Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
You think T of the D'Us is bad?
Just try Jude the Obscure. It's a comedy compared to that.
Edit: ah, Algarkirk has got to that first.
I was actually in Dorchester with the little 'un today, and talked a little about Hardy's work. I love the Mayor of Casterbridge as a novel, but he couldn't get his head around why anyone would want to sell their wife and child ...
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Not from Oxford, but aspires to 'Christminster' ie Oxford. Utterly horrible but great book. 'Done because we are too menny'. Stick to the poetry. His 50 or so best are consolation for getting older, as there is no real chance of anyone really getting them until reaching quite a ripe age. 'At Castle Boterel' is the best of the best.
Close up the casement, draw the blind is pretty good
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
You think T of the D'Us is bad?
Just try Jude the Obscure. It's a comedy compared to that.
Jeez, the level of debate on twitter, particularly the lefty end, about the energy crisis is depressing.
The basic assumption seems to be that freezing prices as per Davey/Starmer plan is just handing fat cat energy companies a massive subsidy.
Eh?
It is. Its paying them to hold prices at the current cap. It is state subsidy of their profit margin whilst holding bills at levels the poorest are struggling with. And taking away the £400 direct help. And it only gets us to April. 29 billion to prop up the energy distribution industry and hold down bills for Keir Starmer and other very wealthy people. Its shit.
Hmmm. Macron discovered what happens if pols try and force prices to be held at unrealistic below market levels. He destroyed EDF at a cost of €12bn to nationalise it, and is not facing an €8bn legal action to boot. All to win an election by keeping the costs of the crisis off the French Govt's books for a few months.
The energy distribution companies are paying world market prices for their supplies in general I think, so the suggestion that it is a subsidy is rather absurd.
Quite how keeping one lot of companies, being forced by Govt to take a loss, out of bankruptcy by giving them taxes raised from another lot of companies, counts as a subsidy, is bizarre.
But some parts of lefty twitter do tend to be a bit dim.
Whatever the government does to ease the cost of energy to the consumer, the cash will still get funnelled to the primary producers, based on market prices. Now in the case of BP and Shell the government can claw a chunk of this back via a windfall tax, but for the producers in the Middle East, Russia or elsewhere, this is theirs to keep and spend on Premiership football teams, weapons or whatever else.
Nationisation of the middlemen would make no difference. Indeed, it would make the exchequer directly responsible for paying these upstream fatcats.
Oh, and those advocating that we should wean ourselves off natural gas will be delighted to know that the shortlist of carbon capture projects announced by BEIS the other day includes a whole load of new-build gas-fired power stations and blue hydrogen projects. These will lock in natural gas consumption for decades to come.
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
You think T of the D'Us is bad?
Just try Jude the Obscure. It's a comedy compared to that.
Edit: ah, Algarkirk has got to that first.
I was actually in Dorchester with the little 'un today, and talked a little about Hardy's work. I love the Mayor of Casterbridge as a novel, but he couldn't get his head around why anyone would want to sell their wife and child ...
An apostrophe marks an ellipse, so what are you leaving out before u in little 'un? Little 'un' would make sense, but I am pretty sure is not the intention.
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
You think T of the D'Us is bad?
Just try Jude the Obscure. It's a comedy compared to that.
Edit: ah, Algarkirk has got to that first.
I was actually in Dorchester with the little 'un today, and talked a little about Hardy's work. I love the Mayor of Casterbridge as a novel, but he couldn't get his head around why anyone would want to sell their wife and child ...
Last time we were there we walked down the river valley to the east through the watermeadows and looped up to get into the heathlands along the old Roman Road (that of the poem, I suddenly realised). His birthplace is a little to the north of that, where the road is engineered to do a double bend up a hill and meets a pond. We came back by way of the agric college and Stinsford kirk which IIRC is where they have the musical group in one novel - Madding Crowd?
Have a good time in Dorchester. My favourite bit is perhaps the Roman aqueduct to the northwest - a quet and small treat for an evening walk - now Maiden Castlke is cut off by the bypass. As for Poundbury, I can't cope with it - the mix of supposedly vernacular building stones ....
Jeez, the level of debate on twitter, particularly the lefty end, about the energy crisis is depressing.
The basic assumption seems to be that freezing prices as per Davey/Starmer plan is just handing fat cat energy companies a massive subsidy.
Eh?
It is. Its paying them to hold prices at the current cap. It is state subsidy of their profit margin whilst holding bills at levels the poorest are struggling with. And taking away the £400 direct help. And it only gets us to April. 29 billion to prop up the energy distribution industry and hold down bills for Keir Starmer and other very wealthy people. Its shit.
If we could guarantee that this energy crisis was going to be over in 6 months it would be a somewhat extravagent and regressive use of tax payers money. But we can't. If it lasts 12 months we are talking serious economic damage, akin to that done by the furlough scheme under Covid. If it lasts 18 months we are looking at massive tax increases to pay for our subsidy which encourages consumption rather than discouraging it. If it lasts 2 years things would start to collapse.
Most of our politicians have painfully short focus in their policies which is a major reason that we are in this mess. But this really takes the biscuit. If this is the sort of policy SKS comes up with he might be better advised sticking to the blank sheet of paper he has had up to now.
And he is being applauded by the sea lions. 'Fully costed' has made a comeback. Every single person in the country needs to understand that 29 billion pounds of their money would be propping up the profits of the energy suppliers who are crippling them with huge monthly bills and ensuring that rich people dont pay any more and because of that you cant have the 400 quid you were getting. But if youre struggling to pay 250 a month? You have to carry on paying that. Its a fucking appalling response. Spaffing 29 billion to not even address the issues.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Yep, I was lucky to get a seat in the last merchants’ caravan from Edinburgh to Glasgow yesterday. Touch and go as to whether the camels would be stampeded by the thunder & lightning.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
This *feels* quite convincing. But then the "rock in a loch" hypothesis felt equally convincing
So I wonder if there is - as I suggested before - a human urge to believe the least weird explanation for something weird, to the extent that you will mentally overrule what your eyes are seeing
What the photo shows is a whacking big weird thing hanging in the sky. What my brains tells me I am seeing is just a rock in a puddle! No, it's just a mountain!
Never "it's a really big weird thing hanging in the sky"
Whatever is going on in that photograph is very very unlikely to be a temperature inversion (cloud sea). I've seen quite a few of these in Scotland.
For a start they usually have a clear sky above, and although you can occasionally see layers during fronts these are normally very local and you can't see distant objects.
What definition there is in the sky in the photograph is also visible both above and below the 'object'. Layered cloud of any kind would be visible as a line across the image.
Interesting. So that rules out the mountain hypothesis?
Well, I don't buy it, anyway. For what that's worth.
All opinions are worth something, and yours is quite persuasive here
I tend to agree. The shape being so similar to a mountaintop is probably coincidence. Nothing else supports this thesis. How could it happen, photographically? Psychologically? How come the plane is in the photo but no other landscape features? Nor does this hypothesis remotely square with the eye-witness accounts (which might all be lies, of course)
I'm down to three explanations
1. A long elaborate hoax 2. Surprising human tech 3. Aliens!???!
I'm suspicious of those branches at the top: suggests they've hung something - perhaps some symmetrical stone object - from them with transparent thread.
If you were going to hang something, you'd make very sure there was no visible means of support, surely!
Anyway, here's a cropped picture of Schiehallion (being a suitable hill for an EXPERIMENT) in a cloud inversion. I took this in January, not August, but you get the idea. The location is only a few miles from Calvine (in the Drumochter hills).
Even with a serious overexposure I think you'd struggle to get something similar to the mystery image.
I still think it is a reflection but am prepared to be convinced.
I totally understand the obsession with ALIENS. Are we alone? It is a fundamental question which will shape how we see the universe if it can ever answered in the negative.
I doubt we'll discover them in this way, though.
The mountain top/stone in loch theories ignore the backstory to the photo. They would be great if there were none, and this was just a photo of unknown provenance bought at a car boot sale. But there is, there's the statement of the guys who took the photo (or at least provided it) who say it was a thing in the sky, which shot upwards after 10 minutes. So if they are lying, what's the theory? That a stone in a loch is the best way of faking the UAP or that they took a picture of an uninteresting lochstone and later looked at it and said Hey, that looks like a spaceship? Neither sems likely. The photo is 1 of 6 by the way, so the mountain in clouds claim looks a non starter unlessly they were spookily static clouds.
What it is, it's the USAF Aurora project.
There is also the plentiful evidence that the MoD took this seriously, and decided the photos showed a real object, hanging in the sky. Not a rock or a mountain
Nick Pope has been a much derided figure in Fortean UFOlogical circles, but he has been adamant for years that these photos existed and they were lost/hidden, and after all that derision, here indeed is one of the photos, and it is a very close match to what he has described all along. He's been entirely consistent. He is vindicated
He is particularly interesting because, in his opinion and those of some colleagues- it seems - this is NOT American tech
Have you eve4 wondered why we never see the same UFO in other reports? If this is an alien craft, and an example of the ones that have been visiting for 60 years, why is there no consistency?
On this particular case, and Nick Pope in particular, I have never doubted the existence of at least one photo, that likely spooked someone in the RAF. But Pope has a new career to push, and books to sell, and a living to make. He is skin in the game.
There are other photos and videos with similar shaped craft, same with 'saucer' shaped, triangles etc. There are other eye witness cases with similar shaped craft - Todmorden Yorks in the 70s for example.
Todmorden - the ex policeman who wrote a story and then pretended it was real? With some startling similarities to other stories? That Todmorden?
Godfreys book was written long after what he reported (and covered his experience, the Adamski case he had investigated as an officer and Travis Walton amongst others) and obviously like any report you can believe, dismiss or scoff as pleases you. Its an example, before the 1990 Calvine photo, of diamond shaped craft in ufo lore. No more, no less.
I’d suggest nothing actually happened at Todmorden. He initially wrote a piece of fiction, that somehow mutated into a report of true events. The Adamski link is the giveaway.
Its quite possible nothing did happen and Godfrey made it up, yes, its also possible he saw something weird. Im not sure where this 'wrote a piece of fiction' comes from? He had never written anything, his alleged encounter was reported by him at the time in 1980? Adamski is just odd regardless. Guy disappears and turns up on top of a coal pile, dead. But its just an unsolved possible murder mystery, theres no indication of paranormal involvement imo.
There was a piece in Fortean Times recently about this. That’s when I was struck by the similarity of the name Adamski and George Adamski. Very fishy.
Well he was called Zigmund Adamski and he turned up dead on top of a coal pile. The coroner who examined his body was called James Turnbull. It was reported on in the national press at the time. Its an interesting mystery, there is no need for paranormal extras on that one. The surname is a common enough Polish surname. He was Polish.
Why did the PC leap to the idea of alien abduction? Maybe he’d been reading about George Adamski...
He didnt. Others (tabloids via 'locals') proposed that. Godfrey just said he couldnt rule it out, he doesn't know how Adamski wound up atop the coal pile but believes he was placed there. I agree the initial suggestions of alien involvement might come from the name coincidence. Godfreys encounter later might be made up or he might have seen sonething weird, i have no way of knowing. As i said i was just using it as an example of similar shaped craft in ufo lore
Fair enough. The Fortean Times piece was essentially saying he made up everything, initially for a short story, and later it became an ‘it happened to me’ story, following on from other stories.
I've never heard of him writing a short story but that doesnt mean he didnt i suppose. My understanding of the timeline is.....
June 1980 Adamski disappears and turns up dead on top of a coal pile, Alan Godfrey is one of the PCs called to the scene where he is found December 1980 Alan Godfrey reports a diamond shaped craft blocking the road in Todmorden, his radio doesnt work and next thing he knows its 25 mins later and he is a few hundred yards up the road, its wet except under where he saw the alleged craft where it is dry Sometime in late 1980 to 1981 reports in tabloids play up the mystery of Adamski and suggest 'paranormality' including alien involvement 1981 Godfrey undergoes hypnosis at a friends suggestion as he is facing ridicule at work and 'recovers memories' of an abduction in the missing 25 minutes, he now says he thinks this was the memory of a dream and has never claimed he was abducted but he stands by the initial report of a diamond etc, he leaves the police force later saying he was not taken seriously and it affected his home life 2016 Godfrey releases a book about Adamski, his experience, what he sees as similarities with the Travis Walton case and others.
This *feels* quite convincing. But then the "rock in a loch" hypothesis felt equally convincing
So I wonder if there is - as I suggested before - a human urge to believe the least weird explanation for something weird, to the extent that you will mentally overrule what your eyes are seeing
What the photo shows is a whacking big weird thing hanging in the sky. What my brains tells me I am seeing is just a rock in a puddle! No, it's just a mountain!
Never "it's a really big weird thing hanging in the sky"
Whatever is going on in that photograph is very very unlikely to be a temperature inversion (cloud sea). I've seen quite a few of these in Scotland.
For a start they usually have a clear sky above, and although you can occasionally see layers during fronts these are normally very local and you can't see distant objects.
What definition there is in the sky in the photograph is also visible both above and below the 'object'. Layered cloud of any kind would be visible as a line across the image.
Interesting. So that rules out the mountain hypothesis?
Well, I don't buy it, anyway. For what that's worth.
All opinions are worth something, and yours is quite persuasive here
I tend to agree. The shape being so similar to a mountaintop is probably coincidence. Nothing else supports this thesis. How could it happen, photographically? Psychologically? How come the plane is in the photo but no other landscape features? Nor does this hypothesis remotely square with the eye-witness accounts (which might all be lies, of course)
I'm down to three explanations
1. A long elaborate hoax 2. Surprising human tech 3. Aliens!???!
I'm suspicious of those branches at the top: suggests they've hung something - perhaps some symmetrical stone object - from them with transparent thread.
If you were going to hang something, you'd make very sure there was no visible means of support, surely!
Anyway, here's a cropped picture of Schiehallion (being a suitable hill for an EXPERIMENT) in a cloud inversion. I took this in January, not August, but you get the idea. The location is only a few miles from Calvine (in the Drumochter hills).
Even with a serious overexposure I think you'd struggle to get something similar to the mystery image.
I still think it is a reflection but am prepared to be convinced.
I totally understand the obsession with ALIENS. Are we alone? It is a fundamental question which will shape how we see the universe if it can ever answered in the negative.
I doubt we'll discover them in this way, though.
The mountain top/stone in loch theories ignore the backstory to the photo. They would be great if there were none, and this was just a photo of unknown provenance bought at a car boot sale. But there is, there's the statement of the guys who took the photo (or at least provided it) who say it was a thing in the sky, which shot upwards after 10 minutes. So if they are lying, what's the theory? That a stone in a loch is the best way of faking the UAP or that they took a picture of an uninteresting lochstone and later looked at it and said Hey, that looks like a spaceship? Neither sems likely. The photo is 1 of 6 by the way, so the mountain in clouds claim looks a non starter unlessly they were spookily static clouds.
What it is, it's the USAF Aurora project.
There is also the plentiful evidence that the MoD took this seriously, and decided the photos showed a real object, hanging in the sky. Not a rock or a mountain
Nick Pope has been a much derided figure in Fortean UFOlogical circles, but he has been adamant for years that these photos existed and they were lost/hidden, and after all that derision, here indeed is one of the photos, and it is a very close match to what he has described all along. He's been entirely consistent. He is vindicated
He is particularly interesting because, in his opinion and those of some colleagues- it seems - this is NOT American tech
Have you eve4 wondered why we never see the same UFO in other reports? If this is an alien craft, and an example of the ones that have been visiting for 60 years, why is there no consistency?
On this particular case, and Nick Pope in particular, I have never doubted the existence of at least one photo, that likely spooked someone in the RAF. But Pope has a new career to push, and books to sell, and a living to make. He is skin in the game.
There are other photos and videos with similar shaped craft, same with 'saucer' shaped, triangles etc. There are other eye witness cases with similar shaped craft - Todmorden Yorks in the 70s for example.
Todmorden - the ex policeman who wrote a story and then pretended it was real? With some startling similarities to other stories? That Todmorden?
Godfreys book was written long after what he reported (and covered his experience, the Adamski case he had investigated as an officer and Travis Walton amongst others) and obviously like any report you can believe, dismiss or scoff as pleases you. Its an example, before the 1990 Calvine photo, of diamond shaped craft in ufo lore. No more, no less.
I’d suggest nothing actually happened at Todmorden. He initially wrote a piece of fiction, that somehow mutated into a report of true events. The Adamski link is the giveaway.
Its quite possible nothing did happen and Godfrey made it up, yes, its also possible he saw something weird. Im not sure where this 'wrote a piece of fiction' comes from? He had never written anything, his alleged encounter was reported by him at the time in 1980? Adamski is just odd regardless. Guy disappears and turns up on top of a coal pile, dead. But its just an unsolved possible murder mystery, theres no indication of paranormal involvement imo.
There was a piece in Fortean Times recently about this. That’s when I was struck by the similarity of the name Adamski and George Adamski. Very fishy.
Well he was called Zigmund Adamski and he turned up dead on top of a coal pile. The coroner who examined his body was called James Turnbull. It was reported on in the national press at the time. Its an interesting mystery, there is no need for paranormal extras on that one. The surname is a common enough Polish surname. He was Polish.
Why did the PC leap to the idea of alien abduction? Maybe he’d been reading about George Adamski...
He didnt. Others (tabloids via 'locals') proposed that. Godfrey just said he couldnt rule it out, he doesn't know how Adamski wound up atop the coal pile but believes he was placed there. I agree the initial suggestions of alien involvement might come from the name coincidence. Godfreys encounter later might be made up or he might have seen sonething weird, i have no way of knowing. As i said i was just using it as an example of similar shaped craft in ufo lore
Fair enough. The Fortean Times piece was essentially saying he made up everything, initially for a short story, and later it became an ‘it happened to me’ story, following on from other stories.
I've never heard of him writing a short story but that doesnt mean he didnt i suppose. My understanding of the timeline is.....
June 1980 Adamski disappears and turns up dead on top of a coal pile, Alan Godfrey is one of the PCs called to the scene where he is found December 1980 Alan Godfrey reports a diamond shaped craft blocking the road in Todmorden, his radio doesnt work and next thing he knows its 25 mins later and he is a few hundred yards up the road, its wet except under where he saw the alleged craft where it is dry
Sometime in late 1980 to 1981 reports in tabloids play up the mystery of Adamski and suggest 'paranormality' including alien involvement
1981 Godfrey undergoes hypnosis at a friends suggestion as he is facing ridicule at work and 'recovers memories' of an abduction in the missing 25 minutes, he now says he thinks this was the memory of a dream and has never claimed he was abducted but he stands by the initial report of a diamond etc, he leaves the police force later saying he was not taken seriously and it affected his home lif
2016 Godfrey releases a book about Adamski, his experience, what he sees as similarities with the Travis Walton case and others.
Garry Nolan at Stanford has been performing medical examinations of govt individuals who have been in proximity to UAP. Some findings indicate changes in the brain similar to those with Havana Syndrome. Dead tissue showing on MRI, akin to white matter disease that would show for MND patients. A quarter of patients who showed damage after claiming coming into contact with a UAP died of the injuries. It’s unknown whether any of the Tic Tac / Gimbal / Go Fast patients were part of the study, or what corroborating evidence there is of UAP encounters for the patients in question (ie did the medical condition cause a delusion or is there reliable sensor data corroborating the encounter?).
Leon’s bias towards “the Others” being cuddly and friendly may be optimistic. We are generally neither wholly benign nor outwardly malevolent to other intelligent species on earth. As a rule we are casually indifferent, from catching dolphins in tuna nets to burning orangutang forest for palm plantations. We mitigate damage if we can but for society overall it’s meh, pass the John West.
You toss out Havana syndrome as if it’s an accepted thing! Never been proved. One convincing theory puts it in the same category as when entire classes of schoolchildren fall in at the same time etc. Suzanne O’Sullivan writes very convincingly on this.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Crumbling statues of Bozymandias.
Look upon his works ye Jocks and despair. Permission given to other nationalities to also despair.
How are comparable rail passenger numbers in Germany, France and Spain?
My recent experience of weekend travel on Avanti wasn't wholly unpleasant but what they called "The Shop" was basically the old buffet car and we travelled both ways without a single ticket check on very full trains but, to their credit, the trains ran well to time and weren't uncomfortable but I would lash out £25 for the Standard Premium next time if I were going all the way to the Lakes from London.
There's huge demand for rail for leisure currently - if Mrs Stodge and I go to Edinbugh later in the year, we'll go on the train and we'll travel well because it's part of the holiday.
I treated myself to First Class when I travelled to Cornwall to scatter my father's ashes the summer before the pandemic. It's still a fantastic journey - well worth the money and the time. Even had at seat service right down to beyond Truro which was marvellous.
To be blunt, I don't care who runs the railways - I do care how they are run and the constant strive to improve services and the passenger experience should be the priorities.
I think the big reason for rail growth is the Swampy-Nimby coalition in the south of England which has shut down new road building. Privatisation can't take the credit for that, but it didn't stand in the way either.
The growth in leisure traffic is country-wide not just in the south. I'm not aware of a large amount of road building in the north either - expanding road capacity and easing known chokepoints is a good idea but I wouldn't drive to the Lake District from London for a week or to Scotland even if the roads were perfectly new.
I just don't understand your argument at all.
My case is that most of the growth in rail traffic is not leisure traffic, it is commuters who would have taken cars if 1960s-80s trends had been simply extrapolated. And the lion's share of the jobs growth is in the South of England, where the opposition to roadbuilding is strongest.
I'd like to see figures for the relative construction of roads per head of population. They seem to have built an awful lot of roads south of, say, Daventry and east of Cirencester.
You are the wrong side of Offa's Dyke. In Wales they have an Earth Mother character * who stops them building too many roads.
* Very forgettable job title that I cannot remember. She stopped the dual carriageway to Port Talbot iirc.
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
Whatever the government does to ease the cost of energy to the consumer, the cash will still get funnelled to the primary producers, based on market prices. Now in the case of BP and Shell the government can claw a chunk of this back via a windfall tax, but for the producers in the Middle East, Russia or elsewhere, this is theirs to keep and spend on Premiership football teams, weapons or whatever else.
Nationisation of the middlemen would make no difference. Indeed, it would make the exchequer directly responsible for paying these upstream fatcats.
Oh, and those advocating that we should wean ourselves off natural gas will be delighted to know that the shortlist of carbon capture projects announced by BEIS the other day includes a whole load of new-build gas-fired power stations and blue hydrogen projects. These will lock in natural gas consumption for decades to come.
Ultimately, though, big rises in energy prices drive big improvements in energy efficiency. The winners of the 1970's were the losers of the 1980's.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Crumbling statues of Bozymandias.
Look upon his works ye Jocks and despair. Permission given to other nationalities to also despair.
That's rubbish. It *can* be like that, but doesn't have to be.
Let's turn it around: "Nationalisation is like buying your house - you do it once and it's done. Yes, it's a huge con trick - the public pay for a company that the state that runs into the ground because the public has zero choice left - they use the product or nothing."
It's an argument about the means to the end not the end in itself if you take the view both public and private are equally incompetent in running/managing any given asset or service.
Privatisation has not ended the monopoly for many - the recent collapses of the smaller energy providers has effectively created a new cartel of large energy providers who now run the market.
That's the thing - you either believe privatisation will bring new players to the market who will improve choice and keep prices competitive or you believe it creates new monopolies and cartels which disadvantage the consumer/customer. Both arguments have merit.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Reminds me of an early Asimov story called the six billion names of god. The premise was that man was on earth to write out these names. Someone thought that a computer program could do this in days (this was the 50s) so he did. And then the stars started going out...
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
You think T of the D'Us is bad?
Just try Jude the Obscure. It's a comedy compared to that.
Edit: ah, Algarkirk has got to that first.
I was actually in Dorchester with the little 'un today, and talked a little about Hardy's work. I love the Mayor of Casterbridge as a novel, but he couldn't get his head around why anyone would want to sell their wife and child ...
It seems to me that about age 11-12 is the right time to learn that the temptation to sell the wives and children and go and live quietly on the proceeds is an understandably irresistible one for some men some of the time. Innocence is a great thing and should be preserved as long as possible.
As to Hardy's novels, the time to read them is as a late teenager (when trigger warnings are merely encouragements to read all night) and then never think about Hardy again until discovering the poetry later on.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
If the current energy price cap were extended for a further 6 months, Britons would oppose the government subsidising the energy firms for the difference
All Britons: subsidise 24% / don't subsidise 53% Con voters: 23% / 55% Lab voters: 22% / 61%
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Reminds me of an early Asimov story called the six billion names of god. The premise was that man was on earth to write out these names. Someone thought that a computer program could do this in days (this was the 50s) so he did. And then the stars started going out...
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
Central Scotland exists so that you can get from England to the Highlands and vice versa without going through Glasgow. I know this is true because I did it on Friday.
If the current energy price cap were extended for a further 6 months, Britons would oppose the government subsidising the energy firms for the difference
All Britons: subsidise 24% / don't subsidise 53% Con voters: 23% / 55% Lab voters: 22% / 61%
And he is being applauded by the sea lions. 'Fully costed' has made a comeback. Every single person in the country needs to understand that 29 billion pounds of their money would be propping up the profits of the energy suppliers who are crippling them with huge monthly bills and ensuring that rich people dont pay any more and because of that you cant have the 400 quid you were getting. But if youre struggling to pay 250 a month? You have to carry on paying that. Its a fucking appalling response. Spaffing 29 billion to not even address the issues.
The proposal (and we don't know if Truss will go along with it) was to give everyone £400 toward their energy bills which is of course better than nothing but it's not much more than that for many. Do we then seek to apportion the largesse so somehow establishing those for whom the energy bill is a real burden get the most help? Sounds a bit bureaucratic.
Your notion this is somehow "propping up the profits of the energy suppliers" is absurd. If we pay our bills we are doing that - whether the money comes direct from the consumer or from the Government or both it ends up with the energy supplier until a nice windfall tax comes in to bring the money back to the Government.
How would we ensure "rich people" do pay more? We are talking about fuel consumption not wealth. You don't have to be wealthy to need to use a lot of energy - indeed, I'd argue poorer people are likely to spend a greater proportion of their income than the wealthy but apparently instead of helping them by freezing their bills we should let "rich people play more" - what planet are you currently orbiting ? @Leon would like to say hello.
Yes, it's a lot of money but unless you're advocating mass non-payment of bills, what are "the issues"? There are valid questions around how much we pay for our gas and electricity and we can argue those. There are indeed organisations making obscene profits currently - it's a pity we can't get a cut of Saudi Aramco's profits for example.
This smacks more of a desire to have a go at Starmer then anything approaching a coherent response to a serious problem but if it's all the Conservative have currently, Starmer has very little to worry about in the age of Truss.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Reminds me of an early Asimov story called the six billion names of god. The premise was that man was on earth to write out these names. Someone thought that a computer program could do this in days (this was the 50s) so he did. And then the stars started going out...
Unless there's a very similar story by him it seems that might be a Clarke story.
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
I’ve often wondered about this. I have double glazed windows and have lagged the loft fairly well. Our house is still not a warm one, and I suspect our walls would need sorting too somehow (extra insulating layer). What level are the 19 million homes that need insulating really at? Is my house one of them?
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Yep, I was lucky to get a seat in the last merchants’ caravan from Edinburgh to Glasgow yesterday. Touch and go as to whether the camels would be stampeded by the thunder & lightning.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Reminds me of an early Asimov story called the six billion names of god. The premise was that man was on earth to write out these names. Someone thought that a computer program could do this in days (this was the 50s) so he did. And then the stars started going out...
Unless there's a very similar story by him it seems that might be a Clarke story.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Are you OK? You have traversed mildly acidic to downright offensive.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Are you OK? You have traversed mildly acidic to downright offensive.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
Pete you're a fucking prat leave Leon alone you sod
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
That’s interesting. I wonder if it was the mining that resonated?
I don't regard it as a classic by any means, but of recent sci-fi premises I have read I enjoyed a story called 'Relic', about a guy who is the sole known surviving human being after a genetically engineered virus wiped everyone out, and his later discovery by aliens (who had not encountered humanity before their fall).
How are comparable rail passenger numbers in Germany, France and Spain?
My recent experience of weekend travel on Avanti wasn't wholly unpleasant but what they called "The Shop" was basically the old buffet car and we travelled both ways without a single ticket check on very full trains but, to their credit, the trains ran well to time and weren't uncomfortable but I would lash out £25 for the Standard Premium next time if I were going all the way to the Lakes from London.
There's huge demand for rail for leisure currently - if Mrs Stodge and I go to Edinbugh later in the year, we'll go on the train and we'll travel well because it's part of the holiday.
I treated myself to First Class when I travelled to Cornwall to scatter my father's ashes the summer before the pandemic. It's still a fantastic journey - well worth the money and the time. Even had at seat service right down to beyond Truro which was marvellous.
To be blunt, I don't care who runs the railways - I do care how they are run and the constant strive to improve services and the passenger experience should be the priorities.
I think the big reason for rail growth is the Swampy-Nimby coalition in the south of England which has shut down new road building. Privatisation can't take the credit for that, but it didn't stand in the way either.
The growth in leisure traffic is country-wide not just in the south. I'm not aware of a large amount of road building in the north either - expanding road capacity and easing known chokepoints is a good idea but I wouldn't drive to the Lake District from London for a week or to Scotland even if the roads were perfectly new.
I just don't understand your argument at all.
My case is that most of the growth in rail traffic is not leisure traffic, it is commuters who would have taken cars if 1960s-80s trends had been simply extrapolated. And the lion's share of the jobs growth is in the South of England, where the opposition to roadbuilding is strongest.
I'd like to see figures for the relative construction of roads per head of population. They seem to have built an awful lot of roads south of, say, Daventry and east of Cirencester.
You are the wrong side of Offa's Dyke. In Wales they have an Earth Mother character * who stops them building too many roads.
* Very forgettable job title that I cannot remember. She stopped the dual carriageway to Port Talbot iirc.
You are probably thinking of Julie James, Minister for Climate Change and smug ill-informed twattishness based on hatred.
I just think of her as 'c***face.' Which, to be fair, is the way I think of most of the loons who make up the Welsh Executive
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Are you OK? You have traversed mildly acidic to downright offensive.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
It still pleases me that we have Brexited, simply because it provokes deep pain in people like @roger - who has had it easy all his life. Finally, he got a slap from the plebs he openly despises. Good
And I mean genuinely: Good. I believe Brexit is morally good for this reason alone
You are less irritating than Roger and not as obviously dim, but I take a milder satisfaction - but a satisfaction nonetheless - in your regrets
And this is not a small thing. It is good to vanquish ones enemies and rejoice in the lamentation of their women
I have got a collection of his journalistic pieces, mainly for the Guardian, from about the same time called the Moronic Inferno. Contains some of the best writing I have ever read. His pieces on the murder of children in LA by a serial killer haunted me. They contained the well known reprise "never go with strangers" repeatedly and the payoff in the last line was "but they do". Much better than nearly all his novels.
If the current energy price cap were extended for a further 6 months, Britons would oppose the government subsidising the energy firms for the difference
All Britons: subsidise 24% / don't subsidise 53% Con voters: 23% / 55% Lab voters: 22% / 61%
Echoes of that Paul Johnson piece in the Times, discussed earlier. We don't like the idea of being poorer.
An awful lot of us have got used to the mindset that Someone Else is stopping us living our best lives. It used to be EU fees, now it's going to be energy companies. The idea that energy extractors are going to make out like bandits on this and there's not a great deal we can do about that, because they have us over an oil barrel... that's not a comfortable thought.
I think we are going to shortly see that Labour lead increase. Truss may receive a small bounce but it won't last more than a few weeks and she may well become the most unpopular PM on record in time.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
How are comparable rail passenger numbers in Germany, France and Spain?
My recent experience of weekend travel on Avanti wasn't wholly unpleasant but what they called "The Shop" was basically the old buffet car and we travelled both ways without a single ticket check on very full trains but, to their credit, the trains ran well to time and weren't uncomfortable but I would lash out £25 for the Standard Premium next time if I were going all the way to the Lakes from London.
There's huge demand for rail for leisure currently - if Mrs Stodge and I go to Edinbugh later in the year, we'll go on the train and we'll travel well because it's part of the holiday.
I treated myself to First Class when I travelled to Cornwall to scatter my father's ashes the summer before the pandemic. It's still a fantastic journey - well worth the money and the time. Even had at seat service right down to beyond Truro which was marvellous.
To be blunt, I don't care who runs the railways - I do care how they are run and the constant strive to improve services and the passenger experience should be the priorities.
I think the big reason for rail growth is the Swampy-Nimby coalition in the south of England which has shut down new road building. Privatisation can't take the credit for that, but it didn't stand in the way either.
The growth in leisure traffic is country-wide not just in the south. I'm not aware of a large amount of road building in the north either - expanding road capacity and easing known chokepoints is a good idea but I wouldn't drive to the Lake District from London for a week or to Scotland even if the roads were perfectly new.
I just don't understand your argument at all.
My case is that most of the growth in rail traffic is not leisure traffic, it is commuters who would have taken cars if 1960s-80s trends had been simply extrapolated. And the lion's share of the jobs growth is in the South of England, where the opposition to roadbuilding is strongest.
I'd like to see figures for the relative construction of roads per head of population. They seem to have built an awful lot of roads south of, say, Daventry and east of Cirencester.
You are the wrong side of Offa's Dyke. In Wales they have an Earth Mother character * who stops them building too many roads.
* Very forgettable job title that I cannot remember. She stopped the dual carriageway to Port Talbot iirc.
You are probably thinking of Julie James, Minister for Climate Change and smug ill-informed twattishness based on hatred.
I just think of her as 'c***face.' Which, to be fair, is the way I think of most of the loons who make up the Welsh Executive
Yes, I think Welsh politicians are in general, actually worse than most cosmic horrors. I think the worst type of politician is the irreligious puritan. They simply hate the idea that someone, somewhere, might be having fun, and believe that legislation is the best way to end it. And, from Drakeford down, Welsh politics is full of such people.
Now Thomas Hardy gets a trigger warning: Warwick university students are told 'Far from the Madding Crowd' contains 'upsetting scenes' about the 'cruelty of nature' and 'rural life'
I did this book for 'o' level english at 15/16. Are these academics seriously saying an 18 or 19 year old cannot cope with some of the stuff in this classic novel?
How are young people going to handle what actually happens in the real world if they are constantly protected from its depiction in art?
The whole world's gone stark bonkers mad.
Don't remember much about it except thinking Bathsheba was a complete c--- and Gabriel deserved better. But the one about the Oxford stonemason is as disturbing as it gets.
Jude the Obscure.
Tess of the D'Urbevilles definitely has its moments too.
Effing Angel Clare.
Shudders.
The problem was he wouldn't eff her.
Had no problem effing someone else, previously.
And her sister.
Which just made him a raging hypocrite. Probably even an effing hypocrite.
But if he had been 'effing Angel Clare' at the right moment the book would have been considerably shorter.
If the current energy price cap were extended for a further 6 months, Britons would oppose the government subsidising the energy firms for the difference
All Britons: subsidise 24% / don't subsidise 53% Con voters: 23% / 55% Lab voters: 22% / 61%
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Are you OK? You have traversed mildly acidic to downright offensive.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
Pete you're a fucking prat leave Leon alone you sod
On topic - There used to be a popular view on here that "Boris" would jack it all in with alacrity in order to "make squillions" and "have fun". This never rang true to me and it still doesn't. It stems from a romantic and false view of the man as some megawatt all-purpose star with many strings to his bow of which politics is just one. Not so. He's devoted his life to politics. Ok, so in a deeply tacky way, driven 100% by narcissism and 0% by public service, but still. He's above all a political animal. I don't think - and I don't think he thinks - he would make a fortune outside politics and I don't think he'd have much fun either. So I reckon he'll stay on - if he survives the "lying" inquiry and he wins his seat again.
You and I both saw the man for who he is decades ago. He really is an unabashed &£#@!
I can't recall a UK politician quite so repellent to me, and with Farage and Corbyn* waiting in the wings that is some bold assessment.
* Worse even than Chris Williamson and Rob Roberts. I even prefer Chope, Bridgen, Francois, Bone and Philip Davies.
I agree with every word of that. I've usually got quite a latitude for public figures that some find repulsive. But not Boris Johnson. I'd even add people who like or admire him-for any reason whatsoever-to your list
Because he successfully took us out of the EU and that boils your pathetic old piss and you will never be able to undo it
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Are you OK? You have traversed mildly acidic to downright offensive.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
It still pleases me that we have Brexited, simply because it provokes deep pain in people like @roger - who has had it easy all his life. Finally, he got a slap from the plebs he openly despises. Good
And I mean genuinely: Good. I believe Brexit is morally good for this reason alone
You are less irritating than Roger and not as obviously dim, but I take a milder satisfaction - but a satisfaction nonetheless - in your regrets
And this is not a small thing. It is good to vanquish ones enemies and rejoice in the lamentation of their women
It still pleases me that we have Brexited, simply because it provokes deep pain in people like @roger - who has had it easy all his life. Finally, he got a slap from the plebs he openly despises. Good
And I mean genuinely: Good. I believe Brexit is morally good for this reason alone
You are less irritating than Roger and not as obviously dim, but I take a milder satisfaction - but a satisfaction nonetheless - in your regrets
And this is not a small thing. It is good to vanquish ones enemies and rejoice in the lamentation of their women
If the people of the UK throw out the Conservatives and leave them in the political wilderness for a generation and we have two decades of progressive centre-left Government, I'm sure you won't forgive some a wry smile of bemusement as those who have called the shots for so long relax in the comfy chairs of irrelevance.
You'll be able to carry on with your usual nonsense but we'll just ignore it because it won't matter any more.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
In response to photographs of the items on the pyre on social media, Sinn Fein MLA for north Antrim, Philip McGuigan retweeted a post featuring a photograph of the bonfire writing “This is pathetic. There is no place for the burning of flags, posters and effigies on bonfires anywhere in our society.”
I don't know, I think we'd be better off if we could burn flags, posters and effigies without it being serious or a concern.
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
Central Scotland exists so that you can get from England to the Highlands and vice versa without going through Glasgow. I know this is true because I did it on Friday.
I flew OVER the Solway Firth, Glasgow and Loch Lomond when I went to Inverness from Gatwick last month.
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
I’ve often wondered about this. I have double glazed windows and have lagged the loft fairly well. Our house is still not a warm one, and I suspect our walls would need sorting too somehow (extra insulating layer). What level are the 19 million homes that need insulating really at? Is my house one of them?
In Ireland they're providing grants so that people can wrap their houses - so insulating cladding on the outside of the walls, hopefully not flammable.
I suspect also that there's potential for some double-glazing not to be as good as it could be.
I don't what "regenerating" means, I have only joined this site for the first time today. But Pete has been trolling Leon for the whole time I've been lurking, what a silly sod
It still pleases me that we have Brexited, simply because it provokes deep pain in people like @roger - who has had it easy all his life. Finally, he got a slap from the plebs he openly despises. Good
And I mean genuinely: Good. I believe Brexit is morally good for this reason alone
You are less irritating than Roger and not as obviously dim, but I take a milder satisfaction - but a satisfaction nonetheless - in your regrets
And this is not a small thing. It is good to vanquish ones enemies and rejoice in the lamentation of their women
If the people of the UK throw out the Conservatives and leave them in the political wilderness for a generation and we have two decades of progressive centre-left Government, I'm sure you won't forgive some a wry smile of bemusement as those who have called the shots for so long relax in the comfy chairs of irrelevance.
You'll be able to carry on with your usual nonsense but we'll just ignore it because it won't matter any more.
Yes, indeed. I would take my blows and nurse them at home, with my loved ones. I wouldn't whinge like a girl, as Roger does
Moreover, the Tories have been in power too long. I don't really give a fuck if they lose in 2024. Starmer has said he will protect the Union, so if he wins, that's fine. He's boring, Woke and useless, and I will never personally vote Labour, but Labour probably deserve a shot
Brexit will not be reversed in the lifetime of anyone on this site
The best thing that can be said about BR was that if it’s trends had continued there would by now be nothing left to subsidise.
How are comparable rail passenger numbers in Germany, France and Spain?
My recent experience of weekend travel on Avanti wasn't wholly unpleasant but what they called "The Shop" was basically the old buffet car and we travelled both ways without a single ticket check on very full trains but, to their credit, the trains ran well to time and weren't uncomfortable but I would lash out £25 for the Standard Premium next time if I were going all the way to the Lakes from London.
There's huge demand for rail for leisure currently - if Mrs Stodge and I go to Edinbugh later in the year, we'll go on the train and we'll travel well because it's part of the holiday.
I treated myself to First Class when I travelled to Cornwall to scatter my father's ashes the summer before the pandemic. It's still a fantastic journey - well worth the money and the time. Even had at seat service right down to beyond Truro which was marvellous.
To be blunt, I don't care who runs the railways - I do care how they are run and the constant strive to improve services and the passenger experience should be the priorities.
Here's comparative data from a European thinktank (pre-COVID data) for a constructive Rail Performance Index. The UK rail network is just below the top tier, which is a transformation since privatisation, and much less subsidised by comparison - which is an imo sensible policy decision that rail passengers should pay a larger % of the cost of their journey here than elsewhere.
The second graph correlates the Performance Index vs Public Cost.
The privatisation model works well *; the question is where we go from here to further optimise, and what do we want to achieve.
* My view is that the model so clearly works better than nationalisation here, that campaigns for renationalisation can only be ideological. I would link that with features of our politics.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
It's highly difficult but not impossible to write an entire book that is scary. Shirley Jackson did it in The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty did it in The Exorcist, Susan Hill sort of did it in The Woman in Black (which is flawed but has that genius killer ending). After that, hmm
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Scottish Water is publicly owned. Spot the difference.
Scotland is wilderness. Spot the difference.
The Central Belt is much more densely populated than eg the Scottish & English borders and much of Wales, so what is the difference?
Remember the PB experts who claimed that the area between Glasgow and Edinburgh was the rarely crossed Great Scottish Desert? You know, the one with the palm-shaded oasis of Bathgate, in the shade of the ancient Pyramids, on the old trade route north through the dunes of burnt oilshale to the spice and coffee port of Borrowstounness.
Ernie Pyle once wrote that Central Scotland between Glasgow and Edinburgh reminded him of Indiana, his home state.
Central Scotland exists so that you can get from England to the Highlands and vice versa without going through Glasgow. I know this is true because I did it on Friday.
I flew OVER the Solway Firth, Glasgow and Loch Lomond when I went to Inverness from Gatwick last month.
Not as if you could take the railway over the Solway Firth any more, alas, after unfortunate incidents with ships and ice floes and just old age.
I don't what "regenerating" means, I have only joined this site for the first time today. But Pete has been trolling Leon for the whole time I've been lurking, what a silly sod
I have got a collection of his journalistic pieces, mainly for the Guardian, from about the same time called the Moronic Inferno. Contains some of the best writing I have ever read. His pieces on the murder of children in LA by a serial killer haunted me. They contained the well known reprise "never go with strangers" repeatedly and the payoff in the last line was "but they do". Much better than nearly all his novels.
Yes, when Amis Junior was good he was very very very good
Have you read his recent novel/memoir about his friendship with Chris Hitchens, the demented Saul Bellow etc?
INSIDE STORY
It's a terribly boring title for a really fine book. It's not quite peak Amis, you can sense the cognitive decline, there are too many meandering paragraphs, or entire chapters, about nonsensical or irrelevant stuff (however interesting) but it is his best book for a long time, and you can see why he was so rated, once again
I think he should have made it straight memoir. It's still fabulously intelligent
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
I’ve often wondered about this. I have double glazed windows and have lagged the loft fairly well. Our house is still not a warm one, and I suspect our walls would need sorting too somehow (extra insulating layer). What level are the 19 million homes that need insulating really at? Is my house one of them?
In Ireland they're providing grants so that people can wrap their houses - so insulating cladding on the outside of the walls, hopefully not flammable.
I suspect also that there's potential for some double-glazing not to be as good as it could be.
There are huge differences in prices and performance of double glazing. At least half-double in both areas.
The best 2G is nearly as good as an average 3G.
At present glass is very expensive, as it takes a lot of energy to make. There may well be better value options if there is a fixed budget to spend.
2G is almost universal now, and loft insulation is a very high % - but quite a lot of it is below the optimal 250 or 300mm.
But then normal loft insulation in a normal loft has basically been available free for the last decade in most places, so people who don't have it have generally not bothered to investigate.
That is one of the things at risk because of Fizzy Lizzy's (her, I think) boneheaded attack on 'green whatevers' in energy bills.
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
I’ve often wondered about this. I have double glazed windows and have lagged the loft fairly well. Our house is still not a warm one, and I suspect our walls would need sorting too somehow (extra insulating layer). What level are the 19 million homes that need insulating really at? Is my house one of them?
In Ireland they're providing grants so that people can wrap their houses - so insulating cladding on the outside of the walls, hopefully not flammable.
I suspect also that there's potential for some double-glazing not to be as good as it could be.
Exterior insulation is done a lot on council and housing association properties in the UK, and I believe there have been schemes to get grants to do it on private homes. Not suitable for every house, but the properties it does get done on generally look smarter as a result.
I don't what "regenerating" means, I have only joined this site for the first time today. But Pete has been trolling Leon for the whole time I've been lurking, what a silly sod
And he is being applauded by the sea lions. 'Fully costed' has made a comeback. Every single person in the country needs to understand that 29 billion pounds of their money would be propping up the profits of the energy suppliers who are crippling them with huge monthly bills and ensuring that rich people dont pay any more and because of that you cant have the 400 quid you were getting. But if youre struggling to pay 250 a month? You have to carry on paying that. Its a fucking appalling response. Spaffing 29 billion to not even address the issues.
The proposal (and we don't know if Truss will go along with it) was to give everyone £400 toward their energy bills which is of course better than nothing but it's not much more than that for many. Do we then seek to apportion the largesse so somehow establishing those for whom the energy bill is a real burden get the most help? Sounds a bit bureaucratic.
Your notion this is somehow "propping up the profits of the energy suppliers" is absurd. If we pay our bills we are doing that - whether the money comes direct from the consumer or from the Government or both it ends up with the energy supplier until a nice windfall tax comes in to bring the money back to the Government.
How would we ensure "rich people" do pay more? We are talking about fuel consumption not wealth. You don't have to be wealthy to need to use a lot of energy - indeed, I'd argue poorer people are likely to spend a greater proportion of their income than the wealthy but apparently instead of helping them by freezing their bills we should let "rich people play more" - what planet are you currently orbiting ? @Leon would like to say hello.
Yes, it's a lot of money but unless you're advocating mass non-payment of bills, what are "the issues"? There are valid questions around how much we pay for our gas and electricity and we can argue those. There are indeed organisations making obscene profits currently - it's a pity we can't get a cut of Saudi Aramco's profits for example.
This smacks more of a desire to have a go at Starmer then anything approaching a coherent response to a serious problem but if it's all the Conservative have currently, Starmer has very little to worry about in the age of Truss.
Of course it is propping up their profits, the government would be restricting them from selling at a profit and subsidising that shortfall. Unless that comes with a ban on making a profit it is directly subsidizing their profit. Creating an artificial market subsidized at a cost of 29 billion. I've said several times what i'd prefer to see, basically long term energy production protectionism and self sufficiency/state ownership, short to medium term a furlough style solution focussed as much as possible on the lower income end which will also encourage energy conservation more than the freeze till April plan will. Also the creation of a state supplier that can absorb customers and even employees from suppliers that go under if they cant stay competitive. And a business cap so they cant continue to be gouged by greedy suppliers frustrated by the personal cap. I've also repeatedly said the Tory plan will be undoubtedly more expensive and probably equally or more garbage. And yes, its having a go at Starmer. Because he's shit. His plan freezes all bills, benefitting those with larger bills and not encouraging energy conservation at all. Double the help for second home owners etc (also a problem with the existing provisions) Im also not trying to ensure the rich pay more for their energy, just pointimg out its costing us 29 billion to freeze their bills along with people who actually heed help and that all this hobbles us to April when, unless a miracle has occured, we'd need to find tens of billions more for however long prices remain high.
Can anyone who is more in the know about energy tell me - how do we calculate the payment for second hand energy? If a windmill or a solar panel generates excess power, and that power is stored by battery, or used to pump water up a hill to be converted back into energy when needed, who gets the payment? Does the wind farm or solar farm get the payment because they generated the energy initially? If so, who pays the battery/water pump people?
Gordon Brown's Army of Loft Laggers must have been round to everyone's house by now, so surely we are all insulated against this winter's energy price hike?
I’ve often wondered about this. I have double glazed windows and have lagged the loft fairly well. Our house is still not a warm one, and I suspect our walls would need sorting too somehow (extra insulating layer). What level are the 19 million homes that need insulating really at? Is my house one of them?
In Ireland they're providing grants so that people can wrap their houses - so insulating cladding on the outside of the walls, hopefully not flammable.
I suspect also that there's potential for some double-glazing not to be as good as it could be.
Exterior insulation is done a lot on council and housing association properties in the UK, and I believe there have been schemes to get grants to do it on private homes. Not suitable for every house, but the properties it does get done on generally look smarter as a result.
Between 2001 and 2020 the social and council sectors had about £20bn spent on them under a central govt programme for the whole range of heat / efficiency / habitability modernisation needs.
Plus there were a lot of local programmes. We had one worth several million in Ashfield where EWI was done to scores of terraced houses, which worked fine - but they neglected to ventilate as well when they sealed the air leaks (which is how permeable older houses work), and had to revisit all of them to deal with the condensation.
Exterior insulation is easy to get not quite right. One where specialist contractors are important.
All this complicated mechanisms proposed for dealing with gas hikes but why cannot there simply be a negative VAT rate applied?
I've been banging on for several weeks that the simplest solution was a simple %age off all bills. With an increase in UC. Encourages less use. Which must happen. Simple to administer. Doesn't distort the market. It's expensive, yes. But so is every other solution.
All this complicated mechanisms proposed for dealing with gas hikes but why cannot there simply be a negative VAT rate applied?
I've been banging on for several weeks that the simplest solution was a simple %age off all bills. With an increase in UC. Encourages less use. Which must happen. Simple to administer. Doesn't distort the market. It's expensive, yes. But so is every other solution.
My faction was into communitarian hivemind living, so we decided China were our natural allies (Putin seemed a bit too elitist for our taste). We agreed with them that they would allow us to settle our huge alien amphibious domes in the South China Sea, in return for which we would defend it against the Americans or any other low-tech (compared to our scary alien tech) opponents.
Sadly, we didn't actually have any advanced weapons tech, but I, um, forgot to mention that to them. However, since everyone, including the American players, thought that we had, it was a perfectly good deterrent.
There are some terrifying speculations by quite serious people positing the theory that aliens, should they be visiting us, might be actively malign - or appear so to us, in their indifference
I guess I always presume that if aliens did ever arrive, they'd be kinda friendly if vastly superior, or neutral observers of our funny ways. ET in the movie
What if they want to hurt us? Or toy with us for sport?
omg I'M GOING TO THE GYM
Of course, they'll be malign, if they're technologically our superiors, even if they don't intend to be so.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
A fine paragraph. By?
Lovecraft, at the start of The Call of Cthulhu.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
Ooh I will try that. I do like a bit of Lovecraft
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
M R James was brilliant at conjuring up horror from the mundane. The short story is best for horror. I think it's very difficult to make horror work over the course of an entire novel.
It's highly difficult but not impossible to write an entire book that is scary. Shirley Jackson did it in The Haunting of Hill House, William Peter Blatty did it in The Exorcist, Susan Hill sort of did it in The Woman in Black (which is flawed but has that genius killer ending). After that, hmm
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Nightmares are "better" when they are short
The Monkey's Paw definitely packs a terrifying punch. If you're going to write a horror novel, I don't think it can be just a horror novel. I think George Martin sums it up very well with this:
“Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”
I think the best horror stories I've read are:
The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs. The Mezzotint, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, by MR James The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe The Pear Shaped Man and In The Lost Lands, by George Martin The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Color Out of Space, by Lovecraft I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
All this complicated mechanisms proposed for dealing with gas hikes but why cannot there simply be a negative VAT rate applied?
I've been banging on for several weeks that the simplest solution was a simple %age off all bills. With an increase in UC. Encourages less use. Which must happen. Simple to administer. Doesn't distort the market. It's expensive, yes. But so is every other solution.
Get rid of the standing charge for occupied houses. Incentives sorted, low use households benefit the most.
Maybe PB economics types can answer this. It seems to me the claim that Starmers or Davey's sweeping across the board freeze of energy costs by massive subsidy does not actually bring down inflation. It just brings down the artificial stat but the underlying reality is being ignored?
Comments
The energy distribution companies are paying world market prices for their supplies in general I think, so the suggestion that it is a subsidy is rather absurd.
Quite how keeping one lot of companies, being forced by Govt to take a loss, out of bankruptcy by giving them taxes raised from another lot of companies, counts as a subsidy, is bizarre.
But some parts of lefty twitter do tend to be a bit dim.
Nationisation of the middlemen would make no difference. Indeed, it would make the exchequer directly responsible for paying these upstream fatcats.
Oh, and those advocating that we should wean ourselves off natural gas will be delighted to know that the shortlist of carbon capture projects announced by BEIS the other day includes a whole load of new-build gas-fired power stations and blue hydrogen projects. These will lock in natural gas consumption for decades to come.
Have a good time in Dorchester. My favourite bit is perhaps the Roman aqueduct to the northwest - a quet and small treat for an evening walk - now Maiden Castlke is cut off by the bypass. As for Poundbury, I can't cope with it - the mix of supposedly vernacular building stones ....
Every single person in the country needs to understand that 29 billion pounds of their money would be propping up the profits of the energy suppliers who are crippling them with huge monthly bills and ensuring that rich people dont pay any more and because of that you cant have the 400 quid you were getting.
But if youre struggling to pay 250 a month? You have to carry on paying that.
Its a fucking appalling response.
Spaffing 29 billion to not even address the issues.
Permission given to other nationalities to also despair.
* Very forgettable job title that I cannot remember. She stopped the dual carriageway to Port Talbot iirc.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Privatisation has not ended the monopoly for many - the recent collapses of the smaller energy providers has effectively created a new cartel of large energy providers who now run the market.
That's the thing - you either believe privatisation will bring new players to the market who will improve choice and keep prices competitive or you believe it creates new monopolies and cartels which disadvantage the consumer/customer. Both arguments have merit.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
As to Hardy's novels, the time to read them is as a late teenager (when trigger warnings are merely encouragements to read all night) and then never think about Hardy again until discovering the poetry later on.
https://twitter.com/L3GSV/status/1558911932555579393?t=9s7v4QBBFE7pl_skw5R9vw&s=19
If the current energy price cap were extended for a further 6 months, Britons would oppose the government subsidising the energy firms for the difference
All Britons: subsidise 24% / don't subsidise 53%
Con voters: 23% / 55%
Lab voters: 22% / 61%
https://t.co/er4m7u0OBA https://t.co/KnjteDsGcz
Superb
He's an annoying man, in many ways, but wow he can write. This was published in 1998, probably the peak of his talent
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/26/the-janitor-on-mars
Your notion this is somehow "propping up the profits of the energy suppliers" is absurd. If we pay our bills we are doing that - whether the money comes direct from the consumer or from the Government or both it ends up with the energy supplier until a nice windfall tax comes in to bring the money back to the Government.
How would we ensure "rich people" do pay more? We are talking about fuel consumption not wealth. You don't have to be wealthy to need to use a lot of energy - indeed, I'd argue poorer people are likely to spend a greater proportion of their income than the wealthy but apparently instead of helping them by freezing their bills we should let "rich people play more" - what planet are you currently orbiting ? @Leon would like to say hello.
Yes, it's a lot of money but unless you're advocating mass non-payment of bills, what are "the issues"? There are valid questions around how much we pay for our gas and electricity and we can argue those. There are indeed organisations making obscene profits currently - it's a pity we can't get a cut of Saudi Aramco's profits for example.
This smacks more of a desire to have a go at Starmer then anything approaching a coherent response to a serious problem but if it's all the Conservative have currently, Starmer has very little to worry about in the age of Truss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
I recall the name only because of a reference to it in the DVD commentary from one of my favourite Futurama episodes*
*sorry to break it to PB, but turns out I'm a nerd.
Although, I'd say his most terrifying short story is The Color Out of Space. It's a constant theme of his stories that the aliens that humans encounter are utterly terrifying, not because they're actively malicious, but rather, they view us as we would view rats or insects.
I know you are exercised by fantasy culture wars. Just a tip, don't believe everything you see on GBNews.
Oh yes, and Johnson is still a &£#@, Brexit or no Brexit. And no we are not going back. I'm cool with that now. A shame we left nonetheless.
I just think of her as 'c***face.' Which, to be fair, is the way I think of most of the loons who make up the Welsh Executive
And I mean genuinely: Good. I believe Brexit is morally good for this reason alone
You are less irritating than Roger and not as obviously dim, but I take a milder satisfaction - but a satisfaction nonetheless - in your regrets
And this is not a small thing. It is good to vanquish ones enemies and rejoice in the lamentation of their women
An awful lot of us have got used to the mindset that Someone Else is stopping us living our best lives. It used to be EU fees, now it's going to be energy companies. The idea that energy extractors are going to make out like bandits on this and there's not a great deal we can do about that, because they have us over an oil barrel... that's not a comfortable thought.
Have you ever read The Willows by Algernon Blackwood?
It's a remarkable pieces of writing from the same era. Manages to conjure serious menace from a bunch of trees. Get a bit mad at the end but still: so clever
The late 19th-early 20th century perfected the spooky-as-fuck short story
https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/image-of-the-queen-and-poppies-appear-on-bogside-bonfire-as-politicians-appeal-for-calm-41913128.html
A lot of folk don't seem to be able to do the sums on the costs involved.
You'll be able to carry on with your usual nonsense but we'll just ignore it because it won't matter any more.
I don't know, I think we'd be better off if we could burn flags, posters and effigies without it being serious or a concern.
I suspect also that there's potential for some double-glazing not to be as good as it could be.
Moreover, the Tories have been in power too long. I don't really give a fuck if they lose in 2024. Starmer has said he will protect the Union, so if he wins, that's fine. He's boring, Woke and useless, and I will never personally vote Labour, but Labour probably deserve a shot
Brexit will not be reversed in the lifetime of anyone on this site
https://conservativepost.co.uk/conservative-party-must-put-boris-on-the-ballot-for-democracys-sake-says-alex-story/
The second graph correlates the Performance Index vs Public Cost.
The privatisation model works well *; the question is where we go from here to further optimise, and what do we want to achieve.
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2017/transportation-travel-tourism-2017-european-railway-performance-index
* My view is that the model so clearly works better than nationalisation here, that campaigns for renationalisation can only be ideological. I would link that with features of our politics.
Short stories are generally better at inducing dread without inducing disbelief. The Monkey's Paw is probably the scariest thing ever written. It's all of 8 pages long
Nightmares are "better" when they are short
But I am going to go big also on Starmer next PM/Labour forms Government.
https://crossingthemoss.wordpress.com/2017/04/02/10-disaster-and-demolition/
It was also posted by the old Leave.EU account.
They are apparently shitting themselves that Brexit dies with BoZo
Have you read his recent novel/memoir about his friendship with Chris Hitchens, the demented Saul Bellow etc?
INSIDE STORY
It's a terribly boring title for a really fine book. It's not quite peak Amis, you can sense the cognitive decline, there are too many meandering paragraphs, or entire chapters, about nonsensical or irrelevant stuff (however interesting) but it is his best book for a long time, and you can see why he was so rated, once again
I think he should have made it straight memoir. It's still fabulously intelligent
The best 2G is nearly as good as an average 3G.
At present glass is very expensive, as it takes a lot of energy to make. There may well be better value options if there is a fixed budget to spend.
2G is almost universal now, and loft insulation is a very high % - but quite a lot of it is below the optimal 250 or 300mm.
But then normal loft insulation in a normal loft has basically been available free for the last decade in most places, so people who don't have it have generally not bothered to investigate.
That is one of the things at risk because of Fizzy Lizzy's (her, I think) boneheaded attack on 'green whatevers' in energy bills.
I've said several times what i'd prefer to see, basically long term energy production protectionism and self sufficiency/state ownership, short to medium term a furlough style solution focussed as much as possible on the lower income end which will also encourage energy conservation more than the freeze till April plan will. Also the creation of a state supplier that can absorb customers and even employees from suppliers that go under if they cant stay competitive. And a business cap so they cant continue to be gouged by greedy suppliers frustrated by the personal cap.
I've also repeatedly said the Tory plan will be undoubtedly more expensive and probably equally or more garbage.
And yes, its having a go at Starmer. Because he's shit.
His plan freezes all bills, benefitting those with larger bills and not encouraging energy conservation at all. Double the help for second home owners etc (also a problem with the existing provisions)
Im also not trying to ensure the rich pay more for their energy, just pointimg out its costing us 29 billion to freeze their bills along with people who actually heed help and that all this hobbles us to April when, unless a miracle has occured, we'd need to find tens of billions more for however long prices remain high.
You get 1mn rubles ($16,000) for having ten children once the tenth is a year old – *if* all nine others are still alive then. Not, uh, as easy as it sounds
https://mobile.twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1559271763028090881
Plus there were a lot of local programmes. We had one worth several million in Ashfield where EWI was done to scores of terraced houses, which worked fine - but they neglected to ventilate as well when they sealed the air leaks (which is how permeable older houses work), and had to revisit all of them to deal with the condensation.
Exterior insulation is easy to get not quite right. One where specialist contractors are important.
Encourages less use. Which must happen. Simple to administer. Doesn't distort the market.
It's expensive, yes. But so is every other solution.
Has any provision been made?
“Bad horror stories concern themselves with six ways to kill a vampire, and graphic accounts of how the rats ate Billy's genitalia. Good horror stories are about larger things. About hope and despair. About love and hatred, lust and jealousy. About friendship and adolescence and sexuality and rage, loneliness and alienation and psychosis, courage and cowardice, the human mind and body and spirit under stress and in agony, the human heart in unending conflict with itself. Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all.
But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well. They have room in them for laughter as well as screams, for triumph and tenderness as well as tragedy. They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety, with love and death and birth and hope and lust and transcendence, with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition. Their characters are people, people who linger in our imagination, people like those around us, people who do not exist solely to be the objects of violent slaughter in chapter four. The best horror stories tell us truths.”
I think the best horror stories I've read are:
The Monkey's Paw, by WW Jacobs.
The Mezzotint, and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, by MR James
The Cask of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart, by Poe
The Pear Shaped Man and In The Lost Lands, by George Martin
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Color Out of Space, by Lovecraft
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Maybe I am missing something?