Welcome to MY world

This is just a test to check if posterous works on my eee netbook with it's hybrid OS. If you post to blogs and suchlike, posterous.com is great and saves a heck of a lot of hassle. Try it. Just do what I have done - compose to post@posterous, write your spiel and send it away.  In that phrase which is beginning to annoy - simples! In the career of glory one gains many things; the gout and medals, a pension and rheumatism....all of these fatigues experienced in your youth, you pay for when you grow old. Because one has suffered in years gone by, it is necessary to suffer more, which does not seem exactly fair. Elzear Blaze - The Military Life

Posted via email from John's posterous

Just wandering through the ether this morning and my eye was caught by this

Things move so quickly these days. No sooner had Kenny MacAskill made his decision to have al-Megrahi flown back to his native Libya than the backlash had begun. Without particularly meaning to, Scotland suddenly found itself in the unenviable position of being the first nation to really nark Barack Obama. And, to be honest, we kind of thought someone else would have got there first.

The internet was awash with outrage. "Boycott Scotland!" was the cry on message boards the world over. In particular Americans, so long proud to claim Scottish ancestry, were encouraged to cease buying our products and show us exactly how pissed off they were. Websites like www.boycottscotland.com sprung up, with hints and tips about how to damage the country that had so slighted them.

These vehement proclamations might have defeated a lesser country, but the Americans had forgotten two important aspects of the Scottish character.

One, we also know how to use the internet and two, we like nothing more than a good rammy. And enter the rammy we have.

That is most certainly true. Whilst my sojurn here has found the Scots to be tolerant (of me anyway) there can be no doubt that they insist on having their say. I suppose it is born from their stubborn resistence to English attempts to subjugate them over the centuries.

Read some of the current responses

This is from a series of images claiming that upcoming photographers can match the bad old boy of almost porn Helmut Newton.
The shot below (in the Trabant workshop?) does present an image of a gritty and polluted Eastern Zone. Even the 7 or 8 years ago that I was there in Berlin, things were better than what I see here. Newton's work has a sparkle to it that lifts him above the allegation that his images are the other side of near the knuckle.





What I get from this image is sense of a broken down, abused and rusty old joy rider. And I don't like her shoes either! Helmut lends himself to stuff ideally suited to being turned into posters

I have been going on about the government's tactic of justifying our stay in Afghanistan by the threat that failing to engage them there would allow them to bring the fight to us here in UK

Well. Seems as if I am not the lone voice crying in the wilderness after all. No less a person than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said

"Al Qaeda is still "very capable" of carrying out a terrorist attack on US soil"

Clever of Brown to bring out all that stuff about released Libyans so as to distract public attention from our making a nonsense of yet another of his spins.

Guy from the Adam Smith Institute day-dreamed Letters To The Editors whilst wandering around in the Lake District, As he had no mobile internet with him (tut tut) they were never sent. This should have gone to The Times. I think it is just so right and proper, I've given it the oxygen of publicity here.

Sir, Your leading article of August 11 is misguided. Decades of bitter experience have shown that no amount of military might can win a 'War on Drugs'. Indeed, all such interventions actually achieve is to raise the market price of these substances, and give the cartels an even greater prize to fight over. The human cost of this failure is enormous. Surely it is time to accept that the only sensible solution is to take narcotics out of the hands of gangsters, and legalize, licence and regulate their production and sale. As well as depriving criminals of a lucrative market, this would have considerable health and social benefits, reducing the incidence of overdoses and poisoning, and making treatment of addicts much easier. Empirical evidence from Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, bears this out.

I had planned a blog about tribes in Afghanistan. About how tribalism would no accept democracy and would just sit it out until the Westerners convinced themselves that ANP (P for Police) and ANA (A is Army) had absorbed all the training and mentoring they needed. We would go home. The tribes would turn back to the life they knew so well.
But - my plans have come to naught. There is already a far far better analysis out there. Best I can do is point you in the right direction.

I am a little confused regarding the angst over the manner in which the repatriated Libyan was greeted. Our politicians and most of America have represented the occasion as a Second Coming. It is not, it appears, the turn-out that was so distressing but that it was given to someone described as a Mass Killer. Milly Band gathered her skirts around her as if rape were inevitable. Americans are demanding the guy be ridden out of town on a rail and subjected to an end akin to that which was a high point of American justice not so long ago.

Under pressure from the Youth Wing of the family, I signed up some while back to both Facebook and to Twitter. The pressure was subtle - as I would have suspected from the relevant individual anyway and took the form of a challenge. The suggestion was that Silver surfers could not hack it on the Internet and that triggered a Manchurian Candidate response from me.
I was quite receptive at first. At first. Just until I exercised my feeble knowledge and did a Google search. I then established that I was mixed up with a load of young tearaway as Serfdom commenced at 50 years of age. My failing powers were unknown to me. At the age of 50 I had been preparing, fighting for and controlling a budget of over £6 million, directing premises and property matters at more than ten offices throughout the UK and was lead consultant of a Facilities Management NHS contract worth just over £30 million. I was regularly walking over 20 miles a day in the hilly and virtually deserted parts of England and Scotland. I was at a muscle-not-posing-pouch-gym four times a week.
I could accept that there had been degeneration between my 50th. and 76th birthday but it was the arrogance of those who set up a age classification at 50 that dismayed and annoyed me. However, to withdraw myself from these two sites could well have intensified the calumny about age-related mental ability.
That rather extended lead-in is necessary background to clarifying my decision to leave both FB and Twitter. I had been a member of a number of discussion groups and forum where the exchanges were robust to the point of  being antagonistic and insulting. Some were run in accordance with the (pedantic) rules of Usenet where the ethereal corridors were patrolled by Moderators eager to banish on the slightest hint of a misdeed. So, there can be no suggestion that I cannot keep up. In fact, it is the lack of that sort of cut, parry and thrust that sees me walking off, Shane-like, into the sunset.
Examine the claim Social Networking. Twitter has been analysed as has Facebook. I can understand the networking bit. I have been careful in my choice of 'understand' because I was always - and remain - dubious about the premise of networking. My experience as a military detective and as a commercial executive was that such liaisons were considered essential to success but I had never followed the collection of business cards and names. I am a solitary sort of bloke; individuals are fine once I have sized them up but lists of people en-masse were not my thing. The discipline of establishing secretary and PA names, birthdays, wife's forename and golf handicaps was beyond me. I thought - and have proven time after time - that I had sufficient chutzpah to telephone or go see an individual who could assist me and get what we both wanted even though we might have started the day totally unaware of the other's existence. So, I have no need of the network side of either Twitter or Facebook. It was the absence of the claimed Social aspect that disappointed me.
I had been used to a reaction to my posts. I would post or read and contribute to a thread that interested me. Back would come a response and generally I was able to follow up on that. Others would gather and we might have ten or more all participating with a wide gamut of personal opinions. Sometimes these got personal when someone would go for the player and not the ball but I found ad hominem situations quite exciting. Facebook seems to attract the middle-class; nothing wrong with that but they are seemingly reluctant to contribute anything that might be described as 'not quite nice'. They retreat behind the net curtains.
Twitter appears - to me anyway - to have a wider range of contributor but a lesser participation. I do not know the figure but I suspect that the ratio of those registered to those who post or respond is very low. There is some - to me inexplicable - need to boast of 'followers' and 'followed'. Applications boast that they will have every Red Sea pedestrian following you in the space of 24 hours. Why the hell would anyone want that? What do they do when they have them? Tweetup gatherings are announced but, whilst these might be held in social settings such as a pub, it is clear that the main attraction is - you've guessed it. Bloody networking again.
After a while, I became bored. I felt that I was having sex with a woman too drunk to know what day it was or dining with a shy virgin who kept her knickers firmly in place with men's braces. Neither challenging or attractive. I thought I might attract responses by submitting contentious posts outside the normal patterns. Nothing. Then I started being (discreetly) abusive or annoying to others. Almost zilch. A return in the realms of decimal point 0 0 sod all.
So - that is why the Aged Parent and John Wood will mount up and ride off into the purple sage resisting any call to Come Back. I cannot say I did not enjoy my short exposures. But then, I cannot say that I enjoyed anything either. To those who tried - thanks. To the others, please carry on with the Networking and God Bless. I am off back to the cut and thrust of My World.

Posted via email from John's posterous

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Posted via email from John's posterous