Reminding the Euro-weenies who's boss

An article in today's Washington Times on the Sarkozys' visit to the USA reinforces the point made in previous posts: as a head of state should, Barry O'Bama is treating foreign leaders very much according to whether or not they serve US interests.

The last paragraph does indicate a degree of personal animus, however:

Unlike the Obamas in Paris, the Sarkozys accepted an invitation to dine in the White House, joining the first couple in the residence for a private dinner. And the two leaders, perhaps the hatchet finally buried, left the stage together, with Mr. Obama's arm draped around the shoulder of his smiling French counterpart.

A rather forced smile in response to such a naked signal of dominance, I suspect. I wonder how Michelle and Carla got along? Cleopatra's nose springs to mind.

Wish I'd written this

In National Review, John O'Sullivan writes trenchantly about the current frosting of US-UK relations, ending with a wonderfully comprehensive paragraph (my italics) that ties in perfectly with my last post:

As Britain’s election campaign gets under way, no major party promises to roll back these regulatory interventions. Indeed, all the talk is in the other direction, notably about greater defense cooperation between Britain and France. That would inevitably come at the expense of Anglo-American defense and intelligence collaboration. Yet the strongest natural supporters of Anglosphere collaboration, the opposition Tories, are (with a few exceptions) oddly quiet on such topics. They want to avoid a row with 'Europe', even though 'Europe' is shorthand for the gradual dissolution of their main national political tradition. That, in turn, compels them to avoid any rhetoric that might awaken patriotic memories. So Britain drifts towards an illiberal European future and away from the U.S. and the Anglosphere on a great sea of ignorance about its own history and boredom with its own identity.

The growing insignificance of national politics

Open Europe has today published the most comprehensive study to date (PDF here) on the cost and benefits of regulation in the UK since 1998, based on over 2,300 of the Government's own impact assessments.

The study finds that regulation has cost the UK economy £176 billion since 1998, of which £124 billion, or 71 percent, had its origin in EU legislation. Open Europe estimates the benefit/cost ratio of EU regulations at 1.02, while the ratio of UK regulations is 2.35, which is to say that it is 230 percent more cost effective to regulate nationally than it is to regulate via the EU.

The study warns that the Conservatives' heavy focus on regulatory reform of domestic rather than EU rules could lead to contradictory or undeliverable policies, since a future Conservative government will only have full control over 29 per cent of the cost of regulation.

Co-author Sarah Gaskell comments that 'our research clearly shows that passing laws as close as possible to the citizen is not only more democratic, but also vastly cheaper. Whether we think [the massive influence of the EU over our economy and everyday life] is a good or a bad thing, politicians can no longer be in denial over the extent of this influence and must dedicate much more attention to the EU in the run-up to the general election.'

Politicians are not in denial - they are incapable of even seeming to govern without the support of their officials, their officials think the EU's model of unaccountable government by people like themselves is the best of all possible worlds, therefore politicians who wish their servants to remain civil will do nothing to ruffle their feathers. 

Special relationship

'Nations do not have eternal friends', said Lord Palmerston. 'They have eternal interests'.

That it has been in Britain's interest to cozy up to the Americans has been evident since Suez. What has been in it for the Americans has been less easy to say, especially during the period when the pro-Soviet Wilson and the sourly anti-American Heath alternated in power.

What has been clear since Bill Clinton mocked the 'special relationship' is that for the last 20-odd years the specialness has been all one-way, culminating in Blair's tail-wagging around Dubya in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

That Brown has been treated with calculated contempt by Obama is akin to someone trying to shake off an unwanted lover who won't take the hint. Naked need is repellent, and often drives the needed to behave cruelly.

Britain's rulers don't even have the bottle to defend the national interest. What possible use are they as allies?

Racist Marxhorroids

It was inevitable that US Marxhorroids would accuse any and all opposition to Obama of being racist. Seems to me he won a plurality in what is still a largely Caucasian country, hence the majority that opposes his statism must include a considerable number who had and have no problem with his skin colour.

The great majority of that part of the population of the United States classified as 'black' appears to support him unreservedly, but unfortunately that is also the part of the population that is most heavily state-dependent, so there is no conflict there. Indeed, most of those classified as 'black' so commonly vote on colour lines as to fully merit the charge of being themselves deeply racist.   

It is also deeply racist to assume that darker skin defines a set of values. I am choosing my words carefully because there are so many gradations in skin colour, and the logic - if one can call it that - of Marxhorroid racism can be fairly equated with the Nazi presumption that a single Jewish grandparent defined the status of the grandchildren.

It was not slavery and the Civil War alone that soured race relations in the USA. They were also, and I believe more harmfully, poisoned by the segregationist 'Jim Crow' laws that the Democratic Party imposed followed the abolition of slavery, which reached their highest point of national acceptance when President Woodrow Wilson applied them in Washington DC.

Yes, that Woodrow Wilson, hero of the 'Progressive' movement, which was openly committed to eugenics - as, indeed, was British Fabianism.

Racism is in the DNA of the 'progressives', which is why they can't stop talking about it. They carry a heavy burden of historical guilt, and their projection of it onto their opponents simply testifies to the intractability of their collective obsession.

Animals!

'Chelsea must banish thoughts of being nearly men, says Carlo Ancelotti', reads a headline in the Guardian sports section.

So, Carlo, which is it? Are they to cease worrying about their masculinity, or desist from aspiring to membership of the human race?

The stupid party

The Tories seem likely to disprove the old adage about government parties losing power rather than opposition parties winning them. Gerald Warner has a scathing take on the subject in the Telegraph, with I believe will be borne out by events.

'Most Tories hate David Cameron and cannot wait to see him crash and burn'. Really? Who chose him, then? And before him Howard, the most hated hold-over from the Major administration, and before him the laughable Duncan-Smith.

But Cameron & Co. have built on the legacy of their immediate predecessors to achieve the seemingly impossible: they have discouraged their core voters while failing to convince swing voters that they are a better option than an administration that everyone sentient knows to be corrupt, deceitful and incompetent, and which has brought Britain deserved international contempt. 

They had a chance to choose a man in David Davies; they went instead with a glib, gilded toy-boy. Fuck 'em. 

INGSOC got it wrong

It's not 'Ignorance is Strength' - it's 'Your Indifference is Their Strength'.

The implacable Richard North has posted another masterful unpicking of the many organizations whose orbits interweave around the global warming scam. There are now way too many snouts in it for there to be any hope of stopping the fraud by merely demonstrating that everything they profess to believe is nonsense on stilts.

Two obsolete aircraft do their stuff

 The aptly-named Russian 'Backfire' swing-wing bomber and the likewise swing-wing ground-attack-aircraft-converted-to-an-interceptor-while-we-waited-30-years-for-the-Eurofighter 'Tornado' pictured at dusk near the Outer Hebrides.  What's the point? Well, you see, it proves how both 'powers' need independent air forces.

'Our pilots, navigators and indeed all the support personnel at RAF Leuchars work very hard to deliver the UK Quick Reaction Alert Force 24 hours a day, which can be scrambled in minutes, to defend the UK from unidentified aircraft entering our airspace, or aircraft in distress', said Wing Commander Mark Gorringe, commander of 111 Squadron. 'It's a very important job, defending the UK and helping to keep UK citizens safe', he concluded.

'We need a strong RAF to keep our skies safe from Russian bombers', echoes Con Coughlin in the Telegraph. 'Just why Russian bombers find it necessary to violate British air-space is something of a mystery – no one is seriously expecting hostilities to break out between Moscow and London – but it does underline why it is so important that we maintain a properly funded and equipped RAF strike force.'

Does it indeed? The PR offensive couldn't be anything to do with the pending reduction of the swill in the MoD trough, where the most obvious saving would be the abolition of the RAF, with its functions at last returned to the Army and Navy from which they should never have been detached - could it?

No doubt much the same considerations have moved the Russian Air Force to send their piece-of-shit Cold War bombers on utterly pointless intruder missions.

Where the real power lies

As we plod along to an election that will decide which faction of mediocrities will dispose of the thirty percent of policy-making that has not yet been surrendered to the EU, a couple of timely reminders of how the other seventy percent is decided.

In the FT, Paris correspondent Ben Hall comments, "Concern about Berlin's self-interest has spread well beyond Paris to other capitals, particularly since the Greek debt crisis began. But it is France that is fretting the most, because for half a century it has used its special relationship with Germany to multiply its own influence in Europe and beyond. That is no longer the case. German selfishness exposes French selfishness."

Since when is defending the national interest 'selfishness'?

The Telegraph reports that figures published in yesterday's UK budget show that the UK's contributions to the EU have increased from last year's estimates. Last year's budget estimated the UK's contributions at £5.6billion for this year, but that has been increased to £6.4 billion this year and will rise to an estimated £7.6 billion in 2010/11. The £6.4 billion cost this year is more than twice the £3.1billion contributed last year. The increase follows Tony Blair's agreement to a reduction in Britain's annual rebate in 2005, in exchange for a 'health check' of the Common Agricultural Policy.

And he didn't even get to be president of the EU in exchange for selling out the national interest.

Hallucinatory stuff

The Daily Mail is running a great piece of investigative journalism that reveals the degree to which old-line communists have wormed their way into leading positions in what remains of the trade union movement, and are convinced they can bring about the great proletarian revolution after all.

Just one teensy problem: there is no proletariat anymore, and the over-paid cabin crew of British Airways operating out of Heathrow are not what any sane human being would regard as a revolutionary vanguard.

But, there we are: they have regained ownership of the Labour Party, and are quite convinced that the great crisis of capitalism predicted by good ol' Karl M has come about, and that they can bring about its final collapse.

That the best they can hope for is to bankrupt BA, to the benefit of all its international competitors, while putting their own members out of work, does not seem to occur to them.

I wonder if Cameron will now summon up the courage to commit himself to ending all subsidies to these loony tunes. 

Follow the money

James Delingpole disembowels the latest tendentious editorial in The Economist arguing that 'we cannot afford to take the risk however small it may be' with reference to the global warming scam.

OK, so UK Plc currently has a massive structural deficit, and knows it will soon have nothing left in the pot to spend on essentials like security and defence, let alone on fripperies. And how is the likely incoming CEO D Cameron proposing to deal with this crisis? Erm, he’s not yet quite sure. But one thing’s for certain: he’s going to stick with the new regulation brought in by the previous regime for this essential new scheme called the Climate Change Act. For the mere bagatelle of £18 billion poured down the drain annually, this will enable UK Plc to stifle its efficiency, drive up costs and wear the smug smile you only get when you know that none of your competitors is nearly SO bound by righteous green regulation as you. Nice.

Nice for some indeed, as one of the comments explains:

Nat Rothschild’s Henderson Global Investors controls $64 trillion in the Carbon Disclosure Project so he has to hedge forward-looking intelligence on AGW profits with institutionalized ignorance of the fraud.

Nat Rothschild was a member of the Bullingdon Club group that included David Cameron and George Osborne. They are what the Americans call 'asshole buddies'. The Economist Group is half owned by the Financial Times, a subsidiary of Pearson PLC. A group of independent shareholders, including many members of the staff and the Rothschild banking family of England, owns the rest.

QED?

Not all arseholes are leftist

The person who blogs under the alias of Old Holborn has decided to stand as a parliamentary candidate for an outfit called the Jury Team. He is 'asking for a Penny for the Guy to overthrow the State, put corrupt MPs on their arses and give us the opportunity to let an honest man with honest intentions enter Parliament.'

And where is he standing? In Cambridge, whose sitting MP is David Howarth, one of the few to come out of the expenses scandal smelling like a rose.

I saw Howarth at Cambridge railway station a fortnight ago. I don't do compliments often enough, but I thought he really deserved one. I told him 'I never voted for you, but if I still lived here I would definitely vote for you next time, as one of the few members of parliament who honoured his oath.'

He went pink and said it was very kind of me. It was not. It is surely incumbent upon all of us to leaven our criticism of the many with praise for the few who do their duty and shame the rest.

Nice one from Mark Steyn

Quite a good ride on his favourite hobby-horse in National Review. It seems he is still having difficulty overcoming his incredulity at the moral squalor he observed while living in Britain.

But what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world. Even as their colonies advanced to independence, they retained the English language and English legal system, not to mention cricket and all kinds of other cultural ties. And even in imperial retreat, there is no rational basis for late 20th century Britain’s conclusion that it had no future other than as an outlying province of a centralized Euro nanny state dominated by nations whose political, legal, and cultural traditions are entirely alien to its own. The embrace of such a fate is a psychological condition, not an economic one.

He follows that up with a quotation from Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944), which does appear to answer his question:

There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought. It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.

Foreign Office fellates Arabs again

The Arabomites of King Charles Street have achieved the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat over the use of forged British passports by the Mossad team that killed Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last January.

As Douglas Murray points out, the given reason is that British passport holders have been put at risk because of the hit. Meanwhile the illegal immigrants and confirmed terrorists Abu Qatada, Farj Hassan al-Saadi, and Ismail Kamoka continue to live at public expense in Londonistan. 

Which means that British citizens with Arab names are practically guaranteed an orifice search if they travel outside the EU. The Arabomites need to be reminded that not everyone enjoys that as much as they do.

There is literally nothing that British officialdom will not do to encourage the Arabs to do their banking in London. Help destroy threat to Gulf States by Iraq - check. Largest mosque in the world - check. Sharia law put on a par with Common Law - check.

But above all show submission, for that is what Islam means.

Parliamentary sleaze (Part CCCXXXVIII)

So, a crude sting operation has caught a bunch of leading Blairites offering to sell their services for money. Shock horror. Comparing their asking price with the sums pocketed by their dear departed leader recalls an anecdote featuring George Bernard Shaw. The tale is that he propositioned a society lady with an offer of £1,000 for sex. She coyly agreed, but then he asked if she would do it for £10.

'Certainly not', the lady replied. 'What do you think I am?'

'Ma'am we have already established what you are,' said GBS. 'We are now haggling about the price'.
 
The fact that this was a sting by the left-wingers of Channel 4 and that their targets were all opponents of Gordon Brown should have aroused mainstream media suspicions - that is, if the collective IQ of MSM political journalists ever threatened to reach 100.

Also not reported is which politicians refused the bait - presumably because early unsuccessful approaches to Conservatives led to a party-wide warning.

Whatever the problem is . . .

. . . the cause is global warming.

AFP - More people die from unsafe water than from all forms of violence, including war, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday in a message to mark World Water Day. 'These deaths are an affront to our common humanity, and undermine the efforts of many countries to achieve their development potential,' Ban said as the issue was discussed at a high-level UN General Assembly dialogue. 'Day after day, we pour millions of tons of untreated sewage and industrial and agricultural wastes into the world's water systems,' he said, noting that clean water has become scarce and would be even scarcer as a result of climate change.

Order Command v. Mission Command

Enough time may have elapsed to be able to state the obvious about World War II in the West: the German army regularly kicked the shit out of the Allied armies until overwhelmed by numbers and materiel. Presenting the results of his extensive statistical research in A Genius for War, Trevor Dupuy reached the following unflinching verdict:

On a man for man basis the German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a fifty percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops, under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had local air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.

One reason stands out to explain German combat superiority: Auftragstaktik, known as 'Mission Command' in English. With Auftragstaktik, an objective is identified and the executor has the freedom to achieve it according to his judgement of the circumstances, and the means he can organise to assist him.

In contrast, the British and American armies were wedded to Befehlstaktik – 'Order Command' – in which the executor is told not only what objective he is to achieve, but also how and with what, granting him limited freedom to respond to changing circumstances, and so to develop his own initiative and skill.

Although Befehlstaktik discourages initiative in subordinates, it requires that they should suddenly develop it upon achieving senior rank. Inherently unlikely as that is, the possibility of anyone imaginative reaching a position of authority is further reduced by promotion according to seniority, while conformity is enforced by the dull-witted discriminating against those more favoured by nature – the ‘safe pair of hands’ strangling those judged ‘too clever by half’.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: Britain has been an Order Command society for a long, long time, and the desperate attempts to micro-manage everything by the current regime represents its ultimate expression. The current British disaffection with their political system can be seen as a belated reaction to centuries of being treated with a distrust bordering on contempt by their rulers.

The 'powers that be' have promised far too much, for far too long, until the power they exercise would be beyond their capabilities even if they were the product of a meritocratic selection process. But politicians and senior officials alike are instead selected according to their ability to lie and dissemble, in a claustrophobic environment that rewards a foul mixture of glibness, moral cowardice, sycophancy and well-timed treachery.

The awful, hope-destroying truth is that prolonged submission to arbitrary rule reduces the possibility of responsible behaviour by the ruled. In the remote possibility that Cameron and Co. actually try to devolve power, they will have to possess the conviction to let those to whom power is devolved make objectively harmful decisions, and to do nothing to ameliorate the consequences of those decisions.

It took the German army well over a hundred years to develop away from the extreme Befehlstaktik of Frederick the Great to the Auftragstaktik that made it so formidable in World War II. And the process only began after its crushing defeat by Napoleon at Jena.

I am not sure that even now the British appreciate how greatly Order Command has failed, at every level. Without that realization, I think it impossible that they will kick the habit of dull submission punctuated by futile grumbling.

How the hell did this work?

The Mail today published this pic of a special couch that once graced a luxury brothel in Paris, allegedly built so that the grossly fat future King Edward VII could be serviced by two whores at a time.

Edouard Soixante-Neuf furniture, perhaps? With the soixante and the neuf performed separately?

America's newest secret weapon

As if our native red squirrels didn't have enough trouble with the little gray bastards, now the bloody Yanks are arming them!

Awww!

Obviously a Cheyenne dog soldier . . .

Deja vu

Ever since returning to Britain in 1999, I have observed with mounting exasperation the clearest possible example of how people learn nothing from history. Every marxhorroid policy that once crippled the country has made a come-back, and now we have completed the return to the 1970s with the rump trade union movement making no secret of the fact that it owns the ruling Labour party.

Galling though this is for punters who do not suffer from political Alzheimer's, it is much worse for those like Norman Tebbit who have watched the painful reforms of the 1980s frivolously thrown away. Britain is well on its way to being once more the 'sick man of Europe'. 

Previously, the channeling of tax revenues to the unions had the political cover of maintaining employment in moribund heavy industry. Now, with trade unionism concentrated in the state sector, there is no political cover at all: the entire Labour movement is a closed system kept alive solely by the embezzlement of public funds.

If - and it's a mighty big if - Cameron & Co. have the the moral courage to take them on, the state sector unions are paper tigers. Strikes simply draw attention to how privileged they have become vis-a-vis the wealth producers who pay their salaries, and will affect mainly the wretchedly state-dependent, who vote Labour.

As for British Airways and the railways, I can think of no action more likely to produce a massive turn-out for the Conservatives than the course the Unite and RMT unions have embarked upon. They, also, have forgotten how loathed they became in the 1970s. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it: the first time is tragedy; the second time is farce.

Cheap politicians

Given how shamelessly on the make Blair and his appalling wife were when they inhabited 10 Downing Street, it should come as no surprise that they regarded the office as merely a stepping stone to serious money.

Blair does, however, appear to have made better deals than the German ex-chancellor Schroder, with his relative pittance from Gazprom in return for playing the anti-American card.

We can still beat the Krauts after all. Makes you proud to be British.

On returning to the sceptred isle eleven years ago, I was stunned to find prices in pounds about the same as they had been in dollars in the States, at a time when the exchange rate was about $1.50-£1.00. Can't remember which political bribery scandal was in the news at the time, but the amount involved was so small that I recall commenting that politicians were the only cheap things left in Britain.

Of course they remain cheap, both literally and metaphorically, but as Raedwald points out, that makes them very expensive in terms of what we get for our money. If you can buy one of the three traditional parties for as little as £5 million, individual parliamentary seats are probably cheaper today than they were in days of pocket and rotten boroughs.

Or 'safe seats', as we call them today. At least in the bad old days voters would get a bung or a piss-up out of it. Now all they get is butt-fucked; and they have to pay for the vaseline themselves.

Why can't we do this to Brussels?

This week Governor Freudenthal of Wyoming signed a House Joint Resolution claiming 'sovereignty on behalf of the State of Wyoming and for its citizens under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government or reserved to the people by the Constitution of the United States.'

That's the 'subsidiarity' that our outstanding diplomats failed to enshrine in the EU Constitution - that is if they ever really tried. The basic principle of the EU is government of the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats and for the bureaucrats, and I can't see our Mandarins objecting to that.

The act continues (my italics): 'That this resolution serve as notice and demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, from enacting mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers. The state of Wyoming will not enforce such mandates.'

Freudenthal underlined his signature with the following words: 'For decades we have shared increased frustration dealing with the federal government and its agencies. What started out as a leak in the erosion of state prerogative and independence has today turned into a flood [of] endless regulation and unfunded mandates – the federal government has become far too powerful and intrusive.'

Wyoming joins ten other states that have passed similar resolutions since last year. Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee passed theirs in 2009, and Utah, Alabama, and South Carolina passed resolutions this year.

Works for me: let those who devise rules and regulations without democratic legitimacy enforce them. Oh, they don't have the means? Then why the hell should we obey them?

Hat-tip to Samizdata.net

Wouldn't it be nice if just once . . .

. . . someone on British TV could summon up the moral outrage to speak out like this about the human effluent in Whitehall and Parliament that has completely insulated itself from the consequences of its own corruption and strident incompetence.

Gays in Dutch army . . .

. . . responsible for Bosnian genocide

Thus the report in the Mail on a statement made by retired General Sheehan to the US Congress. It's not quite what he said, but what a headline!

Tsk, tsk. As a military man, he really should know that the Spartans believed that a phalanx that phux together, stays together.

Some of the most testosterone-laden men I have ever met were gay. I mean guys who would shag a rock-pile if they suspected there was a snake underneath. Whenever I hear the Lumberjack song it calls to mind being propositioned earnestly by a very large, hirsute and drunk Canadian, who fortunately passed out.

I suppose Sheehan does have a point about combat traditionally being for men what child-birth is to women - but where did he get the idea that gays are more likely to fail the test than heteros? Rather the opposite, I suspect, given what gays have to endure when they are growing up.

There are a number of attributes that one can fairly associate with male homosexuality, but lack of courage is not one of them.

Nursery rhymes for our time

Read 'em all on the Daily Mash.

Orlando Zapata - In Memoriam

Orlando Zapata, born 15 May 1967, was arrested on December 6, 2002 by the Cuban secret police on charges of lack of respect for authority [desacato], for which he was sentenced to three months in prison.

On March 20, 2003, 13 days after he was freed, he was arrested for participating in a fasting protest organized by the Cuban Assembly to Promote a Civil Society to draw attention to the plight of several other imprisoned civil rights activists. Orlando was again charged with desacato, also public disorder and ‘disobedience’, and sentenced to 36 years in prison.

Even the ‘progressive’ hypocrites who have hijacked Amnesty International felt compelled to recognize him as a prisoner of conscience. In December 2009, Orland began another hunger strike to protest being forced to wear the uniform of a common criminal instead of the white clothing allowed to dissidents, demanding no worse treatment than Fidel Castro received from the dictator Fulgencio Batista when imprisoned after leading a failed armed coup in 1953. After 86 days he died on 23 February 2010.

A young black man persecuted to death for failing to show respect for an oppressive oligarchy of old, white men. Heard anything about it from our ‘progressive’ media?

A monument to the IRA terrorists who entered the Darwin Awards Hall of Fame in 1981 stands in Havana, where it was unveiled by Fidel Castro and that bearded bloke who has made a ton of money by selling out the cause for which the Darwin laureates starved themselves to death. The pictured plaque quotes the following from a typically florid speech by Fidel Castro in 1981:

The obstinacy, intransigence, cruelty and callousness of the British government in the face of the international community over the Irish patriots on hunger strike to death recalls Torquemada and the barbarity of the Inquisition in the depths of the Middle Ages [Renaissance, actually, but what the hell]. Tyrants tremble before men willing to die for their ideas after 60 days of hunger strike. Next to this example, what were the three days of Christ on Calvary, for centuries the symbol of human sacrifice? It is time we put an end to this repugnant atrocity by denunciation and the pressure of the world community!

So, are we going to see a statue of Orlando Zapata on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, with a replica of the plaque on the IRA monument in Havana?

Yeah, right.

The Pretense of Knowledge

Trawling through my collection of quotable quotes, I turned up this one from Hayek's above titled acceptance speech for the 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics:

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm. In the physical sciences there may be little objection to trying to do the impossible; one might even feel that one ought not to discourage the over-confident because their experiments may after all produce some new insights. But in the social field the erroneous belief that the exercise of some power would have beneficial consequences is likely to lead to a new power to coerce other men being conferred on some authority. Even if such power is not in itself bad, its exercise is likely to impede the functioning of those spontaneous ordering forces by which, without understanding them, man is in fact so largely assisted in the pursuit of his aims.

Opportunity cost, by which is meant the possible benefit foregone when options are reduced or even eliminated, is rarely factored into policy decisions. Cost-benefit analysis, even if carried out by an independent body, addresses only part of the problem - although it would, for example, rein in the wilder excesses of the Health and Safety Executive.

More generally, the desire of politicians to be seen to be 'doing something', and of bureaucrats to extend their own power surreptitiously, tramples on the precepts by which most people factor opportunity costs into their lives:

• First, do no harm;
  
• Leave well alone;
• If you're in a hole, stop digging;
• Mind your own damned business.

Public service cuts

Good vid from the Taxpayers' Alliance. Too subtle for the average punter, though.

In the States they call it the 'Washington Monument Gambit'. That is, whenever Congress tries to force the grotesquely bloated Department of the Interior to slim a bit, the first thing the bureaucrats do is close iconic monuments and what they call 'front-line services' in Britain.

The military analogy is peculiarly apt in Britain, which has more generals than infantry battalions, and many more admirals than warships. Ruritania, Ruritania rules the waves . . .

The last thing any bureaucracy will ever do is cut administrative over-manning. It's the nature of the beast. The only way to reduce the state payroll is to abolish whole departments, leaving the rest untouched. There's not much solidarity among parasites.

Unfortunately that would also reduce the offices that can be given to favoured members of whatever faction is in power. So it's not going to happen.

The poverty of our political class

This wicked photograph of the hapless Baroness Ashton accompanied a story in today's Daily Mail about the psycho Cyclops berating her for her poor performance as the new EU Foreign Minister, saying she had 'let Britain down'.

Well no. She has certainly exposed the shortage of talent in the Brown regime, but it is definitely in the British interest that the foreign policy pretensions of the abortion created by the Lisbon Treaty should be thwarted. Appointing someone with little political experience and less charisma seemed to me a Machiavellian coup at the time.

The key question, though, is why these Labour women are all such mingers? The men are not much cop either (think Robin Cook, Charles Clark, etc.). Is there perhaps a genetic link between being, umm, plain and and the 'equality' agenda?

The leftist have negated native intelligence through 'progressive' education, so perhaps we can look forward to the mandated use of the burqa to negate 'lookism'.

That would still leave them with the intractable problem of character, but I'm sure they will come up with something.

There orter be a law

Tim Worstall comments in the Times that the proposed imposition of a lower blood alcohol limit for drivers is regardless of the fact that 'Britain has the lowest number of accidents per million vehicles on the roads of any EU country, except near-roadless Malta'.

Such a law would be to the detriment of our reputation as a law-abiding people, a reputation built on the general agreement that we aren’t scofflaws because we tend not to have laws at which we scoff.

WHAT reputation as a law-abiding people? That went in the 1960s, when one of the most self-policing people in the world woke up to the fact that only mugs obeyed the laws and paid the taxes imposed on them by a self-regarding and self-serving political elite.

That was then. What we have seen more recently is legislation passed according to the low-mid quest for validation of their mediocrity in law, according to the criterion of nosy, sanctimonious neighbours anxious to make everybody else's lives as dull as their own.

We already are a nation of scofflaws - thank God. It's practically the only sign that some spirit still exists in this miserably misgoverned society.

The House of Genders

The Telegraph reports plans to replace the House of Lords with a chamber of three hundred persons (half of them women) elected by proportional representation.

What's proportional about that? Since, as we all know, 'feminine' and 'masculine' are artificial divisions imposed on society by the phallocentric patriarchy, a mandatory three-way split is clearly required to reflect the rich diversity of the New Jerusalem.

Perhaps the homosexual third might be further sub-divided into fems and butches. And obviously there should be seats (sic) reserved for cuprophiles, flagellants, transvestites and bondage devotees.

Although, come to think of it, that would probably increase the proportion of bog-standard heterosexuals in Parliament. The BBC would not approve. Let all tremblingly obey.

Fundamentalism

The source-betrayer Andrew Gilligan has a bleat in today's Telegraph about a post on the Islamist Forum of Europe, part of which reads:

Of course I am still convinced that participation is correct, but my contention is that it should be on our terms, and not on terms set by others. Why allow ourselves to be boxed in by “rules” that are clearly designed to destroy us in this world and the hereafter? These rules are underpinned by the notion of secularism that is followed by immorality and basic deconstruction of the pillars of what a good society should be based on, according to God. This is manifested in almost every Western government’s foreign policy in the guise of spreading democracy. If only they would spread freedom!

Pausing only to note that the British Trade Union Congress once loftily declared that it supported democracy as long as it produced results that were 'moving in the correct direction', we must ask ourselves what is objectionable about the quoted passage?

If you believe that the Qu'ran, or the Bible, is the eternally valid word of God, then if you follow its precepts you are, respectively, a Muslim or a Christian.

If you do not believe that the Qu'ran or the Bible is the eternally valid word of God, then you have no business describing yourself as a Muslim or a Christian, because your religion is built on the sand of what you find expedient or convenient to believe.

I have no problem with Muslims using political means to persuade others that their conservative vision of the world is compelling. After all, the 'progressives' have been doing just that throughout my lifetime, with the social consequences we see all around us.

I also have no problem with killing as many Jihadists as is necessary to persuade them of the folly of seeking to impose their beliefs by force.

Go for that grant, sister!

Amy North, a researcher working on gender, education and global poverty reduction initiatives at the Institute of Education in the University of London, has found that climate change is exacerbating existing gender inequalities, with a devastating effect on the quality of life of poor women and girls.

In Uganda, the food crises associated with climate change have been linked to higher rates of early marriage for girls, as they are exchanged for dowry or bride price. These “famine marriages” – as they are called – not only lead to girls dropping out of school, but also make them vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections and related reproductive complications.

As opposed to the traditional rape by their male relatives, who considerately use condoms?

How contemptible the British police have become

The owner of a restaurant arrested for defending his premises and clients from a gang of young thugs, who are not even admonished. Yeah, I know it's a Daily Mail story - but so what? Does it make the story less true? Or less offensive to any normal person's sense of right and wrong?

Sussex police said Mr Miah should not have tried to apprehend the youths and should have 'observed from a safe distance' before dialling 999. The spokesman said: 'On no account should any attempt at aggression be made as this could easily escalate into violence.'

Umm, excuse me but hadn't the violence already started? And since when is self-defence aggression?

So, we must all be as shamelessly craven as our persons in black, or be arrested for possession of self-respect with intent to exercise it. What's more, from the point of view of the crime statistics, it shows up as one incident, one arrest. Job done.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist

(thank God!) the British journalist.
But, seeing what the brute will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to.



Fascinating to see how team Ally-Mandy has once more got the Brit press bending over and spreading 'em.

Labour's winning team: Widow Twankey and a dry drunk with a history of psychotic breakdown.

No wonder journalists enjoy a popular esteem even lower than politicians.

Brown to apologise for 'inappropriate' treatment of illegal immigrants

Britain is reeling from the discovery of 51 anonymous illegal immigrants who were not granted the appropriate welcome to the British Isles a thousand years ago.

The police said they were saddened by the discovery of the beheaded victims but that it was not their fault. Social Services promised an in-depth review. 'Lessons must be learned', said a spokesperson.

A local who was heard to say they were 'a lot of bloodthirsty Vikings who got what was coming to them' has been arrested and will appear in court to answer charges of racism and hate speech.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is scheduled to broadcast an apology to Norway and Denmark for this further evidence of the deep-seated xenophobia that makes him hate the English so much.

Crusader's Cross

Re-reading the great James Lee Burke's above-titled novel, came across this:

Our undoing is our collective willingness to trust those whom we shouldn't, those who invariably use our best instincts against us.

How very true; yet the statement is preceded by a remarkably optimistic view of humanity:

My experience had been, like George Orwell's, that human beings are possessed of much more courage and self-sacrifice than we give them credit for, and when the final test comes they usually go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. Our moral failure lies in the frailty of our vision and not in our hearts.

Wouldn't it be lovely to think so? My experience, to the contrary, is that courage is like a muscle and withers when not exercised, that self-sacrifice outside the parent-child bond is rare, and that without a well-developed concept of honour there is not a chance in hell of going down with guns blazing rather than submit to degradation.

Our moral failure lies in our collective lack of courage, compounded by denial.

You couldn't invent this

The Bitchy Boys Club site features an article about North American birds shrinking in body mass because of - you guessed it - global warming. One searches in vain for any mention of the fact that the world has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 19th century.

That is fairly standard BBC reporting, as is the placing of non-catastrophist caveats deep within the article, thus:

Whether the trend will cause the birds any long-term consequences is unclear. "In one obvious sense, the consequences are positive," says Dr Buskirk ."That is, as temperatures become warmer, the optimal body size is becoming smaller."

But then comes the inevitable editorial comment seeking to nullify the inconvenient:

However, even though the species appear to be adapting to the new climatic conditions, it could still be that their average "fitness" in evolutionary terms, is going down.

Regrettably, the Bitchy Boys could not get their source to say so.

But more recent ideas [whose?] suggest that animals might actually be responding instead to something else that correlates with temperature, such as the availability of food, or metabolic rate. "It looks like it might take a while before we know," says Dr Buskirk.

Pretty bird pics, though.

Founding Fathers

Illiterate headline

Thus the Daily Mail today:

Body wrapped in carpet found buried under patio of house owned by former associate of Reggie Kray now suffering terminal cancer

From which we may conclude that the wrapped and buried body in question is still alive, and suffering from terminal cancer. Wow, that guy is really shit out of luck.

Tarnished Brass

Much as I would like to join in the stoning of Gordon Brown because British troops went into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan shamefully ill-equipped, the blame lies squarely with the senior military commanders and the historically corrupt Ministry of Defence.

Before turning his guns on the global warming scam on EU Referendum, Richard North blogged the subject comprehensively on Defence of the Realm and in his book Ministry of Defeat. There was plenty of money available, but it was contumaciously ill-spent. It always is.

To anyone with the slightest awareness of the history of MoD procurement, it can come as no surprise that it chooses the more expensive British or European option over far superior US kit, which is also cheaper because of their large production runs.

American manufacturers have been legally constrained in the pay-offs they can make ever since the Lockheed and other scandals a generation ago. Not so European manufacturers and our own 'national champion' BAe, who can always find a place on their boards of directors for senior officers and officials who, before they retired, steered lucrative contracts their way and then insisted on even more lucrative amendments to the original specifications.

I am sure it is a great consolation to those whose sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers and mothers have been maimed or killed that their sacrifice has enabled a number of knighted knaves to enjoy a higher standard of living in retirement than they enjoyed when supposedly serving their country.

P.S. Richard's guide to his own blogging on the subject is here. It is sad that he is giving up on DOTR, but as the Bible says, you cannot kick against the pricks.

No choice now - civil libertarians must vote Tory

Evelyn Waugh wisely commented that it was impossible to vote for any of the factions vying for popular support - you could only vote against the one you despised the most. I genuinely could not decide which of the two main offerings was the more contemptible until today.

Oddly, the scales have been tipped for me not by anything Cameron & Co. have said, but by Home Secretary Alan Johnson, the most likely future leader of the Labour Party and perhaps the least personally repulsive member of the current regime.

As reported by the Telegraph, when launching a new ad campaign that shows a burglar praising Tory policies, Johnson:

. . . claimed the Tory leader was more interested in civil liberties than catching and punishing offenders. He criticised Conservative positions on the DNA database and CCTV cameras and joked that prisoners would be more likely to back the Conservatives if they had the vote.

Would that the first part were true: Cameron's focus groups have shown no great concern for civil liberties among the narrow sector of the electorate he believes will swing the next election, and any emphasis on civil liberties risks empowering David Davies, the man he beat out for the leadership with a great deal of help from his predecessor, Michael 'Dracula' Howard.

However, the new Labour ad and Johnson's statement makes it clear that the present regime regards civil liberties as an obstacle to what they conceive as justice. If the electorate is too stupid to understand the implications of that, then Britons ever ever ever more shall be slaves.

The power of example - not!

Devil's Kitchen alerts me to this fascinating exposition of how, starting in 1984, the New Zealanders got themselves out of the deep, systemic hole they were in. The first step, which really should come as no surprise, was to stop digging. The next was to bring in qualified outsiders - and to cut senior officials right the hell out of the reform process.

It's a heartening story - until your realize that the example was set a generation ago, and that the lectures on which this article is based were given in 2004. The only thing we learn from history is that nobody learns from history.

Denial is not a river in Egypt

A 'foreign affairs analyst' called Nile (sic) Gardiner has a piece in today's Telegraph echoing a Washington Post editorial about Obama screwing the pooch by not being friendlier with America's allies. It includes this gem:

Barack Obama has failed to invest time in cultivating critically important alliances as well as friendships with key strategic partners. One only has to look at the appalling treatment Great Britain has received at the hands of the Obama administration to grasp the scale of the problem.

From which one might conclude, if one were a 'foreign affairs analyst' as opposed to a churnalist, that Obama does not rate Britain as a key strategic partner. Which is fair enough.

Blair committed the Army to take care of Basra in Iraq, where it failed so badly that the Iraqi government demanded it leave the country. Blair also committed the Army to pacify Helmand in Afghanistan and also undertook to eradicate heroin production. Both missions proved far beyond British capability, and US forces have had to make up the deficiency.

But I suspect the main reason why Obama has treated Gordon Brown with barely veiled contempt and Sarkozy with indifference is because they conspired to side-line the Queen during last year's D-Day Commemoration. Two-thirds of the troops who landed on D-Day were subjects of the Queen's father and she is the British Head of State - but what did for Brown and Sarkozy was that Her Maj and Michelle Obama got on like a house on fire during an earlier State visit to Britain.

It was Obama who coldly insisted that the Royal Family should be represented, hence the wincing appearance of Prince Charles at the event. As the picture above shows, Charles did not have the balls to walk alongside the French and US Heads of State, where he belonged as his mother's representative, and fell back towards the two Prime Ministers who were following behind, where protocol required them to be.

It is not Great Britain that has received 'appalling treatment' from Obama. Gordon Brown has indeed been kicked like a leg-humping dog, but I'm willing to bet that if the Queen pays a return visit to Washington, we will see our Head of State welcomed with the utmost respect.

Mob violence is a terrible thing . . .

. . . so it's about time we unleashed it (to paraphrase Mel Brooks' Frankenstein).

Geoffrey Lean proclaims himself 'Britain's longest-serving environmental correspondent, having pioneered reporting on the subject almost 40 years ago'. I wonder if his work has always been as pathetic as this more-than-usually thin catastrophist article in the Telegraph.

How can there be 'permafrost' under a large, dynamic and unfrozen body of water?

The scathing comments following the article suggests that the 'opposite and equal reaction' to the global warming scam is well under way. With luck the juggernaut will now roll back over the unprincipled bastards who have been pushing it.

Leaving obsessive mediocrities like Lean to join the ranks of the other harmless lunatics marching around with banners calling upon us to repent because the end is nigh.

Love the bears!

Lesser parasites to go on strike

Those who did not experience the 60s and 70s may not appreciate that most of the endless series of strikes that took place were the result of competition among the trades unions for membership. They're still at it: read this article and weep. 'Workers' Liberty: for International Working Class Solidarity and Socialism', forsooth.

It is claimed that the public will not understand our taking action. To the extent that this is true, it is because the public has been fed a steady diet of information about the financial arrangements, bonus payments, gold-plated pensions and golden parachutes of senior civil servants. The reality for the vast majority of us is very different. We must all now take action to defend our terms and conditions. All out on Monday 8 and Tuesday 9 March!

So the largest of five - count 'em, five - squabbling unions is to go on strike, against the other four. It must be against them, because it will not affect the rest of us in the slightest.

Surely it is not beyond the competence of even our pathetic politicians to use this pseudo class war within the Apparat to level the Mandarins down.

What 'unsustainable' really means

Mark Steyn is always readable, although seldom profound. This article from a week ago uses Greece as a hook on which to hang a familiar polemic:

Think of Greece as California: every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. . . . The problem is there are never enough of 'the rich' to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick their defense tab to the Americans. And in America, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

The canard about French farmers does not get any more true by repetition. The imbecilities of the Common Agricultural Policy all stem from the original sin of pandering to the economically marginal small farmers of southern Germany; the French have simply taken full advantage of it, as, indeed, has agribusiness in Britain.

The Americans have maintained a meaningful military presence in Europe and in the Far East because they have judged it in their interest to do so. Any contribution from Germany, which was certain to be devastated if World War III broke out, was welcome but not essential. To say that the Germans 'stick their defence tab to the Americans' is demagoguery.

Finally, fertility declines as prosperity increases because the astronomical cost of raising children is no longer off-set by the return of child labour, which is prohibited by law, or to provide for their parents' old age. Societies are rightly judged by how well they treat their young and their old, and it is footling to lament that one of the consequences of doing so is declining fertility.

I deplore Steyn's use of a sawn-off against the welfare state, because the pellets simply bounce off the carapace of the desire of the vast majority for collective solutions to questions of public health, education, insurance against adversity, and provision for old age.

It also dilutes the key point in the passage quoted above, which is that the bureaucracy that necessarily exists to cater to this popular requirement has been permitted, by politicians totally incapable of even seeming to govern without it, to insulate itself from the consequences of its own actions. This is why I do not call it the 'civil service', a double misnomer, but the Apparat.

Until that immunity is lifted, there is no reason for the parasite to feel that its own interest is served by maintaining the health of the host. Nothing else will do. Whole departments must be abolished, all promotions and hirings halted, and separate pension schemes for all elected and unelected officials must be abolished.

And right after that, we can take the family to see the pigs formation-flying around Big Ben.

University subsidies are regressive taxation

James Stanfield's brief article in Times Higher Education on his recently published ASI report The Broken University (download PDF here) tells it like it is. There is no, repeat no empirical evidence that the massification of higher education provides any economic benefit to society.

The subsidy of higher education, of which I was a full beneficiary, is a regressive tax on the less fortunate for the benefit of those already blessed with the advantage of above average intellectual ability, usually nurtured by good parenting and schooling.

It is indefensible. Yet the greatest beneficiaries of the massification of higher education have been the leftists who infest the pseudo-scientific university departments. So, not just tapeworms, but knowingly evil hypocrites as well.

Just another Cnut

French President Sarkozy's attack on EU competition policy sounds so . . . 60s. Despite the French state's determined defence of 'national champions', manufacturing accounts for a smaller amount - by value - of French GNP than it does in Britain.

Of course Sarkozy's song will be music to the ears of the old left dinosaurs in Britain, but the concept of Comparative Advantage remains the sole major economic theorem that has been demonstrated to be true, time and time again, ever since it was first formulated by Ricardo.

Perhaps his courtiers should carry the wee man on his throne to the mud flats of Le Havre to demonstrate how he can hold back the tide.

Left Foot In It

Innured as we all are to the idiocies of the Brit leftists, they still manage to surprise from time to time by their total ignorance of economics, let alone human nature.

This article in Left Foot Forward is based entirely on the lump of labour fallacy, and concludes that although the state-imposed 35-hour week has been something less than a success in France, a 21-hour week in Britain would resolve all our problems at a stroke.

Since that is about the number of hours' work actually performed by most Brits in a 48-hour week, if wages could be adjusted accordingly it might be welcomed by employers. But not, one suspects, by the leftist auto-proctologists.

The warmist gravy train

Richard North' latest post gives details of the astronomical amount of money devoted by state and para-statal organizations to keeping the global warming scam going, which, he concludes:

. . . in equivalent spending is about five times the amount spent on the wartime Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb – then the biggest ever amount spent on one project. It rather puts the spending in perspective, especially as we seem to have very little to show for it, other than a very large number of academics bought and paid-for by the climate change lobby.

Actually, whatever uses the eek!-o-freak phenomenon has been put to subsequently, my research in the early 1990s found that environmentalism's proven ability to generate university funding was always the driver. After massively over-expanding following World War II, the US university system was facing a moment of truth as the vast edifice of aging, tenured mediocrities threatened to collapse of it own weight.

In the face of a decline in the rate of increase in university funding, eek!-o-freakery's ability to generate whole new departments was manna. Added to which, it also permitted academics to recover some of the prestige that had leaked from the sprung seams of their bloated profession.

The tipping point was when the ferociously polluting Soviet Union collapsed, freeing western left-wingers from the awkward living proof of their cognitive dissonance. Global warming became the new Mecca, and the gravy train now has so many on it, there is so much money involved, so many reputations at stake and so many interests served by it, that I strongly doubt whether merely factual refutation can bring a halt to whole disgusting process.

The dead hand of the old state monopolies

Nice post over at Hexus Channel about the apparatchiki's latest excuse for stealing money to give to those who will, in due course, reward them with generous sinecures.

The mainstream media, if they mention it at all, will as usual miss the point: BT has been sheltered from competition ever since it was 'privatised'. This is just one more in the long series of shady deals that has delayed every stage of the nation-wide move to broadband in order to protect BT's market share.

Nationalised industries were backward and inefficient because they were monopolies. From the consumer's POV, privatising a monopoly changes nothing. From the POV of the politicians and officials, however, it has the enormous benefit of permitting them to collect pay-offs for favouring the resulting quasi-monopoly without being held responsible for its performance.

Waddaya mean 'seen as'?

Daniel Finkelstein's article in today's Times contains the following almost perfect paragraph:

The cynicism about politics is so pervasive that it embraces almost all political activity. Use a statistic? It’s a lie. Cry on television about your dead child? It’s an election gimmick. Attack your opponents’ policy? You would say that, wouldn’t you. And this cynicism extends to the media and our coverage. So not only politics, but news about politics, is seen as a fiction inside an untruth wrapped in a piece of spin.

Replace cynicism with 'clear-sightedness', delete almost, and replace seen as with 'recognized to be' and it would be spot-on. But then the rest of the article and, indeed, all political commentary would become superfluous.

Surely, the key point is that the cognitive dissonance of British politics faithfully reflects the society that has made it what it is. Although there were some aspects of the Thatcher anomaly that tested it, as a general rule it is political suicide to hold up a mirror to the electorate.

We have the politicians we deserve: petty even in their corruption, bitchy, and arrogantly ignorant.

The Five Freedoms

Jay's comment on my post about the shoe-bomber opened my eyes to what a free society we really are, now that we have voluntarily surrendered those so-called 'liberties' for which our ancestors fought and died. Instead we have:

1. Freedom from want, no matter how feckless and indolent;
   
2. Freedom from meaningful education or preparation for adulthood;
   
3. Freedom from proportionate punishment for harmful behaviour;
   
4. Freedom from any less comfortable form of self-knowledge;
5. Freedom from early mortality consequent on unhealthy living.

Oh brave new world. Bliss was it in that dawn . . .

An Inconvenient Truth

Forbes has a worthwhile article on the personality of the absurd Al Gore.

On the basis of his actions and writings over many years my guess is Gore suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The criteria for this diagnosis, as described in the psychiatrist's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, include a "pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts."

The author goes on to cite the many ways in which the diagnosis fits Gore's behaviour. And yes, it was all there in his 1993 book Earth in the Balance. In fact it was staggeringly apparent.

The really interesting story is not whether a man who claimed to be the inspiration of the mawkish Love Story, and to have invented the Internet, is a narcissistic fantasist, but how a sufficient number of influential people decided he was a useful fool they could exploit, and created the great global warming scam.

The (British) shoe-bomber

The judge who condemned Reid, the Brit jihadist who failed to blow up an aircraft with explosives in his shoe, to spend the rest of his worthless life in prison, included the following comment in his sentencing homily:

It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose.

That just makes Reid a bog-standard Brit leftist. Thanatic Islamism provided the final push into action, but it fell on the ground ploughed by demeaned entitlement, fertilised by 'progressive' education, and seeded by the BBC.