“The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness. In truth, sexual conservatives wants to make everyone else pay for their own dark thoughts.”
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“Our exercise program can dramatically improve a woman’s sexual performance,” says Olga Nikitina, 40, the founder of the School for VUM-Building in central Moscow. “She can transform herself from a slow Russian car like a Lada into a Ferrari.” To disguise the fact that the equipment really does look like it belongs in a car-mechanic’s workshop – it’s all pressure gauges and rubber hoses – the school’s two rooms are painted pink and blue; stuffed animals model phallic devices. “Once a woman reaches optimal fitness, she can shoot a fountain of water up out of her vagina in the bath,” boasts Nikitina, a ponytailed blonde in a leopard-print top. The core device is a small silicone balloon that is inserted in the vagina and inflated with a pneumatic pump. “You squeeze against the balloon and measure the pressure on the attached gauges,” says Nikitina. Fine-tuning can be achieved by learning to shoot out pebbles onto a metal target. – Russian women learning how to get – and to keep – rich and generous husbands (with thanks to Instapundit) January 2nd, 2010 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words. – Richard North responds to a lawyers‘ letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have. January 1st, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And what should our mood be? The population restrictionists say we should be sad and worry. I and many others believe that the trends suggesst joy and celebration at our newfound capacity to support human life – healthily, and with fast-increasing access to education and opportunity all over the world. I believe that the population restrictionists’ hand-wringing view leads to despair and resignation. Our view leads to hope and progress, in the reasonable expectation that that the energetic efforts of humankind will prevail in the future, as they have in the past, to increase worldwide our numbers, our health, our wealth, and our opportunities…..Adding more people causes problems, but people are also the means to solving those problems.” – Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, 2nd edition, page 588. The other day, Perry de Havilland took aim at those who would use the violence-backed power of the State to restrict human population. The late Julian Simon had no time for the neo-Malthusian mindset. Among other things, he did not regard wealth as somehow fixed and that if there were more people around, there would be less for each person. We are richer now than we were 100 years ago, and there are more of us. If you want a book that cuts through the crud of the gloomongering cast of mind, this book still ranks up top as one of the very best. December 30th, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I have only one firm belief about the American political system, and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. God is an elderly or, at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on virtually everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club. Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. His nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.” PJ O’Rourke. (Page XXii of Parliament of Whores). Of course, now that the Democrats are led by a Chicago machine “Community Organiser” who is prepared to throw inconvenient former allies under a proverbial bus, it is unclear if O’Rourke’s relatively charming portrayal of the Democrats really holds any more. But hey, any excuse for a Christmas reference. December 22nd, 2009 | 73 comments - (Comments are closed)
Declaration of interest – I know a guy who works on an oil rig. That’s my credibility shot then. – Bishop Hill muses on how any link to Big Oil however tenuous means that your climate scepticism can be ignored by the AGW True Believers. December 19th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
… people are beginning to be afraid of the state – but they are also afraid to be without the state But I think, in fact, it is worse than that. There are many people – and you can often tell them by their fierce, defiant pronouncements that they have nothing to hide, they have done nothing wrong – who are in a dependant, abusive relationship with the state. They feel the bullying and their fear itself as evidence they are wanted and have a place in the world. Being pecked is reassurance that you are somewhere in the pecking-order. Seeing people who are outside the hierarchy of subjection as evil, a threat, and pleading one’s own inoffensiveness at every turn is a way of legitimising one’s own pigeonhole. It is a nasty tendency. The feeble people who are trying to hide in the mainstream make up the lynchmob. And it is entirely equivalent to the morality of the prison-house, where violent gangsters are at the top and sex offenders are brutalised at the bottom, of an alternative chain of being. “You may think I’m scum, but at least I’m not one of them.” (Hat-tip: Iain Dale, even if he was only advertising his magazine) December 18th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is no reason to doubt that Mr Brown’s statement that he went into politics because of his horror at the effects of unemployment. Unfortunately, he forgot one of the few laws of political economy: that the road to unemployment is paved with work creation schemes. He is likely, therefore, to go down as something like the patron saint of unemployment.” – Theodore Dalrymple, from “Not With A Bang But A Whimper”, essays on current affairs, page 79. The whole chapter from which this paragraph is taken is a brilliant summary of everthing that is wrong about the current prime minister. December 18th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown’s plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of “global governance.” Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?” December 14th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s not enough to be rich and famous if you’re not somehow “relevant”. Whether it’s Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: “Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants”. December 12th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK state sector is two large banks with a medium sized government attached. – John Redwood. Funny, but the UK government is not really medium-sized at all. This is still a big country on most measures. And the government’s share of GDP, our overbearing officialdom, and state colonization of civil society, are each now uncomfortably upper-quartile among democratic states and heading rapidly upwards. We are arguably now more governed than France, the home of dirigisme. December 6th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of – to pluck at random – enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths”, are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens – if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.” December 4th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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