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.