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

Alain de Bottom

Read "A Point of View: In defence of the nanny state" and weep. It kicks off with the straw man to beat them all:

A key assumption of modern politics is that we should be left alone to live as we like without being nagged, without fear of moral judgment. Freedom has become our supreme political virtue. It is not thought to be the government's task to promote a vision of how we should act towards one another or to send us to hear lectures about parenting, chivalry or politeness. Modern politics, on both left and right, is dominated by what we can call a libertarian ideology.

Hello? What society is this turkey living in? Then we have an exegesis about Judaism, a moan about advertising and other non sequiturs. What a pile of crap.

Yeah, well I guess that's what you can expect from what the BBC construes to be a philosopher.

Cameron - big self-contradiction

Much hoo-ha about Cameron having the "courage" to denounce the dogma of multiculturalism (full text here), as though the Tory party had anything to lose thereby. Nobody seems to have thought the following worth commenting:

Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things. Now, each of us in our own countries, I believe, must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty.

Multiculturalism represents the most obvious failure of American-style "liberalism", which is the polar opposite of the historic liberalism for which Britain once stood, almost alone in the world. A genuine - as opposed to American - liberal governments does indeed say to its citizens that as long as they obey the law they will be left alone, and is neutral between different values.

Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, the rule of law, and equal rights before the law are not values - they are mechanisms designed to limit the power of the state over the private lives of citizens. Cameron's concept of "muscular, active liberalism" admits no constraint on the power of the state to define and enforce conformity, and is thus the negation of classic liberalism.

A genuinely liberal country is by definition "passively tolerant". The failure of multiculturalism has come about because it privileges certain groups to the detriment of the rest of society, most murderously in encouraging the immigration of people from primitive societies whose "culture" furiously rejects liberalism of any kind, and to grant special dispensation to the laws and customs that have made shit-holes of their countries of origin.

But then Britain is a long way from being a genuinely liberal country because all those mechanisms have been systematically undermined and subverted by the "progressive" concept that natural rights do not exist and that every issue must be decided in terms of expediency. Whether and to what extent the state allows individuals to control any aspect of their lives is viewed purely in terms of whether the consequences serve the interests of the state, which has usurped the functions of civil society.

Because Cameron and his clique do not understand this, as clearly shown by the passage quoted above, the "Big Society" is a self-contradictory sham. On one hand he says he wants to revitalize civil society by reducing the role of the state. On the other he wants the state to "believe in certain values and actively promote them".

In what way is that philosophically different to the Islamic theocracies?

P.S. Sigh. Delingpole misconstrues the point made by Old Holborn, which, stripped of the demagoguery, is the same as mine. It's not the business of the state to define "Britishness", not least because it does not exist. There are English, Scots, Welsh, Irish and various immigrant groups, each with their sub-types; but "British" is just a convenient collective adjective.

Christopher Booker - why the truth has no power

"My long crusade for common sense" he writes to mark the Telegraph's 50th anniversary.

My reporting has ranged over countless other scandals in the past two decades, from the rise of the health and safety culture to the disastrous mishandling of the foot-and-mouth crisis, from the wind farm scam to the asbestos scare, from the ever-expanding powers of the EU to the destruction of our Armed Forces.

All this amounted to a mutation in the nature of our governance. And the consequence is that we are now ruled by a vast maze of bureaucratic structures, not answerable to Parliament, operating at every level, from Brussels down to the town halls and a plethora of executive agencies. The power of elected politicians at all levels of government has been immeasurably diminished – which is one reason why they are now held in such contempt by the public.

The dead hand of this system now stretches into almost every area of life, not just sapping businesses but exercising its grip over the NHS, the education system, the police and much more besides. And the most striking thing about this new presence in our lives is how it lives by its own peculiar values, talking only in its own stultifying jargon, unable to relate to the real world. Common sense, like democratic accountability, has gone out of the window.

The system damages all it touches, which is why it lands us with one disaster after another, from the pointless destruction of billions of fish to the shambles it has made of our rubbish collection; from the skewing of our energy policy in favour of useless windmills to the way our family courts have turned every principle of justice on its head to allow politically correct social workers to seize children from loving parents.

I wonder. It seems too easy to blame the deus ex machina of the EU. My own observations, made with the advantage of periodically returning from long periods abroad to get an "as others see us" view of British society, were that the country was becoming more and more like the third world countries I was travelling from - and that was before the surrenders of sovereignty that Booker laments. Rudyard Kipling expressed it well:

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less

Except - Kipling was contrasting the slovenliness of the "natives" with the discipline of the British soldier. He could not have imagined that the British would become an international by-word for the sluttishness of their women, the drunken brutality of their men and the foul behaviour of their children. Or that the "natives" would come to regard British politicians and civil servants with amused contempt.

Liberty cannot exist without at least the aspiration of virtue. That's gone, and we did it to ourselves. The EU has simply moved into the space left by the erosion of self-discipline, self-respect, honour and courage in our leaders and, by extension, the society that elects them.

Why Prince Philip will not be going to Malawi

Farting in public is now illegal in Malawi, reports Reuters. Guess who won't be accompanying the Queen on her next state visit?

Hat-tip Jay

Peter Oborne - he gets paid for this?

In the Daily Telegraph Peter Oborne declaims that Cameron’s plan to build the Big Society on the verge of collapse, and that this:

. . . would be a crushing blow to the Conservative Prime Minister. It could even signal the beginning of the end of his premiership. This is because Cameron’s Big Society goes right to the heart of everything he believes about government. It defines him as a man and a politician. Without the Big Society, he is rudderless.

Horse-shit. It means no more to Cameron than the "Third Way" meant to Blair - it is a PR catch-phrase that has failed to catch on and consequently will gradually disappear from Cameron's utterances. But for the sake of argument let us assume that there is something other than PR involved. In that case, says Oborne:

The big problem with Cameron’s idea is that it requires time. It means changing the culture of schools, hospitals, local government and the British people themselves. This will not take place overnight. The Big Society could not truly take root for a generation.

What an acute observation! That's only what Cameron and Nat, Lord Wei, the man entrusted with moving the project forward, have been saying for the last nine months. Clever of Oborne to notice that.

Not clever enough to observe that Cameron did not include Wei among the quota of paid government advisers, and that consequently Wei can only devote two days a week to what Oborne says defines Cameron as a man and a politician.

Tories traditionally distrust those "too clever by half". Oborne is safe from that damning judgment.

David Cameron - wanker

David Cameron last night urged backbench MPs to to vote against the Government’s controversial plan to let prisoners vote in Westminster elections. The Prime Minister said a huge Commons backlash would send a firm message to European judges about the depth of anger in ­Britain. But he admitted he and other Government ministers would abstain in the vote on a motion opposing the move on Thursday. Daily Express

Is there no limit to the chicken-shittery? Presumably he is trying to force Fatty Clarke to resign, but what an abject way of going about it.

UK Uprising vid

Click on Muffled Vociferation for a suitably passionate treatment of the shit we're in.

I don't think we'll be victorious, but I think we should hurt the ruling swine as much as possible before all decency and honour is finally extinguished in our squalid society.

EU - degenerate gambling

Quite a good piece in EUobserver by Sony Kapoor, MD of the Re-Define think-tank:

The loans provided to Greece, the ECB's purchase of Euro zone sovereign bonds, and the creation of the European Financial Stability Mechanism (EFSM), have all shifted the risk of losses from creditors to the taxpayers of troubled member states underwritten by the taxpayers of member states with more sound finances. An opaque ‘shadow fiscal union' has been created but no one bothered asking the voters. The official discourse is that both creditors and taxpayers from countries such as Germany will be fully repaid in time. Since this is not possible, this public stance is irresponsible and probably dishonest.

No probably about it, because the EU is a CORPORATIVIST construct, dammit. When will all these analysts go back to basics and check out what the purpose of the whole enterprise has been from Day 1? It was philosophically anti-democratic from the start because the Nazis won power by democratic means, and continues to be anti-democratic because big corporations, financial institutions and unions own the bureaucracy. 

Bill Clinton sometimes glimpsed the truth

When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who is strong and wrong than someone who's weak and right

William Jefferson Blythe III aka Clinton, following Republican gains in the 2002 Congressional elections

For "strong" read "decisive" and that is an accurate assessment of what electorates want - and are not getting from The One in the States, or The Boy Wonder in Britain.

The Equality Act in action

Excellent post by Tim Aker on the ruling this week by a High Court judge that London council cuts to voluntary services were unlawful because they had not carried out a full equality consultation. That is to say, state subventions to charities must continue unless it can be proved that discontinuing them does not harm anybody.

If you’re a Tory and believe in the Equality Act, you are clearly a saboteur to your cause. If you don’t realize it’s a political dirty-bomb Harriet Harman left for you, timed to go off when you’re in government, then you lack the political intelligence God gave to nectarines.

Well no. You see, the Cameron clique's fraffly clever big idea is to put the Labour party out of business by adopting all of its policies. Worked for Tony, so why not for the Heir of Blair?

You read it here first.

Fatty Clarke to go?

"Ken Must Go" says the Sun. "He is a bumbling liability who seems keener to rock the boat than safeguard the streets. He is out of tune with the public and out of step with his own party".

The Mail was less strident but the sidebar to the main story about shysters is equally deadly about Clarke:

One Government source described the stance of Mr Clarke, Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on the issue as ‘limper than an elderly lettuce’. David Cameron will next week allow Tory MPs a free vote – ensuring Parliament will resoundingly reject the idea of giving votes to prisoners. That will pave the way for a defining showdown between Britain and the European Court of Human Rights. But yesterday Mr Clarke warned MPs against voting down a change in the law, insisting ministers must abide by the verdict from Strasbourg.

"MPs must assert British democracy on prisoner votes", says the Express.

"What happens if we defy Europe? Nothing", says the Telegraph.

"Get rid of the lazy bastard", say I.

US state - Leviathan?

This from NR Online:

When we add up the true size of the federal workforce - civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses - and add in state and local government employees - civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers - we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool - one in every six workers - owes its living to the taxpayer.

In Britain formal state employees alone account for 20-21 percent of the labour force, without counting those whose livelihoods depend on the state. Over 9,000 British state employees earn more than the Prime Minister. Check out (interactive map here) what very few parts of Britain have less than the overall level of US state employment.

Now that's astonishing. Parasites weaken and eventually kill the host - but the individual parasites are just doing what comes naturally. To expect the state sector to reform itself is akin to hoping that lice will suck a little less blood and thus restrain their procreation. Ain't gonna happen.

On saying nothing when one has nothing to say

One of the most startling insights I was granted into what I subsequently dubbed the "arrogant ignorance" of a certain type of Brit came when someone I thought well of echoed the fool Wedgewood Benn's "itsh about oil" judgment on the invasion of Iraq.

After I deconstructed her comment, she retorted: "Just because I don't know anything about it doesn't mean I don't have a right to an opinion". Nobody could argue that she did, indeed, have the right: the question was why she should think it necessary to formulate an opinion when confessedly ignorant of the matter at hand.

Thus Nordlinger's article "The Humility of the Knowledgeable" in National Review, that one could wish were compulsory reading for the Brit journopukes currently giving us the benefit of their ignorance about what is going on in Egypt, by far the most populous Arab country with well over twice the population of Algeria, the next largest.

Those who know the most about the Middle East are saying the least, when it comes to the turmoil in Egypt. Or they are speaking most cautiously. They’re quickest to say, “I really don’t know. I don’t know the exact nature of this, or how it will turn out.” They seem to be humblest, about what can be known, now.

I’m talking about Bernard Lewis, David Pryce-Jones, Amir Taheri, Fouad Ajami — people like that. These are men who have spent years and years in the Middle East, studying its politics, peoples, and languages, taking in everything possible. Those who know less speak in far more confident tones. They are even cocksure. I’m not sure we should trust anyone who speaks in those tones, just now.

EU - not content with unaccountability . . .

. . . is now determined to close the few chinks of light that penetrate the murk of its parasitic existence.

EUobserver reports that 180 human rights organisations, transparency pressure groups and journalist unions has called on the European parliament to reject proposed legislation that would tightly restrict the EU’s freedom-of-information rules, just seven years after their introduction.

The MEPs will certainly approve the legislation - the last thing they want is for their countrymen to know exactly how much they pay themselves to rubber stamp whatever the EU Commission proposes.

It's not as though the EU is in any way inhibited by its own rules on transparency. In a speech to the German Bundestag yesterday, former Bavarian Minister-President Edmund Stoiber said: "The big problem I see is in the lack of transparency of European decisions. There is no European openness". 

Meanwhile, La Repubblica reports Italian outrage that the EU Foreign Minister, Psycho Cyclops appointee Catherine Ashton, has refused to identify Christians as the victims of recent sectarian attacks in Egypt and Iraq in a communiqué defending religious tolerance. The Telegraph comments further on the uselessness of the ugly cow.

Nice one from Biased BBC open thread

For those of you not up to speed on recent BBC output, here's a brief summary of the main points:

 

Chinooks - hard to credit

Even by the abysmal standard set by the Coalition government in the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the dithering about confirming the Labour regime's very belated order for more Chinook heavy lift helicopters boggles the mind. The Reg has a fair take on it.

The probable reason is that the RAF would fly the Chinooks and the Army, desperate to control its own battlefield resources, is committed to the far less capable Lynx (see my previous post here).

Only the British political capons would regard that as a Gordian knot. The SDSR faithfully reflected the irrefutable fact that the MoD is simply not concerned with war fighting and is entirely given over to grossly over-priced arms deals and inter-service bickering over who gets the jobs and the kick-backs.

MoD appears to be determined to leave no fuck-up uncommitted. As Major-General Julian Thompson, whose land forces were compelled to walk across East Falkland for lack of helicopters, bitterly wrote to The Times (£) last November:

Harrier could still use Kandahar runway if half of it were blocked by Taleban action; can use any make-shift landing site; has a response time of less than 10 minutes, as against 30 for Tornado; performs better in hot weather; requires fewer ground crew; and has better availability.

Harrier can deliver close air support of ground forces anywhere from the existing carriers, has nearly twice as many airframes provided with precision-guided ground attack capability as Tornado; will not require a further £1.4 billion to re-engine in 2014; and can remain in service until 2023 without significant investment.

The existing Tornado force will cost, over 10 years, seven times as much to keep in service as Harrier. . . . The decision to axe the entire Harrier force is strategically and financially perverse.

Thus also the part cancellation and delay in confirming the purchase of further Chinooks. Men's lives are being sacrificed on the altar of inter-service rivalry, just as they were in the Falklands when the unprepared Guards were sent instead of the battalions that were in high readiness. Prestige old chap, don't'cher know?

Even soothscribes sometimes stumble

Oh dear - Spiked's Brendan O'Neill uncritically cites one of those Americans who thinks that everything in the world is either the result of or in reaction against US policy:

The immediate precursor to the Brotherhood, in the early 1920s, was an Islamist-leaning organisation called the Society of Propaganda and Guidance, which was tacitly supported by the then British colonialists in Egypt (Britain maintained a military presence in Egypt until 1936). They considered the Society to be a useful counterweight to anti-colonialist groups keen to expel British forces. The Society’s journal, The Lighthouse, met with British approval with its articles denouncing Egyptian nationalists as 'atheists and infidels'.

Until 1936? WTF does he think defeated the Italian invasion in 1940 - the Egyptian army? There are more howlers, but that one takes the biscuit.

Ukcunt

How extraordinary - the arseholes demonstrating against companies doing business in the UK who have their headquarters in less feckless countries have designated themselves Ukuncut.

You might say that they have much in common with King Cnut, who demonstrated his inability to turn back the tide; or alternatively that someone transposed the "c".

Genie out of the bottle

"Social technology breaks the Egyptian Internet blockade" reports Hexus Channel in a fascinating real-life illustration of how fast the Internet can respond to changing situations and the power of rapid response crowd-sourcing.

Google acquired a company called SayNow last week [!] that specialises in integrating voice with social media. Armed with its new acquisition, Google collaborated with Twitter to produce a simple solution for anyone to publish a voicemail message to the Internet. All you need to do is call +16504194196, +390662207294 or +97316199855, say what you've got to say, and the message is automatically tweeted on @speak2tweet. Of course many of those messages are in Arabic, but TNW has written about an apparently spontaneous bit of crowdsourcing, in which volunteers are collaborating via a Google Doc spreadsheet to transcribe the messages in Arabic and translate them into English.

As Scott observes, "as an illustration of the power of the Internet as a medium for the unrestricted distribution of information, and of the futility of trying to shut that stable door after the horse bolted decades ago, this is a cool story".

Indeed.