What to do?

The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.

Yob Nation

Francis Gilbert

Regarding the riots across England, I think this sums it up best: This is what autonomous individualism looks like in the end.  Since the 1960s, Britain has been subjected to a relentless campaign to strip the country of its institutions, its history, its morals, its religion and its very identity.  Generations of children have been taught that their country is wicked, that their society is worthless, their history shameful.  They've been told there is no right or wrong save what they decide is so.  For an entire class of society the family has been all but destroyed and mothers gave birth to a generation of bastards who never even knew their fathers. Industry has been punished.  Decency derided.  Patriotism mocked.  Deference abolished.  Chastity forgotten.  All authority over them renounced.  All of this, mind you, in the  bosom of a cradle to grave welfare state that ensures that they never need to work a day in their lives.  And what have they been left with?  A perverted, feral sense of individualism.  Not the individualism of a free man under the law and a being created in God's image, but of a brute answerable to no one and nothing.  This wave of looting and burning isn't surprising. We have "children" (some middle aged) who have a massive sense of entitlement, no regard for law,  no respect for authority, are bone idle and believe that they have a right to anything they can get away with.  And now that the police have shown themselves ineffectual, the government spineless and the populace disarmed, they know they can literally get away with murder.  And that is what Britain is bankrupting itself for;  to support an underclass of parasitic yahoos whose idea of relieving boredom is to rob and burn those few left who are productive.  As for second-generation immigrants who by all accounts made up a staggering percentage of the looters, it's like they've been handed the cultural list and only picked up the worst traits of their hosts.  And the females?  As the father of a little girl, I can only weep at how they have been sacrificed at an altar more terrible than Baal's.

Back in the 1970s,  I recall a story I read in Analog magazine ("Generation Gaps", I think) about a 21st century Earth where the older generation was fleeing to the Moon to escape from a world ruled by hippies who had rebuilt society to their hedonistic liking.   The final paragraphs of the story were chilling as the refugees' "children" begged for help as their children in turn adopted cannibalism and vampirism as the newest fad and rose against them in bloody rebellion.  It was meant as satire, but watching the videos over the last few days, I'm not so sure.

My wife, who isn't given to such things, pronounced that if Britain cannot rise to this occasion, then it is doomed.  I can't help but agree with her, but who have we to deal with this?  An ineffectual Political Class that hasn't a clue how the real world works and a police force that is hamstrung by insane, contradictory directives that damn them whatever they do.  Watching Cameron et al posturing, acting tough, finger pointing, contradicting one another and desperately hoping that this will all go away is nothing less than sickening for, indeed, that is exactly what they are hoping will happen.  The idea that the deadly fruits of the welfare state have finally ripened and begun to fall doesn't occur to them.

That's looking at it at its simplest.  This isn't a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding.  Add in the foreign tyranny of the EU, the economic crisis, the immigration crisis and the ever-pressing threat of Jihad and you've got a whole warehouse full of pressure cookers next door to a depot load of Semtex, a tanker of petrol and an atomic missile silo.

It also doesn't help that the law abiding have been so thoroughly betrayed.  In the 20th century, the state and the people made a compact.  In return for disarming, the state promised to protect the people.  Since the British are a singularly law-abiding people and largely supported their institutions (British criminals were once notorious for their patriotism), this worked.  But when the rot of the welfare state mingled with the cultural poison of the 1960s, that respect faded and the police were emasculated.  By the turn of the century, the only ones who had reason to fear the law were the ones who it supposedly existed to protect.  Want to see swift justice? Ask a policeman if he knows his horse is gay. The people, in turn, were laid naked before the wolves bred over the past forty odd years.

Things have to change and quickly.  How?  I don't know.  It doesn't mean the Tories out and Labour in.  All three main parties are as bad as the other.  It means rejecting all of them and dismantling this insular, self-regarding, corrupt Political Class on all levels of government.  It means very real, basic reform that this country hasn't seen since 1688.  It means undoing decades of deliberate destruction and the rediscovery of who we are.  It's to go so far back that we have to go to every old folks home, look the War generation in the eye and apologise to them for what we've done to their country. 

But that's for tomorrow.  Today we have to look at the lessons we've learned.

The first lesson?  Recognise that the police are the police, not social workers in funny clothes.  Their purpose is to catch criminals, prevent crime and keep the peace.  They are not tasked with "community cohesion"  or any of that bilge.  Nor are they the armed wing of the Guardian.  Their function is to be greeted by the law abiding with relief and the criminal classes with fear. It is not to go after respectable citizens and reeducate them in the proper way of thinking (That is, the Party line) while allowing the yobs to roam and despoil at will. 

1940 appeal.

The second lesson is to allow the citizenry to arm themselves again and to use their arms in self-defence.  No, better than that.  "Allow" makes that into a gift that the Party can take away from us.  Britain needs a Second Amendment.  Recognise the right to bear arms as inalienable, that an Englishman's home is his castle and that he has a right to defend himself.  Where I live in Washington State, law enforcement is in the form of a handful of sheriffs covering an area approximately that of Kent.  If someone is knocking on the door with an axe, you might as well order pizza after calling the fuzz because they'll take about as long to get here.  You'd think that it would be a looter's dream, but you'd be dead wrong.  So would the perp with the axe with the emphasis on "dead".  Something like 90 percent of houses here have guns and the owners aren't afraid to use them.   If a gang of Mexican banditos out of a Sam Peckinpah film stormed up the road on horseback with pistols blazing, I'd never see them from my house because they'd be cut down before they crested the first hill.  That is what we call a deterrent.

The third lesson is to acknowledge the horrible damage done to British society since the foul revolution of 1968.  Admit that the Political Class that replaced the old Establishment is a rotten oligarchy and that the horrors inflicted by them on our morals and our institutions in the name of "reform" and "modernity" have resulted in (among other things) a feral underclass that is as dangerous as it it useless.  And that the experiment of mass immigration, moral relativism and multiculturalism is an abject failure. Does that mean turning back the clock?  It blasted well does.  As G K Chesterton said, "Turning back the clock is the sensible and progressive thing to do when it starts keeping the wrong time".

The clock isn't just keeping the wrong time, some yob has set fire to it.

My Wake Up Call

The My Wake Up Call alarm clock lures you out of slumber with positive motivational messages. 

It would certainly work for me.  Listening to upbeat, cheerful encouragement before I've had my tea will certainly leave me wide awake after I've finished screaming abuse at the wretched thing for five minutes.

2 Thessalonians 3:10

From the BBC:

Rioters in Manchester and Salford have been told that they face being evicted from their council homes if they are identified on CCTV footage.

Not a bad first move, but I'd take it a step further:  Ideally, anyone caught taking part in these riots anywhere in Britain, as well as their parent if minors, should lose access to ALL state benefits FOR LIFE with the exception of compulsory state schooling and in addition lose all eligibility for any form of government employment.   In the case of immigrants or other foreign nationals, the penalty should be immediate and permanent deportation.   This is, of course, in addition to any fines or prison terms.

I dare say that this would be more effective than a hanging as far as this lot are concerned.

Moonbase 3: Behemoth

When open minds become empty heads

Getting in the way.

Apparently being an Atheist who rejects all tenets of the Christian faith and even denying the existence of Christ (which also shows a staggering historical ignorance) is no obstacle to becoming a clergyman in the Protestant Church in the Netherlands (PKN).

As  Dr Spacely-Trellis, the “go-ahead” Bishop of Bevindon in the Stretchford Conurbation and author of God The Humanist might observe,

Cleansed of such outmoded relics, a truly progressive Protestant Church in the Netherlands will arise, a Church in which people of all races, of all kinds of sexual orientation, or previous criminal convictions, and of all faiths or none, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist or whatever, will be welcome to act as clergy. It will be a Church of diversity and inclusion, a Church which will meet the religious needs of the average man and woman of our secular age in a very real sense.

Air dam

Where can we find a 10,000 ton olive?

I don't know if this technology ever had a hope of reclaiming land from the North Sea, but it certainly had the potential for producing a martini of epic proportions.

Quiz

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

With all that's going on, it's time to repost this.


The Gods of the Copybook Headings

by

Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

And we're back

View Initial London riots / UK riots in a larger map
Dear God in Heaven.

It's the first day back from my holiday.  No, that's not right.  Yesterday was my first day back, but I had a deadline with a client in Hong Kong, so I didn't have a chance to post anything.  Hang on.  That's not right either.  In fact, clients kept popping up like weeds all month, I had to deal with throwing together a sudden children's birthday party after the trip to the cinema fell to logistics, and a battle erupted with the local water company that must have learned how to keep books in Fred Karno's Army, so my actual holiday consisted of a couple of days reading books somewhere between the 5th and 10th of July. 

In fact, it's my first day back from doing a load of other things and I still have a stack of e-mail to catch up on, so I think I'll call it my "ignoring most of my e-mail and deleting the press releases from my RSS feed month".

Doesn't sound quite the same, does it? 

The most disturbing recent news (following mass murder in Oslo and Mr Barack Hussein Obama's crowning achievement of throwing his country into the toilet) is the wave of rioting, looting and burning in Britain.  At first, I wasn't too bothered by the events over the weekend.  Occasional riots in London have become something to be endured in modern Britain.  However, that changed as one riot became dozens around and outside the capital.  Worse, a State that prides itself on being able to literally dictate an Englishman's every thought stood helplessly by while modern day Visigoths plundered and burned.  This was no longer breaking the law or failing to keep the peace.  This was a collapse of order and an utter disregard for authority.  Not surprising when the Home Secretary wrings her hands about whether or not to deploy water cannons and rubber bullets as if she was dealing with a nursery school uprising.  Never mind that whole buildings have been burnt to the ground, that innocent people have been stripped naked by robbers or that those who haven't been burned out of their homes are cowering in terror against what the night might bring.

This paralysis, this loss of confidence, is appalling and uncalled for.   There are three reasons why governments exist and abandoning any means they cease to have legitimacy: Defend the realm, prevent crime and preserve contracts.   From the videos I've seen that are less like Britain than Beirut in the '80s, I'd say that all three parties have come pretty close to abandoning pillar number 2.  Why Cameron, Clegg and Milliband aren't walking around with wet trouser legs because they're terrified of what the public will do to them in return for leaving the streets to the barbarians, I have no idea.  And how in God's name Britain ended up with this collection of wet slaps as a political class clearly shows that we haven't been paying attention.  This is indeed a sorry state to be in for what was once the greatest city in the world and capital of the greatest empire in history.

But I'm not going to leave things at that.  Britain is down, but far from out.  Now is not the time to throw in the towel.  What we need more than anything else is not this policy or that.  We don't need the "right" people in office or to say the "right" things.  We need to remember who we are and where we came from.  We need to recall what made Britain great and to embrace that greatness.  I don't mean in some silly Mussoliniesque attempt to recapture faded imperial glories.  I mean in recognising the tremendous legacy that our fathers and their fathers before them left to Britain and the world and to try, try very hard, to make ourselves worthy of it.   If we stiffen our backbones and our upper lips; find the spark and truculence that made an Englishman worth ten foreigners on any day*, then we'll have won half the battle against the nation's rot.

*Yes, I am being poetic.

Apollo 8

Moon Over Africa - Part 25: The Orchids of Death

Click title link to listen.

Zombies of the Stratosphere Part 2

Demon Seed

Connections Part 4: Faith in Numbers

Moonbase 3: Departure and Arrival

Remember those Lunar colonies we had in 2003? Neither do I.

Friends

Why I Hate the Sixties

Moon Over Africa - Part 24: Treachery

Click title link to listen.

Zombies of the Stratosphere Part 1

Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde

Connections Part 3: Distant Voices

Lamb to the Slaughter

Cheap Hotels

Oslo reflections

I haven't commented on the Oslo horror since the first reports came in because I'm still technically on holiday and the story is still developing, but I felt that it's time to make some sort of assessment of the situation.  These are just casual observations, so please excuse the lack of links.

First off, it doesn't need saying that this was an act of pure evil.  The deliberate and cold blooded targeting of innocents with the direct objective of killing as many as possible is inhuman and beyond the pale in any decent morality.  What Mr Anders Behring Breivik did in Oslo and on that now infamous island was a calculated deed of terrorism that makes me heartily sorry that Norway abolished the death penalty.  However, despite his changing claim to be part of a terrorist cell, there's no hard evidence that he isn't lone wolf working with, at worst, only a possible accomplice.  Indeed, what I find significant is how utterly alone Mr Breivik is.  No one has tried to justify his actions except himself.  No one has made him an oppressed victim lashing out against his tormentors.  No one is saying "He's a monster, but..." followed by saying exactly the opposite.  And, most significant of all, no one is dancing in the streets handing out sweets in celebration of the innocent blood spilled.  Mr Breivik will have a lot to answer for when he stands before his Maker and it will be a very lonely standing. 

This is an episode that is, thankfully, very rare in the modern world, but happens often enough to have the depressing air of an unwelcome story coming around again.  There is the usual mixture of the insightful and the fatuous, the hand wringing and the finger pointing, but now has been added an air of hypocrisy and even triumphalism from certain quarters that is positively ghoulish.  On the very day of the massacre, the authorities and the MSM, always so careful to avoid speculating about motive even when the suspect is a Muslim US Army colonel dressed in Pakistani garb and shouting "Alllah akbar" at the top of his lungs while emptying an automatic into a crowd of his fellow soldiers, are perfectly comfortable with immediately saying that an ethnic Norwegian is a "right-wing Christian fundamentalist".  Actually, Mr Breivik turned out to be more of a moderate politically and "not much of a believer" in his own words who seemed more happy in his Masonic apron, but "Slightly Right of Centre Freemason Goes on Murder Spree" isn't a headline that provides much political ammunition. 

Over the past few days, I've run across some astonishing opportunism.  I've seen conservative bloggers and columnists blamed for the attack–indeed, anyone mentioned in Mr Breivik's rambling, strangely Anglocentric 1,500 page manifesto, though, to be consistent, that means that Gandhi, Sir Winston Churchill, Edmund Burke, and John Locke are all in trouble.  So is Sarah Palin, who has also been called into the dock.  Even Jeremy Clarkson, for the love of heaven! (Thanks for the link and comments, by the way, Ironmistress.  Spot on.)

Then there are those who call this an act of "Islamophobic terror". As Mark Steyn points out, this is a stretch given that no Muslims were targeted.    It's right up there with those who now smugly declare that the entire anti-Jihadist movement is exposed as a sham by this single crime, that anyone who for a moment thought that the Oslo bombing might have been the work of Jihadists is a bigot (even if a Jihadist group did claim credit for a while) and that "right wing" terrorism is the real threat.   Some go even farther and claim that anyone who opposes the Left's agenda on culture, immigration and the rest is just another mad killer waiting to explode at any moment.  I know of one lefty pundit who even went as far as to blame freedom of speech and that it would be so much nicer if everyone was forced to read the Guardian exclusively. 

I can't help feeling that they're not taking any of this seriously.  So what if seventy odd people have been brutally murdered and the Norwegian Eden has sprung a few serpents?  We've got political opponents to embarrass.

What I find truly worrying about all of this is that this lone killer may prove to be the first vulture of a bloody season.  God forbid, but it's entirely possible that the world could slide into a sort of similar madness.  For years I've been banging on about how Western governments have got to start taking the entire Jihadist war seriously.  That means aggressive diplomacy, military action, and economic measures as well as immigration reform and dumping the poisons of multiculturalism and political correctness.  If we keep on pretending that there's no problem or make matters worse as New Labour did by treasonously encouraging an invasion of Britain for their own political ends, then the future could get very dark. Dismissing the concerns of those who see the Jihadists for what they are will only leave the field to the madmen and the thugs.  The actions of this bland-faced Scandinavian who went in in leaps from sensible talk to seditious calls to overthrow Western governments to mass murder may one day become the unwitting harbinger for the network of anti-government, anti-Muslim terror cells that he fantasised about.  If it gets to that point, it won't mean a response of writing stern Guardian leaders and calls in the Commons to further curtail civil rights to deal with this distraction from more important affairs of state while the Left sits back and sees their opponents muzzled once and for all.  It will be the Scylla of Jihadism versus the Charybdis of sedition; both armed to the teeth and both determined to use force to get their way.  It will mean civil war and fighting in the streets and God help us all.  I do not want to be caught in between a load of Breiviks and Mohammeds trying to outdo one another in the atrocity sweepstakes and I have no desire to see London renamed Balkans on the Thames. 

As for poor Norway?  They have a lot of dead to mourn and a lot of thinking to do.  Let's say our prayers for them and leave them to it.  I've been to enough Norwegian funerals in my day to know that there's some hard grieving for them to get through.

Update: The Oslo horror and gun control.

Refinery at Work

Moon Over Africa - Part 23: Whispering Forest of Death

Click title link to listen.

Starting Next Week!

The Lost City - Chapter 12

Dracula

Oslo bombings

At least one and possibly several terrorist bombs explode in the Norwegian capital leaving two dead and dozens injured.

According to one Mr Alexander Higgins at Examiner.com, this attack has all the marks of an Al Qaeda operation. So who does he think is behind it?  Jews!

Update:  Seven people dead and fifteen injured; two seriously.

Meanwhile, a gunman disguised as a policeman opened fire at a Labour party youth camp on Utya Island with as many as 20 reported dead.

A Jihadist group called Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad) claims responsibility for the Oslo attack.

Update:  Things are getting murkier.

Update:  The BBC reports 80 dead in shooting incident alone.

Connections Part 2: Death in the Morning

Panem et circenses

Only 2 As a loaf (about 55p)

Rome fell because it taxed itself out of existence providing bread and circuses to the masses.  Proving that it has learned absolutely nothing from this, 21st century Britain is doing exactly the same thing.  In fact, they're going the Caesars one better by charging the taxpayers £20.64 a loaf for the "free" bread.

What's the difference between the NHS and a vampire?  A vampire doesn't pick your pocket while he sucks you dry.

Update: What this "envy of the world" is costing.

Chef's Special

Sound an Alarm

Moon Over Africa - Part 22: Native Revenge

Click title link to listen.

The Lost City - Chapter 11

Curse of the Black Widow

Connections Part 1: The Trigger Effect

I think they should leave this one alone

British scientists conclude: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

How far we've fallen II

Then.

Now.

With Britain all but bankrupted by a feckless political class and their vassalage to the European Empire, Professor John Appleby, of the King's Fund not only doesn't think that the fiscal rat hole known as the NHS should be abolished, he wants its budget doubled.  That will make make the job scheme for bureaucrats health service cost six times as much as national defence.  Remember defence?  The primary reason that the government exists in the first place?  Neither does anyone else, apparently.

Welcome to Britain; once the seat of the world's greatest empire, wielder of the mightiest navy ever seen, mother of parliaments, founder of the Industrial Revolution, royal throne of kings, scepter'd isle, earth of majesty, seat of Mars, other Eden, demi-paradise, fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, and precious stone set in the silver sea–now reduced to a dodgy health plan with a nation attached as an afterthought.

Britain a century ago:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

A J P Taylor

Call my bluff

If you're bluffing, it's usually wise not to tell your opponent that.

It's even wiser not to then dare him to call it.

Sports TV

Put the pipe down, Steve.

Mr Stephen Marche over at Esquire makes the best case ever against legalising drugs.

The sea is falling!

I, for one, welcome our jellyfish overlords.

Mr George Monbiot looks at jellyfish with all the perspective of a panicky meerkat and loses it completely:

A combination of overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has created the perfect conditions for this shift from a system dominated by fish to a system dominated by jellyfish.


If this is indeed what we’re seeing, the end of vertebrate ecology is a direct result of the end of vertebrate politics: the utter spinelessness of the people charged with protecting the life of the seas.

Flee for the hills!  The Day of the Jellyfish is at hand!

Strangeness Minus Three

Moon Over Africa - Part 21: White Magic

Click title link to listen.

The Lost City - Chapter 10

A.D.A.M.

Cosmos Part 13: Who Speaks for Earth?

Reality Check

We had to destroy the civilisation in order to save it.

I am Szondy: Mender of Washers

Day one and holiday is already paying dividends.  This was exactly my reaction after I fixed the washing machine.

Naming Your Child

Family Month

The Szondy family is taking a month off so we can catch up with ourselves, so posting is going to be a little light.  I'll check in when I can, but there are lawns to mow, fish to catch and beer to drink.  And if there's enough beer, the lawn and fish can look after themselves.

Happy American Independence Day

Happy 

American Independence Day

From

Ephemeral Isle

Fifty Years Of Aviation - The Big Picture

Moon Over Africa - Part 20: The Devil Doll

Click title link to listen.

The Lost City - Chapter 9

Jason and the Argonauts

Nuovo

Nuovo:  The personal isolation capsule that give you the solitude you need for quality reading time.

Personally, I prefer the Mark I.

Small details

It's amazing how one little thing can annoy you to distraction like a caraway seed caught in your teeth.  The First Men in the Moon is one of my favourite H G Wells novels and Ray Harryhausen films, so it isn't surprising that this caught my eye in a Wikipedia article on spacesuits in science fiction:

The film depicts the 1960s astronaut spacesuits as run-of-the-mill film prop spacesuits with a 1960s-type aqualung cylinder each instead of a NASA-type life support backpack.

Leaving aside the question of how the blazes the costume designers were supposed to get their hands on a "NASA-type life support backpack" in 1964 when NASA didn't even have them, I couldn't believe that the writer claimed that these:

From Wikipedia

were "run-of-the-mill film prop spacesuits".

NOT a prop.

Sorry, Lads, but these didn't come from the costume department.  Even when I was a kid with too much time on my hands, I knew that these are, in fact, British high-altitude pressure suits of the sort intended to be used aboard the TSR-1.  

That's the trouble with Hollywood: You sweat blood over authenticity and nobody even notices.

By the way, if these helmets from the link page look familiar, it may be because you've also seen a dolled up one on the flight deck of the commercial transport Nostromo.

Sitting Peking Duck

Red China trots out its first (secondhand) aircraft carrier, which Daniel Goure points out makes no sense in relation to China's needs or ambitions and is just the sort of thing the US Navy has spent three quarters of a century perfecting ways of sinking.

Cosmos Part 12: Encyclopaedia Galactica

A telling scandal

Shameful!  Disgusting!

An art exhibition opens in Bristol that sparked so much controversy that the president of the Royal West of England Academy resigned in protest against it.

What was it?  A painting of Jesus Christ in a gay orgy with the disciples?  The Union Jack festooned with pus?  An installation of freshly slaughtered goats?  Anything involving Gordon Brown in a jock strap?

No, (hide the kids) the exhibition highlights an artist who can actually paint and whom the public actually likes!

EADS Altran airport of the future

EADS claims that by 2050 they'll have an airport system that will get you on your plane within ten minutes. 

Unless the authorities have wised up by then and either a) crushed the Jihadists so they no longer pose a threat or b) stopped making the transport system the first line of defence, I see security as the elephant in the middle of the ticketing hall.

Putting that aside, I doubt that being "friendlean" is the answer.  In fact, the idiots who use words like "friendlean" are as much a part of the problem as the "enemyfat" people.  What these over-designing designers fail to understand is that much of the problem is very simple.  Passengers don't want to be interacted with, they want to be listened to.  They don't want to be immersed, they want to get to their plane on time.  They don't want little blue touch screens, they want to get where they're going on time and intersecting with their luggage at the same space/time coordinates.  During this, they want to be treated like human beings, not have to lug their belongings down endless terminals like pack animals, not get molested by dead-eyed security guards, not to have to sit on the floor, not get bumped from flights, not suffer insane layovers that no one told them about, and, please God, be able to get a large pink G & T while waiting for the boarding announcements. 

Part of this will involve technical and logistical improvements that the passengers needn't and don't care to see.  Some of it will mean simply increasing the capacity of airports many times above what they are now to not only allow for more passengers, but also to increase the number of planes that can land and takeoff.  And some of it will mean rethinking air travel in an age of increasingly powerful computers that will allow smaller and smaller airports to take up the slack and change the system from one based only on a few hubs to one that includes many local "taxi" airports.  If we had the latter today, I could catch a plane at a local airfield only ten miles away.  If it included grass air strips, a mile and a half.

But what it really requires is a return to old-fashioned customer service.  We can't recapture the glory days of air travel except for those willing to pay the equivalent of the GDP of a small African nation for a ticket, but what we can do is make air travel not only tolerable, but actually enjoyable once again by treating passengers as what they are; customers who are there to be pleased, not unwelcome baggage to be shoved along.  Get them to where they want to be with a minimum of hassle and allow them to get a drink and a meal without feeling like the passengers of a Victorian railway carriage assaulting the refreshment bar at the station during a ten-minute rest stop.  And if the plane breaks down on the tarmac, for the love of heaven let the passengers off while you fix the bloody thing instead of having them wait in their horrid, cramped seats for five hours without toilets or so much as a glass of water while a dozen infants and toddlers scream in justified outrage.

You'll surprised at the results.

Finally, the following directives should be posted in all airport employee canteens and recited to the staff on a daily basis whilst beating them with rattan rods:

THIS IS AN AIRPORT, NOT A COACH STATION!  ACT ACCORDINGLY!

THESE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, NOT CATTLE!  ACT LIKE THEY PAY YOUR WAGES BECAUSE, GUESS WHAT, THEY DO!

YOU ARE NOT JUST ALLOWED, BUT EXPECTED TO USE DISCRETION AND COMMON SENSE!  DO IT!

Swedish preschool gets those childhood traumas in early

Western Civ circles the drain.

And now a bit of Scandanavian madness: Egalia; a preschool where any references to gender are banned down to and including personal pronouns.

Stand by for the follow up story fifteen years from now about the most confused and screwed up group of people outside of a furries cosplay group.

The Jarvis Model JR-50 robotic hog head dropper

Jarvis Products Corp presents the world's first pig-decapitating robot.

And you know something; it looks like a pig decapitating robot.

News you can use: Cardiac edition

Right.  Where's me hammer?

Popular Mechanics looks into how to perform open heart surgery.

It's good to see that PM hasn't abandoned the DIY readership.

Elliptical Machine Office Desk

For $8000 you can get this adjustable desk combined with a torture machine chair/elliptical trainer to keep you in shape while you play Farmville instead of finishing those quarterly reports that were due last Thursday.

Or, if you're a bit strapped, you can do what I do for exercise:  Work at home with an eight-year old who's off for the summer while sharing the house with two herding dogs who noticed that the neighbours bought a couple of baby goats that are just begging to be herded to death.

I think I've lost half a stone in three days.

Weddings

When the wife and I got married we took one look at the estimate* and opted for a family-only ceremony in front of our fireplace followed by a small reception at a local restaurant and a larger informal one at a picnic ground for our fiends a few weeks later.  I think our decision had something to do with not having to live under a hedge after the honeymoon.

*That and after we sweated blood getting the invite list down to 75 people I noticed that we'd forgotten my sister.

Too little too late?

The Netherlands looks into the abyss and realises that multiculturalism results in more than just exciting new cuisines and exotically-dressed people on the streets of Amsterdam.

It's a welcome development, but I can't help wondering if it's a bit like trying to stop a Panzer invasion by wagging a riding crop.  Thirty years ago, rejecting multiculturalism would have cost little more than listening to cries of "racist" from the usual quarters.  Three decades of encouraging mass immigration of Muslims, many of whom prefer domination over assimilation, has caused so much damage that today we see a native population that isn't just uncomfortable, they are frightened for their survival as a culture and their personal safety.  If these fears aren't addressed and the problems wrought by multicultural insanity met head on, then the final correctives will be very nasty.

As I've said, it isn't a choice between easy solutions and hard ones, it's between hard solutions and appalling ones.  The longer we wait, the harder those solutions become until we face nothing less than Scylla on one hand and Charybdis on the other.  I, for one, don't want to live to see a Europe that has put off the day until the only options left are a suffocating dhimmitude and a grotesque replay of the Reconquista on a continental scale.

Update: The Americans also have some coming to grips to learn, too.

Update: Australia runs in the opposite direction.

Who are the Socialists

Victor Davis Hansen looks at today's Socialists and sees that the one defining factor hasn't changed since the days of the Politburo:

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves — in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to “two Americas” John Edwards, “earth in the balance” Al Gore, a tax-exempt yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions to the “poor.”

Don Draper's greatest challenge

You are aware that monkeys don't have any money, right?

You know you've reached market saturation when the advertising guys start targeting capuchin monkeys.

Why waste time?

Caution: Confusing to headhunters.

Michael Deacon at the Telegraph looks at the advantages of ignorance and snobbery.  I know it works for me.

He also has this to say about poets:

Having never earned a royalty cheque for their own work greater than 37p, most poets don’t know what to do with money, and greet it with the mixture of terror, consternation and hysteria you might expect from a primitive Papuan tribe confronted for the first time by a television set.

Too true.

Swings and roundabouts: Nuclear edition

The good news is that the American nuclear industry is booming. 

The bad news is that all the boom is happening abroad because of the regulations of the anti-progress, anti-prosperity Barack Hussein Obama administration that hold nuclear power to safety standards that a broiled steak wouldn't pass and "oversight" that is indistinguishable from obstruction.

The better news is that small modular reactors may manage a work around.

Ecco camper

Tiny wheels, low carriage, and a wet, uneven beach.  That'll work.

Another one of those "green" automotive designs that are about as practical as trying to mend a roof with a slice of turkey bologna.  I notice that the whole "green" thing is getting a bit weaselly, too.  Now that we know how mind-bogglingly polluting electric vehicles are with their batteries stuffed with rare-earth metals and convoluted international production lines, the "zero emissions" thing has become "zero-local-emissions".  Or "NIMBY emissions" if we want to be honest.

Apparently, emissions (not defined, but I suspect they mean carbon dioxide, which is perfectly harmless) are fine so long as they occur in some faraway land where Ecco camper owner needn't bother himself because feeling good is much more important than doing good.

Suburbs: 1957

 

Life in the American suburbs as seen through the eyes of the marketing department of Redbook magazine.

Lileks did an excellent column on this recently and the lock-step conformity of those who rail against '50s "conformity".  That post-modernist posturing is getting so old that even the self-appointed elite are getting nostalgic.

Moon Over Africa- Part 19: The Leopard Woman

Click title link to listen.

The Lost City - Chapter 8

Galaxy Being

The show must go on

A performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was cancelled after a stagehand died of a heart attack backstage.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but if I'd died on stage*, I'd have preferred to go out the way Tommy Cooper did: With the show going on while my feet were sticking out under the curtain.

*Come to think of it, I did–more times than I care to think about!

Artist's Statement

Revolator

This is what happens after you've ridden the Bubblelator one too many times.

Cosmos Part 11: The Persistence of Memory

Witch Doctors of England

What I've always suspected about the attitude of Environmentalist:

An organisation of British witch doctors– the IPSO (International Programme on the Supernatural of the Occult)–has placed a curse upon the oceans of the world as punishment for man's lack of faith in the authority of global witch doctors.

Green Lantern: The Animated Series

The current Green Lantern feature opened to some mixed reviews, but, as is often the case with superheroes, the animated spinoff looks better.