New York

Bon voyage Clare




These streets will make you feel brand new
The lights will inspire you

Fair isle

I received in the post the most marvellous gift. A Cream original



A hand knitted fair isle vest

Edgar Loves Martine

Google suggests 89 Million results can't all be wrong





Happy Valentines day, baby





What does this make you

Lucky:



Very Lucky:



Not so very lucky:

Baby jeebus it gets worse. Senator Conroy now wants YouTube to self censor on the 'governments' behalf. See here and here.

Sensibly it appears YouTube (Google) has initially said no to Conroy's demands.

Conroy initially introduced his Internet filtering censorship legislation with the stated intention of combating child pornography, a reasonable thing to do, with some support. However as all the experts and the netterati then went on to tell him, his Internet filter plan would do nothing about it. But still he persisted.
As the YouTube filter plan shows, his plan had nothing to do with pornography, it is about political and social censorship. It is about banning and filtering things that the 'government' doesn't think is suitable for Australians to see. That is information on:
Illegal computer downloading/hacking etc.
How to make drugs/bombs
How to commit various crimes
Euthanasia materials
Abortion materials
Pro-ana and Pro-mia materials
BDSM and fetish lifestyles
Hate speech
Direct action political campaigning
Whistle-blowing materials (such as WikiLeaks)
etc. etc.

Now you may not support many of these activities and most are unpleasant, but that is not good enough reason to ban them.
As everyone knows, YouTube is very strict on what is made available on its site and is very proactive in deleting pornography or other copyrighted or illegal content, thus there is no pornography or generally illegal content on there. What the 'government' is wanting to have removed therefore is not pornography as it continues to claim but videos by such Australians as Dr Philip Nitschke. It is a censorship regime being planned that is only matched by dictatorships. And no this isn't a conspiracy theory.

Tips on dietary advertisements

Tip #1 : Ignore silly adverts
Tip #2 : Bellies are hot
Tip #3 : Maybe get a haircut




Tip #1 : Don't be silly
Tip #2 : Flat is not 'sexy'

Tony Blair speaks the truth, again

Mike Huckabee -

I don’t pretend for a moment to understand American politics very well and I certainly don’t understand British politics but why so many of these inquiries? There’s been four and they’ve all been relentless, they haven’t really mined any new ground

Tony Blair -

I think it’s partly because we have this curious habit, I don’t think it’s confined to Britain actually, where people find it hard to come to the point where they say we disagree – you’re a reasonable person, I’m a reasonable person but we disagree.
There’s always got to be a scandal as to why you hold your view. There’s got to be some conspiracy behind it. Some great, you know, deceit that’s gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it’s possible for people to have different points of view and hold them reasonably for genuine reasons.

So I think there’s continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy when actually there’s a decision at the heart of it – but there it is.

As usual Blair makes sense, you may loathe him and believe that he went to war for oil or somesuch nonsense, that just makes you a conspiracy nut and an idiot.


And on another point, why oh why, is Clare Short still allowed out in public.

In a nutshell

Afternoon soaps

Question of the Day

Please tick one box



Update

No, really tick a box

and gathering swallows twitter in the skies

Swallows and swifts cannot nest on metal walls.
They cannot nest unless there are eaves. I think it is wrong.
It is immoral not to consider those other species that share this planet with us.
If the swallows and swifts stop coming here and nesting on the buildings that I love,
then there is no point to life.
Literally

– Prince Charles, from a speech given at the conference of the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, February 2010.

True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;
Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.

- Shakespeare

It's red!

Are you as excited as me about the new England Away kit? The new Home kit was white with a collar

I am gambling the Away is going to be red, and not have a collar. A bit like the 1966 one, maybe, except the Umbro logo will be across from the badge.


Can't wait till March when we see it in action.

You can advance order your replica today sight unseen already, from various outlets if you're mad for it




Oh and speaking of John Terry, here's a quote:

So Terry may just retain his place as England captain by dint of the dearth of viable alternatives. He may be morally repugnant, but who better to lead the morally bankrupt world of English football into combat on the world stage than him?

No loop, but a triangle

It was recently said to me that the further Left or Right on the political spectrum that you go, you end up on the other extreme, as though political views were on a form of loop or Ouroboros. This analysis was originally proposed by Left wingers to explain why all left social experiments became hideous failures, and then to deny that the original protagonists were Left wing to start with. Thus Hitler and Mussolini who’s policies of nationalisation, collectivisation etc. etc. where clearly of the Left are now projected as Right wing.
We all in fact know however that Socialism and Communism and all other Left wing isms threw up dictators because dictatorship was inherent in the theory.
It is also clear that the most destructive part of the Left ideology - systemic racism was also part of the Left agenda. In Australia for instance, the Trades Unions started a ‘Left wing’ political party (The Labor Party) for the single reason of repudiating the British Empire who were trying to install an non-racist immigration policy. You see contrary to general mis-thought, Empire was about trade not racism, it was about making customers and not slaves. Capitalism, which you could say ‘puts profit before people’, does exactly that and has no concept of race, as everyone is an economic unit equally. Remember also that it was Mercantilism that propounded slavery, Capitalism eroded it just for that reason.
Money doesn’t care about race, it seeks to extract the most value. Capitalism will exploit any resource, any people anywhere.

But to get back to the point, there is no line between Left and Right and going to extremes does not make one end up as the other. I would say that essentially Left and Right are interchangeable and indistinct in their fundamentals.

So no loop instead I say a form of triangle, in that political parties or ideological groups, beyond their actions or policies have basic beliefs about people. These are more important.

The Road - John Hillcoat film

Thinking of going to see the movie The Road, don't.

I made that mistake, already.

It was utterly hideous, you know it was a good movie, but utterly utterly hideous. I had thought wrongly that it would be mostly a moving story about the relationship between the father and son. I had not expected the amount of truly horrifying cannibal gore.