If the BBC want to produce propaganda and people want to pay for it, fine. There's no reason why I should.

Metcalf

There was a poster in a friend's room at college (many, many years ago) featuring the words of Pastor Niemoller; 'First they came for...'
I have recently come to recall this almost daily, and completely agree with the author that it's high time people who believe in Enlightenment values stand up to anybody whose response to history is tear it down or smash it, whose response to dissent is to tear at it and smash it, whose response to people whose opinions differ from their own is to.. well, you get the idea.
Where I'd part company is the comments that seem to imply that a line should be drawn that indicates some statues should be torn down, and others not. To the Taliban, the Bamiyan Buddhas (idolatry) were as offensive those of slave traders are to us. The solution is not to erase and destroy, but to learn and build, not to forget. Slave-trader statue? Build a bigger statue of Wilberforce close by with a plaque on both statues explaining what happened. Build a Martin Luther King statue opposite the confederate general.
A principled stance here is not to define what statues you (personally, and in this period of your life) like and don't like, it is to define whether or not society is best served by destroying its symbols and erasing its past, or not.

Edvard Grieg

If you cannot defend say Tommy Robinson’s right to freedom of speech you do not believe in freedom of speech and you aren’t a liberal.

JK Rowling and Suzanne Moore would never have defended anyone they disagreed with, had such a person been cancelled. Neither of them had anything to say about what happened to the girls in Rotherham etc. Their defence of women is a very particular defence of a particular kind of leftish feminism. They helped made the beds they are now lying in, much more comfortably than all those child victims of rape, torture and prostitution, for whom they were not prepared to speak out.

Those who still occupy their exalted positions and refuse to condemn outright, not just the shutting down of free debate, but the shutting up of victims of violence have no right to complain when their turn comes.

https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/the-week-in-facts-who-stopped-mike-tyson-from-hitting-on-naomi-campbell/

June 27

A.J. Ayer (died 1989). In 1987 the eminent philosopher and academic found himself, aged 77, at a party where Naomi Campbell was receiving unwelcome attention from Mike Tyson. He politely asked the boxer to leave Campbell alone. Tyson replied: ‘Do you know who the f**k I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.’ ‘And I,’ said Ayer, ‘am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’

By now it was not just that Watson, Remayne and Radcliffe had ‘called out’ and ‘spoken up’ about Rowling’s views. They had spoken up — as reporter after reporter put it – against Rowling’s ‘controversial’ views. It is a very interesting thing this modern use of the word ‘controversial’, often and indeed usually put in front of a person who holds views which are in absolutely no way controversial.

For his part, Boyega is the perfect advertisement for how to play the celebrity game without self-censoring your beliefs or your background. The son of a pastor and a carer in Peckham, his roots are refreshingly ordinary – a rare thing in Hollywood. As I used to joke when I lived there in the ‘90s, if you only know Peckham from Only Fools and Horses then let me tell you – television has a way of glamourising neighbourhoods.

Garza, Cullors and Tometi insist on an unbroken continuity between Martin Luther King’s movement and Black Lives Matter. But this continuity exists mainly in the imaginations of BLM leaders.




The spirituality of Black Lives Matter, like its ideology, is difficult to pin down. BLM’s three founders are all graduates in the humanities or social sciences; Cullors was a Fulbright scholar.




Their lingua franca is the postmodern jargon of Queer postmodernism, which isn’t big in African American circles. They have used it to evolve a concept of ‘Black’, always with a capital B, which is at the same time mystical, slippery and separatist. You can hear traces of it in the Bethesda Promises, which refer to ‘racism’ and ‘anti-blackness’ as different things.




I’m not suggesting that Black Lives Matter doesn’t enjoy the support of the black community. But to grasp its essence you really need to be familiar with the theoretical underpinnings of identity politics — an inescapable ordeal for millions of young American whites, but not so much for young blacks. As a general rule, the more elite the university, the more fanatical the support of its student body for BLM.

Not coincidentally, these are also the universities in which identity politics most closely resembles what Alexandra DeSanctis, writing in National Review, describes as ‘a creed for the godless’ that takes special relish in excommunication. Hence the appeal of ritual promises.

I think we can trust the Maryland protesters to stay true to their word. They know the score. Three-quarters of Bethesda’s residents have college degrees; half have graduate degrees. The only problem is that less than three percent of them are African Americans. Where are they going to find those black neighbors to love?

Bare-metal hypervisors can dynamically allocate available resources depending on the current needs of a particular VM. A type 2 hypervisor occupies whatever you allocate to a virtual machine.

When you assign 8GB of RAM to a VM, that amount will be taken up even if the VM is using only a fraction of it. If the host machine has 32GB of RAM and you create three VMs with 8GB each, you are left with 8GB of RAM to keep the physical machine running. Creating another VM with 8GB of ram would bring down your system. This is critical to keep in mind, so as to avoid over-allocating resources and crashing the host machine.

When confronted with the messages, Roberts told Guido, “Over the past few months I have been dealing with some personal matters that have affected my mental health and clouded my judgement. During this period, I have made some mistakes and I apologise for any offence caused.”

Publish, and be damned.

What did her memoirs reveal about the Duke? He was, she wrote, her 'faithful lover, whose love survived six winters'. He was 'my own Wellington, who sighed over me and groaned over me by the hour, talked of my wonderful beauty, ran after me . . .' and he was 'my constant visitor', a 'modern Bluebeard', 'my old beau'.

Publish and be damned.

Here, in sight of God.

No machine produces more than it consumes

BOB CREWE GENERATION - MUSIC TO WATCH THE GIRLS GO BY

OTIS REED - CIGARETTES AND COFFEE

Mr Hannaford enjoys pretending to be ignorant.

We're an informal organisation !

They come and they go.

Why am I with all these stupid dummies - they were invited.

What happened in Austria? Hitler happened. He threw you out? She threw him out.

Is the camera-eye a reflection of reality or is reality a reflection of the camera eye? or is the camera merely a phallus.

We are blacked out. Just watch the birth rate nine months from tonight.

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

While Lines -

The problem with this whodunit/whydunit genre — Twin Peaks set the template for this — is that it allows for an awful lot of self-indulgent meandering, invariably leading to a dénouement so bathetic, and involving a plot revelation so tortured and convoluted that you wonder why you bothered. That’s why it’s so important with these things that on the way to your inevitable disappointment, you at least get to hang with a few characters you care about.

But so far — okay, I’m only two episodes in, but that’s the equivalent of a decent-length feature film — I find myself spectacularly uninvolved with any of the dramatis personae. I hate irksome, gobby, bleach-blond free spirit Axel Collins and quite understand why someone, everyone actually, would want him beaten up and killed. His old friends, such as bloated, fading DJ and drug dealer Marcus, are tragic losers. And his sister Zoe (Laura Haddock) sucks the joy out of every scene like a Dementor.

As our protagonist and guide, Zoe — a librarian who blossoms — just doesn’t work. I get the theory: female perspective; emotional journey; couples drama, rather than just boysy thriller. But that’s exactly the problem. It just feminises and waters down (with grisly themes like Zoe’s personal growth trajectory) what should essentially be a stylised, punchy, laddish caper in the spirit of the infinitely more exciting and edgier (and better acted) Mad Dogs.

Blur the edges of the story

He who sincerely seeks God has already found him.

First steps - Van Gogh