dubmeup wrote:
Last year I found one of those rustic benches in a very small Cornish fishing village overlooking the sea......with a plaque that had my name on it.
Died age 16. Was a bit spooky!

Wise Haven wrote:
I'm moving back to Cheltenham in the summer
Both my girls are already living there.

angelchemuel wrote:
Yey!

p.s. Mind the sharks

Space Bandit wrote: Your name is Nosmo King? or would it be Noah Loy-Terring, perchance ?..lol

Jiggly Bitz. wrote:
No, its CC Ouncil

Well, after having been 'headhunted' and a day of frantic phone calls/emails it's looking like I am gonna be spending June travelling Europe (UK, France, Spain, Italy, Greece) showing Canadian and American students around and being paid rather handsomely for it!

Fingers crossed everyone!

oioioi wrote:
Nice one oi, good luck mate

Nice oi they are so trusting and naïve you won't have any trouble trickling them into sleeping the night in that shipping container..

I moved house nine days ago and my cat has just come downstairs for the first time!

(She has been provided with litter tray, food and water upstairs for the last nine days)

I'm so happy that we got SZ up and running again.... I guess I shouldn't complain about it, but I hate fb, its terrible piece of shit spy operation and I really really hope to find a decent alternative for it.

For any actual discussion, this forum will suffice nicely. In here I can say that climate change is a scam used to drain fucktons of money out of people and justify draconian laws and so on without getting instantly crucified by "science believer" types. Not that science is bs, nope... But you know how it is like when you express an opinion or mention something "important." People get stuck on to details which are irrelevant for the discussion and troll you to oblivion.

Anyway. Climate change is a scam and queen is a lizard.

giphy.com/gifs/XFuydKNv7mIKc/html5

I have been very tired, stressed and pissed off lately about many things into which I don't want to go right now.

But today I'm on a genuinely good mood. Not the least because I finally finished the bicycle but also because you guys. As if I got big bunch of long lost friend for a surprise visit. I didn't realise how much I have missed forum style online interaction...

Hexhammer wrote:
Have one of these

I can't disagree I didn't miss this place...that would just be a blatant lie. Funny old world this forum stuff....

Forums have been dying left and right for quite some time... Everyone's on some anti-social media these days. I like forums, small forums where nothing note worthy happens. Bigger circles turn into trollfest circlewank really easy and people often have some agendas to push, bigger the forum, more likely it is that everything's not as nice as it might seem.

Hexhammer wrote: I think just generally the Internet provokes tribalism, which arguably is inevitable as it's probably in our nature to form small tribes. When I was studying Psychology, some of the mainstream academic theories I simply do not agree with, or I think the evidence to support them is insufficient, but one I found extremely convincing was ingroup / outgroup:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups

I see that happening all the time in everyday life. Just yesterday I was watching TV, and there was a report about some Rangers fans trashing part of Celtic's stadium. But I bet if you spoke to those gentlemen they couldn't even explain to you why they hate Celtic.

What I used to find odd was when you'd get people from Stormfront coming on the DIF; surely they have their own forum, why bother? But I think this is the Viking instinct! We have our tribe, now let's conquer their tribe! I really think subconsciously they feel that way, and this is a very powerful instinctual drive, particularly in young men. As they get older, and the testosterone dies down a bit, probably the instinct is dulled, but I don't think it's something that goes away completely. We identify with people who agree with us or who we perceive are like us, and we want to fight people who disagree with us. Even the most pacifistic and peaceful among us will feel this inside ourselves sometimes.

Hello there WUB, nice to see you back here among the tribe.

I think you're right about that, I have seen clear evidence of this among my friends quite a few times... Like those few "science believer" types, not surprisingly, these are usually twenty something year old guys. From time to time they just HAVE TO bash someone who has differing ideas, no real reason, just to go and smack some poor bugger who thinks otherwise. I used to do it too, these days I really don't bother very often as that sort of mentality does not ever change anybody's thinking anyway, possibly just strengthens the us vs. them thinking.

Hexhammer wrote:
I think climate change is a bit of a grey area. The climate always has and always will change..... the question of whether it's anthropogenic or not is another matter.
iirc the earth's temperature hasn't changed since the 90s..... and the permafrost (land locked ice) is still expanding.... yet it is expanding at a lower rate than it was before - which ultimately means that eventually it will cease to expand and start to recede which in turn would lead to the sea levels rising.... albeit over time.

Yes it's true that it's ultimately a cash cow.... everything and any idea is now commodified as much as possible. However, we should not underestimate our impact upon the world. In fact, we should take it very seriously. Because we have screwed up the environment already, possibly beyond repair and we are yet to reap what we have sown.
The severity of human impact upon the face of the earth has led to calls for the period of 1950 onwards to be defined as a new epoch - defined by nuclear testing, plastic pollution of the oceans..... and chicken bones: The Anthropocene.


www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug...s-human-impact-earth

I've often heard it said the "We are a dirty animal, like rats, poisoning our own environment"... I'd argue with the "We" of that kind of statement. I'm not the one churning crap into the waters, or smoke into the air. I'm not goring into the earth's belly for gold or oil, or dropping nuclear bombs into the oceans to test if they work.

It's the same conclusion as with all things - political, financial, social: get rid of the psychos at the top and get more involved in the management of it all ourselves. But the vast majority won't - because they are "the psychopath's greatest allies": the lazy and the apathetic.

That "we" do this and that argument is part of the guilt trip the money hoarding fuckwits want to put us all on to make even more money.... For example cheap chinese good which are made regardless of the environmental impact and suffering of local people there or the work conditions, some times I have no choice but to buy that shit because there is no viable option.

First you're given no real options about it, then the same party who are making enormous profit by the expense of our environment come over to blame "the consumer" for the problem which they have created in the first place. And the next step is to pump even more profit out of people by scaring them shitless and sending them on a guilt trip about the environment. There is a good side to this also, in a way it seems that the climate propaganda is backfiring on the profit makers because I see people reverting back on using GOOD items which are made to last and can be repaired, same goes with second hand good and growing your own food and so on, also more and more people are looking for alternatives for power and get off the grid.

Space Bandit, I agree on what you said about climate, it has always been in a change... I think that's the very nature of it. Also I agree on that what people do here must have some kind of an impact on large scale. It would be stupid to think otherwise. What I do doubt however, is the what media is saying about it. I think there's lot of downright lies and bullshit there.

I feel two things about this. Firstly, there is no doubt that human beings have had a massively detrimental impact on the environment. You don't need to look any further than this:

www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep...life-in-40-years-wwf

We think of dinosaurs of being destructive, I bet the fucking T-Rex never managed to destroy 50% of species in 40 years! We've decimated the rainforest, caused massive environmental and air pollution, destroyed animals habitats all over the world, displaced indigenous people, etc.

When do you ever see a politician stand up on a grand stage and campaign against any of that? When was that ever headline news? No, it's just climate change we need to worry about because there's a scientific consensus on the subject. Well, forget about a 'scientific consensus', the decimation of the rainforest has actually happened. We know this because it's not there any more! We know that the Chagos Islanders were driven away from their native land so that a military base could be constructed because there was a massive court case in which the establishment fought their right to return there tooth and nail. We know that animals are dead in massive numbers directly due to human behaviour because this is easily verifiable. When do you ever hear anything about that? When has Obama ever stood up and said "yeah, you know, maybe we should stop completely exploiting the natural world for profit"?

It's bad enough in 'wealthy countries', but in the Third World you just get massive corporations completely destroying people's lives, and they have no power to fight back. I haven't really looked into this in much depth, but I just found this report which states that the world's top 3,000 firms cause $2.2 trillion of environmental damage EVERY YEAR!

So that's one thing, instantly I'm suspicious of why this is being pushed so hard when other environmental catastrophes are completely ignored. And then I just don't think it's possible for human beings to understand the climate by inputting a load of data into a computer model. If you read how this is done, I don't really consider it to be scientific, it's pseudo-science, in my opinion, so any broad conclusions drawn from it are worthless as far as I'm concerned.

What's on my mind is the fucking wasp that stung me at the bottom of my back whilst I was out in the garden playing with my dog minding my own

I have an above normal reaction to the nasty little fuckers, thankfully not a full on reaction... but one nonetheless and currently it hurts like a mother!