Tim Blair owns idiot

Bike riding journo is rude to a guy delivering mattresses. She writes about it and post pics.

Tim Blair is not impressed and beats the living crap out of her pathetic blog.

 

Elizabeth barely made that point.

Anyway, all hell broke loose. By breakfast, my humdrum little blog had 50 comments and a thousand hits. By day’s end, almost 4000.

Her “humdrum little blog” is promoted by the SMH, where a mere 4000 hits in a day is “all hell” breaking loose.

I was called a pompous prat, a rude and viscious (sic) idiot, an incredibly stupid woman, a small sad person, a pompous git, an old commie bat, an absolute wanker, a poor little suffering Doctor princess pet, a moron, an imbecile, a pestiferous little idiot, a selfish fool, an arrogant conceited woman, an old tart, an old fart, a dolt, lord of the bicycle paths, a wowser, pathetic, despicable, weak, dishonest and a complete f—wit. tim blair

I fear the poor woman has brought a table spoon to a gun fight.

Prince Harry’s Friends

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/9505169/Army-anger-as-troops-strip-naked-in-support-of-Prince-Harry.html

What happens in Vegas should have stayed in Vegas.

Of course Harry showed no judgement at all but it really should not matter. He was not “on duty” in any sense of that word.

As one of the supporters is quoted as saying:

Lisa Bushell spoke for many with her comment about Harry next to her naked salute: “If you can fight in Afghanistan you can get naked wherever you choose in my book. We salute you Sir!!!!”

My book too.

(But I cannot imagine anything more boring than strip billiards.)

Syria

So how long does it take to do a no fly zone?

Assad is going down.

The only question is how long it will take the West to end the slaughter?

 

As Spain, So goes Quebec

Data from the European Central Bank shows that outflows from Spanish commercial banks reached €74bn (£59bn) in July, twice the previous monthly record. This brings the total deposit loss over the past year to 10.9pc, replicating the pattern seen in Greece as the crisis spread. the telegraph

We don’t track capital flows by province in Canada.

But were I a betting man I would put dollars to, er, well Frappachinos, that the smart money in Quebec is moving fast.

 

Bets

My pal Jimmy from the bar – down the hill and thank God he drove me back up – bet me $100 that the Big “0” would win. I memorialize the bet simply because I cannot imagine that the Americans would be so stupid,

Win or loose there are drinks to be had.

Buffers and No-fly

Francois Hollande, the French president, declared on Monday night that he and his international partners were closer than ever before to a formal intervention in Syria.

“We are working … [on] the initiative of buffer zones proposed by Turkey,” Mr Hollande said. “We are doing so in co-ordination with our closest partners.” telegraph

There is nothing remotely good about what is happening in Syria. Assad is a butcher, he’s backed by Iran and Hezbollah. But much of his opposition are Sunni hardliners.

Little wonder there is a refugee crisis. And therefore a reasonable call for the creation of buffer zone. But to have that you need to have air superiority which will mean a no-fly zone. And once you go there things begin to get messy.

Worse, while getting rid of Assad is a good thing, what replaces him is not likely to be terrifically attractive.

I don’t think there is a good solution to Syria, just several solutions which are, potentially, less bad than the current slaughter.

Parade’s End

When I was about 15 I was in Seattle and wandered to the Pike Street Market. Found a bookstore. And, in the back I found Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End.

I read a big chunk of it on the bus coming back up to Vancouver. I’ve been reading it ever since.

I like long novels: Alexandria Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown (even when Scott is writing drunk), A Dance to the Music of Time, Sword of Honour, The Balkan and Levant Trilogies, War and Peace, I Claudius…and so on.

Some make brilliant television, most don’t. The Dance was awful. So I am eager to see Parade’s End which I would have thought was as unfilmable as Ulysses. 

Through the good graces of my pal Kevin Grace I have just downloaded the first episode which aired tonight on the BBC. Should be fun. The ‘net is very cool indeed.

Update: Wonderful. Not the book; rather the essence of the book converted into something which you can watch on TV.  I chat with my eldest son Simon about whether film can be literature. I don’t think it can. It is a different thing.

Tom Stoppard knows that. He is faithful to Ford “in his fashion”.  The essence of Parade’s End is the failing attempt of Tietjens to hold to an upright, romantic, Tory ideal while the Edwardian world collapses around him. And, the fact is that he is smart enough to see the collapse and to see how he might survive it. The tension in the books, and here, is driven by whether he will succumb to the temptation to say “Good-bye to All That”.  And over the next few weeks we’ll see how Sir Tom manages that ambiguous decision.

I can’t wait.

(Oh, and for those thinking this is a Downton Abbey clone…you have not even begun to see how deeply and fundamentally Ford understood the real Edwardian world and it’s annihilation. )

Livid Lutherans firebomb Spiegel

German magazine Spiegel was firebombed today for posting a hateful depiction of Jesus on the Cross… (read the caption).

Oh wait, this is a mature religion which does not firebomb people it disagrees with or even haul them before Human Rights Commission. Nope, the German Christians are reported “angry”.

“I find it problematic when a caricature disparages the very heart of a faith,” Barbara Heinrich, a Protestant official in the city, told German news agency DPA. Local Catholic priest Harald Fischer has likewise criticized the caricature, according to the local paper, theHessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine (HNA), as have Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders from the area. spiegel

Not quite the Crusader spirit. No mention of stoning the blasphemer to death. No suggestion that Spiegel be fined for showing the caricature in question.

“Problematic” – a process word, not an action word. And they wonder why Europe is post Christian.

CBC meet Real Science

The CBC reports a climate alarmist study on Victoria which predicts wet winters, dry summers and higher sea levels due to global warming/climate change. Well worth reading upside down as the overwhelming majority of the comments are very skeptical indeed.

Then, just for fun, Real Science takes a look at 1) temperatures going back to 1850, 2) the tide gauge to 1910: temps falling, sea level, flat.

The sad part is that these facts are not going to make much difference to a Victoria’s Sustainability Department. If there is no change what would these bureaucrats do with their days?

65% of Canadians don’t believe in CAGW

Now, if you read the CBC you find out that 2% of the Canadians surveyed don’t believe climate is changing. That’s the headline “Only 2% of Canadians deny climate change, suggests poll”

But if you actually read the article here are the numbers:

32 per cent — said they believe climate change is happening because of human activity

54 per cent said they believe it’s because of human activity and partially due to natural climate variation.

9 per cent believe climate change is occurring due to natural climate variation.

2 per cent said they don’t believe climate change is occurring at all.

Does not fit the narrative so the CBC goes with the misleading 2% number. (And you have to be pretty dumb to think that climate is not changing – just the PDO will ensure a degree of change on a sixty year cycle.)

Our warmist media can’t bring itself to recognize that the CAGW panic is over. The science does not support panic, nor do the economics justify very much more than a few studies ideally based on realistic estimates of potential change. (Not 1 metre sea level rises in a decade or two.) Better still, CAGW has entirely lost political traction in North America. There are, of course, still greenie scare mongers; but there is next to no political support for any measures costing anything to address what is increasingly seen as a non-problem.

But, for heavens sake, don’t tell the CBC.