Autoproctology

Those few journopukes not given over to voyeurism and gossip have latched on to the concept of "crony capitalism", blithely ignoring the fact that such is the basis of Corporativism (see here and here), which is the founding and guiding principle of the European Union.

This is not an opinion - it is a stone cold fact, readily ascertainable even on-line.

Likewise the current hoo-ha about the judges creating a ridiculous law of privacy is the inevitable consequence of adopting continental Statute Law, with the consequent (and entirely deliberate) erosion of liberties that were secured by Common Law.

The MSM is in the business of telling people what they want to hear and one must presume they are good at it. It follows that what people want to hear is salacious trivia and ill-informed commentary that does not demand intellectual effort.

Hence my sabbatical. What's the point of having the intelligence, learning and life experience to understand what's going on when people feel safe in their profound ignorance and resent any effort to change what they call their minds?

Over and out

Coincident with my conclusion that I have already committed my best to this web-log and that it would be self-indulgent simply to recycle the same views, comments and criticisms, I am also going to be very busy for the next several months leading tours and finishing my book on Hawkins, Drake & Co.

Accordingly take this opportunity to say au revoir and to wish you all the best as you struggle with the over-mighty, corrupt, incompetent and mostly unelected mediocrities who rule over you.

For as long as the MSM focuses popular attention on elected politicians, the parasitic apparatchiki will continue to feather their nests and run their societies entirely to their own satisfaction. Anyone who has not worked that out is indifferent to the point of intellectual coma and does not interest me.

And you, who know that we are administered, not governed, by a bureauratic oligarchy whose personal and collective interests are inimical to free, healthy and hopeful societies, don't need me to harp on about something that is as universal as it seems to be impervious to reform of any kind. I have a T-shirt that says it all:

IT IS AS BAD AS YOU THINK AND THEY ARE OUT TO GET YOU

On the road again

Tomorrow early, to guide a tour of (most of) the battlefields where the British Battalion fought in the Spanish Civil War. Seeing where they fought, badly trained, ill-equipped and more often than not horrendously badly led, one can only feel sorrow that the cause they believed in so passionately turned out to be as bad as the one they fought against.

Members of the "Tom Mann Centuria", the first organized group of British volunteers, in Barcelona, September 1936.

Left to right Sid Avner (killed 20 December 1936 at Boadilla serving with the Thaelmann Battalion), Nat Cohen and his future wife Ramona, CPGB organizer Tom Wintringham (wounded twice but survived), Italian journalist George Tioli, Aussie Jack Barry (killed 19 December 1936 at Boadilla serving with the Commune de Paris Battalion) and David Marshall (wounded with the Thaelmann on 12 November 1936, repatriated).

From their own mouths . . .

The Independent has an A to Z of the Coalition's first year in office that kicks off with two statements it obviously thinks show the Tories in a bad light, but with which any thinking person can only agree:

A is for Arts, which the Liberal Democrats mostly like but the Tories don't, because they see them as being devised by, and for the enjoyment of, a predominantly left-wing, anti-government bunch of agitprop merchants, gays, chatterers and subversives who shouldn't be subsidised by public money. Hence, a big cut in Arts Council – how they hate those two words – funding, and the abolition of the Film Council.

Works for me. Then there's the Bitchy Boys:

B is for BBC, another nest of Communists and self-regarding, lefty tossers, who pay themselves too much from the licence-payers' money, almost five times as much as the Prime Minister in the case of the director-general. Well, they've had a big reminder that they are state broadcasters with a five-year freeze on the licence fee, forcing cuts in salaries and expenses, and programmes too, opening the door for, ahem, Sky (see M).

Sky gives the people what they want, hot and strong; it's called democracy.* Surely a leftist publication can have no trouble with that - can it? Or is it just a drip-pan for the ejaculatii praecox of lowmid lefties smugly trusting in themselves that they are righteous and despising - in particular - the low-brow tastes of the common people?

* Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
   H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Sólo en Inglaterra - postscript

Big Brother Watch has published a comprehensive report on the Coalition's progress in dismantling the police state it inherited from the NuLabour slime that amounts to an A-.

Clearly my last post on the subject was OTT with reference to the Coalition and I grovel; to the LibDems, not to the Tories, who do not give a shit about civil liberties.

But why don't they give a shit about civil liberties? Quite simple - they are very low on the British electorate's list of nimby priorities, and the Tories have never stood for anything except getting and staying in power.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are chicken-shit.

Thomas Sowell - quote for today

The fatal attraction of government is that it allows busybodies to impose decisions on others without paying any price themselves. That enables them to act as if there were no price, even when there are ruinous prices - paid by others.

Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), Professor Emeritus of Economics, Stanford University

Fuck-You-Yama

The "End of History" intellectual carpet-bagger has a piece in the NYT in which he pontificates about Hayek, having apparently only just read The Constitution of Liberty. His conclusion: 

In the end, there is a deep contradiction in Hayek’s thought. His great insight is that individual human beings muddle along, making progress by planning, experimenting, trying, failing and trying again. They never have as much clarity about the future as they think they do. But Hayek somehow knows with great certainty that when governments, as opposed to individuals, engage in a similar process of innovation and discovery, they will fail. He insists that the dividing line between state and society must be drawn according to a strict abstract principle rather than through empirical adaptation. In so doing, he proves himself to be far more of a hubristic Cartesian than a true Hayekian. 

Angels fear to tread wherein this trivial American headline-grabber political "scientist" blithely blunders. Hayek wrote that statist planners are certain to fail because their self interest makes their understanding of the needs of the people they seek to govern even more imperfect than the collective (but also imperfect) knowledge that the people have themselves.

Furthermore, Hayek argued, governments do not proceed by trial and error the way that individuals do because of institutional arrogance and the ability to use force to enforce conformity. It is precisely because governments are so resistant to "empirical adaptation" that the growth in their power leads to serfdom - as, indeed, it clearly has in Britain.

Having trimmed his sails to the Neo-Con breeze back in 1992, in recent years Fukuyama has smartly tacked to go with what he perceives to be a new statist tide. He has the intellectual integrity of a tape-worm.

EU again: you couldn't make it up

This is the EU Engorgement Enlargement Commissioner demonstrating the size of the bollocks he talks.

His name is Štefan Füle.

The EU flag ceremony: Friedrich Karno's army

On You Tube Nigel Farage does the requisite number on the ceremony to celebrate the adoption of the EU flag and anthem.

Dear God, what a pathetic farce!

Orphans of Liberty

A big welcome to this new site. I've put it on my RSS and hope it will eventually subsume a number of like-minded bloggers in addition to the estimable Anna Raccoon and the eloquent Autonomous Mind.

Not for me, though. I'd just lower the tone. ;-) 

Why "progressive education" is an oxymoron

"Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this;
no usurped power can stand against the artillery of [informed] opinion."
William Godwin (1756-1836)

Boy Wonder growing up fast

An unlikely source, but the Sun has an interview with Cameron that - if he holds to the views expressed - will mark him as the most self-confident PM in recent history.

"I'm not a great believer in endlessly moving people between different jobs", he said. "I like to think I have put in a good team of Conservative and Liberal Democrats and they've a lot of work to do."

He contrasted this with the ceaseless reshuffling under Blair and Brown. "We had 12 Energy Ministers in nine years. And the Tourism Minister changed more often than people got off planes at Heathrow. It was hopeless. I think you've got to try to appoint good people and keep them."

Security of tenure permits ministers to learn how to get their officials to do what they are told - but it also permits rivals to build up their individual standing in the public eye.

That's the reason the insecure toad Brown, in particular, played ministerial musical chairs right up to the moment when the corrupt NuLabour Titanic finally slipped beneath waves polluted with the debris of a destroyed economy and a poisoned culture.

Since the buck stops at Number 10, it takes a very self-confident PM to accept that his ministers will fuck up from time to time as they learn their jobs, and to trust that they will fuck up less as time goes by.

Gah! - don't'cha just hate it when events erode your pristine prejudices?

Exposing ministerial spitefulness is bad

Says the Press Complaints Commission of the Daily Telegraph sting that caused the wanker Business Secretary Vince Cable to be stripped of his authority to oversee Rupert Murdoch's bid for BSkyB and other media takeovers.

In a typically British whinge, the PCC is compelled to admit that Cable's vicious bias against Murdoch was indeed a matter of public interest, but deplores (and intends to prevent in future) the manner in which it was done, echoing Sir Mucho Pomposo (aka Commons Leader Sir George Young) who said undercover methods "undermined democracy".

Journalistic subterfuge may indeed undermine the little moral authority still enjoyed by the mutually masturbating mediocrities who infest the House of Commons but it is they, not the journopukes, who undermine democracy by their chronic cheating and lying and contempt for the wishes of the people who elect them.

Shale gas

I'd pretty much given up blogging about the mass hysteria previously known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW) on the grounds that those who able to think for themselves already know it's bull-shit and the rest are simply frightened lowmids being herded by cynical political and commercial opportunists.

It's a religion, stupid - or a stupid religion, take your pick - that has rushed into the vacuum created when the Moscow Caliphate collapsed and therefore as impervious to reason or factual refutation as any other superstition. It is also the enshrinement of nimbyism and fear of the yellow/brown/black peril as the world's poor claim their piece of the pie and become emancipated from shackling Western aid.

However - Soothscribe Matt Ridley, echoed by Soothscribe Christopher Booker, have lately published articles so persuasive about the abundance and ubiquity of shale gas that I think I will re-engage with the topic, not to comment further on the soaring number of practical and properly scientific refutations of the whole AGW scam, but to clock the slimy wriggling of the EU and British AGW advocates like the snerge Huhne who have gone so far out on a limb that it seems impossible for them to crawl back.

On the other hand, given the functional illiteracy deliberately created by "progressive" education, I don't suppose it will affect what passes for politics in the West in general and Britain in particular. People will continue to vote for what they perceive to be their own interest, and AGW is simply the one of the poison suppositories vaselined with subsidies that a people without virtue will continue to shove up their own arses.  

Judge David Eady - wanker

Worth reading the convoluted reasoning this bewigged buffoon employed to issue a super-injunction AGAINST THE WORLD.

It is no doubt simply an unfortunate coincidence that his single-handed creation of a right of privacy seems to favour only the immensely rich.

Far be it from me to suggest that one of Her Majesty's senior justices could possibly be a corrupt son-of-a-bitch, but on the Caesar's Wife principle I think he should make public his personal finances.

Patriotic Retirement Plan

Pay everybody over 50 a lump sum of £1 million each for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1. They MUST retire - ten million job openings - unemployment fixed
2. They MUST buy a new British car - ten million cars ordered - car industry revitalized
3. They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - mortgage/banking crisis fixed
4. They MUST send their offspring to private school/college/university - education and crime fixed
5. They MUST buy £100 WORTH of alcohol/tobacco a week - and there's your money back in duty/tax etc 

ALSO . . . let's get the indigent elderly and the convicts to change places

The elderly would have:

1. Private, secure rooms with cable TV, outdoor yards and gardens fenced off from feral youths
2. Free heating, hot water, meals with room service, laundry service and convenient medical and dental services
3. Constant video monitoring would ensure instant help if they fell, or needed other assistance
4. A warden required by law to check on them regularly and to adhere to a strict code of conduct
5. Family visits in a purpose-built suite, supervised libraries, gyms, swimming pool, spiritual counselling and adult education

The convicts?

1. Tiny rooms, with limited "personal touches" allowed
2. Live in fear of other criminals without hope of any help from the authorities
3. Eat cat food, limited heating and light
4. Grudging supervision by unaccountable social workers
5. Be regarded as "useless mouths" by the Welfare State and treated accordingly
   

Male lesbians

Some of the most testosterone-laden, fuck-a-rockpile-in-case-there's-a snake-underneath, hard-core fighting men I've known have been homosexual. "Butch" does not even begin to describe them.

Likewise I've known a number of "Fems", some as exaggerated in their femininity as the big-balls-that-clang brigade are in their masculinity; but in their way even braver, given that it is such as they who are victimised. 

Which is why I resist the vernacular temptation to equate homosexuality with either moral or physical cowardice. I'm bored with their clamour for special privileges, but they are hardly unique in that. Minorities have been - very profitably - playing the victim card for most of my lifetime.

Given that "effeminate" is to some degree contaminated by the historic association with cowardice (ludicrous on its face, given the courage required to bear children - if men had to do it, the species would die out), we need to adopt a new term to describe the sort of bitchy semi-men that give the BBC its distinctive tone.

The recent sexual history of the snerge Chris Huhne, about whom we are soon to learn further details in his ex-wife's memoirs, provides a candidate. Readers may recall that he left his wife for an aide who was herself in civil union with another woman. I have a suspicion that it was her "butch" characteristics that attracted Huhne, which would make him a male lesbian, a glorified dildo.

Seems about right. There's a lot of them around.

On torture - again

The tide of bull-shit about how torture helped to send OBL belatedly to hell has risen to the nostril level. I have expressed the view from the other end of the electrodes previously, and also questioned its practical usefulness, but both bear repeating.

Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised more than 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, writes eloquently on how unnecessary and even counter-productive it is in Foreign Policy. As he says, the US oath of allegiance says "Liberty and justice for all", not "liberty and security for all".

Actually, since well before the twin towers went down, the operative concept has been "such liberty as shall be judged compatible with security for all", which is of course no liberty at all.

I was myself tortured once, happily by a sadist who only wanted to hear me scream and who quit after he felt I was sufficiently humiliated.  But while I was hooked up to the "talking machine" I would have told him anything he wanted to stop him turning that damned hand-crank.

He made a serious error in letting me go, as I was working for some very powerful people and not long afterwards learned that he had suffered a fatal accident. I am in no doubt that prompt revenge spared me the worst aspects of PTSD and I empathize fully with the celebrations of those who lost friends and family on 9/11 upon learning that OBL had been erased.

Revenge is good. It's healthy. Condign punishment helps victims heal and, frankly, who gives a shit about the predators. If they can't do the time then they should not have done the crime.

But real torture (as in causing physical agony - not the mental coercion that limp lefties seem to think is equivalent) corrupts the torturers and the system that employs it.

Professor Richard 'Ned' Holmes, 29 March 1946 - 30 April 2011

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His life was gentle, and the elements 

So mixed in him that Nature might stand up 

And say to all the world, 'This was a man!'

Sólo en Inglaterra

Jesus wept. And so should any decent human being to read one more egregious example of the police state created by NuLabour and very carefully NOT dismantled by a coalition containing the supposedly civil libertarian LibDems.

Mrs McIntosh (76) and her 46 year-old daughter were ARRESTED for feeding pigeons in their own back yard. We have empowered the nosy neighbours, the kill-joys, the whiners and the oi no moi roights brigade at the direct expense of common sense, and we are deservedly regarded with contempt by the rest of the world as well as by a large proportion of our own population.

Britishness? The right to make everybody else as miserable as you are. The Big (pile of shit) Society, with history's hand hovering over the lever to flush it away for the betterment of humanity.

Bin Laden: How not to flush a turd

Sigh. That's not how it's done, guys. Beautiful op, as one would expect from ST 6, although I imagine the pilot who stalled the Blackhawk must wish he had died.

But, dear God. Did you learn nothing from your Argentine chums back in the late 70s and early 80s when they dismantled the most serious insurgency in Latin America in their own country, and then came up to Central America at your invitation for an encore?

You DISAPPEAR the mother-fucker. Whether he's killed or captured alive, you leave his followers to panic that you've got him and are introducing him to the old telephone hand-crank and the wet or dry submarine. 

Everybody scurries to new hide-outs, tested comms procedures are abandoned, people shed good false identities and scramble to create new cover. And you watch them run, record their conversations and follow the ones you can.

That way you not only maximise the disruption to the terrorist organization, but you can scoop up a whole bunch more people for meaningful chats and seize a lot of electronic and written documentation because people running and looking over their shoulders for helicopters coming for them tend not to cover their tracks too well.

But hey - what's all that compared to getting thousands of yahoos to chant YOU ESS AY and wave the good ol' stars and stripes? 

Maybe the US administration figured they could not possibly keep it a secret for long, but they should at least have tried to maximise the operational as opposed to PR value of the coup.

Arsehole of the wedding: Dominic Lawson

1 May ex Queen Elizabeth II Hospital, Welwyn Garden City

Got my laptop into hospital with me to catch up on some close-deadline writing, but simply have to take a break to elect Lawson, whom I previously considered an anodyne gossip, to join the Culi Emeritus Causa on the basis of his leading article in today's Sunday Times. God knows when I’ll be able to post it, as of course there’s no wif-fi and I gave up my dongle a while back - but no worries: the kind of crap that gets you elected to the Culi is timeless.

Excluding Blair and Brown from the guest list was “the great blunder in an otherwise brilliantly conceived piece of national pageantry”. Thus Lawson in a rash effort to transcend the drivelling trivia which is all nature and nurture have equipped him to handle.

The reasons, he says, are obvious: Brown was excluded because he pulled the funding from the Royal Yacht Britannia, and Blair because he banned fox-hunting and Camilla was an “enthusiastic and intrepid foxhunter”.  

Well now: let’s take those claims at face value and see where it gets us. The second hinges on Lawson’s claim to insider knowledge that William gave his stepmother a “red pencil” to the guest list, and that she indulged it to vent personal spite. Yeah, right. That’s called projection, telling us a great deal more about the person making the allegation than about the target of the smear.

As to the Britannia, she was very old and had reached the end of her useful service life. No question of replacing her, no matter what government was in power, because it would just give ammunition to the mean-spirited mediocrities of the MSM, and to the envy-rotted, subsidy-addicted and ferociously anti-aspirational sub-humans who give modern Britain its distinctive odour of social decomp.  

   

Now let’s consider the very real insults offered the Royal Family by the leading NuLabour duo. Blair shamelessly cashed in on the death of William’s mother, and went on to pose as the “saviour of the monarchy” by forcing the Queen to respond to an episode of revolting mass hysteria that represented the antithesis of monarchy and, indeed, of basic human decency.

Brown excluded the Queen from the last commemoration of D-Day in a desperate attempt to maximise face-time with The One, apparently ignorant or indifferent to the rigid protocol that consigns prime ministers to the second rank. Also indifferent to the fact that the Queen would have been the only national figure present who had served in their country’s armed forces during the war, and that half of those who landed at D-Day honoured her father as their sovereign. 

President Obama not only insisted on the Queen being personally represented – which she was, by the hapless Charles – but both on that occasion and subsequently he brutally snubbed the toad Brown. 

So, a pair of shabby Labourite chancers have been given a small taste of the deep contempt in which they are deservedly held by the Royal Family. And Dominic Lawson does not understand it at all, because he dare not get his head out of his arse, fearing the fresh air would kill him.

Amazingly, there are still people in England who believe that there are some things you simply do not do – not because there is a law against it or because of (today non-existent) peer pressure, but because such acts would rob them of their self-respect. 

Scum like Blair and Brown – and by extension the gossipmonger Lawson – cannot comprehend a concept so alien to their squalid natures.

MPs are time-serving jobsworths - and it's the fault of the media

I had just got through chatting with my son who lives in the Emerald Isle, and telling him I thought I'd let OR lapse because I'm going to be AFK for most of the next three months, when this imbecility by Jonathan Isaby sprang at me from ConHome.

The media should stop vilifying MPs as lazy and idle if we want to continue attracting decent people into Parliament.

Kiddies, check out the list of logical fallacies in my last but one post before departing for Iberia, and see which ones apply most closely to that statement.

Hint: "continue" is the key word.

Battlefield Tours

Leaving tomorrow very early to do a couple of back-to-back recces in Portugal and Spain in order to finalize the details of two battlefield tours I shall be leading for Holts Tours in May and June.

On return I'm having the remains of my gall bladder removed and will at last be without the tube that has been sticking out of my side since January. Not to mention being able once more to eat meat, cheese and all the other things that make dining a pleasure.

So blogging is likely to be patchy for April, which is a shame because OR has moved from the hundreds to the thousands of views per week since my last hiatus during December 2010. Once thing I find particularly gratifying is that the back catalogue accounts for nearly half the views, indicating that from time to time I tap out posts of lasting interest and, I hope, worth.

The Tours

• The first is also the first commercial tour of the battlefields of the British Battalion in the Spanish Civil War, covering the Casa de Campo/Ciudad Universitaria, Jarama, Villanueva de la Cañada and Mosquito Ridge, which gutted the Battalion, before heading north (taking in the battle of Guadalajara en route even though the British were not involved) to cover Belchite, Quinto, Caspe, Calaceite and finally the last forlorn battles of the Ebro offensive.  
• The second treads more traditional ground following Wellington's Campaigns in Portugal and the Border, covering Roliça, Vimeiro, the Lines of Torres Vedras, Buçaco, Sobral, the Coa, Almeida, Fuentes de Oñoro, the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo, the Bridge at Alcántara, Albuera, the siege of Badajoz and Elvas.
• Later in the year I'll be leading another exciting new tour, The American Independence War in the North, based on my book, running down the Richelieu-Hudson valley from Montreal to New York before going to Princeton and Philadelphia to cover the key battles that decided the war in the North.

Next year I'll be leading tours of the Independence War in the South, also a couple more based on my books of the Falklands War and of the Warlords of the Italian Renaissance, as well as touring Wellington's battles in the north of Spain, the Pyrenees and southern France.

TTFN

Climate catastrophist logical fallacies

Inspired by this unconsciously hilarious report in the Guardian about unexpectedly cold weather causing an increase in greenhouse gas ejaculations emissions because people selfishly wished to stay warm, I thought I'd run through the offences against logic commonly committed by the climate catastrophists. I doubt if the list is definitive!

• Ad hominem: seeking to discredit an argument by attacking an opponent's character (or funding!)
  
• Affirming a disjunct: A or B; A therefore not B
• Affirming the consequent: if A then B; if B therefore A
• Appeal to authority: a statement is correct because it is made by a person or persons regarded as authoritative
• Appeal to probability: because something could happen, it will happen
• Argument from ignorance: something is true because it has not been proved to be false
• Argument from repetition: something discussed so often that it does not need further discussion
• Argumentum ad populum: because many people believe something to be true, it must be true
• Argumentum verbosium: an argument too complex or verbose to make it possible to deal with all its details
• Bare assertion: an argument is assumed to be true because it says it is true
• Base rate: to make a probability judgment without taking into account empirical statistics about the probability
• Causal oversimplification: attributing a phenomenon to one cause when there are many
• Cherry picking evidence
• Circular causation: where the result of something is asserted to be its cause (carbon dioxide)
• Cum hoc ergo propter hoc: correlation between two factors does not imply one causes the other
• Demanding negative proof: avoiding the burden of proof by demanding proof of the contrary
• Denying the antecedent: if A then B; if not A therefore not B
• Equivocation: use of terms with more than one meaning without specifying which meaning is intended
• False analogy
• False attribution: appeal to false, fabricated, biased or irrelevant evidence
• False dichotomy: where two alternatives are declared to be the only possible options when there are more
• Jumping to a conclusion
• Moving the goalposts: changing the terms of the argument ("global warming" becoming "climate change")
• Negative proof: because a premise cannot be proved to be wrong, therefore it must be right
• Over-dramatization
• Over-simplification
• Petitio principii: where the conclusion of an argument is assumed in one or more of its premises.
• Post hoc ergo propter hoc: B follows A, therefore A causes B
• Reductio ad absurdam (a.k.a. slippery slope): seeking to deny that A is beneficial because A x 1000 is harmful
• Regression fallacy: ascribes cause where none exists
• Reification: when an abstraction or hypothesis is regarded as having a concrete existence
• Special pleading
• Suppressed correlative: redefining incompatible premises so that one encompasses the other

Risum teneatis, amici?

EU Observer reports, apparently straight-faced, that the European Commission wants to create a new EU internal security body on the model of Catherine Ashton's European External Action Service (EEAS), which has been such a brilliant success at creating new jobs for eurocrats.

Speaking at a European Parliament hearing in Brussels on 30 March, Commission counter-terrorism director Olivier Luyckx [a distant relative of Asterix?] envisaged a new entity that would pull together existing security agencies Cepol, Cosi [fan tutti?], Eurojust, Europol and Frontex under EU counter-terrorism co-ordinator Gilles de Kerchove [it up your jumper].

"There is new room for action at EU level," said Kerchove. "This is how I see the change: to set up a system that would mirror the one that is being set up for monitoring external crises, a one-stop shop for information-sharing."

Friends, can you indeed hold back your laughter? It'll happen, of course. More parasites - it's what the EU is all about.

The cost of Blair's failed bid to become EU President

The Telegraph reports figures from the Office of National Statistics that show the Euro-denominated British contribution to the parasitic kleptocracy in Brussels increased from £5.3billion in 2009 to £9.2 billion last year. On top of that the pound has devalued against the Euro, and the UK Treasury has also had to support bail-outs for Ireland and Greece in support of the Euro.

Stephen Booth of Open Europe said: "We’re now starting to see the full effect of Tony Blair’s 2005 decision to give up a huge chunk of the British rebate. As a consequence, British taxpayers’ contributions to the EU have escalated dramatically and are expected to go on rising. At a time when the Government is trying to cut national spending, it makes no sense to increase our contributions to a bloated EU budget that is in desperate need of reform".

Add in the legal bonanza created by the British Human Rights Act, which gold-plated the 1950 European Human Rights Convention for the benefit of human rights hustlers Matrix Chambers and its leading star Cherie Blair, QC, and the cost of EuroBlairdom is getting on for being greater even than his more successful effort to win a pay-off from the Americans by joining in the attack on Iraq. 

To cap it all, our current Prime Prat fancies himself the "Heir of Blair". We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.

P.S. Whoa! Soothscribe Richard North pounds "Tory Boy" Booth in this post, citing EC figures to come up with gross figures of €11.42 billion for 2009, €12.92 billion for 2010 and €13.13 billion in 2011- respectively £10.04 billion, £11.36 billion and £11.54 billion at the current exchange rate.

The fact that the current gross contribution is increasing roughly in line with the general increase in the EU budget is a testament both to the need for the [Blair agreed] adjustment and its success. It is one that, had the Tories headed the administration, they would have agreed as well [?]. As it stands the UK correction [rebate] in the 2010 budget still amounts to around €4.0 billion. The real issue, therefore, is not the rebate, but the fact that we are making payments of £11.54 billion to the EU. This is happening under the current administration, led by the Tories.

I don't know what to make of that, other than to humbly suggest that it resembles the spirited debate alleged to have taken place among 19th century clerics about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Of course the Tories will seek to blame Labour - it's called adversarial politics, and anyway the EU is their and the Coalition's third rail. Surely any contribution, no matter from what source, that attacks the alleged economic benefits of belonging to the EU should be welcome?

Victor Davis Hanson - Soothscribe

I've held VDH in high regard for a long time, ever since reading The Western Way of War back in 1989. His elevation to the ranks of the Soothscribes Emeritus Causa owes more to the lucidity of his reasoning and the clarity of his exposition than to my agreement with his neo-con POV.

For those not acquainted with his work, "Obama's Amazing Achievements" on NRO is a good introduction. It is also a biting review of the amoral hypocrisy of American leftists, all of whose allegedly lofty principles, as enunciated in their frenzied attacks on the Bush administration, have been abandoned in the face of exactly the same acts or worse when committed by The One.

Moussa Koussa, asylum seeker

Moussa Koussa, Libyan Minister of Foreign Affairs since March 2009, has sought asylum in Britain. A life-long acolyte of Colonel Daffy, the thesis he submitted for his 1978 sociology degree at the University of Michigan was a fawning biography of the Raïs.

From 1979 to 1980 he was i/c security for Libyan embassies in north Europe, during which time half-a-dozen exiled opponents of the Daffy regime were assassinated.

Appointed ambassador to the Court of St James in 1980, he was expelled later that year for stating that he considered his duties to involve eliminating Libyan dissidents living in the UK. For many years he was denied entry to the USA.

He was later a named suspect in the attempted assassination of Sultan ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud of Saudi Arabia.

All that changed when, as head of Libyan intelligence 1994-2009, he became the key figure in the abandonment of Libya's nuclear weapons development in return for the normalization of relations with the USA and UK. A further quid pro quo was Libyan support for the "war on terror", and payment of compensation for the victims of explosives and weapons supplied to the IRA.

So - does he merit asylum as Dr Jekyl, or to be put on trial as Mr Hyde? I'm willing to bet it depends on how many beans he can spill about the secret deals made during the "normalization". Also about the dirty deal for the release on "humanitarian" grounds of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber.

Tricky one. It will be fun watching the Boy Wonder and the Hagueon squirm.

It IS cricket, old chap

Maybe it's just me, but a lot of news today is making me laugh out loud. Here's an unconsciously hilarious report from po-faced KCOC-S Oborne about what it's like to play for countries that take their sport seriously.

If history is anything to go by, today’s losers will face professional disgrace and social ostracism. They will not be able to return to their homes for fear of physical attack. Some may receive obscene phone calls in the night, as Pakistani skipper Wasim Akram did after his country’s quarter-final defeat to India in 1996. His home was stoned, his effigy burnt in the street, and he required a police escort to go outside.

The winners, by contrast, will bask in national adulation. Indeed, a flavour of the kind of rewards that lie ahead came yesterday with the announcement from Shahbaz Sharif, chief minister of the Punjab, that each member of the Pakistani national side will receive some 25 acres of fertile land [and a cow?] as a prize for beating India.

But then he has to get sententious - it's what shows he's not a mere (sniff) sports journopuke:

Behind all this passion lurks a long, tragic and far too often brutal history. Scholars estimate that between one and three million people died in massacres when Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India were split at the time of independence from the British Empire in 1947.

Since then, there have been four bloody wars between these two proud and magnificent countries, as well as a number of smaller conflicts. To make this hostility yet more menacing, both countries are now armed with nuclear weapons, each aimed at the other. And Indian and Pakistani soldiers face one another uneasily across the lonely line of control in mountainous Kashmir, just a few hundred miles from where today’s massive sporting contest takes place.

The German military philosopher Clausewitz famously noted that war is a continuation of politics by other means.* The Indians and Pakistanis have taken the dictum one stage further: for them, cricket is another form of war.

* No he didn't, you pretentious, indolent twit. Check Google (extract edited for brevity):

"War is a mere continuation of politics by other means" was not intended as a statement of fact. It is the antithesis in a dialectical argument whose thesis is the point made earlier in the analysis that "war is nothing but a wrestling match on a larger scale". Clausewitz's synthesis says that war is neither one nor the other, but lies in his "fascinating trinity", a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.

Farts to be taxed: it's about time

Methane is a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So it comes as no surprise that the global warming scammers have turned their attention to taxing farmers who raise incontinently farting cows and sheep.

Of course one might consider not subsidizing them, but perish the thought. Think of all the EU and other bureaucrats who would lose their jobs 

Taxing ruminant farts will increase milk and food costs and bring nearer the day when millions of irresponsible human carbon dioxide producers cease breathing and return their carbon to Earth Mother Gaia.

The Bitchy Boys, whose verbal twee-ness gets more American every day, calls them "burps". Note the verbal sleight of hand by which they add ruminant farts to mankind's contribution to catastrophic global warming:

In New Zealand, livestock account for 90% of the nation's methane emissions, and about 43% of its greenhouse gases from human activities. In short, without coming up with a solution, it would struggle to meet its Kyoto Protocol targets.

In this the Bitchy Boys are following the lead of the UN Food and Agriculture Onanization (FAO), which last year proposed taxing animal "emissions" because when the entire food chain was taken into account the world's livestock accounted for about 9 percent of human-induced ["induced" - dontcha just love it?] carbon dioxide and 37 percent of methane emissions.

It follows, does it not, that Buffalo Bill and all the others who wiped out the biggest concentration of ruminants in the world by slaughtering the Great Plains bison are environmentalist heroes.

Two less Labour bastards

We should celebrate the news that the younger Millipede is to marry his main squeeze in May, thus legitimisng their two children.

Blithering Brits

The Libyan farce simply underlines that the British state apparat cannot do anything right. The catalyst for ordering two large aircraft carriers - in the teeth of the RAF's determination that they should control all fixed wing aircraft and all except light helicopters - was the 1991-95 Bosnia/Serbia fuck-up.

Remember that? Remember "The hour of Euope has dawned", the immortal words of the exquisitely well-named Jacques Poos, pride of Luxembourg and President of the Council of Europe?

Anyway, after the Americans finally got tired of Europeans circle-jerking and bombed the crap out of Serbia, a few brave matelots in Whitehall broke with consensus and pointed out that if we'd had a proper flat-top it could have operated a wide range of British air assets from a few miles offshore, saving wear and tear on pilots and machines and generating a far greater sortie rate than land-based operations, without requiring the by-your-leave of any neighbouring countries or the enormous expense of setting up and defending bases on land.

My word, really? Gosh, and you say that 90 percent of the world population and even more of its wealth lies within easy reach of the coast? Who'd ever have thought it! And that if a couple of far away choke points are closed off by regimes hostile to us, the whole country will grind to a halt in a matter of weeks? Oh, don't say that, it's too awful to contemplate!

So after the Tory ditherers were kicked out in 1997 the new bunch came in and said "Let's have a Defence Review!" And they did. And it confirmed that British strategic vulnerabilities require aircraft carriers. Roll on another ten years of British bureaucratic buggering around and finally they were ordered.

So now, two decades since the hour of Europe revealed the need for them, not only does the Royal Navy not have the big carriers but the dynamic duo of Cameron and Fox have disposed of, or disarmed, the mini-carriers that had been holding the line for the last 40 years - because the RAF Tornados can do just as good a job until the Typhoons are equipped to take over.

Except that, once again, they have demonstrated that they can attempt to do so only by using up all available air-to-air refuelling assets and burning up the flying hours of their pilots so that they can't even sustain the pitiful sortie rate with which they began to Libyan intervention.

But depend on it - Cameron won't permit a reversal of the original decision. It takes a man to admit he was wrong, and he is a conceited boy playing at being a grown-up, so far out of his depth it almost makes you feel sorry for him.

But not nearly as sorry as I feel for the people whose present and future welfare he is supposed to be taking care of.

Adult abdication

Dear God. Read this Bitchy Boys story about how the Children's Commissar Commissioner for England thinks pupils should help choose teachers - and weep. Or vomit.

Longrider does a sufficient number on her imbecility.

Dr Atkinson said: "Young people are a school’s customers, and they see lots of different teaching styles over the course of a school career".

No, the parents are the school’s customers. And it is reasonable of them to expect the school to use competent adults when applying the recruitment and selection process for teaching staff. The idea that children are competent to know what is in their best interests is infantile in the extreme.

When adults abdicate, children are cut adrift. Some children step up to fill the void for their siblings in the domestic sphere, but they are exceptional and pay a high personal price. The vast majority are deprived of any kind of proper upbringing, and their only hope for some structure is at school.

In his brilliant 1993 book The Moral Sense, the American political thinker James Q. Wilson observes that young people in all cultures and every age need to test the limits of acceptable behaviour, and need those limits to be affirmed:

Testing limits is a way of asserting selfhood. Maintaining limits is a way of asserting community. If the limits are asserted weakly, uncertainly, or apologetically, their effects must surely be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, confidently, and persuasively.

How many more lives are to be blighted by the "progressive" concept that children are little adults born with a sense of what those limits are before some sense of shame at the toxic consequences creeps into the consciousness of the trendies?

Farage on the Libyan intervention

Soothscribe Nigel Farage on YouTube telling it like it is, as usual.

You have to see it on RT (Russia Today) Moscow, although it might have been Al Jaz. But not a chance you'll ever see those views expressed on any Brit channel: they're too chicken-shit.

Hat-tip: Muffled Vociferation

Mandy and the Lloyds/HBOS merger

Lloyds Action Now (LAN), an association of shareholders set up to recover their losses as a result of the merger of Lloyds with Halifax Bank of Scotland, has uncovered the "something" that always smelled to high heaven about the deal.

Seems Mandy, then Business Secretary, withheld evidence that could have changed the outcome of a vital court case in the run up to the merger. The evidence submitted to a Competition Appeals Tribunal in the Autumn of 2008 and later the Scottish Court of Session failed to mention the trifling matter that HBOS had been secretly funded to the tune of £25.4 billion in Emergency Liquidity Assistance.

"The evidence submitted by Lord Mandleson was the subject of a secrecy order which means that no-one who was a party to the case can reveal what it contained", said Adrian Lithgow, spokesman for LAN. "That does not prevent them from saying what was not in the secret dossier, and our sources are adamant there was no mention of the £25.4 billion. The implications are astounding".

Well, the fact that Mandy might have lied falls a long way short of astounding. More astonishing is that the perpetrators public servants involved did not get a super injunction to prevent all mention of the matter, as they can uniquely in Britain, where freedom of speech has been abolished along with national sovereignty, habeas corpus and all those other silly things people used to believe were their inalienable heritage.

Spin done well

When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D Nebraska) learned from a very distant relative that their common ancestor, Senator Reid's great-great uncle Remus, had been hanged as a horse thief, the senator promptly replied with a tongue-in-cheek (oh sorry, I forgot - Americans don't do irony, do they?) demonstration of how even the most unpromising material can be - shall we say - presented in the most flattering light.

Here's the unpromising material on the back of the photograph:

Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1883, escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.

Here's the spin:

Remus Reid was a famous cowboy in the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years of his life to government service, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.

Hat-tip genealogist Judy Wallman via Jill

Itch about oil

As the old clown Anthony Wedgewood Benn would no doubt be intoning from a platform in Trafalgar Square if someone could have summoned up the energy to organize a protest against the Libyan intervention.

And, this time and for once, he'd be right. The insurgents are now (one hopes) well disposed towards the Franco-Brits who The One is permitting to grab the limelight while the Americans fly most of the sorties.

And gosh, what a surprise; thanks to the generous interpretation of "no-fly" to include destroying decidedly earth-bound armoured vehicles, the insurgents are recovering all the oil refinery and exporting facilities along the eastern coast.

So, itch indeed about oil. But itch also, if only incidentally, about knocking over a crazy as a shithouse rat Arab dictator who is long overdue in hell - so who gives a damn?

Tornado and Brimstone: ethical tank-busting

As promised, videos of civilian-friendly warfare from the RAF.

Gotta admit the fly boys also produce the moodiest movies.

Can't be helped - the Army and the Navy will never be able to compete on the PR front.

Sinking slowly into a corporativist bog

 This is what happens to you if you write for the Telegraph for fifty years.

Soothscribe Christopher Booker recalled that when he was interviewed in 1990 for the promotion to the job he has held down ever since - as a Sunday Telegraph columnist - he was asked how he saw Britain’s future. "Sinking slowly into a sub-Marxist fog" he replied. 

In 1992 he embarked on the campaign he has waged ever since against the erosion of historic British liberties and the suffocation of the very soul of the society by domestic and EU bureaucracy.


Today, after hundreds of thousands of state employees have demonstrated to DEMAND that the future be mortgaged further to pay them to live better than those whose taxes pay their wages, he summarizes all the ways in which the "savage cuts" the Coalition government has yet to make are a drop in the ocean next to the costs loaded on the British economy by the EU with the bleating acquiescence of successive British governments.

Oh, and the contemptible refusal of the malignant dwarf Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, to uphold the supremacy of elected representatives over bureaucrats even in a matter directly infringing their most sacred democratic prerogatives.

It must make it all seem so worthwhile.

The tablet brought down from Mount Statism

Tim Montgomerie on ConHome's "Left Watch" has this great image:

Quotes for today: Soothscribe Matt Ridley and Adam Smith on Crony Capitalism

Great post on Ridley's The Rational Optimist about nuclear power. Here's the hook on crony capitalism (a.k.a. corporativism, the organizing principle of the EU):

The problem with crony capitalism, whether in finance or energy or anything else [is that the] 'market' and 'capitalists' are not on the same side and against 'government'. No, its government and capitalists colluding against the market, which is on the side of the people. The 'financial market' proved to be no such thing; it was a casino for favoured clients run by central banks. The `energy market' is no such thing. It is a scheme run by governments for favoured clients in the nuclear, renewable and environmental-pressure group industries.

Adam Smith, the Daddy of free market economics (see this fine compilation) wrote:

The proposal of any new law or regulation which comes from [businessmen], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Contempt of Parliament

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative party government has lost a vote of no confidence tabled after a parliamentary committee found it in contempt of Parliament. The accusation was tendentious and was simply an excuse by the opposition parties to bring down the government, but the result is Canada's fourth election in seven years.

With any luck the gambit will rebound on the perpetrators, but the incident made me ponder on how low the British parliament has fallen. The main categories of Contempt of Parliament are:

• deliberately misleading a House or one of its committees;
• failing to testify or provide required documents to a House or one of its committees;
• attempting to influence a Member of Parliament by bribery or threats.

Those first and last of these acts are committed so regularly by British governments as to consitute standard operating procedure. If the Members of Parliament lack the collective pride to demand respect from the executive, they should not be surprised that the people they are supposed to represent holds them all in contempt. 

On the perils of making lofty moral judgments in international affairs

US bloggers have been linking to The One's forthright views on presidents' war-making powers in an interview with the Boston Globe in December 2007.

Question: In what circumstances, if any, would the president have constitutional authority to bomb Iran without seeking a use-of-force authorization from Congress? (Specifically, what about the strategic bombing of suspected nuclear sites -- a situation that does not involve stopping an imminent threat?)

Answer: The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch. It is always preferable to have the informed consent of Congress prior to any military action.

Then there's this TV interview with Vice-President Joe Biden, also in 2007.

I was chairman of the Judiciary Committee for seventeen years or its ranking member. I teach separation of powers in Constitutional Law. This is something I know. So I got together and brought a group of Constitutional scholars together to write a piece that I’m going to deliver to the whole Unites States Senate pointing out the President has no Constitutional authority to take this nation to war [against Iran] unless we’re attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked. And if he does, I would move to impeach him. The House obviously has to do that, but I would lead an effort to impeach him. I don’t say it lightly.

Ooops.

Tomahawk vs. Storm Shadow Part 3

The Reg holds forth on the subject today at great length, extensive to the whole triforce imbecility.

Subsequent to my first post on this subject, I learned that the RN is buying newer model replacement Tomahawks at about £662,000 each. Hmmm. The price I gave was for the older, less capable model.

I think it's fair to use the sunk cost of the missiles actually employed, as presumably they would have been scrapped when the new ones arrived. Waste not, want not.