Huguenot

I had the misfortune of working for Top Gear magazine, and consequently ran across Clarkson with more regularity than is healthy. Suffice to say that he's not playing a character, that's him. He's so obnoxious it's almost perverse. He was fliming down one end of our carpark, and we were down the other - around 100 yards away - having our usual fag break. He completely lost it because he thought we were looking at him. We were subject to a tirade of abuse and then forbidden from smoking when Clarkson was around. What a prat.

Antimacassar Well strictly speaking not a new word, but I found out where it comes from... Apparently Macassar was a hair cream widely used, and much celebrated, at the beginning of the 19th Century. So the anti-Macassar was anti hair oil. They should install them on bus windows. Which is a shame really, because antimacassar sounds like it would be much better if it were an elderly relative's oversized underwear.

I think you're doing a wonderful job Jane, and I'm very glad that the attitude of some hasn't dragged you down as it has me. itatm, this... "if this makes Kings or their charity reconsider their techniques or reflect on their impact ,then I'm glad" Says it all really doesn't it? You've fabricated an evil personality for KCH, criminalised them in your own mind, smeared them with insinuation and you're actually glad. Psychologists have a concept called a 'Scotoma'. It's used to describe a facet of one's behaviour to which one is entirely blind, but which is clear as day to everyone else. If you are actually glad that you've laid into a charity that takes care of people's health, then trust me, your Scotoma is as large as a tank.

It depends upon your route as well. I always found the quickest way to Heathrow was actually to head into the centre of town - Camberwell New Road, Oval, Vauxhall Bridge, Victoria, Hyde Park Corner and then out on the A4. Clean as a whistle. Avoid South Circular at all costs. Even if you have to sacrifice a goat or shoot yourself in the leg to avoid it, it's worth it.

It did all seem very mysterious didn't it? Is he still station manager?

I shouldn't imagine by this thread itatm, I think we'd be elevating ourselves :-S KCH were perfectly reasonably asking for charitable support, what on earth is going on in your head when you start accusing them of 'illegal acts' and 'underhanded' 'cunning' behaviour is quite, quite beyond me. It's such an ugly opinion. What's more, if they truly were 'horrified' it was because they cared. So now we've taken someone who cared and we've rubbed muck on their faces. The only real outcome is that after this petty abuse they'll now care just a little bit less. How terribly sad. We've probably forced them into creating another unnecessary level of bureaucracy, definitely reduced their income, and probably they'll wake up in the morning and look forward to their day just a little bit less. The only winners are the wallies who think they've achieved something. Big up on the ego, eh? It's sour and bitter and unnecessary. The tragedy is that this pungent cynicism has now fecked it up for everyone. So yeah, congratulations, woo woo, special.

I think it's a spectacular fail that petty ingrate potshots at this charity letter has disrupted a powerful force for good in the community, has disheartened well meaning people, and undoubtedly delivered a worse service for everyone. You should be absolutely disgusted with yourselves. In my heart I know you won't be, you'll probably congratulate yourselves on how clever you are. This miserable bullshit really depresses me.

Mind you, on many of those criteria you could also exclude Obama. Probably not the child abuse, but you could trade Pius XII for state-sponsored terrorism. You also can't hope to explore negotiated solutions if you haphazardly start excluding heads of state from your country. You tend to end up with a quid pro quo and a complete breakdown in communication. Nah gid fa naahbody.

An argument that applies equally to heroin, the animal rights movement and knitting. None of which justifies doorstopping. The difference is that these social hooligans don't accept any perspective other than their own, and in the absence of persuasive arguments they'll harangue and harass the weak and the vulnerable until they capitulate. The fact that they 'believe' is a call for therapy and an ASBO, not a carte blanche.

Sorry Louisiana, I may have misconstrued John K's comment and reference. So far as I interpreted it, John K seemed to be suggesting that before we lambasted Jehovah's Witnesses for knocking at our doors, we should remember they've been subject to repression and mass murder for their beliefs. I was merely pointing out that the Huguenots have also been subject to repressiona and mass murder, and I didn't feel that entitled me to go door knocking. If I had a crack at JWs directly, I'd have been told I had no right to comment as I hadn't suffered. Hence I used Huguenots as a parallel in order to avoid that particular piece of muck-slinging.

I know what you're saying John, but I think perspective is needed from both sides. You are ubdoubtedly aware of the persecution of the Huguenots in the 16th century, of which the greatest infamy was the murder of 70,000 over a couple of weeks from the 23rd August 1572. It culminated in the wholesale disenfranchisement of a religious order, who weren't offered an arbitrary homeland as a make-good. It was a holocaust inspired by the Catholic church, and was state sanctioned by Charles IX of France. That gives me no more rights that the Jehovah's Witnesses to visit my opinions unrequested upon the innocent agnostics of East Dulwich on a peaceful Saturday morning.

I think mummy stopped giving them pocket money.

That's the challenge Jeremy, we're just not willing to join the dots!

reggie, I would prefer to see a massive change in behaviour that would dramatically decrease the need for oil, alongside investments in alternative sources of energy and transport etc. The result would be a change in the strategic importance of the region, and a consequent decrease in conflict. I despise the hypocrisy of the British public who refuse to recognise that they feel it more politically acceptable to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people than give up their car. I don't hate the people, I hate the hypocrisy. It's the nimby's who don't want a windfarm on their hill, or a blue cycle lane that eats into personal car space, that are murdering Iraqis - not Blair That these people have the nerve to get on their high horse and start marching around town is almost intolerable. I'm sufficiently aware of my insignificant position in society not to feel guilty about this, but I'm most definitely disappointed.

I can't believe that DJKQ is trying to justify her attitude. What she did was the playground equivalent of running up to a group of quiet girls having a friendly chat and start prancing around them shouting loudly and banging paper bags. When asked to cease and desist she started screeching 'it's a free country I can do what I want' followed with 'you can't stop me it's the law'. When eventually she was moved away, she decided to start her own gang on the other side of the playground, from where she lobbed flour bombs and spittle gambos back at that group she had tried to 'own' and destroy. When this ploy also failed, she started talking about who 'owned' the entire community (like some sort of ganglord) in a transparent attempt to make the original group feel so uncomfortable and unwelcome that they either accepted her as the boss, or left the neighborhood. I'm warmed that more constructive people have won the day.

I was interested :) I always thought it was a peculiar and rather weak tactic to claim to be speaking for a group of people (as in 'no-one's interested'). I think you should accept DJKQ that your views are yours and yours alone, even if you feel they're not worthy unless you have a gang behind you ;-) I think people are trying too hard to post rationalise Blair's motivation for war in Iraq. I think claiming that Blair and Bush committed to it out of moralistic quasi religious fervour is just as bad as claiming that they deliberately concocted dodgy dossiers because they were hate-fuelled murderers. I suspect that the truth is far more complex, and probably a whole bundle of all the motivations that people have proposed. My own view is that people are understating the influence that anxiety about a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil would have had. The problem is that no-one can accept a 'war for oil' because then they have to take personal responsibility. So instead we heap all of our guilt on the shoulders of one man who frankly didn't act alone. We fabricate other hypotheses that let us sleep easier at night.

The overall tone of your post is a bit weird.... "what do scientists actually know about the universe?"... "down to belief, gut instinct and upbringing. AND THIS IS TRUE FOR SCIENTISTS" Those bloody scientists eh? Pesky buggers? What do they actually know? Compared with your commonsense and gut belief? If only only, they could sit down and listen to you and your commonsense, they'd all bit a bit better off eh? Global warming caused by the chinese, and plastic bags are created by people in housing estates? It's all so obvious, right? It's commonsense. As for your conviction that it's 'absurd' to discuss the concept of nothing, I appreciate that you probably just haven't thought it through.

I think it's a weee bit rich to say that 'Prof Hawking has bitten off more than he can chew' and then announce that your alternative solution is that there's a bloke in a towel who writes things in Hebrew on stones at the top of mountains to itinerant jews....

It's a very good argument in the everyday 'literal' world in which we live Silverfox, but everything gets a bit crazier at the quantum level. It's important to distinguish between Newtonian physics (gravity is what makes the apple fall to earth), and quantum physics (the indistinguishable conflation of mass and energy from which particles are formed and interact). In the most brutal way, at a quantum level, energy (and hence mass, matter) can appear and disappear out of nowhere in a spontaneous and unpredictable fashion. Quite simply, out of nowhere. To quote (you can Google the source)... "In modern physics, there is no such thing as "nothing." Even in a perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by experiment to a high degree of accuracy." So what does this mean in the real sense? Well Silverfox is right in saying it doesn't make sense that one can create something out of nothing. The point is that these new 'existences' are simply a fluctuation around a fixed central concept that is nothing. It's just a momentary aberration that will eventually return to it's initial state. So this is what Hawking actually says about the existence of the Universe, and it explains why it is not necessary to have a God, or any other creator: "There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty [five] zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." So it doesn't mean that Hawking is disappearing up his own arse, it just means that you haven't done the maths ;-)

To suggest he did it all to fill his wallet would imply a meaness of spirit for which there was no evidence. You can plausibly doubt his delivery, but I wouldn't doubt his convictions.

You're not standing alone Mick Mac, I'm just gathering my forces. Not that you need me to support you of course ;-) As I've exhorted Piersy for years, despite his weirdy religious knackerings history will judge TB appropriate for his era, his electorate and the brutal truth of the economic necessities inherent in the decline of Britain. He might have put it off for a week or so. To deny that is to fail to look in the loo after your number 2. God? No. Pragmatic? Exceptional.

This is nonsense, there is an underclass. It's not in London, it's in terrible neighborhoods in Yorkshire and Newcastle. With no hope, and with much disaster.

Well, I appreciate your point, but as the child of teachers, I can assure you that the only kids getting an Audi TT on their 18th bithday were kids of council houses who'd sold their house.

Well, because you nag on about it. There's no obligation to pay for housing at all. There's possibly a view that we can create equality by redistributing achievement. It's possible that you believe that achievement and financial benefit is only achieved by theft. I don't agree. There's perfectly bright people that profer a service in pennies that makes them wealthy. They're not bad, just clever. If you pursue a reductionist policy, you'll lose your brightest and your best. It's not government paying for housing, it's your neighbours.

There's been a pervasive air of redistribution of wealth that's infected the Drawing room since DJKQ has tainted this room since my withdrawal. This has to stop. It's a vindictive and passive reductionism of the role that people have to play in their own destiny. There is no 'other' that's preventing achievement in an undisclosed underclass. There may well be a foundation of politically motivated 'blamers' that prevent advancement by creating unidentified enemies of the people. It doesn't surprise me that underachievers would hide behind this mantle. If you give them an idea that someone else is to blame, they'll seize it and sit on thier hands. Come on guys!