Snippets

School Exam:

This guy was forced out and branded a nutball by the educational establshment. Let's see if Joe Public feels the same way (and if he does make a bundle, are any of his critics going to lose their jobs ?).

Classy:

There's a natural tendency to feel sympatheric to those who've lost children - but some don't half push it.

Obvious:

Our alleged intellectual elite are surprised to find that detailing a geologist to talk to a candidate for thirty minutes is a lousy way to spot talent. To which I'd only add that it also gives an advantage to those whose backgrounds has equipped them with an excess of confidence and social skills over those from more humble origins, who may well be more talented.

If only there was some kind of objective measure of ability....

Outrageous:

Labour MP Chris Bryant claims there were racist and homophobic taunts at a pro-hunting demonstration even though no one else supports his claim. You might think unsubstansiated claims from a partisan hack might be taken with a pinch of salt, but the World's Greatest Broadcaster thinks differently.

Predictable:

Nu Lab celebrate the upcoming Freedom of Information Act as only they know how.

Deja Vu

So, it's official: even the NYT can't hide the fact that Oliver Stone's Alexander is the worst film ever made. It's still a shock to the system for those of us who recall how big Oliver Stone was in the 80s, to see how utterly he's self-destructed. Of course, where Oliver Stone is concerned, the 90s onwards were just one big death spiral. Nevertheless, it is something of a shock to see how badly he's handled a project potentially replete with important themes: the clash of civilisations, the border between firm leadership and despotism, the attempts by the Greeks to remake the Middle East..... Yet, Stone passes them all by in favour of so radical gay posturing.

Who does he think he is ? The Conservative Party ?

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Something Else!

How's this for a war cry ?

The Tories would not push ahead with introducing identity cards if elected, the shadow home secretary has suggested.

"England really hopes every man will give it a go."

David Davis said it was unlikely ID cards would feature on his party's manifesto if an election was called before government plans became law.

"I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I'm quite a bit stronger than you think."

On the day before the ID card bill is published, Mr Davis told Sky News he had serious misgivings about the plans and would scrutinise them carefully.

"They have sowed the wind, and they will be in for quite a bit of bad weather themselves."

Really.....

The state wants to stamp free citizens like cattle, making free movement dependant on the whim of the state, and the Conservatives won't push ahead with it.

Gosh, Dave, do you think you're going a little too far ? You won't be able to go for a walk in the park without being interrogated by some knuckle-dragging government thugs, and David Davies has serious misgivings. Wait until they reveal the 'Summary Execution Act (2006)' - we might even get a 'deeply concerned'.

Honestly, they are quite useless. So that's really the question d'jour. What reason does anyone have to support the Conservative Party ? I mean, positive reasons to really support the party - 'the other lot are worse' doesn't count. I'm talking real, 100%, 'that's a great idea' policies.

Are there any ?

Why It Matters

Conservative bloggers are often accused of being obsessed with a certain Shepherd's Bush pro-terrorist lobbying group. Liberals put on their oh-so-reasonable act and enquire why one media organisation sends us so reliably ballistic. One answer is simply this: The Indie might be horrible, but at least you can read a copy of Right-Wing Maniac Monthly without having to give Robert Fisk a fiver. So yes, the licence fee does grate. But even that's not all of it.

In an excellent article in the American Spectator, Lawrence Henry points out that even in America - home of Rush, Fox et al - the news agenda is still massively influenced by the legacy media. That's why the BBC matters. If journalism is the first draft of history, then the BBC's output sets the frame of reference. It's no exaggeration to say that the Beeb acts as a gatekeeper, determining which stories are the scandal d'jour and which are left by the wayside. That's why BBC bias matters - not only the outright distortions the BBC airs, but also the way it can hype a non-story that suits its agenda (Jenin!) or strangle one that doesn't (Ivory Coast). As long as we have a government-coddled elephantine media organisation in existence, it will be able to distort the news agenda to suit its own ideology.

They're Called That For A Reason

In a stunning rebuttal to the image of Conservative intellectuals as a bunch of out-of-touch, Metropolitan elitists, the Speccie exclusively reveals that the Polizei are pondscum. See ? All that time spent at Oxford was worthwhile after all. The Speccie is as yet undecided on the question of whether the Pope really is Catholic, but at least they've got something right.

Not to blow my own trumpet, but some of us have been saying this for years. Meanwhile, it was the Spectator that ran a leader article last month ridiculing S******* for complaining about police misconduct at Hillsborough. Hey - at least Nicky Samengo-Turner is still alive.

You will note, of course, that the Hillsborough Creative Writing and Evidence BBQ Society first convened under You-Know-Who. That's one reason why I'm sceptical about the attempt to lay all the blame on Princess Tony. Yes, Nu Lab has undoubtedly helped to screw things up further, but there are other forces at work.

Equally, the proposed cure for the Police sounds like more of the same. Samengo-Turner, ex-Guards officer that he is, proposes that the Police really need to organised more like the Guards. It's a tempting thought, but it misses the point that the Police have already been developing their own 'officer class' over the past decades, with systems such as the accelerated promotion scheme for graduates and the like. If anything, the development of an managerial elite has been one of the main factors in getting where we are today.

What's happened to the Police is what's happened to Britain writ large. Take the question of morality. Liberals hate the idea of the law being based on morals, yet without that vital compass, what is the law ? Just a set of arbitrary rules. Is it any wonder that we live in an era both of lawlessness and ever-expanding legislation ? Once the law has been hijacked by pressure groups and posturing politicians, who really cares ? Once a police officer could take pride in his job - he understood that there was anarchy and there was the Law. The lawman stood between the predators and the vulnerable, holding the line between the forces of chaos and those of order. Now ? They're just a bunch of hired guns, offering their loyalty to whosoever holds the whip hand today. When an organisation has no morals, why expect moral behaviour from its members ?

Of course, there are plenty of other factors. Take, for example, the politics of envy and petty spite that Labour has done so much to promote. Add in the dumbing down of the education system, with the parallel obsession with building self-esteem even in those with every right to feel like trash. You can even factor in the 1980s obsession with managerialism and efficiency. To the point: if Blair dropped dead tomorrow, that wouldn't be enough to fix the Police.

Yet, saying that the Police are merely an extreme product of our society, does not mean that there are not special problems which affect how we should deal with them. Here's the truth: governments (of whatever stripe) like the idea of well-armed, amoral thugs at their beck and call. So don't expect Michael Howard to save you. Fortunately, being a Conservative, the answer is obvious to me. We don't need government, we can rely on social pressures - in short, we need to bring back the idea of shunning.

What we do need - to coin a phrase - is to 'understand less and condemn more' (if only that guy had become Conservative leader!). Yes, I'm aware that (say) the Chief Superintendent will manage to strong-arm his way into the golf club with a few threats, but that doesn't mean he should be able to find partners. Und so weiter.

So, I suppose I do have to give some credit to The Spectator after all. The more people who know how the Police operate, the closer we are to the day when it is as unacceptable to be a police officer as it is to be a filthographer (As unacceptable ? At least when you order some 'artistic' material, it actually arrives). Or to put it another way - if you're quite happy to associate with a man who arrests people on bogus grounds, then beats them senseless in the back of the van, you can't really complain when you eat a baton.

A Hooray Henry Writes

Laban Tall passes on a report from one of the toffee-nosed fox bothering fraternity.

Another 404 Joke

Seems to sum it up pretty well.

Now, This Is Science

A method to convert Petrolov vodka into something actually drinkable. Even better, it uses one of the health freaks favourite toys.

That sound you hear is mass gnashing of prohib teeth.

The Current Crisis

So, things are so bad that we need this, so we don't get one of these, except that at the same time the government is doing this.

It's a crisis, a huge crisis. Take a blow torch to the constitution, erect gallows in the town square, send off our elite police anti-terrorist officers to beast the Tristans... no, wait, that's not right. They can't be that s t o o p i d. Really ? Even them ? Admittedly, someone may nuke Leeds, but the real enemy are the toffs.

Is this not the perfect barometer of Nu Lab's unfitness for government ? A single issue which exposes both their obsessive desire to reduce the citizenry to neo-serfdom combined with the myopic inability to consider anything more profound than their own petty hatreds and obsessions. Here, after all, was the party which evaluated the world's worst terrorist attack as a good day to bury bad news. Labour will not make Britain more secure, on the contrary, their inability to consider security as anything other than a useful alibi for the acquisition of ever more power means Britain will continue to be virtually undefended. For all Blair's fancy rhectoric, the reality remains that in time of war, he's sending the terrorist hunters to hide outside Otis Ferry's door.

100% Proof

What did I tell you ? The rewards for those who have mastered the art of drinking are so obvious that even slavering prohibs can no longer deny them:

Alcohol misuse is also 'upmarket' - nearly 50% of upper-middle class and upper-class adults are frequent drinkers, compared to 30% of the rest of the population.

Yes, indeed - you can drink yourself richer. Or to put it another way, failure to plan and implement a personal drinking program means playing Russian roulette with you and your family's finances. Remember - barcadi beats bankruptcy.

Motes/Beams Foxes Beeb

The Spanish have become the latest people to find out that it's easy enough to get the L3 to whisper sweet nothings into your ear, but they won't respect you in the morning. The bull botherors were the toast of Islington when they heroically capitulated to Al-Quaida, to say nothing of their ongoing campaign to free Gibraltar from the Gibraltarians. Suddenly, times have changed - to listen to their current rhetoric, the L3 might not have wanted to invade Iraq, but they're sure up for bombing Barcelona.

A section of the crowd at the Spain-England game abused black players, and that means everyone called Jose is a Nazi ? The Left is so transparent. Every position is based simply on the desire to stick it to western civilisation. When the Spanish bravely surrendered, they became lefty pin-ups. Now, the Spanish find themselves on the side of the vast white, male, hegemony thingy, all bets are off.

The Left always enjoys an opportunity to get giddily self-righteous, and this particular incident fulfils all the standard criteria, namely it allows the L3 to indulge their lynch mob mentality, all the while slapping themselves on the back for bravely coming out against something no one agrees with anyway.

As with all the best Lefty posturing, there's a distinct air of humbuggery about it. Of course, it goes without saying that the Left's exquisite sensitivity for slights to some groups, coexists with near catatonia when even the gravest offences are committed against those groups judged to enemies of the progress. Ditto, only a total fascist would point out a certain contradiction between the Lefty demands that the England team should protest/walk off the pitch/machine gun the Spanish manager etc - combined with the not so subtle implication that failure to do so means they were also guilty - and the Left's raging at anyone who suggests that the Vast Majority of Peace-Loving Muslims might say a few words against the head-choppers. Those are totally different cases.

Nope - the humbuggery is a particularly fine vintage this of all weeks as the Left has spent it getting in touch with its inner Klansman. The BBC don't need a passport to go and hunt racists - they have plenty in house.

The Choice

I was going to resist commenting on Boris Johnson's descent - gloating is hard to do well - but it so happens that at the self-same time Johnson was going down, across town something else was happening which shows better than Bill from Stratford could, why the Conservative Party deserves to go down the U-bend. Recall that Boris Johnson became a hero to a large part of the Conservative Party for telling blokes like this that they could shove it.

Following His Leaders Example

This guy will go far under Nu Lab - and all of it past 70.

Whose War ?

War has a way of ruthlessly exposing the posturing and pretensions of peacetime, but not everyone recognises that fact. The L3 media are still trying to float the meme that this is 'George W Bush's War on Terror'. Really ? Robert Spencer decided to analyse just where the war was being fought and, wouldch'believe it, it turns out that large parts of the battlefield involve neither Yanks or Zionists. Maybe it something other than the Vast Jewish World Government Conspiracy or American imperialism which is driving the war ?

Just Die Already

Laban Tall gives a pointer to another excellent slice of Theodore Dalrymple. By now, everyone knows what to expect. Still, I think he misses an important point in his analysis. Dr Ted rightly blames our alleged cultural elite for its role in the disintegration of British culture. Too true. To take an example at random - suppose you have a guy who cheats on his wife, marries his mistress, cheats on her with a subordinate, pressures the girl to have an abortion, then lies about it to his boss - Tory MP or chav ? Who knows, but he hates Scousers 'cause they ain't got no class.

The thing is though, Hollywood is no paragon of virtue. The US elite is full of examples of sleazy low-life. Who'd have thought that the most significant legacy of the Clinton years would turn out to be changing forever the way we look at cigars ? But large parts of the US remain manifestly unaffected by Liberal lunacy. How so ?

In the US there remains a significant divide between Red Staters and Blue - brilliantly parodied here by Iowahawk. The elites in Manhattan are free to blather about obtaining self-actualisation through abortion, but real Americans ain't listening - they've got their own culture. In Britain, it sometimes seems that if the government did manage to push through a North East Assembly, it would set it up in Chelsea.

As long as government persists in trying to run the country from inside the M25, the elite will be able to impose their views on normal people. Equally, nothing would improve the quality of journalism in this country like a Guardian journalist being sent alone onto a Leeds council estate to explain that smackheads are really just exploring an alternative lifestyle.

That's the challenge for the Conservative Party. Forget the Liberal babblings about social exclusion and poverty. The people most disenfranchised these days are the people who hoover their own floors. If you're a scrote, who cares ? If you're Cherie Blair, you have people to do that for you. But if you're just an ordinary, working bloke, you're getting it both ends up. You got scum breaking in to steal your TV, while Her Majesty's Government explains why you can clearly afford to pay yet more tax. If the Conservatives are to win the culture war, or even elections, then they need to mobilise these people.

But don't expect anyone in the modern Conservative Party to see it that way. In fact, they're going the other way.

The Conservatives are thinking of reducing the role of party members in selecting a leader, reports suggest.

A Tory spokesman has confirmed the party's board has been consulting about changes to its constitution.

But the decision would rest with senior Tory volunteers and would not be taken before a general election, he said.

The fate of Iain Duncan Smith, dumped as Tory leader after a no confidence vote from MPs, prompted many to question the current system.

Some would say that's a chicken and egg situation. Did the MPs turn against IDS because of the lack of public support or was the lack of public support at least in part down to the parliamentary party's tantrum about serving under a leader who was (gasp!) selected by the ordinaries ? Whatever - but if we're supposed to be impressed by the contrast between loser IDS and Michael "not necessarily" Howard, I'll have what they're drinking.

It needs to be emphasised that the people they're talking about are party members, the envelope stuffers, doorstepers and phone bashers that the Party relies on. If Tory MPs are prepared to shaft these people, there's nowt down for Joe Public.

That's what's wrong with the Conservative Party. Not only that's it's disengaged from the culture wars, it's disengaged from the actual culture. There was, and is, a certain breed of Conservative who thinks it's a scream how Lady T was supported by so many taxi drivers. Funnily enough, the time the Party moved on from appealing to taxi drivers was also the time it moved on from winning elections.

Given that the Conservative Party shows such contempt for actual conservatives, why shouldn't the public reciprocate ?

Treason Party Urges Withdrawl From Britain

Ginger McBlackout has a cunning plan. He calls it 'tough liberalism'. Yep - the Treason Party is going to ruthlessly grovel to criminals, it'll be an all-out surrender with no holds barred appeasement.

"The real, effective solutions to crime are liberal solutions - punishment and rehabilitation," he will continue.
"But action to tackle re-offending, or to guide those headed for a life of crime into lawful productive lives, is certainly not a soft option, in fact it is not an option at all.
"It is essential if we are going to reduce crime. That is tough liberalism."

Sounds terrifying.

As ever, check the dog that doesn't bark. After all, if the Treason Party really thinks crime can be defeated by love power and community healing sessions, won't they be looking to extend the program to City fraud and tax evasion ? Let's address the underlying causes of insider dealing.

But, no. You will never see share fiddlers being turned over to City community justice panels. All this talk of root causes, long-term plans and the like goes out the window when the question of tax skimming comes up. It's all just a front. It's not that the Left is being 'non-judgemental' in its dealings with scum, on the contrary, it has judged them and decided that mugging old ladies is nothing worth getting hot under the collar about, smackheads are just loveable scamps and joyriding is just the modern equivalent to scrumping apples.

That's the reality of what the Treason Party is proposing. It's a natural progression, of course. Once you've got through justifying their foreign policy, with Saddam being no worse than Bush who's as bad as Osama who's no worse than Blair, then explaining how child molesters are really just confused must be a cinch.

Property Prices Crash In Hell

Beeb's Tourette's Syndrome Strikes Again

There is, rightly, at lot of attention paid to what the Beeb passes off as news. But that shouldn't blind us to the fact that BBC bias is pervasive. The Beeb's own version of Tourettes means that it can't hardly give out the weather forecast without trying to insert a political message.

Take like night's program, Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets, a member of that most accursed of genres, the drama documentary. This featured a space ship exploring the solar system, and first stop was Venus, which apparently suffers what the V/O inevitably informed us was a runaway greenhouse effect, thereby offering a 'warning for our planet'. See ? That's what's going to happen to us now the BushChimpler has been reelected.

Really ? Where the Venusians a little too heavy on the accelerator ? Should they have invested more in wave power ? Nope - the self-same documentary informed us that the CO2 was expelled into the atmosphere by massive amounts of volcanic activity. Funnily enough, volcanoes have not previously been considered to be either man-made or covered by Kyoto. Let's leave aside the fact that the L3 has always previously used the term 'greenhouse effect' as a synonym for anthrogenic global warming, and ask if there's any other reasons why Venus is hotter than Earth. Hmmmmm…y'know, there could just be one.

So there you have it. Venus is a warning to us. It's a warning not to have huge amount of volcanic activity and not to move the Earth any closer to the enormous fusion reactor at the centre of the system. It might just be me, but I can't help but think these two things may be beyond even Halliburton's ability. Until then, we'll just have to work out why the Beeb thinks this all means we should ban 4x4s.

Wrong Number

Hmmmmm...sounds like Blunkett's been at the Gimmickomatic again. He's going to give out the mobile number for Mr Plod so he can spend two hours a day fielding calls asking why it takes so long for the Police to respond to crimes. PC DC will be pleased.

Mr Blunkett said he wanted "to go back to a time when I was very young, when you expected the police to be part of the community and the community to be part of policing and where people were joined together in partnership making it work".

Now, is that concentrated BS or what ? The whole thrust of Nu Lab policy has been to disengage the Police from the communities they serve. That's how we got landed with a current crop of police top brass who commute to work from a nearby universe. The whole concept of using policing as a form of social engineering, by definition, is based on the idea that the police exist to remake the community, that the police exist effectively as a colonial power, civilising these savages. It's a bit late for Nu Lab to start citing Dixon of Dock Green.

In passing, it needs to be noted that idea of a partnership between Police and community would tend to work a whole lot better if the Police didn't start yapping about vigilantism everytime someone successfully protects their family.

This being a Nu Lab policy, it's always best to look for the sting in the tail. Yep - here it is:

The plans also include the idea of allowing people join police forces at different levels rather than the traditional way of making everybody spend specific amounts of time as a constable before being promoted.

At least the current system means officers will have had to spend at least some time on Earth. Now, all bets are off. Of course, with Nu Lab no policy is complete without the obligatory race hustling:

There will also be "specific exercises" to encourage black and Asian people to join the police at senior ranks.

Yes, indeed. It's Chief Constable Abu Hamza, with Winston Silcott as his deputy. Splendid.

No Blood For Dilithium

Stephen 'Bastards' Pound confirms that Nu Lab is now targeting the hysterical, teenage, girlie demographic.

Dhimmis D'Jour

Excellent reflexive dhimmitude on show at the 'hideously white' BBC Six O'Clock News yesterday. There was a segment featuring a BBC reporter wandering around Tower Hamlets, reporting on life in the big city. At one point our man is walking down the road when he is stopped by a mob of Muslims who tell him he's entering 'Bangladesh' and there are no whites allowed down their road. Breaths were held across the country as viewers contemplated the possibility that the Beeb may actually be caught telling the truth about the Small Minority of Extremists setting up Islamic enclaves in British cities. Fortunatly, the reporter in question made sure to tell us on his V/O that he 'didn't feel threatened' by the mob. Doubtless, the Beeb will be similarly supportive of any small towns which object to Muslims moving in, providing they do it in a non-threatening way.

Brilliant

As I usually do when I find myself teetering on the edge of an emotional breakdown, I turned to morning talk shows for guidance.

Liberal Larry gets to grips with morals.

Police Brutality

PC DC compares the doctrines of Sir Robert Peel, founder of modern British Policing, with those of Sir John Stevens, Nu Lab sock puppet. It ain't pretty, but someones got to do it.

Meanwhile, approproatly enough, Merseyside Police (cops for sale or rent)reveal that they've identified the real enemy. Let no man say that the Police have a warped sense of priorities.

I Don't Remember Derek Hatton Blowing Up Anfield

Something I've said before, but is the media trying to have its cake and eat it over Iraq or what ? On the one hand, we have industrial size quantities of hand wringing over the possibility that during the expected-for-several-months assault on Fallujah some civilians might be killed. True, the 'insurgents' may dress in civilian clothes and deliberately set up in civilian occupied areas, but all civilian casualties are the Coalition's fault. All this insanity would be bad enough, but check out the media's reaction to this sort of thing. Huge bomb attack, many civilian casualties, must be the fault of the Coalition for not providing security.

Hey, it's bad enough to hear the Jihadis referred to as insurgents or militants but when the self-same twenty-first century Robin Hoods blow up a bus load of civilians, you start to detect a double-standard at work here. The media claims that when US forces fire on a sniper and kill a bloke in the next room, why, it proves the US Army is just the same as the Waffen SS. Yet, no amount of exploded school buses will result in the media using the T-word to describe the 'insurgents'. Why no bleeding heart soliloquies from the media class on whether the insurgents are doing enough to avoid civilian casualties ? Then again, to accuse the media of merely spinning for the terrorists is to let them off to lightly.

Terrorists set up a fire position in a densely-populated area. US forces return fire and civilians are killed. The media gives the terrorists a propaganda coup by citing another example of US thuggery. Does that make it more or less likely that the terrorists will try again, that more civilians will be killed ? And does the fact that no one in the mainstream media will allow this to deter them not indicate that the media needs no lessons from the Pentagon in contempt for the lives of civilians ?

Go For The Throat

Few things in life are more certain than that when Liberals talk of uniting the country and healing division, it means they've just been whupped in an election. Hearing this garbage from US Liberals is be bad enough, but hearing it from Britain's L3 community is enough to make a dog throw.

True, saith the L3, Dubya won the popular vote, the electoral college, an outright majority and the highest number of votes ever, but one can hardly call that a mandate. Like, hello ? Nu Lab have never come anywhere near that kind of dominance, but if Smirking Sebastian had stood in Downing St on the second of May 97 and announced that now was the Year Zero, who would really have been surprised (although, in fairness, it must be said that in the case of Nu Lab they're far more likely to force people out of the country and into the cities) ?

Blair it was who promised to destroy the forces of Conservatism - can you imagine if Dubya pledged to smash Liberalism ? Heads would be popping all over Islington. Consider that the flagship policy for Nu Lab this term has not been NHS reform, a welfare shake-up or a Concorde-type project. Nope - it's been waging war on the countryside. Say what you like about Republicans, but you'd struggle to find an incident of the type of foaming at the mouth lunacy that infects Nu Lab MPs when they talk about county folk, all of which, incidentally, is usually accompanied by some pious dribblings about democracy. Find me a right-wing equivalent of PC ? Or a right-wing opposite number to the 'No Conservatives Need Apply' Beeb ?

Nope - if scoring a massive 25% of the vote is enough to justify Blair's Kulture Kampf against anywhere with cows in it, then the L3 can STFU about Bush doing what he was elected to do.

But I bet they don't.

It's Not About Freedom

Another side-effect of Dubya's win was a sighting of a favourite Liberal bogeyman, the alleged antipathy of the religious right in America to homosexuals, now supposedly reified in the form of opposition to gay 'marriage'. After all, say the L3, these naughty Christians want to deprive gay people of their right to marry.

We'll leave aside the question of how you can be deprived of a right you don't have in the first place, and 'move on' - as the L3 would no doubt say - to consider the question of what rights it is that gays are being deprived of. After all, a marriage is a complex thing so it's worth setting out exactly what is required. First of all, there's a need for a Priest. Fortunately, there are a fair number of Liberal (in every sense) Christian denominations which support gay 'marriage'. Also, you need to book somewhere for a reception. Again, there are many of these available. Flowers are always useful, and here many gays are particularly well served, quite possibly with the chance to get them at trade prices. Then there is the question of the honeymoon which…..

Wait, you mean that wasn't what you were talking about ? The Christians aren't actually firebombing shops which sell wedding rings to gay couples ? You mean what they want isn't the marriage per se, it's….

What it is that gay rights activists want is not the right to hold a wedding reception without crazed theocrats storming the place, no - it's the legal right to coerce the aforementioned Christians (and everyone else) to recognise them as married. You may think this is all perfectly reasonable - but it's not an argument based on freedom. On the contrary, the end result is to use the power of the state to force people to acknowledge gay couples as 'married' even if they themselves think the whole thing is ludicrous.

Again, you may think there are legitimate grievances, as far as issues such as taxation and the like go. This may be true, but that is not the argument these people have chosen to have. On the contrary, a movement designed to oppose iniquities in (eg) inheritance tax would have forged an alliance with carers while gay rights activists have very definitely chosen to not to address any individual anomalies - no, when they say gay marriage, they mean just that: the ability to coerce third parties into supporting their lifestyle. This debate is just further proof of what has been blindingly obvious since the 1990s. The gay rights movement is no longer concerned with protecting the rights of its members to follow their own lifestyle as it is with curtailing the rights of those whose lifestyles gays do not approve of.

RUV Justice

As a social conservative myself, I'd love to believe that the US election marks the first signs of the backlash against Liberalism. Of course, it's not just us who feels that way. Plenty of Liberals (and not a few Paleocons) want to ram home the message that this election result was down to bible-totting hillbillies. The Left loves this cover story as it allows them to indulge their elitism and to cast Conservatives as hicks but, more to the point, it distracts from the gaping hole at the heart of modern Liberalism.

One significant factor must surely have been the War and, more specifically, the many natural - even lifelong - Democrats who voted for Bush out of sheer disgust with their party's refusal to take the War seriously, call them Republican Until Victory.

There are a very large group of people who realise that the Democrats, and indeed Liberalism generally, have reacted to the world crisis by taking a hike to Venus. It's not that the Liberals advocate bad policies for winning the War, it's that they deny there even is one. Not even a world in flames can shake the essential narcissism of the Liberal.

There are plenty of right-wing objections to Dubya, for a start his 'quick, everyone, have some cash' spending policies, yet the right put aside it differences to stand solidly behind him. In contrast, the Left was unable to process the War as anything other than the continuation of its own obsessions by other means. The nadir of this attitude was when Senator Murray paid tribute to Bin Laden's role in building day care centres in Afghanistan - presumably to help all those women trying to manage career and family under the Taliban. That was an extreme case, but not qualitatively different from the rest of the Liberal approach to the War. True, Bin Laden may have been ranting about the humiliation of losing Al Andalus in the fifteenth century but what he was really talking about was Kyoto.

There can be no better proof of how unfit the Left is to deal with the War than the events of this last week. To listen to the media, Bush's victory meant Hollywood would be under siege by a torch-wielding mob of Christian fundamentalists, demanding they produce nothing more contentious than remakes of 'It's A Wonderful Life', and indeed a film maker was murdered by a religious fanatic even before the voting totals were in. If you spent your days fearing that failure to possess a bible would become a criminal offence - as all Liberals claimed to - then this should really have raised your hackles, except on closer inspection, it turns out the assailant was a……

Here was Liberalism in all its glory. Liberals constantly defame Christianity and its practitioners, all the while professing to be terrified by Christians yet when confronted with a cult whose adherents really do believe in killing the unbeliever, why, they think that's just a quirky bit of cultural heritage. This is the central psychosis of modern Liberalism, the belief that that which they wish was true, is true: Christians are crazed fanatics, while Moslems are noble savages, and don't none of you Nazi go pointing out any gaps in the Manhattan skyline.

This kind of post-modern insanity is not a new departure for Liberals, but the brutal reality of battle sure throws Liberal delusions into sharp relief. Clinton could claim that it depends what the meaning of 'is' is, but a murder in broad daylight demands better than these kind of word games. Indeed, there is a danger here for the Left. Given the sheer mendacity of the L3 approach to the war, how many RUVs will be lead to question how many other sacred cows turn out to be just so much hamburger ? Who knows ? But until the Left can deal with Bin Laden on his own terms, rather than as a mere stick to beat Bush with, they will all be - to coin a phrase - unfit for command.

Civilisation's Oldest Enemy Returns

The thing about living in a bubble is that there are no normal people around to point out even the most absurd contradictions in your position. Take the Beeb's efforts last Wednesday - on the same channel, on the same night, the Beeb ran both The Power of Nightmares and a supposed expose of the evils of the booze industry. So the people flying airliners into buildings aren't a threat, but the brewers are going to kill us all.

The program itself, The Booze Business: Consuming Spirits, was a masterpiece of the Beeb's po-faced, finger-wagging moralising. The program tracked a group of young ladies out on the town. Now take a wild shot in the dark which town it was filmed in ? Yep - Newcastle. Let no man say the Beeb is obsessed with stereotypes. The actual report was a perfect example of the 'gorillas in the mist' style Beeb reporters adopt every time they pass the Watford Gap, combined with the aforementioned sermonising, and no little humbuggery. The voice-over informed us that the ladies had spent over £100 on booze - no, actually they'd spent £20 on booze and £80 on tax. Hearing a whiny Liberal complain that people are spending too much on booze when it's people like him who have driven prices up in the first place is like hearing the guy who killed his parents lay claim to the sympathy of the court because he's an orphan.

Still, the Beeb was proving, once again, to be a perfect exemplar of the prejudices of lemon-sucking, Metropolitan Liberals. There's no two ways about it: foul stench, reports of unusual activity in the sewers...yep, the prohibitionists are back, and with them one of the defining battles of human civilisation.

Alcohol has been one of the common factors in the development of modern life. As far back as archaeologists go, they find evidence of hooch. Hell, man may even be a Johnny Come Lately here. Not only will several higher mammals make special efforts to drink booze when it's available, but even in the wild several primates will go out of their way to obtain those types of fruits which are prone to fermentation. What we do know for certain is that booze has been our loyal companion through the long march of human civilisation [if only there was a large group of people who didn't drink, we could see if their civilisation really was as rich and civilised as the prohibs say it must be] .

Booze has been with us from the dawn of history, and quite possibly so have the pinch-mouthed battalions of lemon-sucking freaks pushing prohibition. They say booze isn't healthy, yet what of those studies claiming that consuming certain forms of alcohol can improve health ? Shouldn't these freaks be out encouraging teetotallers to sink a few ? Maybe it isn't health per se that motivates them. They say people spend too much on booze, but they happily rake off the proceeds of punitive taxation. They claim booze is linked to violence amongst young people, so how come our schools are so violent ? As I recall, most comprehensives only serve lager, so maybe youth violence is down to the actual youths, rather than the sinister brewing collectives.

No, you want to know what really motivates these twisted human leeches ? Check out this 'ere poster. That's how they see it - drunks refusing to play their part in society, refusing to accept their responsibilities to be worker bees in the sociological hive. I doubt that one prohib in a thousand would question the fact that the poster is from the USSR, that the drunk is being criticised for not allowing himself to be a willing slave in the service of evil. To fellow drunks, this bloke isn't a waster, he's a hero, an almost Randian figure refusing to allow his mind to be enslaved by a Satanic regime. But don't expect the prohibs to see that. The prohib, almost by definition, is a collectivist - who else would rant & rave about someone else drinking ?

The prohib may have a laundry list of complaints against vitamin XXX, but it all boils down to one thing, a peevish, schoolmarmey rant that people aren't taking the right things seriously. This seems like a simple thing, yet it lies at the heart of the great divide between drunks and the paisty-faced creeps who wish to persecute us.

To the prohib, all life is a grim struggle, all individuality is the enemy. Think of a prohib and you think of some screechy, red-faced hag. Think of a drunk and you think of Dean Martin. The prohib trades on the supposed horrors awaiting the drunk, the drunk has no need of such fear mongering, he simply points out that life is good, and it can be even better with vodka.

Prohibs claim that drunks are irresponsible losers and deadbeats, that all the successful people are maniacal teetotallers: after all, how can a mind rotted by alcohol possibly match the spotless mind of the teetotaller ? I believe we tested this hypothesis some years ago, when we compared the performance of two Chief Executives, one sober and one drunk.

That's really what it's all about: who your role model is. Whether you think life is just great as is, or whether you want to ascend to the glory of your inner something and claim your eternal something else and then….. Who cares ? If you really can't stand booze then we, unlike YOU, are not forcing our lifestyle on anyone. Leave us alone, shut it and just sit in the corner and enjoy an evian or something.

Meanwhile, On The Other Side Of Town

While the Left is OK with homicidal film criticism by members of certain peace-loving religions, there are others which don't quite get the same pass. The ever-dhimmi BBC has posted a topic at (Don't) Have Your Say covering the whole Anglican women priests imbroligo, and - predictably - the L3 are in fine form:

How do we know that Jesus did not choose any women apostles? I cannot accept that God would have a preference in this matter. Anybody in the church who refuses to acknowledge this fact is in denial and should question their faith. Religion, in whatever form, should not be a male preserve. Male control should end or certain religions will die out and quite rightly so in my opinion.
R.C. Robjohn, UK

Yes, indeed. How do we know who Jesus chose ? If only there was some kind of biography of his life. Until then, actual Christians will just have to rely on moonbats like Robbo pronouncing on whether their faith is valid or not.

If churches want to discriminate against women, that's up to them. But they should not be allowed any funding of any kind from the state, and at the very least should have their automatic right to be a registered charity removed.
Alex M, London

Yes, indeed. Freedom of religion, except they'll be differential treatment for those religions which won't get with the PC program.

D'you ever get the feeling that the L3 don't really get the whole freedom of worship thing ?

Yet more prejudice from a church that claims to represent a loving God. See these organisations for what they are; power hungry bigots, not Christian organisations. If you are a Christian find your own way, do not believe the hate these people preach. They should be prosecuted, if any other employer was openly prejudiced like this they would be in court. This goes for all the other religious organisations that practise prejudice too, and that is nearly all of them.
Chris, UK

Yes, Christians, find your own way, unless it's a way Chris disapproves of, in which case you'll be prosecuted.

This is a pathetically narrow-minded notion in this day and age. Perhaps Jesus did choose only men as his apostles, but that was in an age when men still beat women in public for disobeying then. I thought society had moved on since then.
Martin, Reading, UK

Yeah, Jesus was an OK kind of guy, but honestly, the dude was sooooo two thousand years ago. It's time to move on and start worshipping someone more modern, like Bono.

Meanwhile, research continues into the question of whether the L3 have become such a bunch of narcistic drama queens that they've lost all perspective on the nature of true evil.

This is a huge step backwards for equality. How can we complain about other cultures treating women as second class when a significant sector of our own society is taking this awful step back to the dark ages.
Kelly, UK

The ROP stones young women to death, we refuse to dictate to churches who they can employ as priests. So, who are we to criticise them ?

Of course, the real question d'jour is whether it would be OK if the Church met them halfway, and agreed to shoot the women priests ?

Film Maker Shot. Police Rule Out Militant Buddhists

Well, this is going to be a classic. The dhimmis have been explaining for years how Al-Quaida and the like are merely responding to US imperialism, in contrast to the progressive policies practiced by the Continentals. Let's see how they spin the murder of a film director in Holland into a brave blow against AmeriKKKa.






Oh yes - the Beeb's Have Your Say team haven't got around to posting a topic on this yet. Quelle surprise!

Question D'Jour

When, and how, did this country become so feminised that we lost the will to tell these people where they can shove it ?

Who Is It ?

Sometimes, the simplest ideas are the best. See how hard it is to tell John Kerry from a couple of other prominent Liberal icons - only 7 ex 20 in my case.

Dhimms D'Jour

Hmmmm...the headline's 'Ethnic violence hits China region'. You have to read down to paragraph three to find out that there's a little more to it: 'The clashes were between members of China's majority Han community and the Muslim Hui ethnic group.'

The L3 have spent years trying to prove that opposition to the death cult is secretly ispired by racism, so why so coy the one time that claim can't be laughed out of court ? Of course, given that one of their central talking points is that that the war is actually a racist war waged by white, fundementalist Christians against innocent Jihadis, the news that the Middle Kingdom is also engaged with the death cult does kind of bring that into question.

Add communist China to Hindu India, the secular USA, Buddhist Thailand and Israel (which may well be Jewish) in the list of participants in "George W Bush's war". He must have more clout than you'd think.

TerAYZah In NRO

I told you she was comedy gold.

Fire Them All!

You think you can do this thing to me ? You think I'm just some bum ? Some stupid hick, gets his farm raided twice a week ? You're not dealing with some schmucks here, we don't care what some lawyers say, what twelve idiots say. We're not waiting for you people to give us the OK, we don't care what you cake-eating wheenies say. We don't support your system. Me and the boys, we do what we want. So, we shoot a few people, you got a problem with that ? 'Cause you got a problem with that means yout a problem with us means we got a problem with you. Like we had with Harry Stanley, you know what I'm saying ?

Blubber Burst

David Frum nails the Flint Freak:

Moore arrived late in his trademark jeans, shirt, working man’s jacket, and baseball cap. One of the BBC producers made a joke about the contrast between his outfit and my own Washington-standard-issue blue suit and red tie. I replied that I’d noticed that Moore was wearing a watch that cost at least fifteen times as much as every article of clothing on my body. I learned later that he’d arrived by private jet. Ave et salute, tribune of the plebs!

Well, He Was Once A Ceasar

Meet Kenneth Williams, Carry On stalwart and political philosopher.

The Bright Side

So, OK, Kerry could win and doom civilisation to a new dark age. OTOH, has there ever been a First Lady with as much comedy potential as the Empress Teressa ? Imagine four years of this sort of thing, this or this. Say what you like, at least we'll die laughing.

Hey - Those Suits Are Expensive!

Armani Trev is feeling a little insecure, and Andrew is there to make him feel much worse.

Sychronicity

Scott Burgess offers up this in rebuttal to the latest e-mailed rant from the Pollster:

Up until now, an information elite has been able to misrepresent and manufacture fact with virtual impunity - sometimes accidentally, sometimes as a deliberate means of pushing a chosen agenda.

For example, if a newspaper polemicist wanted to contend that "Scandinavian countries are best of all" at overcoming obesity, it was unlikely that many would notice and connect the fact that: "Norway has the highest percentage of overweight men in Europe, according to a new report by the World Health Organization (WHO)."

...

Those who did notice such "anomalies" had no easy means of communicating them to others interested in issues of journalistic integrity.Best of all, in this new media environment the once-wise maxim "never get in an argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel" no longer applies - we all have barrels now. Ardent proponents of equality would no doubt applaud this development, were they not the ones whose superior status was now under threat.

All of which means that the Left will no longer be able to get by citing 'stuff that everyone knows'. When people who really do know have their own outlets, the Left's sacred cows start to look like hamburger.

Take for instance the evil of the British Empire. For the past forty years the Empire has been A Bad Thing, that's all you need to know. The L3 may be a bit murky about the specifics in all but a few cases, but our normally nuance-obsessed friends are sure about this: everything Britain did in Africa was evil, and only a fascist would ask for actual details. Well, as luck would have it, Laban Tall has just posted this. That's exactly the type of thing that the mainstream media would rather not consider - for all that they mock Dubya for being retarded enough to call mass murder evil, most journalists have a narrower worldview than any small-town American, albeit with a sign change.

Well, now we don't need to rely on the MSM to tell us the full story. They're no longer able to act as gatekeepers. That's the thing, in their nostalgia for the old ways, their frenzied denial of the realities of the new world, MSM stalwarts like the Pollster resemble nothing so much as expatriates in 1950s Africa, convinced that if only they keep dressing for dinner they can yet stave off the end.