Still at it

So no bloggery till next week.

Still at what?

*Chuckle*

via Blackberry

DWMs & the Long March through America's institutions

Institutions don't come much more institutional than the Library of Congress. I visited its website looking for a gift for a friend.

What an interesting picture it presents of the United States. Hardly a Dead (or even Living) White Male of British, Irish, Nordic, Italian or German ancestry to be found - although Wimmin in abundance. There's a link for Wimmin. On the Americana link, the next link is to Civil Rights stuff (bastard white oppressors) and there's a main link to the Great Depression (bastard white capitalists) section.

Easy-peasy finding links for aboriginal or African America, or Russian, Jewish or Japanese (former mortal enemy whom we don't hate any more) stuff. A print of a Japanese painting is the featured item under the heading 'Household accessories'. What every American home needs, obviously. Oh, wait... What's this? Beethoven? Well, OK then.

Right. Now to look for something about America's pioneering work in museums and art collections, American authors... Mark Twain or Hemingway, maybe. The great universities like Yale and Stanford. Austin. American jurists, explorers, archaeologists, historians and linguists. The USA's massive achievements in industrial and scientific research. Its world-leading orchestras. The British and other Western Europeans who built the Thirteen Colonies and the nation's capital - and Capitol. And Congress itself. And the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln.... hm... wait... He was important, wasn't he? Must see if the Library of Congress has anything about him.

Here are a few screen shots I made earlier.

First: People, Culture. "Portraits of children and families and people representing the cultures of Native Americans, African Americans, Japanese, Russians and others". That would be most Americans, those 'others'.

Next: Music. We have Blues (African American music), Classical Music (a black musician is shown), Jazz (originally a Black form), and Paul Simon. Oh, wait. There's a Folk Music link, clicking on which takes you to a page with twelve CDs shown. Eleven of them are about black musicians, and yes, we're still on what the authorities of the Library of Congress calls 'Folk Music', here.

And so to Posters. We have a Native American in the heading, then links for Jewish Interest, African Americans, Native American (nice portrait of Geronimo), posters (misc), and Musical Instruments. Some mistake there, obviously - the instrument shown looks like a person. If this weren't the Library of Congress website, I'd swear it was Bach. Can't be. He's a Dead White European Male Genius whose name will live for evermore.

And finally. Here's that featured Household Accessory I was telling you about. Lovely, isn't it?

There's something odd here, though. Serious omissions. Opportunities missed.

The African American and Native American stuff is properly dominant but where are the links to material on Gay America and American Transpeople? And surely all this emphasis on Jewish-America doesn't fit with the assiduously enforced anti-Semitic zeitgeist in American academic institutions?

Surely the Library of Congress ought to be showing some leadership here and putting up prominent links to its stuff about Muslim-Americans? But... silly me. Of course that will happen just as soon as Muslim donations outweigh Jewish American donations and there's less need to favour Jewish donors so much. And what a day of rejoicing that will be among the thought police of American academe. Partay! With jazz!

Remember? Embarrassing, wasn't it?

With reference to this post.

Gordon Brown’s mission most recently seemed to be to comment on anything the media vomited up would allow. Jade Goody, Susan Boyle, Andy Murray, Jedward – this list continues. By March this year, I was personally convinced that Gordon Brown had replaced Lorraine Kelly on GMTV - Source.

The thought occurs: oh, thank God that's over.

How very unlike the the style of our own dear Head of State

In one whirlwind week last month, for example, President Obama made a third appearance on 60 Minutes, gave a major speech on the financial crisis and made five talk-show appearances the following Sunday. On the eighth day he appeared on Letterman. - Source.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear, dear. How very undignified.

One understands, of course, that the poor chap is frantic to appear... what's the word?... relevant to his electorate, what with the Presidential Sand in the Presidential Egg-Timer running out uncomfortably fast now but it does nothing to recommend the idea of a republic, does it?

Relentless

I am conducting a small experiment into the political bias, or otherwise, of the Today programme. Yes, yes, I know. I know, but where there's life...

Every morning, I switch on the radio, tuned to Radio 4's Today programme, and listen for about 15 seconds. Then, the findings being thus far all of a consistent pattern, I turn it off again.

I am waiting, thus far in vain, for a change of tone from the following 'news headlines and 'factual announcements' -- they are not expressions of opinion. Apparently.

'There are fears that the government's policy of X will cause damage to...'

'The government's plans for Y are causing concern that...'

'[Name of Labour spokesman] has attacked the government's proposals on ...'

'The Institute of N has challenged the government's plans to...'

'The most vulnerable members of society will suffer under the government's plans to P, according to a report from...'

There is the occasional variant:

'The government has announced plans to abolish X,Y and Z. However, the Labour Party has attacked these proposals, saying... '

This experiment is about to reach its conclusion. Findings are expected to replicate those of similar experiments in the past which resulted in the destruction of inanimate objects (to wit., perfectly good wireless sets) by reason of their being hurled against a wall by their owner.

Hoping

That David Cameron has the guts to send his son to Eton if he wants to and disdains to court the grudging, worthless approval of any bastards who would have it otherwise. Get the boy the best you can afford, Dave, and offer the motorist's traditional salute to anyone who dares you not to.

And I trust your daughter's name is down for St Mary's, Ascot, too.

None of my business, of course. I'm just saying. Free country. Isn't it?

Why? Here's why.

Why do Labour and the rest of the Left fight tooth and nail to prohibit academic selection?

Because it is the best possible engine of social mobility and the fastest route out of deprivation.

But, see, it encourages the working class to ape the middle class. They end up believing they're better than they actually are. Makes their hands soft, gives them ideas above their station and before you know it, they've turned class traitor. That weakens the Left. It is not to be tolerated.

Fuck all the education baloney - that's for the great day when we achieve Socialism. Meanwhile, in order to achieve that, in order to build Socialism, it's the class war that matters, comrade. First, last and always. The flourishing of individuals will come, of course, but only after the revolution. Until then, individuals are to be subordinated to the cause. Misery, yes. Demoralisation, yes. But it's all in a good cause.

That is why Anthony Crosland of cursed memory determined to

destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.

He could not bear the thought of the working class becoming middle class.

There is no better way to create a lumpen proletariat (Marxoid-speak for 'cannon-fodder') than to close off the workers' fastest and perhaps only route to economic and social advancement.

Utter, utter bastards. Hang the lot of them, in the name of our lost generations whom they have sacrificed to their ghastly cause.

There they are, all standing in a row

Our alternative Prime Ministers.

• Andy Burnham was one of the nodding dogs who would declare to TV cameras that the cabinet had every confidence in Gordon Brown when the reverse was the case.

• Ed Balls ran the thuggish Brownite machine and the decade-long insurgency against Tony Blair to put his master in Number 10.

• Ed Miliband makes pious noises denouncing "factionalism" as if he is a saintly figure who never had anything to do with it. "The emissary from Planet Fuck" – as he was known among Blair's aides during the civil war – was at the heart of the Brown faction.

• It is a bit tricky for David Miliband. (Heheheheh. Nice.) He was one of the senior members of the cabinet who knew Brown was taking them to defeat and failed to act before it was too late.

Rawnsley.

UPDATE: Oops. Forgot. Tsk.

Sister act

...the most powerful and meaningful person speaking to youth and students today. Her intelligence is unselfish. She shines as she offers cultural, spiritual, political, economical, practical analysis and constructive solutions with the precision of a surgeon. [Her] words, thoughts, lessons, and books are transforming the next generation. Once you have heard her speak, it’s impossible for you to remain the same. You’ll change the way you think, love and live.

Wow. How could I live and yet overlook someone who is clearly a living saint, a veritable heroine? Modest, too. The above is her description of herself on her website. (My emphasis.)

This paragon came to my attention when I Googled an incomprehensible verbal reference by James Forsyth.

So, is it just me, or is the Spectator's current estimation of the... ah... cultural awareness of its readership in need of recalibration?

I agree with Bob Crow

Diane Abbott for Labour Leader. She's perfect.

This morning she was on the on the Toady Programme:

Yes, yes, the Tories -- cynically, of course -- are dismantling the oppressive measures Labour put in place...

Love that 'of course'. They just cannot help themselves, can they?

See, in Abbott World, only the Left is capable of working un-cynically and altruistically for the public good simply because (bear with me here) it's the right thing to do. One can be certain that, by contrast, the Tories are doing it because... well, why, Diane? Are they releasing the improperly detained for their own personal gain? Are we talking brown envelopes, here? Are they reining in your Stasi from surveilling innocent citizens 'to please their banker friends'? What?

Abbott is your archetypal, cynical, motormouthy, Hard Left, Righteous egomaniac with forked tongue, living in a dream world in which Marxist myths... nationalisation, state schools for prole children, private schools for the children of the nomenklatura... are above even the laws of physics.

And that gives me an idea. The Labour Party thoroughly deserves her as its leader.

Sorry, Balls. You are just not ghastly enough. Even Bob Crow agrees. As I said before, for you the war is over.

Recommendations for living in England #638

If you are served thin French-fry-style chips with your fish then you should legally be allowed to slap the vendor across the face with the nearest wet pollock. - Iain Aitch

ConLib bastards to send 5-year-olds up chimneys

Quite delicious. Simply delightful.

Our local freesheet's most devoted correspondent is a terribly caring citizen who also happens to be a diehard Labour activist... although, curiously, that is never mentioned.

The readership's hearts are broken week after week to read how this kind-hearted person is "saddened" by the actions of the born-wicked Tories and the shockingly power-hungry Liberal Democrats.

This week, tears in our eyes and fists stuffed in our mouths, we learn that the ending of free swimming is the worst, the absolutely worst act of this dreadful, dreadful government.

You ain't seen nothin' yet, pet. Brace yerself.

My wicked old infant-nomming Tory heart was especially gladdened by the final, authentically Brownie wail: "Why should our children have to pay the price?"

Here's why.

HMT's projected increase in annual debt interest costs of £40bn between now and 2014-15 is the equivalent of 10 pence on the standard rate of income tax. 10 PENCE. - BOM

And the caring Labour Party it was which has robbed us all, parents, children and the unborn, and forced parents of little children to break into the kiddies' piggy-banks for a family swim.

Does Labour's responsibility for that intolerable burden on our children - and their children - "sadden" such Labour hearts at all? Even a bit? Do they even understand what it means?

Menadacious, manipulative socialist thickos. I spit on their faux-pity.

Genius

What the Doctor ordered. Possibly.

It is a central tenet of Liberal Democrat philosophy that the harder you work, the more tax you should pay.

- according to this authority, that is.

Spooky, how far LibDem and Labour philosophies overlap.

Well, all except those Liberal (sic) members of the Conservative Coalition government who intend to carry on drawing the weekly ministerial envelope for the advertised five years, which may or may not include Trust Me I'm a Doctor Cable.

Latest Balls

FT

So, mad then. As well as bad, obviously.

Gordon Brown is perhaps the most over promoted person ever to make the front bench since the War. - Simon Jenkins

Blair described his chancellor as "mad, bad, dangerous and beyond redemption" and likened Brown's behaviour to that of a "mafioso" in his dealings with him [...] even Prescott was "scared" by Brown. "He knows there's something wrong with him," - Peter Mandelson

And Balls ('I will be leader') was Brown's consigliere, capo di tutti capi and heir throughout the whole disgusting, traitorous, catastrophic melodrama.

And now, with his mate Whelan playing his Balls and probably the poet McBride on bass, he offers the Labour Party the opportunity to reinstate the Brown Balls culture of lies, thuggery and protection rackets, so that the party and the United Kingdom can return to the nightmare from which we have lately been delivered.

Hey, Balls - message for you. You are universally seen for what you are: a sneering, shouting, self-serving, shamelessly lying corrupter of British public and political discourse. Only Labour's pathological wannabe mafiosi, socialist retards who applaud your ideology and your methods, could possibly support you. You are political poison to anyone blessed with a memory or a conscience.

Look, Balls - it's over, so fuck off, you unutterable bastard.

And the same goes for your equally self-serving, craven and economically illiterate colleagues... the Millies, Harmen and all the other Straw men who for years did nothing about Brown despite knowing as fact what the country intuited: that you were all maintaining in the highest and most powerful public office an over-promoted paranoiac who was grotesquely and dangerously unfit to govern.

Benefits of the new politics #371

Not having every damned news broadcast open with: 'The Prime Minister has announced...'

Let's do-oo-oo IT

Compare:

[Conservative Defence Secretary Liam Fox] has just told his departmental Ministers they cannot take more than two weeks' holiday this summer. In September, they will have to start working six days a week as he already does. source

- with:

'Part-time' [Labour] Defence Secretary Des Browne's salary is paid for entirely by the Ministry of Defence even though he is also Scottish Secretary. source

QUIZ

Who's this?

I'll concede it was pretty brave of him to take part in a debate where he must have known his side had no arguments whatsoever. And he dealt with this handicap very professionally by indulging in lots of what actors call 'business' - making exaggerated play of his advanced years and supposed decrepitude, milking whatever laughs he could muster, jabbing here and there with his sneaky ad homs, not actually saying anything of import but doing so with a great deal of authority. I wonder if he has had thespian training? - author

Aw, come on.

Nope. I don't get it. I really don't.

Grumpy young (to me) James Delingpole in his column (not online yet) in this week's Spectator writes about his recent meeting up with his

old mucker Brendan O'Neill from Spiked who very nearly persuaded me a few years ago that I was, like him, a revolutionary Marxist

Revolutionary Marxist? Delingpole?

And in the same week, this in Standpoint, from Nick Cohen:

In the 1990s, the [Revolutionary Communist] party's leaders decided to give up on socialism and move into the media. And like good Leninists, the rank and file obeyed their superiors' orders and abandoned their previous convictions on demand. The Moral Maze is now its base at the BBC and is on the radio as I write. Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, which the party's cadres founded when they decided that Trotsky was wrong after all...

[...]

If you come across a new voice on a Radio 4 talk show, talking with loudmouthed conviction, the odds are that he or she will be from the [Revolutionary Communist Party]/Institute of Ideas. Indeed, if you want to become a talking head on Radio 4, the best advice I can give you is to join the RCP crowd.

As an aspiring pundit you will need to subscribe to the following notions: that the British mollycoddle their children and foolishly protect them from the rough and tumble of childhood with anti-bullying campaigns; that human rights are a joke and humanitarian intervention a crime; that we live in a therapeutic culture, under whose yoke the State tells us how to live, love and grieve; that social workers are agents of oppression; that psychiatrists aren't much better; and that environmentalism is a reactionary attempt to stop human progress

Well, all right, I can just about see how Delingpole might... but... revolutionary Marxist?

Cohen concludes:

conservative readers will be pleased that the former RCP now offers them what they used to find in the Tory press or hear from the lips of saloon-bar philosophers at the 19th hole.

Revolu... What?

Are marxoids all right-wing now, then? Have they grown up, or what? Or have I been a communist all along, only without knowing it? Is this what the Left calls 'false consciousness'?

Oh, and I always make a point of reading Delingpole, Cohen and, erm, Spiked**. Should I see someone?

** And Rod Liddle, soi-disant Leftie, Radio 4 alumnus, now semi-libertarian controversialist. Is he RCP, too?

Room at the top

For a new Cabinet Secretary.

At last someone has pointed the finger at Sir Gus O'Donnell, Blair's man at the head of the politicised, rotting remains of the civil service.

Despite the wholly understandable expression of relief on his face as he welcomed David Cameron into Number Ten as Prime Minister at the opening of the ANL (After New Labour) era, Sir Gus cannot escape censure for presiding over the politicisation, emasculation, ennervation, reduction of intellectual rigour and enslavement to political fashion of the civil service resulting in its corporate corruption (sic) under Blair and Brown.

It would once have been impossible for senior Foreign Office officials to draft and circulate an insulting memorandum about a visiting head of state which, dismissed merely as 'foolish' by their superiors, disgraced the entire service, humiliated the nation and sent the entire civil and foreign service into a reputation-salvage operation which will continue for years. That those responsible were not dismissed summarily is or at least would once have been astonishing and is symptomatic of the extent of the corruption of of public service ethics.

All this is O'Donnell's responsibility, as Cabinet Secretary and head of the Permanent Secretaries Management Group.

It is time for someone to hand the man the Black Spot.

Moat latest - SCOOP!

h/t @johnlister

Wimpish little scrotes

Radio 4, still believing its audience to be as thick as shit, and still in its fit of the vapours on seeing Cameron enter Number Ten, invited some deeeear little chiiiildren to join in its anti-Gove campaign by bewailing the inhuman ConDemNation (geddit?) of their school buildings to decrepitude, live on the Today programme.

Wimpish little scrotes. Your ancestors would disown you. Wouldn't have happened in my day.

This clip, from 2.38 in, demonstrates the only correct response to the total demolition of one's school.

It was written

Who knew that Gove would be the first faux-FAIL? Just about everybody.

The whole of political chatteratidom was agreed that he was a target way before the election, being Head Boy on the Tories' most crucial, important, significant and politically inflammatory policy, i.e., to wrest education from the death-grip of the 'education' establishment, current props. Balls and Blower, disciples of St Antony Crosland and St Antonio Gramsci.

Gove is currently being hanged, drawn and quartered in effigy by Balls, Blower and every spokesperson of every Left interest group from LEAs to the BBC which is quite disgracefully deploying every propaganda tool in its armoury against the Gover. This is all as predicted, although why we have had no sight of Emily Maitlis's vuvuzela remains a mystery.

Gove is doing what ministers of the Crown used to do BNL (Before New Labour) which is to say he is doing the honourable thing by taking the flak and apologising for the civil servants who furnished him with grossly duff data for presentation to Parliament and the public.

Funny that. People whose numbers and powers he intends to cut and who stand to lose from the success of Mr Gove and the Tory-led government gave this Tory Minister embarrassingly flawed information which, if the rentamob got up by their friends and cheered on by the BBC-Guardianistas had its way, would see the coalition's most politically anti-Left policy hobbled and its standard-bearer humiliated.

Got news for you, Lefties. Ain't gonna happen. The little drama you've got up is transparent and pointless.

Michael Gove [said] he was cancelling the approach of Building Schools for the future because it was an expensive, long winded and inefficient way of building schools. He did not say he was cancelling all new schools building. Indeed, if he is right and he can save substantial sums on the box ticking detailed regulatory approach of the old programme this could leave him with more money to spend on bricks and mortar. This message has got entirely lost in the broadcasts and newspaper stories about cuts, leading most people to think there will now be no new schools.

This needs turning round as quickly as possible. According to the figures the Coaliton government is going to spend as much on new capital projects as the outgoing Labour government. In that case they might end up building more schools than Labour for the same amount of money if Mr Gove is right about how to do it more cheaply. Redwood.

This not-even-a-proper-furore is just a ploy in Ed Ball's doomed campaign for his party's leadership. It has worked for him, in clearing the Millies off the front pages and drawing the chattersphere on to ground on which Balls can display a slightly less repellent than usual profile.

Balls is going to lose and who cares anyway? It's summer and his supporters' howls can hardly be heard above the zzz-ing of gnats. The government remains phenomenally popular - whether the BBC likes it or not and it really doesn't so mwahahahaha.

Keep going, Gover. You're right, and you're all right, and you know you are. And so does the country.

Horrible

I pity their mother. No, come on - who would wish this pair of ugly mugs on an innocent woman? All right, a Marxist matron married to a Marxist aristo. But even so, even her. Have a heart.

The I-can-kill-with-this-stare one on the left is weird enough but the sneery, smug I'll-pwn-you-all bastard on the right is actually frightening.

And to think that we are going to see a lot more of both of them.

Bleagh.

What?

Mr Burnham advocates "aspirational socialism" in which enterprise is generally left free from state control, but there is more state or collective ownership in health and social care, the finance industry, and football. Indy.

Football?

Let's see... Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci... Burnham?

Hm. Definitely something wrong there.

Aaah...

Sigh.

Just think, I own one of its poor relations. And even it cost me an arm and a leg. Relatively speaking. Well, all things are relative. Actually, not, come to think of it.

Viva the counter-revolution!

@iaindale tweeted:

Why is it that so many people in their twenties have v little understanding of English grammar or basic sentence construction? Aaaaaaagh.

And then he blogged it. And I replied along these lines:

It's no mystery. The Gramscian long march, which has now completely subverted the most important institution of them all, the education establishment.

Read Toby Young's piece about the Institute of Education in this week's Spectator (not online yet) in which he cites (hilariously) the IOE's stance on transpeople as especially, um, illuminating about its corporate attitude. I find this University of London teacher training college's take on World Englishes, too, not completely irrelevant to Iain Dale's complaint.

The critical question is: who is teaching the teachers, and what are they teaching them? This question may never be spoken aloud, of course, because the (Left, especially Labour and the) education establishment howls it down with cosmically hypocritical shrieks of 'Shocking! Politicising the education of our children! Appalling!'

An educated population which can think for itself and earn its own living spells disaster for the Marxoid Left which requires and is successfully engineering the massive, politically- and literally illiterate, state-dependent, compliant lumpen-proletariat it needs, to entrench itself in power.

The present government is seen as but a stage in history's inevitable march towards the Left's utopia. The Marxoid denizens of the educational establishment will not be dislodged without a bloody fight: they intend to see this government off. They await the restoration of Labour to government so that they can further their project with only the minimum of (electorally unavoidable) interference.

Michael Gove's revolutionary Free Schools policy is correctly perceived as a frontal attack on the education establishment. It is the only possible way, now, in which we can replace indoctrination with education, by giving parents the wherewithal simply to bypass the educational establishment. Naturally, 'educationists' will fight it with every weapon at their disposal. Their worst nightmare is for children to be educated and growing up to be free, thinking, independent subjects, as opposed to objects.

One of Dale's commenters remarks that every generation bewails the deterioration of education since 'their day'. Perhaps, but in our generation, that deterioration is more than an accident, being contemporaneous with both the ascendancy of Gramsci's children and state provision of universal schooling.

As a strategist, Gramsci was no slouch. He knew how to engineer a quiet revolution.

We desperately need a counter-revolution. Go to it, Mr Gove.

Summer Staccato: 2010 edition

Sorry about the on-off silence. Holidaying, kind of, and when not that, in the garden enjoying the summer. We don't get much summer warmth here in England, what with all this global warming, so one has a duty to make the effort and get the deck-chairs and Pimms out, I feel, before the glass starts its annual descent and the next, very overdue, Ice Age begins.

If, like your correspondent, you are a supporter of the estimable, unjustly jailed and soon to be vindicated (so fuck you, you treacherous Fleet Street bastards who deserted him) Conrad Black, you may care to read this. Roll on the day.

Culpable ignorance

Only the dim mainstream media “fears” a double-dip recession; the enlightened (a) are fully expecting one and (b) refuse to call it a double-dip, because using such nomenclature constitutes an acceptance of its implicit premise, namely, that there was a recovery.

What he said.