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What you want to say – 24th August 2016 August 24, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.
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As always, following on Dr. X’s suggestion, it’s all yours, “announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose”, feel free.

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1. EWI - August 24, 2016

The Army dabbling in politics again (showing up at the FG event on Sunday) isn’t a welcome development for our democracy.

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Joe - August 24, 2016

Which event, Beal na Blath or Glasnevin? Do they justify by saying Collins was the first Chief of Staff or whatever the rank is?

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EWI - August 24, 2016

Glasnevin – which was expressly for Griffith, Collins and Eamon Duggan, only one of whom was ‘commander-in-chief’, and only one other in FG.

The society organising this is packed to the gills with Blueshirts.

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2. irishelectionliterature - August 24, 2016
3. Aonrud ⚘ - August 24, 2016

Been seeing these about the place in Belfast:

Oddly, there’s no attempt to direct you to a website or anything. A quick Google suggests they’re all about the UK, with a lot of results from various local papers (e.g. this from Liverpool Echo), and those articles list an associated website. Sounds a bit Freemen or something. Certainly has a bit of funding anyway.

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Torheit - August 28, 2016

It’s a Zen mindfuck. Just look at it and breath.

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4. crocodileshoes - August 24, 2016

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/14-myths-about-back-pain-debunked-by-experts/news-story/164d929023fed231e81636984aee20e2
Mentioned to my Physio the recent discussion here re heavy schoolbags and she referred me to point number 5 in this article. Ring of truth for anyone whose job involves dealing with parents of young childre!

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crocodileshoes - August 24, 2016

That should be point 6

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5. Tomboktu - August 24, 2016

Today, a manager at work asked me out of the blue to rate something in the office with a score between 1 10. I didn’t want to take his request seriously, so I said “pi”.
“Fine?”, he checked.
“No, pi“, I repeated.
“Oh, four point two seven something”, he said.
He’s being paid more than I am. <sigh>

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6. Tomboktu - August 24, 2016

Why does my washing machine take two minutes less on the 50 degrees C cycle than it does on the 40 degrees C cycle? Surely it should take longer to get the water heated to the higher temperature?

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Joe - August 24, 2016

I’m not sure of the answer to this one Tombo but I’d say that manager at work might be able to explain it to you…

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yourcousin - August 24, 2016

Do European machines use coils or do they have a domestic hot water connection?

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Tomboktu - August 24, 2016

IIRC, mine has just a cold water feed.

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yourcousin - August 24, 2016

So take my uneducated advice with a whole shaker full of salt but on commercial applications Variable Air Volume (VAV) Boxes which heat and cool most non residential spaces use a coil system run on a similar system so I have some exposure to this concept. Though I would say an engineer would probably a better answer (LATC I’m looking at you). The best way to explain my guesstimation would be to liken the heating process to bringing a car up to speed. You get up to 65 miles an hour quicker merging on a highway than you will coming off a residential street onto a 45 mph zone on a commercial street. I.e. Flooring it versus incremental acceleration. It is the same process with the coil and heating the water. UPDATE: out of fear of running my mouth I called the Project Manager for US Engineering who I work closely with at work who is also a licensed plumber and he confirmed my theory. So there you go.

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Michael Carley - August 24, 2016

Might not be doing the same things.

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Joe - August 24, 2016

What’s its name? Hal? Be afraid Tombo, be very afraid.

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7. Tomboktu - August 25, 2016

Yesterday it was a manager changing the value of pi. Today it’s the novelist having her river go upstream. The world is trying to befuddle me.

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Starkadder - August 25, 2016

Which novel is that?

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Tomboktu - August 25, 2016

It’s from Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs (page 39).

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sonofstan - August 25, 2016

It’s a narrative trick to make you question the nature of literary realism. Or a comment on the unidirectionality of narrative and a questioning of the subjugation of fictional time to ‘so-called’ ‘real’ time. Obviously.

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crocodileshoes - August 25, 2016

It’s one of many things about that novel that makes the reader wonder about all the plaudits on the cover. Like the wandering in and out of present and past tenses within a paragraph, or even a sentence ( no, Sonofstan, not an attempt to mimic, stylistically, the treachery of memory – just something a first- year English teacher would take a red biro to). The book is obviously two attempted novels welded together, like one of those nightmare cars welded together from the halves of two write-offs.

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sonofstan - August 25, 2016

‘write-offs’
🙂

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sonofstan - August 25, 2016

“It’s one of many things about that novel that makes the reader wonder about all the plaudits on the cover”

I wonder a lot these days about just that, to the point where I believe next to nothing I read about new work from an established fiction writer anymore. New writers, at least, have a chance of provoking a relatively disinterested enthusiasm from a reviewer.

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Joe - August 26, 2016

Well seeing as SoS brought it up. Here’s the plaudit from an American poet called Frank Montesanti on the cover of the soon-to-be published first collection by my boy in Canada:
“D.S. Maolalai writes a travelogue of beds, bars, and the first regrets of love. The poems are done with such craft and immediacy that even the jaded are compelled to feel again the bewildering, blessed wind of youth’s finest mistakes—the promiscuous ego, the inevitable tinderbox of young love, the nights only remembered by scribbles on napkins. Yet after the tempest quiets, you feel in these poems the shaping of an essential tenderness and wisdom, the contours of which linger in the mind well after the book is closed.”

Daddy is very proud. If the book club decides to have a go at poetry, copies can be supplied with generous discounts for bulk orders….:)

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Tomboktu - August 25, 2016

One of the earlier chapters had the curate call on the Karadžić figure to convey the bishop’s concern at the newcomer setting up as a sex therapist, and the pair of them reaching a compromise on how he would describe his trade. The notion that these days a bishop would send an emissary to try tell somebody that they cannot set up shop as a sex therapist seemed far-fetched to me.

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crocodileshoes - August 25, 2016

Agreed. The parts set in London among the marginalised convinced me much more than those in small-town Ireland. Any thoughts on the graphic rape scene – the work of an 85-year-old woman? (The scene, not the rape)

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8. 6to5against - August 25, 2016

And does the ‘water bursting in childbirth’ actually make a recognisable noise? I didn’t think so, but then I’m not a woman who has had many children…..

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Torheit - August 28, 2016

Pedants, the lot of you :-). Give Edna a break.

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9. sonofstan - August 25, 2016

Is this the birth of the long mooted CLR book club? 🙂

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WorldbyStorm - August 25, 2016

This may be a crazy idea, but how about we have a book club thread once a week to start it off?

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Tomboktu - August 25, 2016

Actually, I’m reading this for a book club I was invited to join.

(The book club is an lgbt one (well, g, at least), and I think LRCs is a ‘different’ choice from the usual criteria, by way of ensuring variety. October’s book in Falconer by John Cheever, and I think that’s back on theme.)

(BTW, it’s a bit of a mini-moment for gay fiction at the moment, with Garth Greenwell’s What Belong’s To You and Matthew Griffin’s Hide both getting attention (Hide less so in the reviews on this side of the Atlantic so far, but was the book of the month for the Pat Kenny Show — Easons book club in June).)

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Starkadder - August 25, 2016

“This may be a crazy idea, but how about we have a book club thread once a week to start it off?”

Sounds great! Who might be interested in reading, say
“The Enchanted Glass” by Tom Nairn, or “The Jungle” by
Upton Sinclair?

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RosencrantzisDead - August 26, 2016

What about the Grundrisse?

::runs for the door::

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Tomboktu - August 26, 2016

Grundrisse?

People have been banned for less!

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WorldbyStorm - August 26, 2016

🙂

But seriously ill put up a book club thread every week from now on and we can get it going from there.

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RosencrantzisDead - August 26, 2016

Reading the Grundrisse? That’s a bannin’.

Thinking of becoming a Trot? That’s a bannin’.

Listen to music that has not been recorded on vinyl? Bannin’.

Expressing support for Section 31? Oh, you better believe that’s a bannin’.

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Torheit - August 28, 2016

Can we please start with boil and carbuncle metaphors in Marx?

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10. Pasionario - August 26, 2016

So then… no-one seems to want to bring up Jezza sitting on the floor of a half-empty train. Bit of an own goal there… Thoughts?

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WorldbyStorm - August 26, 2016

I think whatever the reality the danger of giving any space to the media and or opponents should make BLP very wary about doing anything that can be twisted.

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Joe - August 26, 2016

I dunno. The reality is that anything he does can and will be twisted by the mainstream media. Literally anything.
I’ve seen various versions of what happened. If as Pasionario states, it was a half-empty train, it seems strange that several other people have said they had to sit on its floor too.
And as somebody said re the conflicting versions: Who should I believe, Jeremy Corbyn who wants to bring public transport back into public ownership or Richard Branson, the Thatcher-admirer billionaire who owns some of those transport companies?

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sonofstan - August 26, 2016

The subtext is that somehow because this train might not have been absolutely packed to the gills, everything is therefore alright with the railways and that J. Corbyn is a liar liar liar!. The trains are not OK; I don’t commute everyday, but I use a variety of providers in the UK a couple of times a week most weeks and while they’re not all as bad as Southern, compared to my experience of trains elsewhere in Europe and even in Ireland, trains in England are expensive, unreliable, likely to be too full to get a seat quite a lot of the time – both intercity and commuter – and did I say expensive?

The otherside of it is, of course that in ‘Leave’ Britain, people in small towns that are too poor to go anywhere much (yes, I’m exaggerating) see this as a rich people’s problem, just the way rural TDs in Ireland think the Luas is an white elephant built to transport already pampered Dubs from their front door to their place of employment/ expensive shops, with possibly a glass of champagne and fancy soap on hand. Though when people in the other Britain do take a train, bad and all as commuter services in the SE are, the likes of Arriva Wales are absolutely shocking.

The thing is, after 20+ years of privatisation, it would take another generation to get the railways back to the standard of the rest of Europe. British Rail had been starved beforehand, precisely to help make the case for the Bransons of this world to take over.

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sonofstan - August 26, 2016

Just on that, there was an interesting discussion on Morning Ireland between Michael Fitzmaurice and Eamon Ryan about diesel – Fitzmaurice kept going on about rich city dwellers with their trains and their bikes, but how people around him needed their cars. Strange the way the car has become a necessity for the poor, working shifts, living a long way from work, whereas the bike and public transport benefits the middle-classes perhaps more.

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crocodileshoes - August 26, 2016

Heard that, SofS and, having spent the summer in a small rural town, was baffled. Most -even all- of the people working in that town choose to drive to work while every shop and office has empty accommodation above it. The rural Irish attachment to the motor car is not always or even mostly a matter of necessity: it’s a consequence of the belief that only a house on half an acre is good enough. I was a matter of some curiosity for choosing to live in the town and not to own a vehicle.

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sonofstan - August 26, 2016

Yeah, that’s true and it is puzzling about small Irish towns. But I’ve some sympathy with Fitzmaurice’s point. In a previous life, I used to work in an industry where unsocial hours, and uncertain conditions of employment were the norm. I lived in the centre of Dublin and was lucky enough – or old enough – to have bought a house pre-boom. Many of my co-workers were younger and, when it came to starting families and looking for something secure, found themselves in Portarlington or Balbriggan or the like, priced out of even the more remote Dublin suburbs. Most of them are still there, still in negative equity. You could argue that they needn’t have bought, but then, even with a boom time mortgage around the neck, you’re probably paying less than you would be renting in the city. Add to that fact that a lot of work at the lower paid end of the market can start before, or finish after, public transport hours and many lower paid workeres may find themselves more dependent on the car than the better paid.

I agree it’s not always an necessity, but the legacy of the lost decade will be with us for a while yet.

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Pasionario - August 26, 2016

It’s precisely because the trains are rubbish that it’s unfortunate that Corbyn chose to attack overcrowding on a train that happened to be half full.

By his own account, he just couldn’t find two unreserved empty seats side by side for him and his wife. That’s a pretty thin reed on which to hang a complaint and my vision of publicy-owned railways is not where such convenience is always guaranteed.

This is yet another demonstration of why Corbyn is just bad at the basic craft of politics.

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RosencrantzisDead - August 27, 2016

Whoever thought it was necessary to get a photo op to illustrate a fact that would be known to any person who has ever embarked on a train journey is the problem.

It would have been easier for Corbyn to make a statement saying that he had to sit on the floor of a train in the past and asked Theresa May if she or Boris had ever had the same experience. If they deny it, they are pampered, out of touch toffs; if they admit it, they have to acknowledge that train privatisation was a f**king disaster.

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Ed - August 28, 2016

If you really, really want to make a big deal of this: since this now seems to have been picked over more thoroughly than any train journey in modern British history, there are several witness statements (absurd that we should even be using that phrase for such a minor thing) that rubbish that idea of the train being ‘half-empty’. So I don’t think it’s much of a peg to hang a triumphant expose of Corbyn’s craftsmanship or lack thereof.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/passengers-dispute-virgin-trains-version-of-jeremy-corbyn-sitting-on-floor-video-a7205631.html

https://www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/virgin-say-corbyn-train-wasnt-full?utm_term=.nfr8NG1D6#.gfxNZr3Op

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Ed - August 29, 2016

In other news, this is a vastly more serious matter that I expect won’t receive a fraction of the coverage: Corbyn’s main opponent caught out lying (or to be very charitable, shooting his mouth off without getting his facts straight) on a major political issue. The effect of his intervention here was not to shine a light on the damage done to Britain’s railways by grubby profiteers like Branson, but to promote anti-immigrant prejudice.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/owen-smith-says-schools-area-11806234

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CMK - August 26, 2016

Well it’s such a transparent hatchet job on Corbyn what is there really to say?

It’s about the only thing they have sorta caught him out on. Smith is emerging more and more as a deeply creepy individual and Corbyn, who is, granted, not great, shines by comparison.

But the idea that the UK print media would try to question Corbyn’s probity over ‘Traingate’ shows just how far down the rabbit hole they’ve gone.

Interesting that number of people tweeting pictures of packed Virgin trains since Branson release the CCTV images. And, yes, I hope Branson (a tax fugitive, remember) faces consequences for breaching data protection.

It really is a case of ‘nothing to see here’ embellished by a media driven by an almost psychotic loathing of Corbyn and what he stands for.

One of the few remaining decent Guardian journalists, Gary Younge, tweeted that the whole episode said more about the media than Corbyn.

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11. Starkadder - August 26, 2016

“One of the few remaining decent Guardian journalists, Gary Younge, tweeted that the whole episode said more about the media than Corbyn.”

There is a website full of conspiracy theorists called
” off-guardian “, aimed at disillusioned Guardian readers. It has
numerous pieces by global warming denier F. William Engdahl, and
at least one article reprinted from the Lyndon LaRouche
” Executive Intelligence Review “.

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Michael Carley - August 26, 2016

More and more though, Noam Chomsky is being proved right: the information you need is actually in the papers; you just to need to read them properly.

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Starkadder - August 26, 2016

Indeed.

“If we believe in the indispensability of a pluralistic
marketplace of ideas and information, we cannot be
complacent about a narrowly controlled management of that
marketplace, whether it is governmental or corporate, benign or malicious.”

Ben H. Bagdikan, “The Progressive”, June 1978.

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12. roddy - August 26, 2016

Corbyn is being treated vilely by the media.You can almost feel the contempt for him in the vast majority of the broadcast media. As an aside as someone who is literally a “bogger”, anyone attemping to remove my car from me will be told in no uncertain terms to f— off.(And that includes the entire SF ard comhairle ,should they advocate penalising rural motorists!)

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sonofstan - August 26, 2016

I’d like to introduce you to Eamon Ryan. But only if I can watch.

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13. roddy - August 26, 2016

You can do interpretor!

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14. sonofstan - August 27, 2016
WorldbyStorm - August 27, 2016

Dire, absolutely dire. Fair dues to both SF and DUP for being so quick with statements against it.

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sonofstan - August 27, 2016

Slightly connected, but walking back from Pats-Bohs last night, passing Parkgate Street, I saw a poster for Amy Schumer defaced with sexist and anti-semitic drivel. Hard to know if it’s deeply buried somewhere from way back or, more likely, internet generated.

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WorldbyStorm - August 27, 2016

I think Internet has to be some part of it.

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sonofstan - August 28, 2016

“Its spectacular power over the imaginations of so many for half a century (and more) before WW2 always struck me as odd”

Weirdly, on anti-semitism; just now reading Meeks on early Christians and he mentions in passing the resentment of Jews in certain cities of the Hellenistic era – i.e. BC – including the libel that they had been exiled from Egypt because they were really lepers, hence their dietary and hygienic strictures.

Of course, every ‘out’ group in history attracts hostility of one kind or another, and this may only be noteworthy because of the identity of that group.

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sonofstan - August 28, 2016

That was in response to 6to5 below, obv.

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Michael Carley - August 28, 2016

Like Brexit: it was always there but now people feel freer to say it out loud.

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WorldbyStorm - August 28, 2016

+1

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6to5against - August 28, 2016

Anti semistism has really had a strange history. Its spectacular power over the imaginations of so many for half a century (and more) before WW2 always struck me as odd, but in keeping with a world where people often like to pick on outsiders and blame them for pretty much everything. It continues today with many other groups.

But since WW2 anti semitism seems to crop up in places where it doesnt make sense, even within the world of xenophonic hate. How can anybody growing up in Ireland convince themselves that they are the victim of some sort of vast Jewish conspiracy. There is literally no framework on which to build that prejudice.

It really seems to me that anti-semites here – and in many other places – are political simpletons attracted by the transgressive nature of anti-semitism. It’s closer to the beliefs that some (apprently) hold about Iizards running the world than it is to burkini-banning-bigots in France and elsewhere.

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WorldbyStorm - August 28, 2016

Wasn’t the line the socialism of fools coined for anti-semites? I think you’re spot on btw.

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15. Starkadder - August 28, 2016
16. Joe - August 28, 2016

Ah Jesus that was a great win by Dublin today.

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ar scáth a chéile - August 28, 2016

the payback for ’78 – ’09 continues….and this latest instalment was very sweet

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ar scáth a chéile - August 29, 2016

And I think it’s a time for a YPG flag on the Hiill

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Joe - August 29, 2016

Yep. 78-09, thirty years of hammerings. I feel like Lawrence of Arabia swooping down on the beaten Turks, remembering the beatings they gave him, as he shouts “NO Prisoners. NO Prisoners!”

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irishelectionliterature - August 29, 2016

Fantastic match and brilliant result. Kerry threw everything at us and still came up short.

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17. botheredbarney - August 29, 2016

The Beatles performed their last public concert together in Candlestick Park San Francisco on 29th August 1966. The end of civilization as we knew it.

http://www.openculture.com/2016/08/hear-the-beatles-play-their-final-concert-50-years-ago-today-august-29-1966.html

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18. botheredbarney - August 29, 2016

And from the same Open Culture site here is the great movie voice mimic Peter Sellers with a spoken Doctor Strangelove version of The Beatles’ early hit, “She loves you” (…yeah, yeah, yeah)

http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/peter-sellers-reads-the-beatles-she-loves-you-in-4-different-accents.html

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19. Michael Carley - August 29, 2016

Definitely of interest here, the Hart-Borgonovo controversy and executions of spies in Cork.

http://theirishrevolution.ie/cork-spy-files/#.V8QRcdfTVTd

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Joe - August 29, 2016

Just beat me to it Michael. Fascinating stuff.

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20. sonofstan - August 30, 2016

Government to appeal decision that would give us €13bn. This is the sort fo thing that is going to be difficult to explain come the budget.

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21. sonofstan - August 30, 2016

Richard Murphy eviscerating Brian Hayes on Sean O’Rourke

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sonofstan - August 30, 2016

Aine Lawlor now hammering Noonan – whats up with RTE?

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22. Dr. X - August 30, 2016

Suppose the Dublin government was moved to actually stop giving Apple the nod and the wink where corporate tax was concerned.

How likely is it that Apple would close its Irish manufacturing plants in retaliation?

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