Nobody really, just a wee wummin.

One of the 45%, and supporter of Team 56

[frugalmouse]

WTF? I googled "When is the US election?" and got a Trump advert on the Wikipedia page. Someone must be chuffed they got away with that. Tsk tsk.

[blondiboi]

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

Poverty, an overstretched NHS, inadequate housing in one of the richest countries in the world? These problems are not caused by lack of resources, but failures of policy, and the supremacy of ideology over science.

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

This is the fluffy lovely now. He turned out to be a she, very sweet with us, but on a mission to kill everything smaller than a Shetland pony within a five mile radius. Most of our mornings start with cleaning up mouse remains from the floor. And she chased a poor neighbour cat up a tree. How come she is still adorable?

[frugalmouse]

Sorry, don't know source.

[oh-glasgow]

In Scotland, they hated Trump before hating Trump was cool

The residents of Aberdeen in Scotland have been opposed to Donald Trump for years. It's where the petition to ban him from the UK first started.

As we get ready to leave the café, owner Steve Bothwell comes over. His views on Donald Trump don’t leave much room for interpretation.

“He’s a cunt,” he says. “You don’t come to Scotland and treat people like shit, take people’s homes away and you don’t destroy the Scottish landscape.”

Quality.

[frugalmouse]

Trump has blocked the development of the wind farm offshore at Aberdeen for years. The wind farm is part of Aberdeen’s economic development strategy to help the economy survive when the oil industry is no longer viable, and is a key element in years of effort to establish Aberdeen as a centre of excellence for renewable energy. Trump’s selfish attempts to intimidate local people and bully Scotland into giving him what he wants has set us back years and cost our economy dearly. He says he’ll take his fight to to stop the wind farm all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, but I’m sure they’ve got better things to do than entertain a rich tosser complaining about the view from his golf course. Our jobs, our environment, our future, are all more important than the Big Wig’s ego. Up ‘im.

[omgscotlandthebestweecountry]

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

What is it good for?

A citizen journalist group in Syria, gave their verdict on the UK bombing today on the BBC website: 

"We are against the UK strikes on Raqqa. All the world is bombing Raqqa and the UK will not make any change in the situation. If the UK wants to help people then it should accept Syrian refugees and not close the border.

"Just bombing IS in Raqqa from the sky will not defeat IS, but it will make people suffer more. IS will use the UK strikes to recruit new people in the West and new fighters and maybe they will carry out terrorist attacks.

"In the end nobody will liberate Raqqa except the people of Raqqa."

[ayeforscotland]

[frugalmouse]

When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who is going to die. You don't know whose children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken. How many lives shattered. How much blood will spill until everybody does what they were always going to have to do right from the beginning: sit down and talk. (Dr Who). We've been played. (Frugalmouse).

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

Yeah, sort of, but religion is still just a justification, not the root cause. We have to go deeper than that to understand where this homicidal hatred is coming from, and anyway it’s what drives the leaders that is important. You don’t see the leaders blowing themselves up in the market place. Going to meet their maker in glory is not their agenda. It’s about who they are now, and so it is probably really about ego, money, power and sex (or the lack of it), like our own political masters, it’s just that the cultural parameters are different so we don’t recognise it. So we panic.

But look at the numbers: a few hundred people have gone east to join ISIL, hundreds of thousands have fled west. We have to continue to demonstrate the humanist, democratic, economically productive and compassionate alternative. It’s already working.

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

Let’s not get hysterical, let’s get rational. I worked in the former Yugoslavia during the war there. It seemed to me that people use any old shite (like battles lost or won 500 years ago) to justify what they feel like doing right now. We think we have reasons for doing things but actually we do what we just feel like doing and we come up with reasons to justify it, for example killing strangers and blowing ourselves up. This also applies to all the western leaders who are talking about “war” and wanting to bomb the shit out of Syria and to operate outside parliament because we are “at war”. Everybody needs to calm the fuck down. And get rational. Can we have evidence-based policy please instead of sentimental or fear-based reactions and political posturing? Can we first try to understand the issue properly before we decide who we are going to kill?

This does not of course apply to those who lost loved ones in Paris. My love goes out to them, and all the hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their homes, loved ones, and livelihoods in the middle east. 

[blondiboi]

[frugalmouse]

[frugalmouse]

Ouch. Good point.