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Eric Blair

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Everything posted by Eric Blair

  1. don't know how i managed to get a double-post of this. the board is malfunctioning methinks. perhaps the mods could merge the two?
  2. here's another: strange world where hardly anybody i meet has heard of gil scott heron but everybody knows whatshisface.
  3. crikey! i hear you man and i've pasted this into an email to the wife to demonstrate that it's not only me. we are literally disappearing under archaeological layers of children's tat (another layer to be added to in 6 days time). i spent an hour yesterday trying to think up a personal xmas wishlist for her parents. i don't need anything.
  4. i hear he only had one ball too (i think i read it on the bbc website).
  5. "bbc reporting"? considering the status-quo-serving propaganda they regularly put out on contemporary events, what are the chances of them giving us the straight dope on our wartime mortal enemies. and that applies also to court historians. face it, you and i know nothing objective about hitler and the national socialists, nor are we ever likely to.
  6. i did that BKK to Chiang Mai sleeper thing about 10 years ago. it was outstanding, crisp linen sheets etc. i recall thinking it made BR look like some 3rd-world setup. similarly in egypt i took an 8-hour overnight 2nd-class air-con from luxor to cairo in what seemed like 1st-class fold-back airline seats for about £15 return. how can they do it?
  7. "The majority of scientists think they have enouigh evidence", so what? it wouldn't be the first dubious consensus in the history of academe. what's more important is whether there is *significant* scientific dissent from the consensus, which does seem to exist in the AGW debate (despite dishonest attempts to deny/ suppress it) and which clearly does not exist re. smoking causing cancer, the natural selection theory of evolution, heliocentrism and other fallacious parallels to AGW-dissent. in the end it comes down to the quality of the science, which has hardly been discussed in this 86 page thread, even by AGW proponents who claim to understand it but appear instead to prefer appeals to authority and ad-hominems.
  8. yes, innocence like that is so precious (in children). speaking of which, i've lately been reading hans christian anderson's fairy tales to my 5yo daughter at bedtime. i'd recommend them, if you can get a decent translation, as fine literature; a particular example of which being "the emperor's new clothes" as a powerful metaphor perhaps relevant to this discussion. if you recall, the emperor's yarn-spinners benefitted handsomely from his patronage while cleverly creating a consensus in their favour amongst his courtiers by suggesting that any who could not see their magical cloth was either stupid or unsuited for position.
  9. Peter Duesberg is one of the world's leading retro-virologists, isn't he? and how about Dr. Kary Mullis? 1993 Nobel prize winner and inventor of the polymerase chain reaction. which isn't to say they are not wrong, but morons? i think not.
  10. so it follows from you are saying that if the banks do not inject ENOUGH debt-free money back into the economy in funding their day-to-day operations (employing staff, paying shareholders, renting premises etc.) but simply let it accumulate (or invest it abroad?) then there will be a chronic shortage of money to repay debts, short of taking out new loans. could this be the case? and where the flaw (fraud?) lies? and would that not explain the ever-increasing indebtedness and money-inflation we see all around us as well as the growth-imperative built-in to capitalism.
  11. this sounds a bit like N.E.S.A.R.A., the legislative fiscal and monetary-reform programme proposed by Dr. Harvey Barnard in the late 60s. not to be confused with a bacofoilish internet cult trading under the same acronym, which may or may not be organised disinfo intended to discredit the genuine article. the real deal is to be found here: http://nesara.org
  12. a quick update for everybody kind enough to offer advice following my original post in october. we put our house on the market immediately afterwards at 420k and got 2 405K offers within a week, one of which we accepted but which subsequently fell through after a month (buyer lost their buyer). we eventually accepted another offer of 400k before christmas but after a lot of agonising have decided not to proceed and instead stay where we are. factors infuencing our decision were in no particular order: - our failure so far, despite much searching, to find a plausible alternative base within 1 hour's commute of london that offered a fraction of the quality of life we enjoy now, for the budget we have available (even if we took on a new 60K mortgage). i know this is subjective but i realise better now that we are really in a good situation by any objective standards. - my wife's reluctance to rent in the medium to long-term. - i was never happy about the idea of taking my daughter out of primary school and the fact that we have purposely been avoiding inviting her school friends over to the house, thinking we would be leaving, which isn't fair to her. - my family, particularly my mother and my two brothers, who live nearby and my wife's close friends have all been dismayed at the thought of us going even though on a rational level they accepted the logic of the decision. - my income has improved (at least temporarily). i registered with a number of IT agencies before christmas, resulting in a 3 month on-site contract with a prestige london client at 4x (pro-rata) my previous year's earnings which i'm hoping will jump me permanently into a higher earning bracket and allow me to pay the mortgage and reduce my debts without having my wife go back to work (although that is always an option too). weighing against all this, i still believe that the housing market is due for a downturn and that we are heading for a severe recession but considering the numbers afflicted by mortgage and other debts, i don't now believe that the politicians dare allow it to be a deflationary one. in the event of inflation, as a self-employed person, i should be in a more flexible position than a permanent employee to increase my earnings as necessary, the flipside being that i have none of the benefits of an employee either and so will be gambling on staying healthy for the forseeable future. i just hope that this will not turn out to have been the most expensive financial mistake of my life.
  13. let's assume (for the purposes of argument) that the party is over for UK HPI in the medium-term at least, i wonder how bad things would be allowed to get given the numbers of people now exposed to the hardship of unrepayable debt/ losing their homes etc. my own situation is as follows: good family house in a decent part of N. London worth on paper £400k upon which i have a 20yr to run 138k SVR mortgage costing currently £902pm part-repayment along with £118 pm on an underperforming (60k?) £80k endowment maturing in 9 years. we now have 2 kids and since my wife no longer works and my IT self-employed-from-home income is not entirely reliable. i struggle to keep up with approx. £2500 pm outgoings some of the strain of which has been unloaded recently onto credit cards (yeah, daft, i know). i could sell up now, pay off the mortgage, clear some debts and walk away with 230-240k in the bank plus turn the endowment into a savings plan and then either rent where we are now or buy with a small/ low mortgage in a cheaper part of the country. or i could stay here and rough it out which would necessitate my wife going back to work and our youngest child having to go to a childminder for part of the week. even then, we wouldn't have a lot of spare income left after bils and would be vulnerable to interest rate rises and/ or recession/ sickness affecting our ability to earn money (i am 49, my wife 42. no pension). where we live now, while not our absolute ideal, ticks most boxes. good transport/ schools/ services, plenty of living space, safe neighbourhood, daughter just started primary school at the bottom of the road. family nearby. another relevant issue to consider is the encroaching spectre of peak oil and where i would like us to be when that starts to bite. the thought of moving from where we are now is causing me great apprehension but i wonder if change will be enforced on us whether we like it or not in the next few years and whether it is better to leave now under our own terms and establish a new life that we can afford somewhere else while we have the chance. weighing against this, i don't expect that our situation is particularly atypical for london and i'm sure that there are many, many with less equity in their homes who would be even more vulnerable to a HPC/ economic downturn than are we which makes me think that somehow the banks and the politicians will have to engineer some kind of bail-out for the general population along the lines of Dr. Harvey Barnard's NESARA proposal in USA to avoid the disintegration of this country. or am i being too optimistic? what would you do in my place? stay or go?
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