Bad

Nope.

Who'd have thought that Stupidity Shielding would be so effective.

I've had some more correspondence from our little English girlfriends afraid of the Boogey Man. Y'all are not going to believe this, but they're still asking, "So, just what are your thoughts on the BNP?"



Perhaps I was not clear below. I'll try again, using smaller words.

The BNP doesn't matter.

They were only ever a symptom of Britain's deadly political disease.

You have fetishized them because that was what you have been taught to do by the brainwashing you have undergone from the BBC/Guardian Bubble you all live in. Unless you leave the UK, in mind as well as body, you will never know how enmeshed you have all become in the Marxist honey trap.

You've been trained, like a bunch of performing seals, to ritualistically spit on the ground and make signs against the Evil Eye whenever their name is mentioned. In short, your terror of getting the BNP-cooties, and your accompanying fear of a robust political conservatism, is a result of having drunk the lefty Koolaid.

When Call-me-Dave started his "modernising" programme for the Tories, it was, in effect, a white flag, a declaration that the left's bullshit critique, "nasty," of the party was correct. It was, in short, a capitulation, and a declaration that from now on, the goal of the "right" in British politics would be "ever-closer union" with their opponents. Classical or Traditional Conservatives (look it up) now have no representation in Britain's political life. So, good work there, guys, we've been Stockholm-Syndromed, thanks.

(My own political position has had no representation since the mid-16th century, so it's hardly surprising that the likes of you all didn't have a frame of reference to identify it.)

UKIP, as well as the BNP, only went as far as the zeitgeist would allow, that is, to libertarianism. Yes, the joke all along has been that the BNP were never "rightwing" according to any objective standards of political theory. They were socialists and statists as much as every other British political movement. None of which matters much now since they are defunct as a political force in Britain, with nearly all of their support having gone over to UKIP.

But hey, don't let these "fact" thingies stop you. By all means, continue to play your crucial role in the programme destroying our country. That none of you has any idea that fascism and socialism are the same political species, that their diseased shoots come from the same political root, is what tells me there's no hope at all Britain can be turned back to the path of the grownups.

So anyway ladies, if you want another fish from your political masters, or really feel the need of another bitch-slap, feel free send me another email asking if I support the BNP. I'm only too happy to keep mocking and ridiculing you in public.

~ * ~

Oh, and in case you're wondering? Yes, I did actually leave the link to Simon Darby up there specifically in order to get under your skin. Y'all will note that I've moved it up to the top of the list now.



~

What do you do when you're sick?

Watch nature shows on TV.

Durrrr...

Or in this case on YouTube.


Cool BBC documentary on recent discoveries about Archimedes.

Was suddenly violently ill last night. Started vomiting at ten pm and was up all night. I think it was something I et. After my stomach had finished panicking, I commented on FB that having survived C, one tends to think of one's self as indestructible and impervious to all lesser illness or injury. It was cancer after all, and was going to kill you, and instead, you killed it. You feel ready after that to take up grizzly wrestling as a hobby, and you tend to forget that things like flu and food poisoning can still happen to you.

Fortunately, being up all night has lately become something of a habit/strategy to deal with the horrific late Italian summer heat, so I'm not as badly off as I would have been otherwise. Tummy still pretty delicate though, and not exactly bubbling over with energy. So it's a good day to lie around, sketch Winnie, mess about with my new set of watercolour pencils and watch nature shows.

It reminds me of when I was a kid and would start spontaneously vomiting the night before school out of sheer panic at the thought of the next day. I hated school in the 2nd grade more violently and psychotically than I did at any other time. It was probably due to the shock of being back in Canada, among the North American child-savages and teacher-sadists that were such a contrast to the relatively civilised English variants I'd known up to then.

I will never forget the name of my 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Lakowski, who was one of that wretched breed of creature that gets into teaching specifically to have a room full of helpless test subjects on whom to act out her most treasured vengeance fantasies. Her favourite teaching technique was a gentle combination of screaming insanely and humiliation and her cruelty was matched only by her smarmy, treacly sweetness in the presence of parents.

I had been rather sheltered up to that point, (it was still decades before the English school system had rocketed to the bottom of that ol' slippery slope) and the kids I'd known up to then, while not exactly friendly towards me, were at least not encouraged to be bullies. It was something I'd never experienced before. Eventually, my rather hapless mother, not knowing what to do with this kid who was getting more and more terrorised by school, decided that a less structured, more "free and open" environment was the answer. Unfortunately, the structure they threw out at the hippie "free school" was things like classrooms and instruction.

Anyway, suffice to say, I spent a lot of time at home sipping chicken broth and watching PBS.



~

Hey everybody! Free stuff!

I had a very vivid dream last night/this morning that I had gone back to high school as an "adult student," but it was horribly chaotic and confusing, no one would tell me what classes I was signed up for, where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to read. I had a math class but it was over by the time I found it and when I asked for the book, the teacher told me I had already failed. Then I went to my Classics class and though they gave us a big pile of books, the only thing we were supposed to do was watch I Claudius.

I have been thinking back on school lately, and wondering why exactly I hated it so much. At the time I didn't think much about why I hated it; I was too busy hating it. But it seems obvious now that it was a stupid idea to stick a kid like me, brought up to a nearly convent-like domestic silence and solitude, into a high school environment full of screeching thugs and half-crazed teachers.

I remember once in a physics class (which I loved) working out how much time my teacher, Bob Schwartz, spent each year telling kids to sit down, shut up and pay attention. I think it was something like 150 hours a year. He wasn't happy to hear it.

Does anyone learn anything in high school? I know I had a lot of curiosity about things, as I still do. I wanted to know about literature and insects and history and weather and geology and languages and music and art and all manner of things. But looking back on it, I'm surprised I was able just to survive it with sanity barely preserved.

Here's a bunch of sites, using mostly YouTube where you can amuse yourself learning about stuff.

500 free courses from "top" universities.

Free Film Noir.

Khan Academy - science and math lessons on YouTube

New Scientist YouTube channel.

Poetry Readings - something to listen to while we draw.

Research channel of the American Museum of Natural History.(Watch out! Scary close-up pics of live spiders on this page! Ick!)

Arkive blog: lots and lots of nature videos to bring out your inner amateur naturalist.

The BBC teaches you Italian.

Learn Italian on iTunes

Let's learn Italian in five-minute increments

Lots of other languages.

Pilates exercise videos

Bunch more Pilates vids.

Documentaries, documentaries, documentaries.

Atlantis! Dinosaurs! Freemasons! Alien conspiracy videos!

Art of the Western World video series

The Western Canon: audio course on the civilisation-building literature

and The Western Tradition, for those who couldn't afford TAC.

Real Classics: Xenophon's Oeconomicus, a year-long audio course from St. John's College in Annapolis

Learn to draw with John Ruskin's methods: Oxford

Aesthetics and the philosophy of art: Oxford

~

I can stop any time I want

I'm starting an internet meme. We have all read those articles (actually, probably about 1/3 of the articles) that say the internet is destroying our attention span and will power and making us stupid. But few of these have much to say to us about kicking the brain-suckage habits.

There are some of us who have no choice but to spend hours a day on it, and few of these articles ever offer any sort of practical suggestions on how to take control of this activity that seems so easily to take control of us.

I've noticed that sometimes I can find myself doing some mindless thing on the internet and not even really be aware of how I "got there" or even, in some cases, how much time has passed.

A recent study found that social media like facebook and twitter can be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol.

Experts around the world are seeing a rise in internet addiction and the effects can be just as damaging as drugs.

So, I'm collecting suggestions for an article on how to combat the habits that make the internet into a brain-trap. What do you do to stop yourself melting into the net?

Here's mine: Lately, I've been having a hard time remembering to take my medication, and have often remembered only several hours later than the scheduled time. I have two pills to take each day and they can't be less than about 11 or 12 hours apart, so if I forget to take the morning pill until three pm, then I'm facing difficulties taking the second one. Some days I've skipped a dose because of this and have suffered for it.

So, lately, I've been setting the alarm on my phone for when it's time to take my pills. This has the secondary effect of jarring me out of whatever time-sucking thing that I'm currently fooling around with on the internet, reminding me of the existence of the outside world.

So, in order to try to control my internet use, I thought maybe I'd try to set a timer, to go off once an hour or so, to kind of wake me out of my internet trance state and remind me that the world is still there and that there are other things to do in it.

Another big trap is first thing in the morning, when your will power is not at it's strongest, to have the computer sitting there from the night before on the coffee table. It's not quite the first thing I do every day, (my first thought in the morning is always the same: tea) but when the tea's made and I've brought the tray in and put it on the dining room table, there it is. It says, "why don't you just have a peek around Internetland while you're having your tea?" Next thing I know, it's noon.

The solution to this one is to put the computer away at night. Roll up the cable, pack up the laptop and put it in the cupboard over night. The problem with the net is that it's there all the time and it's really easy to get. You just plop down on the sofa with your tea and toast, open the Mac and voy-lah, you're in again. But I've found that I'm not so far gone that I'll do the morning surf if I have to go looking for the computer and plug it in. So, putting it away at night works pretty well.

OK, now you.



~

'Nother contest

Don't usually link to Huffpo, but this is too good to miss: a brief history of Canada's language law.

And the contest is for our American and European readers (so Canuckstanis, shush.)

In the early days of this country most people spoke French; then after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, most people in Canada spoke English.

And that's the way things stayed until the late 1960s when former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau enacted the "Official Languages Act."

This was an historic law which gave Canadians the legal right to get all huffy and indignant and threaten lawsuits, whenever a federal civil servant in places like Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan or Kippers Flippers, Newfoundland didn't start a conversation with the word: "Bonjour."

Which town name is made up and which one is real?

Canada: used to be good, now just funny.



~

Also, I'm starting to think that the internet isn't very good for you

New states of mind the internet has created.

Any of this sound familiar?

(fixed the link...)

The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation. During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.

The behavior equates to mindlessly refreshing and ‘lozenging’ the same sources of information repeatedly. While performing this behavior the individual feels a sense of numb depersonalization, being calmly and pragmatically aware that they have no identifiable need to be at the computer nor are they gleaning any practical use from it at that moment, and the individual may feel vaguely uncomfortable or ashamed about this awareness in concert with the fact that they continue to perform the idle ‘refreshing’ behavior. They may feel increasingly anxious and needful, similar to the sensation of having an itch that needs scratching or a thirst that needs quenching, all while feeling as though they are calm or slightly bored.

Dear God...

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

The Great Steyn hath spoken

I initially had mixed feelings about Everybody Draws Mohammed Day. Provocation for its own sake is one of the dreariest features of contemporary culture, but that's not what this is about. Nick Gillespie's post reminds us that the three most offensive of the "Danish cartoons" - including the one showing Mohammed as a pig - were not by any Jyllands-Posten cartoonists but were actually faked by Scandinavian imams for the purposes of stirring up outrage among Muslims...

But, that aside, the clerics' action underlines what's going on: the real provocateurs are the perpetually aggrieved and ever more aggressive Islamic bullies - emboldened by the silence of "moderate Muslims" and the pre-emptive capitulation of western media.

causa finita.


But it's not just the western media.

Just finished this amusing and highly illustrative exchange on a facebook page where a friend of mine had posted a traditional Bomb Turban cartoon of old Mo in honour of the day. FB, whose profile made it clear that she is a white westerner, whould be a shoo-in for a job with the CBC multicultural relations department. Or maybe the CHRC.

FB:
I'm all for freedom of speech but that does not give people the right to say and do anything that they want. ps I am catholic (if you didn't already know and I go to church).

Hilary Jane Margaret White:
So, you like freedom of speech, as long as its not, you know, free.

FB:
Hilary I don't know you but if i started insulting you would that be ok??? You know free speech and all.


Hilary Jane Margaret White:
It should be legal. That's what free speech means. It means that if you insult me and I get mad, I can't have you thrown in prison.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
...or have your head cut off, or blow up your embassy, or shoot your priest, or kidnap and murder your journalists, or...

get it now?


FB
Interesting theory you have got going there. Don't suppose you are American by any chance?


Hilary Jane Margaret White
Nope. Just rational.


FB
Rational? If you say so..that's your free speech!


A,
so logically, from the point of Hilary, people who blow up embessies [sic] are offended by freedom of speech!!!cuz it is not legal?

FB
A, we could be friends but im getting the hell off facebook bc people do think they have the right to say and do anything they want.


Hilary Jane Margaret White
A, do you just put words into a bag and shake them up when you read things? So sentences are kind of like Scrabble pieces for you then...


FB:
A, don't be offended by Hilary. When people don't have anything to say they resort to comments like this.

Hilary Jane Margaret White
Ready to be arrested now, 'cause, you know, free speech should only be free when no one is offended...

Right?

New "If I wore t-shirts" file

If I wore t-shirts, I'd get one like this:


or like this:


or like this:

Stop me before I share again...

This from Mac's place:


I realise that it probably contradicts everything I've said about Hippie culture, but I still harbour a secret (not any more!) liking of Sarf n' Garf.

It's probably the harmonies.

Yeah...that's it...

Speaking of old and formerly hip...

HOLY HANNAH!

Who's that old guy doing that incredibly good imitation of Peter Gabriel?!

It's not me that's wicked, it's my brain.

I'm just as much a victim as you guys.

Reading John Smeaton's thing on Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad who has been saying some very stern and sensible things about human rights law and the UN.

But my Evil Brain, when I read it whispered, "Metropolitan Krill eh? Man, these foreigners have funny names" and then it burst out laughing.

And you wonder why I live alone in a remote English village.