Monte Carlo

I'm going to run it through that freaky grammar / typing comparison app to see if it's LOF. His reply was just so... measured. :: shivers ::

I think they need to dust off that Men Who Stare At Goats programme. Super-obese psi-warriors could kill the enemy by remote viewing from their hand-tooled leatherette Barca-loungers. Word.

His essay on his experience at the gym reeks alt.account to me, but I'm funny like that.

Right-of-centre chicks are hotter. Fact. Look at the newsreaders on NewsCorp media outlets.

^ But this doesn't detract from the all-round awesomeness of the Canadian sniper's shot.

I can't help but think that this guy is another LoF nom de guerre. He registered last night to, what? Tell us all about healthy diet. He's also weirdly into issues around physical fitness and race, I think he might be from Germany circa 1936. Dude, the racial stereotyping was offensive to this callsign, feign 'what me?' as much as you like but there it is.

The Latin members of the Euro have a different way of doing things from the Northern, predominantly protestant Euro-member states. As Rod Liddle said in the UK press this weekend, the Siesta zone versus the non-Siesta zone. I'm not going to be crudely stereotypical, not least because I love Italy and Spain... but. The Siesta Zone does seem to have higher incidences of public-sector waste and corruption, joke governments (q.v. Berlusconi), late 30-somethings still at university and not even remotely economically active and a lax attitude to tax compliance. and let us be honest - Greece wasn't ready for the Euro zone. Not by a country mile. The EU wanted it in for political reasons and is reaping the results. Ha ha ha. Happily, my own country, which has gotten far more 'European' than I would have liked in the past 13 years and has a wrecked economy, isn't in the Euro. As I said above, ha ha ha. I hope Greece pulls through, I harbour no animus towards them or any other European country (unlike the EU as a political entity) but they need to batten down the hatches because its gonna be tough.

Another irony of American / Euro awareness is the dispora experience. One generation after leaving the mother country, America does such an excellent job of integrating people that their view of their home country warps completely. Irish-Americans are an unintentionally amusing example. I remember a visit to Boston whereby folks about as Irish as I am were blindingly rude to me due to my accent.

If you are asking someone to lend you money, you represent a risk to the lender. The lender has every right to mitigate that risk, mainly by checking your ability to pay and using analysis to gauge terms and conditions. This is why Frau Merkel is being a bit sniffy about Greece, and who could blame her? She wasn't in the chair when the EU fudged Greek entry into the Euro. The problem kicks in when some smart-arse decides to bundle debt into a commodity and sell it, I'm not a financial expert nor economist but even I can see that's a bad idea. As for risk around the relative age of the borrower - it's a no brainer. In the UK the 40-something has more chance of having an asset that can be secured against the loan - namely his or her house and the equity in it. The 20-something probably has five pot-noodles, an i-phone and a pair of skinny jeans to his name.

Is one of those guys the Irish American who supports (almost exclusively Marxist) Irish Republicans? Oh the irony. Apologies if it isn't.

So here it is... what do our resident Stalin-apologists make of it? Don't tell me, they were counter-revolutionaries and it was all part of a greater good right? Try it, just remember, last week you were denying it.

LOL! A much-cherished sitcom here is Dad's Army. It's the adventures of a hapless unit of the 'Home Guard' who were the front line against the massed Teutonic horde camped in France. They spend most of their time trying to augment their meat rations, knitting scarves and gently mocking British class differences. They were made up of pensioners, unfit-for-service kids and guys in reserved occupations. They were armed initially with shotguns, broomsticks with knives strapped to them and US WW1 rifles. Life in Wartime England wasn't exactly luxurious (according to my parents, who grew up in the 1940's) but it was hardly a barbaric fight for survival. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the Blitz (she lived near the docks in East London), the bombing was probably the worst bit. Remember, the enemy never set foot on our shores, unless of course he'd just bailed out of a burning bomber.

Modern British firearms law is encapsulated by two acts, the 1968 and 1997 Firearms Acts ('97 is an amendment). I'm pretty sure the '68 one was a response to the 1966 shooting of 3 unarmed policemen in cold blood by a criminal called Harry Roberts (he's still in prison).

^ Gfted, your point about how recent this all is reminds me of why maybe sometimes this conversation goes the way it does between US and UK forumites. It's not like we were sleepily led down this path over many years, it is in very recent history and pretty-much supported by Joe Public. One reason we are jealous of America is it's sheer size. The sense of possibility. The outlaw ethos. You can be Billy the Kid, Thelma and Louise or Bonnie and Clyde. You can run. The UK is small. You can run. Just not very far, even now. I really think that informs the atittude of many criminals to guns. Cheers MC

No, there hasn't been a big history of civilian, urban firearms ownership in modern British history. There was the longbow, I suppose, but that was muscle-powered. Even in WW2 guns were issued to military reservists, not the civilian population. As for post-Dunblane, all handgun owners were given a surrender period. One friend of mine gave up about

The core issue here has been missed. Why do right-of-centre news channels have the hottest newsreaders?

^ A decent person helped along no end by the foreign policy ballsiness of Reagan and Thatcher. They might be left-wing hate figures now, but they effectively helped destroy the Soviet Union *Champagne corks all round* Shame about the nuclear-armed, completely corrupt kleptocracy of Putin, but you can't have everything.

^ Yeah, there were two seminal moments in recent British history concerning gun control. Hungerford - 1987 - Nut-job with a semi-auto AK murders lots of people, including unarmed cop. Ban on rifles, semi-autos etc. Dunblane - 1996 - Gun-nut went on a shooting spree in a Scottish school and murdered 16 kids and their teacher. The gunman, Hamilton, wasn't a Columbine-style teenager but a grown man and handgun enthusiast. After Dunblane the almost total ban on handguns came in - pro-firearms lobby argue that the warning signs were there with Hamilton and he should have been managed prior to the tragedy. Gfted, we are a small country. I remember Dunblane vividly, I live at the opposite end of the country and people were crying their eyes out.

Wrath, the argument is more nuanced than you describe. I'm not actually disagreeing with you, just asking you to consider the alternative. Personally, I can't get too worked up about gun control in the US because I don't live there. In the UK, however, it sort of works. It isn't perfect, our gun laws are too prohibitive and led by urban, left-wing ignorance in my view, but that's another story. Aggravated burglaries (i.e. with weapons) are rare here. That's because the sorts of criminals who use guns don't commit burglaries as a rule. Here, it's drug addicts after easily disposable goods. And, as easily disposable goods get cheaper they tend to resort to robberies so thank the assorted dieties that they ain't armed. Here in the UK you are on offer for five years for unlawful possession of a firearm. Period. It concentrates the mind. Criminals choose, carefully, which crimes they use guns on. And quite often, watching the news, this appears to be against other criminals. That's not an excuse to relax, because innocent people sometimes get caught up in it and that's a tragedy. But we don't have guns routinely used in crime. Our police still rarely carry them. I've probably got about 35-odd years of life left and I expect to die without seeing the cops armed here. I know it's a British mindset, but I find that more reassuring than a sign of leftie, sandal wearing surrender of my liberty. And I love guns. A day at the range = happy Monte. Shame I can't do it in my own country any more. Cheers MC

^ Dunno, but by the tone of this thread I suspect they are the smuggest.

The original Sacred Gold (like the old-skool look and feel) and Codename: Panzers Cold War.

Oh, whoops, look! We've just gone and committed a genocide by accident. Cause and effect. Nazi-sympathisers and holocaust deniers demand the detailed documentation that proves Hitler ordered the Final Solution, allegedly because outside of the minutes of the Wansee Conference the evidence is largely cause and effect. Hitler was, via a sheer himalaya of evidence, responsible. Yet the deniers still want to see how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Is this sounding familiar?

Yes, because you are one of the most effective and strangest alt.accounts I've encountered in all my time on the internet.

Yep. Apart from Tony Blair, who I suspect was never really a socialist in the way most of us would understand it. But most of the other members of the New Labour project were either members of the CPGB or other extreme left student groups. They did the whole thing, y'know, trips to Cuba, silly beards, marches, advocating nuclear disarmament whilst the Soviets had thousands of 'em and all the other stuff you associate with affluent middle-class students with self-loathing issues. They've done a really good job of destroying the UK as we know it, I suspect the dead-hand of Frankfurt schoolers in there somewhere. Many Neo-Cons were also former Marxists. All I'm saying, LoF, is that unless you are already in your thirties and holding down a state-funded job as an academic, I suspect you'll grow out of the phase you're in. Kiddo. Cheers MC

Can anybody else spot the factual error in LoF's post? I know he specialises in them, but anyway. And thanks for the lecture on my country's politics. The has-beens who run it were all, in their college days, rabid Marxists. That's what happens to them when they grow up.