In South Sudan, food aid is used as a weapon and is either looted and destroyed or blocked from reaching those in areas controlled by the opposition. Similar instances occur in Somalia where aid organizations are heavily taxed, which results in additional funds that are used to perpetuate the conflict. In fact, receiving U.S. food aid literally feeds the violence and is positively correlated with a higher probability and increased duration of civil war.
|
|||||
|
10 ‘Conservative’ Councillors (of the 12 complement) on the Town Council in the little town of Desborough in Northamptonshire have resigned after an apparent hostile response to a 400% tax rise imposed by the local council, and there is an alleged undercurrent of unpleasantness in the local reaction, perhaps the spirit of Poujard lives on.
Well, who is the bully? Is it the Council for ramping up tax by 400% from £19.10 to £96.98 per year on those who have to pay, with the sort like the Chairman, Councillor Pearce, of whom it is reported:
and then went on to say:
That’s a ‘Feck you!‘ if ever I heard one, and which I assume is a reference to the true costs coming through after some financial juggling used to disguise the costs of the Council ended (more like that later). And the article goes on, Ms Pearce said that:
So a frank expression of views and voluntarily withdrawing social interactions is shocking when you start robbing people under colour of law? Her observation?
I think that is exactly what the residents are telling you, Madam! Action and re-action, this is not bullying, it is intra-election consultation. For our more international readers, this council is about the smallest unit of local government that can levy taxes, and this council probably doesn’t need to exist, it can add a local ‘precept’ onto the taxes levied by the other local authorities, (4 layers are possible, 3 with taxing powers), all of which is loaded onto the ‘Council Tax’ bill that households pay, overall bills can be in the region of £1,200 to £2,000+ p.a. To the resigning Councillors, I say ‘Oh dear, how sad, never mind‘, and count yourselves lucky that you live in such temperate times. Meanwhile, at a County level, the County Council for Northamptonshire have spent £53,000,000 on a new headquarters, and in true Parkinson’s Law fashion, with the new HQ, matters have started to disintegrate, with spare money running out, so they have had to go to the government and tell them that they have cocked things up and run out of discretionary money to spend. So having moved into a new HQ in October 2017, they are now looking to sell it to keep themselves going (by which they mean ‘sell it to a company who will lease it back to them, so that they can squander the capital and saddle locals with rent charges’ rather than ‘downsize and cut costs’). It’s just as well that the entire County is not rising up to berate the County Councillors, but perhaps the whole thing is too complicated and remote for people to care. But at least the spirit of Poujade stirs from time to time, the BBC might think like Durin’s Bane, but actually more like Beorn. There is hope yet in England. And the Sage might wish to maintain a discretion on this one. Edit: an erroneous ‘r’ removed, my apologies to the Gods of Accuracy, Spelling and M Poujade, and my thanks to Appianglorius, the price of accuracy is eternal vigilance, its true. February 4th, 2018 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yet the involvement of sitting intelligence officials—and a sitting president—in such a campaign should be a frightening thought even to people who despise Trump and oppose every single one of his policies, especially in an age where the possibilities for such abuses have been multiplied by the power of secret courts, wide-spectrum surveillance, and the centralized creation and control of story-lines that live on social media while being fed from inside protected nodes of the federal bureaucracy. Emphasis added. February 4th, 2018 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday’s TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound. Read the memo. Holy.Fucking.Shit. February 3rd, 2018 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Under Ian Smith (remember him?), only 5% of the population of Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) had votes that counted (and all but one in twenty of them were white) but the other 95% of the population did eat: Mugabe inherited a country where their prosperity was rising. By 2016, only Mugabe and a few cronies had votes that counted, and Zimbabwe produced not the 300,000+ tons of grain per year that it once did, but 20,000 tons. Or, as the poet did not quite put it,
It seems so superflous to add that non-white racism (between the Shona and Ndebele tribes) was also a feature of Mugabe’s rule; he was a Shona as well as a socialist. February 3rd, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
He doesn’t mean to be a monster and I don’t want to see him as one, but in his presence my blood ran cold. I was afraid of him. I was even more afraid of the way the earnest folk in the room laughed as he joked about the unintended consequences of various programmes to clean up the act of the idiotic, self-destructive great unwashed, I realised that I might be the only one there who included himself in the category of “the people” to be shaped as opposed to the smug elite doing the shaping. No one seemed remotely concerned for the freedoms of those on the receiving end of Dr Chadwick’s mind bending, “nudging” and manipulation — the benighted mugs who ultimately pay to have such well-shod professionals sneer about them behind their backs. – Tom Paine writing an article titled ‘An unexpected encounter with a monster‘ Oh boy, do I feel Tom’s Pain (sorry). It reminds me of the following remarks I made when speaking to a rather earnest employee of Her Majesty’s government. It was at a PPE dinner at an Oxford college, filled to the rafters with pretty much the same people who filled the room where Tom Paine’s blood ran cold. As I was clearly very off-message, she had just told me that “You’re the sort of person we need to convince”: “Don’t waste your time trying to convince me its all for my own good, because the objective isn’t my good, its making sure the people in this room have power. If you keep nudging people, and you just won’t stop, eventually they’ll punch you in the face. But we both know the reason that doesn’t happen to you is because Mao’s dictum is entirely correct. Your presumed right to do what you do to the hoi polloi is embedded at an axiomatic level, you don’t have any coherent moral argument to back it up, and why should you? The only reason you can do what you do is because you keep the police force funded, which is why you don’t need to convince me of anything.” For some reason I don’t get taken to those kind of dinners any more 😆 February 2nd, 2018 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
But Justice Gorsuch took not an “expectation of privacy” approach to the question but a property rights approach. Under common law, he said, “possession is good title against everybody except for people with superior title.” Absent probable cause, a trespass action would be available against anyone searching the car. Thus, “by virtue of his possession,” Byrd would have a right to resist a carjacker or throw out an overstaying hitchhiker. “So why not the government?” February 1st, 2018 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Worstall says that Hayek’s much-derided argument that government health care would make us serfs of the state is supported by an astonishing piece by Nick Cohen which appears to argue that so it would, and so it must. Part of me hopes that Cohen, who has often been one of the more principled voices on the British Left, is writing tongue in cheek or trying to provoke a reaction. But the commenters nearly all seem to take it quite seriously and only berate him for not going far enough. Here’s the piece from Cohen: “Saving the NHS means forcing us to change the way we lead our lives”.
Speaking as a base creature myself, I do not believe it would be a healthy future at all to be ruled by people with such contempt for me.
A commenter called “erikus” put their finger on what all this was reminding me of:
February 1st, 2018 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just wanted to share this chance-found five year old Observer editorial because it is so gloriously apocalyptic: “If Britain leaves Europe, we will become a renegade without economic power”
Sounds great! Alas, not all my countrymen share this inspiring vision of our post-Brexit future, but at least we’re out.
January 30th, 2018 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Wednesday, I attended a meeting at the Frontline Club, which is near Paddington Station in west London. The meeting was devoted to the memory of the great Romanian businessman and freedom-championing newspaper owner Dan Adamescu, and the danger now facing Dan’s son Alexander Adamescu. Some friends of mine are also Friends of Alexander Adamescu, and this is me trying to help them. Encouraged by the organisers, I took photos at that meeting, photos of very variable quality, because of my woeful inexperience in what for me were very imperfect lighting conditions. But, I hope that the best of them may be of some use to the cause, and assist Alexander Adamescu’s friends in stirring up more media attention. The cause being that Dan Adamescu was, just over one year ago, imprisoned to death, so to speak, by the government of Romania, and that the government of Romania has for some time now been trying to do something similar to Dan’s son Alexander, after he complained what was being done to his father. Here is a picture of the big picture of the late Dan Adamescu that presided over the meeting, beneath which sat Alexander Adamescu, who spoke at the meeting:
As you can see, I did a bit of photomanipulation there, to make it clearer what Alexander Adamescu looks like. Alexander Adamescu now lives in London with his wife (who also spoke most eloquently about Dan Adamescu) and young family. But the government of Romania wants the British government to hand Alexander over to them, so that they can inflict upon him the same sort of parody of justice that they inflicted upon his father. Their instrument of choice to accomplish this is the European Arrest Warrant. → Continue reading: The government of Romania versus the Adamescu family January 29th, 2018 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
In recent weeks, Labour could not make a simple statement in support of those protesting for freedom in Iran. It couldn’t give a straightforward condemnation of a regime that stones people to death for adultery, publicly hangs gay people, and forces women by threat of criminal punishment to wear headscarves in public. The hard left’s virulent anti-Americanism renders it ‘just not that simple’. No, with the influence and influx of ‘Stop The War’ ideologies, Labour has been dragged so deeply down the rabbit hole of anti-imperialist theories that they cannot condemn dictatorial, theocratic, repressive Iran in case it somehow strengthens, or implies support for, democratic, secular and free America. My Labour would see America is a necessary bulwark against Iran, yet the Labour we have sees Iran as a necessary bulwark against America. I cannot in all good conscience tell a single person to vote for that. – Nora Mulready, writing an article titled “Today I resigned from the Labour Party” As I am some manner of wild-eyed libertarian/classical liberal, I suspect Ms. Mulready and I might not see eye to eye on certain issues, yet I have to respect someone who has the emotional maturity and intellectual integrity to transcend the tribal impulses we are all prone to, to detach themselves from an institution they were once deeply invested in. January 29th, 2018 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad has has died. Evidence suggests that in his youth, Mr Kamprad was a Nazi. I don’t mean this in any metaphorical sense. He appears to have been an actual Nazi. Mr Kamprad then went on to conquer the world through selling people flat pack furniture. Rather than the other way. January 28th, 2018 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments