Godwin doesn’t apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.
– House of Dumb. I agree. It’s okay to call people nazis if they did it first.
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A half brick. That’s about how musical I am as. So I’m no judge of an orchestra, but Simon Heffer in the Telegraph seems to think the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra is pretty good. The unusual thing about this orchestra is that it does not receive Arts Council funding. I have to say that the fact that it gets some of its money from the patronage of the Duchess of Cornwall means that it cannot claim to be entirely independent of the State, since I presume she gets much of her money from the Civil List. But there you go. If one has to have state subsidies for the arts it is much more in the proper style that the dosh should come from the bejewelled hands of the former mistress, now wife, of the Prince of Wales than by filling in a grants form. I rather hope she hands over a velvet bag of gold sovereigns instead of writing a cheque. I digress right royally. Here is what Simon Heffer writes about the orchestra’s founder, John Boyden:
October 3rd, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I see that former Velvet Underground drummer Moe Tucker was spotted at a Georgia Tea Party protest, telling a local reporter that she is “furious about the way we are being led towards socialism.” Prefix magazine calls this “depressing” news that will “bring you down” before the weekend, because it’s incumbent upon all musicians – especially those in seminal proto-punk bands like VU – to have roughly the same, boring lefty politics. – Michael C. Moynihan, linked to and already picked out as a nice little nugget by Instapundit, which is where I saw it. I know, I know, who gives a defecation what ex-music-celebs think? Or for that matter current actors. Well, I like it when they talk sense, if only because the people who talk nonsense get so miserable and angry about it. October 2nd, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday, ah yesterday. All was happy anticipation then. Yesterday there was this article in the Guardian. It began,
and continued enthusiastically
However today, the article has this added to it.
Mr James Delingpole may have had something to do with this sad outcome. You can still see the film if you wish. It has been reposted on YouTube by gleeful anti-greenies. Both his article and the Guardian one I linked to earlier have links. October 1st, 2010 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Ireland’s membership of the euro was thus the single most important reason for yesterday eye-wateringly large bailout of the Irish banks, which will take the budget deficit to 32 per cent of GDP and its gross government debt to 96 per cent of GDP. The tragedy is that nobody is pointing this out: the political establishment is too closely implicated and may yet need to draw on a European bailout fund. Imagine what would have happened had Britain also embraced the single currency: our interest rates – which were substantially higher than the Eurozone’s, albeit still too low – would have stoked our own bubble to an even greater extent than anything managed by the Bank of England. The UK property bubble would have been even larger and its implosion even more devastating. We don’t realise it – but Britain’s bust of 2008-09 could easily have been much, much nastier.” It might be worth re-reading this to recall the ferocity of those pro-euro folk and their treatment of anyone who sought to stand in their way, including, it seems, ordinary voters. October 1st, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I don’t know what organically grown chickens are; I’ve never seen one.” – Tony Curtis, one of the greats, who died this week. October 1st, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Due to technical difficulties – we ran out of elves powering the blog – there will be a ‘reduced service’ on the blog. We’ll be back in full form as soon as possible. September 30th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s something really quite joyous about a woman so ignorant of business that she bemoans the advertising, the commercialism, the specific slicing and dicing of the market to maximise the value of those ads, when that same woman’s salary is paid by the advertising, the very specific advertising in The Guardian’s jobs section for example, which is carried by the newspaper in which she writes.” – Tim Worstall, writing about comments from Zoe Williams, the Guardian writer. I have a simple explanation for the issue that Tim confronts here: folk like Williams believe they are above the fray of grubby advertising, and are free of being persuaded by the evil, silent tricksters of the ad trade. But the unwashed plebs, with their love of glossy magazines, game shows and the rest, need to be protected by their betters, you see. Sometimes, it comes down to simple arrogrance of a mindset that is hostile to the idea to freedom, to the grubby, glorious vulgarities of the market. It is a mindset that is common to “liberal” Hampstead and High Tory Lake Poets in the early 19th Century. September 30th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reading this item over at National Review’s Corner blog, which relates to recent attempts by Al-Quaeda types to attack targets in Western Europe – apparently foiled for now – got me thinking. One of the possible targets, judging by the comment, was the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It makes me wonder when the “blame-the-West-First” crowd are going to understand that it was always idiotic to claim that 9/11, or the Madrid atrocities, or the London bombings/etc could ever be described as the West getting some sort of “blowback” for its allegedly dastardly deeds against Muslim lands. Whenever this argument is made, the implication, explicit or not, is that the appropriate policy to adopt is the equivalent of hiding under the bed. France, let’s not forget, has more than its fair share of bad relations with some Muslim lands – Algeria in the 1950s being a case in point – but in recent years, the country’s government has been at pains to distance itself from the supposedly “cowboy” policies of Bush/Blair, although possibly things might have hardened a bit under Sarkozy. But it makes no difference. Whether you are an isolationist, multilaterialist, or neocon interventionist, the outcome is the same: the Islamists will try and kill you and your fellow citizens without discrimination. We can try and placate the crocodile, but it is ultimately a futile strategy. It is occasionally necessary to remind people of this grim fact. September 30th, 2010 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
What’s wrong with capitalism is that the banking system is socialist. – Steve Baker MP talking on Cobden Centre Radio. Blog posting by interviewer and CCR boss Andy Duncan here. Listen here. It lasts twenty six minutes. That money quote comes just over half way into it. September 29th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few days ago, I linked to an article that seeks to frame some, if not all, of Obama’s political ideas within a sort of anti-colonial setting. It is fair to say that not everyone is buying it, and this article brutally takes on that thesis. And the writer, Heather MacDonald, is no leftie. At all. She writes for the Secular Right blog, which as its name implies, is a site written by those of a generally conservative bent who are not religious and generally regard the Republican Party’s involvement with the Religious Right as not a Good Thing. She does not pull her punches. And she has a point, although I still think the anti-colonial angle has some traction. It does, I think, explain things such as Obama’s apparent no very great affection, that I can see, for the UK. Even so, in general my take is that Obama is a hard-left politician who has – at least for a while – bamboozled a lot of people into thinking of him as a centrist. But it is worth pointing out that his Big Government views are not really so odd in a nation once ruled by the likes of Roosevelt, LBJ, and for that matter, Richard Nixon (who brought in wage and price controls, let’s not forget). Anyway, read the whole piece. September 29th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
It’s official. The North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean navy ship. I have this excerpt from a Jane’s newsletter:
There was a time when this form of international behavior had a name: “Act of War”. September 28th, 2010 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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