Quemado

When someone is shit out of luck, the Spanish say he is quemado (burned).

The term springs to mind when considering the case of a car which crashed into a bus shelter yards from where Gordon Brown, fresh from yesterday's 'bigot' incident, was launching a new Labour Party poster in a car park in Hockley, Birmingham.

It gets better: the car was nudged into the bus shelter by a garbage truck, whose occupants were shouting abuse at the poster launch party instead of looking where they were going.

The Prime Minister carried on with his speech at the event, aimed at re-energising his campaign in the final week of the election, as emergency services raced to the scene.

In less 'progressive' times such a malignantly apposite augury would have been taken as indisputable proof of divine disapproval. You have to wonder how the man even dares to get out of bed in the morning.

A great deal of ruin in a nation

Looking back on my previous posts about this election, I am struck by how blown about a floating voter such as myself can be in a relatively short time.

One constant has been contemptuous rejection of the envious levelling that Labour, Old and Nu, stands for. Apart from their consistently uncompromising record on civil liberties, the Lib Dems are the exemplars of the traditional British inability/refusal to think things through. The NuTories simply do not convince me that they have the strength of character to weather the shit-storm of opposition at every level of government that the entrenched Labour activists will unleash on them. 

What does appear to be undeniable is that the vast increases in deficit spending on the state sector since 2002 has created a situation where a return to the status quo ante Brown is politically impossible.Yet it must come about, because there is not the slightest chance in hell that the economy will grow fast enough to generate the revenues to close the deficit.

The most likely outcome remains a repeat of the sordid 1970s, but it will take crisis after crisis for public opinion to reach the point where it no longer hopes for easy solutions. In 1782, on receipt of a letter in which his correspondent wrote: 'If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined', Adam Smith replied: 'Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation'.

So there is, and so we shall certainly experience over the coming decades during which Britain will continue along the path towards ever-higher costs and ever-lower quality of life. 

Only in Britain

A judge at Manchester Crown Court has overturned a sentence of electronic tagging imposed on a 66-year old petshop owner, and a sentence of 120 hour community service imposed on her son, by Trafford magistrates.

Her offence? Selling a goldfish to a tall 15-year old, when the legal age for goldfish purchase is 16.

Judge Adrian Smith said that the tagging of a 'respectable lady with no previous convictions' had been 'inappropriate'. God, how sick of that mealy-mouthed word I am!

The sting (the boy was sent in by agents of the trading standards quango) that started this whole ball rolling was a classic example of bureaucratic petty Hitlerism, the fact that it went to the Magistrates Court was a staggering waste of judicial resources, and the sentences were a travesty.

I'm more than ever convinced that the only way out of this is to make individual bureaucrats pay a personal penalty for their abuse of authority. If the law won't do it, then maybe citizens should make their disapproval felt by direct action.

Twitter

Never was a communications facility better named. It seems to be the preserve of people who have advanced to, but not progressed beyond, the development stage of teenage narcissism. Hence it appears to be dominated by media pukes, politicians and male homosexuals. 

James Delingpole writes about a twitter-storm aroused by his earlier comment that saying homosexuals were not 'normal' could hardly be classified as hate speech.

If you think I feel even slightly embarrassed or ashamed by what I said you are much mistaken. In fact, your shrill, hysterical attempts to use Twitter as your bully pulpit only serves to prove my point and make me despise you more. Not because you are gay, obviously, but because you are such pathetic libtards wallowing in the stew of your own perceived victimhood and perpetuating exactly the kind of politically correct climate which undermines the very cause you are trying to promote.

To wit, tolerance for ethnic 'communities' where hatred of homosexuals is not only preached but practised.

Homosexual men – not all of them, just the victimy libtard ones – are now becoming victims of the climate that they helped create. I’m not saying “serves them right”. I wouldn’t wish on anyone the persecution they’re suffering at the hands of certain other minority groups. My point is simply that playing the oppressed minority card is doing them no good at all. It’s been trumped by that of another minority. These whingers need to grow up, face the facts and understand which are the real battles to be fought and which just a silly, counterproductive distraction.

Indeed. But male homosexuals are very far from being the only group that needs to examine the chasmic fault-lines that have opened in the 'progressive' belief system. They are, however, arguably the group that should least wish to draw attention to the exceptionally privileged status they currently enjoy of being free to stigmatise anybody who offers less than unconditional support while being themselves beyond criticism.

UKIP

I have watched few of the party political broadcasts - mainly the fringe ones, which are fun. But more by accident than design I did watch last night's UKIP broadcast. I thought it was well presented, and that Pearson and Farage came over as likeable; but beyond that, I was surprised to find that it addressed every single issue that I believe worries the general public, but which the major parties adamantly refuse to discuss.

Can you have unlimited immigration while preserving a comprehensive and free at the point of issue Welfare State? Clearly - if you care about the welfare of your citizens - you cannot, especially at a time when fiscal imperatives make it necessary to cut services drastically. Can you continue to insist that Britain's future lies in the EU, when it adds only costs and regulatory burdens to Britain's struggling economy? Clearly - if you care about the prosperity of your citizens - you cannot. Does a complicated tax code serve social justice? Absolutely not - it serves only those who can afford accountants and can structure their income to minimise tax. Does it at least maximise tax revenues? Very far from it - simple tax codes have increased revenues wherever in the world they have been adopted.

And so on. Yet the mainstream media and most of the blogosphere alike dismiss this party, which came second in the last elections to the European parliament, as an irrelevance. In a functional two-party system, where real issues divide the factions competing to spend public money, one or the other of the main parties would have moved to co-opt its supporters.

But that is not what we have. Instead we have two bunches of gadflies skating on the thinning miniscus of credibility lying over a deep pond of totally unrepresented popular sentiment. As an historian I am only too well aware that oligarchies can perpetuate their hold on power almost indefinitely - but they normally do so by not letting the gulf between their sectional self-interest and the general welfare become too great.

I wonder if our ruling oligarchy may not have finally over-reached itself. The proof may lie in a substantial vote for UKIP in the coming election, to which I shall contribute.

Crystalisation

So, the Psycho Cyclops has actually let a microphone capture what he really thinks of a core Labour voter. Big deal, you may say - it's been obvious for decades that the leaders of the Labour Party fear and despise the proles as only the lower middle class can.

Obvious to whom, though? Clearly not to the life-long Labour voter who asked him what he was going to do about the vast deficit he has run up, and the intolerable strain his policy of unlimited immigration has put on the sacred Welfare State.

Brown's foot-in-mouth moment may be one of those unpredictable events, akin to minerals in solution crystalising, which provide the seed around which previously free-floating doubts begin to take solid form. 

Think of the expenses scandal: most people were dimly aware that politicians, in general, are distinguished from criminals only by their lack of the minimum courage required to rob the helpless openly. Yet it took the revelation not so much of their systematic dishonesty but of the pettiness of their cheating to crystalise that general awareness into the open contempt that they had long deserved.

It is a strange phenomenon. In this case, I pray that it will break the Labour pukes' apparently unshakable hold over the quarter of the electorate that they have most systematically betrayed.

Screw the Defence Review

Official inquiries are the tired old mechanisms employed by British politicians and officials to buy time for the heat to go out of whatever issue they are supposed to address - with a side order of easy money for those appointed to direct the inquiries. The reductio ad absurdum is the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which has poured untold millions into shysters' pockets while ensuring that its final report will be utterly irrelevant to the changed circumstances in Northern Ireland.

Spending reviews perform much the same function. Currently all discussion of defence matters is being kicked into touch pending an eventual spending review, despite - or rather because - the deficiencies in the armed forces are scandalously the product of systemic dysfunction and corruption at the highest levels. One such is the inhuman treatment of those actually doing the fighting, who are grossly underpaid, return to sub-standard housing and, if crippled, to shockingly inadequate medical care. Once they leave the army, ex-soldiers are on their own.

Contrast this with the example of the USA, where bipartisan support has brought about the greatest improvement in the Veterans Administration (VA) since the GI Bill. As The Washington Times reports:

All sides agree the President Obama has made big strides on promises he made in 2008 when competing for military votes against Republican nominee and Vietnam veteran Sen. John McCain - to fully fund the Veterans Administration, expand access to care in rural areas and improve treatment for mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. 'The accessibility with this administration has been outstanding. They listen, they reach out to the veterans' service organizations, they see the value in communicating,' says Peter Gaytan, executive director of the American Legion, the nation's largest veterans' organization, with 2.5 million members. 

The VA has been a stench in the nostrils of America for some considerable time. That US politicians, in the midst of a highly partisan struggle over health care and, now, immigration, have quietly moved to give priority to the needs of those who have risked all for their country, speaks of a residual sense of decency.

Not so in Britain, whose ex-soldiers would fall to their knees in thanks if they could only have the level of support their American peers received from the VA at its worst. It's not the only example of the basic shabbiness of British society, but it may be the most rank.

The eventual Defence Review will concern itself primarily with big-ticket procurement items because those are the ones ministers and senior officials can ride to generous pay-offs when they retire. There is no money for the self-styled great and good in looking after those used up in the wars to which they were sent underfunded, ill-equipped and badly led.

Many things have changed over the last century, but the essential meanness of the British state towards its soldiers remains the same as when Kipling wrote:

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

False Flag political spam

The Lib Dems have just emailed me some propaganda posing as a circular from U-Switch. My spam filter caught it, but I opened it anyway to find out WTH.

U-Switch is a valuable resource, and quite apart from being a possibly actionable misrepresentation, the Lib Dems' false flag approach commits the unpardonable English crime of being 'too clever' - and not 'by half' either.

Lloyd Blair

Among my many misreadings of how the collective English mind expresses itself through elections was to suppose that Boris Johnson, with his carefully cultivated image as an amiable oaf, could not overcome the corrupt machine created by leftist media darling Livingstone in London.

Chastened by the electorate's verdict, I have since then paid much closer attention to what Boris does and says than to how he presents himself. While it may be that he is whistling in the wind, his article in today's Telegraph has caused me to reconsider whether the Tories are quite as stupid as they often seem.

But look at what is happening to Labour! Look at the all-conquering party of Tony Blair. Look at the great humming, purring spin machine that propelled the People's Party to three election victories and humiliated a succession of Tory leaders. They are doing worse than they did under Kinnock. They are down to levels not seen since Michael Foot appeared in his donkey jacket; and with Harriet Harman's teeth locked in Mandy's throat we are beginning to detect the gurgling sound of meltdown.

Taking the broader view, arguably both the main parties have tried to muscle in on Lib Dem territory, and it may be that the bigger loser from that strategy may, after all, be Labour. The NuLabour pukes have alienated their core supporters far more than Cameron's NuTories have their own, who genuinely have nowhere else to go.

The old Labour Party rose to dominance at the expense of the old Liberal Party, whose moral authority was destroyed after it was hijacked by the completely unprincipled Lloyd George from the incompetent alcoholic Asquith. Lloyd George is the scumbag whose statue now adorns Parliament Square - courtesy of Blair, whose own career bears more than a passing resemblance to the Welsh Wizard's.

If the electorate, unnoticed by the media, has drawn the correct conclusion from Blair becoming ostentatiously wealthy as a direct result of the wars into which he pitched the country unprepared, and waged with criminal incompetence, his effect on the party he made over in his own image may well be akin to what Asquith and Lloyd George did to the party of Gladstone.  

The corruption of the Roman Catholic church

Guest post by Kinsla

When you are looking for the key word regarding the Roman Church's recent difficulties in the US, Ireland, and now Austria (et al), the one to focus on is not 'Celibacy,' but rather 'Docility'. Back in 1910 or so, there was much concern in the Vatican about RC clergy in the US becoming too 'liberal'; this is when the phantom heresy of 'Americanism' was first bruited about. It was decided to institute a system of delators (informers) in the US seminaries in order to keep an eye on students who might become too independent minded, in order to prefer those who appeared 'docile' enough always to orient themselves about the official party line.

The more intelligent of the latter were sent on to Rome for study at the North American College for Priests or at the Gregorianum where their nascent personal 'formations' were given some Romanità for polish and they could begin to understand how the career game was to be played by those who most stood to benefit from it. No doubt this same policy was applied in Ireland, England, etc. and it resulted in a self-perpetuating policy of recruitment which emphasized qualities found in immature and passive individuals with a certain requisite level of intelligence, though not a lot of emotional understanding of others.

As the Jesuit historian Monsignor John Tracy Ellis noted, it was not until after the Second World War that there were any Catholic bishops in the United States either of whose parents had received any higher education. This deliberate 'dumbing down' of the Catholic clergy had an unintended by-product: the development of a culture of passive-aggressive individuals who were adept at cloaking their victimization of younger or weaker persons with apparent obedience to their superiors.

Since the superiors were cut from somewhat of the same cloth, they had an inherent blind spot to this growing sub-culture of abuse and molestation, and indeed were inclined to think it only an occasional 'lapse', or perhaps something which they themselves had once been tempted by or even indulged in. Hence it was not made much of, and was hushed up, overlooked, and generally treated as something amenable to a little 'therapy' or by moving a priest to another parish.

Celibacy has almost nothing to do with all this except that it serves as an excellent shelter and breeding ground for people of this immature passive-aggressive bent. If you look at pictures of groups of diocesan clergy in the US Roman Church you commonly view pictures of large, overfed men who have been taken care of for all of their adult lives in a very protected environment, often by indulgent female housekeepers and parishioners. Given the semi-magical view of the priesthood happily embraced by members of that fraternity, it comes as no great surprise to discover that many of them felt that their own behaviour was above the moral laws which they taught to their congregations.

That which ye sow is that also which ye shall reap. The Roman Church is not founded upon that 'rock' which was the faith of St.Peter, it is founded upon a legal system based on the Emperor Justinian's codex and administered by an Italian version of the original predatory Byzantine eunuchs.

And its aim is Imperium, not salvation.

The death-spiral of learning

The Mail features an article on 'Ten of the greatest battlefield tactic' by Rob Johnson, who it seems is a lecturer in the History of War at Oxford. The article is a puff for How to Win on the Battlefield, a book he has co-authored with John France, another obscure academic, and Michael Whitby, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick.

If the article is a fair trailer, the book is superficial, churnalistic drivel and one can only speculate how on earth it got published. From a parochial military historian's point of view, what galls me is that it should have been written by a trio of academics with the time and resources to have written something intellectually challenging, had their aspirations run to it.

It may be, however, that they are simply banal individuals who could not have written anything better. We do appear to have reached a point where the only stretching of the intellect across the entire bloated educational sector is at the primary level. Possibly this is because those drawn to teaching are themselves so narrow-minded and possessed of so little learning that they can only engage the interest of small children.

Now that teachers are either afraid of being seen as 'elitist' (the few), or are themselves no longer educated people (the majority), it seems a strong possibility that the formal transmission of learning and culture across the generations may have entered a final death-spiral. What will take its place is hard to predict, but it is already quite evident that its social effect is to reinforce the already immense advantages of birth.

Cock-chafers

This is the cockchafer. You spend years getting your lawn just right and then this nasty little bug comes along, lays eggs all over it, and its disgusting larvae turn the whole thing into a wasteland.

The analogy with the Labour party and all the parasites it has inflicted on Britain is so exact that I hope the name will stick.

Plus it has a nice Shakespearian ring to it, making it an elegant alternative to the more usual epithet.

Feedback from deforestation

The scumbag speaks

Writing in The New York Times, Mr Sleaze, Bill Clinton, has added fuel to the flames of partisanship by linking today's protests against the aggressive statism of the Obama administration with the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing:

We should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them. On that April 19, the second anniversary of the assault of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, deeply alienated and disconnected Americans decided murder was a blow for liberty.

Nice bit of spin there. That would be the massacre of the Branch Davidians, with concealed sharpshooters firing at them when they tried to escape the building the FBI had set on fire. And that would be the bombing in which the active role of an FBI agent provocateur was very carefully never investigated, nor the interesting coincidence that FBI personnel were all absent from the Harrah building when McVeigh blew it up.

Not a scab I would have thought the scumbag should be picking. He is, and always was, an evil man, and one of the saddest things about contemporary Britain is that Blair and his followers consciously modelled 'New' Labour on Clinton's example.

Eeek!-o-freak ponders a misspent life

Good review in City of Stewart Brand’s new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.This is the guy who founded the Whole Earth Catalog, holy writ for eeek!-o-freak fundamentalists, and ran it for 16 years. Brand has finally woken up to some aspects of the immense harm done by his pseudo-religion, with specific reference to nuclear power and genetically engineered crops. While not quite a mea culpa, Brand's book admits to systemic error in his own personality, which is a good start:

I have learned to suspect my excesses of optimism and pessimism. Apparently I often think that societies catch on faster than they do, and that large complex systems are more brittle than they are. Bear in mind that I might be that way about climate change. And many of my faulty opinions turn out to be based on ignorance; dismissing nuclear was one of them.

The weasel-word 'apparently' apart, this demonstrates more intelligent sincerity than one is accustomed to from the acolytes of eeek!-o-freakery. What has brought Brand to this moment of self-awareness is the flagrant contradiction between belief in the global threat posed by carbon dioxide, in which he still believes, and other fundamental components of 'green' dogma:

I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.

There's no 'daresay' about it. With just a little more intellectual integrity, he might have had to recognize that turning massive quantities of basic foodstuffs into 'bio-fuel' as a gesture towards preventing a speculative catastrophic climate change in the distant future has had a catastrophic effect on the world's poorest here and now.

But then, that would be to admit that he has been agent of evil for all of his life, and according to the logic of his beliefs he should set an example to an over-crowded world by turning his carbon-dioxide producing carcass into organic humus.

Putting UK political corruption in perspective

The 'Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians in 2009' published by Judicial Watch, a US public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, makes it clear that Britain has a long way to go before it can claim to be as 'exceptional' as the home of the brave and the land of the free.

The report quotes columnist George Will's verdict that 'the [Obama] administration's central activity - the political allocation of wealth and opportunity - is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.' Fair enough, but that's been the case for a long time.

The late Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski, most famous as the author of the still highly relevant Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), observed in Parasitism and Subversion: the Case of Latin America (1966) that the most important factor explaining why Anglo-America was prosperous and Latin America indigent was that in the former the main avenue to wealth was business, while in the latter it was politics.

Capitalism tends toward a productive orientation when the capitalist entrepreneurs can neither use coercion for the purpose of parasitic exploitation, nor are so devoid of strength as to be exposed to exploitation themselves - in other words, when businessmen are too weak to prey upon the other classes, but too strong to be preyed upon. Such a situation requires a certain degree of balance of power between the business elite and the political elite. An important application of the principle is that capitalism can function beneficently only in a society where money cannot buy everything, because if it can, then the power of wealth can have no counterweight and a parasitic involution ensues.

Things are far from so clear cut in the United States today - and of course even less so in the EU - while Chile has become the exception that proves the rule in Latin America.

For many years I alternated between periods in Latin America and in Britain. On return to Britain I was always struck by the decreasing number of differences. Britain now has many cultural similarities to a Third World country - and has been de-developing economically for decades. Given its penchant for doing things big, the United States may well overtake us on the way down as fast as it did on the way up.   

Celestial surveillance

NASA's Hubble telescope has found evidence that something damned big has its eye on us, and appears to be displeased.

I knew it!

Following hot on the heels of claims by Icelandic scientists seeking a piece of the pie that global warming will cause more volcanoes to erupt, we now learn from no less an authority than the Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi that earthquakes are caused by saucy women tempting innocent young men.

Always suspected that might be the case - except I thought it was hurricanes.

Maybe all the global warmist female activists can now do the planet a favour by donning a full-length multicultural bag with eye-holes.

Papered-over cracks are still cracks

Gerald Warner's broadside in today's Telegraph about the 'Potemkin Village of Vichy Toryism' (lovely mixed metaphor!) created by the Cameron clique is a great rant, but ignores the political realities.

Cameron took over a party baffled by repeated defeats at the hands of a transparently mendacious shyster, and seemingly doomed to being the regional party of southern and rural England. It was, and still is, a party deeply riven by the issue of the EU, further poisoned by the Europhile coup d'état against its most successful leader of modern times. The whole business of changing its image as 'the nasty party' was always code for finding an alternative to the principled bluntness of Margaret Thatcher.

Thatcher dragged the British horse to water, but the nag hated being forced to look at its true reflection and refused to drink. Since it is the business of political parties to get elected, Cameron had to devise some means of getting back on the horse without asking it to change in any meaningful way. Hence the 'Big Society' theme, an anemic echo of the robust challenge thrown down by Thatcher, to which the society as a whole resolutely refused to rise. 

Cameron's support in the country began its sharp decline from the time he went back on his 'cast iron' guarantee of a plebiscite on the Lisbon Treaty, revealing that it had never been more than posturing in the expectation that ratification would give him a way out. It was frivolous to have given that hostage to fortune in the first place - if he had ever carried it out, it would have split his party.

So: how do you, 'nicely', overcome the enormous electoral hurdle erected by Labour gerrymandering, bribery and fraud? You can't. How do you tap into the well of anti-EU sentiment in the country without splitting your party? You can't. How do you oppose mass immigration without alienating big business donors? You can't. How do you embrace a 'progressive' social agenda and retain the loyalty of traditionalists? You can't. How, finally, can you persuade a sluttish nation that hard work, thrift and self-restraint are desirable? You can't. 

In sum, Warner is right: Cameron has erected a Potemkin Village, and it seems to be collapsing. But Prince Potemkin's subterfuge was designed to show development where there was none. In Cameron's case, it has been an attempt to conceal structural flaws in his party that would have caused it to crumble anyway under the weight of office.

Oddly, therefore, the principal casualty - after the nation - of the most politically dishonest, personally corrupt and economically disastrous government in British history may be the credibility of the main opposition party, whose internal contradictions make it incapable of offering a convincing alternative.

Bendy bus

Civil liberties

A while ago, when it seemed the election would be the usual two-horse race, I quoted a sneering remark about civil liberties by Home Secretary Alan Johnson as a powerful argument to hold your nose and vote for the Tories.

Until last week's presidential debate presentations by prospective prime ministers, I had no reason to consider the Lib Dems as a viable alternative. Now, in the light of the increased likelihood of a hung parliament with the Lib Dems holding the balance of power, I have belatedly had a look at their record.

The minuses are that they are almost uncritically pro-EU, and totally convinced by the man-made global warming scam. On the plus side, they are sound on the Trident boondoggle and the pathetic pretension to 'sitting at the high table' that lies behind it.  

But above all they have a very strong record on civil liberties, as illustrated in this useful site. MPs are ranked by how they voted on ten crucial issues:

• ID Cards (2005); 
• Renewal (2009) of the Control Orders provision of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; 
• the attempt to conceal details of MPs' expenses (2007); 
• the unilateral Extradition Act of 2003; 
• Retention of the DNA of the innocent by the state (2010; 
• 90 day detention without charges, essentially the abolition of Habeas Corpus (2005); 
• Abolition of the right to trial by jury (2007); 
• Religious and Racial Hatred Bill, a drastic curtailment of freedom of speech (2005); 
• Government power to suspend coroners' investigations and inquests (2009).

The Labour pukes unsurprisingly monopolize the authoritarian end of the table, but on the principle of deeds, not words, the solid Lib Dem vote against all of the above makes them the party to vote for if you give a damn about civil liberties. 

Hey, maybe I've been unduly gloomy about these elections. If the Lib Dems do hold the balance of power, and if they do make electoral reform the sine qua non of joining either of the other factions, thereby consolidating their power, it may do more for the recovery of historic liberties than any other possible outcome.  

Big 'ifs', I know. They've been made fools of by Labour before, but this time they may attract voters from both the other parties, which would give them a very strong hand. Let's see how they cope with the shit-storm that is about to break over their head now that it's been poked it above the parapet.

Hoist by their own petard

If the post-debate bounce for the Liberal Democrats persists, history will record one more entry in the long list of reasons to describe the Conservatives as 'the stupid party'.

When the Cameron clique set out to re-brand their faction as akin to the 'nice' Liberal Democrats but more electable, they appear not to have considered the possibility that the electability issue could become fungible. The potential for it increased sharply as soon as the Lib Dem leader was given equal billing in the TV debate, and it came sharply into focus when (so all and sundry appear to agree) Clegg out-pointed his rivals. 

It may be that the crucial competition in these elections is now for the 'None of the above' vote. UKIP seemed to it sewed up with this great poster, but that was never going to appeal to the frightened lowmids, who value respectability above all other considerations.

By showing a toughness nobody suspected him of possessing - and which is, indeed, underlined by the photo of him on the UKIP poster - Clegg may have broken the game open.

Brown, who it seems spent much of the debate agreeing with Clegg, clearly believes that the Lib Dems can only gain at the expense of the Tories, which will leave Labour as the largest party. 

Whether that calculation proves correct or not, it certainly shows more political acumen than the Tories displayed in trying to recast themselves as Lib Dems. Pathetically inadequate though the latter have been during my lifetime, the one thing they are good at is being Lib Dems.

By trying, and failing, to steal Lib Dem clothing, it may be that the Tories have drawn fatal attention to their own ideological nakedness.

Essay topic

The welfare state diminishes personal responsibility; diminished personal responsibility creates a debased and feral underclass.

Moral relativism denies common standards of civilised behaviour; no culture can survive without common standards of civilised behaviour.

Multiculturalism encourages intellectual dishonesty to flourish; intellectual dishonesty makes it impossible to admit error or to learn from experience.

Systematic euphemism (political correctness) substitutes form for substance; an emphasis on form over substance is the defining characteristic of stagnant societies.

The consequences of all the above have achieved critical mass in modern Britain.

DISCUSS

The perfect candidate

Since it seems we have to choose among whatever the rear ends of facades are called, let's go for an extravagantly decorative one.

Sham Liberty

I must be a masochist. Having switched off the faction leaders' brain-deadening presentations, I later watched part of 'Question Time', a programme chaired by one of the Dimblebys, the royal family of BBC TV, in which a panel of public or semi-public persons answers questions from an audience carefully selected to exclude anyone with above-average intelligence, from a pool already self-selected from among those who do not have a life.

The other panellists included the Labour dauphin aptly named Balls, UK Independence Party Euro-MP Nigel Farrage - who was oddly muted - and the Tory Shadow Education Secretary Michael Gove. Then there was the gamine Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, a charity that says it is devoted to 'Protecting Civil Liberties' and 'Promoting Human Rights'. In fact, under Chakrabarti, it has become the leading advocate of unchecked immigration by those seeking to improve their economic lot without discarding the cultural deformations that made their country of origin a shit-hole, with an understandable bias in favour of those, like her parents, from the Indian sub-continent.

So, what did this champion of liberty have to say about the Tories' manifesto commitment to devolution? A bad idea, she said, because maybe somewhere British National Party members might form a majority. In the context, she was supporting the Labour Party view that only an omni-present central government could produce the 'right' results.

That's the Labour party that has abolished habeas corpus, the foundation-stone of civil liberties, eroded the right to trial by jury, permitted the privileged to prevent the exercise of freedom of speech and has presided over the most corrupt administration since Lloyd George's post-Great War government.

Nice one, Shami.

Gove just managed to get out a comment that the Tory policy was designed precisely to diminish the power of the self-annointed like Chakrabarti before Dimbleby cut him off. Not a matter for discussion old chap. Musn't break ranks in the presence of the plebs.

All in all, an encapsulation of all that makes British politics so contemptible, and British society such an oxymoron.

Sigh

I was determined to watch the debate but switched to 'Have I Got News For You' after half an hour.

They simply don't get it, do they? The clearest message they ALL sent with their 'Dave' and 'Nick' and 'Gordon' is that they are members of an exclusive club, with infinitely more in common with each other than with those whose votes they are soliciting.

Clegg has weak eyes, Brown can't sustain the Olympian image he aspires to, and Cameron is so concerned with being 'nice' that he comes over unformed. Already knew that. Who gives a shit?

Freedom and liberty

A typically astute post by Dr Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) in the City Journal on the subject of that homosexual couple complaining to the police because they were refused accommodation at a B&B run by evangelical Christians, and the absurd over-reaction by the British press to the Tories' Chris Grayling's comment that the law as it stands is tyrannical.

Homosexual freedom trumping religious freedom. I wonder how that will play in the Labour Party's Muslim pocket boroughs?

Daniels comments that 'the depressing, and perhaps sinister, aspect of the public commentary on the case is how largely it has ignored the question of freedom. For liberals, it seems, any trampling on freedom or individual conscience is now justified if it conduces to an end of which they approve. Thus liberalism turns into its opposite, illiberalism'.

Indeed - that's why we MUST stop describing these totalitarian turds as 'liberals'.

Bêtes noires combined

Over the past few years I have been accused by my nearest and dearest of being obsessed with:

• the global warming scam, and
• the 'progressive' agenda of the BBC

Fair enough. I am also 'obsessed' with civil liberties, the corruption inherent in statism, ahistoricity, the collapse of standards in education, bad writing and above all the arrogant ignorance of those who pose as public intellectuals, particularly in Britain.

But the Bitchy Boys have once again inflated a balloon (hat-tip to ShaunB) to try to lift their treasured global warming religion out of the mud into which it has been driven by its flagrant internal contradictions and the malpractice of the scientists who hitched a ride on it. So I can't resist popping it. Here's the lead (my italics):

The UK and continental Europe could be gripped by more frequent cold winters in the future as a result of low solar activity, say researchers. They identified a link between fewer sunspots and atmospheric conditions that "block" warm, westerly winds reaching Europe during winter months.
But they added that the phenomenon only affected a limited region and would not alter the overall global warming trend.

The article then goes on to announce, sound of trumpets, that the UK Met Office is 'working on research into incorporating better representation of the stratosphere into our seasonal and decadal forecasting models'. Seems to me that they are guilty of gross professional negligence for having previously dismissed the effects of solar activity and jet streams on climate, but what do I know?

Only this (courtesy of Watts Up With That): in 1810, the English astronomer William Herschel established a link between sunspot activity and the price of grain in Europe - an unimpeachable proxy for climate. So, the Met is only now coming round to examining a 200 year-old hypothesis that has never been refuted.

The authority for the significant effect of solar activity on climate cited by the Bitchy Boys is Professor of Space Environment Physics Michael Lockwood of the University of Reading. This is the same 'authority' cited by the Bitchy Boys on 10 July 2007 for dismissing the effect of solar activity on climate. 'This should settle the debate', Lockwood stated.

The only debates that remain to be settled are how the product of departments such as Lockwood's, which are outgrowths of the global warming funding cornucopia, can be legitimately cited as 'science' at all. And why the hell we should all be paying a poll tax to keep the propagandizing Bitchy Boys in the totally unmerited luxury to which they have become accustomed.

New virus alert

ASI warns of a new and very damaging virus posing as a political questionnaire.

Heads up, folks: if you receive anything marked 'Manifesto', bin it immediately.

Email subscription gadget

I have just learned that if you attempt to use the Email Subscription gadget I had on the blog, it downloads a ton of extraneous crap to your computer (not damaging, but intrusive), so I have removed it.

My sincere apologies to anyone who signed up. I will be less trusting of the gadgets offered by Google in future.

Wordles

These are quite cute: pictograms showing the incidence of given words in the party manifestos.

Labour

Conservative

Whatever the problem is . . .

. . . man-made global warming is the cause. Warmlist has an alphabetical compendium of hundreds of links that support the contention. The following are the Es:

Earth axis tilt, Earth biodiversity crisis, Earth dying, Earth even hotter, Earth light dimming, Earth lopsided, Earth melting, Earth morbid fever, Earth on fast track, Earth past point of no return, Earth slowing down,  Earth spins faster, Earth to explode, earth upside down,  earthquakes, earthquakes redux, El Niño intensification, end of the world as we know it, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, English villages lost, equality threatened, Europe simultaneously baking and freezing,  eutrophication, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (human, civilisation, koalas,  logic, Inuit, smallest butterfly, cod,  penguins, pikas, polar bears,   possums,  walrus,  tigers,  toads, turtles, plants, ladybirds, rhinoceros, salmon, trout,  wild flowers, woodlice,  a million species, half of all animal and plant species, mountain species,  not polar bears, barrier reef, leaches, salamanders, tropical insects), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California,

As others see us

The following is cited by Right Wing News, a US blog, as an example of what America can expect if it continues to follow Pied Piper Obama. The author is strangely unaware that the same phenomenon is already very well established in the USA, where fast-breeding 'welfare queens' have long been the staple of tabloid reporting. I suppose the author thinks the example is more remarkable because the fertile couple are white.  

The Davey family's £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits. Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot. With an eighth child on the way, they are demanding a bigger house, courtesy of the taxpayer.

'It's really hard,' said Mrs Davey, 29, who is seven months pregnant. 'We can't afford holidays and I don't want my kids living on a council estate and struggling like I have'. Mrs Davey has never had a full-time job while her 35-year-old husband gave up his post in administration nine years ago after realising they would be better off living off the state.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flat screen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer - not to mention four mobile phones. With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seat minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes.

But according to the Daveys they have nothing to be thankful for. 'It doesn't bother me that taxpayers are paying for me to have a large family', said Mrs Davey. 'We couldn't afford to care for our children without benefits, but as long as they have everything they need, I don't think I'm selfish. Most of the parents at our kids' school are on benefits'.

She added: 'I don't feel bad about being subsidised by people who are working. I'm just working with the system that's there. If the government wants to give me money, I'm happy to take it. We get what we're entitled to. I don't put in anything because I don't pay taxes, but if I could work I would'.

Deficit denial

A new report by the Institute of Economic Affairs (download here) contains the following graphic, in both senses of the word.

Mark Littlewood, the DG of the IEA, editorializes as follows:

'The current arguments about whether or not to raise National Insurance by a fraction are grossly inadequate. Cuts must be made far in excess of "efficiency savings" or the British public may be sure their taxes will rise substantially to plug the gap. Unless serious action is taken it is possible that the next government could end up being the highest tax rising government in Britain’s history'.

Hat-tip to Mr Eugenides, who states what should be, but sadly is not obvious to anyone who professes to be interested in the reality Britain faces:

I understand why [the Tories] are coy about the scale of the abyss into which we are staring, because they are terrified of the reaction from voters if they spell out just how big a needle they're about to plunge into our buttocks. But we're getting the needle whether they show it to us or not - and you can be sure that the hysterical shrieking from Labour about 'savage Tory cuts' will start anew on May 7th. Each and every measure to plug the holes will be opposed; every tax rise painted as a betrayal, every pay freeze the focus for a strike. These people would rather scuttle the ship than see it sail into port under a different captain.

That's exactly the way it's going to go. And I believe that Labour may yet win it because even if people are in denial about the correction that must follow the last quarter-century of living beyond our means, they can be in no doubt that the vested interests built up by the Labour pukes will fight like rabid skunks to hang on to their totally undeserved income and status.

I don't think this society would be up for a fight even if offered more convincing leadership by David Cameron. In fact I think that a cold-eyed appreciation of just how abject the British have become may explain everything he says he believes in.

But, excuse me: if he is right, the question he needs to answer is why would anyone want to put himself at the head of such a spiritless rabble?

The Sacred Cow

For as long as I can remember, Brits have been saying that the National Health Service (NHS) is 'the envy of the world'. This, despite the fact that no other country has chosen to imitate it. Since the utter stupidity of giving free treatment to all comers has over the years attracted hundreds of thousands of health tourists to fleece the British tax-payer, I believe 'the wonder of the world' is far more appropriate.

In that respect, the NHS is simply an extension of the welfare system, which can only be understood as a massive employer. I doubt if any thinking person now doubts that the bloated welfare system is socially corrosive: but it does succeed magnificently in providing employment for the otherwise downwardly mobile lower-middle class.

That's the social group that pisses down and sucks up: Labour voters, in other words. A few years ago one or other of NuLabour's futile female ministers declared that the NHS was Britain's 'most beloved institution'. Barring Her Maj, I think that may be true. For most Brits it represents the irreducible 'something back' that makes the extortions of a corrupt and incompetent political establishment tolerable.

And so to the Labour Party manifesto, a semi-literate document that can only convince those desperately determined to believe. It contains the following gem: 'The waiting-time guarantee will ensure that treatment begins within 18 weeks of seeing your GP, or the NHS will find you to go private'.

Eighteen weeks? That is four and a half months! What the hell kind of 'guarantee' is that? How miserable are the standards of the NHS that such an aspiration should be trumpeted after more than doubling the amount of money allotted to health care?

'Scientific consensus'

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at the Masachussetts Institute of Technology. That's professor of atmospheric science at MIT, the world's leading centre for science and technology.

If 24-carat credentials counted for anything, therefore, any pronouncement he might make on the subject of man-made global warming should be given the respect it deserves by all the media that pretend to care about the subject.

Instead, his annihilating short article 'Earth in never in equilibrium' found a publisher in The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and has attracted attention only from the blogosphere (hat-tip to Watts Up With That). His concluding paragraphs are superb (my italics):

One may ask why there has been the astounding upsurge in alarmism in the past four years. When an issue like global warming is around for more than 20 years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence and donations are reasonably clear. So, too, are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of carbon dioxide is a dream come true. After all, carbon dioxide is a product of breathing itself.

Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted to save Earth. Nations see how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. So do private firms. The case of Enron (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, Enron was one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon-emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to trillions of dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions.

It is probably no accident that Al Gore himself is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense.

Finally, there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.

Clearly, the possibility that warming may have ceased could provoke a sense of urgency. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, the need to courageously resist hysteria is equally clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever-present climate change is no substitute for prudence.

A message from pulsing planet parliament

Gerald Warner exploded today over the words uttered by Patrick Cormack, a knighted nit-wit who is departing the House of Commons. This is the prick who argued that MPs' salaries should be doubled in the aftermath of the expenses cheating scandal. The italics are mine.

Westminster is a den of blinkered complacency and self-regard. Its club-like, introverted narcissism was well illustrated by the valedictory speech of the second-longest serving MP, Sir Patrick Cormack, who told his fellow parliamentarians: 'I believe that what is so important at the moment is that people outside should begin to regain their confidence in this place. I would say to the fourth estate, which sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying the other three, that the House of Commons is the ultimate defender of all our liberties.'

Words failed me when I first read this. They did not fail Warner, whose furious outburst is well worth a read.

The mindset is the problem

Following on the heels of David Boaz, a US libertarian, our own Matt Ridley confides that 'There never was a golden age of freedom'. Well, stop press! No shit! Both of them appear to be applying the 'lump of labour' fallacy to freedom, apparently accepting that because many were and are not free, then a 'fair' distribution of freedom must mean a reduced amount for those who have 'too much'. Thus Ridley writes:

And as the bureaucratic monster invents ever more ingenious ways of telling me what I cannot do without asking it first, I too succumb to the temptation from time to time to wish I were back in a more free time. But that's because I make the mistake of thinking I would be in the elite in the past.

All the forms of legal servitude he mentions were abolished, by the elites, without creating a 'bureaucratic monster'. One would have expected a fine scientific mind to appreciate that the only correlation between old and new forms of oppression is the desire of some to lord it over others arbitrarily, and to arrange the law so that they may do so.

Get it clear, guys: unless severely checked from time to time, the natural inclination of the powerful is to perpetuate their power. Bureaucratic oligarchy is still oligarchy. 

The value of your vote

Extremely illuminating site here, which shows the relative value of an individual vote. Input your postcode (case sensitive) or constituency, and statistical analysis provided by the New Economics Foundation does the rest.

I'm in a safe Tory constituency, and the relative value of my vote is 0.0082. As if we didn't know, only voters resident in marginal seats (about 20 percent of all constituencies) have any impact on elections. I don't, so I won't bother. 

An addition to the Nuspeak lexicon

The Obama administration has decided that 'rogue state' is too . . . judgemental. The approved new term is 'outlier'. Oooh! Isn't there just a hint of the judgemental in combining 'out' and phonetic 'liar'?

Anyway, let's see how long it takes for the BBC, mouth ever-agape for the latest transatlantic PC ejaculate, to adopt the term.

Bank for International Settlements projections

The Taxpayers' Alliance posts a sombre picture of Britain's immediate economic future based on projections by the Bank for International Settlements that show Britain to be in the worst fiscal position of all developed economies, rivalled only By Japan.

Without in any way seeking to devalue the BIS figures as a judgement on past and current UK fiscal policy, the projections are of course the same statistical horse feathers as any other long-term projections. Long before any of the worst case scenarios came to pass, whatever government was in power would have to take drastic action to change the equation.

So, the question is: who do you want in power when the birds come home to roost? It's a very good question indeed, and may lie behind the current Labour party strategy of playing to economic management as their strength, with their tame unions credibly threatening to subvert an incoming Tory administration.

Mandelweasel and Campbell are calculating that a sufficient proportion of the British middle class is sufficiently cowardly and stupid to vote for the party that seems to offer less conflict in the short term, while among those who despise Labour and all its works there may be a significant number who think that it should be left in power to reap the consequences of it corrupt mismanagement.

They are almost certainly right on the first count. I would incline to the second if it were not that five more years of Labour gerrymandering, bribery and intimidation has a good chance of achieving the one-party state that was always the objective of the New Labour Project.

Either way, the country's slide into the dustbin of history will accelerate. I cannot shake the suspicion bordering on certainty that for the last 13 years the British have not only had the government they deserve, but also one that truly represents them. 

Survival of the fittest

Inevitably trivialized as 'Cameron's Cuties', this group pic of the new generation of Tory women candidates is actually rather heartening. Phoaargh! factor aside, evolutionary biology suggests that one should choose one's leaders from among the good-looking, because attractiveness is a more certain indication of a good genes that practically any other.

The contrast with female Labour intake of 13 years ago is pretty stark. They all turned out to be total failures in office, but then so did their likewise plain male colleagues.

So perhaps a guide to voting in this policy-lite election would be to vote for the good-looking, because at least they won't be bitter and twisted by envy of those more blessed by natural selection.    

Disenfranchisement

The Telegraph's eclectic host of commentators have greeted the start of the election campaign with surprisingly uniform, weary contempt. Simon Heffer today perhaps expresses the consensus best:   

No one from the main parties will tell the truth about the need to sack hundreds of thousands of people on the public payroll in order to ensure we live within our means. Nobody will tell the truth about how lower taxes increase revenue, because there are too many cheap votes in bashing bankers who earn lots of money. Nobody will properly defend capitalism as an essential ingredient of a free society. Nobody will champion selective education, which gives such a chance in life to bright children from poor homes, and nobody will be truthful about the pointlessness of much university education.

Nobody will dare to be radical about the corrupt effects of the welfare state. Nobody will take the radical approach needed to counter the results of unlimited immigration. Above all – and that last point leads on to this – nobody will confront the public with the realities of our membership of a European Union governed by the Treaty of Lisbon, which has left us with a choice of staying in on Europe's terms, or getting out.

Blues and Greens

Ah, the good ol' days. Back in the 6th century the citizens of Byzantine capital of Constantinople were fiercely divided between factions supporting the Blue and the Green chariot racing teams.

On 13 January 532 the mob assembled in the Hippodrome for the races alternated between cheering on their colours and hurling abuse at the Emperor Justinian. Towards the end of the day the Blues and Greens stopped cheering for their teams and began to chant "Nika", which means "Conquer".

Intriguingly, in Latin America the cry of "Nica" is an abbreviation for ni cagando (literally "not even shitting", or "no way", or "up yours"). There is clearly some continuity there.

Anyway, the mob burst out of the Hippodrome and assaulted the palace. Fires broke out and half the city went up in flames. Justinian eventually made a deal with the Blues and massacred the Greens. After which the Byzantine empire reached its apogee and Constantinople was magnificently rebuilt.

Sigh. One can but hope . . .

Gordon the Big Engine chuffs it like it is

To kick off Labour's election campaign Brown spoke with deep sincerity about ‘the contract between the people and those they are sworn to serve’.

The mainstream journo-pukes have attributed this to the inability of the all-seeing monocular to read properly from his teleprompter.

There is nothing in this ghastly man's history to make one doubt that he said exactly what he believes. Let all tremblingly obey.

Election slogans competition

From Brer Rabbit:

IT IS AS BAD AS YOU THINK

                     AND

THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU

'Breaking news'

News flash on TV just now - Gordon Brown has decided that the elections will take place on 6 May.

Odd that my local council sent me my voter card last Friday, which specified . . . 6 May.

What would we do without our red-hot political press corps to keep us up to date?

Hasn't he done well?

Country house of Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister 1721-1742


Country house of Anthony Blair, Prime Minister 1997-2007

Homo-power

Someone dares to suggest that 'being judgemental' about homosexuals is within the ambit of personal choice and nothing to do with the state, and politicians and journo-pukes fall over each other to condemn it.

Male homosexuals have disproportionate power for a number of reasons, none of which they believe it legitimate for non-homosexuals even to discuss. Not being troubled with children, they tend to have larger disposable incomes than heterosexuals, and the 'pink pound' strongly influences policy-makers, as it does fashion. Possibly for the same reason, they tend to have little regard for posterity. They are also hugely over-represented in the arts and the media, where they exercise a pervasive and group self-serving influence.

They are very damned far from being an oppressed minority. The shrieks of 'homophobia' whenever someone dares to express a critical opinion goes miles beyond a legitimate demand for tolerance. Indeed it seems to go far beyond even a quest for acceptance: it would appear that what is required is that they should be loved not despite, but precisely because of what they are.

Good luck with that, guys.

Political naïveté

While it is more than fair enough to state that most politicians and those who report on them are economically illiterate, unfortunately it is also true that most economists and economic journalists are political innocents.

On ASI, Tim Worstall reports on the financial regulation bill introduced by the influential US Senator Dodd:

First, Dodd’s bill would require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then wait 120 days for the SEC to review their filing. A second provision raises the wealth requirements for an 'accredited investor' who can invest in startups - if the bill passes, investors would need assets of more than $2.3 million (up from $1 million) or income of more than $450,000 (up from $250,000). The third restriction removes the federal pre-emption allowing angel and venture financing in the United States to follow federal regulations, rather than face different rules between states.

Tim W comments:

So Senator Dodd intends to eviscerate the funding mechanism for new and innovative businesses at exactly the time when the US needs more funding for new and innovative businesses to create new jobs and get the economy moving again. All because he operates under the delusion that business operates at the same glacial pace as bureaucracy.

Well, no. The first two provisions are Senator Dodd seeking to pay back his big contributors; the third is a sweetener. Large, established corporations are better able to absorb the added cost of regulations, and are also the most generous political donors.

Left unchecked, as for example in the EU, the mechanism quite deliberately strangles any innovation that might threaten the profits of the first and hence the payola that keeps politicians and officials living in the style they believe they deserve.   

'Taking money out of the economy'

A few years ago a senior Customs and Excise plod was on TV ponderously pronouncing that smuggling 'was costing the taxpayer £60 million a year'. Nope. It was costing the government a tiny part of its revenue, but it was a saving to the enterprising taxpayers involved.

Now we have Darling and Brown pronouncing that the Tories' timid promise not to implement the regime's tax on employment, grotesquely misnamed National Insurance, would be 'taking money out of the economy'. So, 'the economy' is only that money collected and disbursed by the state. Where do they think it comes from?

Actually, Brown has read a few economics text books, and one supposes Darling may have done so as well, so this is just standard Campbell/Mandelweasel 'say anything and see if it sticks'. But it does stick with about 27 percent of the electorate, which is disheartening.

On the plus side, the New Labour 'project' was always about making so many people state-dependent that it would bring about a one party state. With over 50 percent of GDP now controlled by the state, a 27 percent payroll vote is actually an indication that the electorate is not quite as gullible as the 'project' supposed.

It is not even an untried idea: the American 'progressives' tried to make themselves 'the party of government' under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. And they are at it again under Obama. As a scheme it falls down on the fact that government employees are also consumers of services, and that over-manning and feather-bedding actually disgusts the best among them.   

Icing on the cake

The eminent Matt Ridley, too nice to voice suspicion that "breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland's melting ice" may have something to do with global warmist journopukes scrabbling for something to counter the bad news (from their point of view) about the recovery of the Arctic ice pack, makes the following point:

The new study says Greenland lost 385 cubic miles [of ice] between 2002 and 2009.
Greenland has 700,000 cubic miles of ice. So it's losing 1% per century, 0.01% per year.
Funny that number never appeared in the news reports.
For Pete's sake, journalists, do your job.

Wonders of the Solar System

A wonderful BBC 2 series, presented by a very, very young-looking 42 year-old Physics professor called Brian Cox. He not only looks young, but he has also retained - and above all projects - a youthful intellectual enthusiasm that is thoroughly infectious. With not a single word about global warming or any of the usual BBC obsessions.

If the BBC's fat cats were prevented from filling their own pockets by commissioning leftist agitprop and other garbage from their own production companies, the corporation would have more of our money available to honour its obligation to instruct, as this series so magnificently does. 

Election slogans competition

Here's one to kick it off:

SOCIALISTS HAVE GENDER

LIBERTARIANS HAVE SEX

Contributions that successfully skate around libel and obscenity will be posted.

Another prop of the global warming scam falls away

Remember this fake picture of forlorn polar bears on a vanishing iceberg? Well, with the news that the Arctic ice pack is back to where it was before the panic-mongers were assuring us that it would all disappear before 2013, the only thing that's melting is the global warming scam's last vestige of credibility.

Here is a partial list of the braying assertions that have been shown to be unsubtantiated allegations when not also outright fabrications:

• the abolition of the medieval warm period in Gore's hockey stick and other pseudo-historic projections
• ice core samples 'showing' that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide causes temperature increase: it's the other way around
• Mann's tree ring and lake deposit 'evidence'
• scientific 'consensus' shown to be a based on intimidation and suppression of contrary evidence
• Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035
• Amazon forest vanishing because of drought

So, what we are left with as the coldest winter for nearly 50 years draws to a close is what nobody with any knowledge of the subject denies: world climate has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, as have sea levels. It is not within our puny power to affect global climate one way or another.

What we are also left with is that the big lie, repeated often and loudly enough, will unfailingly attract a host of cynical opportunists seeking to profit from it, and collective hysteria will ensue.

And that there are a LOT more horses' arses than there are horses.

Lions and Donkeys

Tory shadow Foreign Minister William Hague has declared that under Brown the British, 'as in World War I', have been 'lions led by donkeys'.

A couple of well regarded historical biographies have Hague's name on the cover, but he really should have asked his research assistants to check out that quote. Alan Clarke, showing that 'economy with the truth' with which he will always be associated, fabricated the alleged quote by Falkenhayn to give credibility to The Donkeys, his hatchet job on Great War generals.

Clarke occupies with reference to World War I the same status as the Nazi apologist David Irving does to World War II with his tendentious The Destruction of Dresden: he knowingly launched a blatant lie that has proved far more lastingly influential than all the careful scholarship before or since. 

It is deeply unwise of Hague to remind us of one of the sleaziest of all his colleagues during the period of Conservative supremacy. Clarke and Archer were the clearest illustrations of what a poor judge of character Margaret Thatcher was - and she liked William Hague. 

'Progressive' minger of the week

Behold another of the butt-faced 'progressive' women with a vicious grudge against normal human aspiration.

Devil's Kitchen highlights a highly revealing statement by this person, who is president of the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), Britain's largest teachers' union.

Why, asked Michael Gove, the shadow Minister of Education, doesn't NASUWT run schools of its own, to show us all how it's done?

Sly dog. The cow leapt straight into her own pile of ideological crap. The union did not want to run a school, she mooed. Her union did not want to run schools, she said. Schools should be "democratically accountable" and not operated for and by "the pushy and the privileged".

 Let us savour the full richness of that reply. According to the cow, democratic accountability must therefore exclude "the pushy and the privileged", for which read aspirational parents, the talented, the intelligent, and the good-looking.

Everyone, in other words, not as ugly in mind and body as the highly representative president of the NASUWT.

'The Big Society'

Cristina Odone writes a heart-warming summary of Cameron's latest wheeze in today's Telegraph.

Now I don't know about you, but I would never watch a programme described as 'heart-warming' in the TV Guide. I ruin my tea with artificial sweeteners, but I draw the line at injecting saccharine into my mind.

The Labour pukes, it seems to me, are on much firmer ground by appealing to all that is base, mean and ugly. Ours is a tired and cynical people: we had our Obama in Tony Blair. The self-proclaimed 'heir of Blair' is pissing into the wind.

Anti-Americanism

Most Brit anti-Americanism is so transparently motivated by envy and spite that those of us who have lived there and know what we're talking about are dragged down to the level of discourse set by ignorant malice.

This is tiresome, because there is much to learn from an intelligently critical analysis of the States. Unfortunately the very same people who denounce American imperialism, etc., have been most slavish in adopting every social engineering initiative to emerge across the Atlantic, usually well after its objective failure to deliver the promised result has become apparent in its country of origin.

The vector appears to be the academics, many of whom dream of getting a well-paid job in the States and tailor their views accordingly. To list just a few:

• Comprehensive education
• Political correctness
• Eeek!-o-freakery
• Multiculturalism
• Perversion of the word 'liberal'
• Perversion of the word 'personality'

The last two may seem out of place, yet may be the most damaging. Liberal used to describe a world view that embraced liberty from arbitrary authority in the political, and freedom in the social and economic spheres. The keystone of liberalism was property rights, of which the foremost was vested in personality.

In law, personality describes an individual or organization that can legally enter into a contract, and may be sued for failure to comply with the terms of the contract. Hence the liberal concept of a 'Social Contract', from which a democratically elected government derived its legitimacy - for as long as it complied with the contract entered into with the electorate. 

There are certain core duties that all governments implicitly undertake, such as protecting the populace from domestic and foreign predators and preserving the value of the currency; but the rest of the contract consists of the promises collectively made by those who form the government at the time of their election.

Now, one can readily see why American 'progressives' have been so assiduous in perverting language. The big stumbling block to their totalitarian ambitions has been a Constitution written by men deeply imbued in classical liberalism, in revolt against unchecked government power, and acutely aware that the Achilles Heel of the social contract was that unscrupulous politicians would get elected by promising whatever their audience wanted to hear, only to alter the terms of the contract arbitrarily when in power.

By adopting whatever 'progressive' ideological sewage washes across the Atlantic, the rather dim-witted leftists in Britain have made much deeper inroads into collective liberty and personal freedom than their far cleverer equivalents in the States - because they have no such constraint.

Ah, you may say, then let's adopt a written constitution. Yeah, but any such document would be written by people brain-washed since childhood against true liberalism, and would be voted on by an electorate that has an exaggerated idea of the rights and no concept of the obligations implicit in properly defined personality.

I have little hope that the tide will turn, but a small start could be made by ceasing forthwith to describe the Marxhorroids as 'liberals' and to stop using 'personality' when what we mean is 'character'.

But above all, the envy and resentment that pervades modern Britain might be usefully harnessed to incite rebellion against the cultural cringe that has led to the unthinking adoption of whatever social engineering fad emerges from the fetid hothouse of American academia.

A big dog barks - at last

The influential German weekly Der Spiegel has walked up one side the global warming scam and down the other, kicking foot-holds in its paper-thin credibility. Better late than never.

Maybe now some part of the British mainstream media will get it up enough to do the same. Probably not - the English equivalent of Der Spiegel is The Economist, which usually waits until the New York Times says it's safe to do so.

Vee ask der qvestions!

EUobserver reports that the European Commission has set out its plans for the citizens' initiative, which was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and obliges the Commission to consider producing a legislative proposal if urged to do so by more than one million signatures put forward by EU citizens.

According to the Commission's proposal, which needs to be approved by the European Parliament and member states, the one million signatures must come from at least a third of member states (nine) and reach a minimum threshold in each country proportionate to the number of seats they are allocated in the European Parliament.

The Commission will have the right to reject requests that are 'devoid of all seriousness' or 'abusive'. Applications can also be rejected on the grounds that they go against 'European values'.

Those values evidently don't include democracy, freedom of speech, or drafting laws and treaties that might limit the power of the Commission to do whatever it wants.

Arsenokoitēs and Androkoitēs

Musing on the term 'homophobia', which translates literally as a pathological revulsion against the same, without specifying what the same is, at first I thought that it was just another slavish English borrowing from the OTT American psycho-political lexicon. But further thought led me to the conclusion that the term may reflect a belief that the bitterest foes of gays (another Americanocution) are other gays.

There does not seem to be much difference among the teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam on the subject. All regard homosexuality as an offence. Paul of Tarsus (1 Corinthians 6:9) wrote for all of them when he wrote that 'neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminates, nor homosexuals' will inherit the kingdom of God.

That would appear to put most of us in the same bed, theologically speaking.

But Paul created the Greek neologism arsenokoitēs (arsēn: male; koitēn: bed) when the term androkoitēs already existed to describe homosexuality. And there's the rub. Greek culture was totally relaxed about sex between men, so when Paul invented the new term, he was seeking to strip the concept of the social acceptability implied by the word androkoitēs.

Makes you wonder about Paul's sexuality, doesn't it?

Paul was a rabbi, and his views coincide with the condemnation of Onan in Leviticus, which is actually about coitus interruptus, not masturbation. The offence, it seems, is having sex without the possibility of procreation, which makes the above-mentioned theological bed even more crowded.

All in all, therefore, it seems rabbits must be among the most blessed of God's creatures.

Since the vast majority of humans are not going to inherit the kingdom of God, perhaps we can all regard the whole subject of sexuality with some much-needed indifference. The gays could make a start by ceasing to pose as victims and just get on with celebrating their natures, like the lads in the above picture.

And, oh yes: can we have 'gay' back? It is a most inapt handle for the dreary moaners who claim to speak for homosexuals, and is a useful word with no satisfactory equivalent. Why not 'Andro' instead? Much classier.