The Dave: Focusing On The Real Issues

I can't help thinking it's a bit of a missed opportunity here. With a few sessions on the sunbed she could change her name to 'Nirmala Patel' and tick two boxes.

Really, it's the perfect microcosm of Davism. Problem: Captain Diversity has an entourage full of the biggest collection of silver-spoon wastrels since the Czar's court. Answer: get them to change their names.

Ah yes, that should work. Except for the whole still being rich wastrels thing. No doubt he'll be commuting in from Switzerland when it's time to vote for those ecotaxes.

The Mainstream Runs Through Islington?

In so far as even the Moonbat himself has thrown the UEA fraudsters under the Prius, this would tend to undercut the BBC's claim to be objective. The BBC can't claim to be balanced because it's 'being attacked by both sides'. There's no both sides, there's fringe lunatics and there's everyone else, including plenty of ecoloons. Hey, when you're too much of a moonbat even for the moonbat, you are indeed a moonbat. Besides, I thought these guys were all about supporting the consensus?

But no: they're still ranting about the 'sceptic business lobby'. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it. Just as there is no form of weather known to man that is not proof of gerbil worming, it now turns out that ecochondriacs e-mailing each other about using 'tricks' to 'hide the decline' and plotting to force critics out of their jobs is proof that their opponents are involved in a conspiracy. In both cases, the ecoloon position is essentially unfalsifiable.

The BBC's position is revealing in another way too. The claim that it was the business lobby wot done it only holds up if you believe that there is no good faith reason for anyone to oppose the right of unaccountable supra-national organisations to pass restrictive laws and levy taxes on the world's population. Really? Is there no one in the whole of the 'uniquely funded' BBC who can see why some people might object?

Equally significantly, consider what the nasty old 'business lobby' is charged with: attempting to influence public opinion by campaigning against repressive legislation... you know, kind of like we were in a democracy or something. So not only does our state broadcaster support authoritarian lunacy, it even believes it's somehow illegitimate for anyone to oppose it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, or at least the UEA approximation of it, it turns out that the dog ate their data. No doubt the BBC will be along soon to put it all in context.

The Clue Is In The Question

Three observations on this:

1. Who knew LfaT had it in him? And what would The Dave think? My guess: it's either steroids or the red pill.
   
2. 'Loaded' is not a men's magazine, it's the Beano with more swearing.
   
3. In so far as it's supposedly self-evident that men wanting to set up a club should have to seek permission from the female of the species, I think we can tell who wants to oppress who.

They Probably Think Elvis Is Dead Too!

Conspiracy theorists, hey? What will they think of next?

Police are arresting innocent people in order to get their hands on as many DNA samples as possible, senior Government advisers revealed last night.

Who'd have thunk it? Apart from 'everyone', anyway.

They have a genuinely good idea, too:

They also called for all police - including support staff - to place their own DNA on the national database in a show of solidarity with a public being routinely placed under suspicion.

Hey, why not? Suck it up Plod, I make that a lawful order under Section 7 of the Sauce For The Goose Act (2009)

Actually, no, that won't work. In so far as police officers have been shown to have deprived citizens of their liberty on bogus grounds so as to obtain their DNA unlawfully, merely requesting DNA from serving officers won't work. No, siree, Jack: at the least, they should be seized at random on their days off and held in cells for 72 hours before their DNA is taken, just to level things up.

War Crimes Then & Now

A Canadian pol makes the obvious point:

The Canadian government is dismissing calls for a public inquiry into the alleged torture of prisoners handed over by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.....

MacKay painted Colvin as having been duped by the Taliban and said Canadians are being asked to accept the word of prisoners "who throw acid in the face of schoolgirls.

Then again, it's not like the left don't have form for this, even to the point of being too much even for some fellow liberals.

All things considered, this probably explains why the left has now decided to give up on the whole 'reality' thing and concentrate its fire on imaginary war crimes (but on the plus side, at last the Umbrella Corporation will be brought to justice).

I Have A Few Labels For Them

Here's one for the modern philosophers: how often do you have to screw up not to be the Smartest People In The Room any more?

Leadership!

Stephen Glover writes well in support of the Tory rebels in Norfolk, but he misses the essential contradiction in the Nu Tory position.

The hipster trash claim that the whole 'ideology' thing is dragsville. The job of the modern MP is, supposedly, to manage the business of government rather than advance any particular agenda, so who cares if they're sleazy, providing they can really get to grips with the NHS, right?

The problem with that is there are approximately no companies in Britain where someone can sleep with a senior manager, land a plum job and then claim it's everyone else who has the problem. In any serious industry, Liz Truss would have been shown the door the moment this was uncovered.

But still, that's not it. There's something else going on here. For all that Cameron's drones keep whining about 'inverted snobbery', 90% of the time when his fancy education is cited, it's by one of his cultists claiming that he was born to lead. Really? 'Cause I'm thinking if a trifling matter like a rebel constituency in Norfolk brings out the Sweary Mary in him, he may not be exactly ready for prime time. Those pesky country folk refuse to support his candidate and suddenly he's auditioning for the lead in the English-language version of Downfall - that's the guy we need representing us on the world stage!

Diversity Is Our...... No, Wait! That Was Last Week

This is a great post, but one point that's really worth hammering home is this: didn't diversity used to be a good thing?

Liberals demand that every culture, fragment of a culture, or just plain train wreck blob of social pathology is to be celebrated as a vital part of the cultural ecosystem. Meanwhile, when it comes to actual cultures, like, say, Italian culture... Nope: violent insanity is hailed as proof of aufenticity! in the inner cities, but this whole 'Italy' thing is clearly just a fraud by people who want to hold back the proper development of Euroregion 16 (although it may also be true that the EU feels threatened by the example of a nation that managed to run a real European government without needing twenty squillon bureaucrats).

Equally, the very things liberals claim are ludicrous when used in a British context turn out to make perfect sense when the EU does it. The same people who squeal like stuck pigs when asked to teach British history are pefectly OK even with the most Frankensteinian attempts to create a European identity. Except, y'know, it really is true that Britain spent decades and billions of pounds defeating the global slave trade, but no one in the Normandy beachhead ever thought of themselves as fighting in a European Civil War (not least the C********* and Them Who Shall Not Be Credited Ever).

For that matter, in so far as there is any kind of common European culture, the EU is the antithesis of it. After all, we have approximately 2,500 years of evidence as to what works and what doesn't, and the EU is definitely in column 'B'. In so far as the EU can claim any kind of descent from European traditions, they're ones actual Europeans were glad to drop at the first opportunity.

Femilunacy Round-Up

While the manginas in blue want the right to arrest men who haven't actually done anything illegal 'cause hey, a lot of legal equals one illegal, surely, it turns out that a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do.

Hmmmm.... it's a mystery why marriage is dying in Britain.

Liz Truss: Social Conservative Icon

In a decision that stunned absolutely no one, Norfolk Tories folded like a row of tents and accepted arrogant Metropolitan sleaze Liz Truss being parachuted into a safe seat.

Hey, in so far as her moron supporters have spent weeks referring to the people she claims she wants to represent as the 'Turnip Taliban', it's fair to ask just what it would take for the Tory base to reacquaint itself with its collective balls. What's a girl need to do? Slag off the Queen?

No,wait, she's done that already. It turns out that Truss really is a new kind of conservative, specifically a Lib Dem kind of conservative.

All of which kind of makes an important point. The hip'n'happening Davesters claim that, sure, she thinks the whole marriage vows thing is kind of a drag, and, yessss, technically she has been proven to have concealed important information when specifically asked to disclose it, and she got a plum slot after banging a senior member of the Party, but only total squares would argue that makes her untrustworthy, right?

Except now we know lifelong conservative Truss, isn't. She's a Lib Dem who's jumped ship for a bigger, better deal with Call Me Dave's Nu Tories.

Who'd have thunk it?

Well, not the Nu Tories anyway. Their whole doctrine is that the 'personal morality' thing is dragsville, and no amount of personal sleaze will affect someone's ability to 'do the job', except it turns out that an adulteress who betrays her husband and lies to the people she wants to represent is untrustworthy in her political views as well.

Yes, indeed. It turns out that sleazy is as sleazy does, y'know, just those evil old socio-cons always said it was.

Steyn D'Jour

The Great Steyn returns to an important point:

"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He is an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress – that's to say, a "Punjabi suit," as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez," to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in The Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up – with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaida. In other words, Maj. Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Actually, I'd go further: multiculturalism actively requires ignorance of other cultures. In so far as liberals blindly assume that Islamofascists are basically Guardian readers with a penchant for florid rhetoric, it's the left that is truly ethnocentric.

Liberals are incapable of seeing the rest of the world as anything other than the West's culture wars writ large. Consider Senator Patty Murray's claim that Bin Laden helped to build day care centres in Afghanistan, presumably to help out all those working mothers juggling work and career under the Taliban. To the point: Senator Murray's claim is so self-evidently ludicrous that it speaks to a profound ignorance about the nature of Islam.

All of which is by way of saying that, as ever, the supposedly enlightened liberal position only stands up providing you don't know anything the subject concerned. Hence why liberals are obsessed with the idea of suppressing 'hate speech' and the like: liberal ideas don't stand up well when people are allowed to discuss them.

The Double-Spaced Media

While liberals try and convince us all that screaming 'Allah Ackbar' while gunning down Infidels is hardly proof of religious motivations (Winner of 'Best in Show' here), the Daily Mail takes time out to remind us of the MSM's previous personal best: the Case of the Angry, White, Male Sniper.

Barring some last-minute stay of execution, at 9.30pm, John Allen Muhammad will be killed by lethal injection at a prison in Virginia, closing the book on one of the most nightmarish and perplexing episodes in American criminal history...

Yet one question remains unanswered: why did Muhammad do it?

Yes, it certainly is a mystery all right. After all, consider who the sniper was:

A Muslim convert who last year discarded the name "Williams" and adopted a new identity as "Muhammad". A Muslim convert called Muhammad who publicly expressed his approval of al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks. A pro-al-Qaeda Muslim convert called Muhammad who marked the first anniversary of 9/11, to the exact minute, by visiting the Department of Motor Vehicles in Camden, New Jersey. Two minutes after he left the building, the cops arrived to deal with a mysterious bomb scare.

Then there's this:

Exhibit 65-006: A self-portrait of Malvo in the cross hairs of a gun scope shouting, "ALLAH AKBAR!" The word "SALAAM" scrawled vertically. A poem: "Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don't ask me why."
Exhibit 65-013: The word "INSHALLAH" above a portrait glorifying "Muammar Kaddafi" as "The Liberator" dressed in full military regalia.
Exhibit 65-016: A portrait of Saddam Hussein with the words "INSHALLAH" and "The Protector," surrounded by rockets labeled "chem" and "nuk" (sic).
Exhibit 65-043: Father and son portrait of Malvo and Muhammad. "We will kill them all. Jihad."
Exhibit 65-056: A self-portrait of Malvo as sniper, lying in wait, with his rifle. "JIHAD" written in bold letters.
Exhibit 65-057: A drawing of the Twin Towers burning with a plane flying toward the buildings. Captions: "JIHAD ISLAM UNITE RISE!" along with "America did this" and "You were warned." Portrait of Malvo as sniper labeled "Believer" and portrait of Osama bin Laden labeled "prophet." A poem: "Our minarets are our bayonets, Our mosques are our baracks (sic), Our believers are our soldiers." The American flag and the Star of David drawn in cross hairs.
Exhibit 65-067: A suicide bomber labeled "Hamas" walking into a McDonald's restaurant. Another drawing of the Twin Towers burning captioned: "85 percent chance Zionists did this." More scrawls: "ALLAH AKBAR," "JIHAD" and "Islam will explode."
Exhibit 65-103: A lion accompanies chapter and verse from the Koran ("Sura 2:190"): "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you and slay them wherever ye catch them."
Exhibit 65-109: Portrait of Osama bin Laden, captioned "Servant of Allah."
Exhibit 65-117: The White House drawn in cross hairs, surrounded by missiles, with a warning: "Sep. 11 we will ensure will look like a picnic to you" and "you will bleed to death little by little."
Exhibit 65-133: Reference to "Islamic counter attack force . . . ICAF."
Exhibit 65-114: Self-portrait of Malvo as sniper. Rant says "they all died and they all deserved it."
Exhibit 65-101: Malvo's thought for the day: "Islam the only true guidance, the way of peace."

They ought to print these papers with double-spacing so we've got room to fill in all the stuff they leave out.

Celebrate Subsidence!

All things considered, you have to admire the MSM's ability to mark twenty years since the Berlin Wall fell without once explaining exactly how that particular event came to pass at that particular time. Maybe it was just built with shoddy materials?

Back in 1980 the same people - sometimes literally the same people - were busily explaining that the West would just have to learn to live with the Soviet Union - and 'respectable conservatives' were explaining that all we could do was to try and slow down any further expansion of Soviet influence. But then a funny thing happened on the way to a red planet.

In the teeth of all received wisdom, Ronald Reagan realised that the USSR was a bankrupt thug state, reliant entirely on its ability to repress its peoples at home and to export mayhem to everywhere else. Reagan didn't believe in détente, he believed in victory. Under Reagan, a newly-reinvigorated America bottled up the Soviet's conventional forces, while the CIA and friends not only halted Soviet expanision in the Third World, they bled the Soviets dry just keeping hold of what they had.

Look at Central America. Instead of Marxists sweeping to power in El Salvador, the Soviets were forced to pour in resources just to prop up their basket case Mini-Me government in Nicaragua.

To the point, Reagan almost single-handedly took on the idea that the decline and fall of the West was inevitable. On the contrary, he recognised that, properly harnessed, the strengths of the free world could make victory inevitable, and the utter depravity of Marxism made it a moral imperative.

Hey, the Red Army swept in Eastern Europe in 1945 (and again into Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968 respectively). If all it needed to defeat these savages was 'peaceful protest', how come those lazy Krauts took so long getting round to it?

Return of the Mob of No Appearance

Gosh, what can this all mean?

Let's take a moment to reflect on the fact that in modern Britain a riot in which a police officer is stabbed gets about the same mainstream coverage as League One football results. Clearly, they're stabbing the cops the British just won't stab.

(H/T to Lurker in the comments, with more from Julie)

Appeasement: Working As Well As Ever

Heh. I thought the argument was that Cameron might have humiliated himself, but at least he's managed to maintain good relations with the Eurotrash......

Special HoD Summary of The Tory Position on Europe:

The Lisbon Treaty was a constitutional and legal outrage until the Czech's signed it, but now it's just one of those things and we should all move on.

I guess this time the battle was lost on the playing fields of Eton.

Just Wait Until Anthony Hopkins Gets Busted For Eating All Those People

In case you ever thought the Nu Police live in a fantasy world....

UN Scrapes Barrel

The thing I can't work out is this: if the US is so evil, how come the charge sheet is always so completely bonkers?

He's Not Galileo, He's The Pope

Yep. I feel the same way about the Prof Nutt pity party.

All things considered, Nutt would appear to lack at least two of the main qualifications for martyrdom. Take his supposed claim to victimhood: he was a quangocrat, now he's not. Ah well. Burning at the stake this isn't.

Hey, it's hard to say anything nice about our politicians, but at least we can throw them out every now and again. Fringe kooks like Nutt worm their way into the body politic without the barest public scrutiny, and push their own agendas without any democratic mandate whatsoever. Rooting out rogues who hijack public office to advance extreme ideologies is exactly what our elected representatives should be doing.

This is Humbug No 1 right there: Nutt is exactly the kind of quangocrat member of our permanent ruling class who libertarians routinely denounce, but now it turns out he's a fellow drug bore, he's Leonidas at Thermopylae. Huh?

Then there's the other thing: what principle if he defending anyway? The supremacy of science? But science-based arguments have to be balanced against the wider social issues. Again, this is exactly why we have a Parliament in the first place.

More to the point, what science is this exactly? When he says that horseriding is more dangerous than Ectasy, does that mean in the sense that more people are called each year falling down stairs than going over Niagra Falls in a barrel? Or maybe he means people who die while in the act of taking drugs vs riding? Or does he mean in some other sense? To the point: how dangerous drugs are is a live issue in science, but now here's Professor Nutt announcing Ex Cathedra The Correct Scientific View on Drugs.

Well, no: nothing is more antithetical to science than some pompous prat arbitrarily deciding that his views are certified scientific and everybody who disagrees is an ignorant savage.

For that matter where's the evidence that Nutt's preferred model of credentialed ubermen producing centrally planned truth is any better than the market place of ideas? True, the free market gave us reality TV, but at least The X Factor never caused mass starvation.

No, Nutt is not about the science, but he's a great example of a modern scientist: whiny, entitled and actually quite nasty when it all comes down to it.