I am becoming quite fond of my little corner of Schiphol airport. I have put up my Christmas cards and a few bits of tinsel. I now have a boarding card for the 0800 to Manchester. This is the sixth boarding card I have had. It is very hard to understand why, time after time, they don’t know a flight is cancelled until some time after it was due to leave and all the passengers have queued at the gate for hours.
Of course, Manchester is a lot further from Ramsgate than Schiphol is, so even if the flight atually goes, this represents rather dubious progress.
Happy New Year everybody.
Remarkably, KLM delivered my lost luggage, including my laptop, at 9.30 pm on New Year’s Eve. At that time a pretty lively party was already in full swing,much improved by the presence of a great many beautiful young women, mostly from Latvia. I am not sure why; my life as ever consists of a bewildering succession of chance encounters with really nice people. I am in the fortunate position of being able to say that Nadira was the most lovely of all, without indulging in dutiful hyperbole.
It was an extremely happy Christmas. Having my mum, both my brothers and all my three chidren together was as great as it was rare.
We have been through the laptop in lost luggage discussion before. The problem is that my shoulders dislocate at the drop of a hat, and I travel without hand luggage to avoid an accident.
2011 is going to be a very important year for me. particularly the first quarter. A number of crucial events are going either to set me up financially for the rest of my life, or result in real distress and failure. At present I have reason to be very optimistic. I am also very absorbed in my life of Alexander Burnes, which I hope will help establish a serious academic reputation.
The Portuguese edition of Murder in Samarkand has sold unexpectedly well in Brazil. The translation of the Turkish edition has just been finished.
I hope to do a Wikileaks retrospective in the next couple of days. Just a quick thought on the case of the poor young gardener in Bristol. Of the Jill Dando case, long before Barry Bulsara’s succesful appeal I blogged that this appeared to be a miscarriage of justice in which the police had fitted up the local weirdo.
Despite not being enamoured of landlords in general, I fear the same dynamic is at work in Bristol, albeit Chris Jefferies is much more intellectually capable than Bulsara. My instinct is that the police have picked up on Jefferies for being camper than a boy scout jamboree and archer than Trajan.
Jefferies’ release on bail has me worried that there was nothing against him other than the “He’s a weird one, guv” instinct of some not very bright cop. The case needs to be closely watched as history shows that the powers of the police to make the evidence fit the suspect are considerable.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc82zjZ0rPk
Bornfree
I was the mug who got lumbered with monitoring here over Yule. Now I wouldn’t wish the job on my worst enemy.
The comment-board was so stultifyingly boring I jacked it in after a few days I’m afraid. After all I don’t think even Craig can stomach it either!
Notwithstanding the morass of stupefaction into which the board descended I did ascertain that the anal rape fantasists here resident are keen they should not be intellectually stripped bare like they were for most of last year.
The chief air-head, Jon, has evidently been lobbying heavily for a moderation policy to protect him and his shill friends from the predations of Steelback and Apostate et al and the resulting kind of intellectual exposure they endured last year.
A “moderation” policy will be the means to screen out links to independent blogs and ring-fence the already extremely narrow range of comment board views within the official CONTROLLED OPPOSITION ambit.
In other words comment board contributors will no longer have to think for themselves or stand on their own two feet-I mean that would be terrifying-their thinking will be done for them.
It’ll work a bit like WikiLeaks!
Until they bring it off, what say you we enjoy ourselves?
Yea, up for it…not sure re-the shills though!
Mind you we can always laugh at the image of Jon cowering intellectually naked at Craig’s place in Ramsgate begging for some MODERATION!
(lmao)
By the way my name is FREEBORN not bloody BORNFREE! I mean it means I’m a free-thinker not a bloody lion called Elsa!
More minstrelsy.
http://www.archeophone.com/product_info.php?products_id=74
They sure as Hell won’t like this one on Assange’s Illuminati ties:
http://stream.adamdodson.org/items/view/3920
The shills think the Illuminati is another name for Blackpool illumnations!
Oh look everyone, the clown car has shown up again! Do you suppose they were cooped up in it over the whole of xmas? I admire their loyalty to each other… they never perform on their own.
*
Clark at 4:24 AM: I find that hard hard to believe. If someone is inclined to do good things, they’ll do it regardless of a religious framework.
Whoa clock the Sad Saadi distractionist madly linking to music catalogues!
You couldn’t make it up!
It was worth popping back here just to recapture that image of the distractionist-on-duty madly banging at his keyboard to make sure the sheeple stay way off-topic!
Capt.Beefheart………..how far-out can a guy get, man?
FREAK!
Clark’s arguments are based on some misundestandings. Religion is not an evolved system, which predated atheism. Atheism was known in Greek times, and explicitly discussed without shame. It isn’t true that religion has been a force for learning – it has always been antithetic to learning, starting with the burning of the library at Alexandria and the murder of the lady mathematician, Hypatia.
Where the church seems to have been associated with learning, it usually had its own and political motives. In Scotland we had the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, which famously set out to create a school in every parish. But their intention was simply to have children read the bible (including Gaelic speakers, who had no idea what the words meant) and to build a bulwark against Catholic Jacobitism. However the kids went on to read a lot more Tom Paine and Blin Harry than scripture. The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
It is plausibly argued that the church was responsible for the Dark Ages in Europe, ended by the (atheistic) enlightenment. Some of the mitigations you claim for religion could also be applied to capitalism, revealing their absurdity: for example, here is one of your statements with that substitution made:
“.. yes, capitalism is also a divisive force. That’s typical of an evolved system – it’s not the least bit single-minded. My point is, it must have been doing more ‘good’ than ‘harm’, or evolution would have eliminated either it, or it’s practitioners.”
Capitalism is doing and has always done a great deal of harm. I see little evidence that your beneficent evolution is poised to remove it.
This also carries a misunderstanding of evolution – attributes for strength survive statistically better than those for a weakness, but that does not mean that all weak attributes or adaptations perish – if that were the case, humans would (for example) be less likely to die of choking on their food.
I don’t however blame religion for the ills of the world. Peek behind the pious scenery and you will always find the wheels of power. Religion is politically useful – it’s the earliest PR system, ready set up for the defence of the indefensible and the protection of privilege. It is still with us because it still works well – scarcely a politician that does not confess a deeply held faith at the earliest opportunity in his career.
And Petula is right at 10:44. Marriage had utterly nothing to do with women’s rights – it was about male ownership of women; the woman as chattel.
“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith. We need believing people.” – Adolf Hitler
glenn
Whenever I see that dumb name of yours I always think of the man in the moon. It’s got something to do with astronauts I think.
The moon……..is that where you live? I mean it sounds like you woke up late this morning after another vacuous session of airhead banter last night and wondered what passed at around 4 a.m. between Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
Is that sad or what?
So what’s it like in the moon?
You total NUMPTY!
I am seeing with my own eyes the validity of Chomsky’s contribution to linguistics. I have a young child at home and the remarkable thing is how well he’s picked up basic grammar already at just over 2 years of age. Logic and reason are not yet within his grasp, but his impatient demands are elaborate and stand up grammatically very well! This made me wonder if perhaps some of the contributors here are rather young. You know, the ones that appear unable to engage in a rational exchange and resort to insults as their argument but otherwise manage to form grammatically correct sentences.
evgueni: but young children are so much nicer! still, the ones I know have not been exposed to such extreme violent nonsense, or been abused violently themselves, thank goodness. i’m sure these people would benefit from entering the world as fully formed adults on their own: going travelling, say, or reading different books.
re religion: the lives of the early Christian saints seem quite interesting. The general story seems to be: pacifist, educated people who did high profile good works (helped the poor, saved plague victims, stood against violence and injustice) and then peacefully accepted being brutally tortured and murdered for it.
Hmm. Me, I think the karate kicking Buddhist monks may have had a point.
Reading suggestions:
I am David (Ann Holm)
There’s No Escape/The Silver Sword (Ian Serallier)
A Kestrel for a Knave (Barry Hines); also Kes, the film
Tempted to add any Terry Pratchett.
“Tempted to add any Terry Pratchett.”
Perhaps in particular ‘Small Gods’.
Well ther’re a good few hours of my life gone!
Interesting stuff again (some of) you peeps.
(I was nearly tempted to click on the “Leather Products” Spam-Bot link!).
Winter Greetings to all and sundry.
And Blessings to one and all.
🙂
Jessiedog
Woof
Heh Glenn – what’s it like to live in a country where state-sponsored educators tell children that Jesus and Mohammed could do magic?
Yes, many Americans are quite loud about religion, but the UK continues to take steps to institutionalise religion in state schools. In my country, religion impulses are continuously weeded out.
Plus – what’s it like to live in a country with a state-sponsored church?
that man is mad
Forgotten about Small Gods – Lords and Ladies is pretty cool too. the triumph of the morris dancers…
This natural gas find and subsequent development, will lead to a rise in tensions between Lebanon and Israel.
Already israel is threatening possible exploration companies with interference, should they so much come near their border.
Question is? what are the territorial waters of Israel and do they regard the much smaller gas field underneath the coastal waters of Gaza, also as their own to do as they like?
Craig no doubt would know, maybe there are maps available about territorial waters, if they are agreed that is.
If the borders are disputed we can expect Israel to walk all over any negotiations divide the parties in it or confuse and obfuse the proceedings for decades to come.
http://english.aljazeera.net/business/2010/12/20101230185238763632.html
Happy new year to everyone, unconditionally.
PS the ivory coast electoral disaster is goijg from bad to worse. All in a sudden we hear of Gadbo’s mass graves, as if they have been filled yesterday.
How come they did not know about mass graves? Was it covered up to improve diplomatic relations with this dictator?
and they’re rebelling against the neo-con in Tunisia: protestor shot by police; separate lawyers’ protest in Tunis attacked and lawyers beaten by police; mainstream media shut out; no mention on BBC; aljazeera (also banned there) getting the news from tweets and facebook.
A study examining the causes of a dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place six years ago.
The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year ?” a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/faulluja-birth-defects-iraq?CMP=twt_fd
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/29/us-military-investigates-5th-stryker-brigade
http://progressivescottishmuslims.blogspot.com/
Amanullah de Sondy – theologian – he is doing tremendously important and groundbreaking work. Check out his excellent blog, people. He was at Ithaca College, New York State and currently at the University of Miami. This is exactly the sort of complex analysis we all need.
evgueni
Last I remember you had an argument re-the “confirmation bias” supposedly inherent in conspiracy theories.
I believe the venerable sue hayle (LOL) tried to bail you out but by then the argument-if such there was-had already fallen flat on its face and been exposed by your interlocutor as a hopeless attempt at mystification on your part.
You were rumbled as a COMPLETE BULL-SHITTER to wit!
Wow Suhayl – you managed to link to some sites that don’t contain the Neo-Nazi linkage of the Jews to 911!
Perhaps there’s hope for you!
Don’t feed the trolls, folks.
Good information on the hijackers:
http://www.911myths.com/index.php/The_Hijackers
sue hayle
You wouldn’t know complex analysis from a hole in the ground,pal.
As an analysis of the revolutionary faith James Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men leaves your theological bull on its backside!
Detailed review here:
http://www.conspiracyresearch.org/forums/index.php?s=526f0c7d79f57a7cb3b5716d57c760c5&act=attach&type=post&id=385
Larry, please, do you believe in God? I’ve checked these guys out with a stethoscope and a geiger counter and found traces of human life but I can’t find any trace of human intelligence. Possibly you can help by providing evidence of religious faith. No wonder aliens have by-passed planet earth for so many centuries. They thought only vegetables lived in this place. I’m not joking. Please help. Stranded in Disbelief!!
not anno: don’t feed the trolls…
anno, why don’t you go nibble on a French Fancy you rich God-seeking ponce.