chrisp65

Don't forget the Thatcher government provided arms and support to the Khmer Rouge, yes that Khmer Rouge, the crazy communists who liquidated a huge proportion of their own population in a few short years. Mags decided toarm them after the killing fields. So much for her fervent anti-communist credentials the Khmer Rouge was over in 7th Jan 79 , Thatcher didn't become PM until May 79 apparently she supported them keeping their UN seat after they'd been ousted from power sounds weird, hadn't heard of it before, but it's on Wikipedia and therefore absolute fact

I didn't know that bit about the Khmer Rouge, fascinating. Apparently kept their seat warm at the UN and sent out the SAS to help train them. Yet another case of 'my enemy's enemy' not quite being a good rule to work by. I'd imagine every government has this kind of skeleton in their cupboard, backing up the truism, 'all governments are liars and murderers'.

there is a silver thread of truth and beauty that runs through the decades from 'there is no such thing as society' directly to 'we are all in this together'. both have a glib surface veneer of reasonableness and common sense both translate in action and reality to '**** you, pleb'

so how hard should you tug on an SD card that's mysteriously stuck in its slot? It's not in upside down or back to front, it works. I can take photo's, look at them, transfer them to laptop etc., so at the end of the day I don't have a desperate need to remove the SD card. But I'd like the option! You press it so it does the spring thing and pops out a little, from there you can grip it and get it out a little further - but then it is properly stuck firm. Any ideas that don't involve a mig welder or juniour hack saw?

yes but no you TV has a watershed and thus you wouldn't expect to see certain things before that watershed .... we have threads that carry warnings if they are NSFW or may be offensive ... this thread doesn't carry one I've seen nothing in this thread I haven't expected to see. I'll go further, I expected worse, I expected a shit storm the mods would have to close down.

it's the internet admittedly it's a quite well controlled and monitored part of the internet, but it's still the internet and we are almost all adults there are threads I don't like I no longer contribute to the religion thread, it clearly isn't for me, there were people getting aggressively abusive, so I've ducked out. As my dear old nan would say when mildly offended suggestiveness on the tv, 'there is an off button you ****'.

It'll be interesting to see what questioning there is of the cost of a ceremonial funeral. Estimates of cost for the last two similar funerals (Diana and Queen mum) are that they each cost circa £4M. Given all the variables, inflation, a bit less pomp, potentially a little more security and all that, another £4M spend looks like a decent guess. So, Margaret Thatcher, who has legitimately received over £500,000 in expenses in the last 5 years, will now create a £4M funeral bill. There is a little irony that a woman that strove to reduce state expenditure and to privatise much of what had been in public ownership will now have such a send off. Whilst I'm sure it won't be quite as direct as this, it's worth noting the first quarter of a million bedroom tax receipts of £14 a time from those that are often relatively poor, will simply go to offset the state funeral of the woman that reduced council house stocks. Reduced them by selling them off but not allowing the income from sales to be used to build new ones.

You'd side with the IRA over a Tory? That says an awful lot about your moral compass. as opposed to siding with Pinochet? Who gave the UK considerable aid during our little dust up with his neighbours. Not a nice man but on the other hand at least she stood by those who had helped her country and didn't feel the need to apologise for it. Real Politik has never been pretty. our enemy's enemy is beyond real politik, it's proper blood on your hands stupid - a bit like funding Afghan jihadists, that hasn't worked out very well has it how exactly did Argentina suddenly think they could take the Falklands? anything to do with cuts by any chance? anything to do with decommissioning HMS Endurance - for which Lord Carrington resigned to deflect attention from Thatcher's policy? Not a nice man hardly covers his state terrorism.

You'd side with the IRA over a Tory? That says an awful lot about your moral compass. as opposed to siding with Pinochet?

Except she was good for the middle classes and many of the working class who expressed that by voting for her. The left has done it's work of historical revisionism exceptionally well. there's no revisionism, she was clever enough to give to some and take from others it was a lottery, with the losing tickets often losing everything, but enough winning tickets to keep the whole thing running don't tell me there's been revisionism, I've walked through communities she closed down and put on the sick

Phil Dowd? Phil Dowd? whay does that name ring a bell? ah yes....

I've not really got a strong opinion one way or the other. Nah, only joking. Massively contributed to closing down manufacturing Britain to replace it with financial services Britain - what could possibly go wrong with that idea? Stuck rigidly to the poll tax - what could possibly be wrong with that. A true friend to General Pinochet - no problem with that surely? Everyone likes to help the odd fascist murderer when they can. 'No such thing as society' - might not be a direct and accurate quote, but just like 'we are all in it together' it kind of sums up the whole ethos. In her 10 years, for the first time in a hundred years, the poor got poorer. That was the basis of Thatcherism. But more than any of that tit for tat political table tennis, I know from my own personal experience that she disliked me and my town and chose deliberately and specifically to try and close us down. She destroyed the community I lived in. That community was both the physical fabric, the infrastructure and the people. I saw men that had old fashioned 'labour intensive' dirty hard jobs put out of work. They were then over time persuaded and massaged onto disability benefits because with unemployment over 3 million that was considered to not look good. So those guys that had previously worked for their families were made redundant. They were then put onto disability. Then, somehow after it became tiresome to pay them their benefits, they became skiving scum. She turned hard working dockers into skiving scum and persuaded middle England it was the fault of the skiving scum themselves. She, and her henchman Scargill created decades of misery we are still paying for. We can debate policies all evening, my personal experience is that I saw the innocent suffer because of her deliberate hate filled plan. (I do not vote Labour)

beach shot is quite excellent Cov Cathedral was really annoying, just didn't have the lens or the step ladder to get the proportions or the perpendicular, so yeah, agree again. There is a lens that would be a lazy fix for me, but it costs more than the camera. I decided the stonework line down the middle of the shot should be square and the other lines just are what they are. It's probably a bit of a get out, but my 'method' or my game is to basically take snapshots. I might wait for an old dear to move out of shot, but I will not make a spectacle of myself and lay on the floor or wait an hour for a shadow. Most photo's are literally a stop en route to somewhere I'm working, so I can't let it turn into 20 minutes of pondering the composition. I will mess about on the laptop trimming and rotating later to try and turn a pig's ear into a more shapely bright pink pig's ear.

a special mention for his little laugh when he thinks he's found an amusing fact or observation

need a point or 3 from this one because we've got a couple of toughies o follow we should have the best chance of points of all those around us in the slow kids class

Coventry Cathedral, yesterday

yeh, you've got to take Wigan not getting 3 points from a 10 man QPR as a bonus for us

did this thread get an overnight clean up?

I think the terminology is quite clumsy. it helps perpetuate the glib tit for tat red vs blue droning because nobody actually has to analyse what it really means for people. They can just take a view that suits the view they already had. It's the fault of journalists needing to dumb everything down so people who aren't really that interested won't switch channels or only buy the Star. The reality is, there have been two years of tweeks and changes that have, overall, left the poor poorer and the rich less badly affected as a proportion of their income. Problem being, that sort of explanation just ain't sexy. My missus works a couple of days a week to keep herself sane and do some 'good' and stay in touch with office practises and all that. Luckily for us, her income is a nice extra, but overall, over the last two years she has substantially less money now than then, when you take tax and tax credits etc all into consideration. Knocking 5% off the tax bill of someone on, say, £250,000 a year is going to give them a much different view of how things are going in the economy. Interesting to see a Labour idea being circulated today. A sliding scale of benefits depending on how much you've paid in. That is, somebody that's put 35 years in will get more benefits than a 23 year old or a bloke that's never really been that arsed about working. Feels logical on first hearing, but as ever, i'm sure the devil will be in the detail and the implementation and all that. Interesting timing, being only days after they criticised tories for having benefits statements linked to the serial sponger benefits freeloader Philpott. I suppose Labour haven't used the words Philpott and benefits in exactly the same breath, but come on, are we all really supposed to be that dumb that counting to 10 means there's no link.

QPR win today would do just nicely

what an excellent criteria for choosing a club the guy has all the money he needs and nothing to prove, but he likes playing football and Barnet was close to where he wanted to be I quite like that

this was all faked up you've only got to look at the shadows, the branch is out of focus, also, if you zoom in, they've put the car on the pavement massive hoax

two horse race with Paddy Power giving 9/2 on a Barry win

Alabama 3 gigs in Cardiff and Bristol 12th and 13th July, Friday and Saturday nights really looking forward to that I've been nominated driver for the last couple of A3 gigs and my 'reward' is a free ticket / free beer night this time around