Malcolm 0-6-0

Horrible? well I suppose it was horribly embarrassing for all concerned ..........

And yes people did dress like that back then - I remember it well. Of course back then I had hair and lacked dress sense

Which prompted me to post this great classic.

Fisher's Phospherine makes you glow with inner health (even in the dark)

Meanwhile the beatings will continue until morale improves, and we'll throw in a little strength through joy as well as all becoming Stakhanovites. Oh yes we also have a little onwards and upwards to the bright sunlit uplands of what we started out thinking was a good idea, when we decided that to achieve freedom from want and discrimination was all there was to being happy. To which aim we formed a committee and that little quiet bloke Stalin put his hand up to take the minutes. It may well be true that the final form of human experience is pear shaped whatever the philosophy that directs it.

Naah!!! I just read the latest press releases from the people attempting to manage this plague.

Well played - however you will note that I didn't actually say that empathy and understanding isn't needed, what I said was that without the financial capacity to do so then it is only wishful thinking. A bit like the idea that committees actually meet to decide issues when the reality is that they meet just so everyone has a good excuse why the day's targets weren't met but the lunch provided was great. The irony is that the societies which claim to be the most empathetic are in fact totalitarian because to be truly united and happy a nation needs to have rigorous enforcement of happiness. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I have to disagree. Certainly there is an inbuilt systemic handicapping however that exists in our society, but this is not because of an overall desire to keep people down. In a capitalist system you require workers yes, but also you require that those same people spend money so that the system itself prospers. The more they succeed the more they spend, to encourage the opposite is economic suicide. Even the Chinese Communist Party has worked that out - in China, ostensibly a communist socialist state the government found that pure socialism was a non-earner. Now in China you can be as rich as you like, but the one rule is you don't question the party. To most people seeking prosperity and the life of Riley that price is absolutely worthwhile. Why rock the boat when it's so lovely and comfy on board. What actually causes the handicapping drag is the reluctance of people to chance their arm at bettering themselves. To a great many people finding a secure niche is more important than chancing their arm. To them the rewards of the former are preferable to the greater rewards of the latter. I'm not condemning those people for their lack of initiative. What I am saying that if the game is to be worth the price of the candle then the candle can only be paid for with money earned from real effort - not from a government dole. A real effort to better oneself is a risky game. Socialism, while a worthy concept, has a nasty habit of collapsing into totalitarianism because it is easier to be an apparatchik than an innovator. Old style Stalinist/Maoist Communism didn't thrive on workers sticking together it thrived on workers who formed committees to establish what was political acceptable, and who then decided to equalise outcomes by stifling personal drive to do better. The famous Russian joke about their communist economy "They pretend to pay us to work while we pretend to work", so In the end what you get is what we have seen which is workers' paradises led by dictators because the only means of success is to dominate the committee system. It was a form of personal success but not one that is a product of the egalitarianism it claimed because the only thing that prospered was the production of committees. In the end the only means of beating this economic entropy is to admit that there are some people who have the drive to succeed and many who don't. A wealthy productive society that is led by innovators can afford social justice for the people who cannot for various reasons fit in, but on the other hand a society that doesn't allow those innovators to thrive will collapse and the disadvantaged are the first casualties.

Equity/Equality whatever - just ask someone who is a handicapper in horse racing. It's all about attracting the maximum money from punters. If a champion horse was going to win every race it entered then that would kill any profitable betting/bookmaking on that race. Wheels within wheels .............. My apologies for the coarse analogy but when it comes down to the basics people succeed because they persist and work hard, they don't achieve success as an expression of their true worth in society if all their challenges are removed for them. They only succeed if they overcome those.

It does have a rather austere appearance but nevertheless there is a sort of honest charm. And did not Bulleid take it one step further and create the Leader which was basically two 0-6-0s in unhappy partnership

Government sources.

How interesting, so were mine. We must be related Apropos the BLM issue and the slavery issue. The Constitution of the Confederate States, accepted in 1861 was quite specific that it was a constitutional right to own slaves and was to be protected by the government and also that the owners had the absolute right to reclaim escaped slaves. The last condition takes us back to the Dred Scott case and Chief Justice Roger Taney's ruling in the US Supreme Court which helped set in motion the Civil War. Taney had ruled in 1857 basically that Blacks were "regarded as beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." I.e. an escaped slave could be seized and returned to their owner wherever they were apprehended. Something which Article IV of their constitution confirms. Article IV Section 3(3) The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states. Obviously the matter still run deeps in the psyche because no amount of pleading that the past should not be expunged from popular reference, can overcome such a flagrant legislative abnegation of human rights even by the standards of the mid 19th Century. Some apologists for the CSA like to claim that the war was fought primarily on economic problems in regard to state rights, not over the freeing of slaves. And to be honest as far as the western and north western states of the USA who relied on the Mississippi drainage for their access to trade etc. were concerned, the economic impact of slavery on their burgeoning free economies and trade was a major concern far exceeding that of the issue of human rights per se. But however much that was a component of the causes Article IV clearly puts slavery forward as a main issue both to defend and to fight.

Lovely, 0-6-0 tender engines. Something so endearingly brisk about them.

Well that is almost similar to what might be at the root of our latest burst. Apparently workers at one of the hotels set aside to quarantine returning travellers were somewhat less than assiduous in how they personally behaved and carried the infection back to family members who then spread it on .......... We now have 10 suburbs locked down in an effort to contain this little whoopsie. Where do we get such people

Well those original iconoclasts were responsible for the mindless defacing of statues and other artwork because they offended the iconoclast's idiotic religious beliefs. My view of them is that I hope these religious vandals are now burning in whatever their mindless belief deemed hell. As for the current ones I'm firmly of the opinion that many of them are just following whatever it is now deemed fashionable to riot about. One need only watch the behaviour of those deemed celebrities as they desperately compete for inclusion just so they won't suffer financial loss or, shock horror, become overnight irrelevancies. It seems like only yesterday that the cause du jour was the Me Too fashion now it's the BLM fashion. Do I sound cynical? well I am - so much towards progress and better behaviour is undone by these dedicated followers of fashion. Some idiotic singer changed his/her name from Antebellum to something forgettable - mind you I'd never heard of Antebellum at all. Antebellum is a perfectly legitimate word long used to describe features of the American southern states that existed before the Civil War. Changing your stage name isn't going to erase the tragedy of slavery from history. The Dixie Chicks became plain Chicks and then publicly thanked some other singer whose stage name was Chicks for allowing them to use the name. Here in Australia a company that made a craft beer called Colonial Ale publicly announced that in deference to the BLM movement they were removing the name Colonial because of its connotations. They forgot that alcohol is the greatest single health danger in our indigenous communities so perhaps instead of renaming their product their most effective deed should have been going into the soft drink business. Gawd help us - we Australians, all of us white black or whatever, lived in colonies in the 19th century. I suppose there's a movement in Germany to rename Cologne because that comes from the Latin Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium because it was a Roman colony. As for the plague I can only say that we humans are its best friend. People seem to be treating it like a newly acquired kitten or puppy that they are just eager to thrust on everyone so they can really really appreciate its adorable fluffy cute ways. I had to make a trip to a big shopping centre near me today (American readers - what you call a mall), and spent a harrowing few minutes trying to avoid other patrons who seem to think that social distancing just isn't their preferred way of life. Rant over.

Well here in Australia in my home state of Victoria we've just had a spike in infections with double digit increases for the past week or so. These are in specific municipal areas in suburban Melbourne with the total population involved nearly 2 million. Melbourne's population is over 5 million so there is cause for worry. Mostly the causes seem to be undiagnosed infections being passed on in families where English skills are low and the warnings are not being heeded combined with the usual idiots who think social distancing is a challenge to be avoided. This sudden spike is disappointing because up until now Victoria had, on a per capita basis, seemed to have contained the problem and things were beginning to open up again. Our experience might serve as a warning to those countries that have let restrictions ease despite the continuance of the disease.

Keep that up and you're going to have to add another room

Yes I can see it might have reached the top 40 in 1415 but to me it somehow lacks the driving rhythm of Mick and the boys singing Street Fighting Man. Others might differ.

I might point out that to a person with a lisp, truth is simply the means of hernia relief.

Of course if you ask any economist they will assure you that WW2 was simply a well disguised international initiative, and a very successful one at that, to reverse the financial problems caused by the Great Depression.

Yes the truth will set you free but sometimes it's a bloody boring process.

I think that's one of the early experiments with techno music. Once removed the boy bits were adapted so that they could be plugged back in if the score required it. Apparently it never quite achieved the popularity the inventor thought it might ..........

Annie a bright funny news story just for you - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-27/chunk-the-groundhog-gardening-wildlife-steal-fruit-vegetables/12360190 I warn you old Chunk can become addictive.

Certainly the policing situation has parallels here in Australia. While we don't have a Seattle type situation in the cities we do have similar policing problems in the remote settlements and other indigenous communities. We have the paradoxical situation where many indigenous people just want to live in peaceful communities, as do we all, but see this desire overwhelmed by criminal and generally anti-social behaviour by minorities within the communities. When police intervene there is a sudden upsurge of criticism of the police by mainly outside groups claiming that they are once again behaving like colonial oppressors unsympathetic to the problems of our indigenous people. It is a no win situation where a minority of indigenous people who, in the normal run of things are little different to the criminal underclass in our urban centres, are creating a false view of our indigenous people. These small groups of intractable criminals and misfits come to dominate and harm their communities while garnering support from outside non-indigenous groups who, in their own communities, would never consider making our urban non-indigenous criminals worthy of political support. The voices of sensible indigenous people in the remote communities seeking better lives are thereby drowned out by non-indigenous and outside activists who for political reasons which serve their own interests, deliberately and mistakenly lump both the law-abiding majority and the criminal minority together as having the same social concerns. We are moving closer to the situation where some of the remote communities have become no go zones for law enforcement because the issue has become politicised to the point that police are unwilling to intervene knowing that whatever steps they take will be heavily censured. Also we have had for some years a great deal of concern about the higher rates of indigenous incarceration compared with non-indigenous Australians. Yet again however it is a problem which is distorted by the systemic break down of social controls amongst a small percentage of our indigenous population. Oddly it is never compared with similar spikes of localised incarceration rates for non-indigenous people from specific suburban areas in our main cities. The latter it appears is a criminal issue to be ignored by social activists, while the former is an easily identifiable politically attractive cause for the same activists. Whilst I am not trying to sound like some ultra conservative old fogey, I do think that at times the political activists involved might find that a little introspection regarding their own behaviour might help defuse what is becoming an increasingly harmful problem for all of us.

I'm rather afraid that in today's climate of band wagon jumping the moral judgements are a bit like Groucho Marx's principles - "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."