Thought So...

In the latest atrocity committed by the rambling Socialist experiment that is twenty-first century Britain a woman has been jailed for speaking out about her concerns. For the supposed hate crime of having fears relating to the uneasily and unevenly shifting demography of this country she has been sentenced to twenty-one weeks loss of her freedom and most likely her ability to earn a future living unaided by the state. Good move, Judgey.

At the same time, violent young thugs up and down the country are being given feeble tickings-off by magistrates, receiving fines which will never be paid and being offered counselling and anger management courses – at huge cost to you and me – which are almost universally ineffective. Those same thugs will go on to perpetrate ever more violent acts on individuals and society with impunity: statutory rape as they create more under-aged mothers, drug-peddling, casual theft and routine threatening behaviour, often spilling over into actual assault.

So, jail for Jacqueline Woodhouse for drunkenly saying out loud what is now considered a crime to even think about, but counselling and care for real violent offenders. The race-hate-filled Lee Jasper must be cock-a-hoop as the state spends more and more of your money pursuing new, easy targets – white people who dare to be afraid or ignorant – rather than tackling the true crimes all around us.

Woodhouse was undoubtedly drunk and disorderly and she definitely used threatening language, but did she actually hurt anybody? Her language was indefensibly offensive, but were any of her words translated into action? And since when did causing offence become an actual offence? As with the case of ‘Olly Cromwell’ in Bexley she has been punished for nothing – absolutely nothing – more than speaking her mind. Sticks and stones…

In vino veritas, they say, except often that simply isn’t true – we say things under the influence of drink that we definitely don’t mean and in any reasonable society her drunkenness, whilst a misdemeanour in itself, would be taken as partial mitigation for her words.

Even if her intoxicated tirade represented what she actually thinks, Is it a crime to prefer the company of your shared heritage peers? Really? It’s an actual offence to feel like a minority in your country of birth? It’s illegal to feel physically intimidated by persons of significantly different appearance to your own? Animals survive by recognising shapes and postures as friendly or otherwise – is it now a crime to allow evolutionary instinct to shape your views? Apparently so.

Diplomats learn foreign customs and gestures so as to fit in and to understand the ways of the countries they visit. When Woodhouse’s lawyer asked for a lesser sentence, combined with a “diversity awareness and prejudice training course” her plea fell on ears deaf to the very notion. If judges think we can re-train the uneducable chav scum of our society, why should not the same accommodation be offered an otherwise useful member of the same society?

And as for threatening behaviour, have any judges actually been to a town centre on a weekend evening and seen at close quarters what their liberalism has wrought on Britain’s moral fabric? Have they ever watched a soap opera where virtually every plotline revolves around some moral failure or other? Threatening violence? Why not just lock us all up for thinking violence?

Orwellian thought crime - Labour's legacy - will take a generation to eradicate even if we start today. But that’s not going to happen, is it? Because tomorrow’s judiciary and educators, police and politicians have already been brainwashed into believing the Socialist diktat.

We used to say you can’t be locked up for telling the truth. Well that seems to no longer be so. At least some of what Jacqueline Woodhouse said was true. We’re fucked. 

Will the last intelligent Briton please put the cat out and unplug the telly?

Feeling the Benefit

Well, I appear to have come back from holiday to a shitstorm of stuff going on and it's going to take a few days to get my head around it all. I'm assuming that Greece is still being dragged along in chains behind its European gaoler and that the economies of Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and Ireland are teetering on the brink and that we still have six days to save the doomed Euro (dear god, let it die).

I see that the Leveson business (what IS that about, really?) continues apace and that Tony Blair now seems to be in charge, so I've ordered a Kevlar jacket for when the next war starts. The government appears to be cack-handedly not doing the things it said it would do and the opposition, as ever, have sprouted the wings of innocent cherubim and continue to fool large chunks of the lumpen proletariat by simply lying about their culpability in all that is wrong with this country.

Which brings me to this outrageous benefits saga, the only news article I've really had a chance to read today and for that I offer thanks to a stray Tweeter who broadcast it early this morning.

An impoverished family in Breadline Britain 2012

Go on, click the link and have a quick look. The headlines say it all. Late last night I finished reading "Our Culture, What's Left Of It", by Theodore Dalrymple in which he discusses at erudite length the progressive infantilisation of an increasingly ill-educated populace and the abrogation of personal responsibility. Mr D waxes lyrical indeed on society's ills and I thoroughly recommend his book to anybody wanting a stimulating and learned reading of the situation.

But, not possessing Theodore's deft touch with the pen, I offer the blunter appraisal that this 'news' story pretty much sums up what a crock of shit Socialism is. Is this what we've come to? To openly play the system that is sinking this nation and not give a toss? Are we so far down the rocky road that it is no shame to openly boast about stealing from the state?

And when I say 'state' I mean, of course, you and me - the dwindling number of fools who work to pay for it all.

Homeward Bound

I'm sitting in a railway station, got a ticket for my destination, as yer man said. Okay, Mr Simon, close enough. I'm actually here in the Ata Lagoon Hotel in Oludeniz, at the foot of Mount Babadag, Turkey, with said ticket and a heap of baggage enough to build our own mountain. Paraglider pilots don't travel especially light. There's your wing itself, for a start, a harness to sit in and a reserve parachute. Then there's your flight suit (gets cold up there) helmet, variometer, GPS, camera, camera boom, VHS radio, headsets etc. Plus your normal luggage which, as well as clothes (2xT-shirts/socks/pants) nowadays includes laptop, tablet, smart phone, normal phone, normal camera, Kindle, plus all the chargers and adaptors. You get the picture...

Any old hoo, we now have the unenviable task of hoicking all that crap through Turkish security and the UK border controls during a ten-hour gruelling epic of transfer from hotel, Dalaman airport, four-and-a-half-hour flight, Manchester airport and the drive home to Brum. Then work tomorrow. Oh, dear readers, don't you worry about old Batsby. By the time I've endured the incessant chatter of the crowded bus, the aimless meandering of brainless morons in the airport and the excruciating wait to be readmitted to the country of my birth I will be fully back to my vitriolic self, ready to blog in anger once again!

So, keep the faith; Mr Nice Guy will be well and truly out the window and we can get back to business as usual. In the meantime, have a lovely picture of the bay.

See you back in Blighty!

King of the Hill!

Some days you just have to claim bragging rights.

It's not a competition, but yesterday I won! It can take an hour to get up the mountain - loading up the transport, waiting for stragglers, paying the fees, and struggling up the track, avoiding wild tortoises on the way. At the top you have decisions to make - which launch point, where to set up, whether or not to go off in a gaggle or wait for a solo slot, etc.

Then you have to wait for the right launch conditions and sometimes this means changing launch sites, at which point you have to rely on Shanks's Pony and lots of huffing and puffing. Then, of course, there's the flight itself,which can take anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours if the conditions are right.

From a nine o'clock start it could easily be midday before you are packed up and ready to start again from the bottom... find a lift, load up the transport... you get it.

So, I was particularly chuffed to get in not two, not three but FOUR - count 'em - flights yesterday. Here's a picture of me being chuffed:

And here's a short video of the start of my last flight down.

VIDEO LINK

See you all back in Blighty!

Whether or not...

If there's one thing that preoccupies paraglider pilots it's the gift that keeps on giving; the endless conversational smorgasbord that is the weather. Yes folks, not only can we bore for Britain about being 'aviators' we can also do your head in with  mutterings about microclimates, frontal systems, convergence, inversions, convectivity and cloud tops. We have, indeed, looked at clouds that way.

Find a group of plots on the hill and listen in - they'll be easy to spot, huddled together, slowly advancing towards hypothermia and jabbering away about this cloud or that cloud; about whether it's going to get windier or whether grey, orographic whispiness will develop. They'll point at the sky and consider the implications of ice formations at 35,000 feet and they'll look far out to sea to try and read the wind in the waves.

Sometimes they will spook each other with tales of errant pilots, who turn up on the hill, quickly check out the current conditions, launch and fly... and then die horribly, sucked up into a vigorous cumulo-nimbus cloud. Or be picked up and dragged bodily backwards into the turbulent rotor-streamed air because of an unforeseen gust on take-off. Or... or... or...

Most pilots have had or seen an accident requiring medical attention or air ambulance evacuation, but it's almost never the fault of the weather. It's almost always pilot error and one of the gravest errors is being taken in by the phenomenon of 'ground-suck'. Just as a big cloud can suck you into its white embrace, the weather guru can persuade you that flight is too dangerous to contemplate and it's not unusual to find a gaggle of pilots sitting on launch in perfectly flyable conditions, waiting for a wind-dummy to show them the way.

Often I am that dummy because, having once made a living as an aviation meteorologist, I know that most of what most pilots know about the weather is bollocks. I'd rather be flying. So here's a short clip of me doing just that:

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