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Indeed.
The thing about Delingpole is not just the things he says, but the huge numbers of people he says them to, throughout not just the UK but the entire anglosphere. He said “climate science” was hooey to his massed readership, when saying that really counted for something. Now he is arguing for serious cuts, as in actual reductions, as in large reductions, in government spending, here in the UK, in the USA, and pretty much everywhere, at a time when that too needs to be said very loudly.
It is an odd feeling watching all the things I have have been banging on about for the last third of a century or so – about taxation, spending cuts, Hong Kong, the Asian Tigers, etc. – being banged on about by someone half my age and of several times my eloquence. Extreme jealousy mixed with extreme delight about sums it up. The former, I am getting over. The latter will last. I can remember when we used to dream of getting stuff like his in the Telegraph … blah blah.
So, well done Delingpole, and keep it coming.
Remember Paul Chambers?
Twitter joke trial: Paul Chambers loses appeal against conviction
The man convicted of “menace” for threatening to blow up an airport in a Twitter joke has lost his appeal.
Paul Chambers, a 27-year-old accountant whose online courtship with another user of the microblogging site led to the “foolish prank”, had hoped that a crown court would dismiss his conviction and £1,000 fine without a full hearing.
But Judge Jacqueline Davies instead handed down a devastating finding at Doncaster which dismissed Chambers’s appeal on every count. After reading out his comment from the site – “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” – she found that it contained menace and Chambers must have known that it might be taken seriously.
….
As for the tweet at the centre of the case, she called it “menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed.”
Has Judge Jacqueline Davies ever met an ordinary person other than in the courtroom? They have usually got over wetting the bed coz he said scawy fings mummy by the age of three.
This particular form of infantile behaviour is everywhere. There is a second example reported in the papers just today.
Tory councillor arrested over Alibhai-Brown ‘stoning’ tweet
Police in Birmingham today arrested a Conservative city councillor who sent a Twitter message saying that the newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should be stoned to death.
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The message – now apparently deleted – said: “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really.”
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Alibhai-Brown, who writes columns for the Independent and the London Evening Standard, said last night she regarded his comments as incitement to murder. She told the Guardian: “It’s really upsetting. My teenage daughter is really upset too. It’s really scared us.”
You’ve brought her up to be as big a baby as you are, then.
“You just don’t do this. I have a lot of threats on my life. It’s incitement. I’m going to the police – I want them to know that a law’s been broken.”
She added that she regarded Compton’s remarks as racially motivated because he mentioned stoning.
“If I as a Muslim woman had tweeted that it would be a blessing if Gareth Compton was stoned to death I’d be arrested immediately. I don’t think the nasty Tories went away.”
Waaaah! Make the nasty Tories go away! Hard to believe this is a woman in her sixties talking. The childishness she displays is pitiable, if genuine. However I rather think that along with the hiding-under-the-blankets stuff she is displaying another form of childishness – that of flouncing around in a strop and demonstrating semi-voluntary control of the tear glands.
I left this comment over on Tim Worstall’s blog yesterday, and I thought I might reproduce it here:
“While it is undoubtedly true that there are barriers to entry in certain fields that give the incumbent management the kind of “rent-seeking” powers you talk about, it strikes me that shareholders, over the long run, are hardly likely to tolerate payouts of massive salaries for crummy investment returns. Ironically, it is precisely the sort of mercantilist policies that the left supports – such as attempts to restrict foreign takeovers of “national champions” – that shield management from competition and hence, breed complacency.”
“There is a genuine, global market for talent, and in this globalised, increasingly fiercely competitive world, the pay for the top people will be high. Sure, we can and should remove barriers to entry, and one obvious way to do that would be to encourage small businesses to grow fast and challenge the supposed hegemony of Big Business; this means more free trade, not less; it means fewer regulations and lower, flatter taxes, not more of them, and so on.”
“In other words, if high pay for supposedly underperforming CEOs riles you, then we need more capitalism, not the sort of statist ideas propogated by the likes of Compass.”
For those who may not know, Compass is a leftist pressure group in the UK that tends to argue for such clever ideas as higher taxes, ever greater regulation of business, and so on.
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian back in July:
The return from a tiny government investment is probably greater in the cultural industries than any other – every £1 the Arts Council England puts in generates another £2 from commercial sources.
The UK Film Council, quoted in the Independent in August:
“But the UKFC doesn’t waste money, it makes it. For every pound it invests, the country gets £5 back.“
Ivan Lewis in the Guardian yesterday:
The National Campaign for the Arts estimates that every £1 of grant given to the arts brings a fifteen-fold return in investment into the county [Somerset].
A disenfranchised population becomes an untrustworthy population, since it loses the habit of making its own decisions. The majority become childish in hundreds of ways, looking to the State as parent, complaining without displaying a willingness to any form of self-determination. The more liberty one has, the more indvidual responsibility is required of one to make rational, well-considered decisions in the context of one’s social and personal life. Most of us are educated to think we are not capable of this when, in fact, most of us are thoroughly capable but simply lack either the circumstances or the determination to test ourselves. An authoritarian, paternalistic State encourages us in this belief, by its actions as well as by its rhetoric. By its very nature it creates a morally enfeebled, child-like population. This population in turn ‘proves’ its inability to control its own fate and consequently ‘proves’ the need for the paternalism which created it in the first place. There is no fundamental difference between Tory and Socialist paternalism.
– Michael Moorcock, The Retreat From Liberty, 1983
Why is it that the BBC, in its reporting of David Cameron’s visit to China, keeps banging on about the supposed dilemma faced by the Prime Minister over whether to raise human rights abuse, and in particular the plight of Liu Xiaobo, a prominent Chinese dissident unable to collect his Nobel peace prize because he’s serving an 11 year sentence in a Chinese jail?
There’s no dilemma here at all – except in the vague terms already referred to by Mr Cameron, this is not an issue which needs to be explored at all on a visit which is meant to be wholly about trade. Only the BBC, would, in oblivious disregard for the national interest, keep on trying to make something out of it.
– Jeremy Warner
I seem to recall some ‘sensible’ commentator of the day made similar remarks about those who deprecated comparable government to government relations with Nazi Germany in the 1930’s over that whole tiresome ‘human rights’ thingie 
Says it all, really. Her Majesty’s Treasury informs us that
The Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) is carrying out a review into all tax reliefs, allowances and exemptions, for businesses and individuals, across all the taxes administered by HM Revenue & Customs. The Chancellor has asked the OTS to identify reliefs that should be simplified or repealed to help achieve a simpler tax system.
As the first step of the review process, on 08 November 2010 the OTS published a complete list of tax reliefs and the approach that will be used for the Review. The list is the first time all tax reliefs administered by HM Revenue and Customs have been compiled and made available in a single document.
And here it is. All 349 kilobytes of it.
All good citizens will be happy to learn that “Expenditure incurred with regard to safety precautions at a sports ground is eligible for capital allowances.” (No. 530), although perhaps approval will be less enthusiastic for No. 603, “International organisations and their staffs are exempt from specified taxes.” It is a burden off my mind to discover in the form of No. 673 that “Suggestion awards made by employees which do not exceed £25 are exempt from income tax.” – although one might suggest that the effort put forth by lawmakers to create and tax inspectors to administer this provision probably exceeds the benefit felt by the average taxpayer. In fact that conclusion might apply to most of No.s 1- 672 and 674 – 1042 as well.
This comment by “Armaros”, made in response to a Guardian piece by Michael Tomasky about the former president’s new book, put the case well:
His whole agenda was thrown out the window on 911.
Not since the war of 1812 was the WH directly targeted by an enemy.
He was going to focus on Mexico, L American trade and education.
He recognized that only by bringing Mexico up to par with the rest of N America, can free trade be fair.
He was also for immigration reform and resisted the xenophobic tendencies of the SW states and tried to educate America about why this problem was occurring.
He can claim credit for No Child left behind, along with the late Teddy Kennedy who ran with the bill in the Senate. One of the most memorable stories of bi-partisan co-operation.
He was also instrumental in helping Africa and dealing with AIDS.
Bono and Geldof praised him for that.
His administration was also the most multiracial in American history.
He even offered the VP spot to Powell who decided against it in the end.
He choose a black S of state, a black NSA, and a Hispanic AG.
His Supreme court choices were centrist and sensible in Alito and Roberts.
He addressed crowds in Texas in Spanish and garnered more Latino votes than any republican before him, both as governor and president.
He will be of course remembered for the war(s).
Those will be judged with time. Iraq can be said to be a success. Saddam is gone as is the mad fascist ideology and tyranny. Iraq has proven that democracy can and should work among Arabs.
Most of the criticism of Iraq (aside from the fact that there was a war) was that Arabs cannot live in a democracy.
There have been 4 elections in Iraq with greater turnouts than most Western ones and one can say that democracy did take some hold there.
Afghanistan is still up in the air. I am not sure whether what was done in Iraq can be done there. However it is no longer a base for international terrorism.
In other words, Afghanistan is no longer a threat to us.
Whether it would revert to being that once Western troops leave is a fair question.
Bush was the first US president to declare the necessity for a Palestinian state. Another one of his forgotten positives which the Left omits on the regular.
What do you think?
That is, if this sentiment attributed to him does indeed reflect his thoughts:
It’s his money that he has earned, he should be allowed to do whatever he wants with it.
How about considering that the same courtesy should be extended to everyone else in the world, Mr Olbermann?
This morning I recorded a BBC Radio 4 programme about the late LTC Rolt, historian of the industrial revolution, biographer of (to name but one) Brunel, and the man who put a Rocket, to coin a phrase, under British industrial archaeology and who did much to make it a popular British enthusiasm.
The programme ended by quoting these words from Ecclesiasticus (not in the Bible and not to be confused with Ecclesiastes which is in the Bible) chapter 38:
All these put their trust in their hands and each becometh wise in his own work. Without these shall not a city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn nor walk up and down therein. They shall not be sought for in the counsel of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high. But they will maintain the fabric of the world, and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer.
This guy liked it too, when this show was first aired, on Nov 8th.
Not saying I agree, mind. Read what precedes it (e.g. by following the immediately above link) and you discover that the writer of these stirring words had no problem with the working stiffs playing no part in government. That’s strictly for the idle – and therefore wise – rich to take care of.
But, stripped of that context, the above quote reads more like a protest on behalf of the downtrodden craftsmen and a claim that they should be sought in the “counsel of the people”. Understanding it that way, which is how I did understand it when I first heard the words on my radio this morning, I liked it a lot.
I also think that these words capture something of what the Tea Party is about. We, say the Tea Partiers, run the world, even if we don’t rule it. We certainly maintain the world. We know how the world works. Without us the world – the “fabric of the world” – stops. When the idle rich, mounted on high in their assemblies, decide about how the world shall be ruled, they should damn well be listening to us. A healthy majority of those in such assemblies should be us.
The subject hierarchy in mainstream media is a clear tool for editorial mischief. No doubt the website designers will argue that their pathways are efficient and designed to assist readers to the most appropriate subject. Inbuilt bias does not exist, and you tag the BBC especially for this. Sometimes irony can ensue, such as the Grauniad pairing “environmental” and “nuclear”.
Only this newspaper could render the sour grapes of subsidy junkies newsworthy. Let’s hear the renewable energy mewl and whine because they do not get enough money:
The developments are likely to fuel concerns among the many environmental campaigners who oppose nuclear power that the industry has unfair access to the government, as well as benefiting from hidden subsidies.
“They [government] have to come clean about all the money spent on assisting nuclear – and this would be part of that,” said Mike Childs, head of climate campaigns for Friends of the Earth. “It’s important ministers come clean about who they are meeting, when they are meeting, and the issues they are discussing.”
After all, green lobbyists derive all of their financing from voluntary donations, so they would have us believe. In reality, the renewable energy industry and its lobbyists require subsidies to survive. So does nuclear energy.
Itis particularly telling when they weep because their quango constituency is whittled down to one. The Chicken Littles wail that the sky has fallen because they have to compete on a level playing field of one quango each:
Concern about the preferential treatment given to the nuclear industry by successive governments is likely to be heightened by the decision last month to abolish the parallel Renewables Energy Board, which met every quarter at the department and once a year outside, as part of spending cuts. The work of the renewables board will be taken on by the Office for Renewable Energy Deployment, for which there is a parallel Office for Nuclear Development.
There would have been a time when the Guardian, in its liberal days, could have stepped back from a story of quango competition and included the question: is this a good use of public money? The prevailing philosophy of the newspaper still recognised a link between tax and accountability. Not an argument that we could agree with but one that we could recognise.
What has changed over the last few years is the sense of entitlement from public sector professionals and their media sympathisers. State expenditure is unquestioned and arguments arise over the disposal of the spoils. The immoral, debauched class of New Labour becomes more visible at a time of illusionary restraint on the part of the Coalition.
Yesterday evening, I attended a discussion group at the home of Libertarian International president Christian Michel. Christian likes to invite intelligent people with a cross-section of views to these events, and although this occasionally leads to heated argument, the conversation usually remains relatively polite.
Last night, the subject of biodiversity came up, and someone made a comment about how human activity is causing every increasing extinction of species. I decided to be Devil’s Advocate to a small extent and I asked a simple question.
“Can you name any large animal that has become extinct recently?”
Nobody else in the room could successfully answer the question. One or two animals that became extinct between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were mentioned, as were a number of endangered but not extinct species. After they failed to provide any such animals, I mentioned one myself (the Yangtze Dolphin). For what its worth, one can find quite a few large animals that went extinct between about 1800 and 1960 due to human activity. There have been very few since 1960, however. There may be issues with how long it takes for an extinction to be officially declared, or it may be that conservation efforts are working. Or both. But it is far from incontrovertibly clear that extinctions are occurring at an unprecedented rate. There is a lot of uncertainty.
However, I was assured that there is clear evidence of extinction if I looked it up, and some such, and I was assured that it is smaller animals that are mostly becoming extinct and this is what matters. (On the other hand, if this is so, why do the tigers and other large animals get all the publicity?)
After playing the game slightly longer (“Okay, name any species of insect that has become extinct due to human activity, ever”) I backed off. However, as I was doing this, somebody made a curious comment, which was this:
“Michael, you can’t make claims like this without providing evidence”.
This was curious, as I had not made any claims. I had simply asked somebody else for evidence for what they were saying. We have been here before, oddly enough.
However, the question is a very effective one. Many people have accepted the idea that species of animal are going extinct at an alarming rate, without knowing any actual examples. Most people can at least sense the contradiction if you point it out.
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