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My favourite banner [registration required] from the Washington DC protest last Saturday which did not happen, judging by many media outlets, was a few “tens of thousands” of right-wing protesters, according to the Washington Post, but drew rather a bigger crowd, according to the Daily Mail, than the new Messiah’s botched swearing in ceremony. What I would like to know is when “we want less” became an extremist position? September 15th, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Presently people are very angry about Barack Obama’s speech to young children (with the, now withdrawn, “how you can help your President” stuff), but the real damage is done in the ordinary days of propaganda – ordinary school days, and ordinary school textbooks, that parents do not even notice. For example, American and British schools teach the “Herbert Hoover and his free market policies” legend. Barack Obama has given the enemy a face – but what matters more is the collectivist movement (that which has for more than a century worked to gain influence in all institutions in the West). Yet many people can not see past the bogey man Obama and ignore the vast movement without which he would be unimportant. Just a Marxist son of Marxist parents – making impassioned speeches in parks (to no one in particular). It was the movement that made sure he went to the best universities, it was the movement who gave him the comfortable positions on the boards of the various charitable trusts, it was the movement who supported him in his various campaigns for political office. Sometimes the movement can become a parody of itself – for example when the “mainstream media” try to cover up for a loud mouth like Van Jones. Being a Communist is fine, but going around telling people what you are is not fine at all – it is astonishing that Van Jones was picked for high office for he lacks basic self discipline (the ability to keep his mouth shut about what he is), a quality Barack Obama has so much of. Nor is Van Jones alone: The “Diversity Officer” (Commissar) who goes around praising the Venezuelian regime, and explaining (in detail) his evil plan to destroy free speech in the United States, violates the first rule of being a bad guy (do not tell your potential victims what you are planning to do to them – at least not till they are tied up in your underground laboratory): The science Commissar going on record gloating about the prospect of forced abortions: The health Commissar musing about how the old are useless and do not enjoy life and therefore… Too many of the Commissars go about thinking they can say anything they like without it getting to Homer Simpson (who they see as the typical American voter) – because the mainstream media (both broadcasting and print) will never tell the bald, fat man what they intend to do him and his family. But the mainstream media do not have a monopoly of information these days. The movement should have made clear to Obama that he should not pick people who have film and audio records of what they have said. That he should only pick people who have learned to keep their secret plans… err… secret. However, overall the movement is very effective – on a totally different level from the pro liberty side (who are like a bunch of cats – moving in all sorts of directions and with plan of campaign, more chaos than cosmos – although it is cosmos, non forced cooperation, that we are supposed to believe in, against the taxis, forced order, of the movement). Still economic law (the nature of reality itself) is the great enemy of the movement – and it may save the West yet, in spite of the chaotic nature and crass incompetence of the defenders of Western civilisation. September 15th, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
From time to time, the Guardian, to its credit, likes to shake up its leftist readership with a dose of sanity. Here is a fine example. September 15th, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“By the end of that summer, I had concluded that the population cannot be divided into an intellectual class and a nonintellectual class; instead, I concluded, everyone is to some extent an intellectual. The college professor is an intellectual who, it is hoped, applies his intellect to his teaching and research. The skillful auto mechanic is an intellectual who uses logic to eliminate various possible causes of an engine’s failure in order to narrow it down to the actual cause. Everyone is an intellectual. Compulsory schooling has robbed millions of people of the knowledge of their intellectual birthright.” David Henderson, reflecting on how he learned to be less dismissive of folks who had not been to university. I am glad to say that I have never suffered from that form of snobbery: having a smart-as-hell dad who could have gone down the academic route but who chose a different path does help, of course, in providing a firewall against striking superior attitudes. The way things are going, not going to university will be a badge of pride. September 15th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a quick thought: in the aftermath of various financial crises – the 1997 Asian crisis (remember that one?), Long Term Capital Management (1998), various business blowups (Enron, etc), and of course, the latest excitements, one invariably hears from the Great and the Good that what we need to stop is the “box ticking mentality” when it comes to regulation. We need, so the argument goes, to rely a lot less on making sure the correct forms are filled in, and to require people in business and enforcers of laws to use more common sense. So true. And yet. Every time a new problem emerges, what happens? You guessed it right: more box-ticking. Take the case that this blog has written about in the past few days concerning the attempt to put a quarter of all UK adults under some sort of oversight in case they come into contact with children, and other groups. What is a distinguishing feature of such a bureaucratic, and in fact dangerous, development is that it is bound to involve people answering various forms, entering various answers into a sort of database. In other words, box-ticking. So if you pass the test, then voila! you are in the clear. And so certain crooks and villains will continue to get through, because they have passed the test. So the next time you hear a politician piously informing us that we are going to “get beyond the box-ticking approach”, do not believe them. September 15th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Indonesia, the most populous muslim nation in the world, is often held up as an example of how moderate islam can be reconciled with modernity.
Apparently not. September 14th, 2009 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
Norman Borlaug has died. He may well have saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived. September 13th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We have an incoherent attitude to freedom in this country. We imagine that we value freedom above almost everything else and yet at the same time we are neurotically averse to risk. Every time something terrible happens, such as the murder of a child, the public clamours for something to be done to ensure that such a thing never happens again. Such unspeakable suffering must not have been in vain; inquiries must be held and systems must be put in place; all such risks to children must be eliminated. Yet the harsh truth is that risk is the heavy price of freedom.” She points out that the development – as elaborated below on this blog by Natalie Solent – will poison civil society and discourage volunteering. I think that is actually part of the idea. I have long since abandoned any notion that such developments are introduced by well-meaning but foolish people. Their intentions are to Sovietise British society, to put all law-abiding adults under a cloud, and rip up the autonomous, private spaces that make up civil society. There is a comment I remember being made by the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen: “Old Labour wanted to nationalise things; New Labour will nationalise people.” September 13th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Instapundit, here is the modern form of the classic Mercedes car, known as the gullwing. Given its price tag, I’d only be able to afford the badge, alas. Anyway, it is nice to see a manufacturer trying to make something with a bit more of a stylistic personality. I am writing this while keeping the TV on in the background and the programme is the F1 qualifying round for Monza, Italy. Seems rather appropriate. September 12th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Morning Advertiser essentially reproduces what the IPS press office told them (there’s a shorter version of the same flacking in The Publican), and no doubt other drinks trade press will be printing some of it in due course, so here is most of it.
Note that the existing proof-of-age cards, the PASS scheme, that he goes to such trouble to rubbish, have been supported by the Home Office hitherto, and millions have them. (One of the better ones, CitzenCard, has 1.8 million cards in issue.) They are cheap. They are private and secure, the information on them being minimal and the back-up systems being separate from anything else. Suppliers take no more information from you than necessary to establish your age. They will destroy it on request. They will in general not share it with anyone without your permission. And it is a relationship in which you have contractual and statutory rights which can’t be waived to suit the supplier. The IPS line is that drinkers will prefer to be fingerprinted at their own expense, and provide a massive amount of personal information to a government agency, which will then be held on a central register for life (and likely for ever), used to cross reference other information about them, and passed out to a range of government agencies that are entitled to ask for it. The ‘convenience’ of this card will be enhanced by criminal penalties if you lose it and don’t report it, civil ones if you fail to inform the authorities about changes to your residence or other circumstances, a log of every time the card is used and where, and the possibility that the information required, what can be done with it, and the obligations attaching to the scheme can all be altered by regulation. Who-whom? September 12th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Parents who ferry children to clubs face criminal record checks, reports the Guardian.
Other interesting quotes from the article:
And
And
I do not know if this will actually come to pass. The proposal is massively unpopular on all sides of the political aisle, judging from the comments to this Guardian article and indeed the comments to this Daily Mail article, and this BBC Have Your Say forum. But a moribund Government can convulse in strange ways; they may not care very much about popularity. September 11th, 2009 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 11th, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
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