Hotel California York

You can check out, but you can never leave...

Seriously, though: three murderers on the staff at a single hotel? Who knew CSI was so true to life?

I'm not sure about their new slogan though: 'Dead and Breakfast'

How about 'the only hotel with 24 hour doom service'?

'Neckbreak Hotel'?

I'm guessing that when you go to reception, they don't give you a room key, they give you a toe tag.

Still, York Travelodge has performed one useful social function, beside providing a one-stop shop for homicides: they've neatly exposed everything feminists have ever said as a lie. Companies are biased against women, violence against women isn't taken seriously enough and feminism only means they want equality?

Strangely enough, that isn't the 'Crossbow Cannibal' behind the bar.

Nope, there's no male equivalent to this 'sob sister' carrying of water for murderous trash. This isn't just the notorious 'pussy pass' in action. This is full-on misandry. Men have been murdered, but anyone who thinks being a homicidal loon would tend to make someone unsuitable for a job in the hospitality industry, is a little whiner who should just 'man up'.

Then there's the other thing: this also exposes the truly demented nature of modern liberalism. They don't just want to release savages on the streets, they want to prevent anyone calling them what they are. The left treats a prison sentence as an all-purpose act of absolution. The felons have accepted the state into their lives and been reborn again as upright citizens (until next time).

In so far as the left's position is to all intents and purposes the same as they allege the Cathloic Church applied to paedophile priests, who can now seriously doubt that liberalism is a religion?

Quote of the Day

And talking of the worthless rich, here's Big Hollywood's John Nolte on the cliche that just won't die:

Without the patronizing mantra of “quiet desperation,” what does the left have? Nothing. Only the realization that their own conformity and inability to feel and express joy is their own fault and not someone else’s. Specifically not the fault of an American way of life that for two hundred years has disproved and laughed in the face of the left’s arrogant belief in their own superiority.

The Rich Are Different

Curiously, despite the conviction of Fireman Ed aka The Other Rich Marxist Twerp Called Ed, the MSM has not spent the day reminding us about every time a Labour MP referred to 'fighting fire with fire'.

Of course, this case is difficult for the usual suspects for other reasons. They've spent years telling us poverty causes crime, but now it turns out that it's poor little rich kids who are the biggest victims of all. How else to explain the court's desperate bending over backwards to avoid the obvious?

[Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC] also praised the teenager's mother for encouraging him to give himself up to police after he was pictured by media organisations during the rioting.

Yes, indeed: after having his picture plastered over every newstand in the country for five days, she encouraged him to turn himself in, as opposed to disappearing into Sherwood Forest and living off nuts and berries, presumably.

A vote of thanks also to his class mates, teachers and fellow residents of the Dibden Purlieu millionaire's sink estate, all of who were perfectly happy to spend five days not reporting that they had a thug in their midst. We're just lucky Dibden Purlieu isn't in Liverpool, otherwise Richard Littlejohn would get his next 15 columns out of this case.

Not that I want to inject a class war theme into this - I'll leave that to the judge:

The judge said: "It is deeply regrettable, indeed a shocking thing, for a court to have sentence a young man such as you to a substantial term of custody.

It's shocking to sentence a violent thug to custody? Isn't that kind of the point of the whole 'courts' thing? And no, it's not a substantial term by any kind of historic or global standard.

The judge also said he took into account the defendant's age, his guilty plea at the earliest opportunity and the fact that he had no previous convictions.

Yes, he pleaded guilty after his crime was shown live on national TV.

I'm more sympathetic to the age thing though. After all, there's plenty of 18 year olds so juvenile and irresponsible, they're still busy playing in the sand pit.

I guess we need to update that scorecard again: abortion without parental notification is fine for 12 year olds, but 18 is too young to be held responsible for their actions? Best stop them doing anything dangerous like drinking, driving or voting then, right? Or, at least, just the ones who don't realise that throwing things off a tall building 'potentially endangered people' (although the fact this guy was hoping to go to Uni in the first place does kind of suggest that funding isn't the biggest problem in Academia right now).

And if that's not enough, there's this:

Before sentencing, the judge retired for 15 minutes and Woollard, who has 10 GCSEs, was given a chance to speak to his relatives.

They probably do the same in Newcastle Crown Court, right? Right after they've heard the guilty party explain that he wasn't aiming a bottle at someone's head, he was aiming it with their head.

All of which is by way of saying enough about the Underclass already. Not that we don't have a barrel load of chav scum, but the fish rots from the head. As long as folks like the repulsive Woolard clan, people who've had every advantage in life, are prepared to try and cheat justice, and the courts are prepared to let them, why should anyone else respect the law?

Jack Straw Shoots Congresswoman

See, this is exactly why you need to keep your scorecard up to date: jovial Jack Straw suggests there may be a problem with the 'Pakistani community' and their attitudes to girls who are not-so-Pakistani but even that exercise in euphemism can't stop the left howling and whining (which at least provides us with a nice contrast to their deafening silence every time one of these cases gets uncovered).

Meanwhile, a Democrat Congresswoman gets shot and it's all Sarah Palin's fault.

So there you have it: Sarah Palin's harsh rhetoric (meaning: she wants to win elections) drives people to murder, but the Koran's constant references to the degenerate nature of the Infidel? Just a little over-exuberance by Allah.

Of course, there is the fact that while Sarah's never shot anyone, while Mohammed.....

Cops Gone Wild, Civil Liberties Freaks Gone To Sleep

Like the lady says, it's a good job she wasn't a bloke.

Let's check the scorecard here: the police are trying to blackmail a legitimate news organisation, while whining about 'unfair, naive and irresponsible reporting', meanwhile they're sending out letters accusing innocent citizens of kerb crawling.

This is the perfect example of the moral bankruptcy of both the human rights industry and Cameronism.

It should hardly need to be stated - except it passed most libertarians by - that if the Philosopher Kings on the bench can create absurd new rights at a stroke, they can just as easily sweep aside real ones. This is how we ended up with a country infested with lawyers, but where the police can still demand this:

It informed the car’s owner that her Volvo estate had been sighted by officers and added that officers needed to speak to her as soon as possible to ‘confirm that you have not committed any offences.’

...At which point the ghost of Matthew Hopkins has just slapped himself atop the head shouting 'why didn't I think of that'?

And then there's The Dave....

Hey, we were told that Culture War was passé, so ten minutes ago, squaresville. The Dave would ascend the throne and the lion would lie down the lamb, and with one bound Jack would be free.

Oops.

The Dave is in Number Ten, but staggeringly enough, it turns out the loonies have not in fact folded their tents and retired to Tuscany. Nope, leftist fanatics are still using public services to impose their own crazy agenda, after all. Guess we do need to fight the culture war after all.

Quote of the Day

A long one, since the hipsters need to have things spelled out to them:

We’ve been told for years that suicide bombers who blow themselves up in civilian areas in Israel are “freedom fighters struggling against Israeli occupation.” Does that mean that this Muslim blew himself up to protest against the Swedish occupation of Stockholm?

Sweden has no colonial history, at least not outside of northern Europe. It is a self-appointed champion of Third World countries and has virtually surrendered its third-largest city to immigrant mobs and substantial chunks of other cities, too. Swedish authorities are using the most extreme methods imaginable to suppress any dissent among the native people, who are being ethnically cleansed from their own land. The authorities always side with immigrants against the natives in the case of conflict. Muslims in Sweden can harass the natives as much as they want to and have access to all kinds of welfare goodies and a much higher standard of living than they would have in their own countries. In short, they have no imaginable, rational reason to complain, yet they still blow themselves up.

In Sweden, all the traditional excuses employed by Multiculturalists and Leftists throughout the Western world, fail. This leaves just one possible explanation, the only one never mentioned in Western mainstream media: That Muslims and their culture are fundamentally incompatible with our values and societies.

The Elite In Retreat

Can't say I'm as worried as this guy by the whole nudge thing, and not becuase I don't agree that it is plenty Orwellian. Try this quote for nudge in a nutshell:

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness

Kablooey!

True, on paper, a state pouring resources into attempted mind control is a terrifying prospect, but in reality..... Charlie Gilmour!

Seriously, check out one of the flagship ideas: musical steps. Run to the hills everybody!

Of course, none of this is to minimise the danger, but it's not all bad news. After 13 years of frontal attack, these people are now admitting that they can't win in the marketplace of ideas and have to lie about what they believe. It's just further proof that liberalism can only ever advance by force or fraud.

Beeboid Baffled: Govt Refuses To Investigate Fantasy Screw-Ups

Liberals claim to be outraged! at the bank bailouts, but it always seems to be the ones that got away that really hack them off.

Take Beeboid Robert Preston and his attempts to explain how RBS's implosion means Barclays's management should be up for a public flogging.

Yep, you haven't missed something, his argument really is that stupid: if Barclays hadn't dropped out of the bidding for ABN, they might have paid too much for it, and that might have run down their cash reserves, if they hadn't been offering mainly shares instead of cash.

Nevertheless, in a stunning rebuttal to all that talk of 'liberal fascism', Preston still thinks a private business should be called to account for doing what it didn't actually do in the first place:

However the FSA has neither the time nor the powers to extract the relevant testimony from Barclays. So we won't get it.

But how about that Balen Report anyway? Any chance of extracting testimony about that? Especially since, unlike Barclays, the BBC really does take billions of pounds of public money.

Note too how the multiple layers of fact checking managed to leave out the bit about Barclays offering shares instead of cash in his first post - and note the typically classless way Preston acknowledges the libel, doubtless after a call from m'learned friends:

PS. Barclays (no surprise here) is keen for me to point out that the value of its offer for ABN was significantly lower than that made by the RBS consortium. And Barclays was mainly offering shares, rather than precious cash. So its board behaved less recklessly than RBS's.

But Barclays does not dispute that it should probably say a little prayer of thanks more-or-less every waking minute that it did not end up as the owner of ABN.

So, his report was perfectly accurate, except for the factual bits. It's the unique way they're funded, y'know....

Trembling in the Shadow of Hampstead

And talking of spending money on rubbish, there's a nice summation of Cameron's utter failure to follow through on any cuts here.

It's inevitable though, I suppose, keep spinning long enough and all you'll end up with is a whole bunch of U-turns.

Re: this specific case, you have to admire the brass neck of the left. These people have spent years telling that the whole 'civilisation' thing is a eurocentric concept and who are we to say that the moon landing is necessarily more of an achievement than the Aztec nose flute? The government takes the IV out of the publishing industry's backside and suddenly it turns out these people have no problem defining the difference between civilisation and barbarism after all. Honour killing they're not sure about, but turning the free money tap off? That's just like the Holocaust (but not bad enough for them to pay for it themselves).

There's the other aspect to all this too. Philip Pullman? Never mind the humbuggery implicit in a best selling author with a Hollywood movie behind him demanding that janitors and bar maids be taxed to pay for his industry to produce more garbage, here's a guy who's a fully signed up Dawkette. He hates the idea that Christian taxpayers can send their kids to a state school that reflects their beliefs, but taxpayers on the hook to support his exercises in adolescent smugitude? Who could possibly object to that?

Personally, I'd Go For 'Stop Spending Like A Drunken Sailor With A Day To Live'

Another reason not to elect rich people: they have no idea how money works.

Osbourne claims the only alternative to the VAT rise was to raise income tax or NI. Really? Mind you, that's still better than Red Ed's position that raising VAT takes money out of the economy but so does cutting public spending. Apparently, public spending is paid for by the Tax Fairy.

If Only The Men of No Appearance Liked Poetry....

Given that we now know just about everything about the increasingly less suspicious suspect in the Joanne Yates case, even down to his taste in literature, at least that's pretty much killed off the excuse that the law forces the MSM to produce crime reports stripped of any mention of actual criminals.

Hey, if it's legal to have Professor Louis D'Crus on to talk about how the suspect's taste in fine wine makes him just like Harold Shipman, I think the MSM can stretch to mentioning a few details about a guy who guns down a cop in front of twenty witnesses.

The Greatest Moment In The History Of British Conservatism

What could be more conservative than a bunch of millionaires urging everyone else to give their money away?

Some of the old aristocracy might have been tools, but at least we didn't have to put up with Dukes complaining that the kitchen maids were too tight-fisted.

Best Victimhood Wars Story Evah?

Heh.

Quote of the Day

I’m not such a sceptic that I think the severity of our current winter weather disproves the global warming hypothesis, but it doesn’t exactly add to the credibility of the warmist lobby. The standard response to this is to point out that colder winters are compatible with the theory (see George Monbiot’s article entitled “The snow outside it what global warming looks like”). But that suggests something else, namely, that the theory isn’t wrong, but meaningless. If I recall my Karl Popper correctly, one of the conditions that a meaningful scientific theory has to satisfy is that it should be falsifiable. If heavier-than-average snowfall doesn’t constitute disproof of the theory, then it’s hard to imagine what would – and that, in turn, suggests the theory is meaningless.

Indeed.

It's a point that's often missed. There's no need to get down in the weeds and start discussing the finer points of satellite data or statistical techniques. Simply from first principles, global warming fails the basic test of a scientific theory - it doesn't make any predictions.

Put it this way, if E = M x (C Squared) and C is a constant, then we can predict exactly how much energy will be produced by a given mass. If it was ever observed that a different amount of energy was produced, then the theory would be DOA. That's because it's real science. Meanwhile, global warming theory is more like claiming that E is kind of related to M, but who can tell, and give us your wallet anyway or the Earth will fall into the Sun.

It's That Time Again

Yes, indeed: here we are again at that time of year when a loveable guy in red and white comes into your house with his big sack and steals all your prezzies.

But enough about Scouser Claus, onto the real meaning of Christmas: yes, it's Sweary Elf Day.

Penguin Slashes Cop

Wait... no, my mistake, turns it was a 'man'. Must have used one of these long-range knives so no one got a good look at him, either that or..... it's another attack by the infamous Men of No Appearance gang.

(H/T to anonymous in the comments)

It's The 'Not Flying At All' Squad

Hmmmmm..... 'Asians' you say? Best start making door to door enquiries down Chinatown.

But check out the date of the attack versus the day details were released. Must have had a broken photocopier, right?

Quote of the Day

John Nolte sums up what's wrong with not just one film, but with modern Hollywood in general:

For those of you who haven’t seen “The English Patient,” just imagine what Satan would’ve done with “Casablanca.”

And Talking Of Our Useless Elite...

How useless is the MSM? Well, consider that they keep pushing the line that Ken Clarke is a loveable man of the people when you only have to listen to him for five minutes to realise he's a fascist dolt:

But you have to explain to the sensible public that you can’t give an absolute guarantee.

And there you have it: if you disagree with Fat Ken you're stoopid!

Hey, I don't think it's the right that uses simplistic arguments, and that's without considering the obvious: whether we're talking secure mental hospital or a prison, you really can guarantee a lot less reoffending than if you give them six months aromatherapy and set them loose with directions to the hardware store.

Our Elite Aren't

Now that the Cenotaph sleaze has been identified as Charlie 'Comfortably Scum' Gilmore, we can at least dispose of one myth about the university system. No, the problem is not just folks at Fulchester Uni doing degrees in surfing. In so far as Gilmore is an Oxbridge student, he's supposedly as good as it gets.

And yes, in so far as Oxbridge is apparently struggling with the difficult question of whether or not to even suspend him (from college, not from a tree), I think we can ditch the whole 'tiny minority' defence too. In fact, I'm about ready to start a sweepstake on who'll be the first member of the cult to claim that people only criticise Charlie because they're too stoopid to appreciate the subtle nuances of his position.

All of which is by way of saying that I'm starting to think the credit crunch isn't Britain's biggest problem.

Turns out Whiskey has been thinking along the same lines, albeit in a US context:

The Ivy League and "meritocratic" elites are resented because they've failed...

Outside of Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, both of whom left festering problems of Islamic terror, to crop up with later Presidents, nearly every President since Eisenhower has been nothing but an abject failure. Amiable dunces, lecturing and preening moralizers, devious compilers of enemies lists, or all three in the case of Obama. Jeff Zucker, Harvard University, ran NBC into the ground. The Sulzberger family has made the NYT a national joke, destroying shareholder value not seen since the AOL-Time-Warner deal.

Ordinary people have given about fifty years to the elites, and have nothing to show for it but a ruined economy, cheap Chinese electronic junk, declining real wages since the 1970's, mass immigration turning them into sudden (and discriminated against) minorities in their own country, and the prospect of even more of the same. Meanwhile, the elites have put up a "No Ordinary Whites Allowed" sign in the means to entry into the elites: the Ivies and near Ivies.

A good comment by Novaseeker too:

This blind spot may be what causes the left to dig its grave, politically. They simply do not *understand* the real source of rightist populism (instead labeling it as being based on fear, which it isn't ... it's based on resentment at some Ivy-League jackass telling them what to do, as if he is better than they are -- because he *isn't*, he just has a degree

Actually, it cuts both ways. It isn't only that people don't respect a guy just because he has an Ivy League/Oxbridge degree, it's that these guys don't bring anything else to the table, and don't think they should even have to: they're super smart, what more do you need? Pay no attention to the wrecked nation behind the curtain.

That's the bottom line: from the Romans claiming no man is fit to command who cannot command himself, to the Victorian obsession with inculcating 'Officer-Like Qualities' into their schoolboys, to be elite was a matter of duty as much as privilege. Now? Not so much.

Consider Oxbridge's previous favourite baby seal. The most disturbing thing is these guys aren't asking for special treatment, so much as assuming it is the natural way of the world. Even the worst scumbag of a Victorian squire wouldn't go into print to defend his right to shoot at peasants without consequences.

The idea that privilege and rank is supposed to, at the least, confer a duty not to act out like a spoilt brat rather than a right to do so without consequences has apparently gone the way of the powdered wig.

Actually, I take it all back: Charlie is a hero after all. He's the giant turkey in the mine, telling us just how worthless is our alleged elite.