[Jura-Glenlivet]

In response to a recent argument between Rushy and various members of the sanity squad, it became apparent that there is a disconnect between what many Americans see as the rest of the world's circumstances, and how that world sees itself. This skewed world view only washes up rarely in news stories here when the hyperbole reaches truly hysterical levels, as when a "Fox expert on terrorism" said Birmingham was a Muslim city where non-Muslims just don't go. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11338985/Fox-News-terror-expert-says-everyone-in-Birmingham-is-a-Muslim.html).

So, to counter the impression that as you close your doors to foreigners, you leave behind Europe awash with sharia police, the few remaining whites, living in ivory towers wreathed in opium smoke, wishing we were the 51st state, I would like to present a series of articles on the UK and this continent to give, I hope a balanced view of what Europe was and is like.

Let's start with the basics. Where are we?
The UK is a collection of rain drenched rocks separated from the rest of Europe by the blessed moat (the English Channel), dug by Joseph of Arimathea at the behest of God when he (Jo') came to bury the Holy Grail here, and designed to keep the filthy French (his words) from sullying our shores (this failed, and Gods betrayal indirectly led to the spread of Protestantism and the formation of Hogwarts).

Europe, you will find by swimming straight out from New England, should take you a day or two, but is plainly visible on a clear calm day with an appropriately big telescope (In your dreams Tom).

Racially we are mongrels, the original Pict's were an early Celtic race who were supplanted by the Britons (more Celts) who confined them to a reservation now called Scotland where they thrive amongst the heather by making whiskey whilst wearing skirts. For a better understanding of these Picts I recommend the film Trainspotting and not the massive load of bollocks that is Braveheart.
Britain at this time was not united, the Celts (picts included) did a bit of farming, dragged big rocks about to make circles with, built hill forts, but mostly what they liked to do was fight, preferably naked covered in blue paint or from the back of a chariot, naked and blue.
The tribe where I now live were called the Coritani, we fought the Brigantes (bastards) to the north, the Cornovii to the west the Dobunni (wimps) to the south and the Iceni to the east. This fighting is now ritualised to football or bike gangs, but can erupt at any gathering where alcohol is consumed.

I will take a break before I carry on as it is late and I have to have a shower as my partner hates me getting blue on the duvet. Next time the Romans (bastards). 

[Jura-Glenlivet]

Digression!
In re-reading the above, we can see how tribalism works. Despite 2,000 yrs. of intervening history, all the (as yet) unmentioned influxes of new genetic material, the demographics of my surname probably putting me amongst the Brigantes (bastards) and dalliances with that bloke that looked a bit like Omar Sharif that your mother had when Dad was having his hernia fixed. Yet here we are identifying with a tribe we almost certainly have only location in common?

So what have the Romans ever done for us? Ghostly & Bo will know the answer to this from the Pythons point of view. There are a few more though, Lead poisoning, underpants and erosion of women's rights being less savoury than the roads and the otters' noses snacks, but for this discussion we are interested in new blood.

Now there were never a lot of them during their occupation (about 2%), it was always trouble here, they never made it into the reservation, preferring to wall it off Trump style, and the weather can't have helped. By this time they had learnt to augment their army with auxiliary troops of the kind they didn't possess, chances are their cavalry were Gaulish or Germanic and their archers were probably Syrian. The famous 9th Legion that just disappeared, were raised in Spain, so the diversity of the British/European gene pool grew.

Digression 2.
I can't be alone in thinking when I first realised the Romans were Italians, what the fuck?
Don't get me wrong, Italy is one of my favourite countries to visit and the people are both beautiful, very kind and welcoming but I had been bought up with the knowledge that in the world wars they were a bit lightweight, Italian tanks having more reverse gears than forward, that sort of thing, but they beat the world, up close at the end of a short sword, wearing sandals. I think it was the underpants. Running into battle naked is all very well for the shock factor but when people start waving sharp things in the direction of your tackle, it's got to register. Hessian boxers may not be the best protection but not having your crown jewels flapping around making a target of themselves, has to be a factor, that and the armour.

Where is this all leading? To be honest, I've wandered a bit but I will bring it back. 

[Jura-Glenlivet]

I'd like to skip a vast chunk of history that involves more invasions, changes in fashion, language, death and plagues, to reintroduce America. If anyone has any specific time I've passed they have questions about , please ask.

So, much of the first batch of European settlers to the new world were puritans. Puritans were a reaction to the corrupt, elitist money grabbing kiddy fiddlers called the Catholics, so at first they were a good thing, they bought new ways of thinking that revitalised northern Europe, but also ushered in a load of new wars, the reformation and then the counter reformation, that cleared them out of much of southern Europe.
 
I think the last crusade called by a Pope (Sixtus V) was against England, when Indiana Jones led the Armada, to remove the protestant Queen Elizabeth, it got truly fucked by Francis Drake's navy and the English weather, ensuring England remained protestant and demoted Spain from super power status.

But by the time the puritans hit American shores they were largely a bunch of killjoys that had sucked all the fun out of life, tired of listening to the parties everyone else was still throwing they moved to New England where they celebrated their new found freedom by burning witches and hanging Quakers. These people were to form the bedrock of American society and we threw another party. 

[Jura-Glenlivet]

Chem-trails eh?
So, they found us, as if we don’t have enough madness here, another bunch of tinfoil hat wearers are trying to muscle in on our loons. I mean it’s plausible that thousands of pilots would want to use probably the most indiscriminate method of distribution possible to poison their families along with the rest of us, why wouldn’t they? Such a great idea!

I’m just worried that this is just a diversion from the real problem of the anti-Christ.
 Since the time of Pope Sylvester II, who trained in catholic sorcery at Seville and with the help of his demon lover, became Pope in 999 (invert it sheeple), thereby staving off the 2nd coming of Christ (Leif Ericson) in the year 1,000 by using Tsunami bombs (sent back in time by CERN) to divert his ships to America. The Anti-christ has been battling and winning against the forces of good (eh! Bo?)

If you think that is inconceivable, consider this. He died in 1003, his work done! 1003 is the designated number for Lilofee, an asteroid that some believe shifts around and will one-day crash into the sea, creating a huge tsunami (see above).
Lilofee is from a German folk song and was a malignant water spirit, it disappeared after first being found but cropped up again in 1923. A sign? Weird weather that year, a super storm in the Caribbean formed of four cells that some said announced the return of the four horsemen. who was born that year? Kissinger, Marcel Marceau, Alan Shepard and Robert Maxwell, you tell me.
 
More weird weather (in 1923), Giant hail killed 23 in Rostov, Russia.
23 is a mental number, a prime, factorial prime, Eisenstein prime, safe prime as well as others, and significantly, the sacred number of the goddess of discord Eris, the original malevolent fairy (ask them Trojans). Small Wonder Hitler’s career took off with the beer-hall Putsch this year, and the Hollywood sign went up.

So now the fight goes on as it has through the ages, think, David Icke versus Bob Hope or Bill (the body count) Clinton’s murder of Princess Di (reincarnation of Mary Magdalene?), using Israeli attack vultures to tear out the eyes of her chauffer.

Forget the false flag of chem-trails, if you’re looking up, it should be to heaven.   

[Jura-Glenlivet]

So that's how you grab a few bits of history (there are facts in there) and make a conspiracy, not watertight, but it only has to appeal to your targets prejudices and away you go.

Back to the history bit.
I think as I am a guest on a site that, jokingly or otherwise professes that the world is flat, we should have a quick look at what people actually thought back then. As mentioned before, Leif Ericson found his way to America within a few years of the first millennium, it's a fairly safe bet that as a mariner he was used to the fact that the horizon bends away in all directions and countries he was visiting appeared from the highest point first as Gecko has kindly pointed out, but he clearly wasn't afraid of falling off the edge otherwise he would have been a more stay at home kind of Viking, but this is purely anecdotal as far as evidence goes.

As we who have been here a while know, the round Earth theory is a NASA concoction, however Alfred the Great of  Wessex (849-899), who was a great believer in education for its own sake, commissioned a great deal of translations of classical works and treatise thereof, and he talks of the world in an unambiguously spherical manner. Comparing the earth to “the yolk in the middle of an egg which can move about (within the confines of) the egg. Similarly the world remains still in its station. Outside the play of  the sky and the stars, and the bright shell itself revolve around it every day – long has it done so”
Now clearly he could have done with reading his Copernicus and Galileo, but as this was the late 800's we can forgive him that.

So, either  NASA was conceived  by the West Saxons or these ancients had a lot more about them than some of the people that gather here of a night.

[Jura-Glenlivet]

So, in our attempt to find really cool places to visit, we ended up in Sintra Portugal. If you like weird architecture (see Pena Palace below)

 

Moorish castles, gardens dedicated to to the Templar’s and plenty of history whilst being baked by the sun, go there. The Portuguese are friendly without being intrusive and the food & wine is wonderful.

We run on complete news black out while abroad so it wasn't until we got back that we saw that Trumps brown-shirts had drawn first blood and that IS inspired retards had committed  their sad acts, so the world goes on. 

[Jura-Glenlivet]

What the fucking fuck!

I’m back at work after 2 and a bit weeks off, so it’s rant time! Not that I hate my job, far from it, I’m a bloody genius so I breeze through the day spreading inspiration and awe, so much so that when I take time off, the people I leave to do the various things I do, seem to think they can do it, as easily as I, the fools.

So, I breeze into work, smiling affably, sporting my farmers tan, exotic insect bites and tales of far off places, and they scatter like mice, and before I even read the don’t blame us email, I want to execute every mother fucking last one of them. (Deep breath). But I’m over that, and although I feel there is a space around me now you would give a junk yard dog, I have been plied with tea and grubby pears off someone’s tree and I just know some twat will say soon “got any photos then?”.
That, they will regret, I have 400 randomly downloaded beauty spots including some from Pandora and one of the girl from “The Ring”, ready on slideshow, friendship is a place south of hell.

6.5 million people watched “The great British bake off” it's time for a plague.

[Jura-Glenlivet]

Watched the film War Machine with Brad Pitt the younger and it left me a bit confused (not least you are saying, as you aren't putting it in the appropriate "just watched" thread, but in your self-obsessed bollocks thread, well there is more to this than a film report, so hold on). The confusion arises mainly from Pitt's performance vis-à-vis everybody else in the film, he seems to have been given a completely different MO, something along the lines of "Gurn like Popeye and move around like you have only just taken possession of your body".
I don't know much about US Generals, but just from my memories of "Stormin Norman" of desert-storm fame, they do tend to walk like a parody of John Wayne, and this film is a satire, in parts.
Ben Kingsley plays the part of Hamid Karzai for laughs but almost sweetly and Tilda Swinton's German heckler is brilliant, so why didn't they tone down Brad? Maybe he was going through some personal grief and they didn't want to get in his face, but he was awful.
The combat mission is played orthodox and stands in stark contrast to BP's buffoonery and makes you wonder if they could have made a more worthwhile film if he had played it straighter or they had given the part to an actor. It's worth watching for the message, what are we doing invading countries when we have a wealth of history to prove it's a bad idea.

There is one scene when some guy is explaining to Brad/Popeye why the Afghans are growing Opium rather than cotton, and it's here I would like to take a bit of a detour.

The official/standard reasons for invasions of Afghanistan are political. Anglo-Russo expansion for the 1st British invasion in the 1840's (We lost 16,000 soldiers and camp followers in the "Great shame" and then left killing a lot of Afghan's on the way). The same for the 2nd invasion in the 1880's, but with an agreement not to return if they played ball.
Helping a fellow communist government against rebels, Soviet-Afghan war (1980's), and finally the pursuit of Bin-laden after 9/11 in 2001.
 
Perhaps, but all these invasions of a country steeped in war, impossible to hold and destined to be a disaster, why here?

What if it was all about the opium, I know you have a war on drugs but the moment the US declares a war on things they tend to increase (see war on terror), now when we went in, we were exporting opium to China in vast amounts which precipitated 2 opium wars that coincided with the dates we had invaded Afghanistan.
We know the CIA and by implication the US government were involved in the cocaine trade in central America, what better way to get money and keep your underprivileged compliant, and here's the kicker. In early 2001, the Taliban destroyed the opium crop (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/apr/01/internationalcrime.drugstrade), then later that year they get invaded and boom, since then the opium harvest has not only been re-established but has grown (see graph), despite the war on drugs, and heroin use has increased 5 fold in the US, perhaps the whole thing is designed to get the right people in place to guarantee this lucrative trade as the Taliban had become undependable, just a thought.

Either way, Brad Pitt should be shot, but the film isn't all bad.


UNODC 2016

[Jura-Glenlivet]

Religion is a big thing here at the moment, from the gentle hippyish apocalyptical meanderings of Dither to the "End of days" ravings of Dr Boolittle. We have signs, and signs of signs, of things coming to a head, vis-à-vis our creator un-creating everything, weighing our souls against a feather (or some other such nonsense), and casting all into eternal damnation. All that is, apart from the Boo's, who get to live in perpetual smugness with each other (just one of the many reasons I'm not rushing to repent).

This Christianity isn't the one I know from the leafy lanes and quiet shires of childhood.

As a kid Christianity was (it seemed to me), just there to explain the existence of all the churches, to give the weird guy in the long black clothes a job to do and to provide simple stop-gap answers to difficult questions until you grew up and did science (or became another weird guy). It was the singing of "all things bright and beautiful", harvest festivals and the peal of bells on a Sunday.

However, the doom-laden ending does bear a resemblance to what we were interested in, the Norse/Germanic/Celtic religions, the ones that gave us most of our day names and (we were told) the roots of Christmas (Yule), Easter (Eostre) and Halloween (Samhain). Cool gods with hammers and spears, ravens, drinking, giants, dwarves, serpents that wrapped the world, wolves that ate the sun and moon and Ragnarök.

Ragnarök, is the "end of days" turbo-charged via George Martin and Sam Peckinpah. All the gods so terribly rendered by Hollywood are killed, Thor poisoned by the Midgard serpent (seriously big snake), staggers 9 steps after killing it and succumbs, Odin swallowed whole by the Fenrir Wolf, but avenged by his son, Vidar. Loki, (incidentally the father of the serpent, the wolf and Odin's horse) is killed by, and kills Heimdall. Hel (the place) is opened by Hel (the goddess of death, another child of Loki) and generally, shit goes south. The Norse gods were massively fatalistic, they of all the pantheons were aware of their fate (although if Satan hasn't gotten hold of a copy of revelations by now and learned his fate, I would be surprised), but they did very little to cheat it, they had Fenrir tied up with the loss of Tyr's hand as payment, but didn't butcher it?  At the end, everything is consumed bar a few children of the gods and two humans who get on with re-populating. Much more fun.

Modern Christianity it seems, having absorbed the Holy days may have stolen the ending too, although the Edda's weren't written down until the 13th century, there are carving stones and such from at least as far back as the 1st depicting the legends, and the Saga's they came from, were old when they passed into Britain. Stolen not in the sense that it wasn't already there in revelations but in the pessimistic world view that seems to infuse latter day Christians.

As for the signs? Well, look up Skinner's box and superstition, look up apophenia or confirmation bias.

Anyway we grew up and left all that behind with the tooth fairy*, didn't we?


*(an old Norse superstition of paying children for their spare teeth to make lucky necklaces for battle, although I might of made that up)

[devils advocate]

Love it! As a fellow Brit I confirm you have captured our Island spirit prefect!

[Jura-Glenlivet]

We are a dying breed DA (edit Doh).

I just made everyone in my office, a cup of tea. That’s not a brag just a statement of fact, tea is the leveller here, everyone must take their turn, and they are judged by their results. Expediency does mean we use tea bags, but they are Twinnings breakfast teabags. A teapot isn’t practical here because of the perennial split between teapot cleaners, those weird fuckers that maintain the inside of the pot should be kept clean and proper tea drinkers for whom the build-up of tannin is to be celebrated, and acknowledged with a satisfied nod when a flake of concentrated poison ends up floating in your brew.

I have seen people posting on-line the correct way to make this drink, and those people should be birch whipped.
There is no correct way to make tea, only personal preference, to be stated to the person designated as tea maker for that round and respected as such.

This round; 1 strong with a dash of milk, no sugar, 1 medium, milky, one sugar, 1 medium, milky (to the colour of He-man’s tan), two sugars, 1 milky, weak with honey (faddist) and mine, strong black no sugar. I didn’t have to ask and I nailed it.

People who forget to stipulate their preference, get a tea the maker thinks they would like from the cut of their jib. It is a matter of pride for the maker to correctly determine this, but it is on the drinker’s head for being remiss or too timid, sugar in this case is given as an option and never guessed.

If you ever come to England and decide to get a cup of tea at a tea-shop, and they bring you an actual cup of tea, knock it from their hand and demand a duel, it’s the law and you get to choose both weapons, it is considered bad form to kill them however, as the idea being is to teach them a damn lesson.
Tea in this instance should be a small pot with milk and sugar as options, ideally you should have another pot of boiled water as well for a top up. If you go into a chain coffee shop and ask for a tea, you are a fuckwit and deserve what you get.

That’s tea. 

*(edit) This is reversed in a cafe (no acute accent, pronounced "caff", full of people in hi-vis), here you will likely get a mug of tea, which will invariably be strong "Yorkshire" tea, any attempt at knocking cups out of their hand here, will end with you being buried under the footings of a motorway bridge.

[devils advocate]

Haha this true, the decline of tea is equal to the reduction of satisfaction. Make tea not war! :-)

[Jura-Glenlivet]

Englishness!

Is it a thing? Are we different from the rest of the world? Do we still have anything to offer now we have misplaced our empire?

In this increasingly homogenised world, national identity has become subservient to corporate hegemony. (I have just read that back to myself and I apologise for the pretentiousness, but I’m English and I love the language). The above poncey line has a kernel of truth, but that way of thinking leads to (amongst others) the nationalistic “golden-age” crap I have no time for, Brexit,  and our English equivalents of Trump; Boris Johnson (the first human/teddy-bear/psychopath hybrid to go to Eton) and Jacob Rees-mogg (the first Stepford-husband assimilated by the Borg to go to Eton). And to be honest if you let it be so, then you are a chinless swamp donkey.

As well as the Eton types* who seem to run the country, there is a myriad of kinds of English. We and most of the world are surrounded by our antiquity; dolmens, menhirs, burial mounds, castles, dykes and ruins of all ages, able to plug us in to the centuries past for a sense of perspective. That surprisingly few do this and instead follow the shallow footsteps of America, is a worry.

It is small wonder the US is the home of most of the worlds proponents of a 6,000 old Earth as when you had finished the genocide of the indigenous peoples, that, became your year zero. The remaining pueblos and spear heads are not yours, but a symbol of your shame and you suffer from history disconnect as a result, hence marvel, Christian science and your attempt to fill the resultant void with calories, to the extent when I visited 10 or so years ago I spent a good proportion of my time exclaiming “Jesus creeping shit look at the size of that!”  That you then exported obesity to the parts of the world that could afford it (do you want fries with that?), means now that it isn’t funny any longer, as rising sea levels in England (in part) from the number of homegrown fatties threatens to flood Norfolk, thereby drowning a good sum of said chunkiness. Locking us into a sequence of bobbing up and down in the North Sea until sense prevails.

Having failed to answer any of the three proposed questions I will have to return later, as I am supposed to be working (very British).


 * (and here we see the self-perpetuating problem with the UK “Public” school system. That is, if you take children (particularly boys) away from their parents, and hand them over to sadistic pederasts for their formative years/education, you get a stratum of society who are devoid of normal human warmth, and consequently have the singularity of mind to want to rise in power, as hierarchy is an exaggerated and pervasive portion of their lives, then when they decide to have offspring, armed with that lack of humanity, they see no problem in subjecting their issue to the same, as, (to them) it did them no harm!)

[devils advocate]

We have a few things left in the locker yet but maybe the golden day's are behind us. But what days they were, let's just sit back and list the historical accomplishments of the holders of the record; "Worlds largest empire"...What have the Brits ever done for us?

The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd, Monty Python, Shakespear, Dickins, Pratchett, Byron, The English language, The internet, Chedder/Stilton/Red Leicester Cheese, Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding, Fish and Chips, Formula 1, Football, Rugby (The real man's sport your less macho American Football was stolen from), Tennis, Cricket, rounders (What our school girls used to play-you call it Baseball) Snooker, The Jet engine, The Telephone, theory of evolution, Stephen Hawkins, Richard Dawkins, Penicillin, Steam locomotion, Newton, and Ed the Duck.

However looking forwards, errrrrrrrrr, hmmmmmmm, gimme a sec......................................................................andymurray?........................bollox I'm turning the chair back around

[Jura-Glenlivet]

I don’t like lists, they are inelegant, but I’ve fixed it for inaccuracies and spelling.

The Beatles (meh), The Rolling Stones(meh), Led Zeppelin(meh), The Who (shite), Pink Floyd, Monty Python, Shakespeare, Dickens, Pratchett (see the who), Byron, The English language, The internet, Cheddar/Stilton/Red Leicester Cheese, Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding (the only meat allowed in here is fish, them’s the rules), Fish and Chips, Formula 1, Football, Rugby (The real meathead sport your less macho American Football was stolen from), Tennis(meh), Cricket, rounders (What our school girls used to play-you call it Baseball) Snooker (poking balls with a stick until they fall in a hole is nothing to crow about), The Jet engine, The Telephone, theory of evolution, Stephen Hawkins, Richard Dawkins, Penicillin, Steam locomotion, Newton, and Ed the Duck.

[devils advocate]

I can NOT believe you red-scored Ed the Duck! 

[Jura-Glenlivet]

When I finally go postal, (I am building a repeating ballista to be mounted on a google AI driven flatbed), at least one of my intended victims will be someone who made a career out of cramming his hand up some cute puppets arse and mewling cloying mawkish inanities designed to pull at the heartstrings of sickly children, thereby spreading corruptive sentimentality, calculated to undermine the spirit of England’s future warriors/canon-fodder.
You sir, by bringing to my notice this particular example of the wretched breed, may well have hastened his demise.     

[devils advocate]

England’s future warriors/canon-fodder.

Wow, a boiling kettle that must surely blow and spread the scalding steam of contempt upon those that offended!

I wonder if you could clarify the meaning the above canon fodder/warriors you describe? 

Are we to read that you refer to our soldiers and suchlike or that all current youths fall under that umbrella;

To fight, to kill and die for the nation in whatever chosen path life does select.
To live for England and for all things correct.
To strive in the factories until they can make no more, to toil in the fields until they can reap no further? Maybe to agonise over the arts to the point where the art consumes their soul?
 In the offices, the markets, the boardrooms and stalls. The studios the building sites, the hospitals and schools?
Is this the future for all?

[Jura-Glenlivet]

I wonder if you could clarify the meaning the above canon fodder/warriors you describe? 

Mmm, would there was a difference between the two distinctions, from feeding the poppies of Flanders fields, to patrolling those of Helmand, they fulfil both.

And in this I mean no disrespect, it has always been so.

[devils advocate]

When you do go postal please kill me first as I want not to live in the world you would leave in your wake. Much obliged.