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Supercars are supposed to run over Arthur Scargill and then run over him again for good measure. They are designed to melt ice caps, kill the poor, poison the water table, destroy the ozone layer, decimate indigenous wildlife, recapture the Falkland Islands and turn the entire third world into a huge uninhabitable desert, all that before they nicked all the oil in the world. – Sage and raconteur Jeremy Clarkson. I cannot count the ways we love him. August 24th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole. – Frank Zappa August 21st, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money. – Alexis de Tocqueville (attributed to…) August 20th, 2011 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Christians were not supposed to charge interest. Therefore, the most common moneylenders-to-kings were Jews. They could loan money at a profit, and were thus more likely to lend it. But whenever the King’s debts got too large to repay, he began to demonise the Jews. And eventually came a pogrom. And hey-ho, the debt went away along with the Jews. I’m seeing the demonisation of banks. I wonder how long before government throws a pogrom? August 19th, 2011 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness. […] August 17th, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Richtie is the true Clausewitzian nightmare, an industrious idiot who never stops.” – David Moore, commenting on an item by Tim Worstall, who fisks the absurd Richard Murphy. August 16th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The global paper standard has lasted 40 years but evidence is accumulating daily that its endgame is now fast approaching. The world economy is caught in a deepening financial crisis caused by excessive levels of debt, severe asset price bubbles and overextended banks—all imbalances that are the direct consequence of four decades of unprecedented fiat money creation, of artificially low interest rates and of “lender-of-last-resort” central banking. Monetary policy today—whether by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the ECB or the Bank of Japan—is not much more than an increasingly desperate attempt to postpone via super-low interest rates and periodic debt monetization the painful but unavoidable liquidation of these imbalances. This will not only ultimately prove futile, but will lead to a complete currency catastrophe if pursued further.” – Detlev Schlichter, writing in the Wall Street Journal. The fact that he is now gigging at the mighty WSJ is, of itself, a great thing. Update: today is the 40th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s decision to kill off the link between the dollar and gold, although in reality the old gold standard had been dead for much longer. August 15th, 2011 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is anyone seriously going to try to make the case that this isn’t black culture in excelsis? Or does anyone, perhaps, want to persuade me that this is but one tiny and much-exaggerated facet of a broader black culture dominated by opera and madrigal singing and crochet and sonnet-construction and lawn bowls and Shakespeare and new translations of Ovid? If they are capable of doing so then maybe, just maybe, I might accept that there was something demeaning or reductive in Starkey’s comments on black culture. Problem is, I don’t think anyone can. (And I speak, by the way, as someone who quite likes his hop hop and who is very much into the new Kanye West/Jay Z album. But who, listening to it, can’t help noticing that it’s rather more a celebration of gats, hos, casual sex and easy money, than it is an invocation for study, hard work and social conformity.) To pillory a man for pointing out such a glaringly obvious cultural fact just because he’s white and Right-wing would have been quite wrong even before the riots. Post riots it is positively obscene. – James Delingpole, declining to join the lynch mob baying for David Starkey’s blood. August 14th, 2011 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Left needs to defend the riots; not to valourise the burning of grannies’ cars, but to make clear that we reject the whole bourgeois construction of events, that we stand in solidarity with the oppressed and that, when it comes to it, we will, without hesitation, join the “rioters” to overthrow the legitimised exploitation, state-sanctioned violence and sham “democracy” that oppress us all. August 13th, 2011 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Notice how the loudest complaints about “broken politics” come from those who lost the debate. It’s understandable for sore losers to rage against the machine. But there’s no need for the rest of us to parrot their petulance. August 12th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Allister Heath, editor of CityAM. Read it all. The political party that most intelligently grasps this change of mood, and responds to it by a re-assertion of the right of individuals to defend themselves and their property, and which unravels the disaster wrought by welfarism, supine policing and a hopelessly over-regulated labour market, should win the next election. The question, as ever, is which party has the nous and courage to do this. So far, the signs have not been very encouraging. August 11th, 2011 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed. – Philip Johnston, journalist. Read the whole article. August 10th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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