Mr Spock, what's the intergalactic translation of 'barking mad egomaniacal enviromentalist earthling'?

1 - Insane envirofascist fantasy:

2 - Scientific antidote:

"The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed its primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued commands for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager's vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo. The image was taken with a narrow angle camera lens, with the Sun quite close to the field of view. Quite by accident, the Earth was captured in one of the scattered light rays caused by taking the image at an angle so close to the Sun. The late Dr Carl Sagan was quite moved by this image of our tiny world.

"Here is an enlargement of the area around our 'pale blue dot'"

... and here is a clip of the late Carl Sagan talking about it. But what would he know? He was only an old-fashioned scientist. He wouldn't rate a piece in CiF.

With compliments to Pale Blue Dot from whom most of the above is nicked.

H/t to Fawkes who is keeping me busy today.

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QOTD

After all, if a party can't be seen to manage its own finances properly, why would you trust them with the country's?

More unaccustomed self-awareness from Labour. Funny how hard reality hits home when you have time on your hands.

h/t Guido.

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The child catchers

"Children could determine their own educational outcomes"

Provocative phrase-making there from our friend James Higham who got me thinking with his comment on my post over at Orphans of Liberty (it's also here) on forty years of politically motivated, systematic destruction of our education system. The evil consequences of that campaign of destruction are now denied by almost no-one except the Campbell-Millars and the other Labour Party royalty, comfortably wealthy in their middle class Utopian North London fastness from where they plot feverishly to prevent the escape of other people's ('working class') children from the serfdom guaranteed by their warped ideology.

In (most, not all) of our state schools, newly potty-trained little know-nothings were (and are) not told that they know nothing because they are children and must sit still and listen and learn something, that that is what childhood is for, what childhood is: a time of learning from older people. They are told that they're 'worth it' and tutored in assertiveness. They are 'affirmed' for 'who they are'. They are not told that now's their big chance, their only chance because they will never again be five, ten, or fifteen years old. They are not told - and their parents are not told to tell them - that learning in childhood will liberate them when they are older.

Liberate? What?

Children in the developing world know it. Their grandparents, parents, teachers and playmates all tell them. They are noisily hungry for schooling; daily, determinedly, they walk miles to school, begging en route for pen and paper if necessary. They clamour for education school because they have ambitions to do great things when they grow up and they know that school now is indispensable to their life then.

Our children, on the other hand, are assured that they have everything they need within them. Their teachers will help them to discover and nurture it.

Everything their parents (meh) and ancestors (who?) learned, preserved and want to hand on to them is irrelevant and biased against the present reality. ‘Present reality’, of course, is value-judgement-free, an egalitarian, anti-natural and competition-free fantasy world in which all shall have prizes, created and defined not by God or ancestors but by ‘school leaders’ and those in command of them. Yes, education theorists and philosophers, politicians and NUT commissars, I am looking at you, you malign Marxoid bastards.

The culture within (most, not all) state schools, the 'learning environment', is carefully shaped to influence everything else. Above all the terms of engagement of children with teachers is shaped by the maandatory terminology.

Head teachers are merely 'leaders'. State school children, unlike private school children, are never called 'school children' but 'kids' - much more matey and egalitarian, eroding the relation of hierarchy between teacher and child.

'Hierarchy? Tsk. Inappropriate. Imperialist terminology. Unacceptably oppressive.'

A state school child is not a 'pupil': one who knows not and so is being taught by one who knows. The state school child is a 'student': one who is sufficiently mature and self-motivated voluntarily to undertake private scholarly study with limited guidance from a tutor. 'Student' used to denote a person who had finished being a child-pupil in a school and moved on to higher education as a young adult. Now you start being a student at nursery school. Three years old already? You're on your own, kid. So study.

The mandatory use of the word 'student' serves a political purpose, the investigation of which throws up some egregious examples of organised mass child abuse. What has been done to our children should be named for what it is.

At the height of the Sixty-Niners' nihilist revolution of the 1970s, the Hard Left gestated an organisation, now defunct, called the National Union of School Students. The objective was to eliminate the distinction between young adulthood and childhood in order, by flattering the normal teenage yen to be 'treated like a grown-up', to mobilise the energy of children for the revolution. 'The kids' were urged to 'strike' (against themselves, FFS) and turn out for WRP and SWP demos. Lovely. Actively depriving children of schooling. Caring socialism in action.

The defunct NUSS has a successor, apparently now moribund apart from some onanist declarations about 'the cuts' , in the London School Students Union. Its lair would seem to be in Respect country, in East London.

If the LSSU really is moribund although with a nest of nihilists as with an apparently failed firework or a motionless rattlesnake, one can never be certain, that can only cheer those of us concerned for the welfare of London's children.

'Children determining their own educational outcome' are given the keys to a kingdom which is mined with death-traps, a kingdom whose complexity is unimaginably beyond their capability to comprehend it or protect themselves in it without the defences provided by sound education. They have been exposed to a world they they can neither understand nor flourish in as free persons, by wicked adults who are perfectly aware of the malicious absurdity of what they are doing.

The outcome is an increasingly uneducated nation moving ineluctably from actual and metaphorical junk-food satiety and state-directed quiescence to the dangerous, angry beginning of chaos.

And now people who should have known better - and who do and did know better - but were and are content to leave the 'teachers' to do their worst, who patronised the Pollys, who gave free rein to the deeply Gramscian BBC with its bully-pulpit, its useful idiots and missionaries, are surprised and annoyed and scared at the outcome of forty years of this.

What? Do me, as they say in the street markets of North London, a lemon.

And yes, the cowardly (pre-Gove) Conservative Party is almost equally culpable, having kowtowed to the blackmail of the Gramscian education establishment rather than do its duty to the nation’s children – and their parents. Yes, even Blessed Margaret.

No-one comes well out of this terrible, tragic experiment.

And we wonder why we have unprecedented corruption in public life at one end of the social spectrum and ignorant utter lawlessness at the other? Whence the surprise? We sowed and tended this lethal seed for decades, and now we see the fruit: the next generation of parents, teachers, carers and government ministers. The little they know and understand, they learned in the schools in which we allowed them to waste their childhood chances.

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Going quite well, eh, Vlad?

• The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency.

• The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.

No, no. Not my own. Lenin's.

Oh look. Here's a thing.

Lenin biographer, James Maxton. Maxton biographer, Gordon Brown.

Yes, the very same, nationaliser of Britain's means of exchange, debaucher of Britain's currency by devaluation and the accumulation of historically unprecedented debt, tax-and-spend waster of the nation's resources without precedent and midwife to our now rising inflation, mentor of the world's - especially the EU's - governments on the management of currencies and world economic governance.

Hard man Vlad's softlee-softlee Fabian children must be so proud.

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Pollyworld: a glimmer of light at last? Nope.

No, don't get too excited. Oh, you weren't.

Remember the Polly Conundrum: 'Is she a moron or a liar?' Hm, tricky.

Polly Toynbee, rousing the comrades to continue flogging their dead horse fighting the class war, writes without a trace of either irony or self-reflection:

The postwar years did see an exceptional upward surge, as a great increase in white collar and middle managerial jobs changed a two-thirds working class society into two-thirds middle class: it's worth noting it happened not via education but the changing labour market.

'Not via education'? Oops, missed the critical link, there, Pol. See, in that expanding labour market, the new, better-paid, white-collar, 'middle-class' jobs increasingly went to the millions of people educated in the '11-plus' education system of the 1944 Education Act, the system which you and your privately-educated and relatively wealthy friends so hated and still do, and which your party 'of the working people' abolished purely for ideological 'class war' reasons. And 'up the workers', you might say, because look what happened next:

Then social progress stopped – a study comparing the fate of children born in 1958 with those born in 1970... 

... (almost all of them forced into your mate Tony Crosland's comprehensives)...

... shows the latter more hermetically sealed into the social class of their birth.

No! Well, fancy that.

Is this the law of unintended consequences swinging into play? Or could it be (perish the thought) that the aim was not merely to épater la bourgeoisie (that comes later... now, in fact) but erode them to destruction, 'via education'?  Cynically and nihilistically, to replace the increasingly educated and mobile (translation: 'increasingly liberated') lower- and middle-middle classes with an unemployable lumpenproletariat, a rioting, looting, business-destroying, terrifying, socialism-dependent advance guard of the violent revolution-in-England (sic) so long the objective of the Hard Left, and dreamed-of by both Marx and Lenin?

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

No, not Polly. I doubt she's that brave. That was Lenin.

And remember that it was the evil idealist Lenin, not the cynical opportunist Blair, who coined 'education, education, education':

•  Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. 
• Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

And - we're back in the room. Here's Stephen Pollard in the Times (no £)

The proportion of public-school-educated undergraduates at Oxford was, for instance, on a steady downward path after the Second World War. In 1946 65 per cent of male students were from independent schools. By 1967 only 53 per cent of male students were from public schools. The pattern was even clearer with women, the share falling from 57 per cent of arts undergraduates in 1946 to 39 per cent in 1967. For all the problems with technical and secondary modern schools, grammar schools did a fine job of lifting children out of poverty and into opportunity. Yet today, our comprehensive system has one of the worst rankings in the developed world.

And still Toynbee can't or won't see it. That Polly Conundrum just keeps on giving.

But, of course, she is casting her pearls before swine. Well, all right, Guardian readers. She doesn't matter to anyone much, outside Labour royalty and the BBC, who incidentally have given her another series. On 'class'. Hahahahaha. Now, aren't we all looking forward to that? I know everyone at the BBC is.

Me, I'm torn between the old rage and... pity.

As an old lady enters approaches her dotage, a certain bewilderment can overtake her. Kind confusion shields her from the terrible truth that she and her friends were not only wrong but guilty of blighting the lives of millions of children, and the lives of their children, too. She plucks at our sleeves and breathes her rank breath into our faces as she insists that we look at her faded snaps. She spends hour after hour on her insane and incomprehensible scribblings which she is leaving to posterity which, will of course, vindicate her. She warbles the old rebel songs to anyone with the patience to listen and says Billy Bragg could almost be her son if it were not for his dreadfully common accent. She dotes on that handsome Marcus Brigstocke and shouts at people to pipe down when he's on the telly. Most of the time she just hobbles around muttering 'Historical inevitability', and 'dialectical materialism,' but no-one pays any attention any more.

I am sure we all hope she'll be with us for year as to come, amusing us with her delightfully batty encouragement to fight the Kaiser evil Thatcher what's his name... Etonian bastard... no, it'll come... give her a minute...




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Labour activists are not normal - official

'Right-wing' does not scare normal people like it scares us

Refreshing self-awareness there, from one Rob Marchant, 'an activist and former Labour Party manager who blogs at The Centre Left'. Link? Nope. 




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No, no. No, no. no. Oh, dear me, no.

50km on a bike? Good God, man, that’s why we invented taxis. Actually, anything beyond about 20 miles and I start thinking about chartering a light aircraft.

What he said.

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Toff A v. Toff B

I thought Woodward must be a Tory sleeper when I read this so I tweeted thusly, chortling the while :

Which is of course entirely true.

But then I read this:

Woodward adds that the "market" elements of the government’s health, education and universities reforms are at odds with the public’s expectations for public services, before concluding that the government does "not appear to be seeking long-term solutions to Britain's real challenges and problems and Cameron himself now appears to be a recognisably rightwing prime minister.”

Well, fancy that! Lovely bit of unadulterated Socialism there, see? The choice of 'market' solutions is inimical (natch, and never mind the crapology) to the long term solution of Britain's 'real challenges' making Cameron, ipso facto, 'a recognisably rightwing prime minister' (orly? In your dreams, Shaunie baby, but not on my planet), the which, being translated, means,

'Cameron is a typical baby-eating Tory bastard who worships the market on ideological grounds and has less than fuck-all interest in tackling Britain's real challenges so vote Labour because caring Labour toffs like me will give the public sector unions more of your money with which to degrade the services you think you are paying for than Tory toffs will'.

So, not a Tory sleeper, then.







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The Arts and how they are done - Part One: Opera (How to ruin it and enrage the bourgeoisie)

When the curtain rose on Robert Carsen’s new staging of Handel’s Rinaldo, you could almost hear the audience’s low groan. Oh no, it’s going to be another of these weird productions. Not the lovely colourful escapist fantasy that reading the plot had led one to hope for. No hint of the romantic spectacular adventure in which Tasso’s brave Christian warrior Rinaldo frees the lovely Almirena from the clutches of the sorceress Armida and the Saracen Argante. No eye-candy, no special effects, no gorgeous costumes: instead Gideon Davey has designed a bare-walled schoolroom, and the whole show has gone a bit Hogwarts. 

Rinaldo is transformed into a Harry Potter figure, with a picture of Almirena inside his desk. Armida strips off her black academic gown and mortar-board to reveal herself as a vamping dominatrix; Rinaldo’s boys wear cuirasses over their grey school uniforms. Armida imprisons Almirena in a dormitory, policed by a St Trinian’s-educated girl gang. 

That was the thinking man's unreconstructed music lover, Rupert Christiansen, in the Telegraph. Here's the Guardian making the cardianl point informing my rage-of-the-day, today:

The cliches wouldn't matter so much if the staging didn't so seriously undercut the music. 

You think?

Earlier this year, we had Britten's setting of Shakespeare's Dream, at 'English National' hahaha 'Opera'. Only, we didn't. We had schoolboy savagery ratcheted up into paedophiliac sadism and Lord of the Flies. Nice.

Poor Britten. Poor, poor Britten. The vicarious, armchair thrill of picking over evidence of his (no longer hidden) sexuality in the minutiae of his work goes ever on; and I’ve rarely seen a nastier, more gratuitous example than the new A Midsummer Night’s Dream that opened last night at ENO. Directed by Christopher Alden (who might not care to see his own sexuality paraded with such finger-wagging reproof), it’s more a nightmare than a dream: dark, bleak and desperate. 

That's the Telegraph's Michael White (no relation), another thinking man who declines to bow the knee to the zeitgeist. Yes, there is a fightback in progress against risibly sycophantic, postmodernist critics who shore up the offending directors.

I know many people who no longer go to the opera, put off by the sex and violence which is force-fed to them as they struggle to listen to sublime music and remember the story the composer had in mind. As Frankie Howerd used to say, they get enough sex and violence at home, as do I who have gone from opera-nut to fearful-reader-of-reviews before lashing out £50-120 to get a decent seat.

There was a moment, back there, when I thought, mistakenly, that we’d got past all that nasty adolescent directorial glee in humiliating gifted singers by forcing them to prance about in what the Guardian critic describes as the sort of..

... PVC number that Glyndebourne must have ordered from a very special Soho shop.

This is all in order (allegedly) to ‘reinterpret for our time’ the canonical works of the greatest composers. I suppose that in itself says something pretty unpalatable about 'our time' although I would argue that it says something specific about the opera directors of our time.

Some of them, especially those who knock around with the Brit Art crowd (remember when they were cool, back when Tracey wasn't an almost-Tory?), have never grown up. Some were educated, for want of a better word, by teachers who instilled in them a unwonted self-confidence and the habit, so familiar in the riot-loving community, of in-yer-face assertiveness. Notwithstanding their contempt for what little they seem to know of cultural history, even despite, in some other cases, an expensive education in real schools, they ache to recreate the climate of cultural rejection of the 1960s which (aw) they are too young to know about, having to rely on their lecturers, themselves riddled with nostalgia for a rebellion in which some people they had heard of took part.

These highly-paid autocrats of the opera stage dictate to conductors, musicians, singers, dancers, designers and highly-qualified technicians who all have to bow to their every instruction however insane, if they want the work. Who hires them?  Grant-hungry managements. Whence the grants? Why, quangos run by the Enlightened Ones, of course.

In the columns of the Sundays and on Radio 3, they like to kid themselves (as in the Eye's It's Grim Up North London) as they try to kid us that they aren’t totally embedded in the middle class which they so despise but whose black-tied, posh-frocked browbeaten acclaim feeds their galactic egos. Their egos are further bolstered by the shedloads of money siphoned out of your pocket and into theirs via the Arts Council. You are subscribing to the cost of their NY Meat-Packing District lofts, their exclusive club memberships and club class travel, and their subscriptions to the Staggers, Prospect, the New Yorker and Opera Now.

Meanwhile, the audience is mostly listening with its eyes shut, blanking out the director's 'concept' with its own mental pictures as if with a radio play, desperate to enjoy the glorious music unsullied by the unpalatable onstage guff. They wait (fairly) patiently for the interval when they can get outside the couple of stiffeners necessary to fortify them through the next Act, whispering furtively to each other about the ghastliness of it all and if only this bloody director (another one!) would just let the music speak for itself and not place his fat bloody ego between the them and the composer.

A psychologist friend thinks the worst of these directors are stunted adolescents, still giving the finger to their dads, still half-hoping their mums will burst in to find them wanking in their bedrooms instead of doing their homework.

Speaking of homework… no, life's too short so I won’t start about the mandatory displays of contempt from our entire taxpayer-funded dramatic establishment for the historical, literary and cultural content underpinning the original intentions of the great composers. I mean, they may be good enough songs but FFS, these blokes were working for imperialist patrons and their slave-owning social-climbing rentier hangers-on. Leeches and oppressors. History? Gimme a break. Even the schools have dropped it. And those doorstop tomes by dead white males like Ariosto? Who? Fuck 'em. And now, colleagues, I give you the toast:  'To the honour of Fabius Maximus, Antonio Gramsci and Anthony Crosland, and long life to the Arts Council.'

But I won't go there today. I'll tack it onto another post in the hatchery, the one about the destructive, anti-cultural, anti-social, fascistically anti-English and anti-British legacy of the tax-leaching Tate-ist tendency.

Good afternoon.



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QOTD

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Oh, no, they didn't. Oh, yes, they did. Well, no, they didn't, actually.

Well, it seems that they didn't, um, row all the way. (They clambered over ice rubble for much of the way, hauling their craft behind them.)

Another challenge was floating ice which blocked their route, particularly towards the end of their journey as the ice closed in.

'As the ice closed in...' So very unexpectedly? What? But let us not dwell, etc.

They didn’t go anywhere near the actual, you know, North Pole. (That was never the plan.)

They were 800 miles off the current magnetic North Pole. (That was the plan, apparently. Well, maybe.)

So, er... we're all cheering these guys for what, exactly? Let's see, now. Ooo look. It's because they got there at all, having...

embarked on their expedition to highlight the effects of climate change on the region

But of course they did. Which is why they're in the papers today. And of course, were a major item in this morning's Today programme.

That sound you hear is Delingpole, choking with laughter because... mwahahahahahahahaha... the Telegraph has had to disable comments on this nugget of 'Earth News'. No, don't. Stop it. 

I particularly savoured this (my emphasis):

Mr Wishart, who is in his late 50s described how pulling over ice and rubble in the last miles of the journey (i.e. actually AT whatever they thought was the Pole, presumably) was a “hard reminder that we are mere mortal”.

For a moment there, I thought he was going to say 'a hard reminder that the northern polar regions are made of ice', but no. Only a non-earth-scientist could believe that the whole fucking north polar cap is composed of floating fucking ice. His obiter dictum turned out to be a philosophical reflection on the non-god status of himself and his envirocrapologist colleagues, rather than an historically important scientific announcement.  

Anyway, well done, lads. Remarkable feat of endurance and all that. But as Longrider puts it so pithily in his comment on the post, a lie is a lie.





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An ornament to Britain's Parliament and public life and a role model for young citizens

The (current) wife of the Right Honourable John Bercow, MP, (current) holder of the ancient (c. 1258 AD) and high office of Speaker of the House of Commons who takes precedence above all non-royal individuals except the Prime Minister, the Lord Chancellor and the Lord President of the Council.



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Newspeak and the subtle use of public illiteracy

Net migration total up by a fifth. - BBC News

'Net migration'. WTF is that? Emigrants or immigrants? Coming or going? Both, maybe? Sort of... yo-yoing? How can one know? This is not information but merely words. The phrase is entirely without content or meaning.

Migration simply means movement from A to B. It connotes and implies no quantity and no direction of movement. The word net is otiose. The writer is illiterate and innumerate. I suppose...  And there's little old-fashioned me thinking that the BBC News writers are all graduates and that all graduates are literate and numerate.

The term for which the BBC's writer is clearly not groping is net immigration, i.e., the value of the sum: (total immigration minus total emigration). To call the resulting value net migration  is mathematical nonsense and conceptual gibberish.

The BBC will not expect its audience to know that but, guess what? Some of us do. Some of us are at least as politically aware and at least as numerate and literate as - if not more than - those who control what we are allowed to know and what we may and may not say.

The liberal establishment and the Ministry of Truth always use migration when normal people would use immigration, a word now seldom heard from the Righteous. It is cos to say 'immigration' is racist? Well, yessiree, I do believe it is. And it must be stopped.

But maybe I am being too hard on BBC News. After all, the government office they are quoting, the Office for National Statistics, no longer uses the word immigration. Seriously. They use their own neologism, in-migration. Oh, and out-migration.

First control the language... 

For the sake of actual truth as opposed to what our masters would have us believe, here is the headline  rewritten in old money, to convey, you know, information:

Net immigration up 21% in 2010  - Planet Reality News Channel

How would that as a BBC headline go down in Annie's Bar?

'Good God, the arse has made us look like those racists at the Mail. Killed his Beeb career, of course. My round, I think, Ed. Pint?'   

UPDATE
The infection has become an epidemic. Even the Mail is using Newspeak:

Net migration is the difference between those arriving and leaving the country in 12-month period.

NO IT SODDING WELL ISN'T!

Bastards.

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Heroes

Well, some of them.


Picture Cube

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Can't help wondering...

... what the bloke on the right is thinking...

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Tough call for the Daily Smug: stay pure or take the money?

Seems the Guardian's ad department will run any ad if the price is right. 

I look forward to reading Potty Polly's column condemning the filthy capitalist system that forces her to prostitute herself  to This Sort of Thing.     

via @FraserNels

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Let's get some rules straight around here

First Rule of Left Club: Acquire total control of language.

Second Rule of Left Club: Assert that there are no rules of language. Note: Promulgate this Rule using Approved (preferably amusing) Persons (example) who, overtly or covertly, support the objectives of Left Club.

Third Rule of Left Club: Anathematize all who deny the legitimate authority of Left Club and/or its agents to control language.

Fourth Rule of Left Club: Restrict the teaching of the young and control of public information to Approved Persons (see above).

Fifth Rule of Left Club: Deny the existence of Left Club by any necessary means, from ridicule to violence.

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Plus ça change...

In 1927-8, George Orwell lodged at No 10 Portobello Road with a Mrs Craig, formerly a lady's maid, who, when she, her husband and Orwell were locked out of the house, declined to borrow a ladder from her neighbours to climb through an upstairs window. In the 14 years she had lived there she had never spoken to them; she did not wish to now in case they became familiar - one could not be too careful in Notting Hill. They walked a mile to fetch a ladder from a relative.

From the London Encyclopaedia, prompted by reading this:

Diary date: Sock-Drawer Clean-Out Festival 2011

Noam Chomsky will be the star speaker at the two-day Rebellious Media Conference in London in October. Also in the line-up will be John Pilger, Johann Hari, Dan Hind, Robert McChesney, Jessica Azulay and Michael Albert (of ZNet).

Thank God for the Guardian. I almost forgot.

Hat tip @HolySmoke

Geography Practical #945

Running across Nebraska. So flat that when you look back, exhausted, in the evening you’ll still be able to see where you started out that morning.

Linky.

Cultural dictatorship, then and now

I wonder. Did Evan Davies blush?

On the Today programme (starts at 2.22'38") this morning, Davies interviewed a leading member of Britain's cultural ruling class, a film-maker who, in 1977, scorned the Labour government's offer of the OBE on grounds of high principle ('... despicable: patronage, deferring to the monarchy and the name of the British Empire, which is a monument of exploitation and conquest'). His refined sensibility did not render despicable his award of the World Culture Prize in Memory of His Imperial Highness Prince Takamatsu. His Imperial Highness, by the way, was the brother of His Majesty Emperor (sic) Showa (Hirohito) of Japan. Still, the Imperial Japanese air forces did attack the Pearl Harbour naval base of the hated United States, so I suppose the Japanese Empire must have been much less noxious than the British Empire, give or take the odd health and safety oversight.

Can you see who it is, yet? A couple more clues, then.

An aging, Oxford-educated Honorary Doctor of Civil Laws (Oxon.), die-hard Trotskyist and former EU parliamentary candidate in the Respect interest, supporter of Socialist Resistance, activist for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of the State of Israel, campaigning signatory of Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism, defender of Irish Republican terrorism and supporter of the rebel movement in Chechnya aka the Caucasian Emirate.

Ah, you guessed. Here he is, wearing the regulation revolutionary-socialist keffiyeh. Oh, wait - sorry. I can't find that picture for the moment. Perhaps this one of him in Cannes will do instead:

First, we heard a 'little taste' of the sound-track of a Loach film commissioned in 1969 by the (now fake-) charity, Save the Children (STC) whose then bosses objected to Loach's 'documentary'and strangled it at birth. The news angle is that the film is to be shown (where else?) at the BFI as part of its Loach hommage-fest, thanks to the Loach apologist admirer who is now CEO of Save The Children. He was invited along to purr affirmingly at Loach's every Loach-ism but he went above and beyond, enthusiastically asserting his admiration for the grand old man of our great British film industry.

In the 'little taste' which we were allowed, we heard nothing but, in Davies's words, 'voices of disapproval' of Save the Children's (then) cruel, 'cultural-imperialist' behaviour in Manchester and Nairobi. 

Davies:

You just went out [to Nairobi] and you saw what you saw and you thought, This is the time... this is the way to expose it all.

Loach:

Yes. I was shocked at what I saw. ... it was about providing a western middle class to run industry and the government on behalf of western interests.

Davies, repeating himself to make sure that we all got his point:

You didn't know you were going to make an exposé on the failings of STC when you started. It was only when you got out and saw what you saw that you said, you thought this is outrageous and I'm just going to document it as I see it.

Loach:

Yes.

After hearing Davies's repeated-for-emphasis paean to Loach's wholly objective, innocent, agenda-free and a-political film-making, strongly supported by the top banana of one of our most beloved chiiiiildren's charities, who could doubt that Britain is blessed having Mr Loach among us to open our eyes to the evils of western capitalist cultural dictatorship, along with the roach-like Loach-like faux-nobility of our Gramscian cultural dictatorship elite?

So, the Evan-blush thing. I merely ask, musing on the BBC's renowned objectivity and lack of political bias in the afterglow of an eye-popping interview by the economic genius and entrepreneur-wrangler of Who Wants to Be A Western Capitalist Millionaire  Dragons' Den. 

But why on earth would Davies blush? Everyone around him in the Today studio was audibly nodding and smiling. It was a beautiful moment of unanimous camaraderie. Brought tears to the eyes.

- Something like this is submitted to Orphans of Liberty.

Which MPs do I have to **** to get some sane government around here?

Raging. At this.

Apologies to JH who is averse to terse.

Byebye, balls

"I made myself look marginally bigger and approached very slowly at a slight sideways angle, in accordance with accepted protocol."

What? Oh, you thought I meant that Balls. Hmm... *thinks*

Yes.

 This.

Rational robbery

...criminals implicitly weigh up the costs and benefits of crime. A high probability and cost of detection reduces crime, all other things equal; a low likelihood of detection, a low likely cost (such as a negligible prison sentence or a caution, as has too often been the case in the past) and a larger payoff (flat screen TVs or expensive trainers) raises it. Many of those storming shops made that very calculation this week, albeit implicitly and in some cases incorrectly.

Allister Heath, via Samizdata.

Bloody shocking

History note

"Our Sovereign Lord the Queen chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the Queen!"

After reading aloud this warning from the Riot Act to a mob either engaged in rioting or threatening to do so, the civil authority could lawfully disperse the mob by force.

The Riot Act came into force on 1 August 1715 and remained on the statute books until 1973 when it was abolished, like so much else of proven value to England... the old counties... British resistance to government by foreign powers... by the faux-Conservative government of the notorious liar, internationalist, socialist and traitor, Edward Heath, of infamous memory.

As the enormity of Heath's confidence trick dawned on the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher challenged and defeated Heath in the party leadership contest, restoring the party's reputation, honouring its Conservative principles and reversing the catastrophically destructive measures introduced during the Heath-Wilson years.

It took Gordon Brown a few years in control of British domestic economics and social policy (ceded to him by Blair so that Mister Tony could pursue his preferred and more lucrative career in show business, prancing on the international stage and competing in the World Emoting Championships) to undo Lady Thatcher's good work and so bring us to today's pass.  

Well done, Dave

For reassuring frightened and angry people.

For taking action and invoking the Riot Damages Act.

For defying and rejecting the moral relativism of Labour which, beginning back as far as the 1960s, has created the perfect conditions for the riots.

For unashamedly speaking in terms of morality and responsibility. For declaring that 'you do not hit immorality with a wall of money'.

For rejecting the speak-your-weight machines programmed by Labour's lying, cynical and amoral whips to chant 'police cuts', thereby freeing Ed Miliband cynically to mouth the platitudes he vainly dreams will regain the votes of the working (sic) class long abandoned by Labour in favour of the 'diversity' engineering which, they hoped, would keep them in government for ever and destroy the conservative majority in England.

Someone said that the riots will swing England to the right. Please God, let it be so, while there is still time.

Sent from my iPad

'British vah-lews': the whirlwind arrives

Please read the article by Charles Crawford from which these quotes are borrowed:

The Labour Party’s support for the unrelenting deconstruction of British values has created ignorant, violent decontextualised people, completely detached from history - and morality. 

  

Under multiculturalism what precisely unites us? 

• The Monarchy? Sneer - white privilege and oppression. 

• The Law? Sneer - rich man's justice. 

• British history? Sneer - written by imperialist winners. 

• British economic success? Sneer - just the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor.  

• The British public? Sneer - bring in more immigrants and let them stay in ghettos not learning English. 

• British democracy or even democracy itself? Sneer - a tool of oppression and false consciousness. 

• British literature? Sneer - too many dead white men. 

• Family values? Sneer - repressed middle-class neurosis. 

• Separating Right from Wrong? Sneer - oppressive class-based value judgements. 

• And so on. 

For a gold-plated example of progressive sneering, check out the Nobel Prize lecture of Harold Pinter:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

Regettably, the same sneer is the official doctrine of the controlling intelligentsia of (especially and critically the universities of) the United States and the European Union although by no means of all those whom they control from their fortresses of power.

Those responsible for the causes of the present societal sickness and for the blindingly obvious hell-ward trajectory of our civilisation will never, themselves, suffer the consequences of their evil diktats. When not relaxing as at present, for the most part, in the Tuscan hills, they are maintained in comfortable and elegant metaphorical gated-communities by private incomes, or directly or indirectly by taxes on the poor and the powerless (subsidised 'arts', universities, 'charities', the BBC, think tanks...) or by vast salaries and fees paid to them by their comrades and like-minded wealthy patrons.

Thus positioned safely above the destructive depradations of the lumpenproletariat which they have brought to its present flowering, the only consequence they will ever suffer, if they suffer at all, is the curtailment of any time they may enjoy in government office where, in soft leather chairs and surrounded by officials and flunkeys, they make laws to keep the rest of us in line and on track to the socialist parade which, of course, they will also control. And when the political cycle brings that sinecure to its end, they find other red carpets and downy nests in the nooks and crannies of even more influential and less inconveniently exposed taxpayer-funded quangos. Or are given columns in influential newspapers by their socialist friends.

It is only because most people are more truly civilised than these clean-handed criminal godfathers that their feral children are now destroying the property and security of our country, terrifying those who in fact feed, clothe and house them -- the orderly and productive -- and that they themselves are not swinging from lamp posts. Yet.

If that ever should happen, they will have only themselves to blame for creating the conditions and motivation for it. They will have their wish. They will have achieved the total abolition of traditional morality and destroyed their 'conservative enemy'. Doubtless Crosland will be cheering the victory of his nihilistic principles, from his place in Hell.

These bastards, public confessors of their creed of envy, hatred and destruction, we recognise on sight. Remember, though, that they have many friends in other political parties, including my own.

 

Let us hold fire

... if you'll pardon the expression, until we are told what to believe about the late Mr Duggan. Meanwhile, some background and a suggestion.

I believe that this lovely family man was almost as well-RESPECTed as the more famous Michael Corleone and, like Mr Corleone, active in the retail pharmaceuticals sector. Like many prominent businessmen he carried a weapon for his own protection except at children’s parties. Whether his gun was licensed or not is unclear. I think we should be told. I doubt we will be. I mean, I have no doubt we will be. Told.

Perhaps the official IPCC enquiry will tell us to believe that on the day in question this loving father of four, widely recognised as a jokester, unwittingly gave a nervous officer reason to believe he was about to fire it at him, possibly by pointing it at him in a marked manner but only for a joke. Or perhaps, as I suspect, he was just scratching his head with it. After all, there are lots of midges about at this time of year and I think we can all agree that they are a damned nuisance.

In short, I fully expect that we shall learn that any fear on the part of the officer who fired will prove to have been baseless and that we shall be told that this lovely, innocent man died as a result of ineptitude on the part of trigger-happy, institutionally racist police. Official Report Chapter XXI: Fuckin' typical, man. Again, I think we should wait to be told what to think but regardless of the facts we wa' a public enquiry, yeah?

Harman FAIL. Cor, there's a novelty.

Discussion over at the Graph about Harperson speaking out of both sides of her mouth again. A short selection list of examples is given...

Harriet is someone clearly able to handle a high level of cognitive dissonance. Someone who who says “the government must insist on transparency” – but tried to to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act. A pro-comp class warrior who sends all her kids to posh selective schools miles from home. Someone who attacks internships and the power of connections, but then gets her mate to wangle an internship for her son. 

To which one might add...

... a Labour party deputy leader and life-long feminist who got her husband elected to Parliament via an all-women candidate shortlist.

To be fair, though, decades of life with Harriet may have left Mr Dromey short of a couple of bits of essential tackle. Only Mrs Harman would know for sure. I'm not a lawyer but I suspect private orchidectomy-by-harridan might justify poor old Jack's selection as a female candidate.

Safety first. Mine, I mean.

The first governments arose out of the need for mutual defence. Over time, particularly in the last century, governments have taken on more and more roles. The state now tells you how often to exercise and spies on your bin bags.

But whether you agree with the state’s new functions or not, it cannot be denied that one of its core functions, before anything else, remains the protection of the people from domestic and foreign enemies. If the state cannot do that then it is well and truly failing.

Even a small state can do this. All but the most fervent of anarcho-capitalist should agree that this protection is the one core duty of the state above all others. There is no reason why a strong government must also be a big government.

One of the defining characteristics of the modern state is its monopoly on violence. It is now time to assert that monopoly.

John Phelan

Nice

 http://twitpic.com/63gvl7

Better

 

There's never a copper around when you want one

We may have thousands of officers who lead the field in cultural diversity, a fine police record on sexual hate crime, hundreds of new rape investigators, and an improved detection rate for homophobia. But what we didn’t have on the streets of Croydon last night was any coppers. Just as the People’s Republic of Lambeth in the 1980s was too busy sending fraternal greetings in Moscow’s direction to get round to gritting the streets in winter, so too we have a pc Met Police today that hasn’t quite gotten round to pacing the streets. It is, veritably, the Metaphorical Police force, because first up it exists as an effective law and order unit only in the heads of Parliamentarians and local councillors; and second, it is a metaphor for our times: replete with mission statements, management bllocks, zero tolerance, top brass, liaison committees, targets and training courses.

Strapworld commenting on CoffeeHouse

Because their human rights have been abused, obviously.

  

h/t @LiamHoughton

How about a Human Responsibilities Act?

Humans do not have rights by their nature but only as a matter of law as interpreted by prosperous practitioners of  'human rights law' who have both created and colonised the moral high ground to the great moral (and going by last night in Tottenham, the great economic) impoverishment of our society.

Humans, being moral agents, accept and require their fellow humans to accept responsibilities which, when properly discharged, confer fundamental protections on the persons, property and liberties of other humans. Ignorant, amoral and seditious persons choose or have been taught to describe these conferred protections as 'human rights' . This is dangerous, anti-human nonsense.

Groups of humans - societies - develop laws by which to encourage and if necessary compel each other, especially those least so inclined, to accept and discharge their responsibilities to protect others from harm. Legislators couch these laws not in terms of Thou Shalt but of Thou Shalt Not which although not philosophically ideal is perhaps pragmatically unavoidable if Man is to be everywhere free except where the law constrains him. (Better that everything be allowed except where it is forbidden, rather than the converse.)

Unfortunately, the practical application of necessarily prohibitive laws is exclusively reserved to a class of people (see the first paragraph, above) who have decided among themselves to interpret Citizen A Must Not as Citizen B Is Entitled.

To enact a law called a Human Rights Act, codifying as your enforceable 'rights' the effects of my proper discharge of my moral and social responsibilities is to remove the necessity for me to consciously and actively accept those responsibilities. It relocates the onus to you  - or to the state on your behalf. You are now the active agent, not me. To avert threat to your person, property and liberty, you must first proclaim your victim-hood.

This is to stand natural justice on its head, absolving me of any duty to you except when compelled by state violence or the threat of it. I am no longer obliged to think about justice because others (the victim/claimant, the state, the lawyer...) will do it instead of me, on your behalf as victim.

Thus has an essentially Marxist denial of the moral nature and responsibility of the individual human person removed all culpability from me, rendering me irresponsible and encouraging me to wash my hands of you. The State is responsible for you and does not expect me to be responsible for you.

In place of personal moral, social and civic responsibility for each other, we have a brave new system of 'human rights'. As I wash my hands of your enforced victim-hood there is an outbreak of ostentatious hand-wringing by the authorities, newspapers, lawyers and self-righteous and ignorant ghouls everywhere. Ritual wailing about your human rights echoes fills the air.

Can the Big Society, predicated as it is on personal moral, social and civic responsibility, hope to gain any ground among people thus brainwashed into claiming their 'human rights' without considering their 'human responsibilities'? Good luck with that, Dave.

And so, in a western capital city, in a society more wealthy and feather-bedded than our forefathers could have dreamt possible, we have arson, violence and riots (allegedly) protesting at 'offences' against the 'human rights' of an underclass whose members are utterly unaware of their responsibilities as moral human agents but every single one of whom is thoroughly schooled in the language of human rights.

+++++

Something along these lines will be submitted to the Orphans of Liberty blog, prompted by a post there  on the proposed re-jigging of Britain's Human Rights Act which the writer correctly describes as pointless because whatever follows will be based on the same fallacious document, the Convention on Human Rights. 

Splort of the Week

'Toby Young... invited me to lunch... Unfortunately I was unable to accept the invitation since I was in Borneo at the time, climbing Mt Kinabalu.'

Stanley Johnson in a letter to this week's Spectator.

Norty chortle

For labour and product market protectionism, decent public sector wages and benefits, are the “European Model”. And what’s being said here is that you can either have the European Model or you can have the European Currency.

Guess who?

Teehee.

Marie Antoinette Syndrome stalks the corridors of Euro-power

RBS boss Stephen Hester spoke to the BBC's Evan Davis this morning on the Today programme:

I think that we are seeing today what arguably we should have seen better in commentary in 2008, and that is it's not a banking crisis, and it never was, although banks were involved in the crisis, it was one of global economic imbalances in the way that we all collectively deal with our economies.  

And in that way we are seeing it more clearly that the root of what is going and the nervousness of what is going on is really about how we manage our economies globally and individual, and the confidence measures that go along with it.

Yeah, we knew that at the time. Do the governments know we know, yet? Do Stephanie Flanders and her lying Struthio camelus ignoramus mates at the BBC?

I refer 'honourable' ladies and gentlemen to my earlier remarks.

At the risk of appearing petty and selfish, may I just add for the benefit of Commissar Barroso and the chers collègues that that's my fucking life-savings and my fucking pension you are pissing up your hard-left fantasy euro-wall in your private contest to see who has is the biggest penis in world politics. It's a close-fought thing.

'Hard left?' Oh, yes. Seriously... do some reading up on Barroso, Strauss-Kahn and Cohn-Bendit. They have never given a damn about you (some people have to suffer in order to bring about the socialist paradise), your money (wrong - property is theft) or your liberty (false consciousness) etc. They care only for their system, their idealogy and the privileges of themselves, the nomenklatura. You did not elect them. You cannot fire them. They have all the power and you have none. That's how they designed the system which the British government supports.

What? You know it's my hard-earned, Mr Maoist Barroso, and you couldn't give a flying fuck?

Well, OK then.

I'm off to join the lengthening queue at the rope shop and later today I shall move all my savings into Chinese hempen, rebels for the use of.

The caring Labour Party - judge them by their actions

Look what they did to us, the Brown Bastard and his two bastard heirs, the present Leader of the Labour Party and the present Shadow Chancellor, God help us.

The terrible consequences were predicted by Mr Brown’s own Treasury advisers. Documents released two years ago under Freedom of Information requests show that he was told in clear, direct language by officials that his tax raid would hurt the lower paid the worst and that its long-term impact on public spending would be disastrous, as the government would have to top up local authority pension schemes. They told him that pensioners due to retire would lose out immediately, that it would cost pension providers £4billion a year (it turned out to be more), that pension benefits would be cut, that it could crash in the stock market by up to 20 per cent and that the value of existing pension funds could collapse by £50billion.  

One official wrote to Mr Brown: “Abolishing pension tax credits would make a big hole in pension scheme finances.” Mr Brown ignored all of this.  But he was not alone. Who was his special adviser in July 1997? A certain Ed Miliband. And who was his chief economic adviser, the man behind Mr Brown’s big decisions? The current Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls. - Pollard.

Utter, utter bastards.

Deliberately, knowingly, callously, for political gain.

Hang them. Hang them now.

There's never a Home Secretary around when you want one

http://4liberty.org.uk/2011/08/02/you-yes-you-with-the-murray-rothbard-badge-youre-under-arrest/

Someone call Knacker and tell him to (a) employ only people with brain cells (b) read that big fat book on his desk called 'An Introduction to The Law of England and Wales - for Dummies and Police Officers. Oh, and that other one. Yes, '1984', I think it's called.

Sent from my iPad

"Left wing deficit denying dinosaurs"

Which reminds me.

Has this bloke got anything to do with the shower described here?

Just asking.

Sent from my iPad

Speaking neatly

New Scruton piece up at the American Speccie.

Well, frack me

Where do Britain's ecowankers go for their holidays? Not abroad, obviously. Their carbon arseprints don't allow for that. Hotels are out, being profiteering carbon-guzzlers. Renting a cottage would make them feel too Tory. So, camping, then?

Camp Frack has already amassed interest from the media, including The Guardian and the Blackpool Gazette.

'Amassed' interest. Love it.

Mind you, they're not wrong about everything. Only about almost everything. I mean, Lancashire's lovely in the late summer, when the kids have gone back to school. Providing it doesn't piss with rain, of course, which it mostly does. Or the wind change to the northeast. We can only hope.