Polly and the Millipede

Once she had been soothsayer to the court, the last of a long line that had held that position from her family. She had spent her days examining the omens for the Great Pretender, but at night she had dreamed of a one eyed Viking warrior.

The man that would stride across the world like Odin, and shower gold on the worthy from his mighty staff. Only when her Viking finally came she found his exchequer was barren, and his coffers were empty. Night after night she had penned her appeals to the warrior begging him to shower her in gold. He never did, but she refused to give up hope.

Then the blue painted warriors who had formed an alliance with the bird people to sweep away the old order. They banished her Viking warrior to the icy wastes north of the river and threw her in a tower. These newcomers had no use for her visions of a world where gold fell from the skies.

At first she had prophesized that the walls of their city would come crashing down allowing her warrior to return and free her from her tower. But days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, with no sign of her warrior's return. She longed for her warrior to return. He might not have been able to give her what she needed, but he would at least pretend to listen to her visions. It had been a long time since anybody had. In the end just wanted to find anybody that was willing to listen.

Then one day she saw movement in her cell. A millipede was scuttling across the dirt floor. She reached out with one of her gnarled old hands to pluck up the creature and clutch it to her breast.

"Oh, Mr Millipede how smooth and shiny your carapace is. Will you be my friend? Yes, you shall be my friend. You might be small now, but you will grow. You will become as big like a man, and then you will be able to shower me in gold in the way that my Viking warrior never could."

The millipede chirped and she turned its sounds into words.

"Yes, yes I understand. We shall smite the brutes that claim to rule. The clothiers and heralds will hand over the gold that they have hidden beyond the sea. We shall cleanse our temples of the cheats, asset-strippers and vultures who now live there. The people will rejoice. The blue painted panjandrums of greed will be driven before us. The world is in ruins and we shall make it anew, together!"

Driven by its unthinking instincts the creature thrashed around to escape her grasp. She interpreted this as nods of agreement and laughed with delight. At last here was somebody that would come and listen to her visions, she thought. But she could hold the creature no longer, her fingers had become feeble with age. It slipped from her grasp and disappeared into a hole in the floor.

With her only friend now gone Polly tipped her head back and howled at the moon.

Not so inevitable

The Greek banking system is now basically dead. The only thing keeping blood flowing around the corpse is the life support system provided by the EU, if that is turned off so is the greek financial system. Unfortunately for the EU that would mean all of the collatoral that the ECB took in exchange for earlier money transfusions will suddenly become worthless. At that point the ECB itself would find itself scarily close to backrupcy. Pro-EU people always use 'inevitablity' as their standard argument for why the UK should go along with ever closer union, but the only thing that looks inevitable is the self-destruction of the EU's centerpeice and the massive collateral damage that this will cause.

Make the looters pay

Forget Guido's gadfly petition on capital punishment. I certainly won't be signing that one as the state has too much power as it is without letting it kill people. However there is one out there that I will sign once the ePetitions server come back online, and would urge other people to. This one simply wants parliament to debate looters losing their benefits. Show them that there are some consequences to their actions.

And suddenly violence is fashionable on the left again

After the vicious psycho Anders Breivik decided that the best way to express his anti-immigrant views was to shoot up a summer camp the left suddenly lost it love of violence and denounced it, and anybody that they felt they could smear by association no matter how tangental. It looked like the shock of the horrible murders had finally taught them that violence was not a good thing. Then some riots spring up after one gangster gets shot while trying to murder a police officer and suddenly violence is the best way ever of expressing a political opinion. Even if the only opinion these rioters were expressing was that they wanted more consumer goods. A bit of rioting by people that could be badged as ‘the oppressed’ and violence was something to be praised again. Anybody that does praise the violence enough is not sufficiently ‘right on’ and will get their turn up against the wall when the revolution comes. Well, the anti-violence noises were nice while they lasted.

Come and leech says the EU

Daniel Hannan is reporting that the EU now plans to force the UK to let new immigrants arrive without any way of supporting themselves so they can just leech off the welfare state. Part of me thinks great, more immigrants and anything that destroys the welfare state has got to be a good thing. Another part of me wonders if the Eurocrats are deliberately trying to kill their creation? Has the economic horror created by the Euro finally got to them? Or perhaps they just want to make sure that they have a way out after the Euro has turned the whole of continental europe into a riot plagued disaster zone and the value of all of the money that they have defrauded over the years gets reduced to nothing. Not that I would mind the EU committing Sepuku either. The EU is not just shooting itself in the foot by trying to hit as many hot button issues as it can in one go, it is also deliberately breaking its own rules. Not that we should really be surprised about that by now. More likely it is just the Eurocrats flexing their muscles and demonstrating their domination over the member states because they can.

What time is it?

Via Maritime Compass a simple diagram for converting the time into a ship's watches and the number of bells.

#OpPayPay

Just a quick note on the latest Anonymous protest against PayPal. This one appears to much better than their last attacks as they are simply trying to get out a viral campaign to get people to close their PayPal accounts using the Twitter #OpPayPay hash tag. Which is great, they are exercising their free speech to make their point, without unconvincing anybody that is not persuaded by their arguments. Good on them, and it shows a level of maturity that the likes of UKUncut could never hope to achieve. It has also had some significant short term effects (again more than the lefty boot boys of UKUncut can claim).

So is there anything that I would do related to #OpPayPal? Absolutely, I would buy as much PayPal stock as I could. They haven't really changed the fundamental thing that PayPal is still the most ubiquitous payment system on the web. Those that actually used PayPal will get new accounts eventually oncethey have forgetten the protest. Those that didn't won't, but then from PayPal's point of view that doesn't really matter since they were not getting any money from them anyway. This storm will pass and I doubt it will have any noticeable effect to PayPal's profits. All Anonymous as done is cause a panic which will temporarily depress the stock value, so if I had some spare cash I would grab what I could and wait for the stock to rebound.