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137 comments on Using NATO to fight peak gas

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garyp on January 6, 2007 - 5:50am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Don't take that article too seriously. In case you haven't noticed, the MOD has a cash flow problem and each service is screaming as loudly as possible to keep cherished programmes funded. Its not so much keeping half the existing fleet active that exercises the navy, its keeping the two new carriers on order they are trying to achieve.

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MUDLOGGER on January 6, 2007 - 3:21pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Regardless.

We are not a world power any more. This song no longer applies:

''We dont want to fight/
But by Gingo if we do/
We got the ships/
We got the men/
We got the money too.''

Problem is, The USA has taken this song as its own.

Just as Custer took the Chainy Tenth (Hussars) Mess Hall drinking song to heart for the 7th Cavalry.

If you want to know how it sounds , watch Erroll Flynn play Custer...

...And absorb the haunting refrain of an 18th Century Irish Hunting Song from a unit that took part in The Charge of The Light Brigade.

Empires Fade.

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Don Sailorman on January 6, 2007 - 4:00pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

"Oh by Jingo, Oh by Gum,
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, which they have not."

From these lines the word "jingoism" comes.

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MUDLOGGER on January 6, 2007 - 5:01pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

you may well be right (again).

Your song is earlier than mine.

Mine is from a Music hall ditty from circa 1905. (at the peak of the Dreadnought Gun-Armour and ''ours against the next two other Navies'' race)

It is interesting where the term Ginjoism originally came from.

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smekhovo on January 7, 2007 - 3:28am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

No, you are right. Your song dates from Gladstone's agitation for British intervention in the Russo-Turkish war of the late 1870s.
"Whatever happens, we have got ..." is not from a song at all, but from satire by Hilaire Belloc :-)

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Lanterne rouge on January 7, 2007 - 6:45am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The difference between us
And the Hottentot
Is we have got
The Maxim Gun
And they have not

IIRC

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alistairC on January 6, 2007 - 7:10pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

We are not a world power any more.

That reminds me of a cartoon (by Australian cartoonist/philosopher Patrick Cook) that dates from the Falklands war. Briton reading the news of the sinking of an Argentine ship, exclaims :

"Now nobody can call us a third-rate power!"

Next frame : thought bubble

"(at least, no fourth-rate ones can.)"

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MUDLOGGER on January 6, 2007 - 7:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Argentina can take the Fawks any time it feels like it.

We can do Squat.

There is no way that UKGOV could do it again.

Unless we beg the French for help...

Such is the dust of Empires.

The only reason they dont, is because (at least to date ) Is because there is fuck-all Oil there.

When the Argies made a play for the Fawks , they thought the Fawks would be another North Sea level basin.

It has transpired that its greatest wealth is Sheep.

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