If yer Irish...

... READ THIS.

The silence of the women

In the current edition of Standpoint magazine, Clive James has published an article he hoped never to have to write. It is a blazing rebuke to the left-liberal intellectual establishment for its contemptible complicity (my words) in the terrorising of millions of women in the name of Islam.

James is backed up by Nick Cohen who, in another powerful article in the same issue, rails at, specifically, Western feminist apologists who, from the comfort of their Hampstead apartments and in the name of cultural relativism, volunteer as apologists for the genital mutilation of women in third world societies and are therefore, de facto, accessories, in their silence, to the terrorising and oppression of even brown-skinned women who live in the less appealing parts of their own, British, cities.

Both writers express their contempt for those who would accord moral equivalence with Christianity and Western moral sensibilities in general, to principles and authorities which permit, condone or encourage the oppression, terrorising, rape, imprisonment, torture and murder of women in the name of Islam and other oriental religions.

Both writers condemn the veneer of post-colonialist remorse which masks the Left's and Western feminists' cowardice, hypocrisy and self-evident hatred of their own society, and the alacrity with which they leap to champion almost anything which affronts it.

Cohen will make you seethe. James will make you seethe and laugh out loud, as serious as the subject is and as nauseatingly contemptible the hypocrisy of their targets.

When leading men formerly (?) of the liberal consensus finally clamber to their feet to accuse their sisters of complicity in crimes against half of humanity, you know the tide is turning.

Unmissable stuff.

I may have said this before but if the Spectator is 'champagne for the brain', Standpoint is Krug or Cristal.

Well, stap me!

I am incredulous that anyone voted for this little blogling in Mrs Dale's annual poll. If you did, thank you very much indeed. Look! (Points to cheek.) I'm blushing!

Of course, I don't really care about popularity. (Insouciant toss of the head.) Not at all. Or indeed as one of my ancestors might have said, 'Not at all at all'. And he was a cheerful liar, just like me. Actually, don't tell anyone but I'm chuffed to bits. Thanks a lot.

I am about to go missing again for a couple of weeks, to a land where the current temperature is about 30 degrees C. I hate the heat. Why do I do this? For the culcher, of corse.

Back soon.

And thanks again.

So, tell me...

Why is this bloke whatsisname... Kennedy... so important that multiple obits from Americans unknown to the British people, and every detail of the planning of his obsequies, are dominating the British Broadcasting Corporation's news bulletins on all its many, many domestic channels for days on end? Am I supposed to be wearing black? Are flags supposed to be at half mast?

What did I miss? Anyone?

Prodicus calling Obo. Calling Obo the Clown.

They're on to you, mate.

Bang to rights

So now we know. Gordon Brown ignored the warnings. Explicit, detailed warnings from insiders who named names.

He and the other politicians decided and in the face of all the evidence, still prefer to pretend it's the fault of the hedge funds, which they simply do not understand. Shoot the messenger is official government policy.

And the Treasury is still in denial.

Cheers

Ladies and gentlemen, kindly raise your glasses to salute Senator Edward Kennedy in the most appropriate fashion, with a drop o' the crater, thoroughly drowned. The toast is: 'FOAD, you bastard'.

Oh, he did. Good.

Right then, all over to Mr E's now, to join his own very special wake in the Senator's memory.

Heard the one about the Yorkshireman, the Chinaman and the Greek Scotsman?

Mr E almost lost it when he read that Prescott is to make his own version of An Inconvenient Truth, that jewel coming on top of the news that the Chinese have appointed Prezza Professor of Climate Change at Xiamen University.

It's a personal chair, I understand...

... and away you go...

Credit where it's due

According to the BBC's Greg Wood, the USA financial markets think it was Ben Bernanke who 'almost single handedly' saved the world staved off a meltdown when any fool kno it was... hang on... it'll come to me...

Quote of the week

Mandelson's prostate surgeon told to look out for Andrew Marr "We're pretty sure he's up there somewhere," says BBC spokesman

Source? Guess.

Sunday: breakfast in Holland

'No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too, too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.'
- E Waugh, Vile Bodies.


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Perspective

Wondering if this spectacular night storm, after a day of unbearable heat, will bring down the mighty oak beneath which this small house shelters.
Laying awake, listening to raindrops striking the window-glass like ballistas-full of shingle loosed by a small but noisy, laughing god, and trying to decide whether the temperature is really falling yet, I read:

'The present "best estimate" of observable stars using available telescopes is seventy sextillion (seventy thousand million million million). That is more then all the grains of sand on all the beaches and in all the deserts on this planet, but it is not all the stars; it is only the number within the range of our technology.' - Sara Maitland, in A Book of Silence.

It is still hot. I shall read a bit more since sleep is impossible. Once I do sleep, one or both of the two small flying things I have failed to swat will probably bite me out of revenge.


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EU? I'm all for it, me.

Wandering around Germany, I have decided that I am 100 per cent in favour of the EU. For the rest of the Continent. Not for us.

Just what the buggers need: lots of rules and the power to supervise each other and make sure everyone toes the line. Keeps them all out of trouble and stops any one them getting too big for their <s>jack</s>boots. Gives them plenty of bureau-twaddle to make sure they're kept too busy with compliance to be able to compete with us.

Oh, wait... there's a flaw in this somewhere...


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What he said, morons

Dizzy, brilliant as ever.

Look. Hannan wants to I M P R O V E health care provision in the United Kingdom. Not to abolish it.

Got that? Morons.

Godzilla politics

Of course Hannan's right. That's why They want him strung up: the Unison/Labour block vote; the terrified-of-losing Cameroons who have ceded the NHS to its commissars in perpetuity for predictably cowardly pragmatic reasons.

This is what Marx would have called 'Godzilla politics' had he only known about Godzilla. The NHS is 'too big to fail'. The great work of the Labour Party. And it's killing people, even as it tells them to sit over there, shut up and wait their turn. Makes you proud, doesn't it? Doesn't it?

The irony is that if the Leader of the Conservative Party spoke like Hannan he would sweep the electoral board.

Don't hold your breath.

Bravo, Hannan.

Yes, all right - I'm going

I know I said I was feeling calm and unbloggish and that I planned to stay that way till September. Tsk. Then I picked up the newspaper. Big mistake. But I'm away all next week. Then back for a week and then gone again for a couple of weeks. My anger needs a holiday.

Minsky and me

Regrettably, it is (the) reassuring, consensus driven approach to [economic] forecasting that is part of what went wrong. The flaw was brilliantly identified many years ago by the post-Keynsian economist Hyman Minsky, who observed that benign real economy circumstances invite increasingly aggressive financial market wagers.

The longer, these "Goldilocks" conditions persist – not too hot, not too cold – the more innovative the financial markets become in attempting to leverage them for gain. Extended periods of economic calm thus result in increasing financial system fragility.

Thus Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph.

Now, my reader knows I am not one to blame Gordon Brown for everything, automatically, by some unthinking knee-jerk reflex. No, mine is more a sort of thinking knee-jerk reflex.

Yes, dear reader, I blame the Great Ruiner for our present plight. And I am vindicated by no less an eminence than Minsky.

Gordon Brown told the markets what to believe. Gordon Brown insisted, year in and year out, that he had ended boom and bust once and for all. Gordon Brown bragged endlessly that his steady, expert hand, the hand on the tiller of Britain's greatest 20th century Chancellor, the Saviour of the world, had finally steered the United Kingdom's ship of state into permanently calm economic waters. By his vanity and his spin, Gordon Brown created the very condiitions of hazard about which Minsky warned.

And before my Socialist heckler starts chanting 'Lehman Brothers', here is Warner on that point:

Lehman's was much more of a symptom than a cause of the crisis.

Gordon Brown's mad arrogance convinced him that he had beaten the system, beaten the market, and outsmarted every economist since King Solomon's Keeper of the Gold of Egypt. And just look at the mad bastard's qualifications: a PhD in the history of Socialism in Scotland. Such useful grounding for one who wants to command one of the Western world's mighty capitalist economies, eh? Obviously, he thought that was enough -- that plus his innate genius -- and didn't bother to mug up on Minsky. Stupid, arrogant, soon-to-be-on-the-scrap-heap bastard. Get yer coat, Brown - yer not stopping.

For the avoidance of doubt...

... in anyone who does not read long blog posts like mine earlier today which included the following, and pace that nice Mr Dale who is far more charitable to his political opponents than so very many of them deserve, here is my personal Conservative apologia in terms which you are unlikely to hear in polite society from any elected Conservative politician or candidate. (The word apologia does not, incidentally, mean 'apology'.)

____________________________

While individual followers in either of the two main parties may be either venal or foolish and delusional, the philosophies behind the Parties are, in my view, morally different: the Conservative Party has a conscience in a way that the Labour party does not. This is about as fundamental a distinction as it is possible to make: one party is honest and the other dishonest. This is why I am a Conservative and why I will always fight the Labour Party.

Conservatives do not believe that the end justifies the means and they do believe in democracy.

Labour believes that its ends, being in their opinion so inherently superior to any other political creed that they do justify the means – any means. Labour thinkers and apparatchiks do not believe in democracy. They believe in collectivism which is a horse of a very different colour.

Fortunately for Labour, most of the electorate does not understand the distinction. When liars like Gordon Brown pontificate about 'democracy' when they what they really mean is 'collectivism and state control paid for by taxing wealth creation', the electors relax and tell themselves that their democracy is safe. But it is not.

_________________________

What? The Liberal Democrats, you say? Hahahahaha. Crooked and self-serving to a degree. They are not even honestly dishonest like Labour. A despicable shower. I diskard them.

Gloomy Tuesday

A post and some of its comments on the blog of the Telegraph’s Edmund Conway about house prices have profoundly depressed me.

Conway says in short (and he’s right) that talk of the house price crash being over is tosh. Further net falls are likely for several years, he says, despite up-ticks from time to time. He’s right – and this prospect will make outgoing and incoming governments very depressed.

Sure you want the job, Dave? No? Well, please take it anyway or the Brown Bastard will seize the opportunity of prolonged depression (which is what we are going to get - you can ignore all the cheery shouts of 'it's over!') to further Stalinise British political life and introduce even more quasi-Stasi operations than he already has. Frankly, looking ahead, given his mad economic and immigration policies, one can almost imagine a scenario in which a bastard of his cast of mind would think a Stasi-state no more than common sense.

Conway’s commenters seem to believe that the property market is being manipulated upwards (or at least prevented from falling too much) by Anglo-Saxon governments with the connivance of eastern governments (China) for the simple reason that none of them knows any other way to restore global financial stability, the sine qua non of peaceful governance anywhere.

As one commenter said, the entire global economy since World War II has been a function of the sale of debt - in the form of domestic real estate - by one generation of UK and USA house-buyers to the next, in unbelievably Earth-shaking quantities. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.

There is more food for gloomy thought in comments like these:

Sadly in the UK the national obsession with property ownership and investment is being refuelled by a government and Bank of England determined to keep pressing on the accelerator via record low interest rates and quantitative easing. The inevitable result, with a strictly limited supply of suitable land, will be renewed inflationary pressure.

and

The (government’s) proposals about HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation) are an example of how the political class fails to understand housing is a commodity like any other. The proposals will just reveal some of the Hidden Homeless and put pressure on local authorities to house them when they have no housing available. Houses (or flats) don’t just “Sit There” they are commodities like any other you buy. If they get scarce, due to demand, the price goes up. If the money is not available to borrow to buy then you rent and the rent is subsidised by Housing Benefit if necessary. One thing is certain, the population of Southern England increased faster last year than the number of houses/flats built.

Everything Brown has done since 1997 has entrenched the problem, e.g. uncontrolled immigration of millions and millions of people requiring somewhere to live and the expansion of the state-spending sector which he controls, at lethal cost to the wealth-creating sector which he cannot. He has deliberately capitalised on and aggravated the problem in order to extend his (central government) control because he, a delusional bloody Socialist to his last corpuscle, will believe unto his final breath that Planning, High Tax and Central Control are the way to the Utopian (lit.) Fair Society. The only thing he did not foresee was his own extreme, election-losing political repulsiveness which, the people having had a good look at him, will ensure that he is evicted from Number Ten at the first opportunity. His enormous political vanity made the idea unthinkable until now when even he, not entirely stupid, can see which way the wind is blowing. And so the immoral bastard will subject the nation to scorched earth solely because of his visceral hatred of the Conservative Party. Even when he is gone, the unutterable shit plans to make sure the country pays dearly for voting Tory. And he will smile his unnatural, disturbing 'smile'... Labour since 1997 and the Conservatives in earlier years both engineered and inherited (according to the date) house price inflation. Actually, for once we are all to blame: everybody thought this was a good idea. Yes, all right – except you, sunshine, except you. Can we get on? On the other hand, they had to keep non-property prices and inflation (hence the CPI, sans housing costs, and not the RPI) down in order to keep the public pecker up and themselves in office, therefore, as long as possible – by almost any means available. The chief means was maintenance of the house price bubble for as long as the wheeze would work. The wheeze is no longer working. Eventually, first time buyers, the suckers life-blood of the wheeze, simply could not afford the vast debt they were being asked to buy because no-one was creating the wealth needed to sustain and service the debt.

The brakes started to scream. Finally banks collapsed. The economy stalled, house prices crashed and homelessness started to increase.

Step forward the Saviour of the World and his disciples Poulson and Obama. At any cost, the fiction was to be reinstated. At any cost.

The understandable lust for blood once the public realised the magnitude of the (stupid-government-created) catastrophe had to be diverted from politicians at all costs. It would be satisfied by stringing up bankers and totally innocent but heroic politicians would chair the Court of Public Opinion lead the lynch mob. Uttering bloodcurdling threats in the general direction of their chosen victims – bankers – and whistling in the dark making stirring speeches (OK, we lack a Churchill, here) about a Brave New World Order and No Turning Back (oh, wait… that sounds wrong… ) the world’s ‘statesmen’ are inventing and deploying the sort of economic palliatives which only governments can, in order to restore the status quo ante because, as the taxi driver said, it’s the only language those bastards understand. They print money. They impose ASBOs (All-Socialists-now Banking Orders) on banks. They strut. They speak in sombre voices. The clear message is: ‘It weren’t me, guv. Trust me – I’m a Socialist.’

As far as I can see, the single most important distinction between the Conservatives and Labour in government is that the former are more honest than the latter. Brown (Labour Prime Minister since 1997 in all but name and in sole control of all domestic politics by agreement with Blair) was prepared to do anything – anything – to maintain himself and his party in office, as John Major and the Tories were not. The Conservative Party has a conscience in a way that the Labour party does not. This is about as fundamental a distinction as it is possible to make: one party is honest and the other dishonest. While individual followers in either Party may be either venal or foolish and delusional, the philosophies behind the Parties are, in my view, morally different. This is why I am a Conservative and why I will always fight the Labour Party.

Conservatives do not believe that the end justifies the means and they do believe in democracy.

Labour believes that its ends do justify the means – any means – and Labour thinkers do not believe in democracy. They believe in collectivism which is a horse of a very different colour.

Fortunately for Labour, the electorate generally does not see the distinction clearly. When liars like Gordon Brown pontificate about democracy when they mean collectivism and state control, the electors relax and tell themselves their democracy is safe. But it is not.

And then political-economic reality strikes like a tornado. Unemployment. Homelessness. Hopelessness. The phrases ‘billions in debt’ and ‘higher taxes for a generation to pay for it’ become part of the newsreader’s nightly report, even on Channel Thicko. The natives begin to think revolting thoughts.

Worst of all, the reality dawns that one’s children are going to be poorer, more worried and less safe than we have been, for the rest of their lives. And there is nothing we can do to help them. This was not how it was meant to be: They didn’t tell us this.

And where are They? Retired. Gone out of the public eye. Taken a cushy academic post in an Ivy League university across the Pond, with tenure and accommodation provided.

So who do we curse, now? The millions of immigrants?

Step forward Adolf Hitler. Now do you begin to see why I am depressed? For God’s sake, Dave, do it. Get into Number Ten.

Fuck the unions. They and their evil, statist, Utopia-believing, sod-you-Comrades (aka employees) in the fucking Labour Party have brought us to this. Let them do their worst. We are British, and we will deal with it. And them. They have had their time and time's up. They can die either a slow death or a quick one. Your call, Barber. Cut the shackles of the state, Dave, and set the limbs and minds of the people free. Cut the crap and tell the people the truth. Take a chance that they'll howl at you and throw you out. At least, be a real Conservative - an honest politician.

Get on and repeal some of the evil stuff, fast, and then (your Number One priority) free the people to provide real education (as the state does not) for their children and so equip them to dream realisable dreams and to create the wealth which Socialism would have us believe grows on its childish, plastic, fool-some-of-the-people-all-the-time government-engineered tree. Let’s start building a new house on solid rock, not on sand. As the man said,

Conservative thought consists largely of self-evident truisms that even the stupid can recognize as true, while anti-conservatism consists largely of what George Orwell so aptly described as 'the sort of nonsense only an intellectual could believe'.

And as another man said,

If the grass looks greener on the socialist side of the fence it's because they have a better class of bullshit.

Ruin. Labour always brings us to this, only this time it's much much worse. Ruin.

They are utter, utter bastards. Lying, immoral, control-freak, destructive Socialist bastards.

Yep, still here

Just had to share this from commenter Thomas Cussons at CoffeeHouse, because it sums up my view of the Brown Ruiner more succinctly than I ever could, what with rage diluting my attempts at concision. (My emphasis.)

Brown as Shadow Chancellor was relentless in highlighting the Tories' economic failings. He managed, quite falsely of course but that was the mark of his then political effectiveness, to present the recession of the early 90s, in retrospect a mere blip, as an economic Hiroshima, a calamitous failure. In much the same way, from May 1997 he succeeded in making a supine press believe that he had inherited an economy on the point of meltdown.

In reality, the precise opposite was the case. Nonetheless, the myth of 'Britain's greatest-ever chancellor' was being assiduously spun.

Twelve years later, his true legacy is revealed: an economy castrated by a man in thrall to his own mysterious shortcomings, a man consumed by bitterness, eaten alive by a barely contained belief that the world has always conspired against his self-evident genius.

The question now is less how have we been reduced to this pitiful state, more why are Dave and his boys not making clear that we are ruled by a kind of psychopath.

Brown's legacy – economic meltdown, debt of unimaginable proportions, a vast underclass of benefit-dependent numbskulls, a grotesque expansion of government on all levels – is properly terrifying.

Why is this not being screamed about? Why have we not already taken to the streets?

Is despair the only rational reaction?

It increasingly feels like it.

Well, that didn't last long, did it?

Just a quickie to advise the excellent Mr Quentin Letts, who doubtless reads this blog assiduously, that I am happy to throw my tanner tenner into the collection tin as it goes round.

Oh - and the noble knob formerly known as Sralan is a precious, pompous arsehole.

It's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon

While the bastards who rule us are away, Prodicus is taking a news-free vacation.

Tranquillity reigns. Even the radio is off. No news, no Humphrys, no Naughties. I can recommend it.

I shall be coming and going until mid-September when I expect to be back here and blogging with a vengeance.

I may just occasionally... possibly... check webnews... The urge to blog may overtake me, so if you are a Brown bastard, do not rest easy on that sun lounger.