sweasel.com

Lock of hair, blood sample, fingernail, lick the glue strip on an envelope,

What we need to do is clone some talented people and settle, once and for all, the nurture/nature debate. Is it genetics, or the environment . Would Churchill be Churchill in any other time and place?

Even if you could create the same genetics and conditions that made Churchill the man that he was, social media would never permit such a man to succeed in public office.

If World War II happened now, we would lose.

Did anybody see that Russian celebration today with the missle that supposedly said ‘to be delivered to Obama personally’ Saw it at Zero Hedge…grain of salt. It had a hammer and sicle logo on the side…they aren’t even pretending anymore.

My guess is he had a real big badass poodle, not one of those idiotic toy ones with the humiliating haircut.

From what I have read of Churchill (who fascinates me) he was a bloody pain in the ass- full of opinions, witticisms, and whiskey- all of which generally annoyed anyone who had to work with him. First Lord of the Admirality in WWI, he had a brilliant idea that turned out to be Gallipoli. Had it worked, he’d have been a genius, but like many brilliant ideas it was a disaster. On the other hand, at the end of the war, he was the only one with the foresight to see that there would soon be another war, depite popular opinion that it could never happen again. He therefore had many large naval guns buried to prevent them from being melted down…. And which at the beginning of WWII were dug up and used for costal defense- which would have otherwise been nonexistent.

Still, he spent the period between the wars in the political wilderness. I like to say that the government of the time kept him locked up in a box to keep him from annoying everyone.
At the start of WWII when Hitler made them angry enough, the phlegmatic Brits mumbled,”well, then old chap, you’ve asked for it”, and -donning masks and heavy gloves- let Churchill out of that box and sicced him on the Germans. When the war was won, and they didn’t need him any more, they stuffed him back in the box.

Like MacArthur and Patton, Churchill was brilliant for the war, but a disaster in peacetime.

I think Churchill was less of a disaster in peace than he’s portrayed by a very leftist British press and academia. After the war they went full court press to ram the UK to the left and he was in the way.

I’d say set up the lab in Spain, where everything is cheap (if you have foreign moola) and people are likely to be disinterested. But “The Boys from Barcelona” just doesn’t sound right…

Apparently Churchill had two rusty brown poodles through the years, both of them named “Rufus.” They were not standard size, but identified as miniatures, though one dog seems to have been much larger than the other. Definitely not toys though. And the dogs were not groomed in show-dog style, but were a little rough, sporting puppy clips. He also had a cat that he loved very much: “Jock, a marmalade-coloured moggy with white bib and socks.”

Rumour has it that Churchill gave that nurse a rusty trombone, too.

Why do I have the feeling I shouldn’t Google that…?

If they clone Churchill, the whisk(e)y & cigar businesses should flourish. Nothin’ wrong with that!

Dear Miss Weasel,

Actually, you can just censor or delete that comment, since you probably don’t want to be turning up in those sorts of searches.

Oh, now you’ve *definitely* got me curious, Stark.

I didn’t know that whole *pokes head out, stares at cat, ducks behind door* thing worked with weasels, too!

Some Veg: It was the Germans who buried guns after WW I and dug them up later. Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty, but left that post after Gallipoli. He returned to the government later, but in other posts.

He was in government all through the 1920s. In 1924, he returned to the Conservatives and to his surprise became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He said later “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” (Incidentally, he still had the official Chancellor’s robe worn by his father.)

What put him “in the wilderness” after 1930 was his intemperate and wrong-headed views on India. Pretty much everyone else had accepted Indian independence as inevitable. Churchill insisted otherwise, and added personal abuse of Gandhi.

However, there is a letter from Baldwin, the Conservative PM before Chamberlain, suggesting that Churchill should not be given a ministry because he would exhaust himself in the job. Instead he should be “kept fresh” to serve as war Prime Minister if necessary.

It’s true that Churchill and the Conservatives were tossed out in 1945; but they’d been in power almost continuously since 1931. They hadn’t done anything much about the Depression, but held on to power then thanks to splits in the Labour and Liberal parties and traditionalist voters leary of Labour; and there was an election holiday during the war. By 1945, the party splits had ended and there were millions of new voters looking for a change – which Churchill conspicuously didn’t offer. So Labour got in. But the voters soon thought better of it. Churchill became PM again in 1951, the start of a 13-year Conservative run.