Because It's Brain Food

Obvious, really.

Rainbow Utopia Cancelled

Like most people I imagine, I'm fascinated by Canadian municipal elections.

But not really.

Still, recent events in Toronto provide a certain grim amusement. Don't be shocked, but almost as soon as Toronto managed the oxymoronic achievement of going 'minority majority' they turfed out the groovy liberal and elected a squaresville conservative.

The ever-excellent Kathy Shaidle explains it all to shell-shocked libs.

You brought them over here, not me. You supposedly need them to drive the cabs I don't take, and be the nannies I don't need and the housekeepers I can't afford, and run the restaurants only you get to eat in and run the shops you're too lazy or prissy to own yourselves...

.... they're just patiently waiting for the day that your spoiled, lazy children -- assuming you have children at all -- are working for their disciplined, accomplished offspring.

The day "corporate" pulls its sponsorship of Pride Month, and dumps its expensive, exquisitely useless "environmentally friendly" policies overboard, and quietly stops hiring spindly, neurotic, overeducated white women (who take way too much time off dragging their kids to endless appointments -- if they have children, that is.)

And there will be nothing you can do about it.

They're "minorities." You gave them all kinds of special rights. No one is allowed to criticize them. "It's their culture," remember?

This was all your idea, guys. Not mine.

Decline of Civilisation In One Line

Thinking about it, my main problem with the FU Budget was its essentially fraudulent nature. The Comprehensive Spending Review turned out to be not very comprehensive after all. While the guy in the street got hammered, the CSR tacitly accepted every absurd premise Nu Lab had ever advanced to justify their vision of elephantine government as a natural feature of modern life.

Our enormous, fat slob of a government didn't just happen. It's the product of a demented view of what government is meant to do. For proof of just how warped, consider this snapshot of modern British life.

Welsford now plans to sue the hospital claiming that the therapist abused him, reports The Sun.

It's a Russian doll full of wrongness!

First, there's the obvious point: here's a guy who has chosen to wage war on civilised society in the most extreme way possible, yet thanks to the influence of Cherie and pals, it's now accepted that he can still claim all the benefits of citizenship without taking on anything approaching the ghost of the shadow of hint of the corresponding responsibilities (like 'no raping').

Then there's the question of absurd lawsuits in general. Families need to pay through the nose for tuition fees, but guys like this are getting Legal Aid to claim people having sex with them is, like, totally, the same as torture even where they consented anyway....

Yep, personal responsibility is dead too.

There's the wider issues. We're spending money on therapy for dangerous perverts? Has that ever worked? Putting planes on an aircraft carrier is an unaffordable indulgence but paying charlatans to perform junk science rituals for the benefit of savages? That's just savvy financial judgement.

Then there's probably one of the most common themes in much of our civilisational death spiral: the fact this skank could make the beast with two backs with barbarians, safe in the knowledge that if she did get knocked up then Big Daddy Government would step in and throw money at her own worthless self. And that goes double when Mummy's Little Thuglet starts following in his father's footsteps, and the whole clown circus of the Welfare-Education Axis of Snivel swings into action to enable the little rat to be all that he can be.

Cameron's looting of the productive would be bad enough at the best of times but alongside his refusal to take on any of this brand of lunacy, can the Tories at least stop claiming there's no alternative to soaking the workers?

Two Further Thoughts About The 'FU Budget'

i/ It's an interesting philosophical question which is the more annoying: the money wasted on foreign aid or on the money wasted on climate change.

On the one hand, people really have died of malaria, on the other, no matter how much money we give Al Gore he's unlikely to spend any of it on nukes or terrorism.

ii/If foreign aid is meant to support people making a real difference in the Third World, shouldn't it go to the Army? Don't they do more to improve life in Afghanistan in a single month than any number of Toyota driving charistocrats manage in the rest of the world?

The FU Budget

It's just a pity the smoking ban prevented Osborne ramming the point home and finishing off the budget statement by lighting a big cigar with a £50 note.

Really, what else did anyone expect? This is who they are. Hence a budget where the guy in the street gets El Shafto while billions are thrown away on the obsessions of the decadent rich.

The only real question is to what extent this arises because these guys are simply out of touch with how real people live (like Osborne)as opposed to actual contempt for the uppity strivers (Cameron).

140 And Out

Reading this story reminded me of this.

Obviously, this guy's writing in a US context, and I'm not sure that these people are as sympathetic a pair of characters as he thinks they are, but the wider point is certainly true:

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

There Is No Immigration Debate

What He Said, plus....

How come this never applies to ecolunacy? If the economic benefits of open borders are supposed to trump a few teething problems, like July 7, how come we can't apply the same logic to environmental regulation? Islam has killed more Britons than climate change, and think how much richer we'd be once we applied this new economic growth uber alles rule to handling nuclear waste and PCBs?

Then again, who says there's an immigration debate anyway? Sure, some immigrants contribute to the economy, for example bankers from the US, engineers from China and brain surgeons from Madras but, curiously enough, no one opposes these guys stopping by in the first place. Who are the prejudiced ones here? It's the left that wants to lump all immigrants together, whether they're talented scientists or violent lunatics.

It's not immigration we're opposed to, it's open borders - and that goes triple when it's teamed with the idea any immigrant only needs to touch base in the UK to qualify for a free ride.

Liberals try and frame this as a debate about immigration simply because open borders has been such an obvious train wreck that whining about The Raycism is all they have left.

Quote of the Day

Greg Gutfeld nails it:

Think about it: if the average Joe expresses anxiety over Islamic fundamentalism, they’re called Islamophobes. But if an editor removes a comic in which Mohammed isn’t even present, that’s not honest to Allah Islamophobia?

Look, the media can’t have it both ways. They cannot criticize the public for concerns over Islam and then pull this stunt over a fear they may get stabbed in front of a Starbucks. If their governing principle in the newsroom is fear, then they should admit it and get the hell off our backs for feeling pretty much the same way.

And the flip side works too: enough with the articles about the dangers of right-wing extremism when it's blindingly obvious that if the right really was as crazed as the MSM says, they'd be in full sensitivity overdrive.

This One Could Run & Run

Via the comments at Guido's, it looks like McRuin's new masterpiece isn't going down too well, at least to judge by the tags.

About That 'Token' Thing...

It says a lot about the bogus nature of the left's committment to egalitariasm that they're trying to position Eric Pickles as Two Jags Redux.

Yes, Eric's a northerner - just like Ieuan Prescott always pretended to be - but there's one crucial difference. Prezza spent billions to achieve nothing, meanwhile Marxist berks really are getting their walking papers under Pickles. Hence the left's sudden need to quibble over trivia. Maybe Pickles isn't dismantling the People's Republic of Quango as fast or as easily as planned, but destroying it he surely is.

Come to think of it, let's flip this around. Prezza was there to provide cover for Princess Tony and McRuin, and whatever you think about these two, they were serious individuals with actual agendas. Stupid ones, but real all the same. Meanwhile, The Dave gave a speech and appeared in a few photo ops.

Are we sure he isn't just a token southerner?

Splattergate: Who's Paying For All These Lawyers Anyway?

Looks like the Jihad version of the Splattergate video has been fatwad.

Ditto, the Downfall parody has been taken outside and shot.

And all this on top of the 10:10 campaigns desperate efforts to stop anyone seeing the original video.

In summary then, to stop anyone getting the idea they're a bunch of liberal fascists, the 10:10 campaign is using legal muscle to suppress legitimate debate about their campaign.

With Certified Super Geniuses like that running their campaign, I'm thinking 'Big Oil' isn't their biggest problem.

But let's check the scorecard here: if you don't think school kids being executed is a scream, you're a humourless square. Meanwhile, they're setting m'learned friends on anyone who parodies their crappy video.

All of which raises a question: even assuming lefty snuff movies are a perfectly legitimate use of public money, what public policy objective is being served by using taxpayer's money to try and stop taxpayers discussing how their money's being spent?

UPDATE:

Heh.

The Cameroonatics New Plan: More Dave!

Indeed.

Hey, the World's Smartest Man is baffled about what's happening in the world's lone superpower, and that's a good thing?

If nothing else, if Ayatollah Khameron was able to get within a country mile of figuring out the appeal of the Tea Parties, maybe his acolytes would come up with plans that were less stupid than this.

Never mind that Dave's Drones are possibly the people in Britain least qualified to lecture anyone about winning elections, how do you get from the Tories, for some unaccountable reason, being seen as a party of the rich, to the answer being more Dave?

Wasn't the whole point of Daveness that the Party was returning to its roots as a gentleman's party, purged of dumpy, lower middle class bigots?

Yes, indeed: the filthy proles were purged and charmers like this were parachuted into constituencies, yet it now turns out that shoe-horning the products of absurd privilege into safe seats has not exactly killed the idea that the Tory Party favours the rich.

OTOH, who exactly decided 'right-wing' was a synonym for rich anyway? It's more like the opposite. It's easy for people like Cameron to claim we all need to hug a hoodie - he'll never have to live next to one. Ditto, school choice: with £30 million in the bank The Dave's got no end of choice. It's the folks who live in crappy postcodes and can't afford to go anywhere else who are screwed. Und so weiter....

The Nu Tory Party hasn't just ignored issues like this, in many cases it's lined up with the left in denouncing anyone who mentions them as really huge bigots (and don't even mention the magic of 'Open Borders').

The Marie Antoinette Party sneers at real social problems and the people who mention them, yet somehow the public think they're out of touch? Are we sure it's Sarah Palin who's the moron?

Splattergate: First Parody Sighted

Fast work: I make it two days from the econuts going live with their murderous fantasies to the first parody emerging.

And no, Godwin doesn't apply where people really are laughing along about exterminating their opponents.

So, for those of you keeping score at home, that means some guys on the net have come up with a rebuttal video before our nation's Certified Conservatives have managed so much as a mild rebuttal of a mostly taxpayer funded body producing leftist snuff movies (guess that deficit isn't so bad after all).

Here's the definitive example of liberal tourettes and Cast Iron Dave's savvy political operators are all out of the office. Meanwhile, the base is having fun tearing the left apart. All of which is by way of saying, absent the snobbery, what exactly are Professional Conservatives contributing to the debate? If bar maids and janitors being taxed to indulge liberal Pol Pot fantasises doesn't strike any of these people as an outrage, in what sense are they conservative?

All the energy right now is with the grass roots - contra The Dave, it's not the conservative base that's the albatross round the neck of conservatism.

UPDATE

Don't be shocked, but it turns out the film makers were not crazed lone gunmen after all - EU Ref reminds us just how closely this all tracks with long-established Warmenist strategy.

Meanwhile, the inevitable connection made here (via Samizdata comments).

Oops - guess not on that last one.

Hey, nothing say sticking it to The Man like using fatuous legal manoeuvres to close down fair criticism.

Top Gear > Liberalism

Back to a central theme of this blog: conservatives conceding the intellectual high ground to liberals even where it's the left's position that's stupid and bigoted.

Consider this latest example.

Yes, indeed: no longer blindly enforcing arbitrary limits does not, in fact, cause the streets to look like a Mad Max movie. Who'd have thunk it?

Just about everyone in the country actually. The liberal media cast critics of their goofy auto jihad as crazed boy racers, but now it turns out that it was Professor Smugentool and pals that were full of it after all.

Just what definition of intelligence are we using here?

Tea Parties Land Crucial Endorsment

The Dave doesn't dig the Tea Parties.

Well, that just about wraps it up for Sarah Palin then. If there's one thing The Dave knows about, it's drifting aimlessly.

The great thing about the Tea Parties is that they not only expose the snobbery of Professional Conservatives, they also expose the gaping hole at the heart of 'Respectable Conservatiosm'.

Even if The Dave's desire to throw cultural issues under the bus made political sense, it's also impossible. In reality culture war issues are at the heart of where we are today. Take the deficit. If nothing else, surrender in the culture war means accepting one hundred million diversity officers on the public payroll as a permanent feature of British life.

Long-term, you can't shrink the welfare state while remaining neutral between lifestyles that produce independence and those that reliably produce disaster. The distinction between culture war and economic policy is merely a matter of degree.