Things change
You start from where you are
"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti." Sophia Loren
Convergent opportunism.
'Talking about shovelling shit pays more than shovelling shit. It’s ridiculous, but that’s how it is.' Amanda Owen, the Yorkshire shepherdess.
Abolish the NHS. Everyone has horror stories of infections and iatrogenic injuries. Typical is the the healthy older person who goes in after a fall and comes out in a body bag.
Get the state out of healthcare altogether and make individual citizens responsible for their own and family's health maybe a funded safety net for children. A richer, more free society will foster more private charity. Aligning incentives with good outcomes is humane, whereas spending other people's money on insatiable demand incubates a giant tapeworm that feeds itself on us. M
Get the state out of healthcare altogether and make individual citizens responsible for their own and family's health maybe a funded safety net for children. A richer, more free society will foster more private charity. Aligning incentives with good outcomes is humane, whereas spending other people's money on insatiable demand incubates a giant tapeworm that feeds itself on us. M
Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they knew of me
My mother —my father.
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me
I will bring you love!'
I was taken
Blind, naked, defenseless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
and dropped on the sterile floor
of a foot operated plastic waste
bucket.
There was no Queens Counsel
To take my brief.
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod's shop window.
When my passing was told
My father smiled.
No grief filled my empty space.
My death was celebrated
With tickets to see Danny la Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.
Spike Milligan
"If a child isn't safe in its mother's womb, what hope is there for the rest of us?" Mother Teresa
In 1991 the Soviet Union fell apart and NATO faced an existential crisis: its reason for being no longer existed. But rather than disband, it came up with a new mission: to expand. And in a self-referential loop, NATO expansion would create the hostility needed to justify itself. David Sacks
Chesterton of Wodehouse “It is so easy to be solemn; so hard to be frivolous.”
Guilt is the most self indulgent of all emotions. Lucretia, Powerline.
Everything you read makes sense if you simply translate "experts" as "crazy people". Marc Andreeson
Firstly, the rise of information technology gave enormous economic and social advantages to those of high cognitive ability but tended to insulate them from the physical world, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries which had progressed furthest with digital transformation of their societies. Secondly, the attendant communications revolution created extremely strong horizontal networks amongst the cognitive elites at both the national and global level. Whereas previously sections of the elite may have had quite different outlooks and institutional cultures, now whether you were a bishop, an academic, a politician, a businessman or senior civil servant, your working life consisted mostly of sitting at a PC terminal managing information. In short, the elites became dissociated from those still rooted in time and place (David Goodhart’s ‘citizens of somewhere’) and at the same time developed a strong and highly rarefied shared social culture. The death of distance thus created powerful auto-alignment – or groupthink – among the elites, very often at a subconscious level. Finally, globalisation led to the growth of unaccountable global institutions and corporations which could provide exceptionally lucrative sinecures for superannuated politicians once they left office; it is arguable that in at least mid-sized or smaller countries such as the UK or Ireland, high political office is now perceived to be a mere stepping stone to greater things and even greater riches. Furthermore, the knowledge that such glittering prizes are on offer is almost certain to bias the subconscious decision-making process, even in politicians who genuinely believe themselves to be acting honourably.
The result of all these factors is a kind of mass hypnosis, with hugely damaging decisions being made and sustained on the basis of luxury beliefs and self-interest within the elite class.
Andrew Cadman
Of all the things that didn't happen, that didn't happen the most - anon.
Trust not the physician, his antidotes are poison and he slays more than you rob.. Timon of Athens
Lisa.: Ahh Dad you just don’t understand !!’ Homer: Lisa, just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand “
Lisa: Dad, everybody knows old people are useless and smell.
Homer: I wish God was alive to see this.
Though secession is unlikely, a secession of the heart has already taken place in America. Pat Buchanan on the 2020 election fraud.
We know they are lying. They know they are lying, They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn“A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.” - Saul Bellow
‘A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth’ – Albert Einstein
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus AureliusNothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.
Sir Winston Churchill"Here’s my tip for the week: Don’t get old." Taki
Spassky about his ex-wife: “we were like bishops of opposite color."
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed. Iago to Othello.
Freedom isn't free, but it doesn't have a price. M.
Her father asked what about when she's 40 and you're 90? So I said I'll just have to find a younger woman. David Bailey.
The national health and the national wealth would gain vastly if the NHS were abolished and most people took responsibility for their own health and that of their family. Voluntary charity would fill in much of the rest and probably be a lot more effective.
We live, we look after ourselves, we grow old, we die. As we prosper, it's a delight to help others. But having our money confiscated and misallocated to a bureaucratic, moralizing state religion like the NHS is the behaviour of doomed species. M.
I am of good cheer. Absence will just make the heart grow fonder for:
The most pro-Life President,
Who rescued the judiciary,
Who killed ISIS,
Who slammed the brakes on the invasion from south of the border,
Who enabled America to become an energy superpower,
Who progressed middle-east rapprochement,
Who killed Suleimani,
Who re-built the military,
Who brought jobs home to blacks and whites,
Who fought the media like George fought the dragon,
Who exposed the Romneys and Sasses for what they are,
Who got the Wuflu, got up stronger and campaigned like a hero,
And, because with Trump there's always an 'And'.
The most pro-Life President,
Who rescued the judiciary,
Who killed ISIS,
Who slammed the brakes on the invasion from south of the border,
Who enabled America to become an energy superpower,
Who progressed middle-east rapprochement,
Who killed Suleimani,
Who re-built the military,
Who brought jobs home to blacks and whites,
Who fought the media like George fought the dragon,
Who exposed the Romneys and Sasses for what they are,
Who got the Wuflu, got up stronger and campaigned like a hero,
And, because with Trump there's always an 'And'.
The Orcs would like to jail him on the principle of 'Show the man, I'll show the crime', but let them try. Trump plus the founding principles of America are a mighty army. M. 11/2020
I wish you'd show more respect to vaccine sceptics. The scepticism is founded in evidence. Eg I wholly accept that vaccines produce an immune response and may be sensible for vulnerable subjects, but I do not accept that the modern omni-vax regime has been shown to be a boon to the development of a strong immune system for society as a whole. There are many other queries at a granular and social level that are simply not addressed. Like Global Warming vaccination is a religion which brooks no dissent or query. That is a tell in itself and profoundly unscientific. M
...
The hoopla about vaccines is more convergent opportunism:
1. Boris needs a semi-plausible deus ex machina to get him out of the catastrophe he created while claiming he "follows the science".
2. Government medics want some semi-coherent narrative to cover up their catastrophic errors.
3. The Left and our betters everywhere want to impose vaccination and masks as proof of who is boss.
4. Celebrities want to virtue signal.
5. Karens want to karen.
2. Government medics want some semi-coherent narrative to cover up their catastrophic errors.
3. The Left and our betters everywhere want to impose vaccination and masks as proof of who is boss.
4. Celebrities want to virtue signal.
5. Karens want to karen.
Vaccines in general are questionable as the way to boost the overall immune system of a society versus allowing immunity to develop naturally as normal childhood diseases train our evolved defences.
Moreover these Covid vaccines are exceptionally opaque in their outcomes. Do they prevent infection? Do they prevent spreading? Can they be safely stored and distributed in the real world of socialized medicine that turns hospitals into Covid superspread machines?
The UK government is splurging billions of other people's money on what is at best a social placebo for a bad flu morphed into a plaguelike clusterfudge by the the very same UK government.
M http://disq.us/p/2dmnvfi
Why I'm a vaccine sceptic
It's because the omni-vax proponents are selective with the truth and tell outright lies. Instance:
1. Any sentient being knows that the mortality numbers for Covid are grotesquely inflated, yet Ferguson writes in today's LS "I think that 120 thousand deaths has [sic] provided quite conclusive if tragic evidence that the science which has underpinned the assessment of the public health risks by COVID is valid."[url]https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/02/24/latest-news-295/#neil-ferguson-writes-again[/url]
2. In reply to a series of polite but cogent statements about his model and method Ferguson just waves his arms:
"I am not going to engage in responding to loaded and scientifically irrelevant questions."
He cites a Guardian opinion piece:
"The truth is, the Covid-sceptics aren’t really sceptics at all. They engage in motivated reasoning; they make stuff up and double down on disproved claims. They are powerful figures, not used to being questioned. But the truth is that they have a hell of lot to answer for."
Ironic, nest-ce pas?
"I am not going to engage in responding to loaded and scientifically irrelevant questions."
He cites a Guardian opinion piece:
"The truth is, the Covid-sceptics aren’t really sceptics at all. They engage in motivated reasoning; they make stuff up and double down on disproved claims. They are powerful figures, not used to being questioned. But the truth is that they have a hell of lot to answer for."
Ironic, nest-ce pas?
That's about Covid in general, but the same "motivated reasoning" is prevalent in Big Science whether the subject is Global Warming, Vaccines or Covid. The tell is always the same - they want to suppress counter-argument, eg the suppression of the Great Barrington Declaration.
I will not rehearse the scientific reasons for scepticism of the omni-vax cult, but these people aren't scientists, they're Pharisees.
All these points can be true:
* Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a scam.
* The EV space is frothy. Tesla is overvalued.
* Tesla owners are delighted with their cars. I asked them.
* Most driving is short range and re-charging at home or work is convenient.
* Tesla survives and progresses because it is nimble and because Elon has a synthesizing intelligence. He's also a berk, so what?
* BEVs are inherently more elegant than ICEVs - all those dirty explosions and oily moving parts.
* Above all and conclusively, the EV power source is fungible - it can be coal or cow farts, it doesn't matter, since there's an inexhaustible supply of coal, natgas, nuclear etc. That makes electricity the most efficient power delivery medium since you can switch around between fuels. Infrastructure constraints will just get de-bottlenecked.
Roger Scruton quoted Leszek Kolakowski as summarising the situation in this way:
…in England everything is permitted unless it is forbidden; in Germany everything is forbidden unless it is permitted; in France everything is permitted, even if it is forbidden; and in Russia everything is forbidden, even if it is permitted.
“We’ve gone this far, we must continue to look credible despite the errors and dire consequences – so let’s carry on, keep deceiving and frightening the public until our credibility is restored by eliminating the virus.”
I concur with your diagnosis. This is the prime motive for Johnson, Whitty and Vallance. It’s a first cousin to Project Fear. https://lockdownsceptics.org/2021/03/24/a-dentist-writes/
The Covid death stats are corrupt from top to bottom. There is massive eye witness evidence of false attribution, eg Bel Mooney's dad. Same in America. Even if the baseline for "excess deaths" could be determined to a relevant accuracy, that figure then represents deaths due to Covid + deaths due to the lockdown so far. To that must be added future deaths from this lockdown. Those numbers might then be weighted by 'quality adjusted life years'. Then consider the negative impact of lockdown on overall immunity due to the suppression of normal viral interactions and promotion of more toxic variants. The policy has been a catastrophe from the narrowly medical point of view let alone the global harms. M
I like rust and iron. It's a drug. - Andrew Hague
"No one is truly safe from COVID-19 until everyone is safe....Public health leaders should focus on efforts that maximally suppress viral infection rates...continued public health measures, such as face masks and physical distancing, will be vital"
Susan Michie
Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, UCL, SAGE savant.
et al.
Susan Michie
Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change, UCL, SAGE savant.
et al.
"What seems to be going on is that every one is covering their backs. Ministers want to pass the buck to the scientists. They want to be able to say “What a triumph for our policies” if things turn out fine; and “We followed the science” if they turn out badly. The scientists don’t like being made to carry the can for what is basically a political judgment. They want to be able to say “These were only scenarios, not predictions” if things turn out fine; and “We told you so” if they turn out badly. Each group is trying to manipulate the other. Balanced assessments based on actual evidence are sadly missing.
There are more important things at stake than the reputation of ministers or their advisers. Human beings are social animals. Interaction with other people is not a luxury. It is a basic human need. It is also the foundation of our mental health, our social organisation, our leisure activities and our economy.
There is a breed of public health officials who are indifferent to these things. They have never reflected, at any rate in public, on what makes life worth living. As far as they are concerned, human beings are just instruments of government health policy. They will be lining up to tell us that it is dangerous to return to normal life because we cannot be absolutely sure that normal life will be risk-free. "
Lord Sumption
Lord Sumption
Natural gas is cheap, abundant, massively available in the UK via fracking, very low emission, independent of China, doesn't kill millions of birds and makes continuous power. It makes green sense, economic sense, operational sense, strategic sense and ethical sense. Wind power makes no sense.
So it's wind power, natch. m
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. George Best
If you want to learn, teach. Cicero minor.
If answer to the disease is naturally acquired herd immunity and the change of the seasons, then the Lockdowns have been a catastrophic policy error essentially inflicted by those on the public payroll at the expense of the rest. The vaccines are a 'deus ex machina' in a fictional tragi-comedy. m
"You've wrongly suggested that's also true in older age groups."
The risks of covid to a healthy adult are negligible even according to the government stats that grotesquely overstate the problem. The risks of the vaccine are considerable and getting worse with every new revelation despite the grotesque under-reporting by medics fearful for their standing. Those risks would have precluded licensing the vaccines in any scenario other than emergency. Covid is a real risk to the vulnerable, ie the unhealthy. Possibly the vaccine is worth the risk for them, tho its immediate effect is apparently to increase susceptibility to infection. Really there's no reasoned dispute about all this, just spin.m
"Anti-Vax and Covid Conspiracy"
That's not a rational argument, it's a chant.m
The phrase "conspiracy theory" is past its sell-by date. If you have a rational response, state it.m
Money isn't the problem as Messi's commercial value absent a transfer fee is much more than what he might earn. It's how do you improve as a team with such a unique player. I do hope Guardiola gets another crack at that, albeit wthout magical little goblins like Xavi and Iniesta to work with Messi.m
Do the maskers regularly disinfect their masks? Are the masks medical grade? Do they disinfect the clothes they stuff their masks into? Do the masks damage the normal interactions of their immune systems with the ambient viruses they have evolved to master. Etc..It's virtue theatre that probably damages the health of the herd by inhibiting natural immunities, especially for children. But they're dispensible. The main thing is that old farts like me feel valued and virtuous. m
“instead of souls we have neuroses, instead of sacraments we have shows.” Norman O Brown
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, call it a booster. M
If vaccinated people can transmit the virus, what is the point of banning the unvaccinated from bars, restaurants and other public places? You might as well ban people with ginger hair for all the good it will do.
Yet across Europe we see the unvaccinated being blamed for rising case numbers, with more and more restrictions being placed on their movements.
Vaccine passports and mask mandates are a great example of what’s become known as the ‘politician’s fallacy’, first identified on Yes Minister: ‘We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.’
They are pure theatre, designed to gull the public into thinking politicians are taking decisive action to avert a crisis. And when they fail to make any impact – as we’ve seen across the Continent – the next step is not to abandon them, but to double down. The end point of this remorseless logic – or lack of logic – is the imprisonment of the unvaccinated.
Toby Young
Apart from the jarring impression of swear words sprayed like manure on a field, promiscuity blunts the blade of these anglo-saxon weapons which were deadly when used rarely.
M
Oh, relax. Both variants are malleable. We're not insecure like the Académie Française; we're the Academy Franglais, a thorough mongrel and a thoro mongrel, and that's why our linguistic genes are so hardy. [re American- and English-English per Simon Heffer
"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”― Jonathan Swift
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.- Plutarch
I'm British. Biden and Pelosi are our enemy. They make mischief in Ireland, threatening the UK's territorial integrity as well as civil peace in Northern Ireland, and they refuse to do trade deals putting us 'at the back of the queue' just as Obama threatened when interfering in Our Democracy to make Brexit look bad. I blame the British government's servile tolerance of these clowns. Trump was our best ally but our establishment is too damn stupid to respect him. God, I hate these elites, and hope that my Anglo-American children (who really are elite) will restore the America which was the greatest political formulation in history. Canada and the USA should reconfigure into one big government and one small government entity. Maybe the UK should come in too; absolute contiguity really doesn't matter these days and an ocean can bind as well as separate. Rather what matters is the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the model of the Constitution. -m
The difference between fact and fiction is that fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy et al after Mark Twain.
‘It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.’ Jung.
Re-categorizing scientific truths or moral opinions as religious beliefs is a way of putting them in a small box labelled 'kooky'. M.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” ts eliot
'Lovely hydrocarbons are solar power in a bottle.'
My heart is broken, but I'm not broken. - M
"Over and over again we are influenced and constrained by the hollow momentary world we behold in presence, while utterly obtuse as regards the substantial eternal world no less present around us though disregarded." Christina Rossetti
"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea." Karen Blixen.Premature optimisation is the root of all evil - ?Tony Hoare
We need to start thinking about what sort of world we are going to leave behind for Keith Richards.
They awoke from dreams of exile and dispossession to find themselves exiled and dispossessed – ?T.Keneally
I could be bounded in a nutshell and think myself the king of infinite space but that I have bad dreams-Hamlet
When the ducks are quacking, feed them – currency trader
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of a new bureaucracy – Kafka
The hero and the coward feel the same. They just don’t act the same – Mike Tyson’s trainer
You may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in you. - M
Mission statement: we will strive to make as much money as we can without going to prison.
Churchill "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery."
"If it flies, floats or fucks, it's cheaper to rent."
Erections have consequences - M
You didn’t fuck me because I was snoring. What kind of Frenchman are you ? - Parker PoseyWriting as a grumpy old man about the Wuhan flu
1. The sentimental guff about Captain Tom Moore walking round his garden is nauseating.
2. Most of the harm being done, including harm to health, is being committed by tyrannical politicians and experts.
3. Common Sense would be to carry on as normal while offering additional help to the vulnerable. This is so obvious that it takes an expert or a sheep not to see it. - M
You're always short. That's the sign of a cynical experienced trader still nursing his psychic damage from youthful optimism. You'd drive your Merc private jet to work shouting "Long is Strong" to strangers at traffic lights. Then you got hammered and hammered and aged 20 years. "My name is David and I'm a longaholic." Been there, bought the t-shirt, but now I'm just a trading machine with no attachments. M.
I should have computed the historical co-variance of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead I visualised my grief if the stock market went up and I wasn’t in it – or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret, so I split my contributions 50-50 between bonds and equities – harry m markowitz
Fine article, thanks, but it may be best all round to cut Scotland adrift and let its purse and its politics take the consequences of its actions. Sterling and the subsidy from England prop up the SNP and put the strut in Sturgeon's step. Scotland and England have been dancing the Quebec blackmail tango long enough.
Alternatively let's just invade. M.
MA trading Rules :
Buy low, sell high
Minimise number of trades
Shun shallow-pocket shake-out
Have a pain threshold further away than the amplitude of the price-action noise.
I’m glad I’m no longer chained to an idiot-?Socrates after losing his libido
Do what you can with what you have where you are – t.roosevelt
The sunnier candidate wins – john hawkins RWN
What part of woof don’t you understand?
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into – J.Swift
Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man – Patton
Watch what people are cynical about and one can often discover what they lack.
Classical largactil – MA of easy listening
Accountability is taken not given.
The LNG business is about getting the sun moon and stars to line up – wayne perry, enron
To Lakota indians ;
0-11 years old are sacred beings
12-45 years old are youths
45+ are real people
Kirsten-think how wonderful this food will look if I throw up
Mark-it won’t look any different
Never underestimate the power of power-m
A film has 3 parts: sound, vision and story. Mulholland Drive scores 10,10,0 –m
Last mover advantage – Fortune mag
ET = English Twat or English Twatlet – m+k
We had a choice between shame and war. We chose shame and we will get war - Churchill after Munich
I should have computed the historical co-variance of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead I visualised my grief if the stock market went up and I wasn’t in it – or if it went way down and I was completely in it. My intention was to minimize my future regret, so I split my contributions 50-50 between bonds and equities – harry m markowitz
Prince Philip to a tabloid reporter lurking in the bushes: you people are scum.
Reporter: Yes sir, but we are the crème de la scum.
A bit tricky moments at the beginning and the middle and the end of the trek – Gombu
Undulating up – Gombu
I came to a fork in the road so I took it – Yogi Berra
California democrats governed as they always govern. They buy the votes of government workers with taxpayer-funded jobs,salaries and benefits – and the turn round and accuse the productive class of greed for wanting their taxes cut.
Siamese twins who died in an operation to separate them : if the biani sisters faith in God is justified, today they will see each other face to face in His presence- Mary Kenny
If a fact does not fit a theory, the theory is eliminated not the other way round – clive james, review of goldhagen
Eargasm – ad
Lord, what fools these mortals be. Puck
“Stand up and use your ears like a man!”. Charles Ives
4th Law of Thermodynamics: ‘The amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than required to create it.’
Holding tanker stocks is like being a 15 year old girl waiting by the phone.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
anacyclosis
Britain has been invaded by new insect overlords from several different planets - The "Conservative" Party, that Wee Jimmy Krankie woman, Black Lives Matter, Michel Barnier, Antifa, Police Chiefs who roseby emphasizing their cowardice, scientismists beloved of Nature and The Lancet, Napoleon the Pig, Big Brother and all the devils from Hieronymous Bosch. Right now it looks like Boris is one of them not one of us. And the DT publishes supergalactic tosh about trans this and that while forbidding comments. What's happened to my country? I used to run past a memorial in the Ashdown Forest to young men who gave their lives so that I could be free. Now this. M
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. CS Lewis
There are 2 tribes in America:
1. My tribe, who want to run their own lives, not other people's lives, under the framework of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
1. My tribe, who want to run their own lives, not other people's lives, under the framework of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
2. Another tribe who want to run the lives of others and get free stuff.
My tribe has strived mightily to co-exist with the other tribe, but the other tribe keeps pushing and now controls every institution except, for now, the presidency.
We're at the point where my tribe surrenders or pushes back in such a way as to deter the barbarians, preferably by applying the rule of law. But it ain't happening.
My tribe hates the idea of civil war and hates the idea of surrender, so is there a mechanism peacefully to divorce these incompatibles? The territories of the tribes broadly correspond to the cities and the rest. Can one imagine a divorce along those lines? Let Portland and Seattle and LA and San Francisco and Baltimore and Austin and DC and Minneapolis and New York etc form a virtual federation according to their own new constitution or no constitution, while the rest of the country retains the name and constitution of the United States of America.
[Full disclosure: I'm English with American kids, but a romantic for America at heart. M.
“I was having the rapper’s lifestyle,” he said. “I was sitting up in Paris, and I had my leather pants on … and I had my laptop up and I got all of my creative ideas … And the screen went black and white and God said, ‘if you fuck with my vision I’m going to fuck with yours’.
“And I called my wife and she said, we’re gonna have this baby. I said we’re gonna have this child … So even if my wife were to divorce me after this speech, she brought North into the world when I didn’t want to. She stood up and she protected that child.” Kanye West
Buy cheap and go to sleep. M
t looks like Keynes' fund was almost wiped out in the first 3 years. He viciously underperformed against the market and in absolute terms. Very, very few are able to buy and hold through such a debacle. Buy cheap and go to sleep is a better style. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/investing/shares/invest-like-john-maynard-keynes/ M
Deferred assumption of responsibility > deferred adulthood > prolonged adolescence > deferred self knowledge > deferred wordlywisdom > imbecile acting out. The cure is work and, preferably, love, meaning parenthood.
Covid lockdown:
Who, whom? Who decides? Those who lose nothing. Decide for whom? Those who lose a lot, or the lot. M
“We are all going to die sooner or later. I don't expect the country to destroy itself to save my sorry ass.” Sarah Vine, wife of Michael Gove.
Michelangelo's David is like a Calvin Klein underwear ad...without the underwear - Lloyd Grossman maklng comparison with Bernini's David
North of the Pole Star,
South of the Cross,
Across every ocean,
Until we are lost,
East of the unknown,
West of the wind,
Until we discover
Where the journey begins.
South of the Cross,
Across every ocean,
Until we are lost,
East of the unknown,
West of the wind,
Until we discover
Where the journey begins.
Richard Baker at Skinningrove
This is my Field Theory of SEX, which the world has been waiting for:
MEN are almost all fiecely heterosexual, but they are also to some extent unguided sexual missiles. Hence the old Arabic saying "A woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, but a melon for ecstasy." So MEN are somewhat sexually malleable.
WOMEN are almost all fiercely heterosexual, but much, much more finely targeted than MEN. They are fertility machines first and last. They want babies. If that's wrongthink, tough, the whole of Nature says otherwise.
And that's it. Transgenderism is mental illness as defined by the American Psychological Association until 5 minutes ago. M.
Einstein “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Whatever is your body ailment the panacea and prophylactic is swimming. Anything short of drowning is good enough to re-set your bones and muscles. Even if you drown, you'll feel more relaxed. M
Our hotel was next to the Karakoy Police station where Istanbul’s finest sat sunning themselves daily, ready to fall asleep at a minute’s notice. Anon.
Mark Adams30 Sep 2020 8:28PM
Congratulations! Your photos are excellent; efficient compositions with a modesty that doesn't shout 'Look at me!' I didn't notice the usual landscape cliche's of ND filters, hdr and colour saturation.
I've used similar dslrs and lenses over the years, but now I mostly wander around with a smartphone (Pixel 3a) and a collapsible selfie stick, which I hardly use for selfies, but as an extender and a table tripod with a remote.
I suspect your injuries are related to the weight of your load, so a smartphone would setup would be a blessing. 'Ah', you may say, 'but photography is the point, so that's why I carry top-notch gear.' Well, yes, but most of your landscapes would look the same on screen if taken by a smartphone - the dynamic range and resolution aren't that demanding - and I've found that that printers have no problem making the smartphone files look good to a reasonable size. Your gear is certainly better, but set that against the ease of opportunism, the improvement in agility, the lightness of the load which all enhance the human element. The big drawback is loss of a long focal length as the digital zoom is unacceptable. Anyway my examples of smartphone landscapes are here fwiw.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/learnt-britain-five-year-walk-around-perimeter/
Atheist heaven - vdh
A fine line between stupid and clever - Spinal Tap
If you're going to be two-faced at least make one of them pretty, Marilyn Monroe
-I recently moved back to the UK after many years abroad. I could live anywhere. I chose North Yorkshire 5 miles south of Middlesborough, because:
1. Plenty of sunshine and dramatic light. The miserabilist weather gods get detained further west in Wales, the Lakes and the Pennines.
2. Good value. I'm from London and wow, just wow.
3. World-class scenery - the adjacent Moors, the coast, the Dales, the north Pennines, even the Lakes are all accessible in 10 minutes to 2 hours drive. The North York Moors national park is like heaven as hardly anyone outside the area knows about it or differentiates it from the Dales.
4. Amenities - loads of gyms, pools and soccer. I live in the country and have a decent Co-op 6 minutes drive, open late.
5. Roads far less crowded.
6. People less stressed.
7. Loads of photogenic artefacts - piers, old railways, old mines, old abbeys. more still in South Yorkshire 1 hour away, also canals.
8. Interesting towns - eg York, Durham, Harrogate, Richmond, Whitby, Knaresborough.
9. Idiosyncrasies like classic car auctions and loads of farmers' markets.
10. Great transport links - eg just over 2 hours by train from Thirsk to Kings X, so London's fine for a day trip; Teesside airport (25 minutes), Newcastle airport/Leeds airport (1 hour), Manchester airport (2 hours). I use Manchester airport for the States.
I like it as it is, but Teesside is probably in the early days of an economic boom which may change its character.- M
the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion' – a style of analysis pioneered by Freud, Marx and Nietzsche in which something’s face value matters less than the improper undercurrents you can argue are swirling within it.. Robbie Collin - eg 'You don't respect my boundaries'
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Mark Adams19 Jul 2021 9:04AM
"Johnson’s engrained habit of making policy on the hoof, without thought, research or strategic principle."
Hence the Pilot Scheme wheeze and hanging on to Hancock. It's long past time for the Con Party to ditch Johnson and find a conservative leader, someone who has opposed Lockdown.
Anne Morton19 Jul 2021 9:16AM
They haven't ditched him so far.
I wonder what it will take to get them to chuck him out?
Not much of a choice for PM in those who are left. Who would you like to see take up the reins?
Mark Adams19 Jul 2021 9:24AM
Good question. There's been not a single principled resignation from the Cabinet. In my alternative universe the Cons would co-opt Farage and find him a seat (cf Douglas-Home). Not that Farage is perfect, but don't let that be the enemy of the Good. This isn't politics as usual. We're passing thru a time of unprecedented state tyranny and the big issue is Big State v a free citizenry. The leader of the Conservatives should embody the Right side of that issue.
Anne Morton19 Jul 2021 9:32AM
Yea gods Mark! I nearly lost my breakfast there!
How do you see Farage dove-tailing in with this mob who call themselves Conservative?
Do you think that they could even have a dialogue?
Really interested to know how you think this would work and what the outcomes for the public would be.
Must go as have a slot at the local tip - another of the many inconveniences due to covid.
Have a good day.
Must go as have a slot at the local tip - another of the many inconveniences due to covid.
Have a good day.
Mark Adams19 Jul 2021 9:43AM
The times are out of joint. Obviously the Conservative MPs are pathetic. They allowed Johnson to turn the UK into a police state without anyone even giving up the Whip. They'll follow power. The point of Farage is that he can half credibly lead the country (sodd the Party) to a realization of "never again". Right now we face a future of ad hoc Lockdowns whenever the Sage Cyclops says boo to Johnson. We need a written constitution starting with a replica of the First Amendment. Before dreams can come true, you need a dream.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/19/freedom-day-yet-another-false-dawn/
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Mark Adams24 Jul 2021 10:24PM
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. Mark Twain.
David Robinson24 Jul 2021 11:06PM
@Mark Adams: Animals are sentient so it is abhorrent.
Jonathan Muller24 Jul 2021 11:31PM
Vivisection and animal testing are two different issues. Do you not understand the difference or are you deliberately conflating them in order to use one to damn the other?
Mark Adams24 Jul 2021 11:38PM
They're essentially the same with a large overlap. The essence is that torturing other species is fine because ours is superior.
Jonathan Muller24 Jul 2021 11:52PM
You seem to be awfully quick with the t-word when in fact animal testing and research involve a wide range of different activities.
Mark Adams25 Jul 2021 6:01AM
So what? Suppose I breed a Jonathan Muller, confine him his whole life, maybe anesthetize him maybe not, prevent him from enacting nearly all his evolved functions, do 'research' on him (eg find the lethal dose of a substance that kills 50% of a cohort of Jonathan Mullers, one of the most common procedures) or do something else from "a wide range of different activities".
Then what? Maybe someone with compassion for Jonathan Mullers says "This is wrong." Then along comes a voice to deflect mercy with word-games. If it's ok to do it to other sentient beings, then it's ok to do it to Jonathan Muller. Better in fact because more scientifically useful. You'd better hope there isn't a just God.
-------------------
The critical value of a vaccine to the UK Government (and others) is that it is a means to exit their disastrous lockdown policies without having to admit that the whole thing has been a medically unnecessary and stupendously damaging mistake. A vaccine is Botox for Boris. He will save face. He will roll out the vaccine, millions of healthy people will be protected from a virtually non-existent threat and from symptoms they were unlikely to suffer anyway and Boris will claim victory over the virus at the cost of billions more pounds.
Edit: I realised after publishing this that the vaccine has another benefit: all those people who have been bullied or frightened into believing that Sars-Cov-2 is a real and lethal threat to the whole population will have a rationale for letting go of their fear. A vaccine may have a nugatory effect on the virus, but it could allow people to live freely again without ever having to acknowledge how badly they have been fooled.
https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/botox-for-boris
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and Covid statistics. M.
“Something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it.” Yes Minister
Abolish the NHS. Not only is it a tapeworm on the rest of society, but everyone has horror stories of infections and iatrogenic injuries. Typical is the the healthy older person who goes in after a fall and comes out in a coffin.
Just get the state out of healthcare altogether and make individual citizens responsible for their own and family's health. Maybe a safety net for children. Also a richer, more free society will generate more private charity, but hard cases make bad law. How heartless am I? But the truth is that aligning incentives with good outcomes is humane, whereas spending others' money on insatiable demand produces a giant tapeworm that feeds itself on us. M
A bitcoin has less intrinsic value than a tulip.
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” – Voltaire
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than than to produce it.” – Alberto Brandolini
There’s nothing wrong with being wrong, only with staying wrong:-(?)
“Beware of geeks bearing formulas.” – Warren Buffett
“The fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.” – Bertrand Russell.
“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.” - T S Eliot
What precisely is the question to which the answer is ‘more politicians’ - daniel goldberg in letter to the times 19.6.03
Good prose is like a window pane – orwell
When the law is against you argue the facts. When the facts are against you argue the law. Of course this reads much better in French – graham evans, times letter re iraq 2003
The combined willingness and ability of a number of persons to give dimes to beggars constitutes a demand for beggary – simon newcomb
Love is an act of will – M.Scott Peck
The bloomsberries lived in squares and loved in triangles – dorothy parker
The job of the president is what’s right and what’s right for america – the job is managing the interface.
You can hear his absence – luigi on baruntse expedition of simon
Secco, pointillistic, detache – glenn gould
the awesome dudh kosi – how can it be awesome as well as cosy – m
Why are you licking your elbow? Because it’s there – m
Psycho sicko – m
In holland houses are built around light – k
Alcohol – the cause of and solution to all the world’s problems – homer simpson
Pump and dump – re enron
The trouble with communism is communism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists – william f buckley
The ease of meaningless sex with an object. The difficulty of meaningless sex with a person – j.berardinelli,review of eyes wide shut
BOB’s SAYINGS – bob roberts, walking guide, lantabat
I have short legs – sylvia the shrimp
It’s ok as long as they reach the ground – bob
The ticks are marching north on tiny feet
What flower is this?
You mean it’s generic name ?– natalia
No, I mean what it’s called.
She cooks how she lives, by the seat of her pants – of sally
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer noted that ‘talent hits a target no-one else can hit, genius hits a target no-one else can see’
a quote from a Ring Lardner short story: "Shut up, he explained."
Do you know the operetta “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauß? Let me quote from the libretto:
“Glücklich ist, wer vergisst, was doch nicht zu ändern ist.”
(”Happy is the person who forgets what can’t be altered anyway.”)
As Woody Allen put it: “Every time I listen to Wagner I’m overcome with an irresistible desire . . . to invade Poland.”
Peak oil = peak technology
Aldous Huxley - I remain an agnostic who aspires to be a Gnostic — but a gnostic only on the mystical level, a gnostic without symbols, cosmologies or a pantheon.
Thomas Huxley - When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis"--had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion ...
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic". It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes. - Thomas Huxley
Dr. Marc Faber concluded his monthly bulletin (June 2008) with the Following:
The federal government is sending each of us a $600 rebate. If we spend that money at Wal-Mart, the money goes to China. If we spend it on gasoline it goes to the Arabs. If we buy a computer/Software it will go to India. If we purchase fruit and vegetables it will go to Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala. If we purchase a good car it will go to Germany. If we purchase useless crap it will go to Taiwan and none of it will help the American economy. The only way to keep that money here at home is to spend it on prostitutes and beer, since these are the only products still produced in US. I've been doing my part .
Photoshop Lightroom’s best innovation to my photography is that it’s a fine database enabling me to delete as many images as possible. What’s left is better loved and cared for. Less is more and least is most. - Me.
William Blake "The Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth of a self evident thing is a Knave."
America always does the right thing….after trying every other option. - Churchill
“It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of social services. There is a tendency to forget the most important social service a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.” — Sir John Slessor
liberals think their ideology makes them, above all, morally superior; libertarians think their ideology makes them, above all, intellectually superior.
Moral superiority, for many who feel it, is not compromised by deceptive statements made in the name of gaining the power to "do good." But intellectual superiority is compromised by any statement that is incorrect or intellectually lazy. - SCOTT SMITH, POWERLINE READER.
Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security. John Allen Paulos.
..journalists are remarkably adept at seeing only what they want to see when a liberal dreamboat comes floating along on a river of lies. John Boot of Gandhi and Malcolm X.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." - Saul Bellow
Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to stop believing in something if his salary depends upon that thing.”
Erections have consequences - NY Post on Anthony Weiner
Ronald Reagan "Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them."
"Long-legged young limber folk" Curt waiting for jm on mt sabattus
the real purpose of political correctness is not necessarily to make people feel good about themselves, but to make opposing views literally unsayable. By forcing upon the English language novelties, with new implications and subtleties, the cultural Marxists force English speakers to accept their worldview or expose themselves as heretics.-ed west
Some day, a few decades from now, someone will make a movie set in 2009, and one of the visual giveaways will be those little red envelopes arriving--by way of the Postal Service!--with silver discs inside of them. We will all chuckle with the recognition of a time gone by, while 15-year-old kids will snort and roll their eyes and wonder how their elders ever survived in such primitive conditions. Meanwhile, the federal government will still be trying to figure out how to subsidize the Postal Service and keep Netflix from becoming a monopoly.=robert tracinski
by the time demographics began to look more foreboding, the welfare state had been going on for so long that even people who should have been able to do the math mistook the status quo for a law of nature. They borrowed from the next generation, confident that some trick would be found such as previous generations had enjoyed. When that didn’t work, they cut the military. And when that didn’t work? Well, here we are. - christopher caldwell
Clean bowled by God.
Jonathan Ive said in a 2006 speech that his goal “is not self-expression. It’s to make something that looks like it wasn’t really designed at all -- because it’s inevitable.”
One staunch, longterm associate, now in his sixties, has described how restless Silvio Berlusconi gets during marathon meetings: “It’s clear he’s afraid he’ll catch old age from us.”
She made a hash of her own marriage prospects because she believed in the emotivist, consumerist idea that maintaining autonomy and maximal choice was critical to the good life. It is inconceivable to many Americans today that true freedom comes through limiting your freedom by committing to a worthwhile discipline, which entails self-giving and self-denial. It is a paradox of life, one recognized by Christianity, that by giving up your life, you gain it - Rod Dreher
if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying - Steve Jobs quoting Bob Dylan.
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” - Groucho Marx
In 1915, when Churchill was being turned out of the Admiralty—altogether unjustly—Clementine had made a desperate appeal to Asquith, the Prime Minister, "Winston may in your eyes and in those with whom he has to work have faults," she wrote, "but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess—the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany."
The chief justice took a highly skeptical view of race-conscious enrollment policies, even those intended for benign purposes such as promoting diversity. "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he wrote.
Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”
-Buffett of Newton.
"The...woman told us for an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."- P. G. Wodehouse
Everyone likes a good volcano - Sylvie Adams (snazziness personified)
‘Man ist was er isst’ (People are what they eat)
Do what is right because it is right, and leave it alone. Said by: Chiune Sugihara, Japanese Consul to Lithuania in World War
The strongest evidence against AGW was the attempted suppression of scepticism. The same symptom occurs in other cultural marxist dogmas like "HIV causes AIDs", "prolific vaccination improves the human immune system" and even String Theory and meteor impact causation of the K-T transition.
All these ideas may be true though I'm sceptical, but the priestly curation of them and the venal incentives are evidence the other way. - Mark Adams
#1: It’s sweet how my wife thinks the silent treatment is a punishment for m
#1: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you have boobs.
#1: WASPs kiss their kids on the forehead and their dogs on the mouth.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom. - Eisenhower
Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”
MA comment on Churchill quotes in RWN:
The phrase "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties" is noble. France had collapsed, Britain was alone, the Battle of Britain was about to begin of which Churchill said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Those young men, the few, including Czechs, Poles and American volunteers, "braced themselves to their duties."
"England expects that every man will do his duty" was a signal sent by Admiral Horatio Nelson from his flagship HMS Victory as the Battle of Trafalgar was about to commence on 21 October 1805. Trafalgar was the decisive naval engagement of the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson was killed in that battle and almost his last words were "Thank God I have done my duty."
Mark Steyn - Almost every matter of the moment boils down to the same story: the Left's urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and insist that "conventional wisdom" unknown to the world the day before yesterday is now as unquestionable as the Laws of Physics.
K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”
Pat Buchanan:
"All of these terms – racist, sexist, homophobe – are synonyms for heretic. Any of them can get you hauled before an inquisition.
To control the politics of a nation, control of the culture is a precondition. For who controls the culture defines what is moral and immoral, and what is heroic and villainous. And if you can set limits on what journalists write and broadcasters say, you can shape what people think and believe."
You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them - Malcolm Forbes
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." -Bastiat
"The church is a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for saints." Rick Warren
'Go fuck yourself - Mark. 'I wish I could' - Kirsten.
'When I hold a sweet child, I feel like I'm in heaven.' - the oldest man.
The goal [of design], it seems to me, is to help limit and reduce the chaos of the world about us.Accordingly, the best design for me is the least design . . . Models of good design are almost without exception
models of a kind of design that is reserved and chaste, modest and unimposing, neutral and balanced.
Dieter Rams, former head of product design at Braun, and Germany’s most important industrial designer of the postwar era
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Chief Justice John Roberts
They tuck you up, you mum and dad....ma after larkin
Reward-free risk - Jeff Gundlach on 5-year Treasuries
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.” Malcolm Muggeridge
Pascal - “I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”
As Holman W. Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal astutely writes, “Obama’s great political talent has been his knack for granting his admirers permission to think highly of themselves for thinking highly of him.” Romney’s great political challenge is to wean them away by making them faintly embarrassed about their former infatuation.
“This is important. I want you to hear what I am going to say. Mitt does not like to talk about how he has helped others
because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point.”-Ann Romney
“Barack Obama has failed us. But look, it’s understandable: A lot of people fail at their first job.” -Pawlenty
“The Democrats milling about on the floor have interesting faces,” he wrote. “There are the feminists, the race hustlers, and the other vested interests: environmentalists, consumerists, school teachers – the kind of people that we at The American Spectator call practitioners of Masked Politics. They claim a special fervour for the environment, the consumer, for children. Yet behind their masks they are standard issue Big Government meddlers.” Emmett Tyrell
I think of the Jeeves opus as humour channeled directly from God sipping his favourite bourbon in his favourite chair.
After a few more He lit a Passing Cloud and dictated the Marlowe novels to Chandler. - me.
In 1984 I was the Shell UK products trader, merrily buying millions of tonnes of fuel from Soviet Russia into UK oil-fired power stations in order to break the year-lon communist-led miners' strike. I was at an oil industry dinner at Grosvenor House, when the throng realsed that the guest speaker was to be the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. At that time I wasn't the idealogue I am now and took quite a bit of ''progressive thinking as self-evidently true. My received image of Thatcher was of a mentally inflexible, blue rinsed, starchy matron with strangulated speech patterns. Hearing her address this audience of oilmen for half an hour was a revelation. I'm allergic to stupidity and what shone through was her intelligence. I'm allergic to moral cowardice in others (less so in myself) and what shone through was her bravery. I'm allergic to bad english - that is lack of clarity and lack of euphony - and she was clear and sounded good. Amongst other flashes of humour she took the piss out of how much money we were making from the strike - this while she personally was at the eye of the historic storm raging around her. From that time I've been a Thatcherite. What a woman! I recommend her books.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Heinlein
For most American Jews, leftism is their religion while Judaism is their ethnicity and culture - Dennis Prager
Suck. Squeeze. Bang. Blow. - The internal combustion engine. http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/more-bang-less-buck-how-car-engines-now-go-further-on-less/
If abortion isn't wrong, nothing is wrong. Having arranged a legal abortion 40 years ago my girlfriend decided not to do it. We married. As soon as I held my baby daughter, I was enlightened. I now have 5 girls and 2 grand-daughters. I don't see how it's a feminist position that any of them should have been killed in the womb.
Rape, incest and malformation are hard cases and make bad law when used as an excuse for abortion on demand. - MA
Having thrilled to Puskas and Di Stefano on my black and white tv, then Pele, Best, Cruyff, Maradona and Nobby Stiles, I have to say that Messi is the best. I hope to play against him in heaven so that I can fully appreciate his genius.-MA
Well I struggled thru 2/3 of Scruton's program. My own experience intersects with a number of Scruton's subjects. I worked at the Tate Gallery when Carl Andres bricks were a cause celebre; I studied Classics including some of Plato; I love Rembrandt; I'm a Londoner familiar with the ethos of Britart; I lived in a council high rise; I like my concrete as brutalist as possible; I respect Marcel Duchamp, but despise Damien Hirst.
Scruton's thesis is merely trite. It's obvious that Vermeer beats Banksy. So what? The world is plenty big enough for charlatans and artists who are often the same people anyway. The scandal isn't about charlatanry, it's about money. Don't tax me to build public housing, whether beautiful or ugly. Don't tax me buy a Rembrandt or a urinal. Oh, you cry, but money is nothing beside beauty. Wrong. My money in my pocket is beautiful; my money in your pocket is ugly.
Anyway the documentary was trite, mannered and manipulative. Dull thoughts were given a patina of meaning by beautiful music and twitchy editing.-ma
“Is sex dirty?” Woody Allen asked. “Only if you do it right.”
the true art of government was no longer governing, but appearing to govern - review of in the thick of it.
a highly networked, highly mobile cognitive elite of deracinated ‘Sovereign Individuals’ who spend vastly more time communicating and negotiating with each other than the electorates they are supposed to serve. That, plus the knowledge that future opportunities and sinecures post-politics rely on conforming to the modish thinking of the hour, has led to the ascendency of elite groupthink on a truly massive scale. What we face is not so much a conspiratorial ‘Great Reset’ as the ‘Great Auto-Alignment’ based on elite mutual self-interest and the human instinct to run with the crowd that surrounds you. Moreover, the fact that much of this may occur at a subconscious level is far, far more dangerous than any active conspiracy because our leaders may not even always realise why they are acting as they are.
Andrew Cadman. https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/blairs-children-the-rise-of-the-globalist-sinecure-class/
Afuckingmazong!! - K.
Ok, first a limerick I owe Jeremy, then I'll unsquint my eyes to surf around last night's horror show.
Our special's Obaman solutions
Of abortion and redistribution
Debt up the wazoo
In the policy stew
The recipe sounds pretty gruesome.
My first thought is how much would you have to pay Mexico to take California.
Mark, on Obama's 2nd term victory
Decades ago my father, the least cynical of men, quoted a political scientist who wrote that democracy will survive until people figure out that they can vote themselves money. That appears to be the point at which we have arrived. Put bluntly, the takers outnumber the makers. The polls in this election cycle diverged in a number of ways, but in one respect they were remarkably consistent: every poll I saw, including those that forecast an Obama victory, found that most people believed Mitt Romney would do a better job than Barack Obama on the economy. So with the economy the dominant issue in the campaign, why did that consensus not assure a Romney victory? Because a great many people live outside the real, competitive economy. Over 100 million receive means tested benefits from the federal government, many more from the states. And, of course, a great many more are public employees. To many millions of Americans, the economy is mostly an abstraction. - Hinderaker
Mitt Romney proclaimed that Barack Obama was the candidate of “free stuff,” and voters took him at his word.-Hinderaker
John, thanks for this limpid post. The truth will save us.. The last few days I;'ve been sparring with Obaman friends and taken aback by the level of snark and illogic from people whom I like in other spheres. I'd bet a limerick on the outcome. I paid my bet with:
Our special's Obaman solutions
Of free stuff and redistribution.
Debt's up the wazoo
In the policy stew
So the recipe sounds pretty gruesome.
The conventional parabola - sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears and the final bitterness - was to him shameful and hypocritical.-Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.— President Calvin Coolidge
x xillion planets, y yillion moons, z zillion suns ====> a coincidence or two. - MCA
the human heart is the ultimate IED- Ralph Peters http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/general_failure_E3xLo8eCljhAVVutURLjoL
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.=Santayana
We live in a culture now where it is greedy to want to keep the money you earned, but it is not greedy to want to take away that somebody else earns. Everything is turned upside down. = Neal Boortz
'Single women want the federal government to be their man' - Ann Coulter
'the most honest statement of country’s values is its tax code' -
Jean-Louis Gassée
"Greece has been one of the best trades around"……The real question, perhaps, is why so many other hedge funds missed it.
“People in this industry spend more time trying to sound intelligent rather than making money,” says Greylock’s Mr Humes.
“Being bearish about things is the way they do that.”
"Gun control is not about guns. It's about control." - Mark Steyn, "After America".
Tennyson: “Though we are not now that strength which, in old days, moved Earth and Heaven, that which we are we are.”
MA -- I fit your profile in drinking. I've no doubt you understate your booze intake, but so do I to doctors once every 10 years. They still tell me I'm doomed, but I seem to thrive. But here's the thing: when I don't drink I sleep better, smile more and lose weight. Nor am I any more boring except that I'm better tempered. I remember you figuratively buggering that EU twerp on TV. You did that because you wanted a drink. If you lost the addiction you might lose the telegenic snappishness. I dunno, my happy mean is a couple of excellent bourbons before bed. Elmer T. Lee..exquisite value and unaffected. C'est tout.
Oh one other thing: when you go to lunch it's not important that you drink, but that somebody does. If he or she is a little tipsy, that relaxes you both. Cheers. A month without alcohol - the thought fills me with terror
MA -- There is a vast difference between safe,targeted, limited vaccination for a small class of diseases (polio, tetanus, diphtheria when I was young), and the BigPharma/BigGovernment control-freak programs for whole herds of common illnesses which have low risks and high propensity to build naturally strong immune systems which require no boosters.
It is typical of Scientismists like Mr Chivers to extend extreme, possibly anecdotal, cases to argue that rational opponents are irrational. Why vaccination matters, and why hippies and conspiracy theorists who say otherwise are dangerous
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis
Wittgenstein --
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.
..what can be said at all can be said clearly
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.
If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Charity never solved anything - Carlos Slim
There is a saying that we should leave a better country to our children. But it’s more important to leave better children to our country. - Carlos Slim
Ansel Adams – "There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
Until 5 minutes ago the idea of homo-marriage, let alone homo-adoption, was deviant to virtually everyone including homosexuals. Then a couple of rinses of cultural marxist brainwashing later, almost everyone in the media dubs it a universal human right, so the plastic pols go along for the ride.O what fools these mortals be. - ma
MA - Thinking strategically then:
1. Balanced budget amendment.
2. End universal suffrage - only taxpayers get to vote.
3. Flat tax. I don't mean flat tax a la Carson and Forbes. I mean everyone pays the same tax, say $10k per year. No tax, no vote. Enforcement is simply a matter of a public electoral roll. Shame and exclusion does the rest.
4. Prohibit almost all abortion. A society cannot be sane which murders the next generation.
5. No pay for politicians. Politics must be a matter of public service + federal term limits.
6. Constitutional amendment that no bill may exceed 10 pages.
Utopian, you may think, but I think not. Such a scheme could happen within a state and spread outwards from there (once Roe v Wade is reversed).
Apexes are turning points by definition. Is America at a nadir? I thought so in 2010, but I was wrong. Here's a couple of left-field ideas:
1. Obama turns conservative by virtue of the weight of authority. That would be natural, but for one thing - the man has no good character, he's a coward. But I may be wrong. One of the thrills of life is being proved wrong about a person's courage or honor.
2. A non-politician such as Carson emerges to sell America on 2 or 3 transformative ideas ('flat tax', re-discovery of history...)
3. An early loss of confidence in America's credit.
4. The progressives push so hard that a state defies federal authority or a serious secession movement gets going.
But as Macmillan replied when asked what blows governments off course…"Events, dear boy, events".
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2013/02/dont-get-sick-in-great-britain.html
Well-known, but more apposite than ever:
"The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting an inexperienced man like him with the Presidency.
It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama Presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their President.
The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America.
Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.
The Republic can survive a Barack Obama. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President."
It is the citizenry which needs restoring by:
1. Reversal of Roe v Wade. A society which kills its own children is inevitably depraved.
2. Federal balanced budget amendment.
3. Federal government out of education, marriage, welfare, healthcare etc.
4. Congressional term limits.
5. Correction of 14th Amendment to apply to the children of legal residents.
6. Flat federal tax. Income tax to be abolished. Every citizen to pay the same (low) $ amount - no tax, no vote.
7. Vote restricted to taxpayers.
8. End affirmative action, permit hiring and firing for any reason in a private business.
That King
Treading the purple calmly to his death,
While round him, like the clouds of eve all dusk,
The giant shades of fate, silently flitting
Pile the dim outline of the coming doom;
And him sitting alone in blood while friends
Are hunting far in the sunshine.
Browning, 'Pauline', of Agamemnon
I am strongly anti-abortion and can perfectly well see the perspective of the other side since I was perfectly relaxed about going along with the planned abortion of my eldest child. The mother changed her mind, my daughter was born and it dawned on me instantly how grotesque abortion is. The other perspective has another name - selfishness.
cartimandua replied to you
So you generalize entirely from your own experience.
Maybe that counts for a clever remark in the Church of Infanticide. You and your co-religionists think you speak for women. I have 5 girls, granddaughters to boot and some experience with pregnancy, motherhood, yearning and loss. Life is shorter than you think when you're young and to look back on the death of children at your own hands is a desolate thing. I think I speak for women who've not been brainwashed by resentment into murdering their most basic instinct to defend the baby inside them.
Saul Bellow: “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
MA from Trickey Pond 2010 - We're in a house by a lake in Maine; beaver, loons, hummingbirds AND my new inflatable kayak. Whatever the question, the answer is an inflatable kayak. Like floating on a cloud resting on a cloud.
People who do evil generally don't imagine they're doing evil. In fact, some of the worst evils are perpetrated by those who've convinced themselves they're doing good. One's conscience tends to restrain one from evil; but if one can trick one's conscience into thinking one's doing good by doing evil, well. Then you've really got something.-Ace of Spades
Apple has changed. When Jobs ran the place, it oozed innovation. Now, it oozes MBAs and it risks the same sort of “deadening” process that has plagued Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) since Steve Ballmer took over. - http://etfdailynews.com/2013/01/25/why-the-apple-inc-aapl-sell-off-is-just-getting-started/
"The higher your hair, the closer you are to God." And: "It costs a lot to look this cheap." And: "I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb ... and I know I'm not blonde."
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." Churchill
"The grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for." Joseph Addison
The womb is meant to be a place of safety and compassion and love - Lila Rose.
Paul Erdos - "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."
1 Corinthians 13
New International Version (NIV)
13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Just get government out of marriage altogether. No tax-breaks, no endorsements, no incentives to divorce. The state's interest is child protection and the law of contract.
Then marriage may be re-sanctified. - ma
Boston born, Paul Theroux: We need to remember the past. There were communities in Boston that supported the IRA in Northern Ireland. They were very sentimental about the Irish. They thought the Irish were fighting for their freedom, that's the way it was put: The IRA were freedom fighters. They were fighting against the Protestants and the British soldiers. And the method that the IRA used in Northern Ireland and in England was the nail bomb.
I lived in England for 18 years. What happened in Boston on that horrible marathon day was a very common occurrence in Belfast, even in London. Nail bombs killed several military bandsmen in Regents Park. They killed shoppers at Harrods. They killed people atEnniskillen. It was very, very common. And no one in Boston condemned it. And when Gerry Adams [the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA] came to Boston, he was marched around like a conquering hero.
The idea that our people are chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A" because a punk has been cornered and another one killed isn't really reason for rejoicing. Go see what's happened in the past, how other people have suffered. What the Tsarnaev brothers did was grotesque and appalling. But I lived in England when this was a common occurrence, and there was no sympathy from Boston.
GOLDMAN SACHS ELEVATOR MAN
If higher taxes on cigarettes are meant to decrease smoking, what are higher taxes on business supposed to do?
Homosexuality is a win-win for dudes. It usually takes two good looking guys and two ugly girls off the market.
John Tamny - Rather than judge companies on their individual merits, investors must waste valuable time playing junior Kremlinologist in order to divine the future actions of the second rate economists who populate the Federal Reserve. Investors aren't doing this because our central bankers have any useful knowledge to impart, but because what should be a low-entropy monetary input has become a high-entropy, bull-in-the-China-shop distortion whose actions must be priced.
Tocqueville also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: "It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one's acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."
MA - This: the purpose of society is children; everything flows from that. If children are conceived, nurtured, educated, protected then society is sane and adults are aligned with their deepest duty. If children are routinely and legally murdered, then society is insane and each man and woman's psyche is warped.
"if you're not going to kick a man when he's down, when are you going to kick him?"
“Inappropriate” is not a synonym for “evil.” - Kevin Williamson
“At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact.” Orwell
What is that fact today? Contenders:
1. The West's electorate is depraved beyond redemption.
2. Liberal democracy will only persist when the vote is restricted to adult property owners who pay tax.
3. Institutionalised abortion so perverts human nature as to render society insane.
4. TS Eliot was right: Shakespeare's crucial drama wasn't Hamlet but Coriolanus.
Jeff Bezos - a man who once said the quality he most wanted in a wife was the ability to spring him from a third-world prison.
"My life has been one long descent into respectability." Mandy Rice-Davies.
PG Wodehouse sits at God's right hand beside Shakespeare who sits at God's other right hand. -ma
All the endlessly looping security theatre bollocks should go too. "Will terrorists kindly place their bags where staff will not trip up over them", etc.
Another peeve is the wretched warnings not to beat up the staff. What a distopian impression of Britain is conveyed at our points of entry! No wonder the Chinese think we're barbarians.-ma
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." ~ N. Bonaparte
We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are - Anais Nin
It has become harder for me, because the importance of my skills is receding. Part of my advantage, is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people....
It's not predicting anything the way it used to and that really makes me reconsider my ability to generate superior returns. If the most important price in the most important economy in the world is being rigged, and everything else is priced off it, what am I supposed to read into other price movements? - Stanley Druckenmiller
"Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head" Warren Buffett
ma- http://www.businessinsider.com/us-expats-in-england-2013-10?pundits_only=0&comments_page=0#comment-527baba5ecad045412df173a
As a Londoner who lives in northern New Jersey, used to live in Houston and writes this from Moab, Utah I'll add a few things:
1. In the UK and Europe there's a fantastic footpath network. In the US you need to go to publicly owned land to roam around. That's a much bigger deal than it sounds. For example the countryside round London is superb and you can poke around everywhere.
2. The geology of the UK is far more interesting than NE USA which is largely granitic and conformist to the last ice age. That said, the landscapes here in Utah are world-class.
3. Bureaucracy in the US is way worse than in the UK. Moreover US government workers tend to be less knowledgeable or co-operative. Lawyering in the US is famously oppressive and paper-driven.
4. US tv comedy can be fabulous...Larry Sanders, Curb, Arrested, The Simpsons. The US Office was better than the UK original.
5. The UK is just more centrally placed for travel. Life is more interesting.
6. There are numina all over the UK, whereas the US just doesn't feel haunted.
7. It's even easier to get a game of soccer in the US. Soccer is the biggest participation sport in America and the facilities are pretty good.
8. America is America because of the pioneer spirit, immigrant striving and constrained government. An electorate that could choose Obama twice implies that spirit, striving and constrained government are now minority interests. Too bad. I'd like my Anglo/American children to inherit the best of both, not the huge debt both countries have dumped on them.
“If you’re not sure what to atone for, examine your good deeds” David Mamet citing ‘As the rabbi said’.
Respect the price action, but never defer to it.
Discipline must always trump conviction.
Opportunities are made up easier than losses.
Emotion is the enemy when trading.
Adapt your style to the market.
Maximize your reward relative to your risk.
Ride your winners; cut your sinners.
Perception is reality in the marketplace.
When unsure, trade "in between."
Sometimes the ability not to trade is as important as trading ability.
Don't let your bad trades turn into investments.
Good traders know how to make money; great traders know how to take a loss.
The reaction to news is more important than the news itself.
The only difference between being early and wrong is whether you're there to collect.
Always see both sides of every trade.
Trade to win; never trade "not to lose."
I lived in Den Haag for nearly 4 years and loved it. Bourgeois heaven, and that's a compliment. 2 snippets:
1. After silently standing in a short queue for service in a shop in Denneweg, I was addressed in English by the assistant. I smilingly asked why she didn't speak to me in Dutch and a distinguished looking gentleman told me "You reek of Englishness".
2. In a long queue in daylight outside a cinema I saw a sharply dressed, sinister-looking quartet of ethnic males and females grab a mild young man's hat and keep it away from them. The offenders resembled the threatening types you occasionally see in Tower Hamlets. Nobody helped the young Dutchman so I picked his hat off the ground where it had dropped and gave it to him. Then the most sinister guy put his nose to mine and after a few seconds head butted my forehead. As it happens I have a very hard skull from many years of soccer, so I just stood there unmoved and his eyes flared as tho on drugs. Behind him his girl was waving at me to back off. It occurred to me she was concerned he might stab me. So I just re-joined the queue. Anyway the thing that struck me was how surprisingly cowed the Dutchmen watching had been. Other than that I too am a great admirer.
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, and not read interviews with actors or directors, either of. But it's a long train journey from Plymouth to Barnet.”
Stoppardian. - ma
The president and the officials around him are the product of the same progressive version of higher education that simultaneously excises politics from the study of government and public policy while politicizing education. This higher education denigrates experience; exalts rational administration; reveres abstract moral reasoning; confidently counts on the mainstream press to play for the progressive political team; accords to words fabulous abilities to remake reality; and believes itself to speak for the people while haughtily despising their way of life.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - CS Lewis
not only falsifiable, but falsified - it's not even not even wrong. - of Warmism - ma
As Clemenceau once put it: "Civil servants make the best husbands; they are not tired in the evenings, and they have already read the newspaper.”
Valley girl jibber-jabber. - ma
Pajama Boy = the Platonic form of the right’s stereotype of infantilized urban lefty hipster douches - Allahpundit
Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate. - Rick Warren
"I’ll definitely have to research commas and colons. I’ve put down Thursday 9th (not 8th).
I won’t teach Charlotte this, but in general I prefer American spellings as they’re simpler and/or conform more closely to the original Latin - e.g. ‘color’ or ‘thru’, tho (sic) my rule for ‘z’ v ’s’ depends on whether the word is Latin or Greek, e.g.:
Mark - ‘civilisation’
US - ‘civilization’
UK - ‘civilisation’
Mark - ‘metastasize’
US - ‘metastasize’
UK - ‘metastasise’ (?)
In general if it’s a scientific word it’s Greek, if it’s an humanities word it’s Latin.
And while I’m at it, I’ll mention that my golden rule for any question of language is that first clarity then euphony then entertainment value settle the issue. Usually that means to choose Anglo-Saxon words over Latin.
If you’re interested in this stuff, there’s a great essay by George Orwell…Politics And The English Language.
I copy this screed to Alice and Jess to improve their minds!
Love
Dad"
Real equality:
1. Every citizen to have the same rights and responsibilities. No discrimination by government, affirmative or otherwise.
2. Every voter to pay $5,000 per year tax - no more, no less. 200 million x $5000 = $1trillion, which is much more than enough for all government in a constitutional republic. No pay, no vote. Who's paid is on a public roll. If I want to employ you or befriend you, or serve you, I may consider whether you're on that roll. No other tax, no deductions, no forms, no IRS, no perverse incentives to warp the economy.
3.You are free to serve or subsidize whomsoever you wish with your own money instead of inflicting compulsory 'charity' on fellow citizens.
That's equality. - MA
The test should not be literacy, but paying tax. You must bear the cost of the policies you support. Moreover every voter should pay the same tax; not the same tax rate, the same tax - say $5,000 per year or less. No tax, no vote.- MA
The UK is more republican than the USA. There's been no "archy" in the monarchy these last couple of hundred years, so a Hanoverian family tree is just a way to randomize who becomes figurehead of state. Charles is a widely mocked figure who’s always struggled for relevance, but his sons are impressive. The USA by contrast has families who really do hold power by virtue of relationship - Ted K and Hillary C being merely the most obnoxious specimens. If teleprompters could breed, no doubt we'd have a new royal family in America.
In the UK powerful politicians are subject to more abrasive questioning than the mutual tummy tickling of Obama's courtiers and the White House Press Corpse. The cap doffing of a Bill O' Reilly interview is pathetic. A UK interview in such circumstances might start "Are you a liar, Mr Prime Minister, or just incompetent?" and then get rough. When Joe Wilson called out "You lie" during an Obaman speech, You The People had palpitations. In Parliament "You lie" is tepid dissent.
One last poke: in the UK nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition, but You The People live in perpetual fear of your monarch’s unconstrained IRS and there is no political opposition worthy of the name. - MA
"Now, contemporary liberalism is not an evil ideology. Its intentions aren’t evil or even fruitfully comparable to Hitlerism."
Goldberg is quite wrong on this. Abortion, euthanasia, control of the media, brain-washing of children, plasticizing human nature, the Warmist superstition and all its discontents, und, und, und.......these are all totalitarian, diabolical, overt aims of contemporary liberalism. - ma
"Insignificant person".
The elitism of moral tramps like Pelosi and Lois Lerner is just exquisite. I savored Lerner's "hoi paloi" email rendition of "hoi polloi" as a sign of her elevated caste. Today's Brahmins are bureaucrats like Lerner and spouse-enriched, botoxified, Catholic abortionists like Pelosi and Kerry. What a tribe of preening dung-beetles scurrying around Washington these days. Ugh!
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/08/the-wrath-of-pelosi-the-cool-of-marino.php?fb_action_ids=10152653445867238&fb_action_types=og.comments&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582
The key discipline for a good society is that the individual gets the costs and benefits of his actions. The rest is making liberals feel good about themselves. -ma
The purpose of society is children. The rest is ancillary. A society which murders its children is insane. - ma
"Capitalists adjust their thinking to reflect the world. Socialists adjust the world to reflect their thinking."
"Usually at gunpoint”
They tuck you up, your mum and dad.. - ma
the statist game-plan: (1) government creates problem, (2) government locates scapegoat, and (3) government exploits scapegoat to juxtapose itself as savior — rationalizing more regulation and more power. Andy McCarthy
Einstein -'The tragedy of the German Jew is unrequited love, it doesn't matter how much they love Germany, Germany will never love them'
The allies won ww2 because “our German scientists were better than their German scientists” -Sir Ian Jacob
“..to leftists like the president, "science" is not science, not in the dictionary sense of a "systematic knowledge of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation." To leftists, "science" is merely a word that conjures something good that people respect. It is therefore to be used as a populist bludgeon against those who disagree with the left's agenda.
When science — actual science — stands athwart that agenda — when gender differences are found to be wired into the brain or fracking is proved to be safe and effective or intact families are shown to increase the success and happiness of offspring — then, oh then, a hellfire of censorious, censoring, blacklisting and career-threatening rage is unloosed on the poor scientist bearing the bad news. When the offending scientist is marginalized or battered into timidity, his silence is cited as further proof of the leftist position.” Andrew Klavan
"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical". Thomas Jefferson, 1779.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it”
― Frederic Bastiat
I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride. - Tolkein.
"an extraordinary mixture of man and boy..... you never know which of them you are talking to”. Younghusband of Bruce - my epitaph, perhaps.
Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I WAS!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they knew of me
My mother —my father.
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust
And love
Tho' I couldn't think
Each part of me was saying
A silent 'Wait for me
I will bring you love!'
I was taken
Blind, naked, defenseless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a brass plate
in Wimpole Street,
and dropped on the sterile floor
of a foot operated plastic waste
bucket.
There was no Queens Counsel
To take my brief.
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod's shop window.
When my passing was told
My father smiled.
No grief filled my empty space.
My death was celebrated
With tickets to see Danny la Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.
Spike Milligan
“If thought corrupts language,” Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” Among the main allures of such “debased language,” he argued, is that it is convenient: “Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.”
The argument for the welfare state belongs in the same family as “the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden.” That’s Lincoln again.
Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.”
Subject: Please make an honest whore of The Washington Post
Dear Jeff,
1. Thanks for making my world a better place. You’re right up there with Steve Jobs and Margaret Thatcher.
2. My family are avid users of Amazon Prime. I will certainly buy the new set-top box.
3. My dealings with Amazon have been excellent. When there’s a rare problem, I get a human on the phone in no time and can speak to that human like a human and resolve the problem with an even enhanced appreciation for Amazon. The human is honest and treats me as honest.
4. Which leads me to a case of deep dishonesty in your newly acquired and once esteemed organ, The Washington Post. I sent this email to sundry honchos there:
“Dear Washington Post,
Subject: Your Keystone/Koch story - Please reply to John Hinderaker's letters of 3/26 and 4/3
You know, I know and I expect Mr Hinderaker knows that this news story was pure propaganda. Among other untruths your central point is that the Kochs will be beneficiaries of Keystone. This was fiction.
Conservatives like me are no longer appalled by the effrontery involved; we're bored by it. But I am interested in the psychology involved - you betray your craft by making stuff up. Doesn’t that bother you? If I won a debate by lying about people whom I despise like Pelosi, Reid or Obama, I’d still despise myself as a liar. I suppose your surly, sullen silence towards Mr Hinderaker is its own reply.
What say you?
Mark Adams
5. In my mind and, I guess, the mind of a segment of your customers honest practice is an aspiration thru business and thru life. I’d be overjoyed if you’d look into this dishonesty at the WaPo, not only because I’m right-wing and the WaPo dresses Democratic, but also because I’d prefer to respect my political opponents.
Thanks for everything,
Mark Adams
What I can't wrap my head around is that Jeff Bezos owns this garbage (in both senses of 'owns'). Bezos strikes me as super-smart, but super-grounded. Compare Steve Jobs; I thought Jobs' liberalism was virtually non-existent, a cultural affinity from the early days. I admired his reluctance to give Apple's shareholders' money to charity or to pontificate on all the bs Tim Cook now virtue-signals about. But how does Bezos, a truly fine mind, reconcile his intelligence with the filth produced by his newspaper?
===
Ukip and the Tea Party are very close ideologically. The Tea Party is doing a great job of altering the DNA of the Republican Party in contrast to Ukip which is doing a great job of destroying the Conservative (in name only) Party.
The Tea Party is leaderless and dispersed; Ukip depends on a single political genius, Farage. Hence the Tea Party is anti-fragile as Taleb would put it, but Ukip's spear has a sharper tip.
What Ukip needs is for Daniel Hannan and others with both political skills and life experience to defect from the Conservatives and bring depth to Ukip. Hannan's position is that only Cameron will deliver a referendum, so he's staying put. He's wrong. The EU referendum pledge was wrung from Cameron by Ukip's success. Moreover Cameron and Merkel will make sufficient political love prior to a 2017 referendum in order to get an 'In' vote based on temporarily attenuated power for the EU. Cameron is an overt supporter of the EU and an overt liberal (gay marriage, NHS, foreign aid etc, etc).
The best outcome is as follows:
1. The grotesque socialist, Weird Ed Miliband, wins the next General Election. (Cf the grotesque socialist, Weird Barack Obama, the best thing for American conservatism since Coolidge).
2. Cameron gets the shove as Tory leader.
3. He's replaced by a fierce conservative, possibly Nigel Farage.
4. The Conservative Party splits, spitting out conservatives in name only.
5. The new conservative Conservative Party merges with Ukip.
If Cameron wins the next General Election, I'd bet on Britain getting locked into the EU by referendum. Along with Scottish independence that would complete the destruction of the UK, quite a legacy for a PR spiv like Cameron.
==
The same old special - Ryan, Nautilus Explorer
We assume that you accept your condition - Clara, marine biologist, Nautilus Explorer, not caring that 2 older men, including me, heard her complain about non-existent wrinkles on her chest.
====
Confucius (551-479 B. C.): “If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”
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Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Napoleon.
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Pablo Picasso “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working”.
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Groucho Marx "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
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FDR — the father of the New Deal — warned against welfare dependency. He said, “To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. . . . The federal government must and shall quit this business of relief.”
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"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny. Ernst Haeckel
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“The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.” – Thucydides, citing Pericles' Funeral Oration
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Obama is a symptom. The disease is the degradation of those who elected him. One man, one vote makes no sense; if I want a say in any other society I belong to, then I have to pay my dues. Repeal the 24th Amendment, a 1964 innovation mandating representation without taxation, and pass a Balanced Budget Amendment which will shrink government and the hordes of government's acolytes. ma.
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Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth……….
…………………..
Our universities, after a few aberrant decades of experimenting with open inquiry and the advance of knowledge, have reverted to their medieval purpose (the purpose that Chinese higher education always had): to train an intellectual elite for the propagation and defense of the state ideology. Then it was Christianity (in China, Confucianism); now it is utopian egalitarianism—“political correctness,” the Narrative.
John Derbyshire
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"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and
me. They have...no special talent for the business of government;
they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal
device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for
something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine
times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made
good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in
pillage, and every election is an advance auction sale of stolen goods.”
H.L. Mencken
===========
"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make” - the king in Shrek 1
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“Global warming is caused by the desire for more tax money.”-comment in wsj
==========
“I can calculate the movement of the stars,” he said, “but not the madness of men.”
Newton after losing his shirt on the South Sea Bubble.
=========
My perspective is that of a Londoner, Ukipper, father of American children, interested in the future of America and Britain which are now countries with significantly depraved electorates.
I very much want Scotland, a most beautiful country where I’ve often hiked and climbed and may one day choose to live, to become independent. The main effects will be:
1. England will be come independent, for 59 left-wing Scottish MPs seem to wield decisive influence over UK politics and it will be far more likely that England will leave the EU, a consummation devoutly to be wished.
2. Scotland will be forced to take responsibility for itself, instead of mooching off the rest of the country. If it persists in socialist dumkopfery for a while, a crisis will soon force a more entrepreneurial future on Adams Smith’s homeland.
A remoter effect may be to trigger a separatist wave all over Europe and the US. Good. Unless the strong Federalism of the Founders can be re-established to rein back the US government to its enumerated powers, it will not remain viable for the many healthy parts of the US to be governed by the diseased administration of such as Obama, Reid and Pelosi.
Today’s vote may have an historic significance undreamed of by Rab C. Nesbitt.
=================
My mother was a Jew, but I know less about Judaism than any other thought system. It doesn't interest me. That said, it's obvious to me that Israel is an heroic underdog which uses brains, bravery and an open society to oppose barbarism. - ma
===============
Those trite lines are awful Auden. Only
"Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face"
is acceptable, tho "human" is redundant and merely sing-song.
-ma http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/11133344/Alan-Bennett-on-the-poems-that-inspire-him.html
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A constitution which apparently guarantees:
1. a woman's right to murder her unborn baby;
2. the federal government's right to mandate health insurance;
3. same sex marriage;
4. racial discrimination by "affirmative" action
is insufficiently Progressive while the 1st Amendment stands.- ma
-----------------------
If Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be no more war. If Israelis laid down their arms, there would be no more Israel. (?)
-----------------
“hiding the unemployed in government offices is not a healthy solution” - Hans-Werner Sinn, the president of Germany’s Institute for Economic Research think tank
==============
Professor David Schmidtz “If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn’t.”
========
..government programs initiated to conquer a problem end up, instead, colonizing it by building sprawling settlements where the helpers and the helped are endlessly, increasingly co-dependent. Even where there are no material benefits to addressing, without ever reducing, other people’s suffering, there are vital psychic benefits for those who regard their own compassion as the central virtue that makes them good, decent, and admirable people—people whose sensitivity readily distinguishes them from mean-spirited conservatives. “Pity is about how deeply I can feel,” wrote the late political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain. “And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.” Voegeli
.. the real point of liberalism is to alleviate the suffering of those distressed by others’ suffering, the hard work of making our $3 trillion welfare state machine work optimally is much less attractive—less gratifying—than demanding that we expand it, and condemning those who are skeptical about that expansion for their greed and cruelty. Voegeli
liberals try to frame every issue they can in terms of children’s needs and vulnerabilities. But governing an entire nation on the basis of being nice to children inevitably infantilizes those who are not children. Voegeli
Okay, now apply Occam's razor to say WHY "Obama believes Iran should have nuclear weapons."
Martin Karo · Top Commenter · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Tom Lehrer preceded your thought (cf. "Who's Next?" and substitute 'Iran" for 'Egypt').
The problem Obama doesn't see is that Iran is going to build more than one atom bomb. And it is easier for them to deliver one via ship to New York or London than it is to Tel Aviv by missile.
At least I hope the matter is merely blindness. Even I won't go as far as to say Obama wants Iran to have a stockpile of Bombs as integral to the imposition of the worldwide Caliphate. But Occam might disagree with me there also.ma
It's thought-provoking, isn't it? The difference between me and a liberal fascist like Obama is that my ego and my id are moderately aligned. Obama's ego aligns with left-wing America, but his id aligns with Islam.
Chesterton (as best as I remember): "The mad man is not the man who has lost his reason; he is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
"Interest groups foment outrage, then enlist sympathetic activist journalists who rely on the testimony of deeply invested “experts” while partisan politicians exploit the allegedly systemic problem to advance an ideological agenda and demonize opponents..."
Stop right there. CAGW, 2008 credit bust, AIDS, 1930's show trials.....you name it. Someone coined a term for it - Liberal Fascism.
Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
Don Knuth.
Deborah Brown Howdy! Agree about the Muslims I encounter in sport, in business and as relative by marriage. Lovely people. I'd rather do a deal with a Kuwaiti than a Frenchman! But Islam is a supremacist political ideology which flourishes among poor sex-starved young men with little hope of family formation and among idealistic, westernised young Muslims who are disgusted by our porno-culture.
The Enlightenment is not a suicide pact! Appeasement (often aka 'tolerance') has never worked. Either Muslims must actively and ruthlessly root out political Islam as far as it impinges on Western interests or the West will need to separate itself from Islam.
Steyn: I have quoted before my old friend Theodore Dalrymple on the purposes of lies in totalitarian societies:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
========
To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller, is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors.— J. S. Mill
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Noël Coward, "A perfect martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy", Italy being a major producer of vermouth.
Somerset Maugham is often quoted as saying that "a martini should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously on top of one another."
==========
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. But don't rule out malice. - Heinlein.
======
absence of yes times time equals no - eli, the good wife
======
Oil is not cheap, it's ludicrously expensive. It's cheap relative to your short adulthood, but dear relative to many decades before. $20 crude would be tremendously stimulative to the US economy and lift many out of poverty worldwide. Neither you nor I and certainly not Obama should be the arbiters of how much oil is the right amount.
The only argument against Arctic drilling is disturbance to a pristine environment, but that disturbance is miniscule, virtually undetectable in the Arctic vastness. And by the way most in the oil industry, but especially geoscientists, are environmentally conscious up the wazoo, both from business self interest and direct exposure to the raw beauty of the world.
Your allusion to Deepwater Horizon etc betrays a common fallacy. The actual effects of rare incidents like the Torrey Canyon, Exxon Valdez are insignificant in the context of man's general assault on nature and virtually undetectable after nature gets to work on the residues. Yum-yum. I write as one who is outraged by the harm done to individual animals in these events, but far more outraged by factory farms. The reason they are such a big deal is that they occupy a vast amount of mindspace of media with an agenda but little appreciation of or wonder at the stupendous engineering achievement of the oil industry. Just go to an offshore rig or a refinery if you get the chance and have it explained to you. You'll be astounded.
Anyway the more hydrocarbon the better, the cheaper the better, the more American (and British and Canadian) the better, and if it starts coming out of your ears, the free market will adjust the supply.
MA - http://seekingalpha.com/news/2550336-oil-industry-rebuts-proposed-arctic-drilling-mandates?v=1433004925&commenter=1
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.
- Thomas Sowell
I am an ideological conservative who likes Trump, so far. I'm not obviously stupid or uninformed and I'm English with an accent just like yours.
It's simple. Actual conservative outcomes trump unrealized conservative ideas. Trump looks the most likely to achieve several of those critical outcomes, e.g. illegals, Iran, tax simplification, de-linking federal politics from crony capitalism, restoring American morale.
The cognitive dissonance of admirable pundits like Krauthammer, Williamson, Will, Goldberg, Cooke et al. arises from a lack of international business experience. Business sharpens the wits like nothing else outside war. All that matters is outcomes.
ma v charles cooke
Let's stipulate:
1. Trump is a bullshitter and a blowhard.
2. Trump is not only a bullshitter and a blowhard.
3. Conrad Black, Mark Steyn, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Whittle, Jeff Sessions et al. aren't stupid, but they have a lot of appreciation for Trump.
4. You guys are lawyers and pundits. You live in a world where words are closely parsed and risky acts (like the effect of impeachment or a government "shutdown") are weighed against short-term, predictable effects instead of long-term historical significance. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't live the hurly-burly of the international busine
ss world, where outsize characters like Trump and Icahn do deals that few others can do because they lack both the self-confidence and the authority. You and many of your readers simply don't get Trump. You think he's a fool and those who appreciate him are fools or fans or both. The more Falstaffian Hayward at least gets Trump's humor to a degree.
5. Trump's success across a wide swathe of the electorate must mean something. To me it's obvious: he is the most persuasive of any candidate that he will actually achieve certain crucial (conservative) goals like secure the border, simplify tax, reduce debt, stand up for America and negotiate from strength. To less lawyerly Americans and this Englishman the slogan "Make America great again!" is a winner if uttered by someone with self-belief and bullishness to be credible.
8. Trump communicates, so much so that I'd bet on a 40+state sweep if he faces any of the lacklustre Democrats currently in the frame. For every Mirengoff and Podhoretz too dainty to vote for Trump over Hillary, there are a hundred Americans - white, black, polka-dot, men. women - whose first political goal is to feel good about America.
PS: My preference is Cruz; I'm an ideologue. But my #1 issue is to get conservative things done. Trump could get a massive mandate to turn America round.
ma v j hinderaker
There “is no such thing as an American foreign policy,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in 1968. There is only “a series of moves that have produced a certain result” that they “may not have been planned to produce.” It is “research and intelligence organizations,” he added, that “attempt to give a rationality and consistency” which “it simply does not have.”
lumpenintelligentsia,Geoffrey Wheatcroft
“I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals” Churchill.
OK, first rule of Wall Street - Nobody - and I don't care if you're Warren Buffet or Jimmy Buffet - nobody knows if a stock is going up, down or (blank curse word) sideways, least of all stockbrokers. But we have to pretend we know.- Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey)
Michael O' Leary:
48 reasons why you don't hear much from Michael O'Leary anymore
The outspoken chief executive of Ryanair has remained largely out of the spotlight since the airline began its new "customer-friendly" overhaul. Here are a few reminders why:
On refunds: "You're not getting a refund so **** off."
On overweight passengers: "Nobody wants to sit beside a really fat ****** on board. We have been frankly astonished at the number of customers who don't only want to tax fat people but torture them."
On turbulence: "If drink sales are falling off we get the pilots to engineer a bit of turbulence. That usually spikes up the drink sales."
On travel agents: "Screw the travel agents. Take the ******* out and shoot them. They are a waste of bloody time. What have they done for passengers over the years?"
Ryanair has sought to improve its image in recent years Credit: GEOFF ROBINSON PHOTOGRAPHY./Geoff Robinson
On transatlantic flights: "Ryanair will never fly the Atlantic route because one cannot get there in a Boeing 737, unless one has a very strong tail wind or passengers who can swim the last hour of the flight."
On the airline industry: "There's a lot of big egos in this industry. Most chief executives got into this business because they want to travel for a living. Not me, I want to work."
On European expansion: "Germans will crawl *******-naked over broken glass to get low fares."
On charging passengers to use the loo: "One thing we have looked at is maybe putting a coin slot on the toilet door so that people might actually have to spend a pound to spend a penny in the future. If someone wanted to pay £5 to go to the toilet I would carry them myself. I would wipe their bums for a fiver."
On upright seating: "I'd love to operate aircraft where we take out the back ten rows and put in hand rails. We'd say if you want to stand, it's five euros. People say 'Oh but the people standing may get killed if there's a crash'. Well, with respect, the people sitting down might get killed as well"
On the in-flight experience: "Anyone who thinks Ryanair flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things."
Michael O'Leary thinking of something funny to say Credit: BAX LINDHARDT
On low fares: "I don't see why in 10 years' time you wouldn't fly people for free. Why don't airports pay us for delivering the passengers to their shops?"
If you can't find a low fare on Ryanair: "You're a moron."
On customer service: "People say the customer is always right, but you know what - they're not. Sometimes they are wrong and they need to be told so."
On closing Ryanair's check-in desks: "This isn't the end of civilization as we know it."
On apologies: "Are we going to say sorry for our lack of customer service? Absolutely not."
On refunds: "We don't want to hear your sob stories. What part of 'no refund' don't you understand?"
On Ryanair's image: "One of the weaknesses of the company now is it is a bit cheap and cheerful and overly nasty, and that reflects my personality."
On pilot's wages: "People ask how we can have such low fares. I tell them our pilots work for nothing."
On his popularity: "I don't give a ***** if no-one likes me. I am not a cloud bunny, I am not an aerosexual. I don't like aeroplanes. I never wanted to be a pilot like those other platoons of goons who populate the airline industry."
"We don't want to hear your sob stories. What part of 'no refund' don't you understand?" Credit: Max Rossi
On Ryanair's pilots: "If this is such a Siberian salt mine and I am such an ogre, then why are they still working for the airline? If any of our fellas aren't happy with the current arrangement then they're free to go elsewhere. Godspeed to them."
On Aer Lingus's pilots: "Overpaid, underworked peacocks"
On cost-cutting: "We use our own biros and I tell the staff not to buy them, just pick them up from hotels, legal offices, wherever. That's what I do. Recently I did an interview and I was sitting there with a hotel pen I'd nicked from somewhere. I was asked why and I said: 'We at Ryanair have a policy of stealing hotel pens. We won't pay for Bic biros as part of our obsession with low costs."
On employees: "MBA students come out with: "My staff is my most important asset." Bull****. Staff is usually your biggest cost. We all employ some lazy ******* who needs a kick up the backside, but no one can bring themselves to admit it."
On how to keep employees motivated and happy: "Fear."
On beginning a press conference to announce the annual results: “I’m here with Howard Miller and Michael Cawley, our two deputy chief executives. But they’re presently making love in the gentleman’s toilets, such is their excitement at today’s results.”
On ordering aircraft from Boeing: “The message to Boeing today is: ‘You keep building them, we’ll keep buying them’, and together both of us will kick the crap out of Airbus in Europe. We love Boeing. **** the French.”
On not ordering more aircraft from Boeing: “Boeing had their chance. Eventually you lose interest, dealing with a bunch of idiots who can’t make a decision. They are a bunch of numpties out in Seattle.”
On Ryanair in the 1990s: “Ryanair will never make money. It will always lose money. It’s an airline. Forget it.”
On Ryanair in the 2000s: “We expect our profits to grow by 20 to 25 per cent. That’s not just good, that’s practically obscene in an industry in which few people make money. This isn’t an airline, it’s a drug baron’s business.”
On corporate life: “The meek may inherit the earth, but they will not have it for long.”
On consultants: “I believe hiring consultants is an abdication by management of their responsibilities. If the consultant is so good at managing change, then why not hire him to run the company and do it himself? Every idiot who gets fired in the industry shows up as a consultant somewhere. I would shoot any consultant who came through my door.”
On environmentalists: “We want to annoy the ******* whenever we can. The best thing you can do with environmentalists is shoot them. These headbangers want to make air travel the preserve of the rich. They are luddites marching us back to the 18th century. If preserving the environment means stopping poor people flying so the rich can fly, then screw it.”
"The meek may inherit the earth, but they will not have it for long" Credit: © 2015 Bloomberg Finance LP./Simon Dawson
On Guardian readers: “The chattering bloody classes, or what I call the liberal Guardian readers, they’re all buying SUVs to drive around London. I smile at these loons who drive their SUVs down to Sainsbury’s and buy kiwi fruit from New Zealand. They’re flown in from New Zealand for Christ sakes. They’re the equivalent of environmental nuclear bombs!”
On protesters: “The Swampies of this world are climbing up trees to protest about airlines and airports. They should all get a job and get a ******* life.”
On air marshals: “Air marshals are a complete waste of time. I can’t think of anything that would reduce security more than having a guy on board with a gun.”
On a bomb scare in Scotland: “The police force were outstanding in their field. But all they did was stand in their field. They kept passengers on board while they played with a suspect package for two and three quarter hours. Extraordinary.”
Rows and reduced fares: the history of Ryanair Play! 01:47
On free speech: "I upset a lot of people because I tell them what I think. I'm disrespectful towards what is perceived to be authority. Like, I think the Prime Minister of Ireland is a gob*****."
On politics: "I think the most influential person in Europe in the last 20 to 30 years has been Margaret Thatcher, who has left a lasting legacy that has driven us towards lower taxes and greater efficiency. Without her we'd all be living in some French bloody unemployed republic."
On the European Commission: "They are ******* Kim Il-Jungs (sic) in the Commission. You cannot have civil servants trying to design rules that make everything a level playing field. That's called North ******* Korea, and everybody is starving there. The EU are pursuing some form of communist ******* Valhalla."
On EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes's approval of an Alitalia/Air One merger: "She''ll be rolling over like a poodle having her tummy tickled and rubber-stamping the thing."
On British Airways: "BA have got waterfalls in their head office. The first thing I'd do if I were in charge of BA is turn off the waterfalls. The only time we have waterfalls in the Ryanair office is when the toilet leaks."
On the British Airways/Iberia merger: "It reminds me of two drunks leaning on each other."
On Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of easyJet: "Those of us who sell the lowest fares just get on with it, and those who do not, write whingeing letters to newspapers."
On intelligence: "easyJet are not the brightest sandwiches in the picnic basket."
On Southwest Airlines: "We went to look at Southwest Airlines in the US. It was like the road to Damascus. This was the way to make Ryanair work. I met with Herb Kelleher. I passed out about midnight, and when I woke up again at about 3am Kelleher was still there, the *******, pouring himself another bourbon. I thought I'd pick his brains and come away with the Holy Grail. The next day I couldn't remember a thing."
On Alitalia: "I would not want it if it were given to me as a present."
To the boss of regional airline Aer Arann: "**** off back to Connemara where you come from!"
On offering advice to other airlines' bosses: "They can **** off and do their own work"
magnus carlsen’s father.
‘If it is vulgar and expensive then it is from the previous owner. If it is vulgar and cheap then it is ours.’
ma comment http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/10/more-wikileaks-paydirt-democrats-hate-america.php
The emails of Clintonistas might be edited down to Screwtape Letters wherein a senior Devil educates a junior tempter in the art of perverting the human individual. Eg, off the cuff:
"Wormwood, the Holy Grail isn't just to tempt the mother to kill her own child in the womb, but to make her proud of it. Call it 'choice'. Call the child 'foetus'. Call the murder a 'procedure'. Tempt them to elect a priestess of these 'procedures' as President of the United States. Do you think that we'll be out of a job then? That there's nothing more perfectly Satanic to be done? Maybe, but we can still have fun. Let's pervert the living children. Use your imagination. Persuade a male child that he's a she, that mutilation will make him fully free. After we've driven the humans mad, we'll strip away delusion and lace their madness with despair."
I ramble on....but the trouble is, we're already there.
Voltaire said, “The art of medicine consists of keeping the patient amused while Nature cures the disease.”
It's always darkest before it is totally black.-Anon
Robert Heinlein "Man is not a rational animal; he's a rationalizing animal."
“special Providence watches over children, drunkards, and the United States.”
MA-Russia would in fact be a better friend than Germany to Trump's America. Russia is motivated by national self-interest; Germany is governed by the Euro-snobbery and cultural Marxism of the Eurocrats. Hence the Obama love.
When we lived in Holland, we often visited Germany. As we drove across the invisible border from Dutchland into Deutschland, the sky would darken. One elderly German relative had survived the Eastern Front, but was luckily in the US zone upon surrender, so he got chocolate instead of the brutality he'd expected. Yet he buys the anti-American crap peddled in the German msm.
It was different in Adenauer's day and it will be different again, but for now the failing EU is like the Deep State in America, a snake at bay.
The real divide isn't between America and Germany, it's between the productive people of the West and the social democratic party of the West. The latter is a parasite on the former and uses third-world immigration to prolong its control. Trump is an existential threat to much more than the Democratic Party.
‘There’s a fundamental clash between the self-evident truths of the Declaration and the worldview of the progressives,’ said [Bill] Voegeli. ‘Our view is that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, whereas progressives are inclined to think that government derives just powers from the expertise of the experts.'”
------------
“It’s very simple. In America we have the Evil Party and the Stupid Party. Sometimes these two parties get together and do something really evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”
MA- I'm broke, but I'm not broken.
He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly but because he felt deeply. John Buchan of Raymond Asquith
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. Scott Adams
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s
In deepest consequence.
Banquo to Macbeth
Not another fucking elf." — Professor Hugo Dyson, as Tolkien read an early draft of The Lord of the Rings to a group of friends, The Inklings.
Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. ?Edmund Kean
Clearly Borja:“There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, gossip, sex. …”
vd hanson
"savvy Democrats fear Trump because they had long preached that “demography is destiny” only to learn that lots of minority bloc voting in solidly red or blue states was not as electorally potent as a riled working white class in key swing states. The knowledge that the outsider and supposed fool Trump grasped that truth while both his Republican primary rivals and Hillary Clinton did not proves especially irritating."
ma-
This stuff is intensely dull. Everyone knows that healthy men have a compelling sexual appetite which women, rightly, seek to shape into commitment, financial and otherwise. Morality, whatever that is, is secondary; reproduction and nurturing is primary. Men shouldn't assault women, that's obvious, but women realize that they need to shape the sexual imperative towards family-rearing. Now there's a whole lot of beauty, love and the peace that passeth understanding that gets strapped onto the foundation of evolutionary psychology, but at bottom we're all worms and some of us are glow worms.
Trump's modern precursor was Cassius Clay. Loud, obnoxious, full of fight. Then he knocked out Sonny Liston (Hillary, obviously) and the rest is history. ma.
Jonah, I am biased. I am biased towards YOU. I read your books, listen to your podcasts, admire your wit and your phrasing. I even took my wife to hear you speak once in a room in the Houses of Parliament. But you seem unstrung by Trump. You're stuck on Affect, when what a pragmatic conservative cares about is Effect. And in the process you misrepresent Trump, thereby undermining your own intellectual capital. Kindly stop calling me the Trump faithful or a fan or a cultist. I'm a rational conservative to whom it is obvious that the motive for NRO Nevertrumpets is a visceral aversion to the man's personality.
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."- Jonathan Swift
Having myself endured the unfit-for-purpose Green Card process plus sundry bureaucratic humiliations which would turn a saint against America, I'm a hawk on illegal immigration. But I doubt that any Administration will mass deport the DACAns. If that's reality, then extracting the maximum gains on security and legal immigration makes sense. If the Dems turn Trump down, then making the mid-terms about immigration and the economy is pretty astute when the battlefield has been so well prepared.
After many drawn-out business deals I learnt that chipping away at the other side's position is a frustrating way to get to Yes. It can work a lot better to give the other side up-front most of what they claim to want and which they're going to get eventually anyway just by waiting, while conditioning it on most of what you want, but may never get. -ma
Trump speaks Queens' English instead of Queen's English - ma
ma- I will read this review in the sauna, or several saunas. Of all the NeverTrumps Jonah Goldberg was the most puzzling to me because he's so intelligent and so catholic in his tastes and his mother seems ok with Trump. I attribute NeverTrumpery to a failure of imagination. Can you imagine that a great President would sometimes look and act like a lowbrow phony with nouveau riche taste in women and decor? For me that's never been a problem. For Goldberg, Brooks, Podhoretz, Kristol, etc it's determinative. Oh, they give other reasons - he'll lose, he can't govern, he can't control himself, he's a democrat, he's feigning pro-life, he'll appoint his sister to the Supreme Court, or more complex reasons involving intellectual sleight of hand and belittling Trump's support as a cult - but as each rationalization is falsified by reality, then the NeverTrumps look like Bugs Bunny running frantically to stay aloft after he's run off a cliff.
It's this - they just hate the guy and fear his working-class supporters. They hate his affinity for the lowbrow, his gaudy taste, his grammar, his exaggerations, his Queens ways. For Manhattan Jews there's a special aversion on top, which for Israelis, for doers as opposed to commentators, doesn't apply. And that's it. All the hi-falutin' moralizing about character is a cover for a lack of imagination.
I'd like to hear Jonah take on Victor Davis Hanson on Jonah's podcast, The Remnant, instead of schmoozing with fellow Trump-haters like Ben Sasse. Come to think of it, I'd like to hear Sam Harris take on VDH on his podcast, Waking Up.
Tusk is merely an uber-parasite in a tribe of unelected, unaccountable parasites that feed off the EU. Because he spends all day in a cocoon of tax-payer funded limos, jets, business suits, fine wines, luscious pension arrangements, tax free pay and benefits, surrounded by lickspittles who whisper in his ear how idealistic is the EU, how vulgar is America, so he wafts along in a cloud of self-possession, a pygmy who thinks of himself as Jupiter. Juncker is worse, but at least he's drunk half the time which makes him seem human. Trump is like garlic to vampires among these bloodsuckers.
MA - Men manipulate the world and women manipulate men.
MA-
Random comments from a Briton who was 13 in 1963.
1. The perfect Beatles song is 'She Loves You'. It has that quality of being found rather than composed. It was always there, just waiting for the right performers.
2. Several of the early tracks you picked are a mix of great bits embedded in plonkety plonk. John's acidic, scouse vocals are the magic ingredient. Those songs sound somewhat leaden against the unfussy sophistication of "Don't Let Me Down"
3. The Beatles were a sensation, the sensation, in Britain for a while before they came to America. I've wondered for years what the difference in impact was. Growing up with "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", "All My Loving", "I Only Want to Dance With You", "Eight Days a Week", "Help", to name a few high energy favorites, was a big part of the soundtrack of my adolescence....along with the Stones (eg "Mother's Little Helper") and Dylan (eg "I Want You"). I bought these Albums one by one with my paper round money and played them with my scratchy worn out needle. America by contrast got a significant chunk of The Beatles' oeuvre dumped on it at once. I like to think that you need to be me to really get what it was like, but I know that's not real.
4. Lennon's primal scream album does have some immortal music. "God", definitely. I still find "I don't believe in the Beatles, I just believe in me, Yoko and me, that's reality" straightforward and moving. "Mother" also. What a loss, what a loss.
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
-Alexander Tytler
‘Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca’ (the morning has gold in its mouth). Crispin Odey the day after the Brexit vote.
"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent, (as we deplorables and conservatives are) when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness it has the same effect and is intended to."~Theodore Dalrymple
ma-
The scandal is just how trite, jejune and second-hand are Darroch's insights .
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2 replies · active less than 1 minute ago
You say that Mark but what is your evidence that his assessment is actually factually wrong.
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Plenty, but that's not the point. Darroch's insights are simply a re-hash of the bubblehead journalism that the lumpen intelligentsia uses to assuage its anguish at Trump. My money is extracted to keep these self-important Mandarins in luxury for the rest of their lives in return for their stale prose. Ugh and double Ugh.
“It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” ? Keynes
ma - the left is now actors, academics and activists (and adolescents).
ma- Bush begat Obama, Obama begat Trump. President Romney would have begat President Ryan. There is a special providence that protects drunks, babies and the United States of America
ma- Marx was wrong; it is Cultural Marxism that is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions..
"The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting." Charlie Munger
ma - Trump personifies the concept 'antifragile':
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
The phenomenon is well studied in medicine, where for example Wolff's law describes how bones grow stronger due to external load. Hormesis is an example of mild antifragility, where the stressor is a poisonous substance and the antifragile becomes better overall from a small dose of the stressor. This is different from robustness or resilience in that the antifragile system improves with, not withstands, stressors, where the stressors are neither too large or small. The larger point, according to Taleb, is that depriving systems of vital stressors is not necessarily a good thing and can be downright harmful.
“In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war." — Adam Smith
Doublethink
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink. - Orwell
I may be daft, but I'm not stupid. Andrew Hague.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts
Richard Feynman.
long think, wrong think - chess saying.
At the gate to heaven:
Kirsten: Knock, knock.
St Peter: Who's there?
Kirsten: Kirsten.
St Peter: Kirsten who?
Kirsten: Kirsten Angela Adams.
St Peter: I'll look you up in The Book of Deeds.
Kirsten: Can I come in?
St Peter: No. Begone.
Kirsten: Is this because I got rid of Mark?
St Peter: Nobody cares about that. You threw out the giant Teddy Bear. Come back in 2 million years.