Chris Blanchard

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• Commented on What happens now?
  This is about Ayanna Pressley, with an AOC bit at the end. https://thehill.com/homenews/house/534064-pressleys-chief-of-staff-said-her-offices-panic-buttons-had-been-torn-out Too late to look for more....
• Commented on What happens now?
  I disagree with a lot of what is posted here, and in lots of other places. It seems to me this was a fairly well organised coup attempt, and that Trump was very unlucky it didn’t succeed. I’ve only read...
• Commented on Submarine coming through!
  Yes. Thing is any exchange system where winning this time means your chances of winning the next time go up, like capitalist exchange and most others, means wealth (or whatever else you are trading) tends to get concentrated. And that...
• Commented on Submarine coming through!
  A postcard: We do have the tools to disrupt monopolistic capitalism, if we want to use them. For example, before WW1 John D Rockerfeller owned about 1% of the USA, personally, through ownership of Standard Oil - I don't mean...
• Commented on So you say you want a revolution
  I have another example, this time not about a creep, so it might be more telling. I have a friend who is part of a gay theatre group which has gone out of its collective way to be wellcoming to...
• Commented on So you say you want a revolution
  Sorry, but that won’t do. Not because anyone trans is any different to me; absolutely not, but because some trans people are idiots and worse (it is idiotic that I should have to say this, but I guess I do)....
• Commented on All Glory to the New Management!
  Quite right Greg. I have a Hindemith viola concerto playing in the background. "Thoroughly approved classics" implies not understanding the music....
• Commented on Dead plots
  Oh yes. Don't disagree about Kon Tiki. I didn't know about the sailing techniques, so thank you for that. The way I read it could only have been, at most, an occasional arrival, possibly caught in storms. But the point...
• Commented on Dead plots
  ‘Scuse me. I think I have got carried away. Please blame the late night brandy, rather than (just) me. First off, Charlie. Stories I write are not like that (not as good as yours, but). Inside them I don’t have...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  There is a simple way of cutting through a lot of this stuff about race. The word has a common plain English meaning, and it is that meaning (and all the explicit and implicit inferences from it) which is a...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  And you too. Boney was certainly a murdering loon, but so were the rest of them. What he did was embed some of the gains of the French revolution in legal systems across a big part of Europe. The reactionaries...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  And with all that. In 1815 one side was Prussian, Austrian, Russian, various weirdos from part of the Spanish aristocracy, some very nasty Neapolitans, the British and all kinds of others. The other side had Napoleon, most of France, much...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  So did Nantucket, 1773 is the conventional date, though it is a bit more complicated, and I think Massachusetts was early as well. Though they then had to cope with Southerners working to over-ride their 'states rights' for the next...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  I don't know about Dungeons and Dragons, but if people want to get away from the new reality then some of them might go for older games. I was thinking of poker. Ordinary people who get a bit of magical...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  What I said, except longwinded. There are genetic differences between populations, but 'race' is a stupid social construct, and nothing to do with it....
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Yeah. The genetics is interesting, but it needs more subtlety than a lot of people bring to it. Your point about the relative narrowness of the white gene pool is good but the bit that seems to get missed is...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  William Gibson, 'Pattern Recognition' for thread count and the like. Me, I buy from charity shops where some fool has found a small fray in their shirt collar, so I get an £80 shirt for a fiver, and the (secondary,...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Oops, got a mis-communication here. I am interested in getting at very rich people - the modern aristocracy, and not the bourgeoise or most farmers. I have a lot of anarchistic sympathy and I go with Joseph Proudhon, who wrote...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Hmm. First off, I don't see that corporations with distributed share ownership are somehow worse than individual or family ownership. Not to say I like them, at all, but ExonMobil and Chevron are a lot less destructive than their earlier...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Trusts and that - Heteromeles and others. Doesn't my point about the income being realised apply to Trust taxation as well? The distinction between realised and unrealised (and therefore able to get some tax relief) is part of the existing...
• Commented on Cough Cough
  Heteromeles. There is a less brutal way, somewhat, which is to expand the definition of income for tax purposes. First, tax realised capital gains as income. The realised part is important because that way you don't bankrupt useful small business...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  Several thoughts: First, that voting for Joe Biden (or, a lot of the time, a lot of other people - like Bill Clinton) is a soft version of military disipline, especially at Staff level. Basically, me the Field Marshall has...