Samizdata

Just the other day I finally got a box out of storage, one which contained all of my old photographs. Now the truth can finally be shown.

I prefer going for accuracy over rate of fire. It’s all a matter of situation and appropriateness to the purpose at hand.

One is so surprised to see the BBC acknowledge in any manner the existence of black conservatives that it seems unreasonable to ask them to do it politely as well. Actually it wasn’t too bad. Around the middle Keane was stricken by Paxmanitis and got a little offensive as he kept interrupting Connerly and denying the listeners what could have been interesting trains of thought. Then he got a grip on himself and asked some interesting questions about the lessons that Connerly drew from being abandoned by his father.

That wasn’t what I came here to talk about. I get distracted so easily. Brian, I had a similar experience when I went to Oxford. I was used to being Miss Clever Clogs, top of the class, star of the show. Suddenly I was surrounded by people at least as clever as I was. On the one hand, a bit of a blow to my ego. On the other – how wonderful to strike this unsuspected lode of people who saw nothing odd about wishing to talk about Olbers’ paradox. Let’s just be glad they don’t make us take an exam to determine our rankings in the suddenly-extended Libertarian pecking order. You might not come a-cropper even if they did.

That wasn’t it either. Oh yes, aeroplanes. My dear spouse and helpmeet directs me to say that yes, the Spitfire did suffer from a low range, but the British never attempted a long range fighter, largely due to Portal’s opposition. (See The Right of the Line by John Terraine.) As to armament, the US never needed cannon because they never needed to knock down bombers. Against single engine fighters, .50 calibre machine guns were enough, but you need something which explodes to knock down a twin-engine bomber…

There’s more. Much more. Do you any idea what it’s like living with this? I sit down to watch a war flick and rest my eyes on the young Robert Mitchum, and what do I get? “That’s never a Panzergnadigefrau Mk XCVIII, nah, it’s a recycled Abrams with a cardboard hat on. (They sold a job lot to the Vatican in 1958 you know.) And they have the nerve to call that a EntschuldigenSieWaffen uniform? Hah! Don’t they have researchers? Couldn’t they employ someone to tell them that the silver fly-buttons didn’t come in until 1944, and late 1944 at that….”

After the bite, after the infection has taken hold, Brad Pitt surrenders his earthly coil and joins the ranks of ‘The Undead’.

Tom Cruise commands him to “Look at the world with your vampire eyes”. He does. It is not the same world; it is not the world that others see. He sees a different, hidden, ‘other’ world of signs and symbols and secrets to which the living are not privvy. He moves through this new world and ‘turns’ others of his choosing. But there is no going back; no return to the life he had before, spent in peace and semi-blindess.

Brian Micklethwait is not a number; he is my ‘Lestat’

I’ve been catching up on my essential reading this evening – or rather this AM – and was annoyed to the point of blogging by a recent DOD news briefing. The fantasy mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo seemed to be the only item on the press agenda that day.

I, too, have a question about the prisoners’ treatment. One that is not being sufficiently addressed. One I suspect resonates with others from the same planet as I, ie normal people.

How are we going to keep these bastards off the street permanently?

I want assurances these people will never, ever again have the freedom and opportunity to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, release a bio-agent, smuggle radiological weapons, poison a cities water supply, machine gun a crowd, blow up an embassy or nuke Chicago and LA. I’m really not much interested in whether they’re getting the proper sun block in their Club Gitmo tanning butter.

These prisoners are excessively dangerous men. They are trained, drilled, lethal killers… every one of them. They will seek death for the opportunity to take some of us with them. No normal prison or prison guards will be capable of holding them. If it meant 50 of them had to die so one could grab a soldier’s weapon, they would do so. They will quietly wait 3,5,10 years for a guard to slip, to forget what sort of people they are, to become complacent. They will revolt and kill and revolt and kill again until there are none of them left. So exactly how the hell are we going to neutralize these arseholes? That’s the kind of investigative journalism I wish I were seeing.

I still prefer baseballs in Yankee stadium, but if push comes to shove I’ll settle for a good ol’ fashioned necktie party à la Nuremberg.

There are some people in the world who will go to great lengths not to be taken seriously. One of these people is a certain Mr.Paul Clark who has contributed this stupendous bit of reality-subversion on Lew Rockwell’s website.

According to Mr.Clark, Libertarians and True Conservatives everywhere could do a lot worse than look to European Union for inspiration. Well, yes, they could always look to North Korea, I suppose. He goes on to state that the USA should seek to emulate it.

“In fact, the EU offers, in many ways, an example for the United States to emulate. The EU still is what the US is supposed to be: a federation of more or less sovereign states, united for economic and military cooperation.

For those of us who advocate a small, truly constitutional government basically the same as the US had in 1800, the common response is that the world has changed, and that it is now impossible to have the kind of weak central government that existed two centuries ago, when the population and area were a fraction of what they are today. In response to that, one simply needs to look at the European Union”

Yes, he actually says that! And, to add injury to insanity:

“If I were leader of an island nation in the middle of the Atlantic, and were forced to choose between joining the EU or the US, there would be only one choice. If one were concerned with preventing a deluge of tax collectors, bureaucrats, and regulators; and if one wanted to maintain traditional culture and laws, then one would not join the US”

Do you think he means us?

The whole article is a tissue of egregious distortions and outright misrepresentations. For example, Mr.Clark claims that the EU does not tax its citizens when it is common knowledge to every European that plans to do are already well-advanced. He also claims that the EU has no army when the European Rapid Reaction Force (a rose by any other name…) is being built around our ears and with a brief to do just about anything its political masters order it to do both internally and externally.

As someone who has many friends in the USA so I am only too well aware of the exasperation they feel when dealing with their bloated and blundering Federal Government but to compare it unfavourably with the EU requires not just gall but a breath-taking turn of relativism.

It seems that Mr.Clark is yet another of that curious breed of American Libertarian that is so convinced of the irredeemable iniquity of their own government that any ANY alternative is better, be it the EU, Latin American Caudillos, the Moonies or Pol Pot for that matter. Perhaps Mr.Clark should be directed to this Blog for some clarity about the ‘laissez-faire’ credentials of the EU. He could start by trying to explain away the post below.

But maybe I am leaping to judgment. Maybe Mr.Clark has merely written a ripping satire. Maybe he is deliberatly trying to be provocative in order to make some other subtle point. But, if not, then I regret to say that it isn’t just the prisoners at Camp X-Ray who are hooded and goggled.

Now just a dang minute, Perry! Older, yes, but fatter? That varies in direct proportion to the amount of Guiness I’ve consumed that day and I’m proud to report I can still fit into the pictured outfit.

I sure do miss that white cat, though.