Search This Blog

Tuesday 2 July 2013

Pick up Lines

Hey girls, do you have a map? Because I just got lost in your eyes.

Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?

You must be Jamaican, because Jamaican me crazy

 What have you got in that handbag? 

"Hey baby, this fondue is waiting for you. You wanna taste it?"

You remind me of my son

Nice legs. What time do they open


The word of the day is "legs". Let's go back to my place and spread the word.

Your left leg is Thanksgiving and your right leg is Christmas. I'd love to meet you between the holidays.

"Have you got any Irish (substitute nationality / race) in you?"   "No".  "Would you like some ?"

I've just won the lottery and I'm a friendless orphan

"Where have I been all your life?"

'So you fancy a shag'?  'No', 'Well d'ya mind laying down while I have one'

Hi, you're pretty. Would you like a drink?

Oy! Love! Do you like chocolate? Coz I've got half a bar for you

Awreet hen, fancy a poke an a tickle?

"Hi, I'm [insert name here], what's your name?" and then asking them about themselves.

How do you like your eggs ? fertilised ?

Was your father a mechanic because when you just walked into the room I felt my nuts tighten

Your facial symmetry suggests that you might be a fertile mating partner.

My favourite gay bar chat up line is, "Please allow me to push your stool in for you".

"I'll just go and pop the kettle on for tea, feel free to be naked and lying on the couch when I get back."

You have eyes like spanners. When I look into them, my nuts tighten.

“Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?”


    Do you sleep on your chest? No. Can I?

    Me: Do you like chicken?
    Potential love making partner: Yes.
    Me: Well you should suck my cock, it's fowl!

    There's a party in my pants and you're invited

    "I'm not much of a cook so i'll have to take you out for breakfast"

    I'm drunk and you're ugly lets settle

    You know how brown is good for you? Try me

    ''I've had my name changed, to Bond, but not James bond, Unibond, cos I was made to fill your crack''.

    I may not be Fred Flinstone...but I can make your bedrock

    Hey... so, do you know what's got 100 teeth and holds back the Incredible Hulk?
    It's the zipper on my jeans

    You have a boyfriend? Call me when you want a man friend.

    A guy once came up to me and asked if I could help him identify what material his t-shirt was made of. I said it looks like cotton to me. He said no, you're wrong, it's boyfriend material...

    Excuse me, do you have any raisins?
    Well, how about a date then?

    Buy me a drink and I'll give you my undivided attention

    Do you drive?
    Yes.
    Well, back onto THIS then baby!

    Me :"50 ton penguin?"
    Target: What?"
    M: "Need something to break the ice"
    M:"Did it hurt?"
    T: "Did what hurt?"
    M: "When you fell out of the cute/babe/gorgeous/lovely tree, and hit all the branches all the way down?"

    "Stare at me in disgust if you want to blow me"

    "You'll do."

    "This face leaves in half an hour. Be on it"

     "Do you want to come back and meet my cat?"

    Go up to a woman in a bar, put your hand on her backside and say "excuse me is this seat taken?".

    Fuck me if I'm wrong but is your name Gertrude

    If I was your dad, I'd still be bathing you.

    "Those clothes would look good as a crumpled heap on my bedroom floor!"

    "No hablo español pero beso muy bien..." ("I dont speak Spanish but I kiss very well....")

    *Walk up to a girl whilst bringing mobile phone from your ear*...“I just called my girlfriend to described you to her; she admits, it is only fair and proper that we break up so that I can have this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try to kiss you.”

    “Do you come here often? Give me the chance and I’ll make it five times in ten minutes.”

    “It’s a medical emergency and only you can save me: either help me to get off or stay out of my line of sight, ‘cos every time I catch sight of you, so much blood rushes to my penis that I faint.”

    “Are you paying for that skirt in instalments? If so, I’m very glad you’re skint; let me buy you a drink.”

    A friend of mine used to go up to women in pubs and extremely politely ask them if they had a pen and bit of paper in their handbag as he had urgent need of said items. Once the pen and paper were produced and handed to him he would ask for their phone number, simple.

    "You look way too expensive for me, so I'm just going to walk off. But you can follow me if you like."

    "Would you consider spending the night with me? My ex is coming round tomorrow and you're so hot, it would really make her jealous."

    'I've got a magic watch'
    '...why is it magic?'
    'Well, at the moment, it's telling me that you're not wearing any knickers'
    'I think your watch is broken'
    'Hmm, yes you're right, it's an hour fast'

    "There's only going to be seven planets left tonight, after I destroy Uranus."

    "I hope you have pet insurance, because when we get back to yours I'm going to destroy your pussy."

    "Do you like dried fruit? How about a date?"

    Have you farted because you just blew me away

    The only thing between us is air and opportunity.

    A woman once asked me what I thought of her outfit, to which I replied "I don't know, I've already undressed you with my eyes." 

    My cat said I would never meet somebody like you, shall we prove her wrong?

    "Make sure you don't get arrested for being so hot!"




    Schumpeter's long revenge


    By Chan Akya in Asia Times Online

    News about major retail chains such as HMV and Blockbuster closing shop inevitably attract greater than usual attention because they sell media content and therefore operate on the edge of the world of entertainment. That said, the demise was fairly obvious to anyone who had read their balance sheets, which have been decimated by technological changes led essentially by Apple but more generically by the broader applications of the Internet and improved hardware. 

    Selling and renting films respectively, HMV and Blockbuster were a key part of all retail malls and "high" streets in the UK with similar brands in other countries including in Hong Kong and Singapore. The advent of amazon.com was the first shot across their bows; one that both chains failed to heed. As the business of selling books through bookstores evaporated in the late '90s, the retail chains selling and renting movies and music failed to make the connection between the physical world and the augmented reality shopping of the Internet. 

    The process was to accelerate with improved software - Apple's iTunes comes to mind - even as hardware continued to provide an underwhelming experience. The inability to bridge the quality gaps in films and music (or else apply them to an environment where more people were using crummy mobile devices for enjoying the same) simply meant that all competition ended up being about price. This was the wrong battleground and, much like Napoleon's forces marooned in the harsh Russian winter 200 years ago, the retail chains were destroyed. 

    Oddly enough, HMV also played a small part in the global financial crisis; one of the largest lawsuits from that era pertained to Guy Hands' private equity firm Terra Firm filing suit for misrepresentations against its banker, Citibank, over its purchase of EMI from which HMV had been spun off to a separate listing in 1998. 

    Although the suit was pretty quickly dismissed, opportunities for mirth abounded from the materials provided as part of the proceedings. Such large leveraged buyouts generated billions in loans that were purchased by collateralized loan obligation vehicles, which in turn were partly funded by the shadow banking system that helped to fell the global economy in 2007-08. 

    In any event, the various reorganization plans filed by HMV management provided fodder for private equity firms on its own; in parallel, Blockbuster went through its own interaction with the forces of competition. While the global business of Blockbuster went into administration in 2010, the company continued to operate in many parts of the world. Last week's closure of the UK business is a continuation of the global process. 

    The circle of stupidity

    On the other end of the scale from market forces is the circle of stupidity that underpins global monetary policy today. 

    An industrial version of the HMV/ Blockbuster process of creative destruction is Japan, an article about which I wrote late last year, touching upon the effects of competitive landscape changes ushered in by the pincer grip of South Korea and China at the branded and generic ends of manufacturing respectively; even as sclerotic politics and inane monetary policies end up accelerating the decline. (See The end of Japan as we know it, Asia Times Online, November 27, 2012). 

    Following the elections, Japan's monetary policy impetus has moved into aggressive easing as the government and the Bank of Japan attempt to push the yen sharply lower by easing quantitative policy and accelerating the purchase of bonds issued by the US and European governments (the Italians and the Spanish sent a couple of "thank you" notes to the new government, presumably). 

    Meanwhile, other Asian countries - primarily Korea and China - are increasing their own purchase of Japanese government bonds to offset the effect of a falling yen on their own currencies. And all along, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi are cheerfully printing money by the trillions to support yawning fiscal deficits and to keep their currencies from rising. 

    Think of the average pensioner anywhere in the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations and the picture is downright depressing. With regular income from bonds and bank accounts whittled down to barely nothing, they are being forced to take on financial risks by purchasing "high dividend" stocks or worse, corporate bonds. These are not folks who are equipped to analyze such risks, let alone manage them. 

    Businesses go bust when they run out of liquidity, not when they run out of "capital" or any such esoteric concept. Granted that HMV and Blockbuster were so bad that not even all the money sloshing around the global financial system could save them, but that also raises the question of how many companies and governments survive today because of the excess money sloshing around. 

    At the very least, we know that interest rates and risk premia are severely depressed in G-8 countries and, as a result, across much of the financial world. There are countries that would be considered borderline default where government bond spreads are trading well under 5%, an anomaly that makes no sense irrespective of the "base" funding rate. Similarly, equity markets are getting record inflows at a time when valuations aren't exactly cheap anywhere in the world. 

    Such conditions are usually spelt b-u-b-b-l-e; and I entirely hold Bernanke, Draghi and their kin responsible for this state of affairs. There will be time of reckoning later, but for now we will have to live with all the Keynesian rationalization. 

    Why is Schumpeter important

    One of the key defenses used by those seeking to broaden the ambit of monetary policy whilst emptying government coffers is that corporate closures are bad form and cause disruptions for employees and other stakeholders alike. This is indeed true over the short term, but over the longer term the truth is perhaps in the opposite direction and in line with the views of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter on "creative destruction". 

    Systems that weed out inefficient capital users end up deploying funds to more deserving users thereby reducing the overall risk of the system and increasing the gap between risky and less risky ventures; this extra compensation therefore ends up attracting more robust capital - and perhaps more appropriate capital for risky ventures. 

    In contrast to this, folk who lend money to French companies - typically only other French folk - see their risk analysis dulled by constant government intervention and corporate subsidies (internally) to their worst divisions. When the car firm Peugeot decided to shutter some plants and fire workers recently, the howls of protest were loudest from the country's socialist government, which may however not have quite realized that by denying the company such internal efficiencies they inevitably put the firm at a longer-term disadvantage that increases the chances of a comprehensive collapse at a later date. 

    Investors in such countries will also be confused as to the correct risk premium for a loss-making company compared to that for a profitable company; because debt is about getting one's funds back, the question becomes academic if loss-makers are routinely bailed out. This dulls the calculation of risk, inevitably driving inappropriate funds - pension funds and the like - towards risky assets. 

    That is the reason why the HMV and Blockbuster stories are important. By providing a timely reminder that bad businesses will not survive even the easiest of monetary conditions, they have served to remind all of us of events likely to unfold when the price of money starts adjusting towards more appropriate levels.

    Farming subsidies: this is the most blatant transfer of cash to the rich

    As the British government cut benefits for the poor at home, in Europe it fought to keep millions in subsidies for wealthy farmers
    Daniel Pudles 02072013
    ‘Most of the land in Britain is owned by very rich people, including millionaires from abroad who pay no UK taxes.' Illustration by Daniel Pudles
    It's the silence that puzzles me. Last week the chancellor stood up in parliament to announce that benefits for the very poor would be cut yet again. On the same day, in Luxembourg, the British government battled to maintain benefits for the very rich. It won. As a result, some of the richest people in the country will each continue to receive millions of pounds in income support from taxpayers.
    There has been not a whimper of protest. The Guardian hasn't mentioned it. UK Uncut is silent. So, at the other end of the spectrum, is the UK Independence party.
    I'm talking about the most blatant transfer of money from the poor to the rich that has occurred in the era of universal suffrage. Farm subsidies. The main subsidy, the single farm payment, is doled out by the hectare. The more land you own or rent, the more money you receive.
    Since 1999, more progressive European nations have been trying to limit the amount of public money a farmer can capture under the common agricultural policy. It looked as if, this year, they might at last succeed. But throughout the negotiations that ended last week, two governments in particular resisted: those resolute champions of the free market, Germany and the UK. Thanks to their lobbying, any decision has yet again been deferred.
    There were two proposals for limiting handouts to the super-rich, known as capping and degressivity. Capping means that no one should receive more than a certain amount: the proposed limit was €300,000 (£250,000) a year. Degressivity means that beyond a certain point the rate received per hectare begins to fall. This was supposed to have kicked in at €150,000. The UK's environment secretary, Owen Paterson, knocked both proposals down.
    When our government says "we must help the farmers", it means "we must help the 0.1%". Most of the land here is owned by exceedingly wealthy people. Some of them are millionaires from elsewhere: sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates who own vast estates in this country. Although they might pay no taxes in the UK, they receive millions in farm subsidies. They are the world's most successful benefit tourists. Yet, amid the manufactured terror of immigrants living off British welfare payments, we scarcely hear a word said against them.
    The minister responsible for cutting income support for the poor, Iain Duncan Smith, lives on an estate owned by his wife's family. During the last 10 years it has received €1.5m in income support from taxpayers. How much more obvious do these double standards have to be before we begin to notice?
    Thanks in large part to subsidies, the value of farmland in the UK has tripled in 10 years: it has risen faster than almost any other speculative asset. Farmers are exempted from inheritance tax and capital gains tax. They can build, without planning permission, structures which lesser mortals would be forbidden to erect, boosting both their capital and income. And they have a guaranteed income from the state. Yet all we hear from their leaders is one long whinge.
    I have yet to detect a word of gratitude from the National Farmers' Union to the hard-pressed taxpayers who keep its members in such style. The NFU, dominated by the biggest landowners, has a peculiar genius for bringing out the violins. It pushes forward small, struggling hill farmers. The real beneficiaries of its policies are the arable barons hiding behind them.
    An uncapped subsidy system damages the interests of small farmers. It reinforces the economies of scale enjoyed by the biggest landlords, helping them to drive the small producers out of business. A fair cap (say of €30,000) would help small farmers compete with the big ones.
    So here's the question: why do we keep deferring to Big Farmer? Why do its sob stories go unchallenged? Why is this spectacular feudal boondoggle tolerated in the 21st century?
    Here are three possible explanations. A high proportion of the books aimed at very young children are about farm animals. There is usually one family of every kind of animal, and they live in harmony with each other and the rosy-cheeked farmer. Understandably, slaughter, butchery, castration, separation, crates and cages, pesticides and slurry never feature. The petting farms that have sprung up around Britain reify and reinforce this fantasy. Perhaps these books unintentionally implant – at the very onset of consciousness – a deep, unquestioned faith in the virtues of the farm economy.
    Perhaps too, after being brutally evicted from the land through centuries of enclosure, we have learned not to go there – even in our minds. To engage in this question feels like trespass, though we have handed over so much of our money that we could have bought all the land in Britain several times over.
    Perhaps we also suffer from a cultural cringe towards people who make their living from the land and the sea, seeing their lives, however rich and cossetted they are, as somehow authentic, while ours feel artificial.
    Whatever the reason, it's time we overcame these inhibitions and confronted this unembarrassed robbery of the poor by the rich. The current structure of farm subsidies epitomises the British government's defining project: capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.

    The subversive world of online drug dealing

     

    Encrypted websites selling illegal drugs may render prohibition obsolete, but their profit-driven nature could be just as harmful
    A marijuana plant
    Drugs … 'there will always be a market'. Photograph: Anthony Bolante/Reuters
    A nameless admin at Atlantis, a website selling everything from magic mushrooms to marijuana to crack cocaine, posted an advert on YouTube last week. The video was swiftly taken down, but not before about 40,000 people had seen it, copied down the strange URL and gone off to investigate. It's part of a bold new marketing campaign to allow people to easily buy illegal drugs, wherever they are in the world. Whether that's a good or bad thing is debatable.
    Atlantis is a competitor to the Silk Road, an underground online market where drugs are bought and sold openly, sent to users under plain wrap in the mail. But where the Silk Road hides and does not share its URL very widely, Atlantis is shockingly blatant and comes over like a cocky web start-up. It is paying dividends: the site's owners claim to have processed half a million dollars in deals since March. There are allegations that it is a honeypot, drawing in ex-Silk Road vendors by charging lower fees, and offering proprietary encryption, rather than demanding that users learn PGP software (Pretty Good Privacy). This means the site's owners might be able to see where dealers on the site are sending drugs to, and identify customers, or listen in on email conversations and begin to expose dealers. Might the DEA have set up a bogus site to ensnare the unwary?
    While nothing any government does around privacy should surprise us nowadays, from indiscriminately recording our every thought and whim, to spying on the grieving parents of murdered children with the aim of smearing their characters, the emergence of Atlantis and sites like it into the mainstream does raise the interesting prospect of a new war on encryption. Encryption software, most commonly PGP, scrambles your mail, making it impossible for a third party who does not own two special "keys" to read your mail. 
    Now the Prism and Tempora cats are out of the bag, and it's dawned on almost everyone what fools they've been, I'd guess that governments will soon be very keen to control encryption and will use the drug problem as a straw man defence for their next wave of intrusion. Note to government, it didn't work last time. To quote John Callas, who helped invent PGP with Phil Zimmerman: "PGP is just math, and you can't ban math."
    In the UK, though, encryption can be a de facto crime under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the Labour-era assault on civil liberties. Refuse to hand over the private keys to your private files and you can and will be jailed. IT website The Register reported in 2009 that the first person jailed under part three of Ripa was "a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no criminal record". Found with a model rocket as he returned from Paris, he refused to give police the keys to his encrypted data: indeed, he refused to speak at all, and was jailed for 13 months. Six months into his sentence the man was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and does not know when he will be released.
    It's pretty easy to see what the initial official response to sites such as Atlantis will be. There'll be a concerted media campaign to scare people off. A few big busts of users, plus an attempted and likely very public assault on Bitcoin, the anonymous currency used to pay for the drugs.
    But Bitcoin is essentially unassailable, because the currency has no central bank, and is made and maintained by a network of users. There's now enough of it in circulation to become a closed and private economy. Bitcoin is divisible into eight decimal places – 0.00000001 BTC is the smallest amount that can be handled in a transaction – so there's plenty of spare capacity. Perhaps an attack on Tor might work? Tor is the anonymising software that enables these markets to be hosted and accessed secretly. To quote Andrew Lewman, the Tor project's spokesman: 
    "Our code is all open source, everything we do is open source, and is mirrored all over the world. So even if, for whatever reason, let's say the paedophile-terrorist-druglords and the four horsemen of the apocalypse take over Tor and that's the majority usage, then the current Tor network could shut down, and just like a phoenix it will get born again. Then maybe we'll have 10 or 1,200 Tor networks because everyone starts running their own."
    The only way to tackle online markets such as this is to make postal procedures hugely onerous. But that costs. The Royal Mail is about to be privatised and no one wants to invest. With 96% of its staff supporting a strike and opposing privatisation, it's hard to see workers agreeing to new requirements to scan every piece of post for drugs. In any case, queues in understaffed offices are so lengthy and the entire process of posting a letter so redolent of the frustrating world before the net there would be a customer revolt.
    And there's no way sniffer dogs can tackle the circa 70m pieces of just domestic post at the sorting offices each day. When I was researching my book on the internet drugs trade, the Royal Mail refused to answer even the simplest questions about steps taken to identify packages containing drugs. The reason for that, postmen have told me privately, is that there are none. There's a new Russian anonymous market, that has just come online too. There will be many more, since prohibition makes their operation profitable and their use logical.
    Free market economics, whose rules of supply and demand we so conspicuously ignore in this vast sector of the economy, make simple herbs and plant extracts or simply produced chemicals worth many millions of pounds per tonne. And so there will always be a market. That market has now been virtualised: Drugs 2.0 – click here to buy now.
    But while I smile in disbelief at the defiance and subversion of sites like Silk Road and Atlantis, I can't help thinking that this cavalier dismantling of the failed and discredited prohibition model, replacing it with another system driven by private profit with no regard to people's health, risks exposing people to similar harms as prohibition did. Note past tense.  

    Monday 1 July 2013

    Not talking about death only makes it more lonely and frightening


    In the absence of faith, death cafes can provide a space for us to talk about what a good ending might be
    New York death cafe
    ‘The idea of the death cafe has caught on, with more than a hundred meetings having taken place in Britain and the United States.'
    This is a familiar scenario. I am sitting at the side of somebody's bed in hospital. They are dying. It's not an especially comfortable bed, being designed for ease of cleaning and to help nurses lift patients safely. The sound environment is punctuated by the noise of other people's distress and intermittent bleeping from the apparently reassuring presence of technology – often referred to as life-saving, though of course it can never really deliver on that promise. The flimsy curtain provides little privacy.
    Friends and relatives arrive and tell the patient they are looking "really well". This is often code for: we don't want to talk about the fact that you are dying. Anyway, the priest is here. He can do all that existential stuff. The people in white coats obviously have the physical aspect of things covered. The patient, emotionally drained by illness, colludes with this distressing lie through a simple "thank you". It's distressing because the patient often wants to talk about it. Not talking about it is lonely and thus all the more frightening. Is this really how we want to die?
    When Jon Underwood introduced the idea of the Death Café into the English speaking world in 2011 as an offshoot of the Swiss Café Mortel movement, it was with the belief that we have outsourced all talk of death to medics, priests and undertakers. This displacement of death-talk from everyday speech, he suggested, robs us of agency over one of the most significant things we will ever have to face. First, he approached local cafes in east London to see if they would host a gathering to talk about death. They thought the idea bizarre, ghoulish. So he set up in his front room and asked his mum to lead the first session.
    Since then the idea has caught on and more than a hundred meetings have taken place in the UK and the US. It's not a space for religious proselytising – though people of all faiths and none are welcome. It is not for the recently bereaved. It's more a way of addressing the ever-present reality of death among those for whom it is not a live issue. "It can be very liberating because the way our society shuts down conversations about death can be claustrophobic and stifling," says Underwood.
    My own religious perspective on death and dying is that secular atheism is proving to be a very expensive and a terrible burden on the NHS. When we come to value life simply in terms of itself and "the amount of self-referential advancement obtained in it", as one commentator has put it, then death is seen as doubly frightening because it strikes not just at life itself, which is bad enough, but at the very core of our value system. Medicine thus shoulders the unreasonable burden of justifying our existence. So we charge the medics to do everything they can to keep us alive. And the bills pile up.
    Most of us want to die quickly and before our physical condition deteriorates to such an extent that life becomes intolerable. But this is a comforting avoidance – the fantasy of "getting out of life alive", as theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it. As is all talk of euthanasia: the figures from those places where it is legal demonstrate that only a tiny percentage of people ever choose this route. In an aging population, most of us will die gradually. In the absence of religious belief, we need to develop a language that will help us address what a good death might look like.
    Can we, for instance, start talking about having a natural death in the same way that we can now talk about having a natural birth? Or about dying at home, surrounded by our loved ones and not by machines? Discussions like this might enable us to get off the escalator to intensive care, that miserable and soulless place where more and more of us are now dying.

    Who owns patriotism?


    People count, not battles – yet the right, looking back in wonder, seems only to love only a sliver of Britain
    Annual battle of Hastings re-enactment
    Enthusiasts dressed as Saxon and Norman warriors re-enact the 1066 battle of Hastings. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
    George Osborne has pledged £1m to restore the battlefield of Waterloo (1815) in Belgium, which paves the way for the restoration of the sites of all kinds of victories abroad; ministers are also excited about Agincourt (1415). If they continue on this trajectory, the Tories will eventually find themselves back at Hastings (1066), which should really mash their heads. (I think they have been watching the White Queen too much, which is a shame, because TV history has the same relationship to real history as gastronomy has to kebab vans.)
    I am not sure how this works – how do you renovate a battlefield, anyway? – and I admit to limited faith in such memorials. They have too many emergency exits for places that have witnessed catastrophe, and too many children throwing chips. I would always prefer a book to a battlefield, if I could find a decent public library. Mud doesn't do analysis, and tea shops illuminate nothing. This is the politics of the National Trust.
    It is clearly part of the Tory plan to make Britain feel like a wonderful country, even though it may not feel that wonderful beyond Whitehall: food banks; rising inequality; homelessness; and the ghastly spectacle of the wealthy enjoying a parody of homelessness by camping at Glastonbury in yurts, and treating litter as a sort of fascinating art installation that somebody else will buy.
    Surely we must agree with Edmund Burke when he said: "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely"? No, that is too complicated and presumably expensive; it is better to look to the past when the future seems so foul, and austerity stretches into the horizon like an ever-receding phantom. We have the horrid plan to send children from state schools to the battlefields of the western front – and the second prize is? – and we have Michael Gove, a man who always looks, to me, in need of a chin to stroke, attempting to rewrite the national curriculum in the style of Enoch Powell drugged by Jean Plaidy.
    Who owns patriotism? The left has been too quick to surrender its spoils to the right, largely because so many progressive ideas came from across the Channel, along with the plague. (Did you know the plague ship docked at Weymouth? That is surely worth a plaque). Socialism's relationship to internationalism did it harm, although it should not have done, because the right's definition of patriotism is elitist, confused and often completely bogus. Nigel Farage of Ukip, who is considered dangerously patriotic, at least by the Tories, based more on his ownership of a Barbour, I think, than on any coherent political philosophy, is exposed as a (failed) tax avoider – how patriotic! – and the track where Jessica Ennis trained will be shuttered, due to the cuts.
    Obviously monarchy confounds everything, because it drugs us into confusing love of country with hierarchy, obedience and submission; too often patriotism simply means surrender to the status quo. To applaud the monarchy for spending £5,000 a night on the Duchess of Cambridge's lying-in, for instance, might be considered patriotic, while to complain that she should make do with a world famous NHS hospital is not. Patriotism stripped of proper definition is a cheap political trick and it lies all the time; who remembers, for instance, that in Churchill's five-man war cabinet of 1940, two Tories (Chamberlain and Halifax) were for negotiating with Hitler and two Labour men (Attlee and Greenwood) were not?
    It is obvious that the right loves only a sliver of Britain; and so it is time for Labour to claim patriotism for itself. It began with Ed Miliband's theft of Disraeli's One Nation creed at the party's 2012 conference, which is not as improper as it sounds; Disraeli toyed with many things before he chose Toryism, and his series of progressive social reforms were a Victorian marvel.
    Ed Balls has called for Labour to "recapture the spirit and values and national purpose" of 1945; translate the rhetoric into policy and who knows what worlds we could build? A patriotic nation loves all its citizens, and does not only look back in wonder. Greatness lives in the day; even dogs know that.