DUFF & NONSENSE!

Hurrah! I've got spots in front of my eyes!

After my gloomy prognostications in the previous post, here's some good news courtesy of that well-known spelling mistake, Leif Svalgaard - well, I always spell his name wrong!  He is a distinguished solar scientist who comments frequently and usefully at Anthony Watt's indispensable site.  If you look carefully at the picture below do not attempt to flick those little specks off in the mistaken belief that it's some fag ash carelessly dropped by myself or Dr? Prof? (not sure which) Svalgaard.  They are in fact sun spots and there is enough energy in those little specks to light several trillion billion fags!  They are important because, at long last, they indicate, I put it no higher, that the next solar cycle, #24, is possibly beginning.  I incline to the view that the earth's climate is hugely effected by the sun.  I do this, in the finest traditions of Duff and Nonsense, on the basis of absolutely nil knowledge - so no change there, then!  However, having read proponents of various  theories on this tricky subject I trust the likes of Svalgaard who is always cautious and careful in his remarks.  As far as you and I are concerned it's important because if the lack of activity in the sun had continued (and it still might) there is a goodly chance that we would have entered a cool, or even a cold, period.  On the whole global warming is "A Good Thing"; global cooling, on the other hand, is a disaster!

 

 

If you're old, be afraid, be very afraid!

An alternative title to this post might be What Goes Around Comes Around! During the '70s when I was trying to build my life Britain was sucked into a maelstrom of inflation fueled by borrowing and spending and the wholesale printing of money indulged in by stupid and venal politicians who put their party interests before that of the nation.  One of the immediate effects was an upsurge in union militancy which plumbed such depths of depravity that even the dead were not buried.

As it happens, I did quite well out of it!  As house prices shot up, I kept changing houses and ramping up my mortgage in order to 'buy' bigger and better properties, confident that no matter how much I borrowed the value of the house would leap ahead - and so it proved.  Eventually I was able to sell the penultimate house, clear the mortgage and buy another one for cash. Now the wheel has turned full circle and is about to run over my foot - or even, perhaps, my neck.  Over the next few years the government, irrespective of party, will make feeble efforts to impose the required but tough measures needed to reduce our national debt (which is a mere bagatelle by comparison to the 1970s) by cutting government budgets which will entail lay-offs and wage freezes (or even cuts) for public service employees.  If you're thinking of dying, do it quick, is my advice!  So you can expect the next few years to be dominated by strikes and go-slows for which the government will be blamed.

Politicians being what they are, they will look for an easier route out of this difficulty, and indeed, they have already found it.  If you need more money to keep things going then print the bloody stuff!  As "the pound in your pocket", to quote an infamous Wilsonian phrase of the '70s, reduces in value so does the government's debt.  In the long run, of course, it will end in disaster, but then when did you last hear of a politician who could think beyond the next election?  For those like me, elderly and dependent on a fixed income from modest savings and a pension plan, the outlook is grim.  We will see a drop in our already modest life-styles and a return to a strike-ridden life in which, say, trains and 'planes will cease to operate, energy and water cease to flow and hospitals will cease to operate.  The only very slight and ironic humour to be derived from the situation is that when the teachers refuse to teach it will not make an iota of difference to the 'edukashanal' quality of our children!

Have a nice day!

An inconvenient truth

I am obliged to Bryan (not a blogger with whom I am usually in agreement!) for directing a shaft of truthful light into the murky world of South American politics, specifically with regard to the recent law enforcement action in Honduras.  You will note that I deliberately failed to use the word 'coup' because, as Bryan shows via a link to The Christian Science Moniter, the action of the army was not only proper but undertaken in defence of a democratic constitution.  In effect, the former president was attempting a 'Chavez', that is, a manipulation designed to keep him in office for life.  According to Octavia Sanchez, a lawyer and former minister:

"Don't believe the coup myth. The Honduran military acted entirely within the bounds of the Constitution. The military gained nothing but the respect of the nation by its actions.

I am extremely proud of my compatriots. Finally, we have decided to stand up and become a country of laws, not men. From now on, here in Honduras, no one will be above the law."

The fact that 'Oprah' Obama rushed to condemn this defence of freedom and the rule of law tells you all you need to know about his political instincts.  The further fact that virtually every other government joined in the chorus of disapproval is yet another demonstration of the age-old fact that crooks, when faced with a threat to their bailiwicks, immediately join together irrespective of their politics.

"Seven Days in May" 1964

In a fit of nostalgia I have just watched that old black and white movie, and yes, the plot is a little contrived, and yes again, the liberals are the 'good guys' - what else do you expect from Hollywood? - and true, one or two bits of the script are sanctimonious, but even so - what a cracking movie!  I do not write that only because Ava Gardner was in it but I must confess that she still remains, for me, the most attractive and alluring woman that was ever on screen.

Of course, being a liberal film there was a semi cop-out in that the hero, Kirk Douglas, does sully his impeccable democratic character by taking the incriminating but personal letters which he has obtained by the seduction of the lady concerned, Ava Gardner; but the straight-backed, honourable president, Frederic March, after a brief struggle with his conscience, refuses to use them.  When I think back to our most recent Democratic presidents, of course, they in a similar position would not have hesitated for a second, indeed, a conflict with their consciences would not even have occurred to them.

So, yes, alright, it was a load of piffle, really, but damn I enjoyed it!

More Balls - a must read!

This post by Fraser Nelson is a must read!  It tells you everything you ever needed to know, or more likely, have confirmed, concerning the psychotic liars and hallucinators who run our country.  Please read it.  I will only add these two observations: the fact that Balls picked up the 'phone and rang Nelson personally is indicative of an exposed nerve having been prodded by Nelson's scalpel; and it is a confirmation of the power of political blogs, particularly those written by informed insiders who reach a huge audience directly but whose writings are then picked up and amplified by the broader media.  It was Nelson who first highlighted the IFS study which provided the ammo for what turned out to be a massive broadside into 'Battleship Brown' which had hitherto sailed along laying down thick smoke.  (Enough with the naval metaphors - Ed!)  Even Cameron has now realised that the government's agit-prop must be met head on - with truth.  Let us hope he also realises that under the relentless eyes of blogdom he must ensure that he and his team stick as close to the truth as they can lest they, too, sink without trace.

Now, altogether, three cheers for Fraser Nelson - and three more for 'The Speccie' - hip, hip, hip . . .

Name: Balls, E. Form: Lwr. 5th Grade: 'F'

I will leave you to decide what the 'F' stands for!  After 11 years of government the "Education, education, education" Labour party is bringing out its, oh, I don't know, 4th? 5th? major white paper on education which appears now to be undoing all that was proposed under the previous white papers.  'Ed (Blinky)' Balls made me shiver this morning as he stared at me maniacally out of my TV screen with his bulging eyes.  As usual with all government ministers, I switched the sound off, and fell to wondering exactly how high our education service rates in 'Blinky's' scale of priorities.  Only a couple of weeks ago he was all fired up with the hope that he would be the next Chancellor, and his full-time employment appears to be a despairing attempt to keep 'ur wee Gordie' in Downing Street, but on the other hand, there are increasing rumours that he is now far more concerned with getting himself elected leader when the men in white coats finally knock on the door of No. 10.

In the meantime, education is sluiced down the pan, and we can all laugh or weep, according to taste, at the recent story of 18-year-olds who were unable to understand the term "despotic tyranny" in a recent A-level history exam!  Even more vomit-inducing is the sight of semi-educated smart Alecs here sneering, not at the thickoes with no vocabulary, but at the people who are genuinely shocked at this example of abysmal ignorance.  And these university-educated slobs consider themselves, rightly, I suppose, as prime examples of our brave, new wave, younger generation of intelligentsia!  God help us all!

It must now be a truth universally acknowledged that all ministers of education are a waste of precious oxygen and so is their Westminster department, to say nothing of the countless fat, leeching bureaucracies that have spawned around the country under the title of local education authorities.  The solution is simple: close down all the LEAs, give every parent a voucher, sell all the schools to their teachers (formed into a co-operative) for a penny and tell them to get out there and earn their living by providing a good service to their customers, the parents. 

 

Is the drunken sailor in charge really Capt. Queeg?

I must begin with an apology.  I have frequently implied that our prime minister spends money, our money,that is, like a drunken sailor.  That is a gross slur on sailors, drunk or sober, who tend, on the whole to spend their money on personal pleasures - "Rum, bum and baccy", according to "A Former Naval Person"!  Anyway, I gave the impression that 'Able Seaman Broon' just threw our money around for personal pleasure and as a sop to his atavistic socialism.  He obviously derived great pleasure from it and quickly surrounded himself with a circle of admiring and flattering toadies who encouraged him to devise crooked, underhand ways of spending other people's money without them fully realising the awful extent of it.

Now he has been found out and the full scope of his 'Ponzi scheme' is beginning to enter the public consciousness.  A man of wit and intelligence would try to talk the calamity down, blame others and set about putting matters right by cutting spending and thereby taking credit for his great financial rectitude.  Well, he has certainly ticked off the first two items on his 'to do' list, and it is obvious now, even to the economically illiterate, that he will have to do the third.  However, Queeg-like, he sits glumly in the Downing Street bunker, clicking the little steel ball-bearings in his hand, and recites over and over again that he will not be cutting - but spending!  He keeps re-iterating this lie in more and more strident language.  He appears in public, grinning and nodding, his mouth falling open at odd moments, his body jerking from right to left, like some sort of demented marionette.  Today, almost certainly at the behest of his private cabal, he has postponed the spending review which should, by his own rules, take place this year - until after the election, and will thus be free to carry on borrowing and spending and splurging and then borrowing even more . . . and even more . . . and yet more.

'Capt.' Brown is mad - stark staring bonkers.  If his cabinet had the courage of even a weasel they would lead him quietly away to a rich man's clinic in Switzerland.  Alas for our poor country, none of them have the guts.  Chancellor Darling is a pitiful broken figure.  The ex-postie who thinks he's running the Home Office is as thick as a sack of spanners.  Miliband, Balls, Cooper, Harman and the rest of them, appalled as they are, can only mutter jabberwocky behind their sleeves.

The only very slight encouragement to be found in this unfolding disaster is the obvious fact that Tory Central Office is watching carefully the words of Duff & Nonsense because, after much urging from these august columns, it now appears that Cameron has learned that a good officer shouts "Come on!" not "Go on!" and he seems determined to lead a long and persistent charge head on into the barrage of prime ministerial lies and obfuscations.  I think, I hope, I pray, that the country senses the fact that they are led by a psychotic liar and fantasist and that at the next election they will ensure the utter destruction of Gordon Brown, his wretched cohorts and inded the entire not-fit-for-purpose Labour party.

Black-and-white minstrel dies! World in mourning! Duff asks, "Who he?"

I have odd habits in bed at night! (now then . . .  remember, I do the jokes here!)  One of them is that I often go to sleep with a radio ear-piece burbling away in my ear (so as not to disturb the little 'Memsahib' who can cut up rough if her beauty sleep is disturbed).  I used to tune in to the World Service but found it rather repetitive, so now I stick to Radio 5 Live.  You will notice that both are talk radio stations because I found that when I tried Classic FM the music would often be so enthralling I actually couldn't get to sleep.  Anyway, last night I settled down only to discover that the BBC (and apparently, the rest of the world) has gone into a sort of catatonic shock over the death of Mr. Michael Jackson, the well-known clown whose antics have kept us all chuckling over the years.  It was obvious that to poor little Richard Bacon on Radio 5 the end of the world had occurred as he endlessly repeated in shocked, hushed tones that, so to speak, yet another warbler had fallen off the twig but that this one might actually cause the earth to wobble on its axis.  One might have thought that 'St.' Obama, himself, had passed away - fat chance!  Anyway, it was obvious that the BBC was going to indulge itself in an all-night welter of wet, windy sentimentality over a not very talented song-and-dance man so I tore the ear-piece out and lay awake most of the night listening to the little 'Memsahib's' breathing - which became rather fast and agitated at one stage - she must have been dreaming of me, I suppose.

Additional:  Paul Waugh has a rather charming vignette concerning the late Mr. Jackson, here.

Mummy, mummy, my brain hurts!

Of course it hurts because it's very titchy, even titchier than 'Little Willy's', er, little willy, so that when I contemplate really complicated things like 7x8=? . . . I begin to feel my own pain, never mind yours.  And when I go on to immerse myself in questions like the how? and the why? of life in the universe  then a serious migraine instantly appears.  Well don't think about such things, you silly old fool, I hear you mutter under your breath but the unfortunate fact is that I am cursed with galloping curiosity.  These, and other questions, some profound, some downright dippy, tease away at me and then I go and buy (another) book, and hey-ho my brain-ache begins!

The "onlie begetter" of this particular headache is Paul Davies, author of a slim volume entitled "The Fifth Miracle".  Davies is a physicist with "research interests in black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity" - yeeees, quite!  In this book, published in 1999 so that it's possibly been overtaken such is the speed of scientific discovery, he takes his readers on a journey from the indescribably immense down into the incredibly tiny, from the birth of the universe to the creation of the first molecules.  He offers the hypothesis that life began, not in Darwin's famous "warm little pond", but inside microscopic rock fissures deep below the oceans and close to hot volcanic vents.  Davies is a scrupulously honest writer and hedges his hypothesis about with myriad ifs, buts and maybes.  (It is a particular pleasure to me, as someone who has wasted too much time trying to grapple with so-called 'climate scientists' - step up, 'Little Willy' - many of whom refuse to open their research to others that in this book Davies allows us a glimpse of the great and serious controversies that wrack this area of science but whose practitioners are entirely open with their 'facts and figures' thus permitting careful scrutiny.)

However, in addition, Davies postulates that whilst we are undoubtedly descendents of an original microbe, that microbe itself might not have been the first, or second, or whatever.  Such was the ferocity of the inter-stellar bombardment the earth received in its early days that truly original, microbiotic life forms might have been wiped out, perhaps more than once.  The question then arises as to how likely would it have been if, say, effort #2 had succeeded that the end result would have been much the same as you now see about you?  So far, so . . . well, so maybe!  But then Davies throws in a curved ball by suggesting that life might have originated on Mars - first!  Apparently its current barren, bleak, inhospitable resemblance to a Burnley housing estate should not be taken as a forever!  A little before life evolved on earth (3.8 to 3.5 billion years ago), Mars was rather warm and wet and pressurised properly with all mod cons in the volcanic and deep sea departments and could well have been the first progenitor, so to speak.  Davies theorises, with considerable persuasion, that large inter-stellar debris slamming into the Martian surface (see, those yobs get everywhere!) would have, in turn, hurled huge amounts of debris out into space and much of it would have landed here on earth.  (In fact, Martian rocks have already been identified on earth.)  He maintains that very primitive microbiological life forms in a state of suspended animation could have been carried inside these rocks, thus protecting them from all those nasty rays that flash about in space, and having splashed into our oceans they might well have found the right spot to jog them back into action.  Equally, he is at pains to point out, it is possible that the process went the other way with earthly life forms being hurled at Mars.  ("Heh, heh, there goes the neighbourhood!")

Hanging over all this unbelievably fascinating and exciting stuff, is a truly monster question.  Let me put it this way:  "In the beginning" there was just matter and energy (two sides of the same coin, according to young Einstein) and - gravity.  I emphasise the word gravity because I find it completely mysterious.  I know how it works (well, in layman's terms) but no-one has ever explained to me why it works.  Why should a mass of something attract something else at a distance?  Mind you, it's a good job we have it because the universe began with (I seem to remember from another of those damned books) approximately 75% hydrogen atoms and 25% helium atoms with minute traces of odds and sods to make up the basket [corrected thanks to my first commenter].  There was, I am assured, very slight imperfections in the pattern of the explosion that emanated from the 'Big Bang' which meant that some of these atoms combined and immediately that happened good old gravity began its work.   Without it, stars and galaxies would never have formed, and neither would we.  It is at this point, the very earliest of moments of the life of the universe that the monster question arises: Does the universe contain Laws that tend towards the eventual creation of life?

Well, of course, no one knows but here is a quote from Freeman Dyson : "The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming."(1)  The answer will only be found if and when it can be conclusively shown that life has not and could not have developed anywhere else in the cosmos.  The point is that if our own galaxy (either Earth or Mars, or possible both) are the "onlie begetters" of life then it can be assumed that the whole thing was a fluke, a one-off chance in a zillion.  This would suit the 'Darwinistas' because the opposite conclusion, that life has not only developed in this galaxy but all over the universe in countless other galaxies, would imply (I put it no higher) some sort of guiding purpose or aim in the Laws of Physics.  That sort of thing might actually send 'Archbishop' Dawkins completely round the bend that he is already halfway around - so it can't be all bad! 

You would be right to doubt my pathetic attempts to sum up a complex scientific and philosophical controversy, so let me finish by quoting Davies's final paragraph:

"The search for life elsewhere in the universe is therefore the testing ground for two diametrically opposed world views.  On the one hand is orthodox science, with its nihilistic philosophy of the pointless universe, of impersonal laws oblivious of ends, a cosmos in which life and mind, science and art, hope and fear, are but fluky incidental embellishments on a tapestry of irreversible cosmic corruption.  On the other hand, there is an alternative view, undeniably romantic but perhaps true nevertheless.  It is the vision of a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe, governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve towards life and consciousness.  A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things.  A universe in which we are not alone."

1: Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson, 1979, p.250

Take no Labour party prisoners!

I have admonished you frequently in recent months that come the election Labour must be destroyed - utterly.  If the rascals and reprobates succeed in hanging on to more than a 100 seats you will all be on a charge of dereliction of duty!  Yes, yes,  I know that the Tories and some LibDems had their snouts in the trough, too, but Labour were the ruling party and like the captain of any ship they must take the ultimate responsibility.  One might, after a goodly intake of 'Scottish water', just possibly have been inclined to entertain very slight feelings of forgiveness given one's own efforts to avoid paying those bastards in the Inland Revenue a penny more than one has to, but in their infantile, yah-boo-sucks approach to the election of a Speaker to the Commons they have forfeited any sympathy or inclination to mercy.  It is obvious that given the odium in which young Bercow is immersed as far as the Tory party is concerned it was mass Labour votes that greased him into the chair in the hope that he would be as big an embarrassment to the Tories as that Glaswegian thickoe was to them.  Thus, yet again, putting petty party point scoring before the serious concerns of the country makes them not just unfit for government but unfit to be parliamentarians.  Let us be rid of them, and let a new coalition of the Left arise.

As for young Bercow the signs are ominous but let us wait and see.  It will not be a long wait because his first real test will come when some 'new' government policy is leaked to the Sunday prints or announced on Radio 4.  If Bercow has balls (or Balls, because he is one of the biggest leakers) then he will insist on the minister concerned coming to the Commons and explaining himself.  Well, it might happen - but don't hold your breath!