Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Disruption to supplies around the pacific area.......something will happen....

Looks like that madman is going to keep trying to provoke Trump .

China Calls For Calm In 'Complicated And Sensitive' Korean Situation
Wed, 9th Aug 2017 13:17

The Chinese government has called for cool heads amid the current tensions between the US and North Korea over Pyongyang's nuclear programme.

"The current situation on the [Korean] peninsula is highly complicated and sensitive," according to a fax from China's Foreign Ministry which dpa received late on Wednesday.

"We hope all relevant parties speak cautiously and move prudently, stop provoking each other, avoid further escalating the situation and strive to return to the correct track of dialogue and negotiations as soon as possible."

I wouldn't be surprised if the americans don't knock out of the sky the next north korean missile test as a severe warning !.....something like that....

Anyway...what is this weather ?.....blinkin heck !....I'm getting webbed feet and hands...so much it has rained....can't beat the good ol' british summer weather....never know what it's going to do....

It's globular warming rf.

You need to pay more tax to cure it.

The biggest threat to free speech? It’s the left (Fred and Stan)


By Niall Ferguson August 07, 2017

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/08/07/the-biggest-threat-free-speech-the-left/QeNyES0rXB3bdWR8rjHKTI/story.html



With every passing week, those who predicted the tyranny of President Trump look sillier. Blocked by the courts, frustrated by Congress, assailed by the press, under mounting pressure from a special counsel, and reduced to reenacting “The Apprentice” within the White House, the president has passed from tyranny to trumpery to tomfoolery with the speed of a fat man stepping on a banana skin.

So does that mean we can all stop worrying about tyranny in America? No. For the worst thing about the Trump presidency is that its failure risks opening the door for the equal and opposite but much more ruthless populism of the left. Call me an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, but I find their tyranny a far more alarming — and more likely — prospect.



With few exceptions, American conservatives respect the Constitution. The modern American left, by contrast, thirsts to get rid of one of the most fundamental protections that the Constitution enshrines: free speech. If you want to see where that freedom is currently under attack in the United States, accompany me to some institutions where you might expect free expression to be revered.

Almost every month this year has seen at least one assault on free speech on an American college campus. In February the University of California, Berkeley, cancelled a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos, the British “alt-right” journalist and provocateur, after a violent demonstration. In March students at Middlebury College in Vermont shouted down the sociologist Charles Murray and assaulted his faculty host. In April, it was the turn of conservative writer Heather MacDonald at Claremont McKenna and pro-Trump journalist Ann Coulter at Berkeley.


Nor is it only right-wing speakers who have been targeted. Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Washington state, always thought of himself as “deeply progressive.” In May, however, it was his turn to fall victim to the unfree speech vigilantes. Weinstein refused to acquiesce when “white students, staff, and faculty” were “invited to leave campus” for a day. In response, a group of about 50 students confronted him outside his classroom, shrilly accusing him of “supporting white supremacy” and refusing to listen to his counter-arguments.

No one could accuse the great Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins of being right-wing. Yet last month it was his turn to be silenced. A public radio station in — you guessed it — Berkeley canceled a discussion of his latest book because (in the words of a spokesman) “he has said things that I know have hurt people,” a misleading allusion to the atheist Dawkins’s forthright criticism of Islam. The station’s general manager declared: “We believe that it is our free speech right not to participate with anyone who uses hateful or hurtful language against a community that is already under attack.”

These are weasel words similar to those published in The New York Times back in April by Ulrich Baer, a professor of comparative literature at New York University who also glories in the title of “vice provost for faculty, arts, humanities, and diversity.” “The idea of freedom of speech,” wrote Baer, “does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community.”



“Freedom of expression is not an unchanging absolute,” Baer went on. “[I]t requires the vigilant and continuing examination of its parameters.”

Sorry, mate. Freedom of expression is an unchanging absolute and, as a free speech absolutist, I am here (a) to defend to the death your right to publish such drivel and (b) to explain to as many people as possible why it is so dangerous.

Freedom is rarely killed off by people chanting “Down with Freedom!” It is killed off by people claiming that the greater good/the general will/the community/the proletariat requires “examination of the parameters” (or some such cant phrase) of individual liberty. If the criterion for censorship is that nobody’s feelings can be hurt, we are finished as a free society.

Where such arguments lead is just a long-haul flight away.

The regime of Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, in Venezuela, used to be the toast of such darlings of the American Left as Naomi Klein, whose 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine” praised Venezuela as “a zone of relative economic calm” in a world dominated by marauding free market economists. Today (as was eminently foreseeable 10 years back), Venezuela is in a state of economic collapse, its opposition leaders are in jail, and its constitution is about to be rewritten yet again to keep the Chavista dictatorship in power. Another regime where those who speak freely land in jail is Saudi Arabia, a regime lauded by Women’s March leader and sharia law enthusiast Linda Sarsour.

Mark my words, while I can still publish them with impunity:

The real tyrants, when they come, will be for diversity (except of opinion) and against hate speech (except their own).

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

(bad taste TV):
Good evening Illegal immigrant Contestants and welcome to the show !
Now tonight have we got a show for you :
I see that you have all made it safely across deserts...shark invested waters...customs and excise....beatings...etc..etc...welcome
Now in tonights show you can win a stay of execution in this lovely country by participating successfully in the big wheel of fortune...mine that is ...(giggles...)
We tie the dozen of you or so to the big wheel and give it a spin.....I on the otherhand have a cannon that fires cannonballs at the wheel...if it hits you : you win if you are lucky enough to survive...oh I forgot to mention that the wheel takes a dipping and you as well as it rotates round slowly in the pond at the bottom of the wheel....this is just to make things more interesting...well good luck all at let the show commence.....
May I wish everybody the very best of luck !...

re- MaxK - 09 Aug 2017 20:46 - 78756 of 78757 - The biggest threat to free speech? It’s the left (Fred and Stan)

And I thought they were after all the same person, only depending on what side of the bed (he) was getting up, using one name or the other.

well call it ............dissociative identity disorder or better known as ....multiple personality disorder

note - I reached that conclusion some time back so, now I had the opportunity to say so.

The US will not attack NK because Seoul is within easy range of vast heavy artillery most which is underground. They have 12,000 artillery pieces and 2,300 rocket launchers. NK would destroy Seoul in a matter of minutes. Seoul is far too close the the border.

It may not be a case of the USA will not attack NK ,it may be that the lunatic attacks Guam in which case it would force Trumps hand ,now would Kim Jong un be that stupid ?

the police were right to use a former racist to get those criminals charged you can not ask a child to come forward on their own . the police 100% correct
now when these scum are released they must be deported to their country of dna weather they were born here or not .

just watching sky news over 11m have been abused by Asian gangs it is a national disgrace that the race card has protected these scum .

Walking around London is safe again ..........

British police arrest 41-year-old jogger suspected of knocking woman in front of bus

LONDON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - British police on Thursday said they had arrested a 41-year-old jogger on suspicion of knocking a woman into the path of a bus on a busy west London street earlier this year.

Closed circuit TV footage showed the male runner knocking a 33-year-old woman head-first in front of a bus which just managed to swerve out of her way.

"Police investigating an assault after a jogger appeared to push a woman into the path of an oncoming bus in Putney have made an arrest," London police said in a statement.

A 41-year-old man is being held on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm after an arrest in the nearby Chelsea area of London, police said. The victim received minor injuries from the incident.

The arrest came after a public appeal earlier the week for help in tracing the jogger. Although the incident happened in May, police said they had received a "good response" from the appeal, and said they were still looking for other witnesses.

This Putney Bridge incident may give bankers a bad name..

Lol !!

78760 - i suspect china has a pretty tight grip on kim and north korea and will do everything in its power to stop kim doing anything so crassly stupid

Looking at the video of the jogger in slow motion it looks like the woman was tripping him. Funny that no charges.

Bit pissed, so can't find our football thread. Stan in your wildest dreams could Burnley seriously have expected that result today. Fabulous!! Wayne Rooney say no more. But for Gods sake Ronald we need a striker :o)

A bit late but reading for Manuel!