Hot Air comments are never quite as fiery as those at Free Republic but sometimes they can be irritating. At the thread about the Norwegian terrorist attack I was struck by two reoccuring themes – firstly that the perpetrator must, by definition, be Muslim…you know like the IRA or ETA….and, more disturbing, comments almost making light of the situation with “amusing” remarks implying that the Norwegian authorities didn’t really have a grip on events.

Because the Norwegian Prime Minister is the leader of the Labour Party and the young people killed and injured at the island were attending a summer camp organised by the youth section of the party there were also remarks about socialism as a manifestation of the decadence of Europe, marxist indoctrination etc

Norway was a dull, boring place where nothing had happened for 200 years opined one commenter (conveniently forgetting the German invasion of 1940, the five years of Nazi occupation and the very active Norwegian resistance) while another proclaimed that Norwegians were “soft” because gun ownwership was highly restrictive…..which, interestingly enough, is absolutely untrue – in fact it ranks 11th in the world for gun ownership.

The ignorance displayed about Norway was simply astonishing, almost as astonishing as the strange definition of “education” held by one or two of the commenters. When I, a South Londoner, born in 1940, spoke of my education being interrupted by bombs, I was referring to the V2 rocket attacks that devastasted certain areas of South London in 1944 which held back my entry into full time infants reception class for several months. Obviously to some education can only mean university so much was made of earnest calculations.

I as a baby lived with my mother in London during the bombing of 1940 and 1941 but, of course have no personal memory – but by the time of the V2 rockets I was well over four years old and I do have disjointed recollections of sheltering in the cellar at the sound of the air raid siren.

I don’t mind being criticised for my opinions or even mocked by those who have little understanding of history – that’s all part of the rough and tumble of political activism – but I am as sure as hell not going to be called a liar by a bunch of gormless morons who, like that IRA admiring bandwagon jumping weasel Rep Peter King, think that terrorism only began in New York at the start of the 21st century.

Someimes I wonder at the mutual ignorance of each other’s history and tradition displayed by Brits and Americans and despair. For if our two countries, so closely linked by language, law and culture are so full of misconceptions, what hope for our relationship and understanding with the likes of India and China….

BTW – unlike some of the Hot Air commenters I shall not jump to conclusions even though it is being suggested that the perpetrator might be a non Muslim Norwegian with right wing views….

Recently an English journalist was puzzled as to why a leading politician (“someone of his intelligence and understanding of economics…”) had got something wrong.

The writer was making the same mistake as so many others do. Memorising every line of your Economics 101 textbook is not “understanding economics”.

How many politicians have ever had a real job? How many have had to meet a payroll, earn a profit, satisfy a customer, struggle with regulation, or tell decent, hard-working people face-to-face that they must be made redundant? How many of them have actually had to live with the consequences of their own actions?

It is both hilarious and scary that most of the politicians, academics and media hacks who lecture and hector us about how governments must use taxpayers money to stimulate the economy have never manufactured a bloody thing in their lives. These people couldn’t screw in a light bulb, much less produce something of value: yet they’d direct us in how to do both.

Very few politicians in the western world over the last few decades have had the slightest grasp of “economics”. They did, however, have a good understanding of how to stay popular by making promises that could never be kept. That remains their primary talent.

adapted from Gary Williams via here

A rather precocious university student was irritated when the very old man sitting next to him on a bus asked him if he could possibly lower his voice while he was chatting to friends on his mobile phone. So he took it upon himself to point out why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his generation.

“You grew up in a different world, actually almost a primitive one”, he said in a voice loud enough for many nearby to hear. “We, the young people of today live life in the fast lane, we’ve grown up with computers, kidney transplants, space travel, mobile phones and stuff like that”

The very old man looked at the student but said nothing as the bus came to a stop. He got up from his seat to leave the bus then paused and turned back to the student and nodded.

“You know, son, you’re right. We didn’t have those things when we were young… so we f—— invented them. Now, you arrogant little sh–, what are YOU doing for the next generation?”

Then he got off the bus……

That’s right – you can buy your kids their own personal airship.

Actually it’s looks like an 8m long black bin liner but don’t be fooled…

To unleash its might, just fill it with common-or-garden air, and it will amply demonstrate the power of solar energy. This Airship is different from anything invented by the Montgolfier Brothers or Count von Zeppelin… and simply uses nature’s most abundant gases and the power of the sun to inflate its sausage-like shape–no pumps or puff are required. All you need is a reasonably calm and sunny day. When exposed to the sun’s radiation, the gases in the airship become excited, increasing in temperature and pressure… and lift the mighty tube majestically into the air.

You know what? We tried it on our grandchildren – and it works!

So here’s the gang

Hannah,Oliver,Pippa,Evie and Harry

Hannah and Oliver watched their dads get it going

….and it really does fill up….

….and we have lift off – so hold that line tight…

Oliver concentrates on control

Evie gets excited..

Pippa is not so sure…

Harry thinks it’s awesome…

..and Hannah, being 12, says “yah, that is like so cool….”

Up, up and awayyyyyyy….

It was great fun and it did work. Of course we had to be careful of low flying aircraft…

The trouble was too many trees around with branches to tear the thin fabric. Sellotape helped for a while but eventually the blimp went R101 and further flights were cancelled.

But when we get our new one we’ll fly it from open ground far away from the trees so eat your heart out Count Von Zeppelin….

The royal wedding drew many comments from here and overseas saying how pleasing it was to hear the couple had chosen such well-loved hymns to celebrate their marriage.

The ancient walls of Westminster Abbey will reverberate to the sound of some of the most popular hymns written for a congregation to sing.

A minority of the musical elite are always sniffy about popular hymns forgetting they are popular because the tunes and the words have such a widespread appeal to ordinary folk – they communicate an electricity that runs deep into the very essence of our souls.

As The Reverend Rowland Hill, pastor of the Surrey Chapel in London said in the early 19th century “The Devil Should Not Have All The Best Tunes”

So here is a purely personal choice of hymns that always make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end

A much loved English hymn, for obvious reasons, Jerusalem, as sung at the royal wedding.

Jerusalem, a favourite at Last Night of the Proms, the Women’s Institute and weddings.
It was written as a piece of verse by William Blake, the visionary printmaker, painter and poet around the start of the 19th century and was inspired by the apocryphal story that a young Jesus visited Glastonbury.
Later a rousing tune was composed in 1916 by Sir Hubert Hastings Parry.

Left/liberal trendy clerics hate it (too patriotic) so full marks to William and Kate for ignoring them

Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, words by American Quaker poet John Whittier.

The Brewing of Soma is the Whittier poem (1872) from which the hymn is taken. Soma was a sacred ritual drink in Vedic religion, going back to Proto-Indo-Iranian times (ca. 2000 BC), possibly with hallucinogenic properties.
The storyline is of Vedic priests brewing and drinking Soma in an attempt to experience divinity. It describes the whole population getting drunk on Soma. It compares this to Christians’ use of “music, incense, vigils drear, And trance, to bring the skies more near, Or lift men up to heaven!” But all in vain—it is mere intoxication.
Whittier ends by describing the true method for contact with the divine, as practised by Quakers: Sober lives dedicated to doing God’s will, seeking silence and selflessness in order to hear the “still, small voice” described in I Kings 19:11-13 as the authentic voice of God, rather than earthquake, wind or fire.

And a modern hymn, very popular in many English churches

Shine Jesus Shine has become the most popular modern hymn of the last decade in the UK and is now sung all over the world. It deposed ‘Jerusalem’ from the BBC’s Songs of Praise Top Ten Hymns survey and consistently appears as one of the top songs in the CCL (Church Copyright Licence) chart both in the UK and USA.
In a recent interview the composer Graham Kendrick said:
“This song is a prayer for revival. A songwriter can give people words to voice something which is already in their hearts but which they don’t have the words or the tune to express, and I think ‘Shine Jesus shine’ caught a moment when people were beginning to believe once again that an impact could be made on a whole nation.”

Guide me O thou Great Redeemer was also heard at Westminster Abbey but here it is sung in a Welsh chapel

The rousing words of ‘Guide me, O thou great redeemer’ – better known today as the Welsh rugby anthem Bread of Heaven – is the first to be performed on the wedding day.
Prince William of Wales is also the vice-royal patron of the Welsh Rugby Union.
The hymn was also sung at the funeral service of William’s mother Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 and at a memorial service to mark the 10th anniversary of her death, so it may have bitter sweet memories for the prince.
It is also associated with Welsh Male Voice Choirs and Eisteddfods as it was originally written in Welsh by Methodist preacher William Williams in the 18th century

And, for me, the most moving of all – Abide with Me sung at the annual Festival of Remembrance

“Abide with Me” was written by Henry Francis Lyte. He wrote it in 1847 while he lay dying from tuberculosis; he survived only a further three weeks after its completion.
The hymn is a prayer for God to remain present with the speaker throughout life, through trials, and through death. That is why it has such resonance with service men and women and their loved ones.

No doubt others would make different choices. No problem – it’s a free world thanks to to those willing to die to defend it….

My daily routine re US political news and opinion is as regular as clockwork.

Hot Air to find out the trending topics, Stacy McCain, Dan Riehl (including blog goddesses Sissy and Cubachi) and Prof Jacobson for their conservative readings of the liver and entrails of the latest political chicken, Free Republic for the view from the Truck Stops and then C4P for my Palin fix (I am an honorary Palinista….)

That routine has never let me down and acts as the perfect counterweight to the burblings of the UK media who almost always chew up the offal supplied by the US state run media and then regurgitate it in fatty globules to my unsuspecting fellow citizens here across the pond.

It puts me at least three months ahead on the realities of US politics – so I was talking Tea Party when the Daily Telegraph was still adoring Obama’s finely creased pants. I saw that Obamacare was meeting massive opposition while the BBC was heralding the golden utopia via Michael Moore. Moreover I knew that the Obama/Pelosi regime was going to get a heavy kick in the unmentionables in the 2010 midterms even though the Guardian was still having orgasms over Hopenchange.

That’s why the news of Stacy’s illness has me worried and makes me wish him godspeed for a quick and full recovery. He can be irritating and opinionated at times (feminism, contraception, soccer, anything in the UK etc) but so can I (as my wife tells me)…..I was shocked, SHOCKED at that, of course…

But for 90% of the time his comments are pure gold, cutting through the left’s hypocrisy with the rapier thrusts of wit, satire and reasoned argument. He is also a dogged digger of buried evidence in the finest traditions of those heroic reporters so often celebrated by Hollywood in the 30’s, 40s and 50s when the profession of journalism required years of shoeleathering the local beat for small town news instead of a few style over substance pieces in a college magazine.

Get well soon, Stacy and no, I’m not going to hit your tip jar – I’m a friggin’ old man living on a meagre UK Teacher’s pension for crying out loud – but I shall sink a pint of Shepherd Neame Spitfire on your behalf.

And point out that here all the drugs would be free via the NHS….

God bless you and your family, Robert Stacy McCain.

In all the (quite justifiable) euphoria over OBL plus my own patriotic fervour and obsession with chocolate a quite significant political event has slipped slightly below the radar.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have just won a majority of seats in the Canadian Parliamentary election and therefore, after nearly five years of leading a minority government constantly at the mercy of votes of no confidence from other parties, he will be Prime Minister with a good working majority and beholden to nobody else except his own supporters.

Strangely enough very few people expect to see massive policy changes or initiatives because, despite lacking an overall majority, Harper has already transformed the Canadian political and economic landscape as the BBC, in a surprisingly honest assessment , has been forced to admit.

Analysts say the prime minister has slowly nudged the country further to the right during his five-year tenure.
He has lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided signing climate change legislation and become a stark advocate of Arctic sovereignty.
He has also increased military spending and extended Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan.

He campaigned on his record of economic management. Since Canada has come out of the recession with one of the strongest and healthiest economies of the G7 he was able to make a very effective case. However he promised to focus on lowering taxes even further and reducing the deficit.

Canadians must have been impressed because the Conservatives made deep inroads into metropolitan Canada, especially Toronto which has for many years been a Liberal Party stronghold.

Ezra Levant, a conservative commentator for the Sun News Network, says the switch of support of visible minorities and new immigrants from the Liberals to the Conservatives is a significant demographic change.
“There’s this whole other media in Canada, ethnic newspapers, TV and radio stations in other languages that our parliamentary media is just not plugged into. In those media battlefields, the conservative brand is dominant,” says Mr Levant.

Interesting. That certainly goes against the mantra being constantly pimped by our “betters” in the media and academe. Maybe there’s a lesson there for all those GOP “consultants” and “strategists” being quoted on Politico…

Indeed the Liberals, soft left, corruption prone and buttressed by a compliant media, like the US Democrats, were one of the biggest losers. For nearly a hundred years the dominating force in Federal politics either in government or as the official opposition the party is now reduced to a rump, alongside the separatist Bloc Quebecois.

The BQ had nearly 50 seats in the previous parliament – now they will be lucky to have 4. Most of their seats were captured by the socialist NDP, which, with gains in other areas now becomes the official opposition. Jack Layton, a rather colourful figure, has pushed the party towards a classic rainbows and unicorns platform of high taxes, increased welfare and radical climate change legislation so naturally you will find him being heavily oversold by the US media plus the BBC and The Guardian, despite the “massage parlour” incident from his past.

For some reason the predominantly liberal left Canadian media went John Edwards on this and buried it until Sun TV (a newish channel labelled the “Fox of the North” by the great and the good) brought it up in the final days of the campaign.

Harper is pro Israel, treats a mainly critical media with contempt and is quite a reasonable rock keyboards man. He holds strong social conservative views but in the past has been opposed to those Conservative Party members who wanted to push the party into socially conservative positions. He prefers to be seen as a fiscal conservative, strong on national security and extremely suspicious of the United Nations.

I’ll drink to that.

So, I imagine, would a certain other person from the northern end of the continent….

This was one of the two cakes commissioned by William and Kate for their wedding. The chocolate cake was William’s boyhood foody fetish.

Prince William has asked McVitie’s to create one of his favourite sweet treats that will provide an alternative to the official royal wedding cake by Fiona Cairns.

The confectionery delight is being created by the biscuit company at one of its UK plants to a recipe they have received from Buckingham Palace kitchen chefs.

As a young boy the Prince used to enjoy the cake, which is made from crushed rich tea biscuits and dark chocolate.

Please note – Rich Tea biscuits, NOT Digestives!

The royal family said that the dark chocolate to make it could come from anywhere, but the only acceptable biscuits were Rich Tea ones.

Paul Courtney, Cake Design and Development Head Chef told The Telegraph, “Rich Tea are perhaps not the most glamorous biscuits in the world, and now they are taking a starring role in the royal wedding. But they’re quite crisp compared to a digestive, and so they’ll contrast well with the softness of the chocolate.”

The Lovely Mrs P felt it was her patriotic duty to use the very same recipe to grace the table of our more humble abode here in West Sussex.

It was delicious.

It was more than delicious it was the nectar of the gods – and very very rich…

I wish I could provide you with a picture of our cake – but we ate it…every single crumb.

This is what you need

225g Rich Tea Biscuits

115g Salted Butter

3 rounded tablespoons of cocoa powder

55g of caster sugar (superfine sugar)

2 heaped tablespoons Golden Syrup

115g plain chocolate (zero milk) sweet chocolate, not cooking [semisweet]chocolate

Method

Line 20cm cake tin

Roughly crush biscuits in plastic bag with rolling pin

Melt butter and add caster sugar, cocoa powder and Golden Syrup

Melt chocolate and add to mixture with crushed biscuits

Spoon mixture into tin and leave in fridge

Decorate with melted chocolate and/or icing sugar

Then eat – and enjoy……..

For additional info – watch this….

We sat down at 9.30am and watched the whole thing until THE KISS four hours later.

Didn’t intend to.

At my age this history/politics junkie tends towards the cynical and, of course, being a man prefers to maintain a cool mask of disdain while the ladies wax lyrical over weddings and babies.

Plus I’m always suspicious of crowds.

But the sheer enthusiasm and goodwill of the people who came to watch disarmed my pessimism. They didn’t come to demand more of my taxes to featherbed their public sector salaries. They weren’t breaking windows or urinating on statues because they would have less money to spend on pizzas and beer in their student unions. Their faces were not distorted by hate and anger in order to intimidate an elected government into bending to the will of an unrepresentative minority.

They came as individuals, families, neighbours and friends of their own free will to celebrate a joyous event. They came with banners, flags and placards that proclaimed a patriotic pride and messages of affection and goodwill for two young people who were about to make a public pledge of love and commitment .

Nobody ordered them to come. There were no committees of busybodies telling them which slogans to chant. They came of their own free will. There were one million of them. Young, old, fat, thin, posh and poor they represented the real people of Britain, the folk who do their jobs, pay their taxes and keep the country going and seldom make a fuss. Today was their day and they made it their own.

Of course there needed to be police and many of them armed, not to keep the crowds in order for they disciplined themselves but to prevent evil fanatics and poisonous misfits from performing their street theatre of hate and death.

The bride was beautiful, the groom was handsome, the ceremony was dignified and majestic and the pageantry pitch perfect, but for me, as a father and grandfather, the moment that really touched my heart was how tightly Catherine held her father’s hand as the service began. This is a woman who comes from a loving family and therefore knows how to love.

It augurs well for the future, I fancy….

His pride and joy....

I think our son and his family have been dealt an ace or two….