Four 'Cellists and a Drummer

Ok, I think there's a rule that says you can't be a classically trained 'cellist and a headbanging rocker at the same time.

There has to be.


I think it's because you have to sit down to play. You can't be a proper long-haired headbanger and remain seated. It just looks weird.

Go to another country and eat gross food

you think British people eat awful food? Black pudding and haggis are over the top?

Try Korean!



Yah.

How 'bout a nice spinach salad?

Feminists are Evil

Germaine Greer is a foul old hag and an evil sow. Everyone who believed her and followed her advice also turned into an evil old sow.

Because of her the world is full of evil old sows.


Mr. Bear concurs




Cuddly toys are ugly monstrosities - and it's time we stopped our kids from fetishising them


Germaine Greer
Monday August 27, 2007
The Guardian

We have persuaded ourselves that children have always tended to fixate on inanimate friends. The received wisdom is that they use toys as objects of transference, developing social awareness by interacting with them, even though dolls and soft toys have only been ubiquitous since they began to be mass-produced in the mid-19th century. Before that, human effigies were used as objects of veneration or fetishes or in witchcraft, but never as children's surrogate siblings. Shakespeare uses the word "doll" only as a name, the diminutive of Dorothy. The word "toy" meant for him "a thing of no regard", not an animal effigy that slept with you. Children haven't always screamed themselves into conniptions if Teddy or Bunny or Cuddles got left behind. Nowadays, cutesy effigies of animals are apt to turn up almost anywhere; they gaze soulfully from car dashboards, loll in heaps on undergraduate beds, peep out of rucksacks and grace restaurant tables. Teddies and bunnies are taken into exams and sat on the desks, as if to be without them for three hours would induce hysteria and fainting spells. Soft toys are left along with the flowers at the scenes of fatalities. Wherever they are, they are truly hideous, beyond kitsch. By making our children fall in love with such ugliness, we are preparing them for a life without taste.

Refit's complete

ready to launch in 22 days.

Here's another one ~ Tuesday, March 14, 2006

"Why I Like Civilization More than Barbarism"

Why Kathy likes being Catholic.

I prefer the artificial. The synthetic. The perfectly choreographed. Now THAT's Catholic. Big honkin' non-biodegradable paintings and utterly unrecyclable marble altars and pointlessly extravagant monstrances...

When we Catholics make the mistake of getting "natural", what's the result? Natural Family Planning. Which involves mucus. Just typing the word "mucus" gives me an ice cream headache/anxiety attack...


This made me happy. I have another reason for hating hippies: I was raised by them on the West Coast. I have noticed that people who were raised by hippies either became very very angry conservatives or very very angry feminists. But, Lordy! No one ended up happy.

I also like nature to be very controlled. I remember life in nature, in places like Hornby and Denman Islands where lots of hippies live to this day


Hippie co-op store, Hornby Island

and my peripatetic father briefly lived in a tarpaper cabin with a wood burning cast iron stove. It wasn't all bad. I liked the beach and the woods.


North Beach, Hornby Island

I liked collecting rocks and had quite a good collection of interesting nature things that I had found whenever I went out into it. I have admitted to being outdoorsy. Used to camp a great deal, wandering around the Gulf Islands every summer (the ferry rides between the islands were free in those days.)

But later I wised up. I learned, as did the Barbarians when they got a good look at Roman civilization, that nature is all fine as long as you can go indoors at night and turn on a light and read the field guide to all the interesing nature things you have found on your walk.


I kept camping, but I learned to do it in a manner befitting a lawful heir of Western Civillization. I camped in as much ostentatious luxury as possible. And I mean absolutely crazy luxury.


I'm talking oriental carpets, tapestries, giant iron braziers with whole pigs roasting on them, elaborately engineered outdoor baths heated by wood-stoked ovens. Every time I see a movie that has a medieval or Roman camp in it where everyone is lounging about in luxurious pavillions and drinking a lot of mead from a fancy metal cup, I sigh and think, "I've been to that party, and it was great." (Yes, I can't wait for Beowulf!)

There's nothing quite so wonderful as the experience of waking up early on a summer morning and listening to the birds start twittering in the glorious, clean and quiet and cool outdoors while encased in a silk brocade duvet on a double-size hand made wooden bed in a pavillion decorated with silk banners, an armour stand, and wrought iron candelabra, smelling of wood smoke and thinking maybe a little leftover venison would be nice for breakfast.

Medieval re-enactors are geeks of the highest order, it must be admitted, but how much geekier can you get than a Trad? And at least in their own context, those guys really know how to live.

After discovering the truth that man is meant to subdue and dominate nature, I learned to hate it along with the hippies who worshipped it. The one thing that Rachel Carson was right about was that man is at war with the insects. Her solution, however was to capitulate and thus, we have the absurd yuppies of Kitsilano and the Annex buying absurdly over priced organic fruit that doesn't even taste good. We have the vegans who are going to go blind, and prematurely osteoporotic and probably senile because they don't get enough protein and vitamins. All because we have adopted the liberal line that the strong must apease and capitulate to the weak. I understand we are at war with nature; and I intend that my species will WIN.

Actually, that's not true, I like nature just fine, when it is carefully controlled in a flower pot, cultivated garden, or zoo as God intended (literally! it says so in the Bible!). Otherwise, it tends to crawl on you with its horrible little legs and sting you with its horrible little stingers. Nature is really just trying to eat you all the time. I like that we have mostly learned to subdue it and subject it to our will.

I think I have stayed in Toronto, partly because I know that though it is a nice cozy fantasy, the idea of living in a hermitage somewhere in the woods of, say Vermont, would remind me too much of the grubby, little cabins on Pender Island (before it became a resort) with no indoor plumbing and wolf spiders lurking in every corner. Ugh!

I'm going over old blog posts from TDL

this one was just great (and not my own, so I'm not boasting.)




Remember those occasional issues of Marvel Comics "What if" series? (Come on, you can admit you read Marvel comics. You can even admit that you still do once in a while...)

Well, here's one from an enterprising alternate historian,

I can see that we at Manning House were not the only ones to sit around for hours coming up with world domination theories.

What if Henry VIII had never been born? Or, alternatively as Dom Bettinelli suggested, that he hadn't been such a git?

1. The monastic lands in England were not seized in 1538 - 1541

2. Hence the Great Revolt (aka “the reformation”) does not happen, because the European rulers do not learn from Henry’s disastrous policy that it is possible to go round plundering the Church for loot

1550 Also due to options a or b above, the staunchly Catholic English population fail to become Anglicans. No-one is worried by this.

1553 Queen Elizabeth I fails to govern England properly due to non-existence...

World Decidedly Better Off.

Spared the Ruff.

Shakespeare continues business as usual (minus ruff).

Generation upon generation can recite all his sonnets – and understand them.

Luther sticks post-it note to church door. No one notices...

...

(1694 – 1788) Voltaire has happy childhood, fails to become git.

Things continue swimmingly.

...

1912 Hilaire Belloc and G K Chesterton, having little else to do, spend many happy nights playing cards and reciting poetry.

Belloc blesses World with more verse and Chesterton spends more time with wife, Frances.

All is Well.

...

Sigmund Freud, with the help of his Confessor, overcomes his “issssues.”

World Spared More Misery.

...

Germaine Greer , Jessie Bernard, Maureen Dowd, by positive miracle of God, live peaceably with women of all kinds. World is Staggeringly Better Off.

Pope John Paul II, having not much else to do, spends most of his spare time with Cdl Joseph Ratzinger, playing cards and reciting poetry.

...

2005 English PM, Tony Blair announces severe restrictions on the sale of alcohol.
World (99% Catholic) Horrified.

English monarch, King Francis II, orders his execution. Grants pardon at 11th hour.

...

2006 Catholic bloggers have little to report – fight among selves.

Never Mind, I've decided.

What to do?

OK youse, listen up.

I need some input.

I've got about 30 readers in this little list, most of whom are either personal friends (people I have actually met) or people who were longtime readers of TDL or other bloggers. I have no idea how many on the list are regular visitors, but the mix is pretty good, with people who know something about writing, others who know something about politics and others who know something about me.

I've been refitting TDL in preparation for my return to public trouble-making in a month (ooo! Less than a month to go, I keep forgetting!) and am wondering what sort of direction to go in.

I see that Steve has more or less retired from Catholic Tradoblogging, and good on 'im, I say. He makes the excellent point that since the Motu Proprio is out, Benedict has more or less stolen his thunder, or taken the wind out of his sails. War's over, we won,

now what do we do for fun?

Well, Steve wants to try the genteel life of a gentleman farmer and good on 'im again. But see, I'm Irish and life without a fight is just unthinkable.

Since dropping out of the blogging life, I've snuck back in through Orwell's Picnic and am having a fine old time there, just trawling though my dozen or so daily Google News alerts and posting things up with a link and a quippy headline. No rants and it is exclusively about British politics. No religion, no radial symmetry, ducks or Doctor Who. I've been really enjoying it, but feel the urge to rant in public getting stronger.

Now, I've pretty much had the biscuit of Catho-blogging and can't stand the sight of Catho-political blogs any more. All that stuff is being adequately covered anyway by peope like Fr. Tim. Why reinvent the wheel?

Actually, just by Fr. Tim, who does it better than I, or anyone else I've come across.

As it stands now, people were visiting TDL pretty regularly, and, according to the stats I've looked at, still do now and then. So the address is still in people's blogrolls and favourites lists.

What do you think? Should I decant it all back into TDL? Collapse all the British politics, recipes, Shatner, personal stuff, religious mumbling, philosophical blatherings and all that, into one thing and then discontinue this and Orwell's Picnic? Or keep the two separate, one political and one for all the rest of it?

Or (and here's where I'm inclined) de-post the TDL archives, keep the site address, change the masthead to point away from religious topics and turn TDL into Orwell's Picnic, only with a bit more commentary?

Whaddya like?

I guess that's why they call it the "nanny state"

Women's vote started the free world on the road to big government and social micromanaging.

(...says Some Guy, who's got some kind of degree in something and has written a book...)

In your book, you discuss a correlation between granting women the right to vote and the growth of government -- could you explain?

John Lott: There's been a puzzle that's been around academics for decades about why government started to grow when it did. From the beginning of the country to the 1920s, the federal government had been about 2 to 3 percent of GNP. You'd have a war sometimes and it would go up. After the war was over, government would go back down to where had been previously. But it began to grow through the 20s and the 30s and 40s.

You see a phenomenon that's true around the world, during about 50 years of time in which government began to grow. I've noticed from looking around at these countries that the government growth seemed to coincide with when women were given the right to vote in these places.

I looked at where women were given right to vote in the United States from the first state in 1868 to the last state in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. One of the interesting things here is that some states voluntarily gave women the right to vote, and some were forced to because of the 19th Amendment. ...Is it the fact that you gave women the right to vote that caused the government to grow, or is it that the state was more liberal and wanted to give women the right to vote at the same time they wanted government to get bigger?

The fact that you see this growth in the states that voluntarily gave women the right to vote before the ones that were forced to indicates that it was giving women the right to vote and not just some other factor changing at the same time.

The effect is dramatic. If you look at 10 years prior to when a state gives women the right to vote, you find expenditures and revenues were flat. Once women were given the right to vote, the next year you see an increase in government expenditures. It keeps going up dramatically. In 10 years, government expenditures and revenue doubled in real terms. That growth follows closely with the percent of voters who were women.

After that you basically get to the 1960s, and what happens then is you have a big increase in divorce, and divorce tends to make women a lot more liberal than they were previously. They are more likely to depend on the government for some safety net or protection. We see this in how women's political views change over a lifetime.

Young single women are more liberal than young single men. When they get married, about half that gap disappears. When they have kids, about half of the remaining gap disappears, so about 75 percent of the original gap. If they get divorced, they become much more liberal than they were to begin with. Men pretty much stay in the same place all their life.

When a woman is on her own, she's more likely to support a more progressive income tax. But if she gets married and has kids, she's more likely to oppose those sorts of taxes. There would be similar changes to other types of social programs. Women tend to be more risk averse and more likely to turn to the government for these government programs.

The discussion about divorce is itself driven a lot by government. One of the big changes we had in the 1960s and 1970s was the movement from at-fault to no-fault divorce. When you had at-fault divorce, women were much more protected. If a man wanted to get a divorce, he had to get the wife to agree to a divorce. He had to pay her off, and give her more assets to get her to agree. So her investment in maybe staying home a lot and taking care of the family were much more likely to be protected than they are now.

Now when you have no-fault, if a man wants to get a divorce, the woman almost has to pay him in order to stay in the relationship. Many women are more reticent to stay at home and take care of kids. In this case, they have a big incentive to (work) in case there is a divorce later on-they can have a job and an income they can depend on. Not only do these (divorce) laws, explain why women become more liberal, but they also explain why women are having fewer kids.

I'm starting to like the Telegraph

At first glance,

Home Office information appears to support Clarke's fanciful promises. It says: "The risk of becoming a victim of crime has fallen to the lowest level recorded since the British Crime Survey began in 1981... violent crime has fallen by 43 per cent since its peak in 1995."
advertisement

Do you believe this guff? No, neither do I. And do you know why we don't believe it? Right, because it's not true. Those who seek to hoodwink us with these damned lies and dodgy statistics are insulting our intelligence. They are taking us for mugs.

In a week when little Rhys Jones was gunned down and Learco Chindamo, the killer of headmaster Philip Lawrence, discovered that his human rights count for more than the victim's family's, you'll forgive me, I hope, for listing some discomforting facts.

The British Crime Survey (BCS), a poll of 40,000 people, is what Labour's propagandists trot out when under fire. The trouble is, the survey reads a bit like the report and accounts of an ethically challenged company: much inconvenient evidence is omitted.

Oh please...oh PLEASE...

I promise to be very very good, and not be cranky or ill-tempered for a whole week, and not be mean to a single poor person on the phone at the office, nor to scrinch up my nose when talking to the crazy ladies...

Paxman also warned that Newsnight, the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, might not survive if proposed cuts are carried out.

The bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future.

"I don't want to be apocalyptic, on the basis of what may turn out to be short-term problems.

"But I think it foolish to be too confident on that score. I guess there'll certainly be one more licence fee settlement. But can we really be certain there'll be a fourth? Or a fifth?

"It is all too easy to imagine a future in which our grandchildren will talk of having had an ancestor who worked for the BBC in the same way as people nowadays mention having had a grandparent or great-grandparent who worked for the Sudanese Political Service, or was a District Officer in Bechuanaland."

Not a parody

nor a cockamamie scheme cooked up for the election by either of the two Big Parties.



I'm not making it up...

"I will not set fire to things..."
I will not make excessive noise late at night.
I will not use abusive language to passersby...
Signed "X" (Thumpy the Yob, certifies before a witness that this is his mark.)

The Home Secretary thinks the reason the "Acceptable Behavior Contracts" aren't working to stem the tide of "feral youth" crime in Britain is that not enough of them have been handed out.

Really.

Not making it up, one bit.

DF Assures me that both "Headmaster" and "Headmistress" have been sent down. We shall have to add the term "head teacher," with a resigned sigh, to the list of NeverUse.

Now my next question is, are there any periodic publications that deliberately decline to use the Newspeak terms?

Are there any defiant editors?

If anyone knows, please let me in on it at earliest convenience, as I shall be seeking freelancing opportunities and fear that the ruddy tone of my upper vertebrae area will tend preclude employment in the established press.

The Daily Mail sounds promising, but I'd like to do features for magazines.

Maybe This England.

Anything else?

This Oozy Person is a Catholic

It's making me want to become an Anglican.


Keith Vaz -

Melanie Phillips:

The importance of [the Salman Rushdie] episode and the no less significant reaction to it by the British establishment can hardly be overestimated. Such scenes were unprecendented in Britain...Yet not one person who called for Rushdie to be killed was prosecuted for incitement to murder...

Not even the Labour member for Leicester East.

"In Leicester, the Labour MP Kieth Vaz led a three-thousand-strong demonstration intent on burning an effigy of Rushdie, and carried a banner showing Rushdie's head, complete with horns and fangs, superimposed on a dog."

He told the 3000 Muslims assembled, "Today we celebrate one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain" and attacked the Labour Party as a "godless party".

In February 1990, Vaz wrote in The Guardian newspaper urging Salman Rushdie not to publish the book in paperback because "there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech".

Newspeak Watch

So can the Ynglysshe types here tell me if the use of the Newspeak term "head teacher" in the British press means the same thing as the English word "headmaster"?

I'm confused by this, but the dogged determination with which the term is used and the complete absence of the Ynglysshe word "headmaster" makes me think that "head teacher" is one of those little words I have to add to my list of NeverUse. Like "spokesperson".

I got the banning of "spokesperson" made official policy at LifSite.

It's the details, man.

The Early Life Issues - A Briefing Book For Legislators

Anyone needing a surefire method of overcoming insomnia...

Here it is.


I'll tell y'all a secret:

Pro-life stuff gives me a coma.

I'm sure I would have said that, given enough time and lager...

The Englandism Charter

I'm particularly fond of stipulation

6 The Channel Tunnel will be flooded with warm water and infested with those South American barbed fish that swim up one's urethra.

and do be sure to visit the "Burning National Symbols of Foreign Countries such as Scotland, Pitcairn Island, Wales and Cornwall" page for good fun...

Ooooo I really wish I'd said that!

Yes, Angus McSporran, Dai the Embittered, Mick O'Michael, Francois Fromage Fraise and f*cking Mel Gibson we are superior. And yes, Mr Tarquin Diversity-Consultant and Ms Cressida 'I'm so very sorry about the land clearances and stealing all your North Sea oil so here's £500 million to build yourself a shiny new parliament' the English did actually invent everything everywhere and have been bank-rolling everyone else ever since.

I wish I'd said that...

Flying in the face of the 'given' wisdom of the bespectacled middle-aged middle-class organic lentil baking diversity promulgating estuary accented sanctimonious fact-shy knob-polishers who constitute the vast majority of the purposeless taxpayer subsidised public service 'support' structure that has led to us having more administrators than actually useful human beings and dictates to our collective consciousness that 'Every morning we must wake up and apologise for being English'.

Englandism

It Figures

Immigration stats are in:

74,000 people arrived in the UK from the eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004.

16,000 people from those countries left.

200,000 people from the same countries registered for work in the UK during that time.

haaaang on...

lessee...

74,000 -
16,000
__________

58,000

58,000 is not 200,000.

Does anyone in Britain have any idea how many people are coming into the country?

On a completely different topic...

Got an email this morning from "Parish Chaplaincy - Durham"

Dear Hilary

Just to let you know we have had a response re accommodation. I am photocopying your e-mail and sending your details to the lady in question but I am aware that she is on holiday until next Wednesday - I am sure she will be in touch with you.

Kindest regards,

(St. Cuthbert's parish secretary.)

لندنستان

I was speaking to Auntie Gill, and said that I didn't want to live in London.

She responded, "Well, London isn't London anymore..."

I mentioned that I bought a copy of Melanie Phillips' book "Londonistan". I was reading the introduction on the subway this morning.

I am happy to report that Melanie Phillips seems to have figured it all out pretty well.

Stockholm Syndrome writ large:

The alarming fact is that, far from continuing to embody the bulldog spirit that enabled it to fight off fascism in the 20th century, Britain remains in a widespread state of denial. It understands well enough that it faces a mortal threat from radical Islamists. But by and large, it does not udnerstand why it faces this threat. Instead of laying the blame firmly upon the Islamist ideology where it belongs, Britain has itself adopted some of the tropes of that very ideology - in particular, hatred of America and Israel, whose policies it blames as the cause of Muslim rage.

...

After the London bombings, the main concern of the media and intelligentsia was to avoid "Islamophobia" the thought-crime that seeks to suppresss legitimate criticism of Islam and demonize those who would tell the truth about Islamist aggression.

...

Londonistan is...a state of mind that has spread well beyond the capital and, even after the London bombings, still has deep roots inside British culture...

...

Britain has become a decadent society, weakened by alarming tendencies towards social and cultural suicide. Turning upon itself, it has progressively attacked or undermined the values, laws and traditions that make it a nation, creating a space that in thurn has been exploited by radical Islamism. It has thus absorbed much of the irrational thinking that is subverting not only its own society and the values that underpin freedom and democracy, but also the alliance with America and the struggle to defend the free world.

...

There is little to counter (radical Islamic) influence because of a fundamental loss of national self-belief throughout the institutions of British society. Driven by postcolonial guilt and, with the loss of empire, the collpase of a world role, Britain's elites have come to believe that the coutnry's identity and values are by definition racist, nationalistic and discriminatory ...Schools have ceased to transmit to successive generations either the values or the story of hte nation, delivering insttead the message that truth is an illusion and that the nation and its values are whatever anyone wants them to be. In the multicultural classroom, every culture appears to be taught except Britain's indigenous one.

Britain has become a largely post-Christian society, where traditional morality has been systematically undermined and replaced by an "anything goes" culture in which autonomous decisions about codes of behavoir have become unchallengeable rights. With eveyrone's lifestyle now said to be of equal value, the very idea of amoral norms is frowned upon as a vehicle for discrimination and prejudice. Judaism and Christianity, the creeds that formed the bedrock of Western civilization, have bene pushed aside and their place filled by a plethora of paranormal activities and cults...

The outcome has been a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets. At an abstract level, such moral relativism destroyed the notion of objectivity, so that truth and lies were stood on their heads. This opened the way for the moral inversion of "victim culture", which holds that since minorities are oppressed by the majority they cannot be held responsible for what happens to them. As a result, a climate of intimidation developed in which minorities could demand special treatment and denounce anyone who objected as a bigot...

This moral inversion has been internalized so completely that the more Islamic terrorism there is, the more hysterically British Muslims insist that they are under attack by "Islamophobes" and a hostile West. Any attempt by British society to defend itself or its values, either through antiterrorist laws or the reaffirmation of the supremacy of Western values, is therefore denounced as Islamophobia...

So profound is the fear of being branded a racist among British liberals, so completely do they subscribe to the multicultural victim culture, that the obvious examples of illogicality, untruths and paranoia in much Muslim discourse have never been challenged...Instead of defending Britain against its attackers, they turned their rhetorical guns upon their own nation...

But in the US, at least, there has been a counteroffensive. The grip of the left-wing intelligentsia has been loosened by the growth of conservative think tanks and publishing houses, talk radio and now the internet bloggers. In Britin, by contrast, there has been no equivalent instittuional challenge to the hegemony of the left and its stranglehold on the universities, media, civil service and other key institutions. In the US, at least there are wars over culture; in Britain, there has been a rout...

In Britain, this decadence not only fuels the rage of Muslims at the moral squalor that so affronts them, it also provides an opportunity to fill with an Islamist perspective the space that has been vacated by the collapse of Judeo-Christian moral authority...

Britain has been unable to counter such intimidation because it has already sold the pass to other "victim" groups. It has effectively allowed itself to be taken hostage by militant gays, feminists or "anti-racists" who used weapons such as public vilification, moral blackmail and threats to people's livelihoods to force the majority to give in to their demands. And those demands were identical to those made by the Islamists: not merely to tolerate their values as minority rights but to replace normative values altogether and subordinate the values of the majority ti the minority, because majority values set up a hierarchy that is deemed to be innately discriminatory. So when Muslims refused to accept minority status and insisted instead that their values must trump those of the majority, Britain had no answer...

As religion has retreated and morality becomes privatized, individual conscience has become universalized. The nation and its values are despised; moral legitimacy resides instead in a vision of unversal progressivism, expressed through human rights law and such supranational institutions as the European Union, the United Nations or the International Criminal Court, and revolving around multiculturalism and minority rights.

This has produced the extraordinary phenomenon of radical Islam - which denies female equality and preaches death to gays - marching under the banner of human rights. The self-styled progressives on the British left, for whom huyman rights have replaced Christianity as the religion for a godless society, have formed a jaw-dropping axis with militant, fundamentalist Islamists. These two revolutionary camps have put their very sizable differences to one side so that each can use the other to advance their goal, which is the destruction of Western society and its foundation values.

OK, that's enough...

You can buy it here.

All of which

of course, explains why the Islams all seem, well, not to put too fine a point on it,

nuts.

You try living with a religion that in its essential tenets denies the logical principle of non-contradiction.

Actually, to see what happens when you try to do that, read a life of Friedrich Nietzsche cause that's what he tried to do, and look where he ended up.

Having a grip on reality requires first that you understand and trust that reality to be grippable. Islams suffer from an overly slippery universe and, like all children terrified of being abandoned, have a killing grip instead on their imaginary father's hand.

Trouble is, logic, which is, I believe, latent in every human mind, tells them that there's no father there.

And if they look up, they see a monster.

Nice.

Which is why in this case it really is better to beat 'em than join 'em.

I've Figured Something Out

You know how the liberals and assorted nincompoops are always drooling on about how "Muslims, Jews and Christians all worhsip the same God, after all..."?

Well, it's rubbish but so far I've not been able to make a good case about why. Just saying a thing doesn't mean it's true. We say "Allah, G_d and God the Father are all one," but you actually have to provide some kind of evidence. The fact is, the evidence diproves the assertion.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Christ is a God that has an immutable nature that cannot be contradicted. It is His nature to be true to His nature. From that nature, flows all of the immutability of what we like to call "reality". Without that essential oneness, nothing real is really real, and you are back to the Cartesians and Nihilists and old "esse est percipi" as the whole of the law. You can't have the universe rest on a little bit of objectivity and a little bit of subjectivism, I'm afraid it has to be objectivity or nothin' or the whole thing collapses into the howling void of self-contradiction.

Today, just for the exercise, I was correcting some idiotic rubbish by some silly British teenager on someone else's blog.

To wit:

SBT says: "Morals are morals and religion has nothing to do with them. Just because you choose to follow a strict guide book it don’t mean I cant pick and choose to how I feel."

[Rolling my eyes...fighting the urge just to smack him...] HJMW responds:

"morals are morals"

This is a very interesting and important point. Morals are indeed morals and they can indeed be separated out from any one particular religious system. But the fact that morals are morals, right is right and that's that, actually points to Christianity being the true religion; the one, in otherwords that reflects the true order of the universe.

You might be interested to know that in philosophy there is this thing called the "Natural Law", that has nothing to do, itself, with any religion. It is upon this law that the Christian moral law is founded, not the other way around. (and no, the white smoke thing has as little to do with the doctrines of Christianity as the colour of the Queen's garter robes have to do with Constitutional democracy; do try to look things up once in a while. Stupidity is not attractive Ian, neither is willful ignorance. Do not annoy.).

The natural law theory, developed by the Greeks and later by Roman jurisprudes, and thereby finding its way into Roman law and later medieval law and theology, is that there is a universal idea of right and wrong, embedded in the nature of the universe, that can be known by anyone essentially instinctively. It is the moral law written on our souls that enables us to say, good is good and evil, evil. To shun evil and do the good and that we all know what that is.

Christianity does indeed seek to "take over the world" under this moral law. The main difference between Islam and Christianity is that Christianity seeks to convert hearts and minds and does not hesitate to use rational thought to do it. To Muslims, the good must be coerced, at the point of a sword if necessary. Islam cares nothing for your heart or your mind, and is interested only in conquest. Christianity seeks to convert the world. Islam to conquer.

Islam insists on its laws but only because it is the "will of Allah", and not because it is "right" in any universal sense, (they have no concept of universal moral norms). Whatever is willed by "Allah" is the good, whether it is a grave evil or not. Whatever Allah wills, whether it be the rape of six year old girs, or sawing off the heads of foreign journalists, is the good. They refuse to acknowledge the existence of any universal moral law, saying that if Allah wills the evil, that is the good.

This is the basis of the argument made by many faithful Christians that the notion Muslims and Christians (and Jews, let's not forget) worship the same deity is nonsense. The Muslim Allah is anti-rational and contradicts its own nature. Allah is able to make or break the moral laws at will. This is the essence of the criticism made by Pope Benedict at Regensberg, that God, the moral law and the good are all of a piece and that it is simply anti-rational to say that God could possibly change the moral law or will what is clearly an objective evil. God cannot, by His will, contradict His own nature and say that an evil thing is really a good.

In Christianity, the moral law is what it is because it is a reflection of the nature of God. It is good because He is good. It is eternal and universal because He is eternal and universal. The two cannot be separated.

The fact that you have said "morals are morals" proves that you think like a Christian, make the philosophical assumptions that have been taught, from the Greeks and Romans, by Christianity (formerly known as "Catholicism" until Luther, that good jihadist, came along to start making things up and exempting himself from things he didn't like about the truth). The concept, "Morals are morals" is a Christian concept.

And that is the essence of the problem we are having with the Islams. We make these moral and philosophical assumptions so naturally, and are taught so little about it in what we laughably still call our "schools" that we make another unconscious assumption that everyone in the world thinks like we do. This assumption is shared equally by secularists, leftists, liberals and by thinking religious people. We have been so immersed in the Christian way of thought for so long that we simply can't imagine any other way of thinking.

But there is another way, and the two are not just incompatible, they are like matter and anti-matter: the two cannot exist in the same place at the same time...or there will be an explosion.

Soon.

Allah cannot be the same God as God because it is capable of refuting and denying its own nature. It is, on the one hand, the author of the good, and on the other, the negator of the good. It is the source of truth and the denier of truth.

Of course, the whole religion is founded on the same kind of philosophical narcissism as the lefty/subjectivist thing. It is why they get on so well. The only reason that (most) of the secularist enemy has not (yet) taken up arms against the objectivists (us) is because they are, like everyone in the historically Christian West, starting unconcsiously with Western, Christian, objectivist, Natural-Law notions of what is the right way to fight a fight.

It provides a certain grim sort of amusement to those who have figured all this out, to imagine what is going to happen on the day the Islams turn on their good friends in the liberal subjectivist establishment who have helped them subdue and enslave the West.

"What, you want to kill us too?! but...but...

THAT'S NOT FAIR..."

Who you gonna complain to then eh?

(Of course, the satisfaction of watching them get their comuppance will have to be enjoyed from the perspective of heaven.)

Please Do Not Chute the Ducks

A duck video...

Click it!

I Love My Job

You know, sometimes I like running a story just to get a headline out there.

I recall once that we did one when the NDP were complaining about dwindling "access to abortion" in Canada (an annual thing, they do it on a slow day in Parliament to get a few headlines).

Our headline was something like:

"100,000 Babies Killed a Year Not Enough for the NDP"

Today's is:

"California Company: We’ll Turn Your Child’s Siblings Into Extra Body Parts"

Is it me, or is the whole world turning into one giant Gahan Wilson cartoon?

Can anyone tell me

what this weird pointy easter egg thing is?



They blowed it up real good in Doctor Who last season...

Good Old Fashioned Canadian Values go-get-em attitude Generosity Parochialism

(or, Reason 235,609 why I hate Canada.)

So, I picked up a book last night from the remainder table at Indigo (What were you doing in that place anyway!? yes yes, I know. I was killing time waiting for a film to start, and looking for a copy of Melanie Philips "Londonistan" if you must know. And anyway, I saw plenty of Steyn in there last night.)

...where was I?

Oh yeah, about to make another embarrassing admission: I bought a self-help book.

"The Joys of Much Too Much" by Bonnie Fuller. She's some kind of fashion magazine magnate or something. Anyway, she caught my attention because, as with any good self-help book, she told me what I wanted to hear and already believed anyway.

"the key to happiness is not a balanced life, but one that is maxed out [sorry, but she does write 'fashion news'] with career, romance, and family."

er...yah. Ok.

The gist, however, is something I've been thinking lately. You can't be a monk in the world. The world is there, even the world of men, for us to get into, not hold back from... but anyway, that's not what this is about.

The part I liked is where she made the Canadian magazine and fashion industry look stupid, petty, small minded, parochial and hopelessly self-absorbed; good old fashioned Canadian values, (c. 1968).

She has just become the managing editor of Flare, Canada's first "national" fashion magazine. (I admit to remembering when it came upon the scene, but I was actually a teenager then, and had an excuse, therefore.)

"I started coming to New York and got some help from [grown-up non-stupid] people at modeling agencies, who knew all the hot, up and coming photographers - the budding Avedons and Irving Penns. I was able to get some of the young talent to work fo rus but was then criticized when I got back to Canada for using so many non-Canadians. Canadian makeup artists and some photographers were incensed that I had crossed the border instead of supporting ourlimited pool of native talent.

Reports appeared in the Canadian press about Flare's new policy of recruiting international talent. I was determined to establish that just because Flare was Canadian, it didn't have to be small in its range or focus."

Of course, to do that, you'd have to not have it be Canadian...tough call.

Sappho was not a "lesbian" but a Lesbian

so says our man in Rome.

Duchy of Clover Hill
Latin, Greek, and other stuff for the good of mankind. Whoever you are, whatever led you to this site, welcome. You will not find anything fashionable here, not even a concern for being different.

Grand Old Man of Fleet Street

dead at 94.

Voices from the worlds of politics and journalism have paid tribute to "gentleman journalist" Lord Deedes, who has died aged 94.
"Bill" Deedes was the only man to have edited a national newspaper - the Telegraph - and been in the Cabinet.

No word of a lie, (as they say on the Rock), I was, just last night, wandering around Indigo looking for a biography of Deedes. I figure if there's someone out there whose life and work can teach me to be a real journalist, it's this guy.

He was still working as a roving foreign correspondent, filing reports from Afghanistan, at 86.

When I spoke with Uncle Mike the other day, he said that if I moved to Ynglonde, I would be able to get a full pension. I said that I would rather make a living until the day I can't hold a pen.

One of the things mum used to say about writing is that you can keep doing it until your brain goes. Even if you're a quadro...quadr...qua...if you're paralysed from the neck down, you can get fancy software that lets you keep writing. Good thing too, because if I stopped, I think I'd blow something.

More on Deedes as the days go by. He's a guy I've only just discovered. I think I'd like to be like him when I grow up.

Hoy! 'Ee's got nuffink on!

Has Philip Glass ever, to anyone's knowledge, written an actual piece of music?

also,

does anyone ever recall any announcer on any radio station anywhere ever calling attention to the easily observable fact that the man's "music" is rubbish?

Am I the only one who has noticed that his "music" seems to have no other purpose than to accompany time-elapsed films of flowers opening?

OK,

maybe I'm not the only one...

VIEWS EXPRESSED PROBABLY DON'T REFLECT OFFICIAL POLICY.

"This blog will do more to put people off calling the police than anything, other than actually calling the police."


I really hope this blog is by a real cop.

The Policeman's blog

We take a short break

from our day of moaning, whining and sulking to bring you this message from a faithful reader:

What Britains get up to when Tony Blair isn't looking

Oh gawd.

I just said "frack"

for real.

I should just I get a "I'm a Geek, Please Make Fun of Me in Public" sign to hang around my neck and get it over with.

Sulking

So, I wake up and think, "I feel like crap. I think I'm ill. Or hung over, except that I haven't been drinking...(what's fair about that?!)..."

Not enough sleep for a week, too much worry and excitement.

So, I think, I'll just sit around a bit and watch some TV.

I plug in Ann's computer and it connects OK, except that Ann's computer is crap. The screen's dark and it's keyboard controls and mousepad are archaic...so I think, hey, I'll plug mine in, since it is not crap. It's a brand new Ferrari of a machine.

"Limited or no connectivity"

Click "repair".

"Unable to repair your connection."

Reboot.

"Limited or no connectivity"

Restrain self from flinging computer at wall.

Why do the gods vex me so?

Sigh, deeply, and think OK, now I have to call Dell support. Again.

Can't find, in the box pile, anything connected to my computer information stuff. Have to look up the number online.

Plug Ann's crap computer in again.

Find number.

Where's the phone?

Go off in search of phone.

(time elapses in which muffled Anglo-saxon expletives can be heard emanating from deep in box pile)

Find phone.

Dial Dell support.

Dial tone.

Try again.

Dial tone.

Try operator.

Dial tone.

Phone isn't working.

Sigh.

Fall back into bed, listening to Tony Bennet.

Spend rest of day sulking, watching Battlestar Galactica on TV links on Ann's crap screen until I feel energetic enough to go to the mall.

I might go down to the office tonight to finish the book.

But it seems a remote possibilty.

But of course, first you have to be good n' crazy.

oh yeah,

and never,

ever

turn your back on a woman.

A Classic Evil Overlord Tactic

Kill your cabinet



Saxon in '08!

Britain and Commie China

neck and neck in the race for "complete surveillance".

A high-tech security company has been awarded a contract for the first phase of a scheme to encode computer chips for the residence permits all Chinese citizens must carry, starting in the southern city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.

The government will use the chips to control the whereabouts of its hundreds of millions of migrant workers. But they will also store data on the number of their children under the one-child policy, education records and ultimately medical and credit histories.

Can't wait

Starting off on the right foot

E. wrote:
I am writing to advise you of a splendid and solemn occasion next month. It is the bicentenary requiem of de jure King Henry IX (aka the Cardinal Duke of York), which will be celebrated with much pomp at noon on Saturday, 22nd September, in the Order of Malta church, Grove End Road, St John's Wood.

The official notice of the event is attached. It is under the auspices of the Royal Stuart Society and certain Stuart dignatories it is expected will attend, including H.G. the Duke of St Albans (Governor-General of the Society) and Lord Aylmer. We have a bishop to pontificate and other prelates in choir. For the catafalque, a royal mantle, garter insignia, cappa magna and galero will all be required! All are invited to drinks afterwards in the Chancellory.
I do hope you can attend.

Kind regards,
E.

To which Aitchdubya responds:

Hmmm... sounds like I can be there for it.

But tell me,

where's St. John's Wood?

I suppose I will need a hat.

E again:
Or a tiara. It is in London, pretty central but slightly to the north-west. The Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, in which the Conventual Church of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta sits, is only 2 mins. walk from St John's Wood tube station, on the Jubilee Line.

I hope to see you then. I shall be conducting the choir!

E.

Relative thinking

Golly! Another thought just occurred.

Mike and Gill have several grandchildren.

I could end up being Auntie Hilary, if I'm not very careful.

Poor kids.

I feel like crying

or laughing or jumping up and down...

Just talked to Auntie Gill and Uncle Mike in Cheshire. They're going to pick me up at Manchester airport and put me up.

I can't believe it. It was like talking to someone from a past life.

I was discussing plans with a friend who will also be on the other side of the Atlantic. He asked me what I was doing for Christmas.

For the first time in my life, I said (without a trace of bitter irony) "I'll probably be spending it with my family."

Life is odd.

First thing Gill said to me was, "My gosh, you sound like your mum. When we heard your message on the answerphone, I got a shock when I thought it was from Judy."

Wait till they see me! I hope I don't give anyone a turn. Everyone has always remarked how much I look like mum.

Its MY RIGHT!

I was discussing marriage with a friend the other day, (not for purposes of, you understand) and we concluded that there is no logical reason not to, shall we say, extend the franchise to inanimate objects, or even, as has been portrayed in recent progressive films, to those quasi-animate things like computers.

I've been thinking about it, and I think I'm going to ask my computer. We've just grown so close in recent years, I can't think of a reason why not, neither of us is getting any younger. Though I realise this will upset my teddy bear terribly.

But of course, with the prospect of polygamy coming down Highway 1 (perhaps appropriately named the "TransCanada") from the interior of BC, I imagine it won't be long before we can add Mr. Bear into the mix.

More on Philology

I'm adding "rightwing" (NB: alloneword) to the list of unwords.

Another useful scream-in-the-face that is guaranteed to instantly halt useful discussion on politicis (ie. on anything), rightwing is especially popular in Britain.

But I'll let Peter Hitchens tell it (I do have to wonder what it must be like at the Hitchens family Christmas table when Pete and Chris get together.)

As far as most fashionable people are concerned, it is a serious sin to be 'rightwing', two words they like to run together into one. And it is also very easy. All you need to do is to disagree with any small part of what they regard as the 'progressive' agenda - though they use the word 'progressive' as if it were an entirely neutral description of what they desire.

This unconscious belief in the automatic superiority of their thinking, and the quickness to condemn dissent as an act which is itself wicked, makes it very difficult to argue with them. And it makes serious discussion of politics almost impossible. For instance, we have the Tory Party's current strange ramble into the world of red tape. Whatever it means, the Left don't have anything interesting to say about it

H/T to Kathy

A Fellow Traveller

This just in from a friend and fellow philology nut, also travelling soon to the deepest darkest regions of Europe:

Despite my desire to visit the Infant Jesus of Prague, I have just realised that stopping in the Czech Republic is a mistake. Over "there" the following are words:

zmrzl
ztvrdl
scvrkl
ètvrthrst
blb
vlk
smrt

Meaning: frozen, hardened, shrunk, quarter-handful, fool, wolf, and death respectively.

Why am I stopping in a country that has no vowels?

just so's y'all don't think I've been wasting my time

Introduction - Draft August 5, 2007 - 576 wds

Part I: A Brief Description of the Early Life Issues.
1. When does a human being begin? Draft: August 6, 2007- 1473 wds
2. What are New Reproductive Technologies? Draft: August 6, 2007 - 2412 wds
3. Stem Cells Draft: August 10, 2007 - 3043 wds
4. Cloning – Draft: August 13, 2007 - 2375 wds
5. A Stem Cell Timeline - Draft – August 10 2007 - 605 wds

Part II: The Ethics of the Early Life Issues:
1. What are “Ethics?” - Draft August 13, 2007 - 2141 wds
2. The New Subjectivism – Some Examples – Draft August 14, 2007 – 981 wds
3. Misdirections and Evasions: Common Media Euphemisms - Draft August 14, 2007 - 1243 wds
4. The Case for a Pro-Life View of Embryo Research - Draft August 14 - 1362 wds
5. The Case for a Pro-Life View of New Reproductive Technologies Draft August 15, 2007 – 2541 wds
6. Other Ethical Problems with New Reproductive Technologies – Draft August 15, 2007 – 410 wds

Part III: The Canadian Situation:
1. Time Line – Draft August 16, 2007 2250 wds
2. The Assisted Human Reproduction act Draft August 16, 2007 – 1066 wds

Part V: Resources
1. Source documents and Recommended Reading- Draft August 12 - 857 wds
2. Online information - Draft August 16, 2007 – 1788 wds


Appendices
1. A Glossary of Philosphical Terms - Draft Aug 15, 2007 – 1918 wds
2. A Glossary of Biotechnology Terms - Draft August 13, 2007 – 3356 wds
3. Donum Vitae

August 16, 2007 - Doc to date – 30,397

Kathy

keeps me laughing in a time of stress, confabulation, social horrors and general higgledypiggledyness.

"Hmmmm. My religion does not allow me to be in the same country with people who bow 5 times a day to a pedophile. As well, my religion does not allow me to be within 50 miles of anybody who performs clitoral circumcision. Finally, my religion forbids breathing the same air as anybody who would strap explosives to their children. Saying that, I think I will continue with my all pork Thursday, bacon for brekkie, ham for lunch and pork ribs for dinner. Washed down with some beer and some rock n roll, I think I like my religion over the 'religion of peace'. See ya in court, islamoa$$holes."

Can I just add here that any religion that hates dogs is totally pathetic?

Tash the Inexorable, Tash the Inscrutable, Tash the Irresistible

included in the 99 Names of Allah?

Shipping rates by sea.

$245 per cubic meter for getting it on the boat to Liverpool.
+
£37,50 per cubic meter for terminal handling
+
£65 - customs processing
+
£100 (or so) to get it from Liverpool to Newcastle.
______

I've probably got about 1.5 c. meter's worth coming to about 300kg.

that's (estimate)

$810 Cn.

Midlands landing

I looked at the Wiki entry for Manchester, thinking that since I'm going to land on theh 20th, and can't go to Newcastle until 21, I'll have to stay in the old town for a day.

But Wiki really doesn't make it sound too much better than I remember it.

"Manchester is a huge city..." it says.

subheadings include the very encouraging, "Stay Safe", "Cope" and "Get Out".

But if I run into trouble, I can yell for help.
Free Wifi:
Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street - art gallery, cinema, bar.
Oklahoma Cafe, 74 - 76 High Street - coffee shop.
Suburb, Deansgate - trendy cafe.
The Castle Pub, Oldham Street - traditional pub.

Well, that was easy...

I've just booked myself into the Newcastle hostel for Sept 21. Easy as pie. Just call 'em up and give the nice chap with the funny accent your name.

Didn't even ask for a credit card.

$40 a night and includes a fry-up.

Who said this was going to be hard?

Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull,On whom, as in despite, the sun looks pale?

The poor condemned English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning's danger, and their gesture sad
Investing lank-lean; cheeks and war-worn coats
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts.

Bishop "Tiny"

Do you think it's a nickname?

If so, does it refer to his brain? or something else?

The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah.

Sooooo, never heard of Stockholm Syndrome hey?

H/T to the Kathy the Great

Oooo When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Columnist for the Daily Express

HOW THE GOVERNMENT HAS DECLARED WAR ON WHITE ENGLISH PEOPLE

England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population.   

In the name of cultural diversity, Labour attacks anything that smacks of Englishness. The mainstream public are treated with contempt, their rights ignored, their history trashed. In their own land, the English are being turned into second-class citizens.

This trend was highlighted this week by the case of Abigail Howarth, a bright teenager who applied for a training position with the Environment Agency in East Anglia but was turned down because she was too white and English. The post, which carries a £13,000 grant, was open only to ethnic minorities, including the Scots, Welsh and Irish.

Such social engineering was justified by the Agency on the grounds that minorities were under-represented in its workforce, the parrot cry used by bureaucrats throughout the public sector to justify bias against the English.

 

Yeah! you tell 'em

The New British McCarthyism
Posted by A. Millar on February 15, 2007

Most Americans are unaware of it, but in the country which gave birth to the rights which they take for granted, the home of the Magna Charta and the Mother of Parliaments, free speech is not what it used to be. Under the seemingly innocuous guise of preventing racial violence, the British government in 1976 passed the Race Relations Act, which made it a crime to “incite racial hatred.” Students of bureaucracy will not be surprised to learn that the definition of “incite” and “racial hatred” used in enforcing this law has proved extremely elastic—and served as a tool for government functionaries and activists to suppress legitimate debate. In a country whose culture and character have been suddenly and irrevocably changed in just a few short decades by mass immigration, which now hosts dozens of radical imams inciting acts of terror and calling for Islamic law in Britain, the Race Relations Act has been and continues to be used to intimidate Britons who wish to defend what is left of their homeland’s continuity and culture. What is more, the devotees of the new religion of multiculturalism are quick to sling opprobrium on their opponents, and even attempt to end their careers—for committing such “crimes” as belonging to a perfectly legal political party.

Today's Haul

Completed:

Introduction - Draft August 5, 2007 - 576 wds

Part I: A Brief Explanation/Description of the Early Life Issues.
1. When does a human being begin? Draft: August 6, 2007- 1473 wds
2. What are New Reproductive Technologies? Draft: August 6, 2007 - 2412 wds
3. Stem Cells Draft: August 10, 2007 - 3043 wds
4. Cloning – Draft: August 13, 2007 - 2375 wds
5. A Stem Cell Timeline - Draft – August 10 2007 - 605 wds

Part II: The Ethics of the Early Life Issues:
1. What are “Ethics?” - Draft August 13, 2007 - 2141 wds
3. Misdirections and Evasions: Common Media Euphemisms - Draft August 14, 2007 -1243 wds
4. The Case for a Pro-Life View of Embryo Research - Draft August 14 - 1362 wds

Appendix 1. Glossary of Philosophical Terms - Draft Aug 15, 2007 – 2022 wds
Appendix 2. Glossary of Biotechnology Terms - Draft August 13, 2007 – 3356 wds

Still to come:
5. The Case for a Pro-Life View of New Reproductive Technologies

Part III: The Canadian Situation:
1. The Assisted Human Reproduction act
– what it does
– what it doesn’t do
3. The pro-life fight against the bill; a brief history.
4. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research Guidelines
5. Support for embryo research among individual disease research organizations

Part IV: The International Situation
1. The EU and UN
2. Britain
3. The US
4. Italy and Malta
5. France, Belgium, Spain
6. Germany, the Netherlands
7. Australia and New Zealand
8. South Korea and Japan, Southeast Asia
9. China

Part V: Resources
1. Source documents - Draft August 12 - 857 wds
2. Online information
3. Further Reading – a Short Bibliography

Golly! Dale, why didn't you tell me before?!

And the minister said his vision of hell is 3 folk singers in a pub near Wells.
Well I've got a vision of urban sprawl.
It's pubs where no one ever sings at all.
And everyone stares at a great big screen,
Overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens,
Australian soap, American rap, Estuary English, baseball caps.
And we learn to be ashamed before we walk,
Of the way we look and the way we talk.
Without our stories, or our songs,
How will we know where we come from?
I've lost St George in the Union Jack,
It's my flag too and I want it back!

Remember life before email?

Plus

I've found some more Britbands worth listening to:

The Good the Bad and the Queen...

(They're only seven months old. I think I may be getting hip.)

Here's an ethical question

for you to think about today while I'm working.

A luxury cruise liner is sinking in freezing cold North Atlantic waters in April.

There are about 2500 people on board. The nearest ship that could attempt a rescue is 150 nautical miles away and will take at least 3 hours to get there. A person can survive in the water about 6 minutes.

There are, say, a dozen lifeboats on board designed to carry, at maximum capacity - that's with the boat down to the gunwales - 75 bodies.

That means that at least 1600 people are going to die.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing for the people in one of the filled-to-capacity boats to beat off the frantic survivors with an oar, even killing them in the process, to keep the boat from foundering?

Please answer within five business years.

Sunday's word count

Part I: A brief explanation/description of the Early Life Issues
4. Cloning

Draft: August 12, 2007
1850 wds

Document total: 16,588

Prioritising

First thought upon waking:

"How much determination will it require of a tea-starved British Citizen to acquire a cup of tea this morning?"

Answer: Eight boxes opened. Kettle, teapot, tea cosy, cork trivet, cup, saucer, sugar bowl, sugar spoon, tea strainer, tea strainer bowl, tea spoon, tea, caddy spoon, tea tray and tray cloth located.

MIA: the milk and the milk jug.

Time elapsed: one hour.

Blogging...

will...

be...

light.

One Way Ticket

Sept 19,2007
Toronto - Manchester
Lv. Pearson 11:50 pm EST
Arr. Manchester 11:20 am GMT

Who needs a religious order?
I just joined a whole country!

!!!!parcel!!!!

Came back from my lunchtime errands to find a notice hanging on the doorknob from Canada Post saying there was something waiting for me at the post office.

OOoooooooo!!!!

I'll let you know.

So, ummmm, he seems kinda mad about something hey?

Marxist malice from Bishops' Conference

Today's Word Count

Despite having been interrupted precisely 243,569 times:

Part I: A brief explanation/description of the Early Life Issues
3. Stem Cells
Draft: August 10, 2007
3043 wds

Idly fooling about with my toys

How to Ship Big Stuff Overseas

First, start with a big thing to which you have a ridiculous sentimental attachment:


Then you phone these guys and start throwing a lot of money at the problem.

I found out that there is such a thing as a bike box. I have heard a rumour that bike shops will give away the old ones, or sell them to you cheap.

You take the wheels and handlebars and basket off, put it in the bike box, pack it around with paper to keep it from shifting, and tape it up. Take the whole thing to FedEx and pay the money they tell you to pay.

Easy.

The Art of Knowing When to Start

I can't say today's Biotechnology wordcount is terribly impressive, but I accomplished something I didn't think I could do: I tackled the most mind-numbingly tedious grunt-task of the project, finished it in three hours without (hardly) complaining or procrastinating at all (except for that little bit in the middle).

The last time I did a big project like this, I did it mostly remotely while I was travelling around the maritimes a few years ago. (Didn't even have a laptop then!) But I had the best anchor, a student intern/slave who was actually mentally competent and moderately skilled.

He was a law student, (now articling with a judge in Pittsburgh) and, get this, answered the phone every time I called, did what I told him, made intelligent corrections and suggestions and obediently shut up when I told him to.

Oh, what it must be to have things like secretaries, fact-checkers, proof-readers...

Today, I'm proud to announce that I alphabetised my glossary.

I know, I know, it doesn't sound like much, but I was really planning on procrastinating on it a lot longer. Maybe even taking up smoking again so I could have the excuse of having to pop out for a puff every five minutes. I really DID NOT WANT to do this task.

I'll give you a sample:

5. Blastocoel: The fluid-filled cavity inside the blastocyst.

6. Blastocyst: A preimplantation embryo of about 150 cells produced by cell division following fertilization. The blastocyst is a sphere made up of an outer layer of cells (the trophoblast), a fluid-filled cavity (the blastocoel), and a cluster of cells on the interior (the inner cell mass).

7. Blastomere: a type of cell produced by division of the embryo in the early stages of life. Blastomeres of the inner cell mass of a blastocyst are the “embryonic stem cells” sought by some scientists for their pluripotent characterisitics. If the embryo is left undisturbed, these inner blastomeres will divide and differentiate to form all the tissues of the child’s body.

8. Bone marrow stromal (stem) cell: Also known as mesenchymal stem cells. Cells derived from the non-blood forming fraction of bone marrow. Bone marrow stromal cells are capable of growth and differentiation into a number of different cell types including bone, cartilage and fat.

Make you want to read more?

Meeee Neeether!

I must really really want to go to Britain, because I keep doing wildly uncharacteristic things to make it happen. Things I really hate a lot.

Some who know me well, will know that I have a pathological fear of filling out government forms. There must be a Greek name for it. I start to panic when I even see a government office. The sight of a queue, those little paper numbers they make you take, the light board pointing to which wicket you're supposed to go to, the invariably evil troll sitting behind the counter. I often panic and flee when my turn comes.

Some will recall that for the first two years I lived in Ontario, I didn't get medical coverage. I didn't do it until I had come to work with what everyone thought was pneumonia or possibly flesh-eating disease. I sat hunched miserably in my office, growling menacingly at anyone who dared venture into (what was later to be called) the bat cave. Finally, my boss, Jim Hughes came storming in and said, "Go get OHIP today, right now, or you're fired."

I slunk out, still snarling, and took the entire afternoon to go out to the OHIP office and sign up. I can remember every minute detail of the unspeakably horrifying experience. I think I remember the smell of the slidey blue plastic chair I sat in. It had little sparkly things embedded in the plastic that I found particularly menacing. It was too tall and made my legs ache, as I'm sure it was meant to.

This time, although there have been few (OK, no) trips to offices, there has been an apparently endless succession of forms to fill out, trips to the bank to get terrifyingly large amounts of money in money orders...

I haven't got the passport yet (they said four weeks; I think it's been two), and I really hope it was not all in vain.

Truth be told, I was never this interested in going into religious life. I think I'm on some kind of pilgrimage, and feel as if I'm in the grip of something.

Sleep-deprivation mania, perhaps.

OK, I'll admit that I'm easily amused

Actually, I've just discovered that you can create a playlist on Youtube and it's like buying the album. You just set it spinning and you're away with some wonderfully earsplitting English bands.

Ever hear of the Charlatans?


BTW: anyone know how you can ship a bunch of stuff from N. America to the UK cheap? I'm having a hard bit of separation anxiety about my bike.

I love my bike.

In fact, I’m going to take a picture of it and post it tomorrow.

Or, to paraphrase Anne Coulter

a racist is just a conservative who's winning an argument with a liberal.

PK

You'll also be amused to hear that, judging from his personal experiences with Canada, Kreeft also said that he thought that Homosexualism is the official state religion of Canada.

Word count

Part I: A brief explanation/description of the Early Life Issues
3. Stem Cells

Draft: August 8, 2007
1196 wds

Document total to date:
8315

They are FUNDAMENTALLY different

It's in the genes man!

From Wiki:
A germ layer is a collection of cells, formed during animal embryogenesis. Germ layers are only really pronounced in the vertebrates. However, all animals more complex than sponges (eumetazoans and agnotozoans) produce two or three primary tissue layers (sometimes called primary germ layers).

Animals with radial symmetry, like cnidarians, produce two called ectoderm and endoderm, making them diploblastic. Animals with bilateral symmetry produce a third layer in-between called mesoderm, making them triploblastic.

DOWN WITH DIPLOBLASTIC LIFE FORMS!

NO MORE SPECIAL PRIVILEGES FOR DIPLOBLASTY!

PROTECT TRIPLOBLASTIC RIGHTS!

I love new words!

Proximate Coolness

One of the many things I like about writing for LifeSite is all the interesting and cool people whose home phone numbers I have in my rolodex.

I talked to Peter Kreeft for about an hour yesterday.

Vision TV's Syncretism "Fundamentally Opposed" to Religious Faith

When we were done, I sent him along the following:

To: peterkreeft
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2007 4:18 PM
Subject: Canada
Thanks for talking to me today. Something we mentioned stuck in my head and when you said, "No matter what their religions position is, to have that kind of monopoly is incomaptible with a free society."

I'm afraid my reaction was that you were making some very American assumptions about Canada and what Canadians want.

I thought you'd enjoy this quote from a column by David Warren, who is also rather fed up with Canada and the Canadian antipathy to freedom:

"Canadians are an obedient people. We like big government, we like to pay taxes. (We are among the few countries where a party trying to retain national office will use 'they want to cut your taxes' as a scare tactic.)We often applaud ourselves for the patience with which we form queues. And we can't get enough detailed regulations.

PK replied:

Hilary:
If what you say is true, Canadians are a dictator's dream people.
PK

to which Aitchdubya responded,

...sort of takes the fun out of being a dictator though, hey?

How to Successfully Avoid Work

...and split infinitives...

OK: I've been holding out on y'all.

I've found a whole mess of reactionary, homophobic, anti-choice extremist Britblogs.

Home of the Green Arrow

Battle for Britain

Fulham Reactionary

Ranting Stan

Mr. Smith's Refusal

and they've all got links to even more.

OK, so it's confirmed

I'm actually not a racist.

I wish I could be half as cool as this person.

To Miss With Love

"...and then it was nothing but blastomere separation, embryonic components of the trophoblast and placenta and monozygotic twinning until lunchtime"

Yes, I'm finally doing it. I was looking at websites advertising shared flats in Durham, the cost of one-way tickets to Newcastle, the price of a bed in a hostel or B&B...and thinking, "well, I've got about a thousand bucks in the bank..."

Uh.

Oh...

For a very VERY long time, since just before John Muggs died in fact, I've had a commission sitting on the back burner to do a briefing book on reproductive technologies and cloning and embryo research and related things. It shows how deeply lazy it is possible to be, because I have been offered a reasonably substantial sum of money and I just plain haven't done it. It's just that I'm sooooooo bored with it. It numbs my brain to think about it.

But now, I actually need the money. So I'm going to be somewhat scarce around here for a while.

Suttee

It's an odd thing. The more I see of things like this,

BRITAIN is facing a mass exodus, of people looking to escape the crime and grime of modern living.

The country’s biggest foreign visa consultancy firm has revealed that applications have soared in the last seven months by 80 per cent to almost 4,000 a week. Ten years ago the figure was just 300 a week.

the more I want to go.

I was talking about it the other night and someone suggested it was like that perverse urge one sometimes gets to swerve into oncoming traffic at rush hour or leap off the Lion's Gate bridge or over the rail on a boat. It's nothing to do with being suicidal, it's just that...well, I don't know really, you just want to.

“Ironically, one of the main reasons for leaving is the overstretch of services due to increasing immigration into the UK. People are looking for the better standard of living offered by other countries, as even the most idyllic villages in Britain are under pressure from rising populations.

Some are telling us they are fed up with living in this country. Even business people are saying they’ve had enough.

“They’re saying ‘I can’t put my children into the right school, but if I move abroad I can’. Most people are very patriotic and don’t want to leave. They’re almost terrified about it. But they say they just have to.

“It’s a shame people at the top don’t recognise they’re not doing enough to retain highly skilled workers in this country. A lot of them are quite young, and they’re not idle. They just can’t see a future for themselves in this country. They want to get married and settle down and buy homes, but they can’t see it happening here.

“And time and time again they are saying to us they don’t want to be seen as racist because they are quitting because of immigration. We tell them of course they’re not.”

of course not!

Class Snobbery Not Dead in England

...thank God.

Traditional, unacceptable ways of referring to members of the working class have been replaced by a term which is not only acceptable among some comedians, politicians and journalists, but is an almost obligatory part of their everyday discourse: chav. Just when you thought it was safe to drop your h's, snobbery is right back in fashion.

No country could have embraced a newly minted form of social insult with more enthusiasm and expertise than the English have with the concept of the chav. It seems that when it comes to the subtle gradations of class disdain, we remain world leaders. Other nations may try to emulate our easy, natural snobbery but somehow it never quite comes off. Like an English chef working on French haute cuisine, foreigners have the ingredients and the expertise but somehow their snobbery seems forced. With the English, it comes naturally.

When Bloggers Collide

We had our last do in the corner house last night. (Said quite a lot of ThingsIReallyThinkOutloud, so am not sure how many of these people are still talking to me...Y'all will let me know if there are any more bridges around here that I can burn before I go away, right?)

I have often wondered what would happen if bloggers, people who really ought to have no real life fleshly existence, meet.

Well, the Rift in Space and Time completely failed to show.

Very disappointing.

John Carriere, a fellow Evil Trad from way back, long rumoured to live in the area:

(actually, we agreed that there was no way I could know if he really was John Carriere since I didn't see any ID. But whoever he was, he was just as fun as John Carriere, so what difference does it make, really?)

I told him that he really needs to post more. He gave me some lame excuses like having kids and a job. Pfff!

There were several confirmed Oratorian sightings.


And the social coup of the evening was when Kathy Shaidle showed. I was sitting upstairs, taking a little Doctor Who break before the people started arriving, and she was announced,

I bounced down the stairs like a kid.

Kathy is, as she claims to be, perfectly sociable and non-insane in real life.

I, on the other hand, was told that the bloggers who have met me agree that there is no discernible difference between the online and in-person Hilary, except for being more three-dimensional and less text-oriented.

Stepping back from the edge

The burqa (a total head and body covering) has been barred from classrooms in the UK, is illegal in public places in five Belgian towns, and the Dutch legislature has attempted to ban it altogether. Italy's "Charter of Values, Citizenship and Immigration" calls face coverings not acceptable. A courtroom in the United States has expelled a burqa'ed woman.

Further to our Discussion of "Racism: non-existence of"...

racist -

A statement of surrender during an argument. When two people or disputants are engaged in an acrimonious debate, the side that first says “Racist!” has conceded defeat. Synonymous with saying “Resign” during a chess game, or “Uncle” during a schoolyard fight. Originally, the term was meant to indicate that one side was accusing the other of being racist, but once it was noticed that people only resorted to this tactic when all other arguments had been exhausted, it acquired its new meaning of “indicating one’s own concession of defeat.”

A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy Toronto's Caribana Festival

Never am I more happy to be an Anglo-Saxon/Celt than at Caribana time.

The official propaganda:

Every summer, Toronto blazes with the excitement of calypso, steel pan and elaborate masquerade costumes during the annual Toronto Caribbean Carnival (Caribana) Festival.

Caribana, celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2007, is the largest Caribbean festival in North America. Presented by the Festival Management Committee, the two-week Festival attracts over a million participants annually, including hundreds of thousands of American tourists.

Among the highlights is the Parade, one of the largest in North America. Thousands of brilliantly costumed masqueraders and dozens of trucks carrying live soca, calypso, steel pan, reggae and salsa artists jam the 1.5 km parade route all day, to the delight of hundreds of thousands of onlookers.

The reality parading outside our front step:


* ~ * ~ *

But quite apart from the gross sexual exploitation, the applauding of a criminal subculture, there's that little problem that the black people in Toronto like to shoot each other quite a lot.

Two years ago we had from the Toronto Sun:

"Another tragic incident by one person who has upset the weekend for many, many people." (The police) pointed out Yonge St. is merely a "gathering spot," and not host to a Caribana-sanctioned event."

Oh well, that's OK then. As long as the random shootings are not officially connected to Caribana, I'm sure we will all sleep better.

"Caribana is a cultural festival for the Caribbean community to celebrate their lives, their music, their food, bringing their culture to our country. Shooting people at Yonge and Dundas doesn't fit in that culture anywhere. It has nothing to do with Caribana."

Deputy Chief Robert Molyneaux nine years earlier, talking about the execution-style murder of Elrick Christian and the shooting of three others at the 1996 Caribana parade...

"These were just trouble-making punks who would have done what they did in the middle of the Santa Claus parade." (Toronto Star, August 5, 1996)

Well, thanks for telling us that.

I think I'm looking at Youtube vids

that I ought not to be looking at.

Human Traffic

Small Signs of Hope

OK, I've been watching too much television lately.

Sue me.

There is a memorable scene in Life on Mars that I thought I would share.

DI Sam Tyler, the man out of time, meets a British woman who has an affair with a Gujarati Indian from Uganda. He dies and she's left with a firebombed apartment (these white nationalist racists! you know...) and an unborn child.

At some point, Sam realises that the child is his own love from the future, Maya.

(This is the Beeb, remember.)

Layla takes a puff of her cigarette.

Sam: "I don't know if you realize, but that (pointing to the cigarette) is no good for her (pointing to the baby)."

"It's not a her. It's not a him. It's not even an it. It doesn't matter anyway."

"You're not gonna..." Sam is stunned and is barely able to breathe out the word "abortion."

Here's the BBC suggesting that abortion is a really bad and horrifying. That having a child, even in difficult circumstances could actually be a good thing.

Wonders, as they say...

I'm afraid to go home.

I've been in the office all day, not thinking about the weather. But last night, no one slept in their own beds. By three thirty am I had moved to the living room on the sofa where it was easily ten degrees cooler than my 35 degree steam bath room. The other girls had migrated to the third floor to share a spare room where an ac unit is temporarily installed.

But it's the long weekend and we're facing three days of unremitting misery and sleeplessness.

Weekend temps in the low 40's with humidex.

I just love Toronto don't you?

SPOILER ALERT!!! Life on Mars - Finale

So, he dies and goes to heaven, and heaven is Manchester in 1973.

Or, we could say, he commits suicide and goes to Manchester in 1973 as his eternal punishment, but, by the mercy of God, he gets a nice bird.

It just occurred to me that possibly the reason I liked it, was that I was in Manchester in 1973.

You know that thing where a smell will powerfully bring back a memory? To this day, the smell of pitch or tar will give me a kind of spacial, temporal shift and I am, myself, for a moment, standing in Manchester in 1973. So I know how he feels.

For your early morning yell of horror and utter despair...

Islamic education for all: Great Britain plan would move toward ‘religion of state’

A new government study is being condemned by the Christian ministry the Barnabas Fund because its proposals would move closer to imposing Islam in the United Kingdom as “a religion of state.”

Among the proposals from the study being considered for implementation is the provision by universities for Islamic studies for all students.

The report was initiated by Bill Rammell, the minister of state for higher education and lifelong learning, officials said. He appointed Ataullah Siddiqui, senior research fellow at the Islamic Foundation, to write it…

Why I'm really enjoying this show

Life on Mars

Best line so far: "Dje know, I once hit a bloke for speaking French."

"It's called 'surveillance'"
"Well, it doesn't sound very manly."