Dr John Dee

And Lance was such a reasonable fellow. He told us so himself.

Well, that might be 34 votes he's tied up for the next election. Not sure where any more will be coming from, though.

I thought you were like that every day, Mr Old, though I do admit you've got some extra incentive today.

Dank to sue CAS?

Still, there's a feedback loop going on here, 'tack, since one of the pressures on the hip pocket is produced by the amount of tinfoil those people also have to buy and that forces up aluminium production, which requires more energy, which requires more CO2, which leads to more predictions about climate change, which feeds more loonie paranoia about world governments and the need for more tinfoil hats to make it all go away ... So if people would just stop making predictions about the climate there wouldn't be a problem, although Alcoa might not be so happy.

He showed rock & roll what else it could be. And then did the same for pop. A rare talent.

Since things have got to the point where Daisy is lapsing once again into nostalgic ramblings and Chris Gayle has left the building anyway, it's probably a useful time to close this thread.

Thanks for this bit in particular, Picks.

Ian Dury and Mozart might be an even more interesting double act, pineapple. It could confuse a few of the punters though, especially those still stuck in the seventies.

Try the Barossa, Mr Leg.

You may be right DL. It looks like some kind of off the cuff thing but no doubt we'll find out more fairly soon. What impresses me is how quickly the security forces piece together the story behind attacks even if they're never really able to put it all together in advance.

A year since Charlie and some fool has attempted an attack on a Paris police station, apparently to coincide with the anniversary. This one looks, though, more in line with Marx's dictum that history occurs twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. As Charlie said late last year, in true Situationist style: 'They have weapons. F--- them. We have champagne!'

Ah, bondage, one of those words with several possibilities to it that you can flavour as you wish. Serfs and villeins spent their whole lives in it, so my few humble years are no record I'm afraid. Speaking of records, you may remember this one: As for New Year, this is banana country, no straw men here and banana leaves are too moist to burn (as many a recipe book attests) so no point in shaping them into effigies or anything else. We follow a different tradition, what's known as the de-riding of the Queenslanders, gathering on our side of the border and mocking those on the other side for having fallen a year behind (metaphorically it's many more years than that, of course). Much fun while it lasts, which is only an hour, but then fireworks in your big cities don't go on all that long either ... I'll leave aside the other sorts of 'celebrations' you might choose to indulge in until dawn or thereabouts in Romsey Vale.

Or perhaps you just can't read. I'm glad you think proliferating threads with no significant points of difference is a virtue. I don't.

The 'Greats of the Game' thread has already been stretched to cover this line of conversation.

As a well-practised jesuitical fellow I'm inclined to take umbrellas at any implication you might be trying to get at in your question BBO. In truth though I did spend a couple of years in bondage to that most unchristian fraternity. Amongst the many barbarisms to which I was subjected (some of which, such as corporal punishment you would no doubt endorse) was being forced to play Rugby Union. I've never quite recovered from the experience but I'll have to leave it to others to judge whether that scarring has influenced any tendencies I might exhibit nowadays.

No, just bad puns, Moonie. But you can credit me with more wisdom than that if you like.

Poor old Keith. Does anybody take any notice of him any more? He had a serviceable enough media textbook for a while there and could've just hung his fame on updating it from time to time. Maybe trying to think about the internet-thingy got a bit too much for him. He's a good example of that fashion that had a brief efflorescence late last century and bolstered the neocon numbers a bit, when the demagogues of the left became demagogues of the right; and at least he did enough to endear himself to the IPA and Rupert. But he also exemplifies something more relevant to this thread given how, as far as the right were concerned, his credentials were noisily advertised as resting on some forgotten old honours thesis in history. As with the lists of 'experts' that the denialists keep in their vaults, near enough is apparently more than good enough when it comes to the right's appeals to authority.

Andy Oliver?

It’s a bit difficult to work out which of the two lists of ‘experts’ dumped here as some sort of response to points you’ve made is the more ridiculous. At first blush the Wikipedia one seems well in front. But at least Wikipedia is in on the joke (accidentally or otherwise): My favourite has to be Mary T Mumpter, a name that looks like an onomatopoeia that didn’t quite work. A quick check on Google Scholar doesn’t reveal any academic papers by her, even in her own teaching area. So I’m not sure whether the minimalist test of at least one peer-reviewed paper in any scientific journal is all that rigorously applied. But the 134 self-described authorities in climate-related science who signed the letter to Ban Ki Moon (in other versions it’s 141, but that’s neither here nor there) make a pretty good effort at showing themselves up as well. In the first place they need to distort entirely what the Secretary-General actually said in order to give themselves some purchase (it’s a standard denialist manoeuvre, of course: don’t argue with what someone says, argue with what you think you can argue with). Their science has been well and truly picked apart since then (Skeptical Science is a good source of critiques of denialist excesses) … and they turn out in the main not to be quite the experts in climate science ‘related’ research that they want us to think. A little bit of work with Google on a random sample doesn’t take long to reveal how approximate many of the claims to relevant expertise actually are. I’m surprised, though, that ProDee hasn’t gone the whole hog and graced us with the entire list of names and alleged credentials of the mythical ‘1000 scientists’ who don’t think — even if their different forms of not thinking contradict each other — that global warming is global warming. Why that number of 1000 is so magical I’m not sure. The Spartans only needed three hundred, and the light brigade six. Canute made his point by himself.

Jo Nova. LOL. https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/spreading-misinformation-intentional-or-not/

'weather drones' ad nauseam. nihil sine contumelia

Not me, Daisy. But there are those who'll actually believe that stuff and the conclusion it wants to point to (as you probably know) so just call it a sense of moderatorial responsibility ... not that they'll bother with any link with the word rational in it anyway I suppose. Expecting anything like reason or logic from them is the most immediate source of humour on this thread.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Association_fallacy