“How to make a chemistry set”

David Davis 

Let knowledge drive out your fear, as will always be the case, here and for ever.

We’re working on it.

PLEASE…..could anyone on wordpress tell me what “spammy words” are…..

David Davis 

….so I can get my comments onto other blogs here, and not get them blocked in real time because the duty-cybertron thinks I am a “SPAMBOT”…..?

Does anybody else also think that the chatty “WordPress style”, of instructions and admonitions, suits students on drugs and primary-school children of 13 or 14 in the UK only?

This is what I found I’d got sent to me;

Sorry, your comment has been blocked because you used a word normally reserved for spammers. If you are not a spam peddling robot, you can hit the back button in your browser and stop using spammy words.

What Hugo Chavez’s “facebook” page would look like….(I typed “Hogu” at first, then foolishly had to re-edit it. Ho Ho HO, you’d never have found it then!)

David Davis 

I HAVE to show this to you guys, it is soooooo funny.

 Here, sort of.

Er. Ummm. On second thoughts, it’s perhaps not that funny. Just a little bit, in a proper, Western, liberal, sort of satirical way.  Just true and sad. We laugh at our foes: they can’t – they have to KILL, because everything is SERIOUS. Buggers. Have to get rid of them before harm is done – to us, and (much later on as it’s far far bigger than we are, about 1E22 times!) to the Planet.

The problem that all lefties and other related nazis (Nazism is always on the Extreme Left, and ever will be, and no amount of ranting and hooting and rioting and Polly-Toynbeeing by socialists can change this axiom at all) eventually have, is that they become humorous in their own right, and the pleasure is all ours, for they Can’t See It.

It’s a square world, and the Slobodian* slobs have not got it even after nearly 50 years of Michael Bentine telling them it is. They go on and on and on, strutting, wearing shades, fried-egg-compilations of medals and sashes all over their fronts, and they continue to ride in phalanxes of glossy, black, German limousines. (MERCS FOR JERKS – has anybody written the wikipedia page for this yet? I do not know.) I guess it’s just like Ken Livingstone, although he’s so influenced (by the Huggy-Chav of course!) that he can’t find his shades by lunchtime.

* I’m sorry – I could not find a link to help you to describe “Slobodia”, if you are under approx age 58.

NB! This is a program trailer; If YOU have been affected by the issues in this file, or if you or any relation, or your “part ner” , been Pollytoynbeeized in any incident recently, in a Town near You, then we can help………… We are an accredited anti-Nazi Agency that can offer Counselling Services, if you feel that you have been distressed. Call o845 56710897 for free help and advice.

Problem: (University Philosophy Finals Exam, er, type of thingy. I don’t know, I’m a Bumpkin.)

WHY DO SOCIALISTS TAKE THEIR ENEMIES SO SERIOUSLY,

AND NEVER, NEVER, EVER LAUGH AT THEM OR SATIRIZE THEM?

DISCUSS.

Six reasons why you might choose to smoke

David Davis

Like my old friend Chris Tame, who abhorred smoking and thought it was a disgusting and filthy habit, but for some of his life worked for FOREST, and with deep sincerity about the necessary liberty of the individual to decide, I would not smoke even if you paid me. Well……..now you’re offering, of course every Man has his price, but in my case it would be quite high, say £100,000 a year tax-paid, for life. You’d have to be able to wave goodbuy to about 5 million of capital.

The current lack of defence of smokers in the UK, in the face of a staggeringly cruel and merciless onslaught by the Nazi Smoke-Police, has I think its roots in the former hubris with which smokers freely (it was of course allowed) polluted the air in offices, rooms, trains, pubs and the like, without (mostly) asking if they might be allowed. When, until the late 70s, they were a majority of adults,  I guess this was tough but inevitable.

The point is, because we all felt so put-upon by their habit and its nasty smells, when we couldn’t do a thing about it, we are failing to defend

Defending animal testing: Rights and Duties, in man and animals – NOW UPDATED Thursday 31st Jan with breaking news about the ubyssey.ca writer’s building…

24th November 2008…..thought I’d put this in from the Daily Mash.

Updated again….25th March 2008 … this post has got so many pageviews that I think a really proper article from the Libertarian Alliance, about this immensely important subject, examining the whole subject of Natural Rights, and whether these apply to “animals” as well as Humans, ought to be produced. AS we are unpaid amateur bloggers, I can’t guarantee when it will appear, but appear it must.

David Davis

[  UPDATE BIT INSERTED  ] The biological sciences building at UBC was “locked-down” (I guess that means closed off for security purposes) by Police, in response to a “threat”. I don’t know about you, but for me that means I bet you 5p it’s the “animal rights” terrorists wot dun it to this seemingly fine university, with a blog run by sensible, down-to-earth students….. I rate these ALF-type people as far, far, far more dangerous to the future of Man in the universe, and something serious will have to be done about them ,or we are f****d.  They are, in strict temporal-comparison terms, far more immediate and nearby, chronically underestimated, and potentially lethal to civilisation than the IRA, the “Palestinians” (whatever those might be,) the EU itself (which shall of course implode eventually) or “Radical” Islam. This latter one does not even get off the starting block for me, if you look at the long term effects of i-ware, pop bands, MacDonalds and fully-available-plus-half-naked-Euro-totty (mostly very nice too, wish we’d had some of this for ourselves in the 50s and early 60s) on “young Islamic men”. I might write a piece entitiled “HOW THE c-THRU CROP-TOP WILL SAVE THE WORLD.”

And now, here’s the original, unupdated post………………!

I chanced accidentally, via Mark Steyn (a bumpkin’s daily must-read, to banish the creeping, all-miasmic socialist-induced depression about the world and man’s fate) on the UBC commentary site, which approximates I guess to a student blog. The link I followed logged stuf about Mark’s and Ezra Levant’s battle with Modern Nazi Canadian Sondergerichte thingies, known as “Human Rights Commissions”. There is of course no place at all, for these wicked fascist organisations in free, grown-up nations such as Canada: a nation which, along with Poland and the rest of the British Empire, fought precapitalist-barbarian-leftism from the first day to the last in 1939-45 (and incidentally in 1914-18 too…) “People” who “staff” these grotesquely evil outfits, ought either to seek help for neuroses, or perhaps they ought to read some good history books. Then, if they refuse these two quite painless courses of help, then they ought to be asked whose side they are on in the present titanic struggle of Civilisation against…well…its opposite, and have to choose sides and fight for it.

But now, to animals!

So, scrolling down, I caught the fag-end of a debate about testing of drugs and the like, on animals. The article on the ubyssey.ca site was written by a 3rd-year Biochemisty “major” (so I guess I must have been one too, once! I still teach the stuff, and am amazed at what now is considered by today’s youngsters to be a matter of fact when we had no blinking clue earlier) who also incidentally does the site’s cartoons from time to time; it is common to find curiously polymathic scientists, the world over. His thesis is that (1) he thinks humans are more important than animals, then also (2) in order to minimize human suffering and danger in the advance of treatment for ills, it is necessary although not perfectly ideal morally to use animals, and (3) animals’ physiology and biochemistry approximates to living human systems, so minimizes the risk of error and failure to spot harmful side-effects of treatments.

I agree totally with all this. However, he has missed vital points.  If these processes violated “animal rights”, then we should have to deduce that IF animals have rights, that they also have duties – and the innate understanding that goes with identifying these. Since animals clearly owe no duties to anyone or anything identifiable (caring for the young even in “higher” (bad term!) animals is not a conscious obligation, merely a result of fully-formed largely helpless young being born in small numbers, and also some selection for survival-behaviour) then they can have no “rights” as defined in human terms, which have evolved and crystallised into our modern views of natural rights of Man.

That of course does not absolve thinking humans from the obligation to protect animals in our charge from unnecessary harm or pain. As animals, not being humans, can therefore be Man’s property, this provision allows the killing of animals (as painlessly as possible – I guess it’s curtains for “halal” meat, then…???) for food, and also the use of them for checking what happens when we give them new drugs etc. Had for example, the testing of drugs on PREGNANT mammals, for teratogenicity, been routine in the 1950s and 60s (naturally, it now is) then thalidomide would never have been licensed for use as a morning-sickness palliative for women, and would never have been described as being ”entirely without  known side-effects”. (It was.)

Socialists, tree-hugging dropouts, hunt-saboteurs, social failures, and others who are viscerally-disposed to defend animals’ corner against man and his needs, ought to consider whether they are right to argue that Man is “for the planet”, or whether instead they are mistaken, and in fact ”the planet is for Man”. No possible amount of the wearing of Iraq-1 (or even Iraq-2) faux-camouflage day-leisurewear (made in Vietnam) in the shopping-precincts of Bootle – or elsewhere, even when “doing hunts” - will increase the credibility of these people.

In the end, all the motives of such people come down to a kind of neo-pastoralist lament, supposedly for some past “golden age”, when Man lived in harmony with “his surroundings”, had no influence over them whatever, and “the Lion lay down with the Lamb”….I notice it was never “the Spider with the Insect”. Does anybody consider the rights of insects (animals too, see below) in respect of spiders (also animals?)

Does it always have to be Man who carries the can? If so, then why?

Do “animals rights” “activists” consider Drosophila Melanogaster (the Fruit Fly) to be an animal? It is. To a first approximation, mathematically, “ALL ANIMALS FLY”. Do they know that? Have they done the sums? Animals are not just comprised of furry brown-eyed mammals, and nought else. Many entire phyla of animals have eaten each other, in the normal course of their business, in the most contemporaneously-horrible ways, for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, before we even arrived.

Finally, no scientist I have ever known wants, or has ever wanted, to be gratuitously cruel to animals.  My father was a scientist for the MAFF for 35 years after the war, and supervised among his other responsibilities (when MAFF was useful for something, such as helping farmers to extract more tons per acre, not like DEFRA now) a “room” and its own staff, which (room) I saw often, and which was full of quite large cages of white rats and mice, all carefully labelled and logged. The temperature was monitored 24/7, the staff knew exactly how old all the creatures were, and where, which cages had to be cleaned when, what amounts of food and water where to be given to what colonies at what hour, etc. I was even allowed to ” privately own” some of the creatures from time to time if I was a good boy, and I kept them at home, looking after them myself in my own cage system, and selling the babies in pairs for 2/6d a pair….if I thought the new owner was a responsible keeper. Yeah yeah whatever, slavery mumble groan knickers. I bought dinky Toys with the proceeds. And Mecanno. And Bayko rods and the like. (Floors are almost unobtainable these days.)

But neo-pastoralist lefties, posing as “scientists” (what a staggering corruption that was) such as Joseph Mengele both authorised and carried out personally the beheading of living human children, for “experiments” on “brains”.  I don’t think you’d get scientists doing this to animals, let alone humans, See and wiki their henchmen, Walter Darré, Adolf Hitler (who loved dogs) and Baldur von Schirach, those great reforming neo-pastoralist European socialists, who were all ”kind to animals”, and also had strong views about ”people” – particularly those whom their twisted, barbarian precapitalist strain of neopastoralism, led them  to regard as animals.

If proper classical Science was taught to 7-year-olds onwards, we owuld not have the problem of violent disputes over “animal” “rights”. Does anyone know if other advanced nations have such a problem?

A thousand people a day being phone-tapped in Britain. (I presume they stay on the “can-do” list after the first time?)

So why don’t we see any job ads in the Guardian, asking for phone-tappers? The (not any) people who (admit to) doing it must be very busy; the state must be needing a few more by now. Do you know any mates who you drink with, who say in the bar……”Pint for me mate, yeah, mate, busy-busy-busy! Cooooooooooooooor….. (cough)…. Had to tap 437 people’s phones today mate, I’m knackered….Yeah, boring! All them right wing bloggers….talk talk talk, all day, all that politicky stuff mate, and then there was that scribbler Memberofparlymont fella, you know, Guido, yeah him in Brussels that fella, he wot grassed up that Peter Hain fella….yeah, had to do him too coz’ it’s orderz yeah…….”

The Daily Telegraph had this leading this morning. 

Shocked, I then took a breath and got out my trusty slide rule and did some sums. Here is a powerpoint slide of the UK’s population breakdown, from something called the “Economic and Social Research Council” (Golly! That sounds like some awfully grand outfit! I wonder what it’s for?) For those who don’t have powerpoint, there are about 48 million adults available to phone-tap, since I don’t think even this administration is routinely tapping the phones of under-16s (but you never know!)

Assuming 1,000 orders a day, issued by about 600 “agencies” or “bodies” which allow themselves to do it (that’s heading for two a day for every, say, local council even) in 2006, there will be more by now. We are looking at about 400,000 people a year, or just under 1 in every 100 adults, targetted every year.

This is about eight times as many people as are in prison for anything at all.

So who might be a target for the state’s interest in his/her private communications? The article tells us that “Councils” are interested in “people suspected of fly-tipping”, for example. If this is the case, then it’s clearly nothing to do with “fighting terrorism”, for which, if it was just that, I could feel some slight sympathy.

But I just can’t get my head round there being 1% of the UK’s adults -and  a different 1% every year since once the state starts to tap you then I can’t see why it would stop - suspected of involvement, even most peripherally, with terrorism. If that was so, then, conservatively, 2 MILLION UK adults have become terrorist suspects after 9/11 alone.

They can’t be tapping street-sweepers, OAPs, shop-girls, socialist buskers and street-musicians, librarians, Tesco shelf-fillers, MacDonalds counter-staff, primary-school-teachers (if female which is most of them), hairdressers, gay-lesbian-transgendered-outreach workers, or Ethnic ”community leaders”. That’s most adults accounted for. So who’s in the frame? 

Why do the buggers need to do this stuff?

Are they………

(1) prurient, pus-exuding, sad individuals who have a personality problem? Unlikely, although this profession will attract the few that have the personal misfortune to be this way. Rather like recruiting guards and bullying-staff, at the socialist extermination camps of Europe and Russia, from 1917 to 1990. I just don’t think we have enough of those, although I could be wrong in this century in Britain.

(2) just “Bureau Crats”? That is to say, intellectual socialist/utopians, driven autistico-pathologically by the NEED to MAKE SOCIETY BETTER? This is as as hypothsised by one of our brothers and sisters at Samizdata a little time ago: do they just feel compelled to collect information of whatever sort available, about everyone, in case it “may be useful someday”…?

(3) just tightening up on tax-collection? (They are bust after all…)

(4) finding out what everyone is up to so they can (a) either tell them to stop it coz’ they like the orgasm that gives them, or (b) blackmail them by threatening to tell their wife about what they’ve been caught doing? I guess this puts them in category (1) after all.

(5) just ordinary reporters for the “News of the World”, merely trawling for “footballers’ sex romps”? (Why is it that when a footballer is “caught” having “a night of passionate sex” with a “blonde hairdresser” who is (not) his present girlfriend, the papers always refer to it as a “romp“?)

(6) checking on whether, when we ring from Tesco for further instructions about what to get, we are NOT buying unapproved foods such as chips, sugar, burgers, salt, British meat of whatever kind, airfreighted blueberries from Peru, or whatever? And to make sure that we have cycled there?

Whatever the reason, I can’t think of a nation alive today where there might be as high a level of phone surveillance as this one – except perhaps Cuba or north Korea, where the only people who will be allowed phones are the bureaucrats themselves, and there are few enough that they can and MUST be watched. For the safety of the Dear Leaders.

More on the chemistry set. I invite comments from anyone about what ought to be done about the preposterous British GCSE “science” “syllabus”.

David Davis 

See title, and please feel free to comment!

Today, I tore up my afternoon lesson plans for my students (they are rather hypothetical anyway, it depends what I feel like educating them about after a morning think and a read of the papers) went out with a new cheapo German microscope by a firm called Bresser (I don’t know anything about this firm yet, but I could not leave the machine in a Lidl store for £39.95 just sitting there) and taught.

I used a collection of slides made by my father in the late 1930s when he was a botany/insect-physiology student at Imperial College, and the boys and girls were wowed. None ever imagined that small things in the Natural World could look the way they do.

The machine comes in a kit with a digital camera-thingy, a USB cable and software for Windows/Mac – you can display the image on-screen as well as shove optical eyepieces in and look at it traditionally.

Chemistry in British schools is similarly emasculated, and we need to change this fast, or we as a nation will sink into a new Dark Age of fear, un-knowing and credulousness, much-to-be-desired by wicked socialist politicians and “movers/shakers”.

These people hate us, for showing the world the Door Out Of Hell, pointing the way to it, and teaching the world How To Live.

PS (update) I am now convinced that ALL good chemistry sets should contain a small phial of Mercury (metal), say about 50 to 100 grams,  plus the apparatus needed for its proper handling and use to make stuff like small barometers etc – also for it ot be used as a mobile cathode in electroylsis experiments.

Horrible nasty news from the EU; which is to say, the EuSSR. Relates to Sean Gabb’s postings about “Banned Video back on web” and “the most astonishing video you will ever see.”

David Davis 

I was, strangely, going to write about “Europe” today. I just felt like it, thinking it’s time the blasted contraption got another push down the hill from us here. The subject was going to be

“What should British libertarians recommend and execute, regarding regime changes in nations on the European continent, when the EU shall have imploded and fallen, and it is the job of the Anglosphere (AGAIN) to put things right for the poor wretched people of this unfortunate collection of states?”

A short enough title for this blog, and I will deal with this matter ,but not today now – for something worse has come out of the woodwork;

  

Subj: [eurorealist] more from fascist europe  Date: 26/01/2008 15:10:19 GMT Standard Time From: peter@pwwatson.demon.co.uk Reply-to: eurorealist@yahoogroups.com To: eurorealist@yahoogroups.com Sent from the Internet (Details)

Nigel Farage on his blog and the UKIP website have brought to our attention a rather alarming situation that our colleagues in Portugal are about to find themselves in. The PND [Partido da Nova Democracia] under Manuel Montiero have some similar aims to ours, especially to regain control of their fishing and to oppose the constitution. However a new law comes into force in Portugal in March 2008 that states political parties must have 5000 registered members or they will be declared illegal. Additionally, the names and addresses of the members must be given to the Portuguese authorities. This will mean that ten of Portugal’s fourteen political parties will disappear and the PND is one of them. This intolerance to opposition means that new parties would never be created, existing ones become more powerful and they alone would control party funding.

This situation is caused by Article 191 of the Nice Treaty, regarding party funding. If it can happen in Portugal, it can happen here. A good reason to increase our membership as fast as possible. Although I hesitate to compare it, it does bring to mind the identification of Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. UKIP is currently safe from extinction on these grounds as we have more than three times that many members.

 JOHN BAXTER

UKIP N DORSET NEWSLETTER JAN/FEB 2008
__,_._,___

You’d better read it I suppose. I odn’t see what the f*****g business it is of the EUSoviet Praesidium if anybody wants to form a political party and if so, how big it is. I also can’t see how you get to 5,000 members, so you can be “legal”, without having rather less than 5,000 members for quite some time.

Perhaps my regime change scheme will have to be accompanied by force, like it was in 1944.

I like this, from Delaware Libertarian

David Davis 

The numbers are “astounding” (as the Scottish female voiceover always says on BBC-popular-science programmes on the Wireless tele Vision.)

http://delawarelibertarian.blogspot.com/2008/01/virus-of-mind-with-no-apologies-to.html

I hope Delaware Libertarian will forgive me for just slotting in the link. Better that you read the whole thing, rather than that I should just précis it, and fairly badly as is my wont.

It makes you wonder how, with the current explosion of information and comms going on all about, Stalinists can find the time and resources to keep up with it and keep the chains on the rest of us. But I guess they can; for tyranny, war and inflation are the only things that they do “well”.

“Why does Tesco have soviet powers”

David Davis

Why indeed? Does it? I didn’t think so. Who ARE you, who keeps on about this stuff?

MORE personalised number plates.

David Davis 

L36GY  A        ………………..         I’ve been saving this one for a good day to bury bad news.

I wonder what this woman looks like? Unfortunately the windows of the people-carrier are blacked out.

Peter Hain goes! Strangely, occasionally, thugs do fall off the rattling Labour gravy-Train.

Thanks to Guido from all round, for getting his teeth into Hain’s ankle early on, and hanging on in.

Why is it that that the more greasy a leftist or a Nazi is, the more likely it is that he/she will be eventually found with a hand in the till? This one is neither the first nor the last.

Really, any free citizen eligible to stand for something, ought to be allowed to get contributions to fight some election or other, from anywhere at all, so from a libertarian perspective i can’t see what the fuss is about. Now, I am prepared to accept some basic level of (non-Governmental) legal regulation of how (and from whom) “donations” of any size may be received. However, I will object to what I see coming next, which is that this and other sleazy scams will be used by this government (or another) to argue for State funding of (all) elections. this would be a bad development, ushering in a shutting-out of small, fringe or “unpopular” parties, and setting a sad grey European fascist sort of ”proportional representation” in stone.

I remember the days when conservatives were always found, not with their hands in the till, but with their trousers down in the wrong house and (usually) with a lady who was not their wife. Perhaps their need for money was less pressing, and they were merely short of good, honest sex, with girls who did not resemble horses. Perhaps conservatives are having better sex at home these days, or else their wives have seen sense, as there is little tittle-tattle about what the buggers get up to; I do not know.

Decent chemistry sets. Take heart, people, for one or two of us are thinking about collating and marketing one.

David Davi s

The chemistry set, the proper one which before World War 2, which you either assembled yourself from your hardware store plus the local pharmacists, or which (after the war) you could buy quite easily, which you could still add to, and with which you could burn things, blow stuff up excitingly and also learn chemistry, has disappeared.

“Health and Safety”, a socialist (which is to say, Nazi) concept, plus (in my view) a deliberate State Attempt to deny technical knowledge to “the masses”, which of course socialists and other such Nazis have always regarded as dangerous people – to be controlled, has done for all the useful sets.

A few days ago I posted a wish list of some of the right chemicals which ought to be included. I would welcome comments from interested readers. here is again;

No particular order of importance:-

Phosphoric acid, flakes.

A “Woods metal” ingot (Bi, Sn, Cd, Pb alloy, melts at 55C)

Potassium permanganate, solid.

Iron oxide powder 

Calcium carbide (so cheap once, you couldn’t giv it away.)

Potassium dichromate (or potassium chromate would do.)

Glycerol

Iodine crystals

2-naphthol

Potassium iodide

Manganese (IV) dioxide

Sodium tetraborate

Nickel wire

Camphor

Aluminium powder

Silver nitrate

Potassium or sodium nitrate

Mercury (II) Oxide

Aniline (cryptically referred to as “phenylamine” in the trans-planetarily-wierd and outlandish British A-level syllabus…did you know that they have to represent a benzene ring as a single hexagon with a circle inside it?)

Ammonium (V) vanadate or (VI) molybdate

Sulphur, flowers

Iron sulphide sticks

Magnesium metal, ribbon

Calcium metal in naphtha

Strontium nitrate

Bismuth, metal

Sodium nitrite

Starch powder

Iron (III) nitrate

Phenol

A DECENT spirit burner, capable of running about 30 mins or more and with a big wick

Glass rods and tubes, for bending; capillary (1mm) and standard about 3mm bore

A good sharp cork-borer for same

Proper glass test tubes and corks/bungs to fit

Salicylic acid or benzoic acid crystals

Potassium bromide

Carbon charcoal powder (fine)

Glass wool

Of course, all the usual harmless gear such as Copper (II) sulphate, Copper (II) carbonate, Sodium bisulphate, potassium hydrogen tartrate, Magnesium sulphate (what was this for exactly except as a laxative?) Logwood chips, Sodium or Potassium carbonate, Litmus paper etc would be included.

I am not sure that any Western polity would allow us these days to sell you chlorates AND sulphur in the same set (as opposed to one or the other.) Or even Ammonium nitrate on its own. The “War on Terror” , which is of course the wrong war by definition since you can’t wage war against a tactic, but only against a logically-defined and ideologically-inimical enemy who has actual substance, has put paid to this combination.

It’s because your own “rulers” don’t trust you coz’ of what and who you are; but then that’s your problem, and not ours - for you were asleep and failed to not vote for them, while they were surreptitiously climbing the greasy pole of leftist politics in the West, for the past 40 years…

Still, I’d like to canvass the vies of readers on whether this enterprise might be viable.

“Heath Ledger”…I thought this was something logged-into and kept by Eurosceptics, regarding Ted Heath’s crimes against the British.

David Davis 

A man called “Heath Ledger”, an unfortunate name to be sure, has apparently sadly died in pill-strewn circumstances in New York, aged 28. (They always do, these people; what is it about “pills”, and about the life they choose, that makes this method of death so popular? I only ask because I want to know.) 

I had no idea until this morning what he was known for, since I do not watch “movies” much at all unless they are called “The First of The Few”, the “The Dambusters”, or “Where Eagles Dare”, “The Hunt for Red October”, “Top Gun”,  “Sink the Bismarck!” (surprisingly powerful, sensitive and good when viewed by today’s youth who – through the action of Socialism - don’t know and don’t want to know anything at all about anything, and with very sound performances by Kenneth More and Dana Wynter), and “The Lord of the Rings”. Peter Jackson’s epic, possibly the Great Film of Our Time, is still a bit borderline for me although I consider the Book to be one of the most powerful literary works of Man’s Mind ever to be produced. It is going to be probably the best achievable realisation of my old lecturer’s Personal-Grand-English-Mythology, in practice, in this 21st century sociopolitical climate which we are forced for now to inhabit. (I am old enough to have had the great good fortune to hear the author himself, talking about it informally as digressions from his actual subjects of the day.)

But…

I thought that a “Heath Ledger” was something kept by the society of Ted Heath Burners, until I discovered…..the media.

This is not to belittle the personal sorrow for his family, of this young man’s death. But the eulogies following him, even in the Torygraph, make him sound like the Pope, or even, dare we say it, Elvis. Was he the star of something that the left-mediarati idolize as a philosophy, despite the film’s largely-unwatched status, specially in the Mid-West, or was he just a good actor who will be missed? Again, I only ask because I want to know.

“COMMUNIST WORLD WITHOUT TESCO”. SCARY IDEA. Yeah, I thought you’d wonder about that one.

David Davis 

This missile (see above) collided harmlessly with the armour-belt abutting the port-side of the blog yesterday, in a heavy following sea. It was swiftly and quietly made safe by a bolg-operative (able, second class) who climbed out to the stats page and retrieved it for examination, under enemy fire. He will be mentioned in dispatches (from a dying country.)  (Check this one out.)

What is it, exactly, about TESCO, that upsets and riles lefties? I’d love to hear one of them actually tell us something about this matter. After all, Wal-Mart (American) and Carrefour (French, I think?) are both bigger in global sales value terms. I do not find on the internet, unless I have been purblind and stupid, Walmart (say) coming in for the execration that Tesco gets, daily, in the British media. If one is a fascist-lefty-food-denier-to-poor-people all over the planet, such as certain British male tele-chefs make themselves out to be, then surely one ought to attack the biggest target first?

The identified poor-people may be schoolchildren in Scunthorpe who just want their native foods, or sub-Saharan sand-scrapers (who’d like any food at all) suffering from a surfeit of Bob Geldof, various other “pop singers”, and their friends the Jerks-in-Mercs (they may be wearing sunspecs and medals, so approach the “jerks” with caution.)

Is “cheap food” a problem – as the Prince of Wales is on record for describing this as an “obsession”? (It’s all right for him as he runs a large commercial concern very well and properly(and there’s nothing wrong in that) in which many of the operatives are his colleagues and friends, and who will not let him and his starve – nothing wrong in that either….but he is insulated, sort of, from the consequences of his own statements.)

If the Market can produce cheap food, then why ought it to be made more expensive by decree? Perhaps I will soon have to write that people who want to prohibit, or ban, or otherwise inconvenience supermarkets, are actually mass-murderers (not only murderers of Scunthorpe kids who want to eat chips, bacon-barms and butties for lunch, but also are murderers of Africans.)

Perhaps I will anyway, to see what happens.

AND…………..your Che Guevara T-shirt is EVEN LESS COOL than I said it was yesterday, so take it off and burn it, you immature ass.

The Police, crime and the liberal ideal. Detection rates fall as police spend rises. There is another way…..

David Davis

And so, we have…….

More police. More body-armour (but not for the soldiers at war.) More helicopters and more computers. “Terrestrial Trunk Radio” (isn’t that just a fancy-sounding dictocrat-type name for a secure dedicated mobile phone network for the fuzz? What was all the fuss about the other year, and why was it so expensive and useless? What are they using now?) More “ersatz” Police, even. And worst of all, four million video cameras, almost as many people as are now on the UK’s State-DNA database. (Or is it 5 million by now? The argument is not changed either way.)

The Police now cost nearly half as much as the (falling) defence budget and they are catching up. In a country with a historically low homicide rate, and which has until recently been a model of liberty and observance of Law, this would be humorously preposterous if it was not both sad and terrifying. We now have the satirical situation of a Police Force behaving like an occupying army in an unthreatened home nation, while underequipped and underpaid soldiers fight real enemies of our civilisation in faraway places. (The rest of the Libertarian Alliance knows that I have always supported Blair’s Iraq and Afghan ventures, the only right decisions in his life, that I have criticized the puller-outers, and I have never failed to be their foe. But the inversion of reality, manifested by increasing Police persecution of, say, motorists who drive fast and well in many kinds of condition, and retaliating householders who shout at evil unsocialised yobs, in a country full of real criminals, is getting ridiculous.)

Let’s do a sum, in pure maths language.

Let the current spend on policing be called “£10 billion”. Let it be assumed to rise at, say, 5% per year in real terms. This is about right. Let the year be 2008. Then, in 2009, the spend will be £10.5 billion.

Let there be assumed to be no taxation load (for policing purposes) on the revenue from corporate and excise taxation. The let all taxaion for policing be assumed to be paid out of personal taxation of incomes. Let the nett number of households that contribute a nett positive tax take to be 12 million (it’s a bit conservative and I don’t know the figures.) So we have to raise 10.5 billion from 12 million households. That’s 10.5E+9 divided by 12E+6, which gives £875 per household in 2009.

Let HM Treasury now instruct the Revenue to stop collecting this amount from households forthwith, and tell households to pay for policing and security themselves.

Let is be assumed that a mean of only one third of households will contribute the whole or part of the £875 that they are not now being mulcted for by the government. This will yield £3.5 billion. (The proportion will rise very quickly after a few weeks as people realise there is no infrastructure in place at all.)

There will be also now hundreds of thousands of unemployed Police personnel. Some will become minicab drivers, which will be useful, or bouncers, but on the whole this will drive down wages in the now-to-expand private security/criminal-arresting/property-protection sector, which can now expand quickly at little cost. Since video cameras have been proved useless at deterring street crimes, they can be taken down and sold for scrap to China, which will yield a few million £.

There will not be a lot of “diversity-awareness” in the new Private security forces. Therefore, the percentage of real criminals actually arrested, charged and put away uncomfortably for various periods, in initially quite insanitary and dangerous conditions, will rise. “Anti-racist” groups, and those others whose interest is not individual liberty of the law-abiding but instead is the destruction of civil British society, will find many difficulties in communicating with the criminals, whon they have hotherto used as sticks with which to beat the rest of us. They will find the “receptionists” who now work in criminal-arresting companies strangely immune to their blandishments.

Additionally, tax-breaks might be offered for (property-owning) householders who agree to take and pay for firearms courses. Guns are no danger at all in proper, trained hands, of those who have something to prpotect such as a family, and in these conditions tend to inspire respect and awe of the weapon and not light-headed use. A sum of say £500 per year tax allownance might be given for keeping a non-repeating, short gun at home, in regulated conditions whereby it is easily available to the householder in an emergency.

Let this legislation be widely publicised. Criminals can read things they need to read, even if they and their socialist probation officers pretend that they can’t. Sorry, but it’s a fact. The strongest motor of crime is the conscious decision to commit one.

Drunk out of skull? Bah, humbug.

“I just lost it…” Bah, humbug.

“He just did my head in”…Bah, humbug.

“He were lookin’ at my girlfriend…” (‘Course he was, prat. I would too. Why d’you think you go with her? Because she dresses like a nun?)

“I was trying to run away…” Bah, humbug.

“I didn’t mean to kill him, I just wanted his i-phone and he resisted and the knife slipped” Bah, humbug (as a barrister, you ought to know better on this one at least, you evil, expensively-educated stalinist prat. But I DO think that you should let a Jury decide, having shed your crocodile-tears for the useless waste-of-space whom you have to defend.)

There are lots of things that an initially ruinous but rapidly-privatizing police service would need to learn and could achieve. but I think the results would be better in the long run, for less waste of resources. the protected would be customers instead of a sociallly-segmented, persecuted or ignored proletariat.

MORE on the chemistry set. (Re-edited with fun substances of choice included.) We used to have these, once. Can anybody point readers to a proper chemistry set, anywhere in the world, with chemicals which you can do anything with?

Sorry for the rather short title. This thread on here came originally from the “12angrymenblog” (see our blogroll) some time ago. I don’t mind promoting it again now, because the side of this bolg gets hit by chemistry sets so often.

Apologies; I got called away. Here is a list of chemicals which would once have been common in early, which is to say early/mid-20th-century, chemistry sets.

I remember being able to buy potassium dichromate, in a high street chemist, in Epsom, Surrey, in 1967, for ninepence – not much but I got some, about an ounce or 28 grams, in a little cardboard cylinder with a plastic clip-top. The pharmacist, after informing me that it was a “schedule 2 poison (which I knew anyway, doing A-levels) told me; “now then, careful with that on the bus, sonny!” 

I’ve thought of everything that either I found in my first set, or that with hindsight as an experimental young boy, I would have liked. Further suggestions would be welcome, especially from American readers, who I gather in some states are now prevented from owning scientific apparatus and some chemicals, for “terrorist” reasons (is this actually true?)

No particular order of importance:-

Phosphoric acid, flakes.

A “Woods metal” ingot (Bi, Sn, Cd, Pb alloy, melts at 55C)

Potassium permanganate, solid.

Iron oxide powder 

Calcium carbide (so cheap once, you couldn’t giv it away.)

Potassium dichromate (or potassium chromate would do.)

Glycerol

Iodine crystals

2-naphthol

Potassium iodide

Manganese (IV) dioxide

Sodium tetraborate

Nickel wire

Camphor

Aluminium powder

Silver nitrate

Potassium or sodium nitrate

Mercury (II) Oxide

Aniline (cryptically referred to as “phenylamine” in the trans-planetarily-wierd and outlandish British A-level syllabus…did you know that they have to represent a benzene ring as a single hexagon with a circle inside it?)

Ammonium (V) vanadate or (VI) molybdate

Sulphur, flowers

Iron sulphide sticks

Magnesium metal, ribbon

Calcium metal in naphtha

Strontium nitrate

Bismuth, metal

Sodium nitrite

Starch powder

Iron (III) nitrate

Phenol

A DECENT spirit burner, capable of running about 30 mins or more and with a big wick

Glass rods and tubes, for bending; capillary (1mm) and standard about 3mm bore

A good sharp cork-borer for same

Proper glass test tubes and corks/bungs to fit

Salicylic acid or benzoic acid crystals

Potassium bromide

Carbon charcoal powder (fine)

Glass wool

A year later aged 16, I was allowed to buy a litre of concentrated sulphuric acid, from Messrs Gallenkamp in North London somewhere, having forced my mother to drive me there. The receptionist was surprised, but I got the stuff. I recall that she was a woman of about 28-32(ish), in a tight pink wool (sort of) mini-skirt and a black top that we would now call a “t-shirt”. Goodness, she must be about 70 now…wonder if she remembers the strange boy who wanted REAL chemicals in 500g and 1-Kg lots, and apparatus (and who did the paying) and his stranger mother? (And, re t-shirts, Che Guevara WAS a murderer, and no, your T-shirt is EVEN LESS COOL than it was last year. So take it off, burn it, and get a proper one with Bush on it, looking dreamily off-camera somewhere. Towards Venezeuela if you like. Pretty girls there.)

Socialism and the Left: Accidentally wrong? or less good than the best? or just plain deliberate wickedness and evil? Updated slightly 2nd March 2008.

David Davis

I have been wondering about this problem for some years. It is utterly obvious that human beings naturally want to interact by co-operation in a very large way, immeasurably outstripping even the most social animals observable. 

Co-operation?

Insects? Bah, humbug! They are just robots; you could write a programme called “bee.com” or “termite.exe”……

Animals? …… even “fruitbat.bat” (you could even run all of these in DOS 2.0, a great prog for geeks who like us to not have Windows and stuff, saying that other stuff is better, OK you go try write something else and earn 150 billion in 30 years then) inside about 16Kb of ROM.

A subroutine of “tropicalfish.bat” might fetch a library called “vbruncloseswarm400.dll” which only runs when another bit of schmutter called “get_temp.dll” searches for the datalogger and responds to readings greater than 25deg C - this whole outfit of code might be as much as 180Kb, but not really more. (All this is crap, as I’m not a software geek at all, I know jack-shit about writing it, and I just pick up audible snippets from professionals who are publicly showing off. You know – the ones who “don’t change lightbulbs, as that’s a hardware problem…..”) Man however would need rather more disk space than that. 

Simple observation of history, the News Papers and the Wireless Tele Vision “News” programs (which on the BBC are a sort of light local magazine of ephemeral public sensation, and of individual tragedies which are properly the matters only for the families concerned) makes one want to believe the following things about leftism:-

There are two types of lefty, I think. 

Firstly, the infantile ranting student variety of socialist, such as Peter Hain used to be, which seems to execrate everything that is good because it is old (and which has therefore survived.) This type holds onto student-activist behaviour late into life, like “signing on” in the vacations when in your univ town, or being caught with your hand in the Student Union Till (you were only using the funds to further The Cause, honest Guv) or in your (posher) girlfriend’s wallet. 

Secondly, you have the grown-up sort that dispenses with student niceties of shiftiness based on ancestral middle-class shame at doing wrong, and now extorts money with menaces - such as dictocrasts on “Local Councils” and Ken Livingstone……or who deliberately destroys institutions that he thinks are in its way or which supposedly support and represent his enemies, such as Tony Blair, and also the anti-hunting dudes……and/or who also kills defined groups of people such as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro or Che (and no, your T-shirt is STILL not cool.) These latter type are positioned by their adherents as a necessary and ground-breaking tool for “improving” “society”.

The latest attack for example on Private Schooling (for the benefit of newer American readers, we call them “Public Schools” here in the UK, for they are NOT anything to do with the State but were originally founded to make education “public”) is a case in point. These schools are charities. That is to say, they perform services for those children otherwise unable to pay the full fees through providing assisted or even free places, financed out of their own resources or via donations or legacies from (increasingly often) wealthy former pupils; in return, the British State, even under actual socialist guvmints as opposed to pretend (Tory) ones, has given them relief from some of the more bizarre taxations and imposts.

The British State’s problem is that its own schools, run nationally and financed through taxation, are mostly shit. Sorry, but it’s true. They are, especially in the most rotten Labour boroughs and constituencies, which tend to contain the worst ones financec by the highest State spending, merely rather-poor state-child-minding-centres. The State curriculum, that is to say the politically-agreed nationalised body of “knowledge” which the apparatchiks forced to work there are authorised to transmit, is regularly degraded so as to achieve an ever-increasing rate of “success”, year-on-year. This is, each time, attributed by whoever is the minister in charge of this nonsense, as “yet another vindication of the highest-ever-level of dedication by our fantastic teachers, and becuase their stuidents have worked harder than ever before”.

“Five Year Plans” do not even come close, as exercises in “It’s a Square World“-type self-parodying irony….George Orwell could not make it up.

Unfortunately for the British State, the Universities, especially the best ones, still seem to think that they ought to admit students who are best placed to benefit most from such education. This irritates the left profoundly, and means that more and more State spending on “education” produces less and less result. Public Schools still provide about two-thirds of students at the top 20-odd universities, despite educating only 7%  of pupils (the State’s own figures!) In my day 40 years ago it was about half, with many able chaps coming from “secondary moderns” (abolished since then) - so the Public schools are winning and the state is losing.

The point about “deliberate wickedness and evil” is that the effect of private education, in maximizing actual education while spreading it widely also, is only good. To threaten such places with “closure” (as is now the case, in new proposals) is not to act to spread good, which we have always been given to understand, by socialists, is the purpose of socialism. Instead is it to prevent good from being done at all, given that no comparable amount can be done (as is evident daily to millions of parents) in the State’s own schools.

I learn yesterday that the GCSE Geography “syllabus” is about to be changed (again.) It’s already pretty firmly Marxist in subliminal but insistent slant, being full of Al Gore, exploitation of Javanese women factory workers by “TNCs”, and studies of the “favelas”, “Mumbai”, and tourism-generated congestion problems in Cumbria. As a result, fewer and fewer students optf or it at GCSE. The remedy, we are told by the guvmint, will be ”to re-engage the interest of young people” by making it ”more relevant”, by “focussing more heavily on global warming and climate change issues”. (Their words not mine.) The young people already can’t find their own town (here) on a UK map, let alone Tokyo or Antarctica.

These are just two examples. You’d have thought that intelligent people (most socialists are graduates) would conclude that if going “forwards” makes the problems worse, then you should dump whatever hypothesis was driving you that was and get another. But they don’t. They never, never do. Nobody from the lefties ever said “sorry” to us, or even, say to the Czechs and Slovaks and Poles, not to mention the East Germans, about the Cold War. Ever. At least people like Reagan and Thatcher said, sort of, “sorry you had to wait so long”.

Staggering purblindness to the faults of one’s own deliberately prosecuted, fought-for, killed-for, decades-old ideology, serially-rammed down the throats of nations, and without any successful result ever, suggests not simple error or misguidedness – it suggests pure, bottomless, unfathomable evil and a black heart of darkness – the apotheosis of Hell, translated to Earth.

And then….we all die anyway.

HOW MUCH IS A BILLION? SEE BELOW. By the way, Gordon Brown was the first chancellor to SPEND a Billion a day. (Now he borrows the same amount.)

David Davis 

This is fun from the USA.

From: Gaylon Ross

To: Recipient List Suppressed:

Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:53 PM

Subject: A billion

How much is a billion?
 

        This is too true to be very funny
 

The next time you hear a politician use the

Word ‘billion’ in a casual manner, think about

Whether you want the ‘politicians’ spending

YOUR tax money.

A billion is a difficult number to comprehend,

But one advertising agency did a good job of

Putting that figure into some perspective in

One of its releases.

A. A billion seconds ago it was 1959.B. A billion minutes ago Jesus was alive.

C. A billion hours ago our ancestors were

     Living in the Old (middle paleolithic) Stone Age.

D. A billion days ago no-one walked on the earth on two feet. (That’s 2,740,000 years approx – I think the writer is wrong but it’s a moot point still – David Davis)

E. A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and  20 minutes, at the rate our government is spending it.

While this thought is still fresh in our brain, let’s take a look at New Orleans. It’s amazing what you can learn with some simple division…..Louisiana Senator, Mary Landrieu (D), is presently asking the Congress for $250 BILLION to rebuild New Orleans.  Interesting number, what does it mean?A. Well, if you are one of 484,674 residents of 

  New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.

B. Or, if you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans , your home gets $1,329,787. C. Or, if you are a family of four, your family Gets $2,066,012.Washington, D.C. .. HELLO!!! … Are all your calculators broken??
 

Tax his land,
Tax his wage,
Tax his bed in which he lays.
Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,

Teach him taxes are the rule.

 

Tax his cow,
Tax his goat,
Tax his pants,
Tax his coat.Tax his ties,
Tax his shirts,
Tax his work,
Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco,
Tax his drink,
Tax him if he tries to think.

Tax his booze,
Tax his beers,
If he cries,
Tax his tears.

Tax his bills,
Tax his gas,
Tax his notes,
Tax his cash.

Tax him good and let him know
That after taxes, he has no dough.

If he hollers,
Tax him more,
Tax him until he’s good and sore.

Tax his coffin,
Tax his grave,
Tax the sod in which he lays.
Put these words upon his tomb,
‘Taxes drove me to my doom!’

And when he’s gone,
We won’t relax,

We’ll still be after the inheritance TAX!

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
CDL License Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Dog License Tax
Federal Income Tax
Federal Unemployment Tax (FUTA)
Fishing License Tax
Food License Tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax
Inventory Tax
IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax),
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax),
Liquor Tax,
Luxury Tax,
Marriage License Tax,
Medicare Tax,
Property Tax,
Real Estate Tax,
Service charge taxes,
Social Security Tax,
Road Usage Tax (Truckers),
Sales Taxes,
Recreational Vehicle Tax,
School Tax,
State Income Tax,
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA),
Telephone Federal Excise Tax,
Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax,
Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Tax,
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax,
Telephone Recurring and Non-recurring Charges Tax,
Telephone State and Local Tax,
Teleph one Usage Charge Tax,
Utility Tax,
Vehicle License Registration Tax,
Vehicle Sales Tax,
Watercraft Registration Tax,
Well Permit Tax,
Workers Compensation Tax.
 

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago,
And our nation was the most prosperous in the world.    
We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.What happened?  Can you spell ‘politicians!’
And I still have to ‘press 1′ for English. I hope this goes around THE
USA at least 100 times
 
What the heck happened ?????

Ron Paul is the only one holding a political office

that really cares.

–

Gaylon

Isn’t it funny! Cafes and bars and eateries in Dictocracies don’t satirize Western leaders and Great Men, but we do it to theirs! Shall we go to the Bistro-Castro, anyone? Or the Chavez-Chawarma? Pork Pies Putin?

Our brothers and sisters over at Samizdata got hold of this place;

Cafe Mao ……  Asian. 2-3 Chatham Row Dublin 2. Phone (01) 670 4899. Fax (01) 670 4999

Their very fair comment, I think, was along the lines of there NOT being any places called ”cafe Hitler”, and that these would probably go bust in about three and a quarter minutes, if not previously closed down forcibly while in the process of shop-fitting, by the British Tabloid Press. This press-body screams blue murder when silly young Prince Harry wearas a Brownshirt uniform to go to a student party, but is silent about Stalin, Mao, Darfur, the Copts, Cuba, North Korea, East Timor, the Sendero Luminoso, Russia, Southern Rhodesia, and so many many other places on which it has had decades to do research.

 The joke is, moreover, that the place seems to be not very good! Here’s one review…..

Advantages: none really

Disadvantages: food, staff, name

I been here a few times (more accurately dragged by a friend who appreciates the large smoking section).
The food is adequate but no more than that and tends to be rather oily. Fishcakes are fried spongey balls of homogenised material (unidentifiable).
The staff are of the aspiring actor variety but are unfortunately not able to act the part of waiters very convincingly.
The floor manager I have encountered is an officious busybody who I saw sending a waiter upstairs after somebody she thought might be going to the bathroom – ” he didn’t eat here! Stop him!”. She will make you wait 15 minutes for a table on principle because,you know, Mao is a happening place and you can’t expect to just swan in and sit down at once.
Why give them the money when the cafe a few doors down has lovely food and genuinely charming staff?
Another thing: who chose the name? Was it a toss-up between that and Pol Pot?  

(To be fair, the other two available reviews were positive. ) But if I was the owner, I’d be keen for what ebay calls “100% positive feedback”  – so I’d want to either up the quality of food and staff, or think about my choice of branding rather hard – or else track down and “re-educate” the negative writers like my Icon did.

Why not Confucius? More people born in the West since 1980 may have have heard of him, he’s palpably Chinese, and he didn’t, so far as we know, murder 100 million (ish) people.