The Scottish Conservatives have elected an openly gay leader. Good on them. It is also a shrewd political move. There are certainly more gays in Scotland than Conservatives.
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Nothing of interest under this kilt then. Ms Werrity accompanies me to all important meetings, carrying my appendage in a separate, hygenic bag. Did it come off through overuse, like metal fatigue? Or did you cut it off to pay the business rates? What’s wrong with Scottish men anyway? Sorry. All in the best possible taste.
Happy Eid.
Gay: From the Department of Useless Information, it seems that 3% of the population are homosexual but about 50% of modern composers. Before ‘gay’ gained currency, one would enquire ‘is he musical?’
Ah well ,if the Tories were a rare breed in Scotland prior to her annointment,I suspect they will be rarer than hens teeth next election.
Might I recommend a “short” on RT called “Eco warrior” very scary!
Looks like our super duper ,bestest friends in Washington are a danger to their own citizens , not just the citizens of the rest of the world.
Jeremy Vine is giving space to Ehud Barak on the Marr programme this morning. ‘You have an amazing military record’ gushed Vine who then listed the actions he was involved in.
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This is a reminder of what Barak and Netanyahu were saying to Paanetta the other day.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-officials-israel-refused-to-commit-to-withhold-surprise-attack-on-iran-1.393914
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Meanwhile there is the usual wet piffle in the Observer editorial which leaves the field open for Israel to carry on.
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Israel is unwise to raise the nuclear stakes
{http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/06/iran-israel-nuclear-weapons}
Prof Chris Busby visits the Irish Guards Museum. Nice lingering shots on some of the exhibits! You will know of his work on the effect of depleted uranium used in weapons in Iraq and elsewhere and the widespread genetic deformities occurring in Fallujah.
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http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/msg/1320552545.html
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Only 199 viewings of the video in three weeks I see. Of course. Much rather watch a kitten doing tricks or some other trivial thing which has gone ‘viral’.
What’s the matter with these people? No learning curve. Another pile up.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15610558
The unpleasant Susannah Reid introduces her BBC1 TV programme Sunday Morning Live with the words.
‘Britain is full up. Do we need any more immigrants?’
A lot of unsubstantiated and condescending comments about other people in this forum. Whose prejudice is at issue when the Scottish Conservatives elect a lesbian as leader. How do you know the feelings and attitudes of the people you malign for wearing poppies?
Angrysoba: I don’t know if you’re older than me, but back in the day we had “Jackie Jumpers”.
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Hi Glenn,
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Possibly before my time, but I remember when I first came to Japan I noticed that many people here don’t seem to think much about ‘elf n’ safety when it comes to fireworks, which are very popular. Given Japan’s pacific constitution I doubt very much that fireworks are a way of encouraging people to be militaristic.
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Just out of interest, what would you have said to someone who told you that your enjoyment of Jackie Jumpers was a planned way of brainwashing you into accepting cluster bombs?
Much more to the point than Davidson’s wholly irrelevant sexuality, Wiki tells me she did 3 years in the TA. Before some of us start, this does not automatically make her a fascist warmonger (her membership of the Tories probably does that). What it does do is suggest that unlike the UK Tory hierarchy, she has actually met and been obliged to interact on equal terms with, some real people. Which can only be good.
“‘You have an amazing military record’ gushed Vine who then listed the actions he was involved in”
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Did he mention the occasion in 1973 when Barak assassinated three Palestinian leaders in Beirut, including the poet Kemal Nasser, while dressed as a woman?
What it does do is suggest that unlike the UK Tory hierarchy, she has actually met and been obliged to interact on equal terms with, some real people.
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She might even know someone who has watched telly, played with fireworks, played Call of Duty and all those other things that are disdained here. 😀
Is that what the common people do, Angry? Between writing job applications, wondering how to pay the gas bill, and doing shit jobs for no money? Well, well.
Amazingly he did refer to that (Barak dressing as a woman) MJ but not the details of whom he killed of course.
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Ref killing of Palestinians by the Israeli Occupation Force, ZBC had a report on November 3rd that two Palestinians in Gaza had been killed but they chose to put the headline in inverted commas thus implying it was not true. Note it is a clash and not premeditated murder by the occupiers.
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Israeli troops ‘kill two in Gaza’
Thursday’s clash interrupted a lull in recent cross-border violence
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Israeli security forces have killed two people in a clash on the border of the Gaza Strip, local medics say.
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Palestinian sources said Israeli troops had crossed over into northern Gaza.
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Today I read elsewhere that another killing had taken place at Khan Younis in Gaza but they do not report it.
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‘GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — Israeli forces fired on the southern Gaza Strip late Saturday, killing one Palestinian man and injuring three others, medical and security officials said.
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The shelling attack near Khan Younis in southern Gaza killed a 26-year-old Palestinian man and injured three others, one seriously, medical official Adham Abu Salmiya said.
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H Scott. Not many of us here like warmongers or warmongering and that is what Remembrance Sunday has been transformed into by successive governments sadly, wrapped in the Union flag.
From Greta Berlin co-founder Free Gaza by e-mail just now.
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Greek captain of the Tahrir Giorgos Klontzas has confirmed the use of violence on him by the israeli soldiers during his interrogation in a interview he gave to http://www.Omniatv.com
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He specifically reports that he was handcuffed on hands and feet , very tightly which created a blood circulation problem and that in order to make him give his fingerprints he was held by three soldiers and one was holding him in a strangling way almost suffocating him.
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At one point they stuck two fingers in his eyes creating very strong pain. He said that he was very calm, he did not speak aggressively and that he just requested to see a lawyer… He also confirms that some activists were very badly treated.
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—
Greta Berlin, Co-Founder
Is that what the common people do, Angry?
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Yes, many common people do watch telly and play computer games and enjoy fireworks. Are you telling me it is only the 1% who do this and the rest are keepin’ it real by concocting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? I doubt it. The latter is most definitely a smug and bourgeois activity.
Nobody needs ‘anti-Semitic conspiracy theories’. Israel is a rogue state that reckons it can do whatever it likes, wherever it likes, whenever it likes. For the most part it gets away with it too, because of its backing by Big Brother US.
http://geekyroom.com/2011/11/05/israel-mistakenly-bombed-syrian-textile-factory-not-nuclear/
Angry, I do wish you would stick to criticising what people actually say instead of inventing a silly opinion you can attack.
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I am sure Bullingdon Dave and his chums watch TV, and they are very keen on fireworks (especially those let off over the Middle East and shown on CNN) and computer games. Does this make them the 99%?
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All I was suggesting is that someone who has been in the Forces HAS to be able to rub along with the world at large, and a silver-plated Eton toff does not have this experience – or even inclination. I was in favour of Davidson for this reason. I was in the Forces myself. Voluntarily. Were you? I have worked for Old Etonians. Have you?
I am sure Bullingdon Dave and his chums watch TV, and they are very keen on fireworks (especially those let off over the Middle East and shown on CNN) and computer games. Does this make them the 99%?
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“McBride resigns from Conservative party of “dysfunctional morons”
http://www.firmmagazine.com/news/2672/McBride_resigns_from_Conservative_party_of_%E2%80%9Cdysfunctional_morons%E2%80%9D_.html
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Tell us all something we don`t already know!.
I thought for a minute that was the NuLabour McBride, Damian, the one who had to leave No 10 after the revelations of his plot with Draper to smear top Tory types. He has obviously been on the proverbial road to Damascus and has had a (moral) conversion.
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http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6720903/coffee-house-exclusive-mcbride-joins-cafod.thtml
isn’t it funny, you can’t get a firework until you are eighteen, but if you want a shotgun license, any age will do.
Some 30 ex toddlers in England and wales have received their certificates.
If they know where daddies shotgun cartridges are held and have the key to his locker, just in case a nasty burglar calls whilst dads away on business, they could empty a few and make their own fireworks. I suppose the Tories calls that business accumen.
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/crime/under_10s_in_norfolk_issued_with_shotgun_certificates_1_1118407
I don’t think a properly instructed and supervised 10-year old potting rabbits on his dad’s farm with a .410 presents a major risk to society. And I can’t remember when I last saw a report of a 10-y-o with a shotgun license shooting someone. On the other hand, the ban on handguns following Dunblane has had no impact on the use of improvised and illegally held hand weapons in gang fights…(Hamilton was certainly an unsuitable individual to hold a firearms certificate, and should have been spotted, but he was insane, not ten).
If that’s Angrysoba doing a facepalm, he’s very bald for his age.
Excellent piece from Fisk on the abuse of the red poppy:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-do-those-who-flaunt-the-poppy-on-their-lapels-know-that-they-mock-the-war-dead-6257416.html
Referring to Fisk’s father, who fought in the “Great War”:
“In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. “All I can tell you, fellah,” he said, “was that it was a great waste.” And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn’t want to see “so many damn fools” wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents.”
For dear old Harry Patch, the last of the Tommies. Carol Ann Duffy
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LAST POST
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home –
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now to die and die and die.
Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too –
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queueing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly write it backwards,
then it would.
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Camilla invaded his funeral. They have to pretend to weep with us.
Or this even more potent poem by Wilfrid Owen who died aged 25 in 1918 in Ors, Northern France where he is buried.
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http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
Dulce et Decorum Est (Pro Patria Mori)
I had a couple of friends in the TA and was around the mess quite a lot (their bar was open to 11 in the days when pubs closed at 10). ‘Real people’ isn’t a phrase I would have reached for to describe them and yet they probably were. Gloomy thought. They always reminded me of this.
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LESSONS OF THE WAR
(Henry Reed)
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To Alan Michell
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Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine gloria
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I. NAMING OF PARTS
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To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And to-day we have naming of parts.
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This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.
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This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.
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And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.
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They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For to-day we have naming of parts.
Angrysoba: Kind of tough to accept an argument like that. Particularly since they went out of usage at least 20 years before clusterbombs became known. If they were part of a conspiracy, it would have to be an impressively long-planned affair!
Thanks Vronsky. I do not know that poem. I like the contrast of the banality of the repetitive military instructions, behind which lies instructions in how to kill, against the verse endings describing in minute detail the beauty of nature which surrounds them.