cloverfield review

Most of the action takes place here.


The monster is terrific - and very scary.


These parasites were even scarier.

We've just come back from Cloverfield - the current must-see fillum.

It starts at a Greek wedding party where one of the guests is thrown out into the street for being Turkish. One quick mobile phone call and a group of friends invades the party dressed as monsters! It's all very gory and great fun.

Unfortunately the army get it all wrong and begin to attack thinking the dear little monsters are REAL. Cue hilarity, disembowelling and guns. It all ends up with the Turks being cornered in a dear little field but they are saved right at the end as a group of cows - or parasites according to the army - attack the soldiers with their horns.

Eventually all the partygoers cuddle and are friends again, the dear little cows go back to be milked and all the soldiers are dead.

thatcher, tebbitt et al

Thatcher in her 'prime'.

Norman Tebbitt's in the news again. Most of you won't remember this lefty buffoon, but he was one of Margaret Thatcher's most loyal comrades in the 1930s.

His latest slaverings suggest that all boys should be taken on shoots to watch birds being shot, as this will stop them getting in fights or playing 'video games'.

Now I agree, all boys (and girls) should be taught to shoot, but not innocent birds. They need to be able to handle guns so that in the future, when lefty losers like Tebbitt, middle class tossers, chavs and hippies come looking to grab YOUR land when they're starving, they are able to quickly shoot and kill them.

Tebbitt and Thatcher, like all socialist Peak Oil deniers, need to be buried once and for all. Their views are of no interest to real people.

Jeremy Clarkson - hero

We caught Top Gear last night. What a superb programme. Jeremy and his two chums were soaring around Europe in some silly sports cars. Best bit was when they drove from Davos down to Italy, and Jeremy's genius comment about Swiss roads and scenery - 'This is too good for the Swiss. It should be ours!'

The po-faced leftist 'greens' hate Clarkson, mind you they hate everyone! To me he's a hero. He's totally uncool, his music taste would shame my dad (who thinks Snow Patrol are too raucous) and he attacks all the scared cows of the leftist 'greens' whenever possible. But he's actually using irony so sharply that it takes an age to get it, but when you do ... bang!

He's a Tony Harrison for the full bodied community. Treasure him!

tata to the car

So Tata in India is planning to create a 'peoples' car at around £1250. Oh dear ... there is no way that even existing car-ridden nations can keep up this pretence of private transport for all, developing nations will never know mass private transport even at £1250 for a new car. The resources aren't there, either fuel or raw materials, no matter how much we recycle them.

India should instead stay ahead of the pack and develop its fantastic railway system, build new lines, invest in more electrification and develop super quality stock for the future. And look at Maglev.

Only an idiot would even consider investing in cars in this day and age. Sell car makers, buy rail development companies (unless you want to lose billions of course). Perhaps Ratan Tata, the hippy behind this, will end up in the very slums he's hoping to free the masses from ...

the real cost of political posturing

'The average price of a pint of bitter in Britain's pubs could increase from around £2.20 to as much as £4 next year, the industry has warned.

The massive hike, which is also expected to affect cans bought from off licences, is due largely to increased prices of key ingredients barley and hops - in part because farmland is being turned over to environment-friendly biofuels.

But brewers are also suffering from rises in fuel costs and the price of the metals used to produce kegs and cans. Kegs are now so valuable that they have become a target for thieves, who stole 60 million this year to melt down for their metal.' (AOL news, 24/12/07)

So the hippies' obsession with driving at any cost is already having terrible effects. This is also going to drive more pubs out of business. I'm so glad I'm getting a vineyard in Hungary in the next few years. I'll do EVERYTHING to resist turning my land over to biofuels - the biggest con in history. The recipe for biofuels disaster - loads of scarce water + valuable land + 10 barrels (conventional) oil = 8 barrels biofuel + rich farmers + smug (ostrich) politicians. Total madness.

And the second part of the story is also telling. ALL metals are running out, being snapped up to fuel the expansion of China and India. Okay, as an investment ploy metals are great, but otherwise we should all be concerned ...

hungary

The Christmas market in Budapest. This was great fun with loads of stalls selling local products and even real food (vegetarian!) plus regular free shows on the stage.


The castle on the Buda side. This was very impressive, especially at night when it's floodlit. There were no tourists there on a cold December morning, and all the better for it!


Budapest has - inevitably - a superb public transport system. These modern trams run around the city, though other routes have far older trams, a testament to their longevity and superiority over buses! Behind is one of the maon Budapest stations designed by Eiffel.


The largest open air ice rink in Europe, at the City Park in Budapest.

Hungary's a fantastic country - we're planning to move there within 6 to 7 years.

more idiots

Do you agree with the protesters that the price of fuel is too high?
Results:
Votes
Per cent
Yes
32,284
96%
No
1,324
4%
Don't know
171
0%
Total votes: 33,779

This is an AOL poll. I find it hard to believe that in this day and age fully 96% of the population feel that our ridiculously cheap petrol is too EXPENSIVE! Are 96% of the population completely stupid or do they spend their entire lives hidden in basements??

Get this thickos - petrol is cheaper now than it will ever be again. It is ludicrously cheap, hardly allowing at all for the environmental costs it incurs. Climate Change means we'll all have to produce less CO2. The idiot communist USA isn't even committing to keeping temperature changes under 2 degrees, even though scientists state that any rise above 2 degrees will be catastrophic. Perhaps our dim friends across the Atlantic should look that up in a dictionary (Webster's if neccessary). We don't have the option of over 2 degrees - it will lead to mass extinctions and runaway positive feedbacks. Listen to the scientists - they know what they're talking about. David Handley, the commie christians and the brickie in the pub DON'T!!

And in any case the harsh economics of Peak Oil are upon us, which will decrease the availability of petrol by 7% per year from now on. That will be reflected in prices, idiots. And this is just the beginning.

more idiots ...

'The United States will reject demands to commit to internationally binding cuts in global warming gases at the UN climate conference in Bali, the chief US climate negotiator said.'

More hippies from dying semi-nations burying their heads - and economies - in the sand. Why not join this facebook group if you think all Americans are communistic, christian morons!! Apart from those heading Peak Oil groups, survivalists and Pagans of course, who are well mint.

gloves off ...

'China has refused to accept mandatory cuts on greenhouse gases, saying the West should lead the climate change battle by being less extravagant.'

Have they indeed? Well, if you read the above statement you can see there's the potential for some stunning internal logic.

Let's bring the Chinese dream to life by being less extravagant and NOT BUYING any Chinese products! That will reduce their economic growth and with a bit of luck start the break up of China as a future superpower.

Climate Change is now far worse than even the very worst scenarios predicted. The tropics have ALREADY expanded to the point predicted in the WORST scenarios for the end of this century. There are already massive population dislocations. Nobody, especially some tin pot COMMUNIST third world pigsty, is in the position to decide it ain't going to join in the prevention attempt. Even Australia, hippy communist third world Foster-drinking joke, has now agreed to Kyoto (big deal!)

As Jarvis Cocker once sang so eloquently, 'Something Changed'. It's just a few dinosaurs, hippies and commies still haven't realised it.

No more Chinese junk for me ...

time to disengage

Thousands of Sudanese, many carrying knives and sticks, have taken to the streets of Khartoum calling for the execution of British school teacher Gillian Gibbons, jailed over a teddy bear.

I seriously think it's time the world split into two mutually exclusive camps. That this world of ours can produce such lunacy appalls me and every decent person. Religion is a HOBBY, it's not actually real. And even if it were it has nothing to do with the rest of us. I'm sorry but only a certifiable maniac would suggest that naming a teddy bear anything is courting death. It's pathetic.

We have the decent, civilized, secular world, scientific and advanced and kind, we have the dark third world where people are killed for their beliefs, or elevated to the status of gods. Sudan, North Korea, the USA - they need to be isolated from the real world and we should disengage totally from them. They have nothing we need, and we have nothing that they can learn from. We show our soft side too much. I think the hippes should be ghettoised, for their own good. They've gone too far ...

I wonder what's happened to the teddy?

france looks ahead

With riots in the Paris suburbs and the best cheese in the world, France is always cool.

And with a policy of using nuclear power they are looking ahead to life after oil. But, amazingly, they are also looking even further ahead. 70 French towns are now using horses to take kids to school and to pull recycling carts and dustcarts. They are claiming it's because of Climate Change, but of course it's really because of Peak Oil. It works, economically, already when we still have incredibly cheap petrol! This is the future, and it's already happening.

France has also built over THIRTY new tramway systems in the last 10 years. Makes you ashamed to be living in the UK really ...

(Okay, the picture above is Zermatt, but it was the closest I had to a horse-drawn vehicle!)

the ultimate madness

Look at the slogan on this machine. 'Turn Your Coins Into Cash'. Er, coins are cash fuckface!

I've actually seen people using these machines. You pay in £1 of real money, cash, yours indeed - and you get out 85p. The supermarket gets 15p! Well, they obviously need it and you don't!

I know the average chav hasn't got two brain cells to rub together, but how on earth have we de-evolved this far?? How did this machine ever happen? What makes somebody so STUPID that they use a machine like this?

fucking morons

'The UK population could almost double by the end of the century, according to Government projections.
The figures from the Government Actuary's Department (GAD) suggest that with high immigration and fertility rates, the population could reach 108,723,000 by 2081.'

LOL! Is this the same government that intends to increase capacity at Heathrow Airport? The same government that lost 25 million personal records? The same government that really, seriously believe that the British people will accept COMPULSORY ID Cards??

I project UK population in 2081 to be around 5-8 million.

looking backwards

Mmm. So Sudan is imprisoning a woman for calling her teddy bear Mohammed. Whilst the world burns up and we run out of petrol these spoilt mummys' boys and nutters have nothing better to worry about. How we envy them.

Don't tell anyone but I've just called my pet rat Jesus ...

too late?

So the IPCC report on Climate Change presented to the United Nations now claims that some Climate Change effects can not be reversed. We need to know - are these effects that will kickstart positive feedback? If they are then we are well and truly fucked, and every 'green' initiative will make no difference. Coupled with Peak Oil it really is a bleak picture, though not one without some degree of potential romantic adventurism.

Our kids won't be worrying about mortgages, traffic queues, celebrities and holidays. They'll be engaged in a daily competition with nature as they learn to live in a world where the slightest weakness is punished, where you grow your own food or starve, where you learn what you need to live and not much else. But they'll also have more time, they won't be wasting loads of it travelling, they won't be sat stupidly in front of the TV. Who's to say that CC and PO aren't good things?

dinosaur watch

I've had great fun with a group called We Will Not Be Paying Over £1 a Litre for Petrol in the UNITED KINGDOM [sic] on Facebook.

They are fair game because they are dinosaurs. I find it extraordinary that in 2007 with the first effects of Peak Oil starting to hit there are still a few people who think £1/litre is expensive! This is hilarious. In a few years it'll be £2/litre, within 15 years probably around £10/litre. There's no way out of this and there's no point bleating about it. It's simple geology and economics, a lethal combination. Even now we only produce 1 1/2 million barrels of oil over demand levels. Demand will rise by 2 million barrels a day next year yet the wells are now not only running at full capacity but are running dry. Is anyone willing to take bets that next year there won't be a REAL oil crunch?

The sad thing is that there are still millions of people in the UK that are too stupid or too decadent to take this on board. There are still 17 year olds learning to drive, there are still people moving into areas where there's no public transport or work.

But you know what? I'm not going to 'bother' them any more. If they want to live in a fantasy socialist utopia with petrol at 80p a litre forever then let them. It's probably not wise to spread the word too much - some of them may have the brains to see that what we're saying is right and they may then compete for all those lovely assets - land, trees, seeds, tools, networks, gold - that WE need.

Climate Change deniers - remember them - helped keep up demand for waterside properties and other useless assets, reducing the value of useful stuff, making it easier for us to get MORE of the real stuff, so perhaps we should let the Peak Oil Prats do the same? In a few years we'll all be fretting about Peak Oil and locating away from the danger areas, by then all the sensible folk should be well ensconced in their nice self-sufficient defendable homes. Let the lefties descend on us then - we'll wipe 'em out!

the romance of rail - is back ...

More proof that even this dumbo government realise the way things are going is the £800 million redevelopment of St Pancras for the new Eurostar trains. When is any money invested in roads nowadays?

But what chance does the car have against rail? There's no glamour in driving - it's an endless slog being stuck behind lorries, bikes, horses, old fuckers ... If you want to enjoy driving one last time head to eastern Germany where there are still no speed limits on many of the autobahns. This is going to change soon and all autobahns will have a 130kph limit.

Meanwhile rail just keeps growing. Soon all short-haul air trips will go. We still need to invest massively in the UK high speed network, now we've made a start. Within 20 years even medium distant air trips will go. I reckon we'll be doing Bristol to Budapest in 12 hours by 2037. And the light rail/interurban revival is only just beginning.

And the new Eurostar is promising ROMANCE again. This is something the railways always had in droves, until swept away by the socialists in the 60s and 70s. But romance is making a big comeback, and rail is - again - the big winner. In a car-less future we'll all become rail travellers, crossing Europe at 300 mph, catching the tram into town, visiting the coast and villages by light rail. We need romance. The car tried to kill it. It failed.

silence of the lambs

Our 'government' is proposing some ridiculously soft 'green' taxes that will encourage purchasers (NOT existing users) of new, large fuel-inefficient vehicles to choose more sensible options. AOL did a vote on whether this was a good idea. Duh - soft but could only be good. I voted just for the sake of it, expecting a 100% yes. Amazingly, unbelievably, the vote was 74% NO!!!!!!

This is simply more confirmation that the little soft lefty luvvies really don't have a clue what's coming! That they don't understand even the basics of the huge changes that are going to turn their lives upside down - if they survive. Twenty years ago this may have been a workable idea. Today it's irrelevant anyway - the soaring cost of petrol will ensure that we all opt for firstly smaller cars then for lifestyle changes that will mean we can live without the stupid socialist things.

It never fails to amuse me that the general public are so backwards-looking. This is OUR opportunity. All the time they're going the wrong way we can pick up the assets that we'll all need in the future at knock-down prices. Every 4x4 sold, every seaside house, every beefburger means that the real stuff - gold, seeds, land, woods, tools etc - are still available at reasonable prices. More power to the idiocracy!

flood disaster

Stayed in with some Stella and Mr Toms last night and watched the British disaster movie 'Flood'. And what a disaster it is too. Starring two icons - Robert Carlyle and Tom Courtenay - surely we could have at least expected something half decent? Had they played Begbie and Billy Liar perhaps, but Carlyle plays a gormless yuppie and Courtenay plays a rheumy-eyed humourless professor. The whole film from start to finish is a wish-fulfilment fantasy - London flooded, great loss of life. It could have been such fun. But it was so downbeat and lacking in character or spectacle that I'd rather have watched Wacky Races with the sound off.

But what's this? Vicious storm to the north of Scotland with 90 mph winds, storm surge down the North Sea, London flood barrier raised, spring tides ... oh dear, that's just what's happening in reality tonight! Looks like we may be in for a re-run of 1953. They're forecasting a 2.9 metre storm surge. That's scary. 1953 was 2.4 metres ... and the land has sunk 6 inches since then, and sea level risen about 2 inches.

But ... if you live on the North Sea coast surely you've taken this possibility into account, your house prices will almost certainly reflect this risk. Why are the people in Great Yarmouth fighting over sandbags? Surely if you live in Great Yarmouth you already have sandbags? And flood boards. And you're moving your furniture onto upper floors. You've got tinned food, bottled water and everything else ready - always.

This is the future. It will get far worse. It's your responsibility to be prepared, no-one else will look after you. Stop whingeing and just sit it out. This is the tame taster for a wild future. Get used to it. Be Dutch about it ...

idiots ...

(Nostalgic look back at petrol under £1/litre)

This on today's Moneyweek website

'The IEA reckons that oil could hit $159 a barrel by 2030, with demand of 120m barrels a day far outstripping supply of 116m barrels a day. And this is assuming we can get supply that high – it’s currently just 85m barrels a day, and if you believe in the Peak Oil theory, then it’s not going to go much higher than that.'

Perhaps the IEA should employ an economist? The idea that by 2030 production could reach anything like 116 million b/d is absolutely hilarious. Latest figures in the real world suggest a 7% pa fall from now on in oil production. Taking this to 2030 suggests a REAL oil production figure of 16,014,988 b/d, so there's a shortfall of just under 100 million barrels a day to find! Biofuels? Hardly. The EROEI is less than zero anyway for biofuels, so all biofuels will do is use up the existing oil that much faster. As will pumping harder, though that seems hardly an option now. All taps are fully open and stockpiles are still falling. And people still complain about £1 a litre petrol! It's hilarious. £10 a litre will seem cheap in ten year's time. They are like lambs to the slaughter.

In reality I suspect the retreat from oil will make all this speculation seem silly in 2030 - we'll wonder why we ever bothered.

And as for $159 a barrel by 2030? My guess is somewhere between $1000 a barrel tops and $0 if we're in a post oil economy. And yes, I will remind you of this forecast in 23 year's time!!

Figures for projected oil production assuming a 7% year on year fall in production capacity starting from a 2007 base of 85 million b/d are as follows -

2008 79,050,000
2009 73,516,500
2010 68,370,345
2011 63,584,420
2012 59,133,510
2013 54,994,164
2014 51,144,572
2015 47,564,451
2016 44,234,939
2017 41,138,493
2018 38,258,798
2019 35,580,682
2020 33,090,034
2021 30,773,731
2022 28,619,569
2023 26,616,199
2024 24,753,065
2025 23,020,350
2026 21,408,925
2027 19,910,300
2028 18,516,579
2029 17,220,418
2030 16,014,988