Yeah... but for all the silicon in China you wouldn't catch me knobbing that vile munter he's shacked up.

And he has to. She knows where the bodies are buried.

Translation please, Nick?:-)

If my Nick-to-English dictionary is working...

"I find Mrs. Blair highly unattractive, but he's stuck with her because she'll publish a tell-all book about his misdeeds if he were to leave her."

Er, 'translation' was not the right word (I do read NickMese, to an extent...). What I meant was more like background - more specifically, what does Mrs. Blair have to do with her husband's profiting from foreign conflicts? Although the Chinese silicone part still has me stumped as well...

Um I believe that the silicon in china is a Nickese mutation on the "All the tea in China" expression of old. Tea being a very expensive luxury back when the phrase was coined.

Now, in the Computer age, silicon is where the big money is. I could be wrong of course.

As for Satchmo Blair, well she is the one doing all the spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave, no wonder our Tone has to go out robbing as hard and often as he does.

In my experiences of China, they still have an awful lot of tea, so no real need for an update.

Thanks RAB, sound about right...

"Whenever I see tragedy I immediately look for the economic opportunity it creates." -- Scott Adams

Oh, and Alisa, I'm no scientist but I believe there is a difference between "silicone" and "silicon". The latter is used in computer chips, the former has, um, other applications.

"In my experiences of China, they still have an awful lot of tea, so no real need for an update."

Precisely Michael. Now given the laws of supply and demand...

Hnce my choice of another commodity.

RAB and Sunfish are both right.

I still wouldn't give Cherie one for all the three-pointed stars in Alderley.

Laird is correct. On makes silly twats* (there doesn't even need to be an 'app' for that) and the other makes silly cones. And stuff to seal the bath in with.

*and anyone who goes on about how cool their phone is is a silly twat.

Alisa, 'tw*t' is not related to tweet, i.e. birdbrain, as I once supposed, but is a slang term for the female region between the belly-button and the thighs. Ultimately it comes from the believe that humans with this (i.e. females) are inferior to other humans, i.e. males.
You may take this up with NickM at your leisure.

Alisa - methinks that "'Nuke' Gray" typed that last one from deep within a fall-out shelter ...

Personally, I enjoy the scholarly explanation, myself, here ...

Nuke, er, um,....[cough]...thanks for the tip dear. When I next chat to NickM, I'll make sure to advise him that he should from now on refer to people thus obsessed with the coolness of their communication devices as 'Richards'.

Alasdair: where's the link? I like scholarly.

Alisa, 'tw*t' is not related to tweet, i.e. birdbrain, as I once supposed

Do you know Nuke, I can actually believe that. You Tit!

Can we start the thread now please?

Bliar is the most venal, self serving, self delusional, two faced utter cunt, ever to smarm his way into 10 Downing Street.

Along with the wince inducing, mincing Machiavelli, Mandleson, the Ton Ton Macute, Alistair Campbell and the sociopath Gurnin Gordon, he has managed to wreck this country to buggery and beyond.

And his crystal skrying, candle sniffing, navel gazing malicious bitch of a wife, aided and abetted him at every turn, like Lady Macbeth.

But you know what? when history gets to be written, I bet my fuckin boots that our Tone will come out as a pretty straight kind of guy. Well straight if you want to use him to open a wine bottle, and it will be still be Maggie what gets the blame for everything!

Bliar is the most venal, self serving, self delusional, two faced utter cunt, ever to smarm his way into 10 Downing Street.

Alisa,

I don't know what URL Alasdair was going for, but here's one possible etymology.

Most other sources seem to regard the origin of the word as unknown.

Nuke,

In British English we use synonyms for both the male and female genitalia as terms of abuse. The idea that it originates from the belief that one sex was deemed inferior to the other therefore seems unlikely.

The oddest thing is that I think Mr Blair is sincere.

He really thought that he had convinced the "Mad Dog of the Middle East" (whose 42 years of Islamic Socialism had left vast numbers of victims in Libya and around the world) to reform.

And now Mr Blair (with equal sincerity) believes that Captain (he promoted himself to Colonel) Mad Dog, should be violently overthrown.

If one filled Mr Blair with "truth drugs" or connected him to a lie dectector he would say exactly the same things.

Actually it is quite scary.

A, should be, famous photograph springs to mind.

It is Mr Blair (a Fabian) standing underneath the "Fabian Window".

This is a stained glass window that so horrified Brother Glenn (although some of us have know about it so long it no longer horrifies us - although perhaps Glenn is the sane one on this, as it SHOULD horrify us)

Famous Fabians (with their full approval at the time) are shown heating the world up in a fire and then hammering it - to make closer to their "heart's desire".

Famous socalists like the Stalin fan Sidney Webb, and G.B. Shaw - who believed that everyone who could not "justify their existence" before a govenrment board ("organized like the income tax tribunal") should be GASSED TO DEATH.

And H.G. Wells (always shown as a lovely man in Hollywood films and BBC progammes) - another fan of totalitarianism, who wanted to take the "teeming millions of blacks, browns and yellows" and murder them - again by poison gas.

I must stress that the above people were not being "ironic", they were not joking. They meant it all.

So Mr Blair stands under a window showing this evil people destroying the world (by fire and hammers) in order to create a new world in line with their hearts desires (their perverted and insanse desires) and he smiles in happy and content way.

Yet, in his own mind, there is no contradiction.

Because nice people (such as himself) have taken an organization (the Fabian Society) founded by evil people for evil purposes (the utter destruction of civil society and its replacement with a totalitarian nightmare) - and turned it to good.

A humane socialism - that is all about helping people (not gassing them).

And Mr Blair believes this with utter sincerity.

Quite informative Simon, thank you. My default etymology source is as lacking on this as other mainstream dictionaries, but instead offers a rather amusing anecdote.

"But Fabian socialism was about gradualism".

So it was - but only as a TACTIC.

If Socialist revolution (i.e. socialism by one sudden leap) was practical - then the Fabians would support it (as they did in the Russian case).

American socialists then AND NOW are the same - democracy and gradualism are TACTICS (nothing more).

And remember that the final objective is the same (as much for G.B. Shaw and co as it was for Lenin).

The total extermination of civil society (which they, quite correctly, understood to be based upon the secure possession and voluntary use of private property in the means of production, distribution and exchange) and its replacement with totalitarian collectivsm.

The "state" might or might not be a temporary thing (depending on whether they were non Marxists or Marxists - with the latter pretending that the state would vanish at some future date), but the totalitarianism remained constant.

As Mr Sidney Webb put it on seeing a great cathedral for the first time - "this will make excellent muncipal offices".

And if anyone thinks he was joking - you are wrong.

The smile is one of the most effective enemy tactics (and it is a tactic - look at the eyes when they smile).

They openly state what they believe and what they are going to do - but they smile, so their victims believe it is all a joke (and think "paranoid" anyone who tries to warn them).

Kim Philby did it - state the truth (what he really believed), but smile (so people would think it was a joke - and laugh at anyone who accused Philby of being a Red).

Most of them do it.

Thanks for sharing that, Alisa! :-)

Laird: :-)

On George Bernard Shaw....

Well he was an epic cunt and no mistake. He really was. A complete and utter cunt of the well first cunticulated water. Oscar Wilde had this to say of him, "He hasn't an enema in the world and his friends don't like him either". Quite.

Not a typo. An innovation - with the acid sulphuric. He was a right cunt. And a left cunt. He was indeed a spherical cunt. A cunt every which way you looked at him.

Indeed a profound cunt.

This planet has given rise to a fair few cunts but thankfully few on the unmitigatedly cunticulated scale of George Bernard Shaw.

For he was a cunt.

On George Bernard Shaw....

Well he was an epic cunt and no mistake. He really was. A complete and utter cunt of the well first cunticulated water. Oscar Wilde had this to say of him, "He hasn't an enema in the world and his friends don't like him either". Quite.

Not a typo. An innovation - with the acid sulphuric. He was a right cunt. And a left cunt. He was indeed a spherical cunt. A cunt every which way you looked at him.

Indeed a profound cunt.

This planet has given rise to a fair few cunts but thankfully few on the unmitigatedly cunticulated scale of George Bernard Shaw.

For he was a cunt.

My goodness, he always had such nice things to say about you, NickM!

Anyway, GBS may indeed have been a "spherical cunt" (still trying to wrap my head around that one), but he was an epigrammist of the first rank:

"Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve."

“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education." (Sorry, couldn't resist that one!)

"Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them."

Yeah right!

And he was supposed to be a Dramatist. His plays are about as dramatic as watching someone read a Seed Catalogue.

Laird, he did call him 'profound'.

Let us all be civil and polite, and simply refer to utter swine as 'socialist', our ultimate term of contempt. This term is gender-neutral. After all, as a man, I find various parts of the female body to be quite attractive, so references to them as insults seem counter-productive.

Nick M. is correct.

And remember that Oscar Wilde was himself was a SOCIALIST.

He just was not relaxed about the murder of endless millions of people.

Shaw was, and he did not even pretend it was punishment for some great evil they had done.

"I do not want to punish anybody, but there are great number of people I wish to have killed....."

The speech (in a quite and considered tone) goes on and on (and is one of many such speeches).

And, as Laird points out, Shaw was good with words - he said exactly what he wanted to say, he said what he MEANT.

"But Paul, he sometimes had a little smile - or made some comments of wit and humour".

Quite so - and so did (at a lower literary level) Kim Philby, and so does Bill Ayers and a Legion of others.

But never allow yourself to fall into the trap of thinking they do not mean what they say.