Hottest Year Ever

Two hot (sic) links:

"Norway at 140 Year Record-Breaking Cold" on Hockey Shtick

Daily "Hottest Year Ever" updates on Tom Nelson

If it weren't so pathetically tragic, it would be funny to watch the climate scamsters squirm.

Latest poll of LibDem party members

Joanna Hughes - arsehole for today

"What were the CPS and the courts thinking?" she bleats in the Spectator. 

A mother jailed for retracting allegations of rape by her husband [1], (allegations she now says were truthful [2]) has been freed. A few days ago, appeal judges overturned the eight-month sentence of which she had served seventeen days, ordering her immediate release. A triumph for common sense and compassion, but why was she jailed in the first place? Yes, the CPS thought she’d lied under oath and invented a rape claim - and that’s serious – but, as it turns out, her husband intimidated her into retracting the claim [3]. 

1. Her husband made these allegations?
2. What possible legal weight can the retraction of a retraction of a serious accusation have?
3. If so, a crime. Is he being prosecuted? No? Then it's another unsupported allegation, isn't it?

And on it goes. The "violent" father refused to hand over his children to the woman's sister. Who says he is violent? Why the hell should he hand over his children to the sister of a woman who tried to put him in jail? Have the child welfare gestapo taken the children into care? No? Then he is clearly not an unfit father.

Ah, but Hughes has a woman's way of knowing, before which phallocentric concepts like evidence and logic pale into insignificance.

"It's a sad world where stringent justice has such savage consequences" says Hughes in closing. What "savage consequences"? That a perjurer should go to jail? Surely it's even sadder when perjurers do not go to jail.

I know no more than Hughes about the case, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary a woman tried to ruin her husband by making a very serious and false accusation against him. The way the justice system is set up today, he would have had to prove his innocence - a practical impossibility when it is no longer permissible to impugn the testimony of the alleged victim.

Then she changed her mind. Possibly all she wanted to do was scare him, but the police and the CPS are fully entitled to take a very austere view indeed of being dragged into a domestic on the basis of perjured testimony. So she was punished to deter other women from doing the same thing.

Shame they can't do the same for female journopukes who confer automatic victim status on "a mother" regardless of her actions. May we consider the possibility that her children might be better off without such a mother?

Vince Cable - wanker

My own personal instincts - partly because I am the Secretary of State responsible for universities and partly because I think the policy is right - are very much to vote for it. But we have got to vote as a group, collectively, and we are discussing how we do that. My position is somewhat different but I am willing to go along with my colleagues. We are a disciplined party, we work together. We are clearly going through a difficult period over this issue and we want to support each other.

Statism in the UK - demoralised and demoralising

The first in the BBC2 series "Age of the Do-Gooders" presented by Ian Hislop, Private Eye's gnome-in-chief, was the polar opposite to the "Berlin" shite fronted by Matt Frei. 

Hislop does not try to make himself the story in the brow-beating US presenter style caricatured by Frei, so he was able to cover a lot of ground and also make a few important points in what used to be the traditional English manner - understated and assuming his viewers are bright enough to draw their own conclusions.

There was, however, a point of what I am sure was unconscious irony, which was the praise heaped on Charles Trevelyan for instituting civil service exams, after which - according to Gus O'Donnell, the current head of the Civil Service, bureaucrats became brighter and politically non-partisan, their job prospects no longer dependent on nepotism and cronyism.

Yeah, just like you, Gus, and all the other senior bureaucrats who trimmed their sails to the NuLabour wind, most of whom - following in their hero Blair's footsteps - have moved on to lucrative jobs with the corporations they favoured when in office.

Not mentioned was that Trevelyan got the idea from the very high standard of administrators selected by the very demanding examinations run by the - nasty, exploitative and (gasp) private - East India Company. And that the highly qualified EIC "do-gooders" kicked off the Indian Mutiny, the biggest crisis of Victoria's reign.

But still, the point Hislop was trying to make was good. Only a highly moral civil service could have won the prestige and power that ultimately led to it being entrusted with the administration of the Welfare State. Unfortunately, as the great Victorian intellectual Lord Acton wrote, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Less often quoted was his elaboration of that theme:

There is no worse heresy than [to argue] that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

The greatest tectonic shift that has taken place in British society in my life-time has been the corruption of the public service ethic. When I was a (highly qualified) young man, public service was still seen as an honourable career choice, which you took knowing you could have earned more in the private sector, because it offered the prospect of making a direct and positive contribution.

That is quite clearly no longer the case at either end: the civil service is now hugely privileged over the private sector, and it is rightly held in contempt by the subject population for its inability to do anything well - other than to feather its own nest. I doubt if many spirited individuals still join the civil service, and those who do must sacrifice their intellectual and moral integrity, or else their self-respect must lead them to resign.

I believe the tipping point came when Thatcher had to bribe the civil service so heavily to keep it "on side" for her confrontation with the trades unions. But the demoralisation began long before that. By the late 1970s the corruption of the judicial system had become a scandal too great to cover up any longer, while international comparisons cruelly highlighted the contumacious ineptitude of British statist management.

At some point the idea that Britain was a worthwhile enterprise drained away, and the public service ethic went with it. And without that ethic, public administration degenerated into parasitism. It really does not matter whether an excessive investment of power corrupted the civil service, or whether corruption within the civil service made it horrifyingly apparent that it wielded far too much power. The result was the same.

There was, is and ever more shall be only one way out of the declining spiral of a civil service becoming more and more corrupted and demoralised by its inability to deliver what politicians and people demand of it, which is to greatly reduce its functions.

Hislop's do-gooders created institutions that reflected their own high and self-confident moral purpose; absent that self-confident high moral purpose, those institutions have exerted a deeply demoralising influence on the whole of society. What is required is a frank acknowledgment that institutions have a finite life-span, and that without the spirit that animated them, the achievements of the great Victorian reformers are a harmful incubus.

Matt Frei - pretentious bore of the week

Of course he's one of the Bitchy Boy faces and by definition an arsehole, but I would have expected Frei to make a better job of Berlin. His attempts to imitate Alastair Cooke from America have been laughable, of course, but dammit - he was born and spent his first ten years in Germany. If he was going to be interesting on any subject, it should have been on his heimat.

But no - disconnected visuals barely linked by superficial commentary with portentous background music. WTF did he think he was doing on top of the Brandenburg Gate? From Frederick the Great to Hitler, the only link material was on Marx, Liebnecht and Luxembourg and some socially "meaningful" art.

Hello? Heard of Bismarck? Unification of Germany?

What a waste of time, money - and of an opportunity to inform, educate and entertain.

Kyoto Protocol Scorecard

Global cost: $868 billion
Global warming supposedly averted by 2050: 0.009°C
Carbon dioxide emissions reduction: 0.3%
Cost per 1°C of global warming supposedly averted by 2050: $96.4 trillion

From Hockey Schtick

Ambrose Bierce on climate catastrophism

In his immortal Devil's Dictionary, Bierce defined a ghost as "The outward and visible sign of an inward fear".

There is no point in continuing to belabour the eek!-o-freaks for their desperate clinging to discredited - sound of trumpets - SCIENCE. The whole debate long ago moved completely away from anything as mundane as verifiable facts. They continue to believe, passionately, because life would be intolerable for them if they did not.

To persist in pointing out that the bogeyman is the product of irrational fear, deliberately ramped up by pseudo-academics and by cynical political and business vested interests, is a waste of time. The scam will continue to run for as long as the frightened lowmids invest it with all their fears of national and social demotion.   

As we can see in the person of the truly ridiculous Chris Huhne, it appears to be the flag that the lowmids have nailed to the mast of their sinking ship. Damned if I know what can be done to strip the crowd cover from the scamsters. 

I was once married to a beautiful and talented woman who was almost disabled by fear. I kept thinking that if I could help her to see that her fears were irrational, she would blossom. But as each bogeyman was exposed to the light, she simply created a new one in the darkness.

Insecure people are a bottomless pit: you can shovel reassurance into them forever, and never fill the void.

The primacy of politics over markets

In a preface written for the French edition of his Tract on Monetary Reform (1924), Keynes described the attitude of the French government in terms that apply with even greater force to Angela Merkel:

Each time the franc loses value, the Minister of Finance is convinced that the fact arises from everything but economic causes. He attributes it to the presence of a foreigner in the neighborhood of the Bourse or to the mysterious and malignant influences of speculation. This is not far removed intellectually from an African witch doctor’s ascription of cattle disease to the "evil eye" of a bystander and of bad weather to the unsatisfied appetites of an idol. - From Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance (2009)

Hat-tip: Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Statism is theft

Question: Why are savings so much lower in aging Europe than in countries with younger demographics?
Answer: because those Europeans who did save money for their old age have had it stolen by their governments to ensure a comfortable retirement for state employees. As Zero Hedge reports:

Financial News explains how France has "seized" €36 billion worth of pension assets: "Asset managers will have the chance to get billions of euros in mandates in the next few months for the €36bn Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR), the French reserve pension fund, after the French parliament last week passed a law to use its assets to pay off the debts of France’s welfare system. The assets have been transferred into Cades, the state’s social debt sinking fund. The FRR will continue to control the assets, but as a third-party manager on behalf of Cades".

FN condemns the action as follows: "The move reflects a willingness by governments to use long-term assets to fill short-term deficits, including Ireland’s announcement last week that it would use the country’s €24bn National Pensions Reserve Fund “to support the exchequer’s funding programme” and Hungary’s bid to claw $15bn of private pension funds back to the state system." In other words, with the ECB still unwilling to go into full fiat printing overdrive mode, insolvent governments, France most certainly included, are resorting to whatever piggybanks they can find.

 Financial News misses the point - as soon as he got into power in 1997, Brown assaulted the British private pension funds, at that time the best funded in Europe. He did it for purely ideological reasons, with every intention of using the money to privilege and vastly increase the number of state employees.

Statists hate individual autonomy. Their overriding aim at all times is to discourage or drive away those who aspire to a better life, and to expropriate the provident. Whenever they achieve absolute power, they commit genocide with the professed aim of clearing the way for "the new man", a termite-like creature that unthinkingly does what it is told.

Wikileaks - a quandary for libertarians

In principle, the more the workings of any state are exposed to public scrutiny, the more people will realize that they are ruled by group-thinking mediocrities corrupted by an inflated idea of their own importance. The hope is that this will motivate people to take back the excessive power they have delegated to the state.

In practice any student of politics already knows this, and the rest are divided between those who prefer not to be reminded of their own abdication of  personal responsibility, and those who yearn to be subsumed into a great collective endeavour because their individual existences are so dispiriting.  

This peculiar fellow Assange seems to be waging an info-war exclusively against the United States, as though it were the source of all the evils in the world. Yet he is able to do this only because it is the most open society in the world. One that, at its best, does more good in the world than all the rest put together.

From the treatment of AIDS in Africa to Chilean miners trapped a mile underground, who are you going to call?  Not that you need to - they are usually only too ready to volunteer the help that only they can provide. The rest of the developed world may have the means, but it miserably lacks the capacity to act. 

Does Assange only receive leaks from US sources? If so, is it because it is more careless with its confidential information? Or because the profit to be made from it far outweighs the limited amount of punishment the US can inflict on those responsible?

If Assange does not receive leaks that would embarrass other governments, then the potential profit and loss calculation would seem to predominate. But if he does receive such information, and chooses not make it public, then his pose as a guerrilla warrior for freedom of information is a sham. 

As I said at the beginning - it's a quandary. The most likely result of using the relative openness of US society in order to damage its international standing will be to make it less open. Power will still do what power always has - it will simply do it with less consultation and on the basis of far more limited group-think.

Brit statism - a steep hill to climb

Front page of the Sunday Times (£)

UK's fast recovery saves 90,000 jobs - that's state employees. So the good news about the economic recovery is that it will permit the persistence of a greater than expected amount of statist parasitism?

Britain fears Islamic fury over leaks - that's the British government. Get it straight - the state is not the nation; it is a symbiont that has outgrown its utility and now actively harms the host.

Bolivian president explains why "European race" is bald

At a meeting of American Ministers of Defence in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, the host president, Evo Morales, who as you can see has a fine head of hair reaching well down his brow, declared that the baldness of Europeans demonstrates the decadence of the white race.

 

Morales (right) is Amerindian, his Venezuelan friend Hugo Chávez (left) is an African-Amerindian, but their Cuban hero and idol Fidel Castro is white on both sides.

 

So, for that matter, are their allies Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Rafael Correa of Ecuador. Still, never mind Evo - two out of five ain't bad.

Euro-running with the bull

God, how I love the blogosphere! Here's a well-worked You Tube on the travails of the Euro, created by BaNZai7 for Zero Hedge

If you want to stop laughing, click on European Debt Crisis Cheat Sheet by Tyler Durden, the site's founder and principal contributor. 

Cameron's latest jolly super statist wheeze

A couple off days ago the Press Association reported that Cameron was to announce that "wellbeing" is to be measured for the Government from next April so that ministers can help the British people attain "the good life".

Dear God, I thought, how many questions is it possible to beg in a single sentence? Cameron added to them:

Prosperity alone cannot deliver happiness and the coalition must promote quality of life as well as economic growth. To those who say that all this sounds like a distraction from the serious business of government, I say finding out what will really improve lives and acting on it is the serious business of government.

Let's deconstruct the proposal: further, massive, intrusion by the state into private lives, and pressure to force people into the straight-jacket of what the parasites - bureaucrats, politicians and their special advisers - define as "the good life".

Given that envy is the defining feature of British society, that can only mean levelling down. Which explains why the Coalition has not revoked the Labour regime's Equality Act.

Could someone please tell me in what way this differs from the programme of the Labour party?

The Hagueon - is it just me?

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a comic called The Eagle, which featured the adventures of a spaceman called Dan Dare, often in conflict with a galactic evil-doer called The Mekon. I'd forgotten all about the comic, but recently it has come to mind quite frequently.

I wonder why?

Sprouts of grass-roots activism

Very interesting development in the East Riding of Yorkshire. A campaign led by TPA's Andrew Allison has led to the removal from the party's list of approved candidates of ten Tory councillors, including the leader, deputy leader, group secretary and chief whip.

Their offence? They made a "discretionary payment" of £364,205 to enhance the pension pot of Sue Lockwood, the Corporate Resources Director, who wanted to take early retirement. In doing so, they ignored clearly - indeed loudly - expressed popular outrage at the blatant cronyism.

[They]are allowed to appeal against this decision. They have 28 days, although I think it is unlikely any appeals will be successful. They have crossed the line. I haven't met anyone - apart from them - who think the discretionary payment was justified. People power has won. Those who have tried to defend the indefensible have found themselves out in the cold.

Now that's the "Big Society" at work. How d'you like it, Cameron?

Brian Micklethwait - soothscribe

Having purged my RSS of the main sources of intellectual dandruff, brushing the larger flakes into the Cūli emeritus causa permanent hall of shame, I can focus on the far more rewarding task of honouring those who enlighten the blogosphere with well-written and incisive commentary.

I should have selected Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait long ago. Today's article "They are not liberals and they are not progressives" is a good example. Indeed they are not: they are totalitarian statists and it's about time we all, systematically, stopped playing their semantic game.

Statist words will go on meaning what the statists want them to mean only if the real liberals and the real progressives allow such foolishness to continue. For the people who really do believe in liberty and in progress can now decide their own language. They can use their own preferred words amongst themselves and they can attach their own preferred words to their enemies, and when they do, there will not be a damn thing that the statists will be able to do to stop them.

As others see us 2

The WSJ speculates how much worse things would have been for the Euro zone if Britain had joined:

Fraught as things are now, imagine how much worse they are in some parallel universe where the UK adopted the euro. After all, even in this world it managed to get itself into arguably more trouble than any developed economy with interest rates a good deal higher than those it would have had from the European Central Bank.

Its orgy of public and private debt-fuelled madness would have been even worse inside the Euro zone than it was out, hard though that is to imagine. The UK’s public-sector net debt was £952.8 billion as of September 2010. Put that in euros, remember that it might well have been higher, and it makes Ireland, Spain and Greece look like well-governed paragons.

Hard not to conclude then that UK eurosceptics missed a trick. They should have been keen to join up. By now their bloated, flailing economy would probably have gone down, taking the whole project with it.

US readers - this is what the BBC teaches our children

A series called "Horrible Histories" was broadcast on the dedicated children's channel (CBBC) by the poll-tax financed "British" Broadcasting Corporation based on author Terry Deary’s enormously popular comic books.

It includes a brain-washing song entitled "British Things".

Now consider what the INTENDED effect was on the children of the ethnic minorities who have chosen to make their home in gloriously multi-cultural Britain. 

It's too late for us. Don't let your "liberals" do the same to your children. Leftists are shit and contaminate everything they touch.

Britain's £260 billion trade deficit with the EU

Responding to a written question from independent Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon, the Director General of the Office of National Statistics has confirmed that in the ten year period 2000-2009, Britain ran up a trade deficit with the EU of over £260 billion. Lord Stoddart commented:

These figures speak for themselves and expose the lie that being in the EU brings Britain trade benefits. These shocking trade figures together with the disastrous performance of the euro, for which we are having to pick the bill, more than ever indicate that it is time for us to pull out of the EU.

Table showing accumulated deficits or surpluses in the United Kingdom's trade with the other European Union countries between 2000 and 2009 in (a) manufactured goods, (b) services, and (c) goods and services [HL4152]
£ billion	Balance of Goods with EU27	Balance of Manufactured Goods with EU27	Balance of Services with EU27	Balance of Goods and Services with EU27
2000	-5.2	-6.5	-1.6	-6.8
2001	-12.6	-13.6	-0.8	-13.4
2002	-22.2	-22.5	-1.4	-23.6
2003	-26.1	-25.6	-1.1	-27.3
2004	-30.9	-29.6	0.5	-30.3
2005	-36.7	-35.5	-0.7	-37.4
2006	-31.4	-32.3	1.8	-29.6
2007	-42.0	-39.9	6.8	-35.2
2008	-39.2	-39.3	10.7	-28.6
2009	-37.2	-34.9	9.2	-28.0
Cumulative Total 2000-09	-283.4	-279.7	23.2	-260.2

For the full text of Lord Stoddart’s question and the Government’s response go to:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/101125w0001.htm#10112535000619

Great photomontage from Autonomous Mind

Nice one from that dependably robust site.

The accompanying article fully supports the expertly doctored pic.

Shabash!

Intelligence failure

Here we go again. Seems my old Firm got taken for a ride by a guy posing as a senior Taleban figure, whose bona fides was apparently confirmed by senior individuals in the Karzai regime's security forces.

Cue the CIA to declare that they have "long been institutionally sceptical" of dealing with "non-marquee Taleban". Long-term being since last January, when they lost eight officers after a man they were cultivating came calling wearing a C-4 waistcoat and blew up their main station in Afghanistan.  

Cue politicians to schedule a judicial inquiry; cue journopukes, who as we know always check their sources so immaculately, to jeer and to demand greater oversight. The Times (£) second leader says:

It is surely time to abandon the Intelligence and Security Committee in its present form and replace it with a joint parliamentary intelligence committee of both houses with its own independent secretariat.

Hello? Earth to the Times: these are people the best and the brightest of whom fall for the most blatant journopuke stings and whose entire existence is one long round of off-the-record briefings to the press. Not to mention going unpunished when they reveal top secret operational details in and outside Parliament, or when exposed as agents of a hostile intelligence service.

As usual, the journopukes want it the way they like their sex: both ways. Intelligence services have to work with walk-ins, and cannot avoid being vulnerable to plausible fraudsters if they are to remain open to the possibility, however remote, that the genuine article might waltz in.

Half a million quid is PEANUTS compared to what a "marquee" Taleban figure could collect.

Also as usual, the MSM is missing the key point: the validation of this turkey by senior figures in the Karzai regime, who must have known he was a fraud. Two possibilities:

1. A desire to embarrass the Brits, who are not only the ancestral enemy but are also militarily as well as politically contemptible in Afghan eyes; or
2. The Karzai regime is stocked entirely with con-men who will flee the country the moment the US pulls out, to live very well on the money they have been salting away in numbered bank accounts, and they are ready to play along with any stupidity the Allies come up with to keep the scam going as long as possible.

 A bit of both, is my bet.

Eating crow - the Church of England

Oh dear, done it again. Since I despise the bicycle-seat sniffing that makes up the bulk of MSM journalism, I must refrain from jumping on whatever band-wagon of superficiality they are pushing at a given moment, especially if it appeals to my own prejudices.

Commenting on the failure of the current crop of socialist mediocrities at the head of the Church of England, I have failed to balance my gloating with reference to the immense amount of good work it does at the parish - or "Big Society" - level.

Comes Archbishop Cranmer to rebuke the Tory party in terms that I ruefully accept apply to me as well.

What about the Church of England’s social housing programmes? Its inner-city work among the poor and disenfranchised? The fact that it runs thousands of schools? Its advocacy work for prisoners of conscience in repressive regimes? It unparalleled dedication to charity concerns? Its voluntary work with the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable groups? The Church does not only talk endlessly about these things; it does them. But the media aren’t very interested, you see: they wish to focus on the drama of division, contention and conflict.

Demophrodisiac

Since many of the po-faced MSM commentators must have experienced the last wave of student demos when they had waists and hair, I wonder that none has dared mention the main attraction, namely that the girls get all aroused and the boys get to fuck them.

Forty years ago a bunch of Cambridge students, wound up by Gottfried, brother of the German Rote Armee Fraktion terrorist Gudrun Ensslin, attacked the Garden House Hotel because it was staging a Greek Week. The youths wanted to register their disapproval of the military junta then ruling Greece, got into it with the cops, and seven of them were successfully prosecuted and sent to prison or borstal.

A somewhat roseate account of it appears in Cam (page 22 of pdf), the Cambridge mag. A shorter version in the dependably chicken-shit Independent identifies Gottfried Ensslin only as "a West German student".

What is perfectly clear from the full article is that some, maybe most of those involved had no previous experience of demo-excitement and just got carried away by the moment.

There was, as I recall, great satisfaction among the citizens of Cambridge that "the gown" was at last being treated the same way as "the town" would have been. The stunted careers of the individuals involved does a lot to explain why political activism in Cambridge took a forty-year sabbatical.

In 1968, when asked to express solidarity with rioting students, the communist Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini replied that in any conflict between the children of the working class - the police - and the children of the bourgeoisie, he was unreservedly on the side of the children of the working class.

Sarah Palin and social media

Given that the Bitchy Boys' vagina envy regularly vents spitefully in the direction of Sarah Palin - oooh, look out Sarah, the BBC doesn't like you! - in the light of their gloating about her having said North instead of South Korea, I thought I'd check for the lady's usually lethal Facebook riposte.

Sure enough, it's a gem. The following is a compilation of The One's verbal gaffes, linked to You Tube clips.

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that . . . 

The singularly under-reported fact is that The One is a loose cannon away from his teleprompter/autocue, and continues to get very gentle treatment from the MSM. But who cares? The social media now reach far more people than the printed press, and reach them more directly than TV. By constantly misrepresenting easily verified facts the MSM simply increases the rate at which it digs its own grave.

Is this the stupidest person in the world?

There is a look of bovine self-satisfaction - but nothing out of the ordinary for a Labour puke. Still, let's not be sexist: we must appreciate MEP Mary Honeyball - no sniggering - for the quality of her mind. The following is from her blog:

The crisis of the euro has shown in very graphic terms that the UK is in Europe and cannot ignore what happens in other EU member states when it comes to their economies. Britain has ended up paying out a very considerable sum of money. I doubt if it would have been any more if Britain had been a fully signed up member of the euro zone.[!] The last Labour government, it is true, refused to take Britain into the Euro. I have always been in favour of joining the single currency and, I must say, am once again beginning to feel vindicated that my point of view is the best one for our country.

David Bowden - arsehole for today

I've been dropping the main employers of lefty arseholes from my blog-list; but I still read Spiked, mainly for the editor's input, so am exposed to the intellectual stool of baby-faced David Bowden, as in his infantile review of the Bitchy Boys' The Accused series.

Thus Bowden's response to a protest against the grotesque parody written by a "Gritty Left-Wing Dramatist™" (hee, hee - jolly jape) called McGovern from the intelligent and humane retired Colonel Tim Collins is: "Well, you can stick your mark of Cain up your arse, Colonel Tim Collins".

Unlike Collins and Dannatt, McGovern at least proved himself to be militant about what he does for a living: writing good, intelligent TV drama rather than viewing it as a form of dumbed-down prole theatre or as a stepping stone to the movies.

WTF does that mean? Did Collins and Dannatt not prove themselves to be "militant" by putting their lives on the line and by leading men into battle? And what the hell is wrong with "dumbed-down prole theatre"? Does Bowden think it shows some kind of intellectual superiority to take people's money - by force - and then give them programming they won't watch? Of course I know that's what the Bitchy Boys think, but baby cheeks is supposed to be a TV critic, not an entrant for the Bitchy Boys' suck a golf-ball down a hosepipe contest.  

What the hell British troops are fighting for in Afghanistan remains unclear [not if you know how to read - see here, for example], but we should all be thankful that we don’t live in a world where the army can dictate what gets shown on TV.

But we do live in a world where the security apparat dictates what gets shown on TV: in all Muslim countries and most of non-Muslim Africa, in Cambodia, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea, in Venezuela, in Vietnam - you know? All those people's republics that "Gritty Left-Wing Dramatists" and their Bitchy Boy paymasters have been so careful never to criticise over many decades.

Dhimmitude

"British foreign policy to change reflecting Arab concerns on Middle East" reports the Telegraph. No change involved - the institutional proclivity of the Foreign Office has always been to bend over and spread 'em, and if for Arabs with a reach-around to feel those pulsing petro-dollars pumping into the City that pays Britain's bills.

Dhimmitude is a condition of submission (concession, surrender and appeasement) towards Islamic demands. It is derived from the Arab word dhimmi, which literally means 'protected' and refers to non-Muslim subjects of an islamic state - or empire - who are required to show 'proper submission' and to pay a tax.

In this case, the tax amounts to prostituting the Queen and the surrender of such shreds of soiled self-respect as Britain still possesses.

EU - just another in a long line of failing organizations

Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems that require increased investment merely to preserve the status quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of bureaucracies, increasing specialization of bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal control and external defence. All of these must be borne by levying greater costs on the support population, often to no increased advantage. As the number and costliness of organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society's budget available for investment in future economic growth must decline.
                                          Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge 1988)

Nigel Farage - Soothsayer Emeritus

Wonderful speech on YouTube. Watch, listen and revel.

I'll just put him with the Soothscribes - but nothing any of them write can be as effective as this sort of speech in the belly of the beast itself.

It's official - Eurocrats can pay themselves whatever they want

The European Court of Justice has ruled that EU officials are entitled to the full 3.7% pay and pensions increase proposed by the European Commission for last year under the terms of the Staff Regulations passed by the European Commission in 1968 and gold-plated by the Commission in 2004.

In December 2009, member states in Council had agreed to cap such an increase at 1.85% to take account of the economic and financial crisis. The ECJ finds that  "the Council has no margin of discretion allowing it to decide upon a salary adjustment different to that proposed by the Commission".

And here's the kicker. The Council may try to invoke an exceptional clause (Article 10 in Annex XI of the Staff Regulations written by the Commission for itself) in the case of a sudden and serious deterioration in the economic and social situation, but "that special procedure can only be set in train by a proposal from the Commission". 

In other words the parasites have total freedom to decide how much blood they can suck, and the politicians elected to defend the interests of the hosts, who gave the parasites that power, have now discovered that they cannot take it back unless the parasites agree to it.

Which will happen right after pigs are observed flying around the Commission offices in perfect formation.

Useless gobshites

God bless the freedom of the press and the Irish!

Shame our media are so studiedly low-key. But then again, when you are reporting what my main man Ambrose E-P has to say, the facts scream more than loudly enough.

I see Angela Merkel  has declared that "I vill not let up on this because the primacy of politics over markets must be enforced."

How are you going to do that, Angela?

Entitled to his opinion

No, that is not a picture of a convicted child-molester. It is the Bishop of Willesden, self-styled republican Philip Broadbent (sic).

He hath delivered himself of the opinion, to which he is entitled quoth Lambeth Palace, residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the Royal Family is a waste of money and that the marriage of William and Kate will not last seven years, among other charitable sentiments.

Broadbent is a member of the Labour party, for which he was formerly an Islington Councillor and Chair of its Development and Planning Committee.

But he is also a considerable shaker and mover within the fast-dissolving Anglican church, whose head is the Queen, to whom he and all Anglican clergy swear an oath of loyalty.

Let's see now: Bereft of Christian charity - check. Forsworn hypocrite - check. Uncertain sexuality but full-time wanker - check. Bitchy little shit - check.

Of course he's a member (sic) of the Labour party! What else could he be?

Big Society - the cost of cowardice

"Politics is the art of the possible", has long been the mantra of cowardly politicians and policy failure. Falsely attributed to Bismarck, it can more certainly be linked to Rab Butler, the Tory half of the post World War II Keynesian economic consensus known as "Butskellism", which led to the train-wreck of the 1970s.

It was always apparent, simply from their demeanour, that Cameron and Osborne are weak men, and that, allied with their wishy-washy clone Nick Clegg, they would preside over a period in which the economic and financial legacy of their Labour puke predecessors would be consolidated rather than confronted.

There is at least one Tory MP, Westminster and the City's Frank Field, who is not afraid to admit that the odious Brown set a trap for his successors, which they should have denounced at the the time and which they should certainly be emphasizing today instead of rabbiting on about fairness and the "Big Society".

In his bid to ensure the Labour government took the kudos for sparkling new schools and hospitals while avoiding current accounting of its cost, Brown used PFI as a means of keeping infrastructure investment off the public balance sheet by entering into long term deals. While the capital value of PFI contracts was only £55bn, the vastly higher sum that we will eventually pay reflects the huge mark-up costs of lengthy maintenance contracts. It was a political masterstroke, allowing him to boast of prudence by keeping the headline proportion of public debt to GDP below 40%, as promised, whilst at the same time generously ‘investing’ in public services for immediate gratification.

He (correctly) calculated that by the time his trick was revealed, it would not only be someone else’s problem but would prove too complex a manoeuvre to capture the public’s imagination. After all, what is the more terrifying prospect to politicians? Telling their constituents that the last government has given the country 37 years to pay off a £200bn bill or that the current government is cutting the number of police patrolling their local neighbourhood? The other smart strand to his ruse was that the other chief beneficiaries of these flawed PFI deals were middle class professionals (consultants, lawyers, architects, accountants, building contractors), normally the most vocal and articulate critics of public sector waste.

The scam was perfectly apparent, as was the awarding of PFI contracts to Labour constutuencies regardless of merit. The point is that Brown set out to buy the electorate with their children's money, and were it not for the intervening international financial crisis, he would have succeeded.

There was only one way to undo his work, which was to confront his legacy with the same ruthlessness that he demonstrated. Being "nice" and "fair" cannot hack it, because the status quo he created is neither.

We are going to live through another Edward Heath interlude until the LibDems panic and the Coalition falls, at which point the Labour pukes will return to power and complete the destruction of the British economy. The LibDems and the Labour pukes will just be doing what comes naturally to them - it is Cameron and Co who will bear the greater responsibility, for offering no meaningful alternative when in opposition, and for frigging around at the margins instead of going for the kill when they slithered into power.

Ireland - me and mini-me

"At least Ulster isn't a victim of Euro disaster" wrote Newton Emerson in the Times (£). But then he went on to point out that Ulster was already the victim of a currency union - sterling.

Northern Ireland is a text-book case of the problems of a currency union. Like most big countries, the UK suffers from having one currency across the disparate regions. Without an exchange rate, varying productivity can be reflected only by prices and wages, which are rarely flexible enough to do the job. So the less productive regions end up with higher unemployment, while the more productive regions end up with higher taxes.

This is the internal bargain all nations strike, but it is rare to find such a clear example as Northern Ireland. Because of its huge public sector, Northern Ireland has too many people expecting British pay in British pounds with no allowance for their location. Many public-sector workers get a London weighting, but there is no equivalent Belfast lightening. 

Instead, throughout Northern Ireland, there is persistent long-term unemployment, the UK’s highest level of economic inactivity, and a subsidy of about £10 billion a year, more than the one-off bailout London is considering for the republic.

As well as contributing to these problems, currency union denies even a region as developed as Northern Ireland the tools to solve them. Stormont is unable to print money or set interest rates, but it also has little scope to vary taxes. The possibility of lowering Northern Ireland’s corporation tax has been debated for years, but it will still require London’s permission. Even then, there is no guarantee of getting it past the European commission.

When such policies are discussed, Stormont’s status as a glorified county council becomes apparent. This is precisely the status Dail Eireann acquired when Ireland joined the euro. It may have taken a crisis to make it apparent but the surrender of economic sovereignty was complete from day one.

Hat-tip NI Centre-Right

Win-ter is i-cu-men in

Sv-mer is i-cu-men in, Lhu-de sing cuc-cu, says the 13th century song.

Winter is icumen in, Loudly sing Goddamm, wrote Ezra Pound.

Winter has arrived again, sternly warns the Met. 
Global warming is for shit, loudly sing Goddamn, combines the two for today.

"Global frigging warming" blogs Richard North in response to the prediction that snow will shortly fall on much of the British isles. The original doesn't quite scan, but the prose that follows could be sung:

All we need now is to switch 
Off the heating of 
All MPs who still believe 
In global warming 
And we might start seeing some sense
Strange though that might seem.  

Better still strip them naked, 
Coupled in a chain 
And parade them round and round
Ancient Parliament Square
Chanting "global warming's nigh"
'Til they drop from cold.

So-called

When watching the so-called documentaries broadcast by the so-called British so-called Broadcasting so-called Corporation, it occurs to so-called me that these so-called documentary so-called makers are seeking to imprint their so-called vision on a so-called population that has had all concept of so-called truth erased from its so-called consciousness by a so-called education run by so-called people very much like themselves.

Oh, and also to fill their so-called pockets with the so-called money extorted from the so-called population by commissioning these so-called programmes from their own so-called production so-called companies.

I'm not sure which is worse: their assault on objective truth, their perversion of language or the fact that they are running a racket at the expense of the common people while smugly posing as their champions.

Bitchy Boys' time warp

Astonishing. BBC 2 managed to package every single fellow-travelling cliché about the United States in the 50s into "American Dream", broadcast in prime time on Saturday.

Cud by lefty zimmer framers, complete with a 90 year-old ex-communist folky Pete Seeger, and one of the Rosenberg orphans still trying to wriggle around the indisputable proof that his father was a spy for the serial rapist Beria and that his mother cared more for the party than she did for her children.

McCarthy; Nagasaki; tupperware; valium; big bad corporations; inequality; on and on it went. "Consumerism" bad; money doesn't buy happiness; suburbs are "boxes made of ticky-tacky". They probably concluded that the American Dream was a nightmare, but I had given up by then.

Meanwhile the regime for which all those persecuted idealists betrayed or denounced their own country, and which by implication these geriatric Bitchy Boys still believe represented the "progressive" option, was a totalitarian empire run by a genocidal dictator surrounded by perverts.

I not only furiously resent my money being spent on this lying crap, I am disgusted by the thought that I may breathe the same air as the mental degenerates who made it.

The Great Game

I'm linking to the Guardian, but the rest of the Brit mass media also reports below the fold the key deal now confirmed at the NATO summit meeting with Afghan President Karzai.

The Kremlin and western governments appear poised to embark on a range of joint security, political and military projects aimed at closing the worst period of friction since the cold war. Russian President Medvedev and NATO leaders are expected to agree on a range of policies and projects today, from Afghanistan to joint analysis of future security threats.

The Russians have agreed to expand NATO supply routes to and from Afghanistan, to service Afghan helicopters, train Afghan pilots and conduct joint programmes with the west aimed at countering the Afghan heroin trade.

OK - that will help take Pakistan out of the loop, and without that there is no hope whatever of getting out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Afghanistan has ALWAYS been a big geopolitical chili up Russia's arse, and now they are going to recover some of the influence they lost in 1979-88, with the blessings and indeed the gratitude of their old Cold War opponents.

Gove's da man - innit?

The Telegraph reports Education Secretary Gove's plan to re-introduce penalties for pupils displaying poor spelling, punctuation and grammar in exams, dropped by the Labour pukes. Other proposals:

• A move away from bite-sized "modular" courses in some subjects in favour of tests at the end of two years of A-level study, and allowing universities to script A-level exams and syllabuses to ensure sixth-form courses act as a better preparation for a degree.
• An "English Baccalaureate" that rewards pupils for gaining five good GCSEs in English, maths, science, foreign languages and a humanities subject [can general adoption of the International Baccalaureate be far behind?] and a ban on schools using vocational courses as "equivalent" qualifications to boost their ranking in GCSE league tables.
• A review of the National Curriculum to outline the key "bodies of knowledge" that children should master at each stage of their education, and a reading test for all six year-olds to identify those struggling after a year of school, ensuring they receive extra tuition.

If only Cameron would just stop posturing and going on about the "Big Society". The ministers who bothered to prepare for office - Gove, IDS and Pickles - are delivering real change for the better. The rest are pretty much dross - but that still beats the Labour regime, which never backed anyone who put country before party.

The Euro - why Germany should pay the costs of maintaining it

Many thanks to Burning Our Money for this highly illuminating graph.

P = Portugal
I = Italy
I = Ireland
G = Greece
S = Spain

Fair enough, you may say. The Big Bad Wolfsburgs had to cope with the indigestion of swallowing East Germany and they have just - well - run their country far more competently than the happy-go-lucky PIIGS.

That's not the way it works, though. The houses of wood and straw may have blown away, but there is always the final refuge of a floating currency that simply sails with the prevailing wind.

Seems to me that if the Germans want to keep the advantages of the Euro, they should also shoulder the cost of maintaining it. Bit of a political problem for Merkel, though. If she admits this to her domestic audience to pacify their self-righteous outrage about the PIIGS's profligacy, she will make it extremely difficult for the the PIIGS leaders to sell austerity to their own people.

Internet freedom - one small step

Vaizey,the communications minister, has given the green light to internet service providers to favour some internet traffic over other content – as long as they inform customers - reports the Telegraph.

Churlish of me, I know, to carp at any small green shoot of deregulation - but when will the economic illiterates in Whitehall and their political front men learn that price is information?

Why are the Frogs top of Al-Qaeda's shit list?

On Atlantic Community, Olivier Guitta speculates that French Special Force may have come close to killing Osama bin Laden recently, hence the vehemence of OBL's most recent taped message.

It is a simple and clear equation. As you kill, you will be killed. As you capture, you will be captured. And as you threaten our security, your security will be threatened.

Seems they are obsessed with the Eiffel Tower. Good luck with that - it's latticed and riveted cast iron. 

But the more intriguing part of Guitta's article relates to AQ in the Mahgreb - that's the bit of North Africa that used to be French - and the strong possibility that OBL is looking to motivate the Muslim underclass in France.

The French have done an admirable job of countering threats that have emerged on foreign soil but they may be unaware of homegrown threats to their security. Indeed, with his most recent message, bin Laden may have been trying to reach out to those who have been radicalized in France. It is this threat that may worry French security services most of all.

Unaware? I doubt that. I imagine one in every four or five bainlieu dwellers is on the DGSE payroll.

Old Etonians' hissy fit - shit happens

Apparently the mutual masturbation at the Spectator's annual "Parliamentarian of the Year" awards went with a bang - umm - maybe a splash? Anyway, amid all the circle-jerking it seems our little prime minister wanted to remind the biggest Johnson present who's the boss. Fraser Nelson reports him saying:

I think the great thing about the Spectator is your extraordinary heritage, the remarkable figures who’ve sat in the editor’s chair. I’m thinking of people like Iain Macleod, Nigel Lawson and obviously not forgetting my own particular favourite. We went to the same school, the same university and of course I’ve got a soft spot for him. A man of high intelligence and huge ambition. An irresistible charmer with an enviable head of hair. Always bursting with brilliant turns of phrase and bright ideas. Yes, my kind of political maverick . . . Ian Gilmour. I’m not quite sure what went wrong for Ian. I suppose he rubbed the Prime Minister up the wrong way and never really recovered. Shit happens. Anyway, there’s always the chance of becoming our ambassador in Pristina I suppose.

Ian who? Looked him up - he was one of the Heath shower, wetter than wet on every issue, and a Scots baronet to boot. Sacked as Lord Privy (sic) Seal in 1981, he declared that Thatcher's government was "steering full speed ahead for the rocks", and said he regretted not having resigned before he was pushed. Thereafter, like his hero Heath, he sulked until fellow wet John Major made him a life peer in 1992.

Plus, Pristina is the capital of Kosovo and Cameron's closing quip, quite apart from being gratuitously insulting, reveals that he is unaware of what a demanding diplomatic post it is right now.  

So, wee Cameron dropped his pants again to reveal not only how very small they are, but whence they came.

Anglospheric education

A report from The Onion seems to indicate that educational reform in the USA is running into the same problems as all similar endeavours have encountered on this side of the Atlantic.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Education released a comprehensive, nationwide evaluation of American schools Monday indicating that attempts to teach absolutely anything to these little shits is just a huge waste of everybody's time.

"We remain committed to providing every student in the country with access to a high-quality education," said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, adding that good schools are a key component to the success of American democracy. "But to be honest, none of that matters. We're not talking about promising young scholars here - we're talking about a bunch of fucking animals."

"We've basically flushed $11,000 down the toilet for every single one of these little bastards," Duncan continued. "Not to mention 18 years of my life."

"When I first started teaching, I would see the smiling faces in my classroom and get excited about nurturing their young minds," said Melanie Whitman, 35, a first-grade teacher quoted in the report. "Now I can't look up from my desk without wanting to puke at the sight of all those little psychopaths."

H/T Jay

Note to lefty academics

Traditional forms of anti-Semitism continue to plague societies worldwide. We are all familiar with ongoing hostile acts such as the defacing of property, desecration of cemeteries, and even accusations of blood libel. Conspiracy theories continue to flourish, such as supposed Jewish control of the U.S. media and the world banking system, or that Jewish persons were involved in executing the September 11 attacks. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion continue to be best sellers in many, many countries, and taught to religious students as truth.

Opposition to a policy by the State of Israel morphs into anti-Semitism easily and often. We record huge increases in anti-Semitism whenever there is activity in the Middle East. This form of anti-Semitism is more difficult for many to identify – but if all Jews are held responsible for the decisions of the sovereign State of Israel, when governments call upon and intimidate their Jewish communities to condemn Israeli actions, when academics from Israel are boycotted – this is not objecting to a policy – this is anti-Semitism. - State Department Official Hannah Rosenthal

Juan Manuel Barroso - arsehole extraordinaire

Following from AFP, reporting the words of the leading boar in the European Commission pigsty.

I regret that a small number of member states were not prepared to negotiate in a European spirit. Those that think they have won a victory over 'Brussels' have shot themselves in the foot. They should know that they have dealt a blow to people all over Europe and in the developing world. This is not a budget for "Brussels". It is the beneficiaries of EU programmes - citizens, businesses, towns, cities, regions and rural communities - who will feel the impact of this failure to reach agreement.

Just a thought, but maybe all those deserving people would not have to do without EU largesse if the Brussels  apparat did not steal so much of what it already gets. 

Statist employment map

The Guardian has come up with a genuinely useful if rather appalling map of Britain showing the proportion of people employed by the state. You can't beat the following for lefty stupidity, however:

According to the latest figures from a joint release by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Office for National Statistics, 20.4% of the population now works in the public sector - down from the 21.1% figure published by us in June. This decrease can be expected to continue due to the many public sector cuts that have been announced under the coalition government. Ironically, it was higher under the previous Conservative government - in 1992 the figure was 23.1%. But since then privatisations took their toll.

Well now, the "previous Conservative government" ran from 1979 to 1997, so selecting 1992 seems a bit arbitrary. And then there's "took their toll" - reduction in state employment is a BAD THING, you see, regardless of whether those ex-state employees continued to have jobs in the nasty private sector. 

The stats that count are: how many state employees were there on 3 May 1979, 9 June 1983, 9 April 1992, 1 May 1997, 7 June 2001, 6 May 2005 and 6 May 2101. 'Cos that's when there were general elections, and those figures would test the Guardian's assumption that more state employees mean more votes for the left.

The other shoe Part 2

Further to my last two posts, I am grateful to Burning Our Money for this graphic of British banks' exposure to Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

As the man said, "overall exposure to the Irish economy is by no means trivial", but it's come whistling down from the peak a year ago, which shows an unexpected amount of intelligence at work.

Damn that British understatement - you never know when it's for real. Now what do I do with all the tinned goods I bought?