GlennB

John beat me to it. For about 20p don't you get the same job done? Or go totally wild and add a snap swivel instead of the paperclip. That's about 30p ....

Glad gozzer mentioned wheat. This is a cracking bait for roach and the bigger fish do eventually move in. The obvious disadvantage of maggots is that every minnow in the river is also attacking them with a vengeance

yeah, Greece too Mind you, I could do murder for some HP sauce or Branston pickle. Speaking of Gurkhas, they shot at my Dad during WWII! Mind you, him and his mates had gone swanning off in the dark - somewhere in the Far East - to "investigate" a supply train that had been hit and disabled. (Just helping mind, looking for illicit goodies was right out. Patriots all). Pottering back to base in the dark the Gurkha guards took them for the enemy. Dad ended up in an old bomb crater minus a boot which he never recovered and had a hard time explaining the lack of. Would Gurkhas serving in the Brit armed forces over the years be classed as 'mercenaries' in the strict sense of the word? Some internet searches don't really clear this matter up.

Strewth! How did this get revived?

This is where you went wrong. You gave a serious response to people who didn't realise your OP was a light-hearted troll, then it all got out of hand

You mention "bunnies". OK. Can you explain why it's OK to drop shampoos, cleaning products etc. into the eyes of strapped-down rabbits - day after day until 50% go blind, or die or whatever - for the convenience of people who don't actually need these products any more than they need everyday soap? Does this benefit humanity, or is it somehow justifying the pimping of yet more useless products on the gullible public? Is this more justifiable than ritual slaughter for religious reasons, given that ritual slaughter is pretty much what happens outside "western" civilisation anyway? Serious quesion (and I hope you will answer) .. you will recall the beagles forced to chain-smoke for much of their lives in the interests of "medical research" into smoking. If you object to this kind of practice are you happy to be labelled as a "beagle-hugger" ? Or did you happily see the beagles die a horrible lingering death for no earthy benefit to humanity whatsoever?

Point I was trying to make Ken is that it isn't purely a Kosher/Hallal issue. How many Indians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Mexicans, Nigerians and - in general - folks living out in the sticks obtain their meat from the high-tech slaughterhouse ? In the big cities maybe, but for most? Nah, snap the chicken's neck ... cut the pig's throat ... At Greek Easter there were fully conscious young goats and sheep getting their throats cut all over the country. A heavily Orthodox Catholic country, naturally.

Cutting an animal's throat is a pretty standard way to slaughter it, so I'm not sure what Islam and Judaism has got to do with the discussion.

On the other hand .. I remember when beagles were strapped into devices and forced to chain-smoke for 12 hours a day, in the interests of "research into smoking", when a billion adults world-wide were already producing plenty of experimental evidence Was that OK? Did it deserve protest? Of course it did. I also recall biology students putting cats into a large (cool) tumble-dryer - "to see what happens" . Balance, chaps, balance. Bods marching against all animal experimentation are just t.w.a.t.s. Justifying any animal experimentation is also twattish.

I have a nice set of Tarot cards. Yours for a small fee . I "learned" Tarot by just reading the meanings of each card from a book, and making up some bulloney that strung it all together. Basically, Tarot (and the rest) is a load of bunk. Anybody willing to ask the Tarot a question is likely to interpret the results favourably. A bit like spiritualism and homeopathy, really

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes "Who watches the watchmen?" As long as the mods are doing their best and not grinding any personal axes in their decisions, then all's well along the watchtower (.... exit stage right, to listen to Hendrix)

"Celebrity" b#####ks is one thing I definitely don't miss about Blighty. Dear Lord.

No you're not. "Proper decent food" can be amazingly cheap and good, as your example shows. But a lot of people think they aren't eating right unless they eat a lot of processed/packaged stuff, which costs.

Do they have to get those trains going on a downslope ? I'm only half joking .. I used to work for a quarry company (Foster Yeoman) in Somerset and in the 90's they imported some monster tractor units from the USA to haul their trains. I recall one of the the limiting factors was getting them to move at all without grinding away the railway track Awesome videos.

False dilemma (I realise you realise ) . Hans Blick and co had access to Iraq to check out WMD and were busily failing to find any. Not surprising, 'cos there weren't any.. Neither torture nor invasion was necessary. I recall a newspaper cartoon at the time .. GWB is wiring up the door to Iraq with explosives ... Blick is standing there saying "But it isn't locked". Here's a thought .. what if it turns out that the victim of torture is totally innocent and has no knowledge of the subject. Based on "an eye for an eye" principle, let any torturer - or those who authorise it - suffer the same pain. Seems fair to me.

Yep. About 1,000 years ago mankind learned that torture provides the answer that the victim thinks the torturer wants to hear. It's a good way to stop the pain, I suppose. Since then we've understood that torture is - in fact - just fun for anyone seriously into torturing. Drugs are hugely more effective.

Interesting .. I saw an English couple hauled off by the police at Athens airport for "slapping" their kid in the way you describe.

Amen. It could also mention all those "murderers" who were banged up for long periods of time but who turned out to be innocent all along. "Putting to sleep" victims of corruption/over-zealousness/incompetence is not something I'd want to live with.

That's where you're wrong, Cory. You could have sat in an office surfing the 'net or playing PC games all day long and made less of a hash of it. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I still see business bods defending an ongoing system of grotesque bonuses on the grounds that "if we don't pay up, the expertise will just go elsewhere".

I totally agree. But it implies that "morality" is not a fixed universal concept. If you tried to bribe a minor bureaucrat in the UK to get a decision made or some paperwork speeded up you'd likely fail and might even get busted. In most of the world this kind of bribery is a fact of life and doesn't even cause a raised eyebrow. It's what you're expected to do and how that official earns a fair living. Are the people in those countries "not decent" or "immoral" for behaving like this ? By UK standards, yes. Hence my vote. But put a "decent" UK citizen in most parts of Asia, Africa or Central/South America (and some parts of Europe) and they'd have to start acting a lot less "decent" just to get along from day to day. A trivial example from here in Greece - Friends have told me that if I ever get pulled over for a routine check by traffic cops I must pretend not to speak a single word of Greek. The cops will likely just wave you on rather than face the hassle of getting a translator to do the paperwork to deal with my expired car emissions test or whatever. So this is what I've done a couple of times, and it works. But I'm well aware that I'M DELIBERATELY LYING when this happens. My high standards of morality just took a hit

Yes and No for me. We folks answering this poll are lucky enough to live in the "civilised" parts of the Western world. The fact we have homes, PCs, telephones and electricity already means we're privileged and likely to know similar people who have an investment in remaining 'civilised'. Out there in the great big world I reckon life is generally a lot more difficult and 'morality' is a luxury that a lot can't afford. Funnily enough this reminds me of the "there's no such thing as a bad dog, only bad owners" debate.

It's a complex business. The mujahideen (a faction of which later became the Taliban) only managed to kick out the Soviets with covert aid from the USA, when the USA wished to give the USSR a seriously bloody nose. And they succeeded. The mujahideen were - effectively - an ally towards the USA's goals. "Freedom fighters", in Ronald Reagan's words. Then the USA reaped what they had sown , by helping Islamic fundamentalists gain power in Afghanistan, and the Taliban suddenly became a deadly enemy of the West,. And so they remain. "We" installed them in a position of great power and now fight them at huge expense in terms of lives and money. If you can make sense of it all you're doing better than me.

No, I watch Al Jazeera a fair bit. I was just surprised at the suggestion they might broadcast a beheading and was wondering if they'd done it in the past. I would prefer to be watching BBC World News, but their poxy tickertape crawling along the bottom drives me up the wall. I tried putting a bit of cardboard up against the tele, but without a remote control for the cardboard it got a bit inconvenient.

Is Al Jazeera prone to showing grisly stuff like that? I didn't realise.

OK, a proper job it is. Thanks for the advice