The generalised contempt in which the MSM, particularly the DTP, are held can hardly fail to be deepened by this absurdly optimistic article in the Independent, which suggests that the replacement of zebra crossings with pelican crossings is a shame because the British tradition of stopping at zebra crossings to allow pedestrians to cross is a noteable indicator of the niceness of us all.

One cannot help but wonder where the author has spent the last few years. I know it’s not in Sutherland (a remote part of Scotland, the least heavily populated subregional zoneunit anywhere beneath the iron heel of the bloody awful EU) because there are no zebra crossings there at all.

I never use the zebra crossing, because it is more dangerous to do so than to cross at whatever position is indicated by the ballistic intuition, or natural grasp of calculus, for which pedestrians have in this country for some time been naturally selected.

The reason for this is that if one attempts to use the zebra crossing one will observe roughly the following proportions in driver behaviours:

Drive straight across as though the crossing were not there at all: 60%

Fail to notice crossing until too late; perform incompetent emergency stop; glare accusingly at pedestrian: 15%

Stop correctly and completely: 10% (a good day)

Start to slow down, then, realising that the pedestrian is not a blood relative, suddenly accelerate at the last moment to prevent use of crossing: 10%

Play boy’s game of stopping, waiting until pedestrian is halfway across the crossing (the oncoming traffic then starting to move) and then, as noisily as possible, accelerating hard over the half the victim is about to cross: average 5% (though up to 75% on Friday and Saturday nights)

These behaviours add considerably to the complexity of maintaining one’s membership of the Quick (as opposed to the Dead), and so it is safer, in my view, to dodge hurtling traffic on any old bit of road, on the assumption that no driver can see one, nor ever wanted to, than to have to deal with this pre-existing condition on the one hand and the prospect of deliberate malice on the other.

As for pelican crossings, I suppose that if one were to attach to each of them large, scary-looking and brightly-coloured camera boxes, and to make a huge propaganda campaign out of catching and horribly punishing those who ignore them, then one might get a few more than 15% of incompetent emergency stops at the expense of the 60% of drive-throughs, but to do anything about the others one would clearly have to replace the camera with something well-oiled and belt-fed.

So they are probably a waste of public money, like Belisha beacons. If it doesn’t include an hydraulic truck-stopper, it can’t be relied upon to stop the British motorist. If it can’t be relied upon, then, as a safety measure, it’s worse than useless. The entire menagerie of these idealists’ figments should be abolished forthwith and ‘road safety education’ replaced, in the spirit of post-socialist realism, with endless screenings of Death Race 2000.

There is simply no point in maintaining traffic control systems based upon trustworthiness and a sense of duty in a country the population of which have, and aspire to, neither. One must assume from her foreign-sounding name that Ms Dejevsky, the author of the optimistic article, is from a much more civilised place.

When I was young, one occasionally came across people who were Official Met Office Amateur Weather Observers.

The signs were fairly clear. They were almost always either retired men of a certain kind or spotty youths who had yet to discover girls. They had impeccably tidy gardens, in the middle of which, like a Shinto shrine, would be their collection of Approved Met Office Pattern Instruments. Occasionally a particularly young one would appear on the BBC’s appalling Blue Peter programme.

Every day, the observer would go to the instruments and read them in the Met Office Approved Manner. He would then fill in the Met Office Official Reporting Form, and every so often would send it off in the post and start a fresh one.

I assume that the Met Office still uses these fellows, though I do wonder whether the species might be becoming endangered.

Nowadays we have electronic weather instruments which can easily be connected to a computer, to form a weather-server which will provide its readings as required.

Were one to gather up quite a number of such servers and refer to them regularly, one would soon have a set of data points even more impressive than the Met Office’s exclusive cadre of those who elect to spend their retirement (or to mis-spend their youth) filling in forms.

Were one then to perform upon the data from these points the same sort of calculations as the Met Office are wont to do then one might expect to come up with some weather predictions, just like the Met Office do.

I gather that this is the procedure undertaken by Weather Underground. Their website seems to be maintained by advertising, but it seems that they will collect weather data from just about anywhere.

An interesting idea, but of course they are not proper Met Office meteorologists, and of course they are not using the (allegedly classified) software available to the Met Office’s supercomputers, so of course their predictions are likely to be a bit sketchy.

Except that they’re not. I’ve been comparing form for some months now and am able to say that Weather Underground’s forecasts for this area are consistently more accurate than those of the Met Office.

They are also completely free; the data are provided, essentially at zero cost, by computer-networked observers, and one must conclude that the adverts pay for the website.

The Met Office consistently predicts better weather than actually occurs here, while Weather Underground, perhaps lacking a red telephone connected to the offices of IngSocTourist, does not.

Also refreshingly lacking from Weather Underground’s site is any reference to global warming climate change any damn thing as long it scares the proles into paying more taxes. One is uncharitable enough to suppose that this can hardly be coincidental.

I strongly recommend Weather Underground. I believe that this is the way forward for meteorology; just another more or less fully automatic function of the internet, provided with a bit of extra hardware by enthusiasts and those who have such stuff for their own reasons anyway.

I can see no purpose whatsoever in continuing to pay the Met Office to sack everyone who won’t shout about global warming (when this happened twenty-odd years ago I was convinced that the whole thing was nothing to do with science, and everything to do with geopolitics, and have not changed this view since), to lie about the weather in the hope of increasing tourist revenue, and to bang on about this tired old twentieth-century scare-story for the sake of its political masters.

The original purpose of the Met Office (then a part of the MoD) was to provide weather forecasts for bombers over enemy territory; after WWII its function changed to that of predicting the fall-out patterns arising from the inevitable nuclear war. It is now, like the vast majority of state-funded institutions, little more than a Labour Party / EU / IPCC propaganda engine.

I say close it down. Weather Underground does a better job for nothing. Whatever the Met Office costs, it is too much.

It is National Shooting Week (h/t The Remittance Man).

The irony of this, in what must be one of the Top 10 of ‘countries with scared, cowed, submissive, dependent, unquestioning but above all else unarmed populations’, is perhaps lost upon the organisers.

I cannot help admiring the patience and self-restraint of An Englishman, whose mild remark upon this piece of outrageous authoritarian drivel from the Times, which he has had the broadminded tolerance, dedication to duty and closely-controlled blood pressure to read and comment upon, is:

And what’s the weather like on the planet you live on? I only ask pretending to be interested because I never want to visit or live there. Twat.

Frankly, my own version of this would have been:

And what’s the exact location of the planet you live on? I only ask out of curiosity because I have recently built a vast interplanetary battle-station and would rather like to test its main armament. Signed: D. Vader (Mr.)

I am not going to attempt to fisk the Times article because I have not yet taken the relevant medication and promised the doctors, etc. etc. In fact I am going out into the garden. We have taken about as much of this wealth-redistribution crap from socialist slugs as we are prepared to take.

More angst in the Telegraph about teenage pregnancies.

This morning, to my disgust, there was one of those smug, self-righteous, patronising Labour Party managing-women on the wireless, wittering on about this. I believe her name may have been Toynbee. She was asking her listeners to believe that ‘we’, by which she means herself and her fellow Comrades of Proven Worth, do not understand why so many teenage pregnancies are now carried to full term.

In words of one syllable, then, Ms. Toynbee:

That. Way. The. Girl. Gets. A. Free. Flat.

The ‘get-yer-baby-get-yer-flat’ arrangement has been clearly known to young women of a certain class in this country for so long now that there has been more than enough time for a local council of my acquaintance to acquire some land, to demolish the buildings thereon and to construct a group of impressive, architect-designed low-rise blocks of flats, each and every flat being currently occupied by a young single mother, and which is now, thanks to its tenants’ attention to matters of housekeeping, about to be demolished and replaced with a newly-built replacement estate with lifts, etc.

Does the singular Ms. Toynbee seriously imagine that her claiming, in the offensively matronly manner which I imagine to be her trademark, that ‘we’ still don’t know why the immediate and copious production of babies is, and has been for decades, seen by many as a vital passport into full membership of the benefits culture, will persuade us all that the government which she appears to represent is innocent of any connection with the affair?

Or is it just a question of saying that black is white often enough for people to get tired of denying it?

If I carry on at this rate the doctors will have me writing out a hundred times ‘I must not listen to the BBC’.

Speaking of flattery I note that I got the Ambush Predator’s Quote of the Month. I purr. I do.

However it occurs to me that anyone younger than a certain age will have little idea what we are on about. Though I discourage children on this blog (they make so much noise, and always seem to spill things) it would be inhospitable not to explain at all.

The idea of the Cold War was: Communism is so bad, because of how badly it runs everything and how badly it treats everybody except its top nobs, who live rather better than the average king and more like certain notorious mediaeval popes, that rather than allow it to happen here we will at remarkably short notice transform the bulk of the Northen Hemisphere into what is known as a ’self-illuminating glass car park’.

The Communists, who at the time were mostly in Russia, naturally took a different view.

Accordingly our generals and the Communist generals spent all of everyone’s money for about fifty years on huge rockets with hydrogen bombs which they carefully aimed at one another and offered to fire off at the slightest provocation. This was somewhat nerve-racking for everyone else, but despite people often jumping at shadows, looking under their beds for Reds, and reacting to bright flashes by ripping all the doors off and hiding underneath them nothing ever actually happened, and so a good many of the rockets are still there to this day. Nobody knows whether they would work now, or indeed whether they would ever have worked.

Eventually the Communists ran out of party bosses old enough to have drunk Lenin’s vodka, who all died, one after the other, and everyone else got so bored with listening to the solemn music on Radio Moscow that they started to listen to Radio Luxembourg instead.

A fellow about half the age of his predecessor was duly found to be the new boss. He was an agricultural management expert and an absolutely crashing bore, the sort of chap who is heavily into spreadsheets and can recite tables of production figures from memory. Why did they make him the boss? I don’t really know. Perhaps they thought that he was so boring that he would not die at all and thus Radio Moscow would get its listeners back.

The boring boss looked at the accounts and the bit about defending the revolution from its encirclement by capitalism was, frankly, over-budget.

So the next time he met his opposite number that worthy, who, like all Americans, played poker, said, as usual,

“I will see you, and raise you another 250 ICBMs, with MIRVs, New Mexican sauce, and a side order of mobile cruise missiles, to go, how d’you like that?”

In reply to which the boring boss, who, like all Russians, played chess, waited a very long time and then said

“I resign.”

And so it all suddenly stopped. The boring boss, who had turned out to be about the least boring of all in the end, retired to write truly boring books, and was replaced by a big noisy guy with a drink problem, so at least not everything from the old days was just thrown away.

And the ex-Communists discovered that their countries had, while they had been worrying about the Teller-Ulam Configuration and the Capitalist Encirclement, been taken over by the Mafia, in whose hands they largely remain, but about whom the people there would very much like to do something, only they’re not sure what.

And we discovered that our countries had, while we were worrying about Sakharov’s Second Idea and the Domino Theory, been taken over by the intelligence services, the political police and the military-industrial complex, in whose hands they largely remain, but about whom we do nothing at all.

This is because to replace the ‘War on Communism’ these ingenious fellows, likely otherwise to be unemployed before long, had very quickly indeed to come up with the ‘War on Terrorism’, which was a CIA-Hollywood co-production the star of which was unfortunately a guy they’d already said was dead and whose lookalike therefore appeared only on blurry video, but which had really expensive special effects. They hoped that people would think that the ‘-ism’ on the end (the script people tried ‘drugs’ first, but it didn’t rhyme) would make it just as scarey.

It isn’t. Terrorism’s just a tactic, used mostly by poor people who are really pissed off and have nothing much left to lose. It’s not even a good tactic because everyone hates people who use it. When some real terrorists, who were from Ireland, tried it on with us, we just ignored them until even their own side hated them, and so eventually they went away.

And Communism’s just an idea. Really good, really selfless, high-minded, public-spirited people could live under perfect Communism and be quite happy with it, provided they were careful, and unanimous, and really, really good. It’s not Communism itself that was ever the problem; it’s what it always seems to do. If anyone tries to implement it, because people are, on the whole, not really good, and hardly ever unanimous, it won’t work at all unless, as it always has, it turns into totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism is a much worse problem than terrorism because terrorists, particularly real ones, can usually blow up no more than a few dozen people at a time, and that only occasionally, and can sometimes be nobbled if they can’t be nicked, and can be ignored the rest of the time, whereas totalitarians always bully everyone, everywhere, all the time, for ever, in ways that are really quite difficult to ignore. They are addicted to power, can never have enough of it, and to ensure their supply of it they will stop at nothing.

The great mystery of the 21st century is why people, including people who in recent memory stood up to some real terrorists and won, are now apparently so afraid of terrorists that they’ll submit only slightly grudgingly to totalitarians.

Or is it the totalitarians they’re really afraid of by now, and not the terrorists at all?

A twenty-minute essay. To avoid unnecessary speculation I can confirm that I am going for a smoke behind the bike sheds. Vissarionovich: you are in charge.

One of the nice things about having to get up early and get Mrs. Underclass off to work is getting first go at harrumphing about what is in the Daily Telegraph.

Prison officers have been told not to refer to their charges as “inmates” because it might offend them.

Poppycock.

Prison officers have been told not to refer to their charges as ‘inmates’ because this word is now more appropriate to all British subjects.

It is clearly a harrumphing-at-stuff-in-the-Daily-Telegraph sort of morning. looking for a voice cites this:

More than one assault takes place in Jobcentres every day, official figures have revealed.

Guthrum remarks:

If you have ever been inside a modern jobcentre, you will be surprised that there are not more cases of violence.

I’ve been inside two.

I now communicate with the benefits office entirely by phone or post, and don’t have to visit them any more. When we first moved to Redneckshire, however, I had to go through the whole process, which involved a number of visits to the local jobcentre, which is in a town about seven miles away.

The office was built into what I believe was once one of those big pretentious town-centre furniture shops, an Edwardian building into which had been inserted a number of desks, lots of cubicle partitions, a decent lift and a sort of waiting-or-milling-about area provided with armchairs and blue fibreglass computer gadgets. It was all very new, very commercial-looking and very clean, lit like a nice office except for the bits which were lit like a boutique, it was staffed with kindly people who were as polite to me as I was to them, and the whole business had the air of an agreeable visit to an oversized and rather well-funded Citizens’ Advice Bureau.

On one occasion, as I was putting on my coat and hat on the way out, there was a fellow who would clearly have to pass a number of exams before qualifying as ‘unemployable’, one of Mid-Redneckshire’s original three families, from his distinctively genetic appearance, standing by one of the blue fibreglass computer gadgets with one of the kindly office ladies as living proof that somewhere not far away a village was temporarily without its idiot.

“I can’t do that,” he was saying.
“But you’ve only got to press the buttons, my duck. You have to do it, you see, so we can pay you some money.”
“Can’t do computers.”
“Oh, but it’s not even a computer, is it, it’s only like one of those hole in the wall machines.”
“Can’t do machines.”
“It’s just so we know you’re looking for work, see.”
“Can’t do work.”
“I tell you what, my duck, I’ll show you again, but next time you’ll have to do it yourself, you see, because there’s not enough of anybody in here. Now what you do…”

Before moving to Redneckshire we lived in one of those notorious ’satellite towns’ just north of London. I had no intention of claiming anything until we’d moved, but I had to go into the local jobcentre about some bureaucratic detail which now escapes me.

The jobcentre was built in the 1960s. Whether it was something else before I don’t know. It seemed to have been built for purpose. It was made of concrete, a long, narrow hall with at one end a door covered in decaying notices prohibiting things. The windows were narrow slots at the top of high, unclimbable walls, their dim northlight reinforced by the pitiless 4000 Kelvin of armoured, undiffused industrial fluorescents which might once have seen service on an oil rig. On one side, a row of scarred and filthy plastic benches on steel frames bolted to the concrete floor, watched by a huge old-fashioned CCTV camera. On the other a counter like that of a bank, massive armoured glass rising to the distant ceiling and loudspeakers every few feet. In front of each loudspeaker something like a bar-stool was fastened to the floor.

On the far side of the armoured glass, when I finally took my place on one of the bar-stools, was a benefits officer. Apparently female, this individual’s aspect and manner suggested that she had been employed not because of her aptitudes but because of her disabilites. I am not a doctor, but one does not have to be to spot that someone is only about three feet tall, and has no arms.

Naturally ignoring this, I set about doing the business I’d gone in there for, imagining that perhaps if I were nice to this unfortunate lady she’d perhaps be nice to me.

Unfortunately this did not work, and her contemptuous and confrontational manner, enhanced by the Dalek-like quality of her amplified voice, and the repetitious exhibition of the chip on her shoulder were in my view completely unprofessional, and fully justified every inch of thickness of the Pilkington’s finest from behind which she gloated over and tormented those even worse off than herself.

Having established that my modest administrative needs were met, albeit with an ill grace, and that I would not be bothering her office with a claim, I was dismissed, and gratefully walked out of the awful, vomit-stained, alcohol-and-despair-reeking place, and went home and told Mrs. Underclass that if this was the way it was going to be from now on I felt that on the whole I’d rather beg on a street corner.

One of these offices is a place to which I’d cheerfully return, confident that despite the tortuous tangles of benefits bureacracy the experience would reflect my reasonable expectations of a government department doing a rather frustrating and sometimes trying job to the best of its abilities and being as cheerful as it can in the process.

The other is a place to which I’d cheerfully return. Once. With my mates, and our accoutrements and impedimenta. Once we’d liberated the victims and dragged into the street and shot their oppressors, we’d walk away leaving the satchel charges to blow the obscene place off the map. Were we holy men, we should plough, salt and curse the site as well, but we’re not.

It’s all about style, really.

Mean-spirited, joyless Scrooge Patrick Vessey (LPUK Unofficial) snarls bitterly at the spirit of Christmas; turning on retailers of Christmas gifts, and their financial associates, he says:

Rather than paying 200% or 300% APR for sh*t you don’t need, ever thought about not buying it in the first place?

At last!

Of course people in the UK should be completely free to run themselves into catastrophic debt by spending vast sums on status-indicatingly expensive gifts, seasonal illuminations by the kilowatt and the medical services germane to a fortnight of attempted suicide by chocolate overdose. Of course they should. And they should expect subsequently to suffer the consequences thereof, etc.

But the further away from me that they are when they do it, the happier I shall be. In richer times Mrs. Underclass and myself used to seek asylum from the ‘festive season’ in a friend’s lonely, more-or-less-restored cottage, at the end of half a mile of low-grade Land-Rover track somewhere in Pembrokeshire. It was refreshingly peaceful (if, on occasions, something of a survival exercise; an outside chemical khazi is perhaps amusing in the summer, but less so in 15 degrees of frost; a passing fox was astonished at the depth and scope of human masochism).

Every year, at about this time, someone from the Retail Industries Federation (or whatever it’s called) appears on the wireless to make this year’s demands. I remember a few years ago that the spokesman demanded an average outlay of £800 per person in the UK, “or we’ll have to start laying people off.”

One could go on (and on, and on). The whole exercise is an elaborate blackmail. Hand over (x) amount, Buster, or your kids’ll shop you to Esther Rantzen.

If ever there was something which deserved a boycott, it’s the Consumerist Christmas.

[Galileo]

In an article in The Times, a columnist jumps neatly onto the Flat Earth Society’s annual anxious-young-mums’ bandwagon about time zones (“They’re Stealing Light from Our Children!”).

It is futile to try to argue with these people. The bare facts of orbital mechanics and the reason for the Earth’s seasons are beyond them. Centuries of exploration and research mean nothing. The Government can do anything. If only we clamour enough, The Government will Step In and Something Will Be Done.

How even the most bloated totalitarian bureacracy can reasonably undertake to alter the axial inclination of the planet is beyond me. However, their carefully nurtured society of telly-addled, selfish, ignorant, shrill, strident, I-know-my-rights adversarial-consumerists demands every year that it be done.

This happens quite reliably, and it’s a sad reflection on what we call ‘education’.

Unless, of course, this time it’s just another EU stalking-horse. I’m sure that our masters in Brussels find it inconvenient that we are not in the same time zone as themselves.