And how do I know? It has passed Julian’s Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT).
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A press release from the Association of Chief Police Officers, not surprisingly, welcomes the latest police-state measures. But it seems they were taken by surprise, too:
(Sic. Really – a direct cut-and-paste from here) The unnamed (conceivably fictitious, since no-one is offered for interview) spokes Can the Home Office not even get its news management right? A huge and complicated Bill is launched which will tear up important parts of common law, create major data-mining powers of an unprecedented nature, and create severe sanctions backed by imprisonment for people who have done nothing wrong at all if their conduct is deemed potentially helpful to criminals anywhere in the world. It was not drafted over the weekend. It is a surprise the department failed to get a Chief Constable briefed and ready to stand up to say how wonderful it is in glorious detail, complete with scary illustrative anecdote – preferably involving paedophile terrorists. ACPO are left not knowing what the Bill is called. Or how to spell what they think it might be called. Still, they are so desperate to kiss the governmental arse that something supportive is rushed out, regardless that it is gibberish. At some point current ACPO members will have sworn to uphold the law and keep the Queen’s peace. Is that not incompatible with being political lapdogs? [Thanks to PJC Journal] January 20th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 So, Yates of the Yard has arrested another lacky of the Blair Regime as part of his investigation into the cash for peerages crimes. When will the Godfather himself be nicked? I hope that the boys in blue are forcibly taking blood samples from these perps. After all, as Blair himself would say, it is in the interest of all our security that suspects contribute samples to the National DNA Database. What if Levy or Turner or Blair’s criminality manifests itself in other ways? We must have samples in case they offend again. January 20th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across the Moses Wine novels of US blogger Roger L. Simon after reading his blog a few months. Blogging has opened my eyes to authors I might never have encountered before, and I am sure many readers of this site probably had similar experiences. I am a fan of John Scalzi’s science fiction books, for example, and came across them after seeing favourable mentions over at Instapundit. And so on. I have been enjoying Roger’s book, Peking Duck, which relates the tale of Moses Wine’s trip to China in the late 1970s during the years immediately after the death of Chairman Mao. Wine is persuaded to go on a trip with a bunch of liberal-leftist writers, publishers, fashion models and various other Californians by his Aunt Sonya, who is a sort of ageing communist straight out of central casting. The group with whom Wine travels are shits of varying degrees of ghastliness, egomania and falseness. The book flags up Roger Simon’s own gradual shift away from socialism and Wine’s own observations on China and his travelling companions are well observed, all the more so for not being overtly political. It is a fictional version of PJ O’Rourke’s wonderful article, ‘Ship of Fools’, which depicted a group of far-left travellers to the former Soviet Union in his book, Republican Party Reptile. The fondness among a certain demographic for communist and repressive regimes has not died out. By coincidence, blogger Matthew Sinclair recently fisked an appalling piece of flim-flam by the British writer Will Hutton, who can still not bring himself to acknowledge the full scale of the slaughter perpetrated in Mao’s China. (Hat-tip, ASI blog). Of course, in reflecting on such matters, we should not forget that on the other end of the spectrum, there were plenty of people, like the Mitfords and so on, who were only too happy to travel to places such as Italy in the 1930s and drool over the supposed efficiency and orderliness of Fascism, or more recently, to defend ‘strong men’ types such as Saddam Hussein. Human capacity for folly is not confined to the left side of the spectrum. January 20th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Democratic Undergrounder 1: “Dude, Bush is a god-damn fascist. I asked everyone I know and like no one voted for him! Patriot Act, wiretaps made easier, locking up people in Guantanamo Bay without a trial… he’s like some whacked out Christian dictator!” Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Yeah man! It’s so good to see Chavez in Venezuela sticking it to Bush’s buddies in the oil business! He’s gonna make Venezuela totally free now! Democratic Undergrounder 1: “That’s right! Did you hear? He’s been given powers to rule by decree and now he can close down opposition newspapers, silence non-socialist radio stations and throw his political enemy’s asses in jail if they don’t do whatever his decree says.” Democratic Undergrounder 2: “Woah, cool! One day I hope we’re as free as that in the USA!” Of course, I am just imagining that discussion. I am sure nothing like that ever happened. January 20th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
It seems that the Tory Party wants less market forces and more local political planning of the economy in order to stop local shops from closing. But if enough local people wanted local shops to survive at the expense of supermarkets and out-of-town shopping centres, they would indeed already be voting for them… with their wallets and credit cards. Yet that notion seems not to compute with ‘Conservative’ Nick Hurd, the MP for Ruislip-Northwood. Presumably what he wants to ‘conserve’ is the power of local political activists by giving them even more power to decide who can and cannot make money in local communities. More ‘direct democracy’, eh Nick? I must say the Spanish solution to people who cannot restrain themselves from meddling in the lives of others who want to just go about their business starts to look more appealing by the day. January 19th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a report in the Telegraph called Entire village suspected of mayor’s murder that caught my eye.
I regard it as a truism that ‘the state is not your friend’, but it is easy to concentrate one’s attention on the outrages to personal freedom that come out of central government, the big sweeping laws that abridge liberties and which get talked about in the national newspapers. Yet in many ways the most fearful tyranny is the one which gets imposed by people living right next to you, because it is almost impossible to avoid or mitigate… well not entirely, as Mayor Miguel Grima discovered. January 19th, 2007 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
January 19th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just to state the obvious, White Rose is inactive. This is due to a simple lack of time on the part of the main contributors. Work, life, other blogging… alas White Rose is currently a ‘blog too many’. Quite possibly WR will be reactivated at some point in the future as Gawd knows the need for it has not gone away. TTFN. January 19th, 2007 | Comments are closed
Producing a plausible TV show about international terrorism without depicting Muslims is like producing a plausible TV Western without depicting cowboys. – The indispensable Robert Bidinotto January 18th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
My friend Amy Alkon (ask Perry about her delightful “Godless Harlot” business cards) is a nationally syndicated advice columnist in the US. She gets requests for assistance “a little too frequently,” as she puts it, from a certain girl in the UK. After being copied in on a round-robin email appeal from this British girl to several advice columnists, Amy pointed out to the help-seeker that she is more likely to spend her time responding to those who are not mass mailing loads of other people with the same question. How did the girl respond?
Somehow I do not think that Amy need worry about having to fight an extradition order. January 18th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
An idea of the late FA Hayek was that people could use different currencies within the same jurisdiction and break away from the idea that if you lived in country A or B, you could only use one currency within A or B and never use more than one in each place. The idea of “monopoly money” is so ingrained that to broach the idea is to incur looks of incredulity. (“But surely that would be messy!”) Now, I have looked quite a bit at the idea of competing currencies and there strikes me as being nothing that is implausible about such an idea as such. This story in the Daily Telegraph is therefore most interesting:
Article worth reading here from time back by Max More. January 18th, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
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