I am grinding my teeth trying to restrain myself from commenting on some of the drivel being written about the recent murder of US soldiers by a muslim US army officer... but this is just a measure of the ignorance that permeates the profession and which is directly responsible for the growth of so called 'new media', i.e. things like blogs. Nick Allen writes in the Telegraph in an article titled "gunman used 'cop killer' weapon in massacre at US Army base" (a catchy 'yellow journalism' title if ever there was one):

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven, a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that can fire armour-piercing bullets.

Oh for fuck sake. Any weapon can fire 'armour-piercing bullets'. I know little about Nick Allen, but I assume he is a Brit and therefore knows bugger all about firearms and thus parrots the equally dismal urban US journalist propensity to describe any handgun firing a round capable of penetrating (some) body armour as a "cop killer". Also I strongly suspect 9mm and 10mm handguns are far more popular with SWAT teams, as SWAT teams have rifles for use against armoured targets.

The weapon is designed for high(-ish) penetration for use against low end body armoured targets (the victims at Fort Hood were almost certainly unarmoured), but it has rather poor stopping power (that said, when it comes to handguns, bullet placement rather than calibre is the largest single determinant of stopping power), making the FN actually a poor choice... presumably the high magazine capacity may have been why the murderer chose it, knowing he was going to commit his crimes at very close range in a 'target rich' environment.

If journalists want to be credible, they need to try to avoid loaded (no pun intended) and rather ignorant terms like "cop killer" and not make meaningless remarks about weapons being capable of using "armour piercing" rounds (which is just another way of saying "they can shoot the rounds they are loaded with"). This ghastly incident contains more than enough news fodder that such sloppiness is inexcusable from 'professionals'.

I am the only libertarian who has read all six VAT directives

- Philip Chaston.

Researchers are claiming that there is a link between individualism and depression. Some may take offence to this notion but it does not surprise me at all. That said, I am far too cynical to automatically assume that the 'researchers' are not grinding some ideological axe, but nevertheless I find the basic idea quite believable.

Frankly collectivism is a form of mass delusion, an 'opiate for the masses' method of replacing profane objective truth with sacred, subjective 'acceptable' truth... i.e. 'truth' is what the collective wants it to be. Indeed I would say much of the allure of collectivism is relief from the weight of individual responsibility, the sense of moral externalisation that comes from outsourcing choice to a 'higher power'.

Individualism on the other hand is a more lonely path without a nebulous 'them' to absolve you from consequences and that can be stressful. And so it comes as no surprise to me that some collectivist societies may be less anxious (at least for those who actually buy into the collectivist meta-contextual assumptions) because collectivism depends on a view of the world that filters reality through the comforting, blame deflecting, wilfully ignorant lens of what is politically tolerable... and ignorance is bliss.

It is Friday, and I cannot be bothered to ponder the latest outrages of our political oligarchy. For our mental health, let us ponder the lines of this new little beauty from Porsche.

Burn that carbon, baby!

Blogger and debunker of various economic fallacies, Tim Worstall, points out something that tends to be forgotten in some of the angrier, gloomier commentary about the European Union and the recently ratified Lisbon Treaty. We - the UK that is - can leave if we wish to do so, and it will be a lot less complex than such a process can be made to appear. That surely is the 800 llb gorilla in the drawing room - we can get out pretty fast if the whole edifice becomes intolerable. And there is nothing that any EU bureaucrat or their political allies can do about it. How likely are they to ever use a military option? Hmmm.

"David Cameron ditches referendum and backs away from EU bust-up" chuckles the Guardian... followed by "Eurosceptics welcome 'never again' rhetoric".

So in effect Cameron is saying "yes I know I said we get a vote before... "iron clad" was the words I used... but if those mean old Euros want to grab even more power than all that stuff you are not going to get a vote on after all, we will have a referendum next time. Really, you can trust me".

Of course the Eurosceptics are happy, because after all, if David Cameron promises something, you can be sure he will keep his "iron-clad" word, right? Amazing.

Never forget that the party of Winston Churchill was also the party of Neville Chamberlain.

A British court has ruled that environmentalism is 'protected' as it is functionally indistinguishable from a religion and thus cannot be discriminated against by a company.

We are now only one logical step away from disestablishing the Church of England and making environmentalism the official state religion, a mandated one in fact, complete with inquisitors and witch finders.

Although much will be made of the GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey, I do not think they really matter that much. The one that did matter, the third party insurgency in New York, was won by Obama's man... that was the important one.

All the wrong conclusions will now be drawn. The doom-loop has not been broken.

Simon Heffer has a pretty good - and by his standards, measured - take on how Mr Obama has been doing. Latest election results in Virginia and New Jersey were clear slaps in the face for him, and a boost to the GOP.

But as we have found here with Mr Cameron's Conservative Party, which has profited from the sheer, plodding ghastliness of Gordon Brown, the welcome fall from grace of Mr Obama, a puffed up Chicago machine politician, is very different from meaning that the GOP is back on the road to recovery. As our own Perry de Havilland points out, the Republicans need to rediscover the "leave me alone" agenda of limited government, low taxes, tight spending and free trade. And they need to rediscover it convincingly, and learn the lessons of George W. Bush's terrible error of talking the free market talk while doing the exact opposite. The GOP also needs to remember that being in favour of small government is not just about economics, either.

As I wondered at the time, the absurd decision to award Mr Obama the Nobel Prize for Peace was almost like a curse. And maybe it proved a turning point: the point at which the sheer absurdity of this hard-left "community organiser" and his Marxist associates became too much for too many Americans to bear. The odds must be shortening on him becoming a one-term occupant of the White House.

For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of "Stalinism" among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty's reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return - and has never done so.

Nor is this ancient history.

The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).

The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama - a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.

Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on "Soviet Disarmament Policy") so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day - a year will do.

Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago - by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.

I mean nothing "racist" when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else "Stalinist" is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.

P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a "McCarthyite" as a complement. But then I have read "Blacklisted by History" by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.

In New York 23 Hoffman is going up against both the Democrat and the Republican machines (Dede S. having endorsed the Democrat and working closely with him on get-out-the-vote) so if he wins it will be a big upset in a district that supported Barack Obama.

Actually the New York Conservative party may evolve (from an unimportant group that just follows in the wake of the Republicans) into something like the "Barnburner" (later Van Buren) faction of the New York Democrats of the early 19th century.

No doubt the Republicans will reach out to Hoffman if he wins and say "Caucus with us" - but he would be sensible (again if he wins) to keep them at arms length and avoid going back into bed with people who stabbed him the back.

The Virginia race looks won for the Republicans (famous-last-words) a big defeat not just for Barack Obama - but also for the Washington Post (which ran smear ariticles on the Republican almost every day for the last month or so).

New Jersey.

My prediction is the same as I have been saying for a long time - Christie will win on the day, but Goldman Sachs will remain Governor.

One indication already - 3000 absentee ballots were checked and it was found that the signatures did not match. But, no doubt, they will be counted anyway (and this is the tip of the iceberg - there are more absentee ballots this year than there were in the Presidential election year).

In short, as so often, in New Jersey the fix is in.

I hope I am proved wrong on that one - but it would take a get-out-the-vote effort by the Republicans on a scale they have not managed in New Jersey since 1993 (when there were simply so many people voting Republican that their votes outnumbered the fake votes).

I had a good chuckle after reading this over on Goat in the Machine:

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is concerned that her Pakistani hosts have failed to grasp the nettle of good governance, and reminds them of the high purpose and duty for which democratic societies entrust their representatives with the sovereign power:

"We (the US) tax everything that moves and doesn't move, and that's not what we see in Pakistan."

That sure explains Pakistan's little handful of problems at present. I'm ashamed I never thought of it. I had some childish intuition that they might have something to do with a civil society sufficiently dysfunctional that making a living by taking other people's stuff off them, was far too easy in comparison to getting paid for producing stuff they wanted.

How could we have been so blind? The Taliban and Al Qaeda are pissed off at the world because they are under-taxed! Oh the humanity.

The creepy thing is I am sure that really is, in essence, what Clinton thinks.

Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.

- David Cameron in 2007.

The obvious conclusion being that he must not be allowed to become Prime Minister as his "cast-iron guarantees" are as firm as limp wet paper. Pathetic.

Bishop Hill:

Devil's Kitchen has a must-read post up, detailing the increasing use of enabling legislation by the government. And he doesn't swear at all - must be serious.

Indeed.

I daydream that one day, a British Cabinet Minister will grab hold of one of the laws that DK writes about, where it says that, if there is a crisis (and it is up to him to decide), then he, the British Cabinet Minister, may do whatever he considers to be appropriate (i.e. whatever he damn well pleases). I daydream that he, the British Cabinet Minister, will bring into the House of Commons a huge list itemising all the laws that he is now going to repeal, just like that, no ifs no buts no discussion, because he, the British Cabinet Minister referred to in one of the laws, says so, on account of there being a crisis caused by all the damn laws.

Impossible, you say? Very probably. But it is surprising how much of history consists of impossible dreams that were dreamed during earlier bits of history.

Much garbage has been written about the Professor Nutt affair. The notion that governments hire scientists to make informed decisions is laughable and the fact scientists are outraged that the government fired Nutt for contradicting the official line on drugs is a measure of their self-absorbed pomposity.

Governments hire scientists for the same reason companies often commission consultants to study some aspect of their business and make a report... i.e. to justify a course of action the board already wants to do but which they need to justify to investors. Similarly the job of a scientist on the government lists is to remain torpid until wheeled out in front of a camera to drone the government line with the caption "This man is a SCIENTIST and therefore the government's edicts are incontrovertible and must be OBEYED".

Professor Nutt was a stage prop, nothing more, and he is a fool to be surprised he was canned for being off-message. Of course what he said about marijuana and alcohol was true, any fool can see that. But how is that relevant?

To the complete and utter surprise of... er... well no one really... Dave Cameron has refused to jump the fence yet again. This worthless Labour-Lite jackanapes will not give Britain a vote on the Lisbon Treaty after all.

Yeah I know he promised we would get a vote. And you believed him?

Vote UKIP rather than waste your vote on BlueLabour and the principle-free weathervane who leads it... and if the powers that be have destroyed UKIP by election day via the courts, stay the fuck home and do not dignify the worthless Cameron with a vote that will simply be an endorsement of more-of-the-same.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if the allocation of scarce resources that have competing uses is no longer the province of voluntary market exchange, but state control, it gives all manner of power, sometimes life and death power, to state functionaries. I wrote about the issue of healthcare, but we have had another example here in socialist Britain, in the form of our state education system.

At present, parents who send their children to state schools must send them to a school that operates in a "catchment area". Parents who want to send their children to a school in a different catchment area cannot do so, except in exceptional circumstances. And much to the comical horror of our educational establishment, some parents have told lies about where they life so they can send their children to the highest-performing schools. The performance figures of school pupils are now published and, while a crude measure of performance in some ways, give parents at least some idea of where the best schools are. And so naturally, parents like to choose the best schools.

Of course, if we scrapped the state schooling system, and gave generous tax breaks or vouchers worth several thousand pounds to any parent with children, they could directly shop around for the best schools, and the whole nonsense of catchment area allocation would disappear. New education entrepreneurs would spring up. The catchment area mentality is partly drawn from a classic piece of egalitarian zero-sum thinking, which goes a bit like this: there are only so many good teachers to go around, and it is wrong that some children should be better schooled than others because of some unjust inequality in the spending power of their parents. But leaving aside the fact that I deny it is unjust for parents to spend as much as they want on their children's schooling, the fact is that if you give far more choice to parents, competition will drive up the overall standard of schooling, and this, in my view, will disproportionately benefit youngsters from the poorest backgrounds. It is poor children who most need the kind of competition and drive of a school that has to worry about keeping its "customers". Let's face it, children from middle class schools will always be able to have some of the benefits of private tuition, etc.

I know that one objection to vouchers is that the state could, presumably, dictate certain standards for any school receiving voucher cash, and might use that power as a way of interfering with education another way. Fair point. To reduce the dangers of that happening, any voucher scheme or tax break system for schools should be accompanied by the obliteration of the current education bureaucracy. This is desirable on a number of grounds, not least for the cuts to state spending. It is, however, folly to imagine that a perfect free market system would be on the table any time soon, but as an intermediary step, greater parental choice, which would be of particularly great value to parents on low or moderate incomes, would be an enormous benefit to society, not just in educational terms, but also as a way of reinforcing the power of parents and of families generally. As some readers might remember me saying before, any such reform should also be accompanied by a reduction in the school leaving age.

But the present system of allocating school places by a rigid geographical formula, and policing it in the current way, is simply unendurable. It is also worth considering something else: in UK society, many of the big spending decisions that people make, either as individuals or as parents, are not mediated through the voluntary exchange of a market, but via the "tax-now and we might give you something in return" route of the state. On education and health - two of the most important issues for us - the role of the private sector is squeezed to the margins. One would have thought that the great growth in the prosperity of the West would have made the involvement of the state in such large areas less necessary than it might have appeared to someone in say, the late 1940s, but judging by this story about schools and catchment areas, the statist mindset is as strong as it was in the era of Clement Attlee.

We are used to all manner of choices in our lives in the West, whether it be our choice of holiday, spouse or computer system. Is it really such a massive leap to hope that parental choice of school will soon be as unremarkable as any other choice we make in our lives?

The predicted insanity of "quantitative easing" (i.e. re-inflating the bubble) is laid bare:

Sharp increases in share prices have improved the outlook for pension funds in every major developed nation apart from the UK, according to research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The news coincides with figures which reveal that the deficits in Britain's largest privately-sponsored defined benefit schemes have soared by £15bn to £77bn, wiping out almost all the gains achieved by market increases the previous month. [...] The deterioration is largely an unhappy consequence of quantitative easing (QE). Pension funds' deficits depend on two factors: the value of their assets, much of which are equities, but also the potential amounts they will have to pay out when people retire in the future. These future liabilities have been pushed higher as QE has depressed yields on gilts and other bonds

I would quite like to see the people responsible for one of the greatest rolling acts of theft in recent history hanging from lampposts. Bernie Madoff was a minor league player by comparison.

Wise words have been heard coming from the lips of someone in the acting profession, to wit multi-talented MILF action babe Milla Jovovich.

"I think parents need to take a lot more responsibility than they do about whether it's OK for their children to go to Resident Evil or any other movie with violence or sex or whatever. It's really easy to blame Hollywood for violence having an effect on kids, but movies would have no power if parents would just set their own standards. And it's the same with video games."

Common sense of course and that she had to even say this is an indication of the extent to which civil society has decayed. Violent art forms are as old as art itself.

The trouble is rules based safety nets often end up subsidising what they are supposed to be alleviating.

The big advantage a charity has is that they do not have to give you anything if they do not think you actually deserve it... the state on the other hand operates (quite rightly) not by using discretion but by following politically derived formulae. To get things from the state all you have to do is understand the system. This has all manner of unintended consequences when you (in effect) nationalise charity and replace private institutions with public ones... in short, when you replace charity with an entitlement, you completely change the rules of the game.

- Perry de Havilland

Much is being made in some circles about this "9 Principles, 12 Values" thingie being bandied around by Glenn Beck. So as I am in the grip of insomnia yet again, I though I would run my sleep deprived eyes down that list and see how I would stack up were I an American politico, presumably running not under the Republican Elephant Banner but some sort of vaguely libertarianish 'Don't Tread on Me' Rattlesnake Flag or maybe a Star-Spangled Hippopotamus Vexillum (I did warn you I was sleep deprived)...

The 9 Principles

1. America Is Good.

- America is a nation-state and even the least bad nation-state can never be more than a necessary evil. It is the nature of the beast.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

- Nope and she ain't ... but "Hail Eris" just in case.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

- Um, Glenn ol' buddy... this 9/12 shtick is addressed to politicians, no? And anyway, I think I strike the right balance between honesty and tactical duplicity.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

- The family is a pretty good idea, so yeah, but in truth I am pretty much owned by my other half as she can be pretty scary when she wants to be.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

- Justice is blind and achieving it is a vital life objective ... the law on the other hand is not just blind but rather prone to be deaf, dumb, stupid and as often as not utterly malevolent. So yes, it needs to be applied to politicians good and hard.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

- Hell yeah.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

- Amen to that.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

- Indeed.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

- Quite so. In theory. Sort of.

The 12 Values

* Honesty

- Great idea, at least with people likely to reciprocate.

* Reverence

- Very overrated... to me 'reverence' is something that I only feel when confronted by a juicy medium rare Argentine steak or a 10mm that never jams.

* Hope

- Essential.

* Thrift

- As politics is about Other People's Money and Liberty... utterly essential.

* Humility

- Nice but hardly essential.

* Charity

- Also nice but how does this fit into politics? You cannot be charitable with other people's money.

* Sincerity

- Indeed and anyone who can fake that has chosen wisely in their decision to pursue a career in politics.

* Moderation

- To quote Barry Goldwater... "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

* Hard Work

- Essential and I intend to hire people capable of doing exactly that.

* Courage

- Essential in all things.

* Personal Responsibility

- The cornerstone of all moral calculus.

* Gratitude

- I would be grateful to get a few hours sleep at some point tonight.

Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive to the Royal Society of Arts and a former adviser to Tony Blair, recently wrote an article in the magazine, Prospect, on the political potential of new developments in behaviourial economics, neuroscience and related disciplines. Such an enterprise is always difficult, in so far as new research is often part of an expanding research programme and questions are not fully answered. Therefore, one should be careful in the enthusiastic application of such results to the political arena.

Taylor's article marries the politics and selected research results, with section headings such as the Social Democratic brain and the Conservative brain. Without citing too much detail, the aim of the article is to describe and promote this research as a source of justification for policy and power:

Much of this research makes good reading for social democrats. By highlighting our psychological frailties and the way these contribute to market epidemics, behavioural economics makes a powerful case for regulation, paternalism and measures to promote feelings of security. Nor is this the only encouragement for the traditional left.

Homo oeconomicus is circumscribed by the explorations of rationality undertaken by neuroscience and social Darwinism, but the disciplinary failure of the social sciences, the tabula rasa, is erased from the historical backdrop, as this draws attention to their total failure. A neoliberal dominance in our understanding of the human is conjured up to allow the entry of this new legitimation. The vision that Taylor pictures is of mankind as a social being, who requires constraints and direction through social institutions and norms. Such a general vision that marries up with your philosophy is the danger that the contemporary amateur interpretation of scientific results will conclude.

Given that there is no consensus on human nature, merely a greater understanding of our predispositions and controversy over how they relate to the social sphere, is it not arrogant to presume that existing political ideas have the key to unlock the controversial interplay of the social and the inherited. Such interventions in the past have proved disastrous, as the race science of the twentieth century demonstrates. Caution is a watchword here.

The byproduct of this article is the realisation that neither the Tories or Labour can articulate moral arguments and are reduced to tagging their miserable ideas on to the emergent exploration of human nature for the sheen of scientific authority. Economists and intellectuals working in these disciplines are seduced by the consultation of those in power and turn towards the exercise of application in a political sphere.

This article is a useful reminder of what both parties share. Supping from the same well via 'libertarian paternalism' or behaviourial economics, we begin to see the outlines of a commonality in approach, though there are differences in institutional and political implementation. Neither approach from Labour or the Tories is a friend to freedom.

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

- Lord Acton, from The History of Freedom in Antiquity

...with extra added bonus quote from the same:

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime...

Sometimes a 'leader' is the person at the rear directing others to do things... but sometimes the 'leader' is the one out in front, well, leading, and the people who follow that person's lead only after they see the way things are developing are mere 'followers'... the bandwagon jumpers and weathervane watchers.

And that makes Sarah Palin a leader... quite possibly the de facto leader if she really wants. Certainly people who bet their party machine politics against her will think long and hard before crossing her after what happened to Dede Scozzafava, who the left wing statist press hilariously describe as a 'moderate' Republican. That the likes of Palin, Armey et al. can come in and kick the snot out of the established local party, even when it has the backing of people like Gingrich, will gave many pause for thought.

Of course some Democrats will rub their hands with glee and see this as the 'Republicans tearing themselves apart'... and they are right, but wrong to be happy about it, because in truth the party that Obama beat needs to 'tear itself apart' and the fact it is starting to do so means the party opposing Obama could be a very different party in a few years... a party that rejects the catastrophic Bush years that hugely expanded the scope of the state and which made everything that Obama is trying to do now possible.

I suspect the reason so much effort was put into rubbishing and ridiculing Palin was an early indication that many of the ultra-statist in both parties saw what Palin represents as deeply unsettling, and not for any of the reasons usually given. Certainly I started to take Palin far more seriously the more she was lampooned by the usual coterie of dismal entertainment biz apparatchiks.

She ain't no libertarian but she certainly ain't no John McCain/George Bush either. I suspect her principle-over-party endorsement of an obscure New York conservative over an obscure New York Republican on the far-left of the party, may represent one of those seemingly minor events that turn out to be the precursor to something quite interesting and far reaching. Only time will tell but I think the winds of change are blowing and quite a lot of people are going to be genuinely surprised when their political careers get dumped in Boston Harbor.

Update: And to the commenter who called himself 'Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle' on my previous post about this issue... you said:

You know what is really funny? The Republican party candidate is not a lefty at all. She's made nice to unions a time or two. That's about it. She isn't a RINO by any stretch of the imagination

Oh really? Well guess what... Republican Dede Scozzafava, who suspended her campaign yesterday in the New York 23rd Congressional District, has endorsed Democrat Bill Owens.

Yeah, not a RINO at all. This actually makes the "Palin called it right" contention incontrovertible. By doing this Scozzafava has just made Palin even stronger.