WaffenThinMint

Quite right too! We need to start buying from our own manufacturers - oh hang on, we've not got any since the Tory b*****ds and New Labour b*****ds merrily allowed them all to be closed down or sold off to the highest asset stripper because they weren't "competitive" (ie. weren't getting the massive state subsidies & other sleights of hand manufacturers in the US, Germany, France, Italy & Spain got routinely). Typical Labourites, promising to shut the barn door long after the horse has not merely bolted but been sold for glue & couch stuffing.

For decades politicians in the democratic west have looked on with quiet envy at the sinister dictatorships and the vice like grip they had over their people from a subtle process of divide & conquer in one respect (making the individual feel more powerless & more afraid to upset the apple cart), manipulating them into falling in with particular special interest groups where they can be 'led' down particular pathways in others (over sexuality, race, faith, nationality, etc) suiting the contemporary interests of the ruling elite (& discarded when no longer required). The New Labour project was probably the zenith of attempts to replicate this within the democratic framework - & certainly the most evil, where newspeak such as "rendition" entered our language to whitewash grotesque human rights abuses done in our name that would have been condemned had it been used by the old Soviet bloc. What they failed to appreciate was the difference in the citizenry's perceptions living in a democracy (as opposed to an actual dictatorship) where you can vote the b*****ds out, at least in theory. As governments changed come election time but the mantras stayed the same (red to blue, blue to red) it created a surly, cynical, demotivated population (hence the reason for the decline in workplace output business experts have whinged about for two decades) for whom an endless parade of "here comes the new boss, same as the old boss" made them slowly less pliable to their manipulation, & potential open targets for others. The declining numbers voting in elections ought to have been the warning, but all the elites did was shed some public crocodile tears over what they thought in private suited their best interests. In some ways, they've still been lucky. We've had Brexit, we've had Trump, but it's still largely the same old lot in charge. But for how long before people start deciding that safeguarding their interests is best expressed by means outwith the ballot box? Protest marches can - & sometimes do - turn violent. With the world library that is the internet, anyone can become a terrorist, not merely the pathetic losers suicide bombing for their god or gods believing they'll get their 96 holes in paradise to make up for the 96000 holes they've just blown in themselves & countless strangers unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We may be sleepwalking ever closer to a Hobbesian state of nature.

Tory supporters tend to come out in all weathers for any old election, which is what often makes it so hard to get rid of them.

Watch out for the Waxwings - coming to a garden near you this weekend:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/01/27/birdwatchers-told-look-irruption-waxwings/ An "irruption of waxwings"! To go along with a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a gaggle of geese, a raffle of turkeys I suppose. http://www.britishbirdlovers.co.uk/articles/collective-nouns-for-birds There doesn't appear to be one for Great Tits. Any suggestions? A Sun of?

Strange how similar it looks to one I remember seeing about Rangers during the David Murray era and immediately after.

Interesting to see the Scottish Libertarian Party turning up - unless this was a member of the English party who decided to stand (the Libertarian Party UK - LPUK - which covers England, Wales and Cornwall) in the SLP's patch. A complete political irrelevence, but used to have some interesting nutters (sometimes in a WTF sort of way) such as Old Holborn & Obnoxio The Clown back in the day. Labour's doom continues - not so sure about whether the Tories simply picked up what would have been the LibDem & UKIP votes.

Depressing, truly depressing.

Yet this is also the same person who not so long ago sneered at Republicans as dumber than rocks, after winning the election said there was a lot of good things about Obamacare after all, & appears to chop & change his opinions in accordance with what's trending on Twitter & popular within the mass market media. Reagan was a puppet president for vested interests who indulged in school bully foreign policy to please rednecks that never got over the U.S. getting their arse kicked by their Vietnamese "assets" gone rogue 20 years earlier (an all too familiar story of American relations with the world). What Trump REALLY believes in is anyone's guess, & that's what makes him so terrifying as a President. His presidency will be in accordance with nothing more than the whims of his ego - like Kim Jong Il, except in this case not in charge of some backward basket case, but a nation with the capability to create international chaos & which could easily take decades to put right after. Right wing conservatives & Vladimir Putin may be feeling smug now, but I've a feeling it will be less than a year before they come to bitterly regret ignoring those their own common sense telling them of the insanity of allowing the most powerful nation on earth to be controlled by a 70 year old plutocrat who cannot even control himself.

The only signs we ever see in our area of a sparrowhawk is the occasional large pile of pigeon feathers on the roads. The irony is the local sparrowhawk is about the only defence the little birds have against the wood pigeons - the fat fuckers swoop down & hoover up every scrap of food available all day long. Blackbirds will take on the magpies, who won't tangle with a determined opponent. If you've got crows or rooks in your area, I'm guessing you'll be getting regular battles between them & the magpies. Despite being a good 15 to 20 miles from the coast, we get an occasional flock of gulls coming in, landing in everyone's gardens & making a racket, resulting in the local rookery sending a team out to chase them off. Where they're heading in from or heading out to is anyone's guess.

Guys.... http://www.snopes.com/white-house-web-site-trump-changes/ This is what happens when people take the word of a has been actor scrambling for relevance for three decades. Things are fucked up enough without anyone adding sauce & a flake.

This is going to be a long four years. It had better not be eight.

To say nothing about the farce of a football league where the same club is national champions year after year after year - um, hang on!

Get on the train at the end of the day, think thank fk it is the weekend, get the earphones out and the tunes in - what is the first tune that comes on at random? The Man At C&A by The Specials - the one that starts "warning warning, nuclear attack!" Hope this isn't a bloody omen.

Well since you ask, RedRobin72, a flock of Long tail tits have been making themselves busy over the past week along with a Tree Creeper that's terrifying the squirrels every time they run into it. The annual battle for who gets to nest where is about to commence. Smaller birds appear to prefer a well trimmed bush but the larger are more comfortable with one in a natural full state of growth until their babies are ready to leave.

Done years ago in Paisley. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/apr/18/lornamartin.theobserver Despite local journalist Gavin Pennie doing everything he could to keep his mate's crappy establishment alive via purple headlines in the Paisley Daily Express (they'd previously tried being a cannabis paraphernalia shop called Bongheads - also failed), it managed to put itself out of business. Discovering the punters weren't beating a path (or anything else) to their doors they began offering "extra services" to try & stay afloat: within a week, they were appropriately "busted" by police. Quite apart from picking one of the busiest parts of Paisley making for a massive deterrent to anyone going in, it was an area of town the police were seldom away from due to two feuding brothers next door to them running rival businesses with a tendency to come to blows every so often if one felt the other had "pinched" his customers. Never realised the piano trade was so cut throat.

Da fuuuuuu.... that makes even less sense? Why drag themselves all that way out there for a foregone conclusion game? Unless it's all a cunning ruse so they can actually go & hit the Lochgarron tartan mill January sale pure Royal Marines style, like.

Starve their club of funds and give it to a competitor - yes, that's certain to work as well as all similar such stunts have in the past. Not that the Eeekies will mind - all contributions to their SPFL Expeditionary Fund will be Keanly received.

Better luck next time, champ!

"It was a man older than me and with a bigger arse who wore a small pair of swimwear. I'm not sure what goes through the head of a person to wear this kind of clothing. It was not an edifying sight" This will shortly be followed with: "Der fette Deutsche von Room 203 wurde spontan vom Schwimmbad verbrannt. Mein Luftkissenboot ist voller Aale."

Deeply worrying business down in Leeds Crown Court today: http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/15028718.UPDATED__Teenager_accused_of_terror_offence_called_Jo_Cox_s_murderer_a__hero___court_told/#articleContinue A teenager accused of making a pipe bomb in preparation for an "all-out race war" celebrated the killing of MP Jo Cox on the day she died, praising her murderer as a hero, a court has heard. Police found a device in a desk drawer in the 17-year-old's Bradford bedroom after they were alerted through his Snapchat messages, prosecutors told Leeds Crown Court. One of these messages was a cartoon-like image of a mosque being blown up along with the words: "It's time to enact retribution upon the Muslim filth." Another was a picture of a pipe bomb with an image of the Bradford skyline and the message: "Incendiary explosive and home-made black powder. More to come." A jury heard how officers found the defendant's bedroom covered in flags, including the Swastika and the symbol of the Waffen SS as well as a laptop with wallpaper featuring a Nazi eagle over a Swastika and the German phrase: "One Nation, One Empire, One Leader". Barnaby Jameson, prosecuting, said that on the day Mrs Cox was killed by Thomas Mair in her Batley and Spen constituency on June 16 last year, the defendant posted a picture of Mair on Facebook. He also posted the message: "Tommy Mair is a HERO. There's one less race traitor in Britain thanks to this man." Shortly after, on another social media site, the defendant posted the same picture with the post: "Absolute f****** legend. He's a hero, we need more people like him to butcher the race traitors." The prosecutor said: "(The teenager's) political views were so extreme that he celebrated in the murder of a democratically elected MP - presumably because she had voted to remain in the EU. In (the defendant's) view this was race treachery." The judge, Mr Justice Goss, reminded the court that Mrs Cox's murder happened before the EU Referendum. Mr Jameson took the jury through a number of social media postings and messages detailing what he said was the defendant's racist, white-supremacist views. Many of these related to his links with National Action, which the prosecutor described as "a small, secretive Neo-Nazi British youth nationalist organisation." He said: "Little is known about its internal structure or the size of its membership. It is known to be a white supremacist group. "At public meetings, members make the Nazi salute and keep their faces covered." Mr Jameson said messages from members of a National Action chat group found on the defendant's phone included phrases like "should we just blow up Leeds or some s***?" During one message exchange, the defendant said: "'I don't use cookers, but I make miniature pipe bombs and s***. Just f*** around with them'." Mr Jameson told the jury: "As we will hear in due course, (the defendant) did something with a pipe bomb that was less to do with 'f***** around with them' and more to do with an ideological war he was waging." After he was arrested, the teenager told police he had made the pipe bomb out of sparklers, the prosecutor said. The teenager said in a statement when interviewed: "I've simply been fooling around with fireworks and showing them off to my peers in my naivety I have never had the intention to cause any harm to any person." Mr Jameson said the pipe bomb was tested and was "a viable device - technically known as an Improvised Explosive Device or 'IED'." Summarising the case to the jury of six men and six women, the prosecutor said the incident "places (the defendant) squarely in the terrorism legislation as a man with a political and racial and ideological cause". He said: "This was not, as the defence will suggest, a bad joke gone wrong. This was the opening stage of (the defendant's) all-out race war and that is why the crown leads it case with an allegation under the terrorism legislation." The blond-haired teenager, who cannot be named, denies a charge of preparing a terrorist act and an alternative count of making a pipe bomb. He sat in the dock wearing a suit and flanked by a security guard. The trial was adjourned until Wednesday. I hope those in the media who have been bigging up those wee shits of National Action - little more than sad spotty wee fuds who did nothing more than troll the net twelve months ago - are proud of themselves. Having given them all the encouragement possible to act even more "mental" to keep up with the expectations of their "fame", now they're graduated to full blown bomb making - something even the loudmouthed thugs of Charlie Sargent's Combat 18 drew the line at.

Stop messing about!

This is a disgrace, an absolute disgrace. http://www.scotsman.com/news/young-father-31-left-dying-on-a-bus-for-five-hours-1-4338303

They've also pinched Gade Valley in the Three Rivers from the Tories on a 24% swing. Place your bets now on a certain someone rushing to rejoin now "the cockroachs" appear to have been forgiven by the electorate. To think we thought last year was barmy - all this, & Cyprus reunification too. P.S. There appears to be a rational explanation for the result: Labour's new candidate was the head of the Sunderland branch of Momentum, who are about as popular in Sunderland as a Newcastle United shop would be. Talk about a perfect storm.

Normal service then?

This is where hipsterism was born - no wonder the Romans crucified so many of them.