A boomerang for the multiculties

Oh, this is too good. The Searchlight Education Trust commissioned pollsters Populus to check out popular opinion about immigration and got it up the butt without KY gel. Populus found that 63 percent of white Britons, 43 percent of British Asians and 17 percent of black Britons believe immigration has been a bad thing for Britain.

But the one that must really make multiculty rings sting is that no less than 38 percent of British Asians, more than the 34 percent of white Britons and 21 percent of black Britons, think all immigration should be halted until the economy is back on track. Just over half of the sample agreed with the statement "Muslims create problems in the UK" and just under half would consider supporting a far-right party if it did not promote "facist imagery" or violence.

The Searchlight weenies said the report "paints a disturbing picture of our attitudes towards each other and the unknown". In the foreword to the report, the aptly named Jon Cruddas, one of the Labour pukes who flooded the country with unvetted immigrants to provide clients for their party, multiplied by race-based fraud and corruption, had the almighty gall to write the following: 

Put simply, unless political parties step up and provide a new language of material well-being, of identity and belonging, then these political forces might refract into more malign forms.

Refract, eh? Refraction is the change in direction of an optical or acoustic wave due to a change in speed, typically when entering water. What an unwittingly accurate word to use when writing about opening the floodgates to indiscriminate immigration, overflowing the cup of British tolerance; and to the detriment of the majority of ethnic immigrants, who come here seeking a better life, leaving behind the crime, ignorance and superstition that have made shit-holes of their countries of origin.

Change just one letter

Following from Archbishop Cranmer in "Ireland's New Puppet Government Emerges".

Politicians seem to win elections by promising heaven on earth, and when, a decade later, the electorate realises that they are still in purgatory, another swathe of disaffected voters views the democratic process with cynicism and disdain, declaring a plague on all their houses. This leads to voter apathy and alienation, a deterioration in democratic participation and a declining turnout in elections, especially among the young.

If our democratic leaders do not wake up soon to the inevitable consequences of this, then Tripoli and Cairo will come to Dublin, Lisbon and London, just as it has already come to Athens. You can’t buck the people.

To the contrary: you can buck some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and most of them come back for more. Maybe the Irish should build a colossus astride the Liffey to match the one I propose for the Thames, symbolizing the Greatness of Modern Britain: a fat, balding man with his back to the North Sea, bent over with trousers around his ankles to reveal vestigial testicles and the bold caption:

BUCK ME (IF IT'S NOT TOO MUCH BOTHER) - I LIKE IT

Defence Secretary Basil Brush's own goal

Goals scored from within one's own half are rightly regarded as primo examples of the footballer's art, combining intelligence, spacial awareness and phenomenal skill.

Own goals from the same distance reveal the opposite - stupidity, tunnel vision and profound ineptitude. No examples in football, but plenty in politics. The most recent is this article by Lame Fox in the Telegraph.

An island nation like Britain, with so many interests in so many parts of the world – 92 per cent of trade moving by sea, around 10 per cent of our citizens living abroad – is inevitably going to be affected by global instability.

So, of course, it has been entirely correct to gut the Royal Navy, destroy naval aviation and to go ahead with the construction of two aircraftless carriers solely to keep jobs in the Clyde, which benefits only the Scottish Communist Labour party, which gave us the Psycho Cyclops and all the other north of the border apparatchiki who deliberately wrecked the economy in order to hand over the poisoned chalice to the hapless Tories.

The wanker Fox also appears to be unaware that HMS Cumberland, the command ship for the belated Libyan intervention, was on its way home to be scrapped. Please, can someone put him out of our misery?

Larry, the Downing Street cat

I seldom give the Independent a puff, but this sustained metaphor by Matt Chorley is clever. Seems Cameron's cat is a pussy when it comes to killing rodents. Hmmm.

But it hates journopukes, so it's not a complete failure.

Quote of the day: Appalling Strangeness

This from today's post, "The Toxic Labour Party":

When I think of the Tories, I feel a complete lack of enthusiasm combined with mild suspicion about their social conservatism. When I think of the Lib Dems, I get mildly amused by their ineptitude and amateur nature. But when I think of Labour, I feel rage and hate. I despise them for their continual raids on my wallet and the decimation of civil liberties during their long years in power. And I am enraged by their complacent arrogance, by their assumption that they should be in power, and that anyone who stands in the way of their project is in some way hindering progress. To my mind, none of the main parties have shown that they are capable of governing, but Labour have categorically shown themselves to be utterly incapable of treating the people of this country with any other than contempt.

While we're at it, read the whole of Anna Raccoon's excellent "Hurrah for Hereford!"  Damn, I love a robust woman!

Correlation is NOT causation, dammit

Whoever wrote this article from the Economist's Democracy in America column (for "democracy" read the Democratic party) is just another standard product of Anglo-American "progressive" education, which eschews the teaching of history and logic because it would demolish the entire edifice of totalitarian thought the lefties have created. Such people simply lack the intellectual equipment to even see, let alone acknowledge, the gaping holes in their argument. 

First of all, as the article and the link on which it is based grudgingly admit, the relationship between the unionisation of teachers and performance in standarized testing proves nothing at all, not simply because - contrary to the indoctrination in those schools about global warming and other leftist pieties - correlation is not causation. However, another obvious objection is that the ACT and SAT tests are set by the teachers themselves in an institutional act of begging the question.

Yet another point ignored by the article is that the reason Republican are hostile to state employee trades unions is that the unions are the mainstay of the Democrats, recycling tax money back to the party that, unsurprisingly, has increased their pay and benefits beyond the ability of the productive sector to sustain them. So the following conclusion, so "wet" and so obviously written with an eye back across the Atlantic that it must have been by a Brit, is farcical.

There are clearly some serious problems facing American governance [1], and public-sector unions are going to have to make adjustments [2] to solve those problems, whether it means pension restructuring or allowing the firing of incompetent teachers. But those kinds of reforms will be unachievable if unions correctly [3] understand that their opponents, including Scott Walker and the modern Republican Party, are not in fact interested in collaborating with them on solutions [4], and are instead trying to destroy their existence as institutions [5].

1. No shit. Do you suppose a bloated parasitic sector might be one of them?
2. Adjustments, eh? Not "savage cuts", evidently. 
3. There can be no "if" in that statement. The unions' understanding is "correct", therefore their opponents are wrong, therefore:
4. Collaborative reforms are unachievable by Republicans [UK Conservatives] and we must all vote Democrat [UK Labour].
5. As to the Republicans attacking the unions, as the French aphorism puts it: Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend [This beast is very wicked: It will fight back, when it’s attacked].

OK - Peter Oborne is an unredeemable arsehole

Read this Standpoint article for the final reason why Cameron's lead lickspittle takes his place among the Cūli Emeritus Causa.

Tebbit's finally lost it

Extremely strange post on Critical Reaction, Tebbit's blog.

A culture of briefing and smearing against civil servants is now the norm amongst responsible ministers and this is a deeply shaming thing. Or to be more precise, it’s what the Cameron-end of the Conservative Party alone has achieved, for this vice is exclusively restricted to them. There’s no evidence that either the handful of traditional Tories in office are engaging in it, nor that the Lib Dem ministers are behaving in this degraded fashion: it’s just the people who have been briefing against other people for a decade now who are still at it.

He selects little Gove at Education as the worst sinner against the sacred civil servants, and that is simply absurd. The Edustablishment declared war on him from his first day in office, and their attempts to embarrass him and the tsunami of leaks coming out of that dire department has magnificently upheld Whitehall's global reputation for competence only in treachery.

The same journalists who take this poison against civil servants are the same hacks who are furthering the Cameroon spin against William Hague, Andrew Lansley and Liam Fox. The sordid enthusiasm with which the Prime Minister’s allies stoked up the Foreign Secretary’s difficulties last year is well enough known, but it’s the pre-emptive blame-shifting in the direction of the Health Secretary which is baffling. If the Prime Minister really believes – as opposed to his merely being habitually frit at the approach of more heavy weather – that the health reforms are being mishandled, why is he allowing Lansley to continue his supposed ‘mismanagement’ of them?

So Guido Fawkes, who started the Hague is gay hare, is part of the Cameron spin machine? As to Fox, he has presided over the most catastrophic Defence review since the appalling Nott, and if he is being put in the frame for something run by Cameron, then he should resign. Finally, Lansley is a cow (bull would suggest he had a pair, which clearly he does not) in Britain's most iconic institutional china shop, and Cameron would be insane not to make some space between them.

But the most astonishing thing remains that Tebbit, who knows damned well how the bureaucrats extorted privileges from Thatcher in return for not sabotaging her administration, should think they are poor little things who need defending from the sheep in sheep's clothing of the Coalition government.

Quandoque dormitat Homerus

Oops. Soothscribe and Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill should have proof-read James Heartfield's review of The Taste of War, which contains this howler:

It was Britain that first pushed the world into protectionism with its ‘imperial preference’ tariffs in 1932.

Bull-shit. The game of beggar-my-neighbour was kicked off by the protectionist US Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, as anyone who presumes to comment on 20th century history should know.

Wikileaks spoof

The review of this book by always brilliant Soothscribe Brendan O'Neil on Spiked is one of those very, very rare reviews that actually makes me want to go out and buy it full price. The following says it all. 

Churnalism is when journalists are "reduced to passive processors of whatever material comes their way". Er, hello?

Sometimes, the best way to deal with a weird political story is by parodying its protagonists. These two authors have done a brilliant job of that. Wikileaks is really a story of an incoherent American elite effectively farting its own secrets into the public arena, where they were then lapped up by hackers who are the close cousins of David Icke in their conspiratorial outlook and by hacks who no longer know how to find "the truth" and so they wait for it to land in their laps, scribbled on a napkin, like a modern-day version of the all-knowing Dead Sea Scrolls. 

By dressing up this rather sad and sordid shebang as a James Bond-esque escapade involving brave spectral whizzkids and fearless journalists with macchiatos in one hand and cop-outsmarting mobile phones in the other, "Leigh" and "Harding" brilliantly ridicule the life out of the Wikileaks myth and nonsense. Buy this book if you like a laugh.

Quote for the day - Autonomous Mind

EU leaders love globe trotting and telling the world about the wonder of democracy. But they sure as hell don’t practice what they preach. Out of all the member states only Ireland held a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty’s package of measures to dramatically increase the power of the EU at the expense of national sovereignty. That’s democratic? The cosy stitch up by of the political class serves no one’s interest but theirs, but they believe their own bullshit and think they are some kind of model democratic structure. In truth the EU is only a model for a modernised version of the totalitarian autocracy being thrown off by the people in north Africa. The only difference being the illusion of democracy where in truth none exists.

Full article here.

Reprise: posting from 28 February last year

Let's skip the Heath interlude

Yeah, I know I've used it before; but it deserves another outing in the light of today's news that Cameron has led his party to near-parity in popular esteem with the human rejects clustered around the psycho Cyclops. [2011 - and is now well behind the same scum clustered around Mlillipede Minor, with "savage cuts" still to come instead of hanging them firmly around the neck of the Labour pukes immediately on coming to power]

Those of us who recall the 60s and 70s have been suffering badly from déja vu for the last decade:

1. Basic odiousness of the Tory capons becomes ever more apparent;
2. Meddlesome low-mids come to power amid hosannas from the self-annointed;
3. Meddlesome low-mids fuck it up royally;
4. Tory capons win a narrow majority under a pompous prat;
5. Tory capons impersonate cocks amid general derision;
6. Meddlesome low-mids come back and fuck up what they did not fuck up previously;
7. Stagflation; runs on the pound; call in the IMF;
8. Attempts to cut back the bloated public sector fail;
9. Capons choose a dominant hen to lead them to victory;
10. Wrenching period of adjustment;
11. Economy recovers and becomes among the most competitive in the world;
12. General prosperity;
13. Capons depose the hen and elect one of their own;
14. Return to 'basic odiousness' and repeat.

So, this time around let's skip the Heath interlude. The Gadarene swine need to run off a cliff.

Wafa Sultan - soothspeaker

This clip from Al-Jaz dates from 2006. According to the Google entry on Wafa Sultan it went viral and became the most discussed video of all time when the Middle East Media Research Institute posted it on YouTube.

Time to start the ball rolling again, now that we have the Arabomites of the FCO and the BBC having self-induced orgasms about how a thousand flowers of democracy are springing up from the shit-heaps of the Middle East.

There is no cultural basis for such a hope - I wish there were. The most likely result of all the turmoil is that "moderates" will come to power first, amid hosannas from "progressives" in the West; they will fail to cope with the enormous structural problems in their societies and will be too weak to contain the Islamofascists.

The way to bet is for the see-saw of alternating government by the military and a corrupt civilian oligarchy, as in Pakistan. If you can get good odds, put one either way on an Islamist theocracy like Iran, or total social breakdown and war of all against all as in Somalia.

Churnalism Detector

This is cute. Put a passage from your least favourite journopuke in the box and trace the plagiarism.

However, I suspect that if you input anything by Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Polly Toynbee and similar pond scum, you'll find that they are simply recycling their own crap, like the Hogs of Westphalia. It's not what is known as churnalism, but I think it qualifies - in fact I think it's even more lazy and dishonest.

I'm sure they each have their own program (something like the Postmodernist Generator) into which they input a certain number of variables and it churns out an article that ticks all the lefty trope boxes: Israel, USA, capitalism, greed, racism, etc.

Easy money - but of course such heroic champions of the downtrodden can't be shameless greedy bastards, can they?

Quotes of the day - Tims Black and Congdon

Faced with a chronic housing shortage, the state, regardless of stripe of government, seems incapable of doing anything about it. As it stands, housebuilding rates are set to dip to their lowest level since the 1920s. Yet, too cowed by adverse publicity, too weak to actually justify a major undertaking such as housebuilding or a new generation of nuclear power stations, the government is content to look as if it is doing something while achieving nothing. While the state is happy to preoccupy itself with our behaviour, nannying then, nudging now, it seems unable to provide its citizens with the things we might actually want.

Tim Black in Spiked.

An amazing feature of modern societies is that people believe what they read in the newspapers. As a result, consensus narratives become established from hurried guesswork about facts and instant opinion based on that guesswork. If people want to read newspapers and to believe the narratives they spew out, they are likely also to buy books that distil these narratives and reconfirm their views. The reconfirmed views then become the "conventional wisdoms" which motivate political dialogue and government action.

Tim Congdon in Standpoint

Sheik me all night long

'Cos the walls were shakin'
The earth was quakin'
My mind was achin'
And we were makin' it
And you
Shook me all night long
Yeah you shook me all night long
Knocked me out and then you
Shook me all night long


For some reason the words of the greatest rock 'n roll song of all time by AC/DC came to mind when I read this piece by the Great Ambrose about how the fattest and lousiest of the Arab sheiks has been panicked into releasing $36 billion from his family's obscene hoard of cash to stave off unrest among his fly-blown subjects.

Meanwhile, the price of oil is likely to double and that, my friends, will be the final push into deep shit for our already precarious economy.

Tax accounts for over 80% of the wildly inflationary cost of gasoline in the UK. The mutual masturbators who govern us are snugly smug in their self-serving ideology of global warming and will not - unless confronted with serious violence that threatens them personally - reduce the amount they appropriate to insulate themselves from the consequences of their corrupt and incompetent administration of the country.

Time to riot, folks. Time to burn the grandiose buildings where those moral pygmies lounge around and pleasure themselves at our expense and to chase the mother-fuckers through the streets with cattle-prods.

In Memoriam: WPC Yvonne Fletcher

Irish Monopoly game

 

Hat-tip ShaunB

Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Mullah

Two million Egyptians in Tahrir Square chant "To Jerusalem we are heading, martyrs in the millions". YouTube.

Seems we've been here before. Lefty pukes - read these subtitles, you slimy little shits 

Kapow! NASA breaks ranks with the climate catastrophists

"Satellite launch tomorrow aims to study settled incontrovertible science" reads the ironic headline in Hockey Schtick, with reference to the NASA Glory satellite scheduled for launch tomorrow, whose purpose is to help scientists "understand the dynamics of global warming and identify its causes." Seems the premier agency concerned with cosmology doesn't think it's "settled science" after all. The mission website states: 

The impact of solar variability and aerosols on the Earth's climate is believed to be comparable to the impact posed by greenhouse gases. Still, aerosols remain poorly measured and may represent the largest uncertainty in our understanding of climate changes. The root of the problem is that the Earth's atmosphere and its surface have a complex relationship, which leads to large uncertainties in simulations that scientists use to describe and understand this system. The objective of the Glory mission is to reduce these uncertainties.

All we much-libelled climate catastrophist "deniers" have ever wanted is an end to the politicization of science and an admission that our collective understanding is much, much too limited to justify the trillions of dollars of lost wealth and millions of lives that will be blighted by the unregenerate communist agenda posing as "Green".

Quote of the day - Aeon McNulty

Democracy doesn't cause freedom; it's the other way round. It's necessary but not sufficient. And, besides, its purpose is not to give "power to the people" its purpose (like term limits, etc) is to limit the power of government.

Some times the same thing needs to be said many times before it gets through to enough people. These are the kind of ideas worth repeating in any case.

Thanks, Aeon. It does get dispiritng seeing the same damned stupid things being said and done in the public arena, and to anyone who lived through the 60s and 70s the sense of déja vu is almost overwhelming.

But yes, to give up simply because one's arguments echo in the void just hands the game over to the statist pukes, who use every opportunity to restate their nostrums and have won round after round by simply wearing people down.

Gaddafi - please let it be true!

Gaddafi refuses to leave power, vows to die a 'martyr' in Libya 

Tribal and religious leaders condemned Gaddafi for the attacks against civilians; some urged all Muslims to rise against him. Influential Muslim cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi told al-Jazeera that he urged any Libyan soldier who has the opportunity to kill Gaddafi - and issued a religious decree to that effect. "I am issuing a fatwa now to kill Gaddafi, to any army soldier, to any man who can pull the trigger and kill this man to do so.

Thus the Washington Post. Oh, I do so pray the sick bastard will stick it out. Wouldn't like to see him shot though. No, I want to see him dragged from his palace, stomped to death and hung by his feet in some very public place.

Laconic post from Biased BBC

David Preiser (USA) contributes a new Open Thread on B-BBC with this excellent montage (love the deliberate inversion [sic] in the middle) and comments:

Due to swingeing boodget coots, the local council has had to close a library, a swimming pool, and a community garden, as well as put several adorable puppies to sleep in order to afford to put up this new open thread.

Maybe that's the best we can do - just laugh at the pathetic bastards clinging to the increasingly withered tits of Crone Britannia.

One in the plus column for the EC

The Reg has a fascinating commentary on a recently published European Commission response (pdf) to a four-year-old freedom of information (FOI) request by privacy and data protection campaigner Chris Pounder (Hawktalk), who was only sent the FOI material after the European Ombudsman intervened.

It seems the EC has expressed strong criticism not only of Britain's Data Protection Act (DPA) but also of how the British courts have interpreted it, as falling far short of ensuring the citizens' rights against the state as enumerated in the EU's Data Protection Directive of 1995, which was supposed to have been enacted by 1998.

Among the items in the Directive that the British state has found it inconvenient to enact (unlike EU directives increasing the power of the state, which are always gold-plated by British officials) is the right of citizens to check the accuracy of data held by anyone, ensure it is being kept up-to-date, and to rectify, erase or block it if necessary. The DPA grants the courts discretion to grant or refuse any such applications; and refuse them they do.

I'm beginning to nurture the subversive thought that as far as civil liberties are concerned, it may only have been membership of the EU that deterred the totalitarian ambitions of the Blair/Brown regime.

More brown-nosing - Alex Singleton

Order of the KCOC-S to yet another Telegraph journopuke! 

Just as many Tories were becoming fed up with Cameron, our PM has done three things that should put smiles on their faces.

"Our PM" - yeah, right. The Heir of Blair continues to believe that it's all a matter of PR - which is, after all, the only life experience he brought into politics. As commented previously (here and here) the Cameronian washing machine is in full spin cycle.

The problem (please excuse the mixed metaphor) is that he threw out the baby long ago, and after the bath-water is spun away there will be nothing left.

Cameron screws the pooch again - twice

So, as predicted the Boy Wonder's sad spin machine is following up the Commons vote that rejected the ECHR ruling on votes for scum-bags by sawing away the planks sagging under the weight of Fatty Clarke.

But soft - what's this? Cameron is appointing a head of strategy and a deputy to beef up his policy unit. That's right, after nearly a year in government he has discovered that nobody is buying his "message". So, like The One in the States, rather than ditch the message he has decided the problem is that people don't understand his vision.

So the first thing to do is to get his cabinet colleagues "on message" - that message being how wondrous the Heir of Blair really is. So . . . who can be depended on to do that? Why the Boy Wonder's Svengali, Michael Howard! The most loathed minister in the hapless Major's government, widely known as "Dracula" (Batman to Cameron's Robin?) - what could go wrong?

I had few expectations of the Boy Wonder, but I did expect him to know something about politics. Instead he has squandered his first year in office, failing to disarm even the most obvious booby-traps laid for him by the Labour pukes. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression - he's blown it, and beefing up his "strategy unit" can't recover lost momentum.

But above all he will not see that as far as the British people are concerned, one Blair was enough; and that Howard is a political liability whose appearances on TV as a minister and a leader of the opposition invariably boosted Labour's popularity.

Wank of the weekend - Christopher Goodwin

As if we didn't have enough pseudo-intellectual wankers of our own, today the Sunday Times (£) "Kultchah" section has a cover story by this LA-based poser. He could, of course, be a transplant - he certainly sounds like a typical Brit journopuke.

It's a shame the article is behind a paywall, because I really can't be bothered to transcribe more than a few lowlights: 

For anyone over about 25 [1], movie-going has become an astonishingly dispiriting experience. . . . The inescapable truth is that American cinemas, one of the great cultural achievements of the 20th century [2], has reached a nadir. . . . The studios also point at least one finger of blame at adult audiences, who, they claim, simply don't go to the cinema as much as they once did [3] . . . . The British - whose cinemas, at least, can be relied on to screen worthwhile [4] indigenous films and the occasional subtitled hit from Europe and East Asia. Boxed first spread: In 1993 only 1 of the year's top 10 highest grossing movies was a kids' film; in 2009 it was 8 out of 10 [5]. Boxed second spread: an analysis of why middle budget films lose money [6]

1. Since the main thrust of the article is that the film-going public is now predominantly adolescent, it seems maturity takes a while to arrive in LA . . .
2. Clearly he meant cinema; as written it suggests that the tacky movie theatres were a great cultural achievement. But even going with what I think he meant, that is an astonishingly grandiose claim. 
3. Blame? It's called technological change, arsehole. No doubt music hall nostalgics once said the same about movies.
4. For which read state-subsidised.
5. D'you suppose it might be because kids' movies make money? Gosh, there's a thought.
6. D'you suppose that might explain why middle budget films are finding it difficult to attract commercial backing? Gosh, there's another thought.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

So said Samuel Johnson. According to this NYT story it is the first - at least as it applies to the US Patriot Act, an Orwellian misnomer if ever there was one.

For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.
 
The Justice Department, which in the last few months has gotten protective orders from two federal judges keeping details of the technology out of court, says it is guarding state secrets that would threaten national security if disclosed. But others involved in the case say that what the government is trying to avoid is public embarrassment over evidence that Mr. Montgomery bamboozled federal officials.

Actually, if Samuel Johnson were alive today, he would modify his adage: what he meant was the abuse of patriotism that we now call National Security, in whose name so much evil has and will continue to be done for as long as we refuse to see that governments exaggerate external threats to justify internal repression.

Hat-tip Kinsla

The Psycho Cyclops speaks

This gob-smacking extract in the Telegraph from Brown's address at Lambeth Palace to a group of leading clergy, including the Archbishop of Futility:

We know here in the West that what may begin as a benign attempt by a politician to explain their religious motivation too often ends with the spectacle of them hinting that God has sanctioned or ordained a course of action. Whether in foreign affairs - perhaps hinting at a justification for weapons or a war - or in domestic affairs - perhaps justifying intrusive laws in deeply personal matters best resolved in the privacy of conscience and family.

Billed as an attack on Blair and Bush, what it illustrates - particularly the last bit - is the maniacal outcome of cognitive dissonance, which is the psychic cost of simultaneously holding two or more mutually contradictory beliefs. Evidently, the more passionately those beliefs are held, the greater the psychic cost.

Which explains Brown completely. Faced with the impossibility of reconciling his belief in himself as a force for good and the amorality of the means he employed to stay in power, he bankrupted the country in an attempt to drown out the psychic noise.

What's the point?

Today Christopher Booker, backed up by Richard North, has written about the EU-made shambles that is rubbish collection as exacerbated in Britain by its maniacally elaborate enforcement. The words "cost effective" are kryptonite to bureaucrats everywhere; but the British sub-species seems to be particularly aggressive in seeking ways to impose niggling, unnecessary burdens on the rest of the population.

It may seem OTT to ascribe a philosophical underpinning to the squalid scramble to feed at the public trough, but it is essential to seek an explanation, not so much for the behaviour of people living at public expense, but for why that public has put up with their exponentially rising exactions, increasingly flagrant corruption and chronic incompetence for so long.

Part of it stems from envy. The ideal of equality or "fairness" in Britain comes down to the squalid sentiment that if I can't have it, nobody should. Envy is the enemy of aspiration, and it works at all social levels - particularly among the young. There is no difference between ghetto youths attacking the "oreos" who want to make something of themselves and public schoolboys victimising the studious as "swots".

From this, possibly, comes the apathy and cowardice among the general population that has been the main enabler of a relentless drive for the lowest common denominator in all aspects of social engineering. The adventurous and the ambitious have been fleeing Britain's deadening consensus for centuries, and the genetic pool left behind must have been diminished by the diaspora.

Unfortunately, although in the past immigration by Huguenots, Jews, Eastern Europeans and others fleeing oppression injected new dynamism, more recently it has mainly added ethnic sub-groups nurturing historic grievances and demanding special entitlements with the active encouragement of the British bureaucracy.

But something else must be at work for those more blessed by nature to subscribe to the general malaise. Although most of them will never have heard of it, I believe it lies in the perversion of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. 

It is the sentiment that underlies a sense of duty and of social obligation; but the sting in the tail is the last bit, the "will that it should become a universal law". From "will" to "enact" may seem barely a step, yet there is a gulf between the two into which, without exception, all social engineering legislation falls, however well-meaning. That gulf is the moral disempowerment of the population the legislation is supposed to benefit.

From which, after many decades of relentless social engineering, we have a de-moralized as well as demoralized society, governed either by cynics who use the slogans of a more idealistic past as a smokescreen for looting the public purse, or by arrogantly ignorant theorists like our current prime minister and deputy prime minister. Ignorant because what they fondly believe are new ideas are old and failed expedients; arrogant because they believe that their will can overcome profound institutional inertia and widespread societal indifference.

They all end up in the same place. Those who enter politics with an eye to filling their pockets do so. The idealists take another course: they come to despise the people who do not respond to their exhortations and, most notoriously in the case of Blair (on whom the charisma-lite David Cameron seeks, without success, to model himself), persuade themselves that their public service deserves generous private reward.

I do not see any way that the Gadarene rush to the final extinction of everything that was once distinctive and admirable in Britain can be halted or even re-directed. As Yeats put it in "The Second Coming":  

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Bear in mind he wrote that in 1919, in my opinion the moment when British society changed irrevocably for the worse. If Britain had been governed by decent people instead of the profiteering scum and opportunists* who backed Lloyd George (who himself stole money donated by Carnegie to help the war wounded), the enormous sacrifice of the Great War and the social solidarity of the trenches might have transcribed into a more just society.

Instead there was a betrayal of hope so egregious that I believe it broke the spirit of the British people. The welfare state that might have been created in 1919, when Britain was still a wealthy nation, was built instead in bankruptcy after World War II. The will for a better life dashed in 1919 came back in 1945 as the grimly determined sense of entitlement that has been the curse of Britain ever since.

Barring defeat in war and occupation, I know of no society that has ever broken out of a spiral of decline. Social revolutions are generally conservative phenomena sparked by economic changes that threaten the lower middle class, which supplies the principal clientele for socialist parties.

That class, roughly defined as shitting downwards and snarling upwards, holds absolute sway in Britain. It is unmoved by facts or logic, and knows no reasons other than its precarious social and economic status, and the desperate fear of change it generates. Everything else follows from that. 

* Including the devouringly ambitious Winston Churchill, desperate to recover from his humiliation over the Dardanelles fiasco.

Brown-noser of the week: Peter Oborne

"David Cameron was a Great Cricketer" he says, because he used to play with him (sic).

The financial crash of 2008 has drawn attention in the most graphic way possible to the failure of free-market capitalism. The Big Society offers a way out of this morass. Here again, the critics – who insist that the concept has not taken off – are ignorant and wrong.

I do not deny that there are problems with the Big Society. They concern implementation, explanation, and very worrying structural flaws. But the ambition is magnificent. David Cameron has set out to restore pride, duty, reciprocity, independence and civic obligation to Britain – and he has embarked on this mission with exemplary vigour and enthusiasm.

Dear God. Has he no pride? Doubtless he will soon receive a knighthood for services (sic) to journalism. Which one do you think it will be: the Knight Commander of the Itinerant Shameless Sycophants And Supine Servility, or the more usual KCOC-S?

NHS euthanasia

A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members. - Mahatma Ghandi 

For those who think corruption only occurs when there's money involved, the publication yesterday of Health Service Ombudsman Ann Abrahams's report Care and Compassion should be an eye-opener. But it won't be; the NHS is a totem for the Brits, and none of the gruesome details in the report are in any way news.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, produced the usual bad faith gloss: "It is of course important to put these 10 examples in perspective. The NHS sees over a million people every 36 hours and the overwhelming majority say they receive good care. But I fully appreciate that this will be of little comfort to patients and their families when they have been on the receiving end of poor care".

How many of those treated by the NHS have any basis for comparison? The ten cases in the report were explicitly cited as tips of a vast, stinking iceberg and even the Independent was moved to comment adversely on the sacred cow:

Ageism is rife in the NHS. That has been established by innumerable investigations over the years. Denial of treatment on cost rather than clinical grounds is less of a problem than it was. But deep-rooted cultural attitudes to ageing remain. As Ms Abraham says, they are personal as well as institutional, a "failure to recognise the humanity and individuality" of the people concerned.

Thirty years after Sir Roy Griffiths was drafted in from Sainsbury's to reform the NHS, it remains an institution overly focused on the interests of the providers – the staff. In a million ways – from making an appointment to see a GP to getting help with eating on a hospital ward – its lack of focus on the patient is evident.

I have had rather too many occasions to observe the workings of NHS hospitals at close hand over the past decade and I am in no doubt that the treatment of the elderly is a deliberate, institutional attempt to shift the problem out of the hospitals altogether. Even when Brown was fire-hosing money at the NHS they were closing facilities for the long-term medical care of the helpless elderly and coined the appalling term "bed blockers" to describe them. "Useless mouths" is what they mean, as one would expect of a utilitarian socialist institution.

The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped. - Hubert Humphrey

Humphrey and Ghandi would have agreed that NHS abuse of the elderly is only the most starkly undeniable evidence that the soul of the British state is deeply, squalidly amoral.

Global Competitiveness Report

Following from the World Economic Forum's report for 2010-11. For the UK see pages 338-9. The executive summary:

After having fallen four positions over the past two years, the United Kingdom moves up one spot to 12th place this year, with a stable performance. The country benefits from clear strengths, such as the efficiency of its labor market (8th), standing in contrast to the rigidity of many other European countries. The country continues to have sophisticated and innovative businesses that are highly adept at harnessing the latest technologies for productivity improvements and operating in a very large market (ranked 6th for market size). These are all characteristics that are important for spurring productivity enhancements. While somewhat improved since last year, the macroeconomic environment remains the country’s greatest competitive weakness, with deficit spending that must be reined in to provide a more sustainable economic footing going into the future.

The assessment is based on 12 "pillars" broken down into the following parent categories:

• Basic Requirements: Institutions; Infrastructure; Macroeconomic Environment; Health and Primary Education
• Efficiency Enhancers: Higher Education and Training; Good Market Efficiency; Labour Market Efficiency; Financial Market Development; Technological Readiness; Market Size
• Innovation and Sophistication Factors: Business Sophistication; Innovation

The devil in the details is that Britain ranks 72nd out of 139 for government wastefulness (p.373) and 89th on the burden of government regulations (p.374). It would be very interesting to compare these rankings with what they were before the Blair-Brown regime abandoned all fiscal restraint. 

Hat-tip Autonomous Mind.

Al Jaz - infantile maunderings

Have been regretting adding Al Jaz "In Depth Features" to my RSS. Today's offering from Marwan Bishara, their "senior political analyst", overflows the cup. If I felt a need for lousy syntax and sophomoric content I'd read the New Statesman. 

The military's insistence to keep the Mubarak appointed Ahmad Shafiq government for the transitional period has raised concern. Likewise, freezing the constitution is a double edge sword. While it allows for writing a new more democratic constitution, it could also enable the military leaders to act according to its own interest, rather than the interest of the revolution [d'you think?].

It also begs the question [he means raises the question - begging the question is when the proof of a proposition is implicit in the premise], why hasn't the military command cancelled the emergency laws nor freed those arrested during the last three weeks, not to mention the political prisoners?

In the short term, the foremost loser are the region's autocrats who most likely will face serious pressure as the spirit of peoples’ power spread around the Arab and even Muslim world. So will al-Qaeda and its ilk that preferred violence to peoples' power. [I'm getting all misty-eyed]

In the long run, the three theocracies, or theocracy-based regimes - Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran - could see their religious-based legitimacies falter in favour of civic and democratic legitimacy as more people rise and claim their governments as citizens and people not subjects and sects.[then again, they could not - wanna bet on it?]

A united, democratic and strong Egypt can regain its long lost regional influence as an Arab leader. It will eclipse Saudi Arabia, put the belligerent Israeli occupation on notice [Of what? Peoples' Power? Because the armed forces sure as hell don't want another round with the IDF], and curtail the Iranian Ayatollahs’ ambition for regional influence.

Mubarak left because the military told him it was time to go. The only way Bishara's dream can come true is if the second largest and most privileged armed forces in the Arab world (after Pakistan) hand over power and thereafter refrain from intervening when their interests are threatened. And the three bears.

Eating crow - Nick Clegg isn't an arsehole

In an interview published in the Guardian (!), the LiDem leader said the following:

I need to say this – you shouldn't trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government – full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.

He goes on to condemn the Blair regime's assault on civil liberties in the strongest terms:

It was the outright derision towards the criminal justice system… and extreme disdain for due process. For Blair the criminal justice system was an impediment to keeping people safe.

Last April I dared to hope that if the LibDems held the balance of power, it might do more than any other electoral outcome to restore the civil liberties raped by the Labourite pukes. I wrote: "on the principle of deeds, not words, the solid Lib Dem vote against all of the [authoritarian Labour legislation] makes them the party to vote for if you give a damn about civil liberties".
 
They have come though on civil liberties with the Protection of Freedoms Bill, published last Friday. Don't take back a word I've written about old prune-face and other LibDem ministers, but gotta eat a crow on this one.

Shame they are such fools on AGW and the EU. 

Grandmother Courage

This is 71 year-old Ann Timson, who last week attacked six sledgehammer-equipped young men bent on robbing a jewelry store in Northampton and has become an international heroine.

I am genuinely astonished that she has not been arrested for her unprovoked assault on the thugs - not to mention showing up the police and shaming every man in sight. 

The Express reports that she is flying to New York, first class, to appear on the "Today" show. Why has she not been invited to appear on British TV? Oh dear, we wouldn't want to encourage this sort of thing, would we?

It seems she has form and was the mainstay of a highly successful "take back our neighbourhood" campaign that cleaned up the once-notorious Spring Boroughs estate.

And guess what? As a reward for having worked so hard for her community, the local Labour party rejected her as a council candidate in favour of an outsider.

Raedwald - blowing his own

Loved this bit from the boat-dweller's latest post "Beyond the Big Society".

I need to guard against a certain smugness, for I'm a consummate prosumer [producer-consumer]. I have tools and knowledge and physical ability. I can restore battered sad old furniture to add 1,000% to its value at a cost of less than 100% of its purchase price as long as I don't cost my labour. If I want to use an absolutely specific type of bath salt I can make it. I can transform the cheapest and least popular cuts of meat into exquisite meals. I can cook, sew, decorate, grow, join, plumb, tile, brew, bake, wire, craft and create, make all my own picture frames, fix engines and computers and anything I can't make or adapt I can procure on the best possible terms because I can use the internet effectively. It may not be worth my while - yet - to make my own pins, but the benefits of the Division of Labour established by Adam Smith at the start of the industrial nation is now everywhere in reverse. And Toffler is right in one thing; no government, no State, can capture by economic statistics the 'value added' by prosuming. It's a choice, of course; a trade-off between time spent and value gained. And its impact is grossly underestimated.

Wow. He'd make someone a great wife, don't'cha think?

Ashton says we have "deep democracy" thanks to the EU

Unelected - by any constituency, anywhere, anytime - EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton, having been turned away by the Egyptian authorities, has laid out her message in a Guardian article.

I hardly need to parse her argument - as you can see from the comments following the article, it was too hypocritical even for the lefties who read the Guardian to swallow. However, it is a very clear expression of the corporativism that is the organizing principle of the EU and as such repays study.

Two principles underpin the European Union's actions. The first is that we in Europe know how long and painful the journey towards liberty can be. Our own path to 20th century liberal democracy was a slow one. The EU itself was born in the ashes of conflicts that reminded us how terrible life can be when democracy breaks down. Add in the mixed record of Europe's empires, and some humility is in order, even as we assert that democracy is the necessary foundation of human progress.

Second, democracy is, of course, about votes and elections – but it is also about far more than that. What we in Europe have learned the hard way is that we need "deep democracy": respect for the rule of law, freedom of speech, an independent judiciary and impartial administration. It requires enforceable property rights and free trade unions. It is not just about changing government but about building the right institutions and attitudes. In the long run, "surface democracy" – people casting their votes freely on election day and choosing their government – will not survive if deep democracy fails to take root.

All very plausible, right? Except that it is a very well-drafted - not to say "deep" - excuse for the total absence of democratic oversight in the EU and for the spurious eminence of an apparatchik like Ashton. Democracy is entirely about votes and elections, and anyone who suggests otherwise is the enemy of freedom.

In the case of the foul Ashton there can be no doubt about it: she was the treasurer of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament when its main source of funding was the KGB.

P.S. After posting the above, saw that Autonomous Mind had let go a similar broadside. I imagine I'll find a few more as I work through my RSS. Ashton's words, and her history, are compellingly revealing about the nature and intention of the European project. I feel so sorry for the peoples of Eastern Europe who have jumped from the frying pan of Soviet totalitarianism into the fire of Eurocorporativism. Same animal, different stripes. 

Tim Worstall on planning

Worstall is often worth reading, but he misses the point in his latest ASI posting. Seeking to over-kill those who seem to have have blotted the 50s, 60s and 70s from their their minds, he ends with linked rhetorical questions:

. . . let me close with a little question to those who still think the UK economy should be "more planned" than it is at present. Just who do you actually trust to be able to do that planning among the current political crop?

And who in one of the political parties you don't currently support would you trust to do it when your favoured and anointed one loses office: as will surely happen in a democracy?

The answer is that such people hate competition because they are losers. Their ideal is an unchecked bureaucratic oligarchy staffed by people like themselves, which they came close to achieving under the Blair-Brown regime. They did not succeed in abolishing all civil liberties but they are still there, festering in the state sector and waiting for their time to come again - as it certainly will.

For them, the fact that their ideal of government has led to economic stagnation and brutal repression everywhere it has been tried is not proof of failure - those are the outcomes they wish to achieve. They hate freedom of any kind because only in a thoroughly "planned" society can resentful mediocrities such as they hope for power and wealth.   

Mental amoebiasis

I thought I might be safe from agitprop last night when watching a programme about Reggae on Bitchy Boys 4 - but no. 

Some semi-white loser apparently once associated with the fusion of Reggae and Punk (I think - was getting comatose from boredom by then) had the following to say about the social significance of his brief moment of emergence from the obscurity for which nature and nurture intended him:

Thatcher was shutting down all the industries because they weren't making a profit. They weren't paying money to her gang.

Hello? Anybody home? If they weren't making a profit, how could they pay money to any gang? They could only be taking money from the rest of society, including thick as pig-shit musicians scratching a living from a fad that rewarded an aggressive lack of talent.

The Egyptian revolution

Always happy to see a dictator get the heave-ho, although events have proved that Mubarak's regime was not dictatorial enough. Ya gotta be a socialist to do dictatorship right.  Look at the Castros in Cuba - fifty-two years and counting.

Still, I'm with Edmund Burke on revolutions: "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations". If there were any prior history of democracy in Egypt, any institutions other than the armed forces to provide continuity, one might be more sanguine. It is always possible that some kind of new, civilian-run order will emerge from the inchoate protests that brought Mubarak down - but it's not the way to bet.

In general, a prolonged period of submission to arbitrary power reduces the possibility that it will be replaced by responsible self-government when overthrown. The exceptions that test the rule are the more western members of the old Soviet Bloc, who made the transition remarkably well. The clue there lies in "more western" - they were only subject to despotism for forty-five years, and retained the memory and the habits of responsible self-government developed before Soviet occupation. 

As far as the Middle East is concerned, the most optimistic precedent is the way Ataturk and the army broke with the supranational Ottoman inheritance to impose a new, nationalist order on Turkey. Unfortunately that option is not open to the Egyptian military. First of all, Egyptian nationalism produced the pan-Arabist Nasser, not a westernizing Ataturk. Secondly, the Muslim Brotherhood is not tainted by association with obscurantist clericalism and is the only organized opposition.

I think the military will have to do a deal with the Brotherhood. Let's see what the terms of that deal are before celebrating a brave new dawn in Egypt.

Jobbery

Corrupt influence, which is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; which loads us, more than millions of debt; which takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution. - Edmund Burke, 1780

Jobbery was the term Burke might have employed to describe the creation and awarding of often superfluous public appointments. It has fallen into desuetude, and to a degree has become obscured by the more encompassing term "rent seeking", which includes cosy government contracts with private business.

We really need to revive "jobbery" because it perfectly describes the legacy of, above all, the "New Labour Project", which was simply the old "progressive" dream of US President Woodrow Wilson to make the Democrats "the party of government" by creating so many public employees that it would remain in power for ever.

The legacy is plain to see in the well-paid sinecures created by the Labour fiefdom of Manchester City since 2008, illustrated here.

As the Daily Mail reports, eighteen public toilets are to be closed, lollipop patrols cut, two swimming pools and three leisure centres shut, five libraries sold off, charity funding reduced, and 340 independent living homes for the ­disabled closed.

All of these deeply - indeed deliberately - unpopular acts are being blamed on "savage Tory cuts", yet none of the vast number of non-jobs for Labourite parasites is to be axed.

My view is that if the electors of Manchester are too stupid to see what their Council is doing to them, then they deserve each other and should be permitted to go down the toilet together.

Ireland - Fianna Fáil

In Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell's  "Not Too Big to Fáil - The death of Ireland’s crony capitalist party" seems a bit optimistic. After all, if rampant corruption troubled the Irish people, they would not have elected Fianna Fáil for 61 of the last 79 years. Even when it was briefly in opposition, Fianna Fáil has been the largest party in the Dáil since it first took power in 1932 - and remained in power for sixteen years under Éamon de Valera, of whom Dubliners joke that there is no street named after him because none are crooked enough.

Fianna Fáil represents everything that is disgusting and self-destructive about the Irish. The legacy of the Irish diaspora world-wide has been organized crime with a political gloss. Their effect on the Roman Catholic church has been similar. Long a refuge for discreet homosexuals, it has been the Irish contingent that has brought the church to the brink of ruin by raping the children entrusted to their care. 

Yet, knowing this, the Irish at home and abroad continued to support their church, and to vote for Fianna Fáil. Just as a large minority of the British people still vote for a Labour party that has betrayed the class and country it is supposed to represent, so will many of the Irish vote again for Fianna Fáil - not despite but because it is shamelessly corrupt, and as such fully expressive of their own character and culture.

Quote of the day - Simon Heffer

I´m not much of a fan of Simon Heffer, but he sometimes has a nice turn of phrase:

If this Government did not maintain its doctrinaire, bigoted and ignorant prejudice against selective schools, the state system would produce many more students capable of thriving in the best universities. If such universities are forced to take a quota of pupils who are not academically up to it then those universities will decline. Standards would need to drop to avert a rash of failures. The best teachers, frustrated, would be driven abroad. So would gifted ex-private sector students, sent overseas by discrimination. Higher education would be added to the list of things we once did so well, but have through stupidity destroyed. 

Just as it has already done in the USA, from which the British slavishly copied their "comprehensive" schools. It's not just stupidity, it's also the cultural cringe that has infected British "progressives" since the early years of the last century, leading them to imitate every academic fad to emerge across the Atlantic.  

Hilariously, the US Progressivism that the British Fabians copied was itself the ideology brought back from German universities by the first wave of American social "scientists" in the last decades of the 19th century. Not terribly surprising that "progressives" so easily default into totalitarian social engineering.

An appeal to moderation

The EU is a logical fallacy

Open Europe points to the manner in which the MSM uses words like:

. . . "mainstream", "slow lane" and waving "goodbye from the platform" - without any definition or further explanation - to present an underlying assumption as if it was a matter of fact. The assumption is that, looking ahead, not being in the eurozone is synonomous with being left on the periphery, in the slow lane or even standing still - an assumption which arbitrarily puts further integration in and of itself above, for example, economic growth as the main determinant of what constitutes the EU's "fast lane".

This borders on thought-terminating cliché - trying to end a debate with a commonly used phrase which is actually meaningless without some sort of definition, but that tends to discourage further reflection from the reader or listener. Or perhaps we can call this appeal to process.* Circular reasoning which sees the process of EU integration, in and of itself, as determining the speed at which a country travels - by virtue of being, well, EU integration. The actual outcome is secondary. 

 * Just a variant of petitio principii with elements of appeal to common practise and appeal to authority.

Votes for felons

Sound and staged fury signifying nothing. So, irrefutably, says Mary Ellen Synon in the Mail about the hoo-ha in the Commons over votes for convicted felons.

All parliament has to do if it really does want to stop the powers of this 'court' is just vote to pull out of the Council of Europe, ECHR and all. Then this absurdity of votes for prisoners, and every other ECHR so-called 'human rights' absurdity, goes away. Or at least - and this is what Cameron is hiding in this debate - until Brussels reminds the United Kingdom that by signing up to Lisbon Treaty and the rest, powers across the Channel can go on imposing these 'human rights' on Britain whether the UK tries to derogate from the ECHR decisions or leaves the Council of Europe altogether.

Which is why the noise in the Commons over this is just noise. Either parliament is sovereign or its not, and until the MPs vote to take Britain out of the EU, it's not: the 'legal personality' called the 'European Union' is sovereign.

That last paragraph says it all, and trumps the thoughtful argument in favour of derogating from the EHCR set out by ASI. The political and economic establishment has too much invested in the project ever to permit a free vote on whether or not Britain secedes from the EU. If even the Irish, with their long history of rebellion, cannot summon up the necessary rage to overthrow their hopelessly corrupt rulers and to regain their independence, there is no chance at all that the dispirited British will do so.

As with climate catastrophism, the true believers will not be moved by - hell, they are incapable of even recognizing - any evidence that contradicts their faith, the politicians and bureaucrats are doing very nicely out of it, and the big money likes things just the way they are.

As far as these things can be proved, they have been. It does seem futile to continue to belabour the point. Those reading this blog are likely to be possessed of sufficient intellectual curiosity and independence of mind to have already reached any conclusions I may draw - so what's the point?

To answer that rhetorical question, I would be ashamed to abandon blogging after a mere twelve months, when for decades honest men like Richard North and Christopher Booker have been fighting and losing round after round against the squalid mediocrities who govern us, but who have not given up the good fight.

History is not altered by the jetsam that goes with the tide. One must hope that, thanks to the democratization of means of communication, eventually a sufficient number of people will realize that the ideological emperors strutting among them are stark naked - and destroy the shameless posers with vengeful laughter.

Big Society - would t'were so

Baroness Warsi has defined the Boy Wonder's "Big Society" as follows:

The big society is defined by many in this House [of Lords] as being what most of them have done for most of their lives. It is a volunteering, social action, philanthropic approach to life, but it is also about the opening up of public services to local control and devolution of power.

The comments following the report in ConHome are revealingly superficial. The fact remains that devolution of power involves, in the first instance, giving up control to local authorities whose corruption and unfitness for purpose is notorious. The only real devolution of power is to reduce the role and cost of government and to cut taxes, so that people can vote with their own money rather than with debased and devalued ballots.

Since that is not going to happen, the "Big Society" is simply a PR gloss on the pious hope that the British people actually want to take control over their lives instead of demanding that in return for high levels of taxation the state should take all the hard decisions - how to raise their children, how to manage their health and how to look after their elderly relatives.

Cameron and Co. are certainly right to argue that a revolution in public attitudes is essential to break out of the welfarist death-spiral. But they are equally certainly wrong to think it can be brought about by preaching de haut en bas from a tainted pulpit.

If they really wanted to institute devolution, they would start by repatriating the powers of self-government surrendered willingly by the British political elite to the unelected, unaccountable EU bureaucracy. Since they are not going to do it, their commitment to devolution is a sham and their dishonesty patent.

A house divided

If this report in the Guardian is true, then either the Coalition cannot last no matter how many MPs are on the government's payroll vote, or the Tories will have consented to being subsumed by the LibDems.

Nick Clegg will try to draw lines in the sand over the government's public services reform programme by insisting that he will not allow private providers to run schools for profit, or skew the health market in favour of the private sector. In a speech to the Guardian public services summit in St Albans, the deputy prime minister will promise to take a hard line against blanket privatisation.

We've had Cable boasting about how he can bring down the Coalition, now we have his nominal boss doing the same in response to a mutiny by his party's local councillors. The only certain outcome of a LibDem defection would be their electoral annihilation, so this is the equivalent of someone standing on a high ledge and threatening to jump unless his demands are met.

Why should anyone other than the current LibDem leadership care whether they jump or not? I hope they do, as they will drag the Cameron-Osborne duo down with them and we may get back to something akin to real politics.  

Quote for today

Jail-bird Conrad Black in NRO on the subject of The One's pronouncement that France was the USA's closest ally:

The French are magnificent in their way, but you have to know what you are dealing with, and I have always thought that you should be a cat-admirer to appreciate them, as they are feline in their elegance, cunning, and total self-absorption. But as allies, unless your interests are exactly aligned, as in World War I, they are hopeless and usually treacherous.

Academic group-think

The NYT reports an experiment conducted by Jonathan Haidt, a U of Virginia social psychologist whose field is the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. At a conference in San Antonio he started his presentation by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

"This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity", Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and later in an interview, Haidt argued that social psychologists are a "tribal-moral community" united by "sacred values" that hinder research and damage their credibility - and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.

And his solution? To promote affirmative action for conservatives! He's locked into his own academic group-think and does not even realize it.

Hat-tip: Kinsla

National debt

Everyone should read UK Debt Bombshell and re-read it every time the Labour pukes or their tax-payer funded* Guardian-BBC propaganda machine yaps about "savage cuts".

* Directly in the case of the Bitchy Boys, who keep the Guardian alive by subvention disguised as advertising.

Public Choice

Allister Heath in City A.M. laments that the British civil service ain't wot it used to be. While recognizing that good governance always took second place to bureaucratic empire building, he thinks the civil service used to attract well-intentioned and competent people whose abilities were misdirected by perverse incentives.

While the incentive mismatch remains a lethal issue today, an added tragedy is that the quality of the civil service has also deteriorated, as testified by the fact that so much government legislation is riddled with errors, internal inconsistencies and other problems. The bureaucracy has lost much of its competence. The "Rolls-Royce" (yet deeply flawed) civil service of yore no longer exists. The situation is even worse in quangos; the biggest problem is a lack of managerial ability among senior people. Few of those in positions of power have real, private sector operational knowledge.

Many intelligent, altruistic and principled people work for the state. But the average competence of civil servants is in decline. Our antiquated and over-centralised system of administration remains outstanding only in one respect: it is not corrupt. But other than that, it now resembles a cross between Yes, Minister and The Thick of It, a modern-day, coarser and horribly plausible satire developed by Armando Iannucci, where the political-spin-doctor-civil service establishment is hilariously depicted as idiotic, gutless, incompetent and power-hungry.

Having worked in it back the the good ol' days, I have to giggle at the idea that the civil service was ever a "Rolls-Royce". As to it not being corrupt, that's up there with the NHS being "the envy of the world" and Britain "punching above her weight" in international affairs among the blinding conceits that make it almost impossible to change even the most evidently dysfunctional British institutions.

The civil service is institutionally corrupt - and it cannot be otherwise. It is exasperating how culpably ignorant the British commentariat is about Public Choice theory and the concept of Rent Seeking, in particular as it applies to government bureaucracies. It's really quite easy: all you have to do is to look at government from the perspective of individual bureaucrats and politicians, and assume that each acts in a self-interested way.

Somehow our benighted society has bought into the idea that simply by becoming a civil servant, all the greed and selfishness that supposedly characterizes human behaviour in every other walk of life is washed away as by the blood of the lamb. The Orwellian mantra "public good, private bad" seems to be accepted without question, when even a moment's thought should reveal that private corporations cannot force you to buy their products, whereas "public" corporations like the BBC, the NHS and all the other monopolistic services provided by the state not only can but will also persecute you if you seek alternatives.

If monopoly is a "bad thing" in the private sector, how can it be a "good thing" in the state sector? Even worse than that brain-washed conceptual blindness is the utter stupidity of refusing to see that government regulations supposedly designed to protect employees in fact favour large, established corporations by suffocating competition and by raising the cost of entry.

Why do you suppose retired politicians and senior civil servants walk into well paid jobs with the corporations they supposedly regulated for the public good while in office? Because of their ability? Don't make me laugh.

Quote for the day

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (first self-styled anarchist), 1851