair and Cameron, though it might contribute to it.

    I have had strong willed leaders/managers, who have set policy, and enabling managers, who were more cooperative, (and in both cases, and in between, I have not always agreed with policy) but difficulties have usually arisen where boundaries have not been agreed or I was unable to act on information because I was not allowed to receive it! Apart from those who have lied by omission or just lied, it ought to be possible to work with someone you don’t like, especially if it is not a unique view in the office.

    If Corbyn does win, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Westminster Parties have the problem of deciding how to choose a leader.

    Do all the members have one vote and everyone who has to work with the leader, such as MPs or MEPs, can (impotently) hate his/her guts because they have no power over the leader or, do the upper strata choose, and the leader knows that his leadership could be removed if he offends to many of his close colleagues, but they all become the disconnected elite?

    It looks as though if Corbyn wins, the current elite will be under pressure to ‘work to rule’. Oh, the irony!

  39. I read this in today’s hard copy of The Times:

    Flight to safety ‘gave Germany a €100bn profit from Greek crisis’
    “Germany has profited from the Greek crisis to the tune of €100 billion, an independent study showed yesterday, as Berlin continued to dig in its heels over signing off a third bailout for the struggling country.

    According to the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, Europe’s biggest economy saved the money via lower interest payments on government borrowing as it benefited “disproportionately” from investor “flights to safety”.

    “These savings exceed the costs of the crisis, even if Greece were to default on its entire debt,” the institute said.”

    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/economics/article4523398.ece

    That last sentence puts it all into perspective.

  40. Strapworld

    “I admire a man who sticks to his beliefs?” What?!!

    Stalin, Hitler, Adolphe “Ralph” Miliband?

    Give a little commie guttersnipe like Corbyn his chance and we will see what he REALLY believes. With Fatso Abbott ministering to both his personal and political demands? It starts with Cheka, develops into the KGB then the NKVD. Utopian bullshit that leads to rivers of blood.

    Putting ‘sincere’ and ‘politician’ into the same phrase is the ultimate oxymoron. Using the yardstick of Blair and his bitch, or the Cameroons, to validate another seasoned member of the Comintern seems a little desperate.

    As for agreeing with the resident troll on his return from civil unrest, regardless of whatever convenient twaddle he spouts here in an attempt to curry favour? DMAFF!

    You obviously need a summer holiday to clear your head – and your desk.
    Have I inadvertantly strayed into a doppelganger of the Coffee House Wall with not-so-subtle implants? Is this a hi-jacking?

  43. Frank P 16.18. Calm down dear, calm down. But your advice is rather late as my desk is clear as I prepare for my week of transcendental meditation. I will attempt to send out calming vibes to you!

    Bye.

  46. Conservative canvasser came to the door. Nice older man. Told him I was a conservative but didn’t consider the Conservative Party conservative at all. He thought Cameron was doing a lot of good, sending a couple more dogs over to Calais. I said I couldn’t vote for any of the three main parties.

  47. Peter from Maidstone @ 20:13

    That’s a good one, Peter, ‘sending more dogs to Calais’, how come it didn’t convince you?

  48. RobertRetyred @ 19:42

    And how exactly would one inquire into someone who sits at the top of the BBC pyramid of power? The man’s indispensable, Robert, he’s a more permanent fixture of the monstrosity than the bricks that house the fruitcakes.

    Think about it, if we were to deprive the engineers of the human soul of the easy money (over £5.0bn each year), the task of at least moderating the tenets of the deluded Left like PC , moral equality, the rainbow crap and stuff would be much easier.

  49. Baron was going to have a deeply felt moan about current roadworks, the roads around his place are full of them, now when the holiday season hit, but he’s too tired, you’re to eb let of the hook for once.

  50. If A E Housman (Enoch’s old teacher) were alive today, he could not write more pertinently than he did.

    The laws of God, the laws of man,
    He may keep that will and can;
    Not I: let God and man decree
    Laws for themselves and not for me;
    And if my ways are not as theirs
    Let them mind their own affairs.
    Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
    Yet when did I make laws for them?
    Please yourselves, say I, and they
    Need only look the other way.
    But no, they will not; they must still
    Wrest their neighbour to their will,
    And make me dance as they desire
    With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
    And how am I to face the odds
    Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
    I, a stranger and afraid
    In a world I never made.
    They will be master, right or wrong;
    Though both are foolish, both are strong.
    And since, my soul, we cannot fly
    To Saturn nor to Mercury,
    Keep we must, if keep we can,
    These foreign laws of God and man.

  52. A strange story started going around.
    A 14 year old boy is convicted of stabbing a teacher at a school in Bradford.The teacher is from Nigeria and is a Christian.He forgives the boy.
    It is described as a `racist` attack:but there is something wrong here (apart from the crime).The boy’s attitude and language is that of the`Apache`culture and argot of the American black-male street gangs;and the British yardie gangs.He calls the teacher nigger and puts on `facebook`an hip-hop/rapper style boast.So what is it about?

    Eventually the word `asian` is used:down at the bottom of reports in the Telegraph and the Independent.The Express writes:”The boy–from a Pakistani background–did not like being disciplined by a black man.”

    The longest report is in the Independent.
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/vincent-uzomah-teacher-stabbed-in-racist-attack-praised-after-forgiving-his-attacker-10449147.html

  55. ABOVE @ 23-45.

    The Independent does use the words “of Pakistani origin” in the 6th paragraph.

  57. From G O V
    In the Middle East, There Are Only Lose-Lose Options
    Posted on August 11, 2015 by Baron Bodissey

    Ruins in Syria

    On this morning’s translated op-ed about the European immigration crisis, our Arabic translator ritamalik left an excellent comment that is worth reproducing in its entirety. It has been edited slightly for punctuation and clarity:

    I certainly disagree with you on so many levels, RonaldB. First let me say that I am an Iranian ex-pat, and I want to tell you my perspective on these issues as an outsider to Western culture:

    As I have observed you Westerners now for close to twenty years that I have lived amongst you, I have learned that you are a people that think you are responsible for all the things that go on in the world.

    You are obsessively solution-oriented people, which means you think for any problem that we have in this world, there must be a solution, and you implement various solutions to international problems that you see around you. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

    You also are a highly responsible people, and when even the slightest thing goes wrong, you are very angry and indignant about it and you quickly want to find the one responsible for it and punish him. You quickly look for someone to sue.

    Being a guilt-oriented culture (as oppose to shame- and honour- oriented) also you are very quick to take responsibility when you feel (real or imagined) that you did something wrong and quickly start to beat your chests in a public mea culpa and engage in proverbial self-flagellation.

    All of the above make you incapable of understanding people from my neck of the woods, and your and our tendencies have made a really toxic combination on the world stage.

    Why? Because we in the Middle East are a very irresponsible and fatalistic lot. When things go wrong for us (as they often do) we never fuss too much over why they went wrong. We expect things to go wrong all the time as part of the natural process of things, and when they do we don’t try to find the guilty party to sue him. Analysis and self-reflection and making sure it will never happen again and stuff like that are highly alien activities to us.

    Unless of course what went wrong causes us shame and embarrassment, in which case we will do anything possible to deflect blame from ourselves, especially if we have a hunch that it actually was our fault. We will make a lot of noise, give lots of excuses and engage in a lot of blame-shifting. We roll up in a fetal position and pretend that we are actually the prime victims of what went wrong, all the while knowing full well that we have caused the damned thing to go wrong ourselves!

    All of that dysfunctional behaviour is highly exacerbated if there is a willing person (or country or culture) who is gladly taking all the blame for our behaviour on himself and has the peculiar tendency to totally disregard our role in what went wrong.

    Now this toxic mix applies to the politics and wars in the Middle East and in the Third World in general in this following way:

    We in the Middle East have a problem. For example we have a brutal dictator like Saddam. Then you see that we are suffering and people are being tortured in his prison and you wonder how you could help. Then Saddam invades Kuwait. You decide, enough is enough, and attack and free Kuwait, but you decide not to go all the way in and remove Saddam. Then Saddam, angrier than ever, lashes out even more at his own people and kills lots of dissidents and gasses the Kurds.

    Now all of this becomes your fault, because you didn’t finish the job and didn’t remove Saddam. Then Saddam continues his bad behaviour and now he is even trying to develop WMDs. This time you say, enough is enough, and you go in and remove him. You offer democracy and financial aid on a platter to the Iraqis. Now in post-Saddam Iraq, Shias and Sunnis start to fight and chaos starts to reign, and no matter how much you try you cannot properly pacify the country.

    So now all of this chaos becomes your fault. Everybody says that you should not have intervened and removed Saddam because even though he was brutal, he was keeping everyone in line and preventing Shias and Sunnis from killing each other. So now what do you do? You say OK! Enough is enough, we leave and won’t intervene again because we just made a mess. So you pull out your troops, and now what? The Shia vs. Sunni fight is exacerbated, and even war and chaos spreads to the rest of the region. In Syria you decided not to intervene and now ISIS has taken over. So now you assume that the rise of ISIS was somehow your fault as well. But had you actually intervened and tried to put in a regime that was a bit more manageable than ISIS, you would have been blaming yourself for having installed a puppet regime that would predictably torture everyone and make people miserable and want to leave their country. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t seems to be the destiny of any policy that you pursue in the Third World.

    People are still blaming the West for not having intervened in Rwanda in the ’90s when 800,000 people were killed, while simultaneously blaming the West for intervening in Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere.

    In all of these blame and regrets one thing is missing: assigning responsibility to the people of the Third World themselves, who are actually the primary causes of the chaos and mayhem in their own countries. As if we are passive objects that if you push the wrong button in us we will inevitably act in a certain way. The West was not at fault for the genocide in Rwanda! The Rwandans were! The West is not at fault for the chaos in the Middle East, we Middle Easterners are! We are the ones who have a bloodlust and long to shed each other’s blood for silly reasons. Your “failure” to stop us from destroying ourselves IS NOT YOUR FAULT!! We are a confusing and hard to deal with lot! Please get that!!

    In dealing with us, the people of the Middle East, you have had, and will have one long series of lose-lose options. There are no win-lose options! None! When dealing with irresponsible and bloodthirsty cultures you cannot have good outcomes, no matter how much you wrack your heads and try to come up with a policy that would work and bring peace and prosperity to us. It will not happen! We are the ones who have to change and do some self-reflection and soul-searching in order to maybe… just maybe, learn to be a bit more civilised!

    Meanwhile, all that I ask of you is that, whether you decide to intervene or not in our affairs, keep your expectation of the outcome low. Accept no responsibility for the outcome. Put the blame for the negative outcome of whatever policy you pursued where it belongs (on us!) so that we won’t have the chance to save face despite our countries’ being in an embarrassing mess, and feel like victims when we should be soul-searching. And, for the sake of anything that you hold holy and dear, please don’t wreck your nice and orderly and civilised societies and advanced cultures by taking millions of refugees, in order to save us from the mess that has nothing to do with you and came about despite your best efforts, that we have caused with our own hands, and given half the chance, we will cause in your countries as well as soon as we settle down here, or even sooner!

    Thank you!

    This entry was posted in Arab Spring, Enrichment, Europe, History, Immigration, Islamic Atrocities, Middle East, PC/MC, Stupidity, USA by Baron Bodissey. Bookmark the permalink.

  58. I believe canvassers are extolling the praises of holidays at The Jungle outside Calais

    “Very handy dog-friendly hotel near to Calais”
    4 of 5 starsReviewed 7 November 2011
    I’ve stayed here a couple of times and it’s a very useful stop-over to and from the ferry at Calais. The hotel is in the centre of town and within easy walking distance of a good sized park.
    Service friendly and efficient, and the rooms are quiet and well-equipped for a budget hotel.

    Stayed September 2011, travelled on business
    4 of 5 stars Value
    5 of 5 stars Location
    5 of 5 stars Sleep Quality
    3 of 5 stars Rooms
    4 of 5 stars Cleanliness
    4 of 5 stars Service
    Was this review helpful?Yes1
    Report
    Ask DrivingwithDogs about Ibis Saint Omer Centre
    This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC

    http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g562728-d281537-r120296500-Ibis_Saint_Omer_Centre-Saint_Omer_Pas_de_Calais_Nord_Pas_de_Calais.html#

  59. Radford NG, August 11th, 2015 – 23:45

    Thanks, I had been puzzling about that one, but last week I was somewhat distracted.

    Do you, or any retired legal beagle hereabouts, know when all this “cannot be named for legal reasons” crap came about? This rule seems to be selectively applied. eg. in the case of Ann Maguire there seemed to be no problem with publishing the name and photos of her murderer after the trial. No prizes or guessing why.

    In England the age of criminal responsibility is 10. In Scotland it is 8, but 12 for the purposes of prosecution. So what’s the problem with naming them? Secret trials as conducted by the behest of the SS (Social Services) is another thing that is wrong with the bloody country!

  60. John birch – 05:51

    🙂 Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose!

    Re: Ms BatmanJelly

    Some wag observed last week that when she’s not on public display wearing her ostentatious super hero costumes, in the private life of her secret identity she probably dresses quite normally and goes by the name of “BruceWayne Jelly.”

    Dear Mr. Littlejohn

    In the interesting times in which we live, “Batman Jelly” is most probably what gets applied to Robin as the couple relax after one of their exhilarating night time adventures in downtown, Gotham City.

  61. Nothing to see! Just move along:

    Kids Company staff ordered to ‘shred client files’ in last hours

    ” Staff at Kids Company claim they were told to shred client files hours before the charity collapsed, as it emerged that taxpayers may never recover a last-minute £3 million grant.

    Workers in London and Bristol said they were instructed by managers to destroy documents and in some cases delete emails. The order allegedly came shortly before the youth work charity permanently closed its doors and made its 650 staff redundant last Wednesday.”

    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4524634.ece

  63. RobertRetyred – 12:02

    Hence the oft heard opening statement by defence barristers…

    “M’lud, ladies & gentlemen of the jury, there’s not a shred of evidence that my client….. etc.)

    However… bank statement copies can be obtained from the bank and, barring the trashing by a good old fashioned 6in nail, deleted files can be recovered from the hard disks of pcs and their servers.

  64. EC @ 10:31

    Only to tell you, EC, Baron got his copy today, signed it seems rather quickly, which should be good news for Mark’s legal fund, the more books the better even though the signature is just a squiggle.

  66. Baron – 12:42

    From Judith Curry at Climate Etc.
    This is a damn good read if you can spare 10 mins or so.

    http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/12/the-adversarial-method-versus-feynman-integrity-2/

    Here’s a snippet

    JC comment: Hucksterism is a great word to describe what goes on in the communication of climate science in service of policy advocacy. The complicity of many climate scientists and professional societies in this hucksterism is a cause of great concern.

    The path that led Lucas and his followers to increasingly implausible positions defended using increasingly adversarial arguments starts with Stigler conviction and a commitment to an initial conjecture that turned out to be false. Why did Lucas, who as far as I can tell was originally guided by Feynman integrity, switch to the mode of Stigler conviction? My conjecture is economists let small accidents of intellectual history matter too much. If we had behaved like scientists, things could have turned out very differently.

    JC comment: The year 2000, the publication of the IPCC TAR, and the elevation by IPCC Chair John Houghton of the hockey stick to icon status. A small accident in the history of the IPCC has had serious adverse consequences for climate science.

    It is worth paying attention to these accidents because doing so might let us take more control over the process of scientific inquiry that we are engaged in. At the very least, we should try to reduce the odds that that personal frictions and simple misunderstandings could once again cause us to veer off on some damaging trajectory. I suspect that it was personal friction and a misunderstanding that encouraged a turn toward isolation (or if you prefer, epistemic closure) by Lucas and colleagues. They circled the wagons because they thought that this was the only way to keep the rational expectations revolution alive.

    JC comment: The tragic case in point for climate science is Mann versus McIntyre, as revealed by Andrew Montford and the Climategate emails. ‘Circling the wagons’, even. I’ve written previously of how we managed to quickly get back on track on the hurricane and global warming wars, whereas Mann continues to fight the hockey wars not just by hucksterism but by attacking his opponents. This kind of behavior does not help keep the dangerous human caused climate change narrative alive, and at some point simply becomes pathological.

  67. EC (15:25)

    Yes indeed. Let’s hope Comey has enough clout to follow through and feel her collar.
    Hope he does it personally, too. He’s 6’8″ so that would make a great happy snap – as he clicks the bracelets on the piss-taking poisonous political pygmy. Well … we can dream, can’t we?

  69. EC (16:02)

    “This kind of behavior does not help keep the dangerous human caused climate change narrative alive…”

    The sting in the tail? Even she clings to the tautology and arrogant fallacy? Or am I misreading that?

  72. EC @ 19:34

    Baron reads the great Mark Steyn and Anthony Watts, EC, understands them, follows their argument, often admires the way the argument is framed. Probably because she’s been at the science for some time (she says she can chuck it in, stay comfortable if she felt too much under pressure), has imbibed the jargon of the profession for years, as an insider is familiar with its nuances, Dr Curry somehow doesn’t fall into the same category. Or, it may be the poorly educated Slav is not up to it to grasp what she says.

    Baron quotes: “My claim is that economics is characterized by a trigger strategy/reputational equilibrium that sustains the scientific method. In calling attention to defection by the freshwater economists, I am following a strategy that is equilibrium play in this reputational equilibrium”.

    Pardon?

  73. EC @ 15:25

    Since the scandal about her using a private e-mail address for government business broke, she’s had enough time not to just delete what she doesn’t want anyone to read but, in the jargon of the trade, burn it.

    Given she’s an insidious individuals, she very likely left few bits that the MSM crowd will home on, but nothing of any substance that could bury her chances in the presidential race.

    Could Baron be wrong?

  74. telemachus @ 07:44

    There very likely are at Calais some who deserve help, people who suffered badly, lost everything, seen family members slaughtered. Unquestionably, there are also those, it appears to be a majority, who want to better themselves, use the chaos in the ME to sneak in. However much one can sympathise with the economic migrants, we simply cannot absorb them.

    If all those who want to come to the West, to the UK in particular, were to come, we would turn into a society not unlike the ones these people are leaving, and not only because of a potential social unrest, but also for purely technical reasons, our infrastructure, institutions like schools, the NHS, food distribution and whatever else would crumble. Even you must see it.

    The only lasting and mutually acceptable solution must be to help the countries from which these people are fleeing to remove the reasons for which they want to escape, to re-build civic societies there, to ensure they can find a place under the sun where they were born.

  78. Baron:
    Brietbart and the Mail (and probably others) are getting worked-up again about the BBC.In this case it’s the BBC P O C C |/| |/| (which as near as I can tell–in Latin script–is the Voenno Vozdushnye Sily Russii *) as painted on the tails of these Tu 95 propeller driven bombers Putin is sending this way again in acts of aggression (in the various photos that have appeared).
    I wonder that Russia does not have any more modern jet planes…..there again maybe they are just for show,given that the Vulcans have been retired and I doubt America is intending to use long rang bombers against Russia when we both have ICBMs.

    *Military Air Force Russia.

  80. Baron 0013
    That truly is the most reasoned tract I have read on this troubled issue
    Yet how do we square the barriers with our supposed Christian values
    Our belief in ourselves is a belief fostered in the wider values of Christendom
    We need a solution that we can justify at the Pearly Gates
    I fear that a solution requiring change in the circumstances of origin of these poor souls is a solution without possibility
    There is no apparent solution to Syria without a change in Amrican psyche
    And where is the will to invole anyone with the resources to fix the failed states of Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia and so on
    All telemachus hears is the same folk who are incensed by immigration are violently opposed to the Intenational Development budget
    *
    We must I fear trudge on with compromise. I am no Jeremy groupie but I wonder if such as he will produce a more equitable solution to these troubled issues

  81. Radford NG @ 04:09

    Thanks for the link, Radford, the mute season on Russia has ended as the Iranian deal where the Americans needed Putin got signed.

    Both sides are like cocks, muscles old and tired, posturing. But for what? The KGB man would do better to sort the Russian economy, the honorary Muslim has also few boils to attend to. Lunacy, and Baron’s loosing interest, one cannot help someone who to be helped wants not.

  82. From Guido:-

    SHAMELESS BURNHAM’S NHS “NEWS MANAGEMENT” CHUTZPAH

    “Another stunning lack of self-awareness from Andy Burnham, who has some nerve putting his name to this article in today’s Mirror:

    “the Government publishes all the bad news about the NHS on the same day in the hope that it will minimise the negative headlines. It’s a cynical attempt at news management from a Tory Government that knows the NHS is going backwards on their watch. And it shreds Tory claims to be committed to transparency in the NHS.”
    “Minimise negative headlines,” you say? “A cynical attempt at news management”. Oh really?

    Let’s remember how, as Health Secretary, Burnham and his deputy allegedly told the Care Quality Commission to “tone down” a report into hospital deaths because it would be too “political” before an election. This is from the Guardian’s write up at the time:

    “Burnham, then health secretary, had questioned why he had heard “graphic details” about Basildon hospital’s treatment of patients on Sky News before he had been briefed about it in December 2009. The agreed protocol was that his department was told in advance of such reports and CQC officials were told he was “furious” about the breach.

    Two months later with an election looming, Burnham’s deputy Mike O’Brien also cautioned the regulator that “anything you do is going to be political whether you intend it to be or not. And of course once we reach March (2010), purdah, whenever that starts, you can’t publish anything”.

    Perhaps most damaging is the CQC’s own interpretation of ministerial wishes. Following the meeting with O’Brien a former non-executive director Martin Marshall at the CQC discusses the publication of the 2010 State of Care report, which summarised of the regulator’s findings in health and social care during the year.

    In an email to former chief executive Cynthia Bower and her deputy Jill Finney a few months before the 2010 general election, he warns about “the politics”. “It is really important that we get this report absolutely right before sending anything to the department … The DH will go through this with a toothcomb and it is naive to think that they will really only do a factual check”.

    Marshall said there was a need to be “careful about language” and suggests “being hard-hitting without presenting critical data will … be more politically acceptable than criticising with evidence”.”

    Posted here for the benefit of telemachus who regularly defends the slimeball Burnham at the other place.

  83. telemachus @ 06:29

    If one’s Christian values lead one to a state of impoverishment, if not annihilation, which would bring with it a complete loss of Christian values anyway one must put a limit to one’s generosity, no? Or, to put it simpler (less pompous?), one must be charitable but without putting oneself in need of charity.

    And how do we bring some peace and life to the Somalis of the world? Since foreign aid has failed for all to see (in some long period of time, some 80% of the foreign aid to the country ended up in the pockets of few corrupt Kenyan politicians, apparatchiks), perhaps the time has come to re-dust the colonial model, get in, sort things out, stay until a more trustworthy local middle class emerges. That may do the trick, Baron reckons.

  85. telemachus, how could you, betting so heavily on the horse of the fatty Balls, now switching to another one owned by Burnham. Where’s your loyalty gone, young man?

  86. I bought three books by Simon Sebag Montefiore, two on Stalin and one on Catherine the Great and Potemkin, which I should have read already. Once back at my hotel, I tuned in to Tuesday’s Alex Jones Show in an effort to catch up.

    He issues a total emergency alert.

    It looks as though the odds are on WW3 starting in October (50-60%) – coupled of course by your old friends, financial implosion, etc.. etc. Jones suggested that his sources were the best and I have to admit he looked really freaked out.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kjUA1YqlEI

    Is the developing legal and political attack focusing on Hillary Clinton’s criminal activity part of a white hat attempt to stop this? I don’t know, but that was my only positive thought.

    Except of course that everything is awesome, everything is cool.

    I am sure therefore that there is no reason to be alarmed. I am sure for instance that when I reach the end of Montefiore’s books on Stalin’s reign of terror, he will conclude that the story is total fantasy, as such things just do not happen…

  87. Malfleur – 09:55

    On mornings like these, despite the lovely weather, I’ve got nothing against WW3…
    However, if Alex could ask the protagonists to delay the nuclear hostilities until at least November, then I’ll be sunning myself somewhere in the vicinity of “Clear Memories.”

  88. Baron and friends:
    It is a mistake to look at the Calais situation as either a moral question or a consequence of disruption in Africa or the Middle East.
    We are faced purely and simply with a failure of Cameron and his weak ineffective government to confront the French with their culpable probably wilful neglect of their international responsibilities.
    These migrants on French soil are the exclusive responsibility of France.
    France can round them up and deliver them where they wish.
    But to leave them and wash their hands of them is not only a policy devoid of humanity but also a hostile act on a nation that delivered them from a cruel invader in the last century.
    Come on Mr Cameron-Act.
    Sure as anything if you and Ms May do not act the electorate will not forgive you.
    And Ms May your vacillation has denied you chance of party leadership.

  89. Baron, August 12th, 2015 – 23:45

    You have misread JC’s blog post.

    At the start she writes:

    “Ed Dolan pointed me to a series of remarkable posts from economist Paul Romer’s blog: Romer starts with a story about freshwater economists, the details of which are not particularly germane to what I find interesting in this. My excerpts focus on issues raised by Romer that are of broader relevance to the climate debate.”

    So the excerpts from Paul Romer’s blog are in italics, and JC’s Comments below each of excerpt are in plain text. JC was just trying to draw a parallel between the disputes happening in the world of the Economics and what is happening in the world of “Climate Science” (currently an oxymoron) Economics is one of the darkest arts and

    I’m not surprised that you were befuddled by the terminology indulged in by modern economists, any sane person would be !

    Judith Curry is one of a small band of climatologists that has had the courage to speak out against the unscientific ideology of the politically motivated eco/climate fraudsters. She is interested anything that draws attention to the aspects of their religious fervour which is all they have, scientifically speaking, to back up their dogma.

    She follows scientific method and subscribes to Feynman integrity, which is all you can ask of a real scientist:

    “From a commencement address by Richard Feynman that described what this type of integrity entails:

    It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

    Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

    Call this Feynman integrity.”

    Feynman Integrity is rarer than rocking horse shit in the world of “Climate Science”!

  90. Baron, August 12th, 2015 – 23:45

    Richard Feynman, physicist and mathematician, was already a legend when I was a student.

    Feynman was appointed by the Rogers Commission to investigate the cause of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster. He was apparently the only person in the USA to be trusted to be independently minded and robust enough to cut through all the political arse covering bullshit that the various organisations with vested interests were indulging in at the time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

    Not only all that, he could play the Bongos! 🙂

  93. Update: Swedish IKEA “stabbing” update:

    “After the stabbing on Monday, the store reopened this morning. News Agency AFP reports Swedish police have been “tight-lipped” over what precisely happened in the store, and have refused to confirm various claims in the local and global media, from the identity of the victims and perpetrators, the exact nature of the murder weapons, to whether it was a beheading. There are unconfirmed suggestions in the fringe press that the killers shouted “Allah Akbar” as they struck.”

    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/08/12/first-it-was-gun-control-now-its-knife-control-ikea-stops-selling-knives-after-store-stabbing/

    Poor sod, how could he help himself? On seeing a unattended knife it must have been an involuntary reflex action !

    Once again the jihad enablers are peddling muslims might be at risk of the mythical “backlash by dark forces” schtick!

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33905334

  95. Not you, too, EC: a friend of Malfleur says the end of the world, well, a nuclear war really, is to break out in the Autumn, here you’re telling us it’s already arrived south of Birmingham.

  96. Do persevere with this one, it has a blonde in it, and it once again demonstrates how many of us have gone charmingly loopy, and sadly for the rest of us, it’s those infected with the bug of incurable imbecility who shout the loudest.

    Btw, when the marching stops, the topless girl does the talking, do look to the right, the bloke with dark glasses, where does he look, what is he looking at, a potential rapist perhaps?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKfdS38aBSk

  97. It is always a mistake to use the NHS as a political football
    I know for a fact that before the last election all NHS staff were warned of election purdah such that comments to media on any subject were forbidden to minimise political misinterpretation
    Guido is of course mischievous in misinterpreting similar constraints before the 2010 election
    *
    Perhaps Guido would have been better served by telling us the benefits to the health of the general population by the doubling of the funding of the NHS by the Government of the MP for Leigh

    *
    It is a sad fact that those who live in cosy cosseted splendour in the HCEA bucolic idyll view the accent of the most sincere of our political representatives with disdain and use this flimsy excuse to lambast him

  100. telemachus @ 12:53

    Any set-up that employs a number of people ranking it third after the employment by the Chinese Army and the Indian railways, devouring almost 10% of a country’s budget, and chronically in a crisis is bound to be a political football, telemachus.

  101. Baron – 15:55

    I do wonder where the Chinese Railways and the Indian Army appear in the list.

  102. Please forget he who Alexandr calls Belsen Burnham. Blair has just guaranteed a Corbyn victory.

  104. Baron (15:55)

    Heh-heh-heh…

    I know I’m being lured into a little bear trap here, so I’ll bring my bolt cutters and a rope with me:

    http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/where-theres-smoke-the-5-richest-tobacco-companies/

    Much as I despise Georgie boy, the Nanny State and large charity organisations that jump on any finger-wagging, bandwagon cause, allegedly ‘pro bono publico’, exponentially more is my contempt for those who propagate and profit from human weakness and addiction to fill their fat wallets and bellies.

    Prohibition of the vice of stupidity may not be the answer to it, but nor is exploitation of it. The executives of all five of the major corporate poisoners should be lined up and shot, pour l’encourager les autres; ‘les autres’ being the executives of the five big pharmas – and while they’re at it, the great band of twats who want to let loose the latest proposed ‘legitimate industry’: the producers and purveyors of what are currently illicit narcotics, methamphetamines and hallucinogens.

    The least we can do is discourage smokers, dopers and excessive drinkers, not give them a pass in the cause of ‘freedom’. Sometimes a little help of the legislators is necessary.

    Having spent most of my life, in a number of different careers, clearing up the human detritus left by the complete conglomeration of these cynical bastards, I am not likely to join the great cause of ‘libertarianism’. None of us are born free, most of us will never be free – we are subjects of human frailty and targets of the hounds of hell.

    Balance m’lord. Balance. Adjustable, on our toes and sensible – there must be a middle way. Hookah pipes, e-puffing – just hokum! Let’s encourage a little strong will rather the free-will. Pandering to pricks never appealed to me; and I speak as an ex-smoker. What a plonker I was. Still am in many ways. Would have been much more so, had it not been for ‘a little help from my friends’ – the legislators of yore.

  105. Frank P – 13:52,

    Notwithstanding my various infirmities, thankfully I still reckon that I could outrun her! Although I’d still take the precaution of first tying telemachus’s shoelaces together!
    🙂

  106. Applied Racial Anencephaly: Making Things Worse
    Posted on August 13, 2015 by Fred Reed
    Note: Last week’s column on evolutionary biology was a total spoof with imaginary brain anatomy and so on. Some people took it seriously. My apologies.

    It never stops, and won’t. Another state of emergency in Ferguson. Headline: “Post-Dispatch Reporter Recovering after Attack while Covering Ferguson.”
    He was photographing break-ins.
    “The attackers punched him in the face, hit him in the head at least three times and kicked him in the back of the head when he was on the ground, Hampel said.”
    This is normal behavior for those doing it. Interesting is that several white men showed up calling themselves Oath Keepers and carrying serious rifles. Depending on which news account you believe, they were there to protect stores or people. Either way, it looks like another step toward The Big One.
    It sets one to pondering the racial disaster that we never call a racial disaster. The usual pattern is that a black man dies or is roughly handled while being arrested. The police may or may not have misbehaved. It doesn’t matter. The media then assert that “the victim”—not “the criminal”–was a gentle giant, wanted to help people, planned to go to divinity school, and was only inadvertently committing burglary or selling drugs. Later it transpires that he had seventeen felony arrests. It doesn’t matter.
    Nothing does. The talking heads and headesses, aflame with indignation, treat any shooting as unprovoked racial murder not requiring investigation and tell “African-Americans” (what a pretentious designation) that they are, as always, victims of discrimination, racism, oppression, structural racism, microaggressions, anything and everything but responsible for their own actions. Such as being burglars or drug dealers.
    None of these media delicates will ever have walked a foot beat in a bad section, fired a gun, or imagined what it is like to be in a dark building with a criminal you can’t see and who may be armed. The talking heads seem to have no idea of the intensity of the anger and hatreds in the country. Notice how puzzled they are by Donald Trump’s popularity. For the price of a cup of coffee in any truck stop on I95, and a little conversation, they could have found out.
    A casual glance at headlines around the internet on almost any day might give them a clue to the seriousness of things:
    “Black lives Matter Protest Turns Violent in Texas”
    “Anniversary of Michael Brown’s Death Brings Gunfire in Ferguson”
    “Farrakhan. We Must Rise UP and Kill Those Who Kill Us. Stalk Them and Kill Them”
    “Sandra Bland Protest: All White People Should Be Killed”
    Does this sound like a road to a happy ending?
    Referring to these headlines will not suggest to the heads that we have a problem. Instead, they will conclude that I am a racist. What could be more useful? (Imagine the uproar if a white said “We must kill all the, er, teens.”)
    You might think the proper approach to shootings by the police would be honest investigation of each shooting. No. That isn’t how the game is played. The media lie, doctor audio recordings (NBC was it?) and speak of er, troubled youth. Blacks, intensely tribal, seem uninterested in questions of guilt or innocence. To them, everything is race. Logic, truth, circumstances lack importance.
    What with the internet, whites know all of this. As blacks become angrier and angrier because of what they are told is heartless, causeless discrimination, whites get angrier over the endless Knockout Game, hidden by the MSM but not by Drudge. This makes things worse.
    Making things worse is the norm for talking heads and the “elites.” Consider Jeff Gutenbezos, daddy of the Kindle and honcho of Amazon. In a display of his essential goodness, he recently pulled from Amazon all items containing the Confederate flag (while continuing to sell Meinkampf). Net effect? To infuriate a lot of white people, largely against blacks, without doing anything to benefit blacks.
    Will denizens of the ghetto do better in school with no Confederate flags on sale at Amazon? Will they stop shooting each other? Get married before giving birth? No. But Jeff will feel good about himself. The talking heads will love him.
    Making things worse.
    The other day Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate, aged 73, was speaking when a mob of blacks mounted the stage and shut the event down. Why do they do this? First, hatred. Second, because they know they can get away with it. Parents have forever known that if you let children behave badly, they will behave worse.
    A country deserves what it tolerates. And gets more of it.
    All racial policy now is symbolic and without substance—and makes things worse. E.g., I read that black graduate students of education at UCLA have protested because a professor corrected their grammar and spelling. Yes, graduate students who cannot write correct English. I was required to do it in the eighth grade. The professor of course whimpered and groveled like a puppy who has wet the rug, and apologized.
    This story raced around the internet to a mixture of laughter, contempt, and horror. Laughter because it is funny, contempt because it is contemptible, and horror because the education students will be teaching our children. Which latter arouses anger.
    Making things worse.
    I assert, in hopes of being successfully contradicted, that given current approaches racial relations can only get worse. If this is not true, tell me why it is not.
    What do blacks not fit into American society? First, very poor education. People reading at the level of middle school or below cannot find work in a technological society in which automation is putting literate whites out of work. Second, a culture of hostile dependency brought about by condescending racial policy that requires nothing of them.
    What to do? To suggest that blacks need to make their kids do their homework is racism. To suggest that marriage is key to upward mobility is racism. To suggest that blacks really need to stop shooting each other is racism. To suggest that PhDs ought to be required to write English is racism.
    Merry Christmas.
    And there is no way out. Blacks in Detroit are doing nothing to solve their problems. Black clowns—“leaders,” I meant to say, leaders—like Jesse and Al are not suggesting anything practical, such as studying. They are just milking the victimization cow. The Republicans don’t care and the Democrats keep black votes by nurturing self-pity.
    The results? The police in many cities have largely stopped doing anything. If, in a region of armed thugs who hate them, they try to enforce the law, they or a thug will eventually get shot. It doesn’t matter whether the shooting was justified. Either way the cop will be raped in the media. It is therefore common sense for them to avoid contact with criminals.
    Which makes things worse.
    It has become apparent that the two races cannot live together amicably. The endless efforts to force them to do so only make matters worse. To restore a degree of peace and even of good will, when possible would it not make sense to separate them? At a minimum , get white cops out of black neighborhoods and black out of white? This would instantly remove the racial element in those regions.
    Since the races have very different ideas of the purposes of schooling and the manner of effecting it, why force them to mix? For example, why not let universities decide whether to be white, black, or mixed? We could call it something like “freedom of association.” White universities could require spelling and grammar, set entrance standards as high as they liked, and teach subjects of interest to whites, or some whites, such as European history. The black universities could decide for themselves what to teach and require. They may have no interest in European history, as blacks have no connection to it. Should this not be their decision?
    How to keep aged presidential candidates from being roughed up is another matter. If whites did such a thing, I would say put them in the cooler for six months. To suggest this in the case of blacks would be racism.
    Perhaps candidates could speak from a raised platform with retractable stairs and thick glass walls, maybe surrounded by barbed wire. Or maybe on a giant telescreen, with the actual candidate hidden somewhere in a safe house. Have we come to this?

  107. huktra – 16:40

    If by some bizarre turn of events Jeremy Corbyn eventually becomes PM, then he says that he will put Blair in the dock for war crimes. (hopefully Alistair Campbell too) Tony Blair is now as rich as Croesus, but he is also deeply unpopular. (about as welcome as a blocked bog on the ISS) Let’s face it , it could be a vote winner…

  108. Robert & Frank:

    Apology is in order, the NHS ranks fifth, but if you read the link, it’s not kosher for the US Armed services, The two US based retailers to be compared with the NHS the way the DT (or rather the BBC) did it. In case of the US military, it’s both the boots and the supporting staff, as for the retailers, it includes every country they are in. The NHS is just the for the UK, excluding its contractors.

    Even so, to rank fifth in a country of 65mn as opposed to China, India, the US with by far greater population numbers is an achievement of sort, don’t you think?

    We should be proud, and proud we are even though we could do better.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9155130/NHS-is-fifth-biggest-employer-in-world.html

    And this for Frank:

    Nicely crafted as always, but not entirely convincing. Smoking harms (not everyone and certainly not if done in moderation, Baron’s paternal grandfather smoked like a chimney, pegged it at 96, and not because of smoking), but so does, above moderation limits, drinking, gorging on carbohydrates, running, playing squash …..

    The best way of stopping overindulgence in anything is to let people to take care of their own health, we did it before the Full Monty of Welfare including the NHS was born, or rather morphed into the for-live mutation. If we turn it back, switch its help to that provided by private insurance i.e. ‘one off help if one paid the premium, then one’s on his own’, many a societal boil will at least ease off, perhaps disappear.

    It’s knowing that whatever one indulges in, and often in uncontrollable excess, the Welfare will step in, save one that does it. But legislating directly? Hmmm

  109. Baron

    You didn’t address my main gripe. The existing law could always have been applied to the tobacco moguls. Conspiracy to cause GBH (your grandad notwithstanding). Btw my mother lived to 95 and never smoked in her life. OTOH one of my brothers choked to death on lung cancer after smoking all his adult life at the age of 63. Extrapolation of limited stats doesn’t help when trying to determine what to do about unnecessary self-harm (or in some cases harm to others) Or indeed clogging up medical resources and blocking help for those whose illness was not self-inflicted. 🙂

    But I concede your points about public funded healthcare. But that clock cannot be turned back – sadly. In fact if Jeremy Corblimey has his way with us?

    The commissars will flourish. 🙂

  112. Oil down to $42; petrol down to $1.4 a gallon in the States. Time for a major road block again; somebody is taking the piss! £1.20 a feckin’ LITRE still up the road from here.

  113. Frank P – 21:25

    In conurbations, unleaded is around 112 – 114p/l, while in the sticks it’s around 117-118p/l, so your garage does look on the pricier side.

    Try this site to find a bargain:
    http://www.petrolprices.com

    You will need to supply an email address, and they do send emails, but you can unsubscribe from them, when your car is full of cheap fuel.

  114. An impassioned plea to restore and keep The Faith, from Mr Boot. Wish I could see what he can see; a glimmer of something or other reflects off his pen, then the heavy cloud of cynicism descends as the unprovoked pain of human suffering, all around us, screams, “WTF is all THAT about?!!

    The ‘omnipotent’, omniscient One, is silent; communucating only in dog (collar) whistles and the intellect of art and music.

    And Planned Parenthood is allowed to perpetrate its infamy, 50m souls thus far:

    http://alexanderboot.com/content/extremism-another-word-christianity

  115. Frank P @ 18:44

    Your main gripe Baron has no quarrel with, Frank, and your observation about the bearded cumred fits the barbarian’s thinking, too. If he gets in in 2020 and does the walking as madly as he does the talking now he may even nationalise all private dwellings, too, what’s a £4.0tr bill to man with a vision, ha?

  116. Frank P @ 23:02

    One of the best the omni-all Mr. Boot has ever penned, Frank.

    It pains Baron to say it, however, he’s preaching to himself and the few in the ‘healthy core of Englishness’. But who can say, perhaps his time will come one day.

  117. Frank P @ 21:25

    What puzzles is this, Frank: About a year ago, the barrel of Brent crude was priced at near $120, today it’s is barely above $40. Something’s smells here. It’s either we were grossly overcharged in the past, which in a properly functioning market, shouldn’t happen, or someone somewhere is manipulating the price, massively.

  118. Baron (23:53)

    We are being gouged, me ol’ China. And the government is complicit; as for ‘cheap petrol’ ( Robert -tks) – I used to fall for that scam until someone drew my attention to the fact that less mileage results and it is therefore false economy. And anyway – even Supermarket ‘cheap’ is exorbitant, given the current price of a tub of black gold. The retailers blame the fuel tax, anyway. Most small garages are struggling. Once again it’s Whitehall that benefits. Funds for jobs for the boys. Bastards! And the roads hereabouts are beginning to resemble the droves of my childhood.

    The unacceptable face of capitalism gives metaphorical fuel to gobshit commies like that fucking runt* Corbyn to put on his act of ‘sincerity’!

    *An interchangeable first consonant is appropriate if you desire. I think you dropped it from your moniker for some reason at Quickfit). 😉

  119. This poor woman, an ex-military vet, suffered a double whammy: first she has the misfortune to have Yazza A B as a doppelganger, then she gets murdered by an illegal immigrant. And Mr Boot urges me to believe in a just creator?

  121. I just can’t believe what’s happening Stateside. Surely we won’t witness the final choice for POTUS being between The Donald and Joe Biden.

    The Teflon Donald v Daffy Duck.

    Only in America!

  122. If Joe wins – he won’t need a speech writer for the inaugural – I can see it now: “This is THE big fuckin’ deal! Donald – you’re FIRED! 🙂

  123. Petrol prices
    remember 58p + vat per litre is tax. So while you are right to say prices are still too high, you need to calculate on the non tax amount, not what you pay

    but if oil has come down why has there not been a correction in domestic gas and electric prices.

  124. I thought this comment from the spectator comments was worth posting here.

    Wasn’t Pickles a young(er) councillor at the time of the Honeyford Affair – an event which will be seen by future historians as the beginning of the end of Great Britain as a nation; the point at which the values which the country once treasured – honesty, universal education, democracy, freedom of speech, equality of the sexes, racial equality and tight limits on religion in public life – were abandoned in favour of multiculturalism, tribalism and Islamism – with its sexism, dominance of religion over everything, including democracy and women’s rights – and a preference for convenient lies over truth.*

    *Two examples: Honeyford said in effect that Pakistan was a failed state with a disastrous history of governance. He was correct. Instead of trying to refute him, his opponents shouted him down and refused to allow the matter to be debated.

    Honeyford also said that the educational failures of the Afro-Caribbean community could not be blamed solely on racism since some ethnic groups – eg Hindu & Sikh Indians, Chinese and Jews – prospered in England and indeed generally did better than the indigenous English. Again, no refutation was forthcoming, instead they screamed him down.

  125. Frank P @ 02:10

    Hard to stop laughing, Frank, reading this short burst of the wit to yours, the last two sentences are pure gold juxtaposed so tightly together, this one you must smuggle into any sizeable blog either at the DT or the Spectator, it should be recorded in as many places as possible.

  126. Baron’s having a chinwag (or rather was) with two Americans on the Breibart blog about the warmongering between Russia and the Republic, one calls himself Todd, the other Milton, their bigotry seems bottomless, the hatred of Russians, Mexicans amongst other undesirables unsurpassed. Here’s a taster, it is how it actually begins:

    “saved europe”??? you russians gang raped and murdered most every female from 8 to 80 en route to berlin. If it weren’t for the US, the degenerate russian apes would have continued their “Great Patriot Gang Rape” all over europe.
    the russian ape strategy was to have one more body than your enemy has bullets. Such a tragedy that the US destroyed the manufacturing capability and transportation of Germany before Germany was able to kill millions more of you degenerate, gang raping apes. But history is what it is. At least ya’ll had to empty out your prison system (gulags) and use the nkvd to force people to fight, so a bunch of them were killed off too.

    But apparently not enough as you russian apes are still looting, raping and murdering in Dagestan, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Georgia, Karelia, Koenisberg, Maldova, Crimea, Ukraine, etc. Humans need to keep on killing russians until they take their baboon like ways back to the corrupt cesspool called russia. Go back to their cages and stay there, never to go into other people’s countries and cause them problems again”.

    As you say, Frank, only in America.

  127. Still nothing to do with Islam?

    Hidden from view: Muslim sectarian hate rises in UK

    Sectarian hatred at the heart of British Muslim community
    “Religious sectarianism is on the rise in Britain’s Muslim community and threatens to spill over into violent crime and terrorism, leading clerics warned yesterday. An investigation by The Times has found a sharp but largely hidden rise in sectarian tensions between the minority Shia community and the dominant Sunni groups, driven by the long, bitter war in Syria. Ill-feeling is being stoked by vitriolic preachers on both sides of the divide — including some who lecture at British universities — and incidents such as assaults, attacks on buildings and intimidation online. Sayed Ammar Nakshwani, one of the world’s leading Shia clerics, revealed that he recently left Britain for the United States after enduring years of intimidation from hardline Sunnis who allegedly threatened his life, followed his parents and vandalised his car. Sheikh Ahmed Haneef, a Shia imam in London, called for 24-hour police protection for Shia mosques and said that community leaders…”
    (£) http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/faith/article4527003.ece

    Are British taxpayers supposed to pay for this 24-hour police protection?

  128. Baron – 09:45

    Notwithstanding the colourful language, Baron, surely there are a few grains of historical truth in there, Baron?

    When it was safe to go in the heroic French occupying forces in SW Germany had many Algerian/N.African units. It was not so much a case of “lock up your daughters” but it was also “lock up your little boys” as well!

  129. Frank P – 01:50

    The world has gone mad! Only just over 12 months of Obama to go, but how much more damage can he inflict? Whoever the next POTUS is, they are going to deal with one hell of a “legacy” left by this bastard. “Sanctuary Cities” to name but one aspect. WTF thought that daft idea up?

    That was a sad case you reported. The USA is not a good place to live on one’s own, with or without an arsenal of firepower in the house. A couple of hungry, light sleeping , dobermans would also seem in order!

  130. EC @ 10:58

    Goo d point, EC, war is nasty, bad things happen, both sides did a fair share of looting, raping, burning, the Red Army unquestionably more than our side. As Baron said before, given what the Nazis were doing to the Russians at the start of the war one can explain, understand their response when they got the upper hand, but not justify it.

  131. Some of the true but deliberately inflammatory comments, and the reactions from the usual suspects, on this one are really quite amusing:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3196808/Angry-passer-sprays-w-ker-BMW-5-Series-parked-disabled-bay-without-blue-badge-display.html

    There is far too much incompetence and fraud associated with the administration of Disabled Badge parking schemes… leading to too many allocated places! It is very galling when one sees one of these bastards with Royal parking privileges sprinting away from their vehicles like an olympic athlete. Of course , it could be something to do with their medication but in most cases that I observe on a regular basis it’s fraud! An acquaintance of mine with one of these badges, quite legally held, has even completed Wainwright’s 200 mile C2C walk. However at least he has the cunning to carry a stick and affect a limp until he is 10 yards away from his vehicle – or until he’s sure nobody is watching.

    Something should be done! Helicopter gunships equipped with Hellfire missiles is my preferred solution.

  133. EC @ 10:58

    And this, EC:

    Re-reading the posting, what surprised Baron is that you should comment on ‘the grains of truth’ in the man’s rant rather than the man’s bigotry, noting just ‘his colourful language’. Surely you’re not in the ‘kill all the Russians’ camp, too, are you, EC?

  134. RobertRetyred @ 10:24

    What amazes more, Robert, that we haven’t seen much of it yet, most of of the intimidation seems to be hidden, dealt with probably by the ‘local’ mosque leadership, and if anything leaks out, the secular powers suppress it quickly for it would be dynamite (to be finished later, the plumber calls).

  138. Frank P – 12:29

    Without the scale of funds available to CM, the Aussies wouldn’t have me, Frank. Mind you, they probably wouldn’t have me, regardless! 🙂 🙂 More importantly, Mrs EC would never countenance anything other than a holiday – with all grandchildren in the UK.

  139. Baron – 12:07

    No, not at all, Baron. What, perhaps, surprised me is that you thought that such comments were noteworthy in the first place. Not difficult to find, the blog-o-sphere is full of it. When did Baron go online? You should’ve been around in the 90’s and 00’s!

    As far as “killing all those other ‘tards” is concerned, humankind is pretty much irredeemable, i’m afraid. It is an unfashionable truth that in recent times the British, and the British Empire, has had the most civilising effect on the world but we were rejected, our leaders betrayed us, and you see the result, everywhere, when you look around you.

  140. EC @ 13:42

    That was a tease, EC, you out of all people taking an extreme position? Hmmm. Would you, or even could you do it? Baron doesn’t know you that much, but reckons you’re one of the last people exhibiting borderline views.

    This has nothing to do with you personally, EC, but the barbarian often wonders how on earth did you, the Brits, ever got to running the world, virtually everyone’s all wishy-washy, non-committal, taciturn, buttoned up, often haughtish, almost always hypocritical particularly in position of power ….. Not the qualities one associates with the leadership of men. Or is the barbarian wrong?

    When Baron could again visit the region he hails from, people ask him ‘so how are the English’, one of the ready answers the barbarian gave was: You meet an Englishman, ask him ‘how are you’, he says ‘fine, fine, thank you’ then turns around, drops dead.

  141. Frank P 12:26

    The plumber’s British, Frank, more specifically as English as they come, very particular, does an excellent job, but one pays for it, doesn’t talk much, aged over, 60, but heavily tattooed arms (not that unusual that), has nothing against immigration (Baron of course asked him, carefully) except for the numbers, the speed at which it hits the country (his son’s married an Austrian girl, he visited the country, says ‘the Austrians are lovely people’).

    Your question about a ‘different plumber’ intrigues the barbarian. enlighten him, please.

  142. EC @ 12:07

    What’s this Dickens cider stuff, EC? Is it for real, or a spoof? And why is for the ladies only, the Australians the barbarian knows would drink everything that has alcohol in it, and flows.

  143. RobertRetyred @ 10:24

    (con’t)

    The fear of the in-house animosity between the two wings of the Islamic family blowing up is probably one of the reasons the politicians, the MSM poodles here are so keen suppressing anything that has to do with the ROP, it’s often the members of the Shia faction who misbehave, to say the least, within the ROP they account for only 15% of the whole, but commit most of the atrocities, mess it up for the Sunnis who prefer more subtle way of gaining the upper hand.

  149. @telemachus 11th – 07:50

    “we are about to see a major political party led by a True Man of Principle”

    TM, old chap, just because someone hews to a certain set of principles it does not make those principles correct. History is replete with evidence of that.

  150. The Russians are long lived.
    There is the story of an ancient peasant who had seen Napoleon ride through the village in 1812.Hearing this Nicholas II went out of his way to go there.He asked the old man:”Tell me,what did the Emperor look like?”.To which the ancient replied:” He was tall with a long white beard”.

  151. RIP;also:

    David Nobbs;Mch 1935–9 Aug 2015 (80 yrs).
    Creator of Reggie Perrin.(I didn’t get where I am to day without knowing he was creator of Reggie Perrin.)

    Steven Lewis (actor);Dec 1926–12 Aug 2015 (88 yrs).
    Played `Blakey` in On The Buses ;and `Smiler`in Last of the Summer Wine.

  152. i likes david nobbs novels about Henry pratt

    Second From Last in the Sack Race; Pratt of the Argus; and The Cucumber Man.

    made me laugh out loud. Could be tragic in places tho.

    lovely character – tosser pilkington-brick

  153. Baron the Dickens Cider Company’s CEO is called Mike Hunt. Does that help?

    As for the other connotation of ‘plumber’: in my old trade it meant something completely different. They always carried a little black bag and were very light of foot (not necessarily light on their loafers though – I’m talking brothel creepers as a prerequisite for their stealthy trade). And I would have guessed that you knew all about that sorta t’ing. Your old mate Vlad certainly did.

    On the subject of rampant Russki’s, hell bent on revenge post WW11; a little empirical and subjective experience. When, in the very early 1950s I joined a specialist unit at Thalerhof bei Graz, it still had all the Luftwaffe detritus lying around, less than a decade after the rout; it was a Gerry military aerodrome and Gestapo base, later converted into a little Lufthafen and our cosy little outfit. You probably know it as Graz International Lufthafen, now. But then, in those days Heathrow was two Nissan huts and a couple of ticket offices – those were the days!

    Sorry, duty calls – the memsahib is in need of assistance. I’ll finish my evidence when I return. Court adjourned, with your permission m’lord?

  155. Ostrich (occasionally)
    August 14th, 2015 – 17:24

    You clearly have been listening to Tony:

    “Tony Blair warns that leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn has a huge arsenal of principles of mass destruction, and these could quickly be deployed to reduce the Labour Party to an organisation that listens to its members.“People don’t realise how dangerous principles are in the wrong hands” explained foreign dictator consultant Blair. “Jeremy Corbyn could use them to make Labour unrecognisable inside an hour of becoming leader.”

    “20 years of building relations with multinational corporations and City bankers could be reduced to rubble, and for what end, so ordinary people can have a bigger slice of the pie? Oh please” said Blair.

    “This sort of ‘principles’ approach would be frowned upon by big business– it could seriously affect the chances of me being invited to a sleepover with Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng.””

    http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/08/14/blair-claims-corbyns-principles-of-mass-destruction-could-destroy-labour-in-45-minutes/

  156. telemachus,

    “it could seriously affect the chances of me being invited to a sleepover with Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng.”

    Point of order!

    Deng is no longer dinging Rupe’s dong!

    (they got divorced in 2013/14)

  157. one wonders if labour will be able to kiss and make up after what is becoming a bitter campaign.

  158. Huge cruise ship to house 2,500 refugees arrives in Kos
    ” A huge cruise ship turned floating refugee camp has arrived on the Greek holiday island of Kos, as the daily stream of refugees and migrants washing up in small wooden and rubber boats further down the coast continues to grow.

    The Eleftherios Venizelos docked in Kos town port at 3pm today after travelling overnight from Athens. She will accommodate up to 2,500 refugees and migrants in an attempt to ease the growing crisis on the island. The ship is to stay anchored in Kos and will serve as a registration centre. ”
    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4527589.ece

    “The ship is to stay anchored in Kos and will serve as a registration centre.”

    So, there’s no plan, when the ship is full, to have night time sailing back to the Libyan coast? 🙂

  159. Baron – 16:09

    The monster lurks within us all. Thankfully most of us are spared the burden of absolute power, which tends to draw it out.

    The British: Phlegmatic, is what you should say to your friends, back in old Czecho, and then point them toward this highly educational film by way of illustration:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l_3-23zAWM

    (see, the afghans were always revolting!)

  160. Alexsandr – 19:45

    It’s a political version of Groundhog Day:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_%28film%29

    “[The] arrogant [person] … finds himself in a time loop, repeating the same day again and again. After indulging in hedonism and committing suicide numerous times, he begins to re-examine his life and priorities.”

    Except, in the film, it didn’t go on for fifty years! 🙂

  163. PfM – 21:56

    “The cashier kept her head and told him to rejoin the queue,” said Agnieszka Wlodarska from the Warsaw police. “She then called the police.”

    The man, who has not been named owing to reporting restrictions, apparently followed the cashier’s instructions and sat down with other people waiting to be served.”

    We shall see, but queue joining is a very British custom and uncommon where the British have not had a presence. I would be surprised if it had been accidentally acquired on a short visit to Britain, especially as the influence would have been diluted by the year in Germany. The report doesn’t mention whether he can speak German, or English, for that matter. He might be dumb, as in he cannot speak.

  166. Andy Car Park @ 23:14

    The monster lurks within us, Andy, only if we have the stomach for it.

    Btw, why only the occasional stop at the CHW, surely the NCP’s duties cannot be that demanding, should allow you few spare moments to visit your old friends more often, why don’t you.

  167. EC @ 23:36

    Are we introducing theme days, EC?

    Yesterday, Robert kept posting mortuary stuff one after another, today, you and Andy cannot wait for the barbarian to open his eyes, bombard him with blood curling stories ….

    He did have a very distinctive voice, didn’t he, if he were to rob a bank in Poland (why Poland, Baron asks you, this alone would suggest the man’s not well, not much money there), it would definitely be for him a smart thing to do to keep his mouth shut (what a syntax, but then its early morning only).

  168. Frank P @ 19:01

    Missed this posting of yours earlier, guru.

    The Hunt hint is to direct the sclerotic brain of Baron to the rhyming slang of London boys living in the east end of the city, right?

    Your post war time story sounds interesting, you should warp it in more meat, have it published, Baron has urged you before to search in your memory bank, put the stuff you find on paper. As Vincent had a singular voice, you possess a distinctive writing skill, why waste it?

    What is it you know about the KGB colonel and brothels, and are not telling us?

  169. Baron – 09:13

    Why, the theme was Shakespeare, Baron 🙂
    Next Friday, I’m hoping to persuade ACP to participate in a biblical plagues of Egypt night!

  170. Baron – 09:13
    “Yesterday, Robert kept posting mortuary stuff one after another …”

    I thought many were looking on the bright side.

    No one of any value died that I can determine, only Muslims fighting each other because they have a common view that the others are not proper Muslims.

  171. Outrage as BBC boss claims marauding Calais migrants are like Joseph, Mary and Jesus
    BBC religious chief Aaqil Ahmed sparked fresh fury yesterday by comparing migrants who sneak illegally into Britain to the “Holy Family” of Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus.
    http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/598502/BBC-boss-claims-marauding-Calais-migrants-Joseph-Mary-JESUS

    Mary and Joseph were returning to Joseph’s ancestral hometown and Jesus’ birthplace, namely Bethlehem in Judea. The marauding migrants in Calais appear to have little in common with this young family, who were compelled to travel because of a decree of Caesar Augustus.

    To be like them, they should be clamouring to return to their homelands, in the rest of Africa, because their senior politicians had ordered it!

    Knowledge and application of the Bible’s contents doesn’t seem to be one of Aaqil’s strong points, but I expect that is why he managed to get the job he has.

  172. RobertRetyred – 11:28

    And they fled because they were being targeted, not because there was a war.

  173. Baron (09:31)

    Apologies for the untimely adjournment, but sometimes domestic exigencies have to take precedence over the gentle jossing of our little forum. The interruption was caused by a refrigerator problem (no plumber of either type involved – one hopes), but as you well know, once these matters become urgent, cause and effect creeps in – and before you know where you are, one thing leads to another. This wee crisis led to a trip to Curry’s emporium; later reorganisation of the utility room; then the garage – all between sudden downpours of Adam’s Ale (some might say God’s message to an infidel with a hint to ‘cool’ my blasphemous rhetoric, but then again, it pissed down on all the believers too, as I noticed when passing a local church fete en route to the purveyors of cheap Chinese obsolescent crappy electronics). I also noted the irony of the situation, when inadvertantly I caught a news item on one of Curry’s thousand or so flat screen Telly’s, that the Chinks has just devalued their feckin’ currency!

    But I digress. As is my won’t.

    With regard to the Australian ale. One supposes it is more difficult for someone whose second language is English, to pick up the sonic nuances of word-play and punnery. Close your eyes and say Dickens Cider, then close your eyes again and say Mike Hunt.

    I once sacked a hospital employee who phoned A & E and asked the lady receptionist there on night duty to ask, by means of her tannoy, all the walking wounded there the question, “Has anybody seen Mike Hunt?”

    When some wag in the front row, waiting for a stomach pump for an overdose of something or other yelled, “No, but I’m up for it if you are!” She suddenly realised she’d been had and burst into tears.

    Now scroll back to the Aussie clip and watch it again. In the meantime, I’ll finish my prep for the delivery of a new fridge and when I’m done, I’ll address the question of revenge by rape. Another sensitive issue… indeed. 😉

  174. Btw, my auto spell checker is responsible for slipping that inappropriate apostrophe into ‘tellys’ – more crappy software. 🙂

  176. Baron

    Another window of opportunity; back to Thalerhof bei Graz and our little secret squirrel unit in the idyllic setting of the Steiermark Plateau:

    Our quarters and operational unit were surrounded by two 8 feet Barbed wire fences 10 feet apart, for security purposes, patrolled inside the two fences by ex-Gestapo POWs,

  177. @telemachus 14th – 19:34

    “You clearly have been listening to Tony:”

    You is surely joshin’…isn’t you?

  178. … (contd) … with German Shepherd K9s, who were by then thoroughly tame and only too pleased to share the rations and quarters of the conquerors, which were streets ahead of what they were used to in their native digs, at that time. They were amiable coves, most of them spoke English and seemed to be very glad to be shot of Herr Shickelgruber (I know, I know – cue Mandy Rice Davies – whom I met professionally; my profession not hers – in a later role in life btw).

    During our stints on watch scouring the shortwave ether and recording anything that buzzed, beeped, spurted, spluttered or4 spoke – and noting even the levels of QRN & QRM (little esoteric stuff there for the cognoscenti), keeping an ear open for not only Uncle Joe’s Army Navy, air-force and ‘diplomatic’ services, but also of all the satellites of the Eastern bloc (yours included, Baron), not to mention listening in to friendly folks, as well as ‘potential’ enemies, we also were not averse to having one of our split earphones tuned in to AFN, BFN and other sources of radio entertainment, to break the boredom of listening the the commie propaganda of Tass, et al. – and the official propaganda output of the USSR (sickening twaddle) , in the code of Mr Morse.

    Apart from the hired help of the ex- squaddies of the Bosch, we also had a couple of Yugoslav refugees who were ‘security cleared’ odd jobbing around the barracks. One of them, Ludwig, hated Tito with a virulence that at the time was none of my business, but somewhat puzzling as he was supposed be a ‘friend’ then. Later events have enlightened me somewhat, but I’m sure that’s more in your Bailiwick, Baron?

    But the best part of it was being pampered and waited upon, by the Mädchen aus Österreich, in our rather sumptuous and large log built dining room, previously occupied by the officers of the Third Reich. The Army Catering Corps were mere adjuncts to the excellent Austrian Ladies. (“Who called the cook a cunt?” yelled the Duty RSM. “Who called the cunt a cook?” was the combined, if somewhat muted riposte).

    In our off-duty time at the Flughafen, (which was really just a Hoffstatter then a few gliders used the old runways but there was no air service and it was just a place for boozing and dancing in the evenings. to the local oompah bands), we fraternized with our waitresses and lady chefs and other local ladies of easier virtue. And now, via an admittedly tortuous route, I reach the point of my evidence, m’Lord, that addresses the ‘ishoo’.

    They were all very happy with their English ‘liberators’. Extremely happy at times. Rape was a redundant word, unless it was applied to woman on man (which, let’s face it, it rarely does). They were, to put it mildly, very keen to collaborate in the cause of improving international relations, including a sexual component, when and as necessary.

    But any mention of our Russki ‘allies’ (Austria was still under Four Power Occupation at that time), was met by a deeply darkening mood – and I received many first-hand accounts, which were very similar to those rather uncouthly alluded to, by the commenters on the blog you cited. Apparently the Russki squaddies were brutish, murderous, dirty and diabolical.

    All the lassies who worked with us had been multi-raped as the bastards passed through. The had to submit – or else. And some had lost sisters and mothers who had discovered what ‘or else’ meant.

    I know all soldiers behave badly at times in foreign lands. War is hell; it brutalises and leaves callouses on the soul. But the Russkis had a particular gripe and used rape as revenge, with vile persistence, against the women. That is NO excuse for that. Put together with what I heard over the airwaves, left me with an impression of Russians that has not been altered by anything I have experienced since.

    When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down I felt a strong sense of foreboding. I feel now that my doubts were entirely justified. So, by and large, though I understand your cameradi with hoi polloi of Mother Russia, I fear that Vlad and his thugs have designs on ‘correcting history’, restoring a neo version of the USSR and undermining the American/Allied hegemony. So my sympathies tend to flow with the well trodden Boot in this respect. But you view it through a different prism historically and I respect that, as you are clearly from the great band of good guys.

    As for the terms in which the bloggers couched their ant-Russian remarks. Perhaps I’m not the best one to sit in judgment on that score, am I? 🙂

  179. Forgive me if I invent a new acronym: ITSFS (it’s the stoopid feckin’ spellchecker). Re 14:19 above, ‘wont’ not ‘won’t’.

  180. Wonder how Anne WK is getting on with her upheaval. Update us gal. Don’t be doin’ a Verity on us. And what is David Ossitt up to? A sickie, Annual Leave, or AWOL? I know it’a the Silly Season, but Colonel M is a bit muted too. Plenty of grist to the mill atm, let’s be ‘aving yer!

  182. Frank P – 18:17
    “… you view it through a different prism historically [to Boot’s view]”

    I know that you weren’t responding to me, but I shall still interrupt!

    I infer that, as Boot is not keen on the Shirtless Wonder, you think others are.

    My view is that he comes from such a different culture, it is futile to empathise. Instead, we need to focus on our interests, decide what we want from him and then determine what is possible, if anything.

    Currently, we have no idea what we want! Some want a sovereign nation, a smaller state, some want everything nationalised, from the energy industry, including the coal mines, the oil & gas supplies and domestic suppliers, to schools, the railways:
    Nationalisation: Energy, railways, etc
    http://www.cityam.com/222020/jeremy-corbyn-s-renationalisation-agenda-would-be-disastrous-consumers

    and to scrap the nuclear deterrent, tuition fees and cut less and spend more:
    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/7-jeremy-corbyn-policies-public-6126442

    Then we have the swarms at Calais, the risk of terrorism, the banks continuing to be ‘effing stupid about miss-selling, Trojan Horse schools, the death throws of Multiculuturism, the fraudulent Climate Change Act, the feminisation of education, the Armed Services cuts … the list is endless. And there is still the Deficit, let alone the National Debt.

    So, do we really want to poke the Bear, because we have so little to hold our attention?

    I don’t think so! It does mean that, while we need to stand our ground and protect our interests, we don’t need to be provocative. We cannot afford it, we don’t currently need to do it, it is tension relieving (in our leaders emotions), not national goal achieving AND there is little benefit to accrue, but plenty of pain.

    Toppling Ukraine’s (and Russian friendly) democratically elected leader was being provocative. To have it led by Baroness Ashton, whose democratic credentials are nothing, compared to Putin’s, is beyond credibility. It has caused economic pain in EU provinces that could have done with an economic boost, not a kick in the allotments!

    We can empathise with individuals, as we are human, but transferring that to national policy is inviting expensive trouble.

    If there is any ‘correcting history’ to do, let it come to us: slowly, slowly, catchy monkey.

  183. Speaking of the feminisation of education, I found this recent article:
    Boys are getting a raw deal in education. And our economy suffers as a result
    http://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/kathy-gyngell-boys-are-getting-a-raw-deal-in-education-and-our-economy-suffers-as-a-result

    In the posts below the article, I found this, from 2007, which is even more illuminating, with several well known names being mentioned:

    How feminists tried to destroy the family
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-430702/How-feminists-tried-destroy-family.html

  185. Frank P @ 14:19

    What has the blue veined barbarian done to deserve one of the largest if not the largest posting from you ever, Frank, in two parts, too, and with a prelude?

    Pity, the timing of it doesn’t suit Baron well, not unlike you, he’s also going through a major improvement of his living quarters, it should have been done and dusted this week, it wasn’t, the grief Baron gets from the boss is getting unbearable, why TF should be his fault the job’s taking the highly recommended, professional (and bloody expensive) plumber longer than expected? More to the point, a part, a large part of the utility room in his abode now looks as a control panel of a nuclear power station, so many new pipes, wall instruments, buttons, valve levers, arghhh.

    Still first things first, the barbarian closed his eyes, repeated many times the magic double word conundrum you and EC have posed, and finally got it. You’re right, it boils down to the inability to get the smallish nuances of the bard’s tongue for many of those born in countries where a different tongue is spoken, for Baron in particular, as he has no talent to tell even if a person has a regional accent, here or in his mother country.

    One cannot have it all, you know, what the poorly educate Slav lacks on the subtlety of the vernacular he more than compensates with his natural charm, youth, physical beauty … (only joking).

    (to be con’t)

  186. As a substitute of a prelude:

    When you have the time, Frank, tell the barbarian what have the Russian apes done to you personally, or to the country you live in?

    To make it easier, focus on the last quarter century in particular, but by all means include the post war communist phase, too. Or, if you so desire, include the war years, and those prior to the war.

    Please, do reply: what have the Russians done to us (Baron says ‘us’ because he’s been one of us for longer that he was one of the ‘not us’).

  187. RobertRetyred @ 21:29

    Thank you, Robert, for interrupting, very noble of you to lend a hand to the barbarian, who, when it comes to debating, no longer is what he used to be.

  188. Part 2:

    How much do you know about Russia, the Russians, Frank?

    Baron will try to run your knowledge of her by himself, correct him if he’s wrong.

    You don’t speak Russian, you’ve never lived in Russia, given your take on the Russian tribe, it’s very likely, you’ve never visited the country.

    You must have read books by Russian authors in translation, most likely by the pre-Bolsheviks writers, possibly also “One day in the life ….’, listened to classical music by Russian composers, attended a Russian ballet, perhaps, and, of course, you read the omni-all Mr. Boot’s seminal masterpiece Peter advertises at the head of the blog.

    You eavesdropped, professionally, on communist military traffic, rants, agitprop after the war, spoke to some Austrian maidens, who were eager to have sex with Western liberators, hated to get screwed by any “brutish, murderous, dirty and diabolical” Ivan.

    (What wasn’t clear to the barbarian was whether the willings girls were also raped by the Russian apes, and whether they knew personally any women who said ‘no’ to the Ruskies, got killed. If you have the time, enlighten him on this, please).

    Baron hopes this short summary doesn’t upset you, Frank, it’s the last thing on Baron’s mind to turn you into an adversary, you would be a formidable one, the barbarian would be unlikely to even get a draw.

    Unless you object to the above, convince the poorly educated Slav that you possess deep knowledge of things Russians, he may like to stick to what he reckons is your slicing of Russia and the Russians – a mere prejudice. Nothing wrong with it, we all have our pet prejudices, it’s a free country.

    You’re not alone in this, Baron’s has some friends here, many more in the neck of the woods he hails from, who feel animosity towards the Russian tribes, often more strongly than you do, will not buy Baron’s argument that it wasn’t the Russians, who inflicted pain and suffering on the millions (including themselves), it was the creed of communism, more preciously, the Russian mutation of it.

    When the barbarian was grilled by a KGB colonel at Ljubjanka, who ranted about this or the other achievement of the communist regime, the rights it bestows on the people, the freedoms …. the barbarian felt the guy was no more free than Baron who was incarcerated, the only difference being the space either of them could move in and around.

    (to be con’t)

  189. Correction:

    …..it’s very UNlikely you’ve visited Russia, sorry about this, Frank, entirely Baron’s fault, the spellchecker is not to blame.

  190. Correction:

    The corrected text at 00.09 is wrong, the original version’s OK. It’s tiredness, Frank, it’s after midnight, and the day wasn’t one of relaxation.

  191. Baron

    Q. What have the Russians done to us?

    A. Espoused and brutally imposed communism throughout the world, by the means of stealth, propaganda, wholesale murder and oppression. I cannot forgive their kind for that scourge on humanity! It affects everybody in the ‘free world’, either directly or indirectly. Moreover, it is still spreading; witness Obama and his clique; the potential first female POTUS Hillbillary Clinton; the cunning of her alleged challenger, Bernie Sanders and in the ‘UK’ Corbyn and many more of his ilk – traitors all. The Russian experiment kicked it all off in its Marxist vrsion, anyway – and the impetus is still there, both explicitly and implicitly. The people of Russia have been responsible for their government, have they not?

    I agree that the traitors within our own country are worse, but that is a different debate. I’m surprised that someone who lived his early life under the yoke of the red menace, can find it in his heart to sympathise with those who allowed their regime to flourish for so long with its infamy. Your Christian forgiveness is admirable, but misplaced, imho. Will that do for starters? I’ve never really understood why you have taken so strongly agin Mr Boot who makes a very strong case within the book of his early life and follows through with his mordant essays. Puzzling. I’m still grateful to Bruce F for introducing him to this band of brothers and sisters. Enlighten me, m’lord, as the regurgitated noises of Radio Tass are still resounding in my inner ear, having been evoked by your prompting over the past couple of days. And bear in mind it was crude reminders of the rape and pillage of WWII Russkis that kicked off this discussion. I can forgive the Tourette’s outbursts of our septic counterparts from over the pond, suffering from similar urges myself at times. I cannot forgive vicious rape and cynical totalitarianism. Hope that helps to explain my antipathy to Mother Russia.

  192. Frank P @ 00:53

    Now you’re talking, Frank, sadly using your wordsmithing ability to confuse the issue.

    How did the Russians imposed communism on Britain exactly? If you were sincere in your anger against the creed of communism shouldn’t you kick Karl who, if memory serves, wasn’t Russian? Wasn’t it his tomes of Das Capital that kickstarted it all?

    When the communist gulag was still alive, how did it impact on Britain? Big military spending would probably be the answer here, but why then have we kept the military at all after communism in Russia collapsed? I know you’ll say ‘just as well, bloody Putin’s as bad as the communists, worse what with his KGB membership in the past’. This however doesn’t help, Russia after communism fell was pliable, meek, lost, yet if anything we surrounded her tighter than the USSR.

    And this:

    Baron has little time for Putin, it doesn’t concern him at all what happens to the man, he’ll be long gone, Russia will live on. What does concern the barbarian is that when the KGB colonel goes the new guy in Kremlin will be not a Nemtsov replica, but someone worse, Baron would bet on it, and that, Frank, is the last thing we need. If we could have lived with the totalitarian Soviet Union, we should be able to live with Russia post communism whoever is in charge in Kremlin.

    And lastly, wait for the last part of the barbarian’s answer, it links with what kicked off the trail. He’ll try to post later.

  193. Baron

    We crossed posts there. Just one point from the reasonable points offered in your 00:07 (funny that 007 – you trying to tell me something by that timing? :-)) needs answering – at least credit me with the ability to judge whether someone is telling me the truth when face to face with them. All sorts of judgment criteria are instinctively employed in such circumstances; I later acquired a reputation for knowing the difference between lies and truth in confronting some of the most cunning crooks, both in the Smoke and in international mobbery. Why would you think I would be bedazzled by the Mädchen whose expressions and body language left me in no doubt about the truth of their claims. The context of the Zeitgeist also helped. Moreover, I had no reason to give the Germanic race the benefit of the doubt at that time, though Austrian lassies probably had as much reason to hate the Hun as we Brits, to be fair. Just sayin’.

    As for the consensual heterosexual urges of young women recently liberated from both the Gerries and the Russkies, nothing wrong with consensual hanky-panky is there? I would also modestly point out that with a sweetheart awaiting me in England, my carnal knowledge in Austria was mostly observatory, rather than participatory. Rather foolishly as it later transpired, as I discovered that my faithless paramour had been consorting with Yankee airmen at an aerodrome close to my home town while I was away. So I had no reason to feel enamoured of Yanks ‘overpaid, oversexed and over here’ which was the mantra of the day.But boys will be boys and girls will be girls. Not anymore it seems. 🙂 Anything goes! Funnily enough I could put that to music, too. from the sump of my sepia memory bank.

    OTOH I bow to your own personal, in situ, Russian experiences and wouldn’t doubt your feelings about the overall goodness of the common folks. Speak as you find is not a bad motto to guide your philosophy. Admirable in fact. Forgive me for being less Christian vis-a-vis Marxist atrocity. With regard to Boot v Hitchens minor, I’m still with Boot, your persuasive advocacy notwithstanding. 🙂

  194. One thing I’ll concede, my Baronial mukka, having just read your last post, is that useful idiots are just that, whatever the nationality. But … Mother Russia sure had more than her fair share of those offspring – no?

    I rest my case. Let the jury have their way (if we can wake them up – as I often muttered to my coppering colleagues after the judge’s summing-up).

    Bwaahahahaha!!

  195. Part 3, and definitely the last, Frank, (put together hastily, it’s well past Baron’s deb time):

    When the war ended, the poorly educated Slav was just over four, he remembers little of it, and nothing in his memory holds anything about the Russians, either during or immediately after the war.

    Baron’s farther was a long distance engine driver, during the war he took trains, all military trains, not soldiers, just stuff like weaponry, ammunition, foodstuff, deeply into Russia (and back, lucky he). The stories he told of the trips ranged from the mundane to the inconceivable. Could he have made them up, the latter in particular? Unlikely, even if you have to take Baron’s word for it. Well before the Red Army turned the course of the war, he quit, switched to short trips, to the great displeasure of Baron’s mother, who used to enjoy the luxuries of life (not that there were many, the war was on), the long train journeys paid handsomely because of the risks, money bought the good things. More to the point, he wasn’t that keen on the Russian Bolsheviks (or for that matter on the any other nation’s communists) either.

    Here’s a sample of one of the stories he told Baron.

    The Germans (an SS unit) were clearing a captured hospital. Those patients (all Russians) who could walk were compelled to drag the immobile patients to a small room where they got shot, one by one, the corpses were taken out by the walking patients outside the building, dropped into a hole dug by them, too, some dropped dead digging. Then they also got shot over the hole. When it was all over, the Germans poured petrol over the dead bodies, set them on fire.

    The hospital had a maternity unit, about a dozen women, the SS troopers forced the pregnant women to strip naked, pushed them into the open, sliced their stomachs with bayonets, asked them to run. Before all that, the expectant mothers were told that whoever gets to cover a distance first will be saved, her stomach will get stitched up. Some of the women tried to run, or just walk holding tight their bleeding stomachs, some even tried to prevent others from moving ahead, the SS soldiers laughed, enjoying the spectacle, in the end they killed them all, had an argument who should clear the mess.

    (The train crew was at the hospital when this was going on, they were supposed to stay at night there, refused, were allowed to sleep on the train, the Germans provided a guard).

    The guys from over the Breitbart blog may say “this is how one deals with apes”, but Baron wants to believe very much that whatever you may think about Russia or the Russians, you wouldn’t endorse their (most likely) take on the story.

    Like you, Baron abhors what the Russians did when they conquered Germany, it was barbarous, inexcusable, can in no way be justified. Knowing what the Germans did to the Russians, one can however at least try to understand it.

    And let us not forget the immortal words of the great Basil Fawlty on the question of the Germans and the war – ’ you started it’.

    and this:

    Baron will answe r some of the more specific points, Frank, but alas tomorrow happens to be an open gardens day, duty compels him to go, very much involuntarily.

  196. Baron posted the 3rd instalment, then read your two last posts, we must synchronise better, guru.

    It’s after two, that’s it for one day.

  198. What, no takers for the sermon by the impassioned “Son of the Manse” this afternoon?

    I thought it somewhat bizarre that this bloke who was urging caution on the membership about not picking a leader that was unelectable (i.e. Corbyn) was same bloke who mentored/sponsor of rED Miliband – supremely unelectable! Even more bizarre was that he listed and praised all his Labour heroes including BIGGING up Neil ‘Kinnochio who was the biggest electoral disaster prior to rED. He gave the briefest of nods to John Smith and Anthony Charles Lynton Blair who were the only two in recent times that were remotely electable. (but not by me)

    Had El Gordo given an honest an honest appraisal of the four candidates’ merits then I might have had a grudging respect for him.
    i.e. that his fellow Marxist Corbyn was an intelligent, but cunning, dissembling and potentially ruthless bastard. Whereas the other three candidates were unprincipled clueless PR soundbite fuckwits, and any of them would therefore be clearly viewed as PM material by the electorate – judging by current standards of both.

    “No really, oooh, aaah, no missus, they’re all unelectable.” He should’ve left it at that, and spared us the rest!

  199. EC – 19:10
    I would say Liz is a smidgin more principled, but more clueless, but otherwise you are right. I bet all four believe in Climate Change, so that says it all really!

    Now that the Labour Establishment are saying that the party’s policies and actions in the Sixties were worse than useless, we now need the Tory Establishment to say that the party’s policies and actions in the Seventies, in particular, joining the EEC, were worse than useless.

    It just seems so ‘fair’ to me that they should do this.

  200. EC @ 19:10

    After three gardens, some half a dozen cups of tea, a cake or two and over 100 miles on the clock how could the barbarian be not interested in the dour Scot, EC?

    You know what nearly floored Baron, and he was driving when he heard it for the first time? – Brown saying the Labour party must elect a leader with a ‘sound economic policy’. Arghhh. arghhh, arghhh

    A man who single-handedly fugged up the economy with his imbecilic, delusional, never doable doctrine of ‘no boom no bust’ is lecturing Labour, telling them to be led by someone with sound economic policy? The fruitcake wouldn’t recognise a sound economic policy if the policy were to bite him the the arse shouting ‘I’m a sound economic policy’.

    Why sin’t he locked up in one of the Scottish monasteries in the Highlands yet?

    Robert’s right @ 20.10, just look where we have chronic difficulties, it’s in those domains that Labour messed up both in the 60s and 70s, in fact, in the 13 years in power headed by the ghastly Blair with Brown & Balls in the Treasury they nearly bankrupted us.

  201. The win at Crystal Palace was far from convincing, the Frenchman should put his thinking and hiring head on, do something decisive or the title this year will be as elusive as it has been in the last twelve years (?).

  204. Baron – 20:43

    Corbyn – swap Lenin hat for a pussy cat – bears an uncanny resemblance to Max von Sydow’s portrayal of Spectre’s Boss – the super villan Ernst Stravro Bloefeld – in the James Bond Film, “Never Say Never Again.”

    http://snag.gy/TrzF4.jpg

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