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Paris, France.
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Paris, France. October 25th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Initially, when I saw the article, I wondered what on earth the editorial honchos at the Spectator Coffee House blog were doing in allowing this piece of invective to be published about the Tea Party movement in the US. But maybe those guys are actually being very smart, since the article is so bad, so unhinged, that it bears out the truth of what this Daily Telegraph columnist argues, which is that a large chunk of liberal (in the US sense) opinion is in total denial about what the Tea Party movement is about. It is just not within their mental frame of reference to comprehend ordinary voters rebelling about having to pay higher taxes for higher spending. (“But darling, how can the little people be so ungrateful?”). The Coffee House article tries to dismiss the TP movement is nothing more than a front for religious extremism. Now I don’t particularly care for religion and as regulars will know, I tend to regard the separation of church and state as being one of the good things about the US, although the idea of such separation is not explicitly called for in the US Constitution. But what the author of the Spectator Coffee House piece does not ask is this: if some of the Tea Partiers are playing fast and loose with American history, then are not the supporters of Mr Obama, and the bailouts, and the money printing of the Fed, also taking liberties with the intentions of the Founders? And that, surely, is what this is all about. The anger that is felt across the US among ordinary people is that their country is being bent out of shape by a group of people who hold them in contempt. October 25th, 2010 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I attack the concept of ‘Biodiversity’ – and note the inverted commas, that’s kind of key – I’m not voting, as the eco-fascist would-be suicide bomber James Lee so touchingly put it, against “The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.” What I’m railing against is the way a noble-seeming concept has been subverted by the watermelons of the green movement in exactly the same way as “Climate change” has and with precisely the same aims: to extend the powers of government; to raise taxes; to weaken the capitalist system; to curtail personal freedom; to redistribute income; to bring ever-closer the advent of an eco-fascist New World Order. I’ve got nothing against biodiversity. But I’ve an awful lot against “Biodiversity.” – Delingpole, having done so much damage to the last Big Green Thing (see posting below), turns his guns onto the next one. But will Greenery of any kind now be trusted enough to serve as the next big excuse for global statism? October 24th, 2010 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Do you have seven and a half minutes to spare out of your crowded, creative, busy life? I recommend that you find it, and watch this bit of video, now conveniently viewable at Bishop Hill, this video being … well, see the title of this posting. Of it, the good Bishop says:
Me neither. It’s as good a short summary of the whole Hockey Stick furore (Bishop Hill’s book about it all being a much longer version of the same story), what it is, why it matters, and so on, as you could hope to find. The content of this snatch of video is impressive, of course. But I especially love McKitrick’s calm tone of voice and measured manner. How those climate warmists must hate the internet. They’re still at it, by the way. October 24th, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 24th, 2010 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences. October 23rd, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
More up-to-the-second analysis from the fourth estate:
Byron York apparently does not understand Libertarianism. (H/t: Drudge) October 22nd, 2010 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well that was not very clever of me, was it? I got the wrong de Soto in the original posting here, which I have taken down to avoid confusion. My apologies for the first poster who told me it was wrong. Ugh. Grovel-grovel. Here is the event, anyway. I strongly recommend people to go if they get the chance. I will be. October 22nd, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
See, whilst many (most of them apparently on Twitter) are psychologically able to ignore, or excuse, or basically discount altogether the taking money from people bit of public spending, there are some of us that just can’t. One day it occurs to ask the question, “What exactly gives them the right to help themselves to whatever they want?” and the answer turns out to be because they can. Then you get a bit angry and frustrated, feel almost entirely helpless, then, just to make things that little bit worse, everyone else in the world comes and slaps you in the face for even daring to consider such heretical notions. The taking from me bit doesn’t count. I don’t matter. It’s the no longer giving bit that counts. Think about how people feel! Think about all the things they could do with that money, or that job, or learn from those people or achieve with the support of those others! Don’t you understand? Have you no feelings? Apparently not. I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?” – Charlotte Gore, spotted earlier in the week by David Thompson. October 22nd, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Concerning these elections that are coming up in the USA in a week or two’s time, there seems to be a big argument going on about how smart the Democrats are compared to the Republicans. How smart or dumb are Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and the rest of them? Who, for instance, is being smarter or dumber about the year 1773? But those who worry about how smart or how dumb the various candidates for election are, or how smart or how dumb are the particular voters they are each trying to pander to, are, I think, missing a bigger point. If you think that you and people like you should control large swathes of society and large swathes of the economy, then you really had better be very – make that impossibly – smart, and you are not smart, if only because you believe in this seriously dumb idea. But if the notion that you keep repeating during your campaign is that neither you nor people like you, nor your political opponents nor people like them, should have this kind of centralised power over everything, then provided you are sufficiently smart to make that one smart idea stick and have political consequences, it really doesn’t matter how dumb you may be about anything or even everything else. Obama has many smart opinions and many dumb ones, I think. But if he and his ilk are to have the kind of power they seek over the world, then them being quite smart and quite dumb guarantees not smartness but dumbness, in all the areas of life where regular people have found that they want to do things in their own various ways, while Obama and his friends think that something that they consider smart is preferable. And the smarter Obama and his friends think they are the dumber they end up being. (Alternatively, as Paul Marks likes to say, Obama is smart and is being dumb on purpose. Either way, it is not smart to vote for him.) It is said that Sarah Palin and her ilk have many dumb opinions. Clearly Palin couldn’t have got where she is, any more than Obama has got where he is, without being smart about some things. But yes, I’m sure Palin’s fairly dumb about some things. But the difference is not merely that Palin is smart and dumb this much, while Obama is dumb and smart that much; it is that their dumbness or smartness have profoundly different consequences if Obama and friends think that President Obama and friends should boss lots and lots of things, while Palin and friends think that President Anyone and friends bossing lots and lots of things is dumb and are able to act on that notion. So, for instance, if you have (what I would consider to be) dumb opinions about God, evolution, and so on, it doesn’t matter, if, when you win your election, your most important political idea about God, evolution etc., is that both you and I should be allowed to worship God or not, think seriously (as I would see it) about science or not, as you imagine that your God is telling you to, or as I think makes sense. If that’s what you’ll do when you win your election, that’ll do for me. And our agreement actually goes deeper than this. If the major political consequence of you believing in your God is you also believing that nobody on earth should try to play God, then I agree wholeheartedly. Politically, we are more than mere allies; we are kindred spirits. My worry, and the worry of lots of others who believe in the government bossing as little as possible, is that the team which now says it is against politicians bossing everything, even against themselves doing it, may do very well in their mere elections, but then, when the power to boss everything actually is right there in their hands, they will forget the one truly smart thing they were saying during their campaign, and start being truly dumb. The bad news is that quite a few of the people on my preferred team probably already think like this. The good news is that others in the team I support are already looking beyond the elections, and saying that if that is how things then go, they won’t go along with it. October 22nd, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
There have, as I might expect, been a flurry of reviews about a recent biography of Harold Macmillan, who – to those non-Brit readers who might not have heard of him – was prime minister in the late 1950s through to 1963, and who was involved in controversies that hung over his head until his very old age, such as the issue of his alleged involvement in sending Cossack forces back to the tender mercies of Stalin at the end of WW2. He was a complex and interesting character in many ways; my mother remembers his nickname of “Supermac” and the extraordinary period in the early 1960s when the Profumo Scandal broke, as well as Macmillan’s own resignation through ill health and the subsequent emergence of Alec Douglas Home as leader. Home, let it not be forgotten considering how he was mercilessly lampooned by parts of the leftist press, almost won the 1964 general election. One review here by Simon Heffer more or less sums up my own views of the man. Heffer recognises that for all Macmillan’s undoubted merits – he was, for example, an extremely brave army officer wounded several times in the First World War – that he was a decidedly flawed politician in certain respects, particularly on the crucial issue of economic policy and industrial relations. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise of what was to be dubbed the “British disease” – a time of rising industrial strife, inflation, low productivity, endless “stop-go” cycles of Keynesian-inspired reflation followed by subsequent slamming on of the monetary brakes. And while it would be grossly unfair to pin too much blame on one prime minister for the sort of problems that eventually came to a head in the 1970s, he must take some share of the responsibility for the mess that was eventually addressed – after a fashion – by Mrs Thatcher’s administration in the 1980s. And yet the impression I get from Heffer’s review, and particularly, this one by Peregrine Worsthorne, is that the biography more or less absolves Macmillan of any blame whatever. Worsthorne’s review in the Spectator – behind a subscription firewall – carries this, for instance:
Oh dear. Fell asleep during the 1970s, did we? He also says that Macmillan was right to have played down the danger of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I am not sure that is really true, but if it was true, is that to his credit? With the benefit of hindsight, the Soviet Union was a rotten house that looked imposing with all its mass Red Square parades and all the rest but eventually crumbled very fast, but at the time, it did not seem that way, and some very supposedly clever people, such as that Keynes fan (!) JK Galbraith, were arguing as late as the early 80s that there was no real difference economically between the West and the Soviet Empire. And the sheer size of the Soviet armed forces, and the way that the Hungarian and Czech revolts were harshly suppressed, hardly squares with the idea that that Empire could be treated with a sort of shrug of the shoulders. By the way, for a dose of good sense on the Cold War years, I recommend this by Norman Stone. But perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of Worsthorne’s review is this part, in which he writes mournfully of what might had been had Sir Alec Douglas Home won in 1964:
I am going to do Worsthorne the respect of assuming he is sane, and serious, when he wrote that somehow, Mrs Thatcher’s time in office was some sort of ghastly “interlude” when the rightful aristocratic rulers of us unwashed were horribly pushed aside by a bunch of grammar school educated City slickers and Jewish intellectuals. Macmillan once infamously said that he regretted there were more Estonians than Etonians in the Tory Cabinet of the time, a particularly nasty little line. Sure, the attack on the Blair and Brown bunch is perhaps more deserved, but let’s not forget that Blair was a Fettes public schoolboy, and a good many of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers came from smart backgrounds. In fact, when all is said and done, what Worsthorne rates as Macmillan’s greatest achievement, is contained in the opening paragraph of his review. I leave readers with this to ponder:
In other words, whatever Macmillan may or may not have done to stem the UK’s post-war economic decline, at least he kept the toffs on top. Words fail me. October 21st, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
On this day in 1805, a famous signal was sent in the context of the struggle against an earlier iteration of pervasive European Union. October 21st, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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