The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

This today from Hot Air.

Personally, I think it was staged, so as to create yet another offence to put on the statute books;

“If a male, and while being recorded or not, pinching or appearing to pinch, or conspiring with or without others to pinch, the bottom of a state-broadcasting-female-executive, whether of the BBC or of any other Channel. The appearance of appearing to pinch a State TV Female’s bottom shall be deemed to mean the actual pinching of the same bottom, and shall constitute an offence.”

Life gets more and more ridiculous every day, doesn’t it. If it was not tragic for Mankind and for the furtherance of God’s Vision for the Cosmos as prosecuted by The English West, which is the Only Heir to the traditon for this imho, then it would merely be funny. But it’s not.

Here’s the video of it.

Here’s the article. 

Libertarians, and other hominids, have, I am sure, pinched women’s bottoms since God was in short trousers. I’d do it more, if I could get away with it, cos’ they are nice, so I can only use my wife in nearly all circumstances, and she then wails and complains that I am not sweeping the patio of rotting pears, or some such irrelevant stuff that is nowt to do with women’s bottoms. It is what their bottoms are for, after all, otherwise they would not be accentuated visually, and then they would not be the shape that they are supposed to be. You can’t gainsay Richard Dawkins, after all!

If God had not intended Men to have sex with Women, then he would not have given women bottoms for pinching, by men, as a necessary signal for the process to be started.

A pinchable bottom means that she will breed well as there is enough fat on her to sustain a pregnancy (shun low-fat foods! NOW!)***…..it has always been so, as our biology is at least 1,185,000 years ahead of socialism’s attempts to redefine it to the purposes of the gramscian sex-gestapo. The phrase to use, really, to check that you - as a woman - should NOT buy something is “does my bum look a bit too small in this?” If the answer is yes, don’t buy!

Twenty-one cheers for the man in the video. If he is not caught, and if his life is not ruined, then may he be as successful as any of us could want in life, and may he go forth and multiply hugely. But not with Telly-State-princesses; just ordinary women.

*** What you must all do now…..

When you are in a supermarket, and you pick up any stuff that says “low fat”……. or any variant of same, just shout…

” LOW FAT??????????? CAN’T EAT THAT THEN, CAN WE !!!!! “

Make sure that you can be heard by at least eight people who are within ordinary talking distance of your trolley. I will bet you 5p that FOUR of them will laugh, and ONE will agree with you…out loud. Fats are what make stuff tase of anything, chemically. The State(s) may be determined to remove TASTE from food, as “taste”, allowed in something, would then be a suitably sexy reward for compliance, in something. But……..this could be the start of the fightback, if you want.

The late Chris Tame was as avid a reader (and also a notable collector) of SF as I have ever known. My father was one too, but his library of it, which I inherited, only stretched to about 6 yards; Chris’s was five or six times that even years before he died.  Chris preferred what he called “hard SF”; I don’t know if Heinlein would fully qualify there, as he tended to stray into “rocket-opera”, which is always a temptation as it’s popular. But I was reminded of the existence of chris’s huge librray of the stuff, and my smaller one, by this newsgroup posting I got earlier today.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy
As they say on the moon, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!”

BY TAYLOR DINERMAN
Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and “populist” by
university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural
artefact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine
articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater
impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the
20th century.

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have
shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one
finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what
used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C.
Clarke put it: “Almost every good scientist I know has read science
fiction.” And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson
Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.

The list of technologies, concepts and events that he anticipated in
his fiction is long and varied. In his 1951 juvenile novel, “Between
Planets,” he described cell phones. In 1940, even before the Manhattan
Project had begun, he chronicled, in the short story “Blowups
Happen,” the destruction of a graphite-regulated nuclear reactor
similar to the one at Chernobyl. And in his 1961
masterpiece, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Heinlein–decades before
Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to the White House–introduced the idea
that a president’s wife might try to guide his actions based on the
advice of her astrologer. One of Heinlein’s best known “inventions”
is the water bed, though he never took out a patent.

Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical savvy–
based largely on the engineering training he’d received at the U.S.
Naval Academy and a career in the Navy cut short by tuberculosis in
1934–and a broad knowledge of history and foreign languages.
Bemoaning the state of U.S. education in the 1970s, he wrote
that “the three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history,
languages and mathematics . . . if you lack any one of them you are
just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.” Heinlein was
certainly no ignorant peasant.
Though he later became well known for his anticommunism, Heinlein in
the late 1930s indulged in both leftist and isolationist politics. He
sold his first science-fiction story in 1939 for $70, “and there was
never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work.” After
Pearl Harbor, to his great disappointment, he was not called back
into uniformed service. He ended the war at the Philadelphia Naval
Aircraft Factory, working with fellow writers L. Sprague de Camp and
Isaac Asimov.

From the late ’40s to the late ’50s, Heinlein mostly wrote adventure
stories aimed at boys. Some, such as “Citizen of the Galaxy” (1957)
and “Starman Jones” (1953), examine social and economic status with
as jaundiced an eye as Tom Wolfe’s. Others are comedies like the
delightful “The Rolling Stones” (1952), which helped inspire the
famous Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.”

In 1958, in response to what he saw as a liberal effort to weaken
America’s military, he set aside the “Sex and God” book on which he
had been working and wrote “Starship Troopers.” This was probably his
most controversial book. In it he imagines a future society in which
the right to vote must be earned by volunteering for service,
including service in the military. In response to claims that the
book glorifies the military, he wrote: “It does indeed. Specifically,
the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who puts his frail
body between his loved home and the war’s desolation–but is rarely
appreciated.”

Afterward, he finished the work he had set aside, and it became his
second and possibly greatest masterpiece, “Stranger in a Strange
Land.” The book tells the story of a human child raised by Martians
who is brought to Earth and discovers religion, lust and love, as
well as politics, interplanetary diplomacy, legal shenanigans and
life in a traveling carnival. The novel introduced the word “grok”
into the vocabulary of the 1960s counterculture and seduced many of
its members into reading some of Heinlein’s other works–writings
that, in some cases, helped them to rethink the assumptions of
hippiedom.

His next book was “Glory Road,” another novel on the subject of duty,
heroism and love. The first chapter not only sets up the story but
includes one of the most eloquent and witty denunciations of military
conscription ever written. In “Glory Road,” his protagonist is
magically transported from Earth, where he had been
fighting “pragmatic Marxists in the jungle,” to a fantasy universe
where, armed only with sword and bow, he would rescue a priceless
treasure. His guide and mentor is a woman of “ageless perfect beauty”
who later turns out to be the Empress of the Twenty Universes. She
explains to the hero that “so far as I know, your culture is the only
semi-civilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art
and given the serious study it deserves.”

Heinlein’s political beliefs were moving more and more toward the
libertarian side of the spectrum. He supported Barry Goldwater in
1964, and in 1966 he published what many considered his greatest
book, “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” the tale of how penal colonists
and their descendants on the Moon successfully revolt against their
Earthly masters. The core of this book, which keeps it near the top
of the libertarians’ reading lists, is the speech by an old
professor, Bernardo de la Paz, to the rebels’ constitutional
convention: “. . . like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous
servant and a terrible master. You now have your freedom–if you can
keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly
to yourselves than to any other tyrant.”
The professor explains: “The power to tax, once conceded, has no
limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told
them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away
with government–sometimes I think that it is an inescapable disease
of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved
and inoffensive–and can you think of a better way than by requiring
the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby.”
As they say on the Moon, “TANSTAAFL!”: “There Ain’t No Such Thing as
a Free Lunch!”

Heinlein’s later novels were overshadowed by his failing health, and
he often wrote on medical themes such as brain transplants and
cloning. He was a strong supporter of blood drives and a big
supporter of NASA’s medical research projects. In the ’70s, in a
speech to the midshipmen at the Naval Academy, he said he thought
that “patriotism has lost its grip on a large percentage of our
population. . . . But there is no way to force patriotism on anyone.
Passing a law will not create it, nor can we buy it by appropriating
so many billions of dollars.”

Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988, lived a life inspired by two
great loves. One was America and its promise of freedom. As one of
his characters put it: “Your country has a system free enough to let
heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its
looseness is destroyed from the inside.” And he loved and admired
women–not just his wife, Virginia, who provided the model for the
many strong-minded and highly competent females who populate his
stories, but all of womankind. “Some people disparage the female form
divine, sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters.”

In another hundred years, it will be interesting to see if the
nuclear-powered spaceships and other technological marvels he
predicted are with us. But nothing in his legacy will be more
important than the spirit of liberty he championed and his belief
that “this hairless embryo with the aching oversized brain case and
the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes will endure.
Will endure and spread out to the stars and beyond, carrying with him
his honesty and his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage and
his noble essential decency.”

http://opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110010381 

I wondered about France today. Not for the first time either. This bout was triggered by scanning John Gibson’s book “Hating America, the new world sport“. You want to ask, how many Frances are there actually? (Well, there’s West Germany, where they speak French and which faces us across the Channel, then of course you have Germany itself east of the Rhine, and…….but that’s a joke.)

France is a problem that libertarians ought to devote time to addressing, since its foreign policy activities - and its domestic ones in large and increasing degree through its catspaw the EU, impede the efforts of people all over the world to promote liberalism and individual freedom. You could almost be forgiven - the disarmingly frank admissions of French and other EU officials aside - for thinking that the French ruling class is against the whole idea of individual liberty. And the place is a Nuclear Power with it. (I don’t mind the electricity thank you very much, but ought France really to be allowed nuclear weapons, if we are pretending for a moment not to be libertarian?) 

The France that impinges mostly on your average modern Mondeo Man is of leisurely vacational wanders by car, past patisseries, boulangeries, charcouteries, and roadside eateries, with the obligatory family stock-up trip to Carrefour etc, for cheap wine and (relatively rather) expensive food - but they don’t notice that in the passion of the moment. There is also this residual, sort of ghostly even, feeling that this France is somehow strange and exotic. I even know youngish people who think that Frenchmen are rural characters who cycle about cheerfully in berets, with massive strings of onions attached (to the bikes, not the berets.) I don’t know about you, but I have not seen one of these in years.

Then there’s the one you want to do your “No Turning Back” TV moment of fame in. I’ve just heard of another mum of a child at my wife’s nursery this evening, who wants to “go and live abroad”, probably in 2/3 years, and it would be so great to “live off the land!” This is not the same France, I feel, as the one Mondeo Man thinks he knows.

There is the urban France you get fed occasionally on the TV News, the one where disaffected North African Male Youth does its stuff, and whom the President famously called “Cannaile” in a previous life. I don’t think the French ruling class wants this exposed much, and in my experience it’s very hard to find your way to those places without a good map.

The ordinary French people are in there somewhere, but I don’t know any personally right now, so I have no idea whether they know how to act for themselves. I suspect they can’t owing to the sheer weight of bureauracy imposed on businesses and ordinary transaction. Make mental note to find out.

That’s four already. But now on top of this we have the French Political Class, which I suspect is the root of the problem. This is the France that kept the UN and the Allies (us) off the back of the wicked butcher Saddam Hussein for so long, when it was clear his number was to be up. This is the France that wanted us to pretend that it was nothing to do with NATO for so long. this is the one that merrily allows EU “directives” to be passed in its name and ours, while tacitly ignoring those that don’t suit its domestic and foreign interests. 

It’s inconceivable that French people can be that different from other nations who inhabit this general neck of the woods; so then, why does such a construct as the énarquerie, relying openly on State authority, coupled to arbitrary application of logic and philospher-king-Platonism, not get turned over and thrown out? In liberal capitalist terms it is the cardinal anachronism! The French people are marvellously ingenious and creative - just like us. They have contributed much more than an average human share to science, engineering, music and literature; so why do they feel the need to tolerate a superimposed class of Platonists which appears to order their lives, and wants to order the world’s?

Perhaps the énarques ought to get out more. After all, France lost the First World War in 1759, or thereabouts. They lost the Second in 1815. Public rapprochement with “les Rosbifs” has saved them from total humiliation in World War Three (1899-1989 with three armistice periods starting in 1902, 1918 and 1945. I don’t know what the solution to the France problem is, for the future of world libertarianism, but I suggest it’s a psychological issue which chiefly affects their top graduates or the educational bureaucrats’ tradition which trains them.

Can anybody suggest soutions here?

This just recently from Freedom and Whisky.

(Telly Dailygraph 23.07.07)

 Binman’s St George bandana ‘is racist’
 By Nigel BunyanLast Updated: 1:45am BST 23/07/2007 

Clearly, when a socialist says something, it now means the opposite. Furthermore, Libertarians ought to agree that law-abiding Christian sea-traders might consider a skull-and-crossbones definitely offensive, and quite possibly racist, since the bones depicted will always have been from a race (even a religion) other than that of the pirates, who would have not had the best interests of the said traders at heart. But I don’t expect Mr McInery will discipline Mr Carter for that.

One rule for one person and one for another.

These excrescences have arrived en masse, typically in foul 70s-retro-Biba-type socialist-chic colours. One Soviet’s bins in the Liverpool “Gau” are a particularly repellent shade of bright magenta, which I previously only thought suitable for the more appropriate types of ladies’ visible underwear. They will now disfigure the country (the bins, not the underwear sadly.) Metal dustbins were much more iconic of liberalism, since they were statistically all different within a small area. They would quickly go a sort of brownish grey shade, merging into the background, like conservative people. You could burn stuff directly in them also, hence returning millions of tons of much needed CO2 to the atmosphere where it rightly belongs for the good of the Earth, while simultaneously reducing the volume of “waste” you produced.

We are to pay through the nose for these, an unfortunate turn of my phrase but there you are. However, I offer on this bolg a prize, which is (to be, sometime, when I get around to it) a hypertext link to a FIAT-paper voucher (the relevant experts are to convene a meeting to explore the feasibility of the scheme) to be exchanged for a bottle of State Champagne-Substitute, which will be awarded for each further useful suggestion for their uses, which gets successfully added to my preliminary list of ten below;

 10 useful things to do with wheelie-bins………. 

1                   Use as H&SE-approved substitute for sacks in “sack races” if not allowed to race “solo”  (oh, er, sorry, I forgot that you can’t say the word “race” any more.)

2                   Drill small drainage holes all the way up each side and grow potatoes in them (got to dig for victory after the floods…)

3                   Ditto carrots – height deters carrot-fly.

4                   Leave outside charity shops after filling with smelly old clothes.

5                   Ballast with half an inch of lead plate in bottom, and paddle around Tewkesbury.

6                   Upturn and stand on inverted base, to call for help after capsizing (see (5) above.) 

7                   “Install” 1,762,468 bins at the Tate-Modern.

8                   Place on side and use as long kennel for very short dog.

9                   Fill with concrete and use as barricades (if you are a socialist student.)

10      Fill black ones with concrete and place horizontally, three deep, across middle-class residential roads at night, to deter young male feral men with no hair driving W-reg Vauxhall Novas at 134 mph. An unplanned cheap flight of some 20-30 yards will result.

Axioms to start with;

(1) The Earth has no settled “climate”. Never has had, never will.

(2) Man is too insignificant to change its non-settled climate at all. Ever…or at least for the next few centuries, until (if the West’s traitors-in-its-midst allow it to survive, and individual scientific creativity is still allowed) we can deploy the kinds of amounts of energy that could hope to begin to compare, even locally, with the Sun’s radiated output and flux at the planetary surface.

(3) We CAN predict local (very local) weather which we can’t change, quite accurately.

(4) If you abolish local drainage patterns, then when lots of water comes at you with erratic periodicity, you will get floods.

The above things ought to be obvious. However, I have observed some disturbing notions now circulating in the meeja;

(A) The “gumment” ought to have “done more”. (A sentiment worryingly expressed by an uncomfortably large number of affected individuals.)

(B) The “environment” “Agency” didn’t do whatever it thought, and others thought, it was supposed to do.

(C) the “gumment” is still apparently going ahead with plans for 3 gazzillion “affordable houses”, mostly in the very parts of the country where there are still-unconcreted flood plains.

Almost worse than all that, I am assailed by walls of silence from the West’s “pop singers” and “celebrities”, who have so far signally failed to call for, let alone start, an appeal fund for those individuals affected - most of whom will have contributed thousands of percent more to the same pop stars’ fortunes than any number of hapless victims of the Tsunami (anyone remember that, or what happened to what Bob Geldof famously called, years before, “the f*****g money”?)

So. “Where’s the f*****g pop-singers, then? (when we need them….)

Well, so. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of British people are finding that they now live in unreliable geographic conditions, in a State whose generalised incompetence they ought to begin to realise. There are three things they can do right away; 

The first thing they’ll have to do is learn to be more self-reliant, since nobody else clearly is going to help them, ever.

The second thing is to forget about the efficacy of buildings and contents insurance, since the providers of same will have been in cahoots with the “gumment” for some time; they must now simply modify their own properties (which are probably now unsaleable for the reason given in this paragraph) unilaterally, to defend against the “gumment’s” promise of more and better floods.

The third thing I can think of here is to demostrate, politically at first - all the time and always and every day, and then aggressively if need be (learn from the French, who have never had the good fortune to live under a liberal pluralist democracy, and so they act accordingly) against any further plans to concrete over their counties, to provide “affordable housing”; that is to say, socialised housing projects for State Salariat Staff to be built mainly in Tory areas. Or for any other reason; moreover, there are plenty of brownfield sites in my part of the country, where yet more labour voters will feel quite at home among their own kind, instead of being dumped unceremoniously in smelly rural towns and villages and fields full of pig-shit and crappy plants, and not a night-club or tobacconist or Post Office for the giro-cheque, for miles.

As for the pop-singers and their silence on this, f*** them. To hell with “their” money; we are better people than they think. I bet you 5p they’ll all be on the next band-wagon - literally -  for “climate change” (see the start of this) or some far-away disaster of which we know nothing. Charity ought to begin at home.

Yesterday I had a go at the Tories (see below.) Now we find their own slaves revolting. And in the Snidey Torygraph to boot! (Don’t worry; it’s the only Sunday paper that’s remotely readable in these darkening days. It’s just that it’s what we called it when we were students, nearly 40 years ago. You had to seem to be “left-wing”, or you would not be able to pick up girls; it’s the way it was.)

The by-election results give us all we need to know.

 Sedgefield results: Phil Wilson (Lab) 12,528 (44.77%, -14.11%)
Greg Stone (LD) 5,572 (19.91%, +8.02%)
Graham Robb (C) 4,082 (14.59%, +0.19%)
Andrew Spence (BNP) 2,494 (8.91%)
Paul Gittins (Ind) 1,885 (6.74%)
Toby Horton (UKIP) 536 (1.92%, +0.36%)
Chris Haine (Green) 348 (1.24%)
Stephen Gash (Eng Dem) 177 (0.63%)
Tim Grainger (Ch P) 177 (0.63%)
Alan “Howling Laud” Hope (Loony) 129 (0.46%, +0.08%)
Norman Scarth (Anti-Crime) 34 (0.12%)
Lab majority 6,956 (24.86%)
11.06% swing Lab to Lib Dems

Ealing Southall results: Virendra Sharma (Lab) 15,188 (41.48%, -7.28%)
Nigel Bakhai (LD) 10,118 (27.63%, +3.19%)
Tony Lit (C) 8,230 (22.48%, +0.91%)
Sarah Edwards (Green) 1,135 (3.10%, -1.52%)
Salvinder Dhillon (Respect) 588 (1.61%)
Dr Kunnathur Rajan (UKIP) 285 (0.78%)
Yaqub Masih (Ch P) 280 (0.76%)
Jasdev Rai (Ind) 275 (0.75%)
John Cartwright (Loony) 188 (0.51%)
Sati Chaggar (Eng Dem) 152 (0.42%)
Gulbash Singh (Ind) 92 (0.25%)
Kuldeep Grewal (Ind) 87 (0.24%)
Lab maj 5,070 (13.85%)
5.24% swing Lab to Lib Dems

If there was ever any point in the Libertarian Alliance trying to capture the Conservative Party, there is none now; it has too few MPs to make a difference, most of its “members” are dead, and it has effectively no representation at all in much of my part of the world.

Voters this time seemed to think the Lib dems offer a more convincing way of having current Tory policies delivered than the Tories would themselves. And, moreover, STILL they put in a Labour MP. you’d think a child of six would by now understand that Labour hates everything about Britain, British culture and British history - in particular any and all English contributions to its Institutions  -  and wants it expunged, erazed utterly from the memory of Man. 

Perhaps most people don’t care much about the sustained abolition of their country and their culture, which is what I’ve suspected for the past 15 years. Perhaps they are too busy, or too exhausted by recreational pursuits such as “reality TV”.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that they don’t give a stuff, in the entire Fullness of Time. Our Finest Hour may indeed have come and gone. S**t happens, after all. If so, then we still have a grand historical record, to be utterly proud of, and which no other nation or civilisation on Earth can match, or perhaps ever will. 

It does not mean to say they, these seemingly uncaring compatriots of ours, don’t share Libertarian values, if they knew what these were. The Tories have gone collectivist just like all the other saddos who can’t get proper jobs doing real stuff; their home-tragedy is that while wanting to be liberals at heart, they don’t know how to do the Marxism-crap like the real fascists and statists who have been practising it since being in nappies; so they not only seem to echo their enemies but they sound unconvincing with it.

To hell with the lot of them. There is a case for now founding a proper Libertarian Party in the UK, which is why I’m going for the £1,000 essay prize in memory of Chris Tame, and all you readers who agree with me ought to do so too.

Go to the LA’s home page (link above) and you’ll find an announcement on the front page.

This today from other crap.

Al Gore, $100,000 Man “If you’re looking to book Al Gore for a 75-minute ‘Environmental Multimedia Lecture,’ the former vice president will cost you $100,000, plus travel, hotel, security, and per diem expenses. Gore’s standard speaker’s contract, a copy of which you’ll find below, also stipulates that the Democrat’s ground transportation be ‘a sedan, NOT an SUV.’” 

No wonder he can afford a house with 25 times the “carbon footprint” (whatever that is meant to be) of your average redneck, whom he must clearly despise. On the popularity ratings, I think Blair will probably have to start off by paying people to let him turn up and spout. As he gets better at it, he may be able to charge a few hundred or so.

Come to think of it, I’ve heard little recently from the UK arm of the Global-Warm-Mongers. You’d have expected them to shriek constantly that the unseasonal rains and cold are “All Your Fault” and “All Due To Global Climate Change” and “You Have To get Rid Of Your SUV, Now.”

Our potatoes are ruined; too dry too early, and too wet too late. And our Kohl-Rabi is not now going to mature in time for autumn. But the Greenazis are silent. I wonder why? Perhaps “the Science has not been settled after all”?

I had an idea today. Don’t ask me if it’s been floated before as I don’t know. it just seems so elegant; what we once called “A one-stone-solution to a two-bird-problem”.

Waging war against anti-Western (that is to say, anti-liberal and anti-freedom) jihadists is becoming rather expensive and irritating. Not to mention the loss of life, mostly among Moslems or so it seems, when you watch these people “sawing heads and blowing up marketplaces while shrieking about their victimhood” (I got that from another bolg.)

There might be, say, and I am working this out as I go along, 50 million bored young men with no girls to talk to, of whom let us say 1 million are in jihadist training camps or British universities, and who have no female company and no money. They must be getting scared to talk to the girls by now, who may be stoned to death while the boys’ backs are turned. Our security services must be capable by now of finding all these chaps whether in Bradford or the Yemen, and then of making them an offer.

I mean, really, what a miserable life! To be forced on pain of death to live without sex until you marry, and even then not to be able to choose her, then to be lumbered with your cousin, and in the meantime to have no money, no computers and no playstations the-while, must be torment unimaginable; let us help the poor buggers.

The other strand of the device rests on the willingness of enough single British (or other) women, who for whatever reason can’t find a young dusky hunk like Bin Laden Junior, and who would be prepared to have one, along with some money. If there was one, and there was and she’s married him, there must be others.

Let us say that MI5 and 6 have got their teeth into the ankles of the 1 million. (This ought to be near the case by now.) Let us make them all an offer. We will give each one who agrees to renounce jihad $100,000 PLUS a free X-box-360 AND a free PS3, AND 20 free games. Yes, a hundred thousand greenbacks, and the hardware is effectively 2p. They can take £50,000 sterling instead if they prefer.  In addition, they HAVE TO take on one of the willing group of “white girls”, who will have been canvassed for this role by the “Social Services” departments of the various British Soviets in which they are currently paid out of the public purse to live, and they HAVE to live in a unit of “affordable housing”.

Those who would like more than one “wife” will, of course, be allowed to, subject to having to accept to receive appropriate multiples of the “dowry” and subject to each wife’s approval. It goes without saying that each “wife” will have to cease to be a charge on the State.

If all the one million took it up, this would cost $101 billion, which includes one billion for the toy-hardware. This is much much less than half the cost of the Iraq war to date, and a substantial although uncosted sum will be saved from socail security benefits. But not all will, so we will save costs here.

What it will also do is dramatically weaken the will to self-immolation through jihad, among the rest. We can afford it indefinitely. The jihadistas can’t begin to match it, and even the oil revenues of the wahhabists can’t keep pace while also keeping them in princes and Sri-Lankan slaves, at the required rate of consumption of both. Furthermore, the injection of so much money, leaving the public purse and entering the free market of cities like Bradford and Leicester, will have secondary benefits.

Wouldn’t “Paradise Now” be preferable to “Paradise Lost”?

As a libertarian optimist I am constantly struck just how well humans are doing as a species and this general disposition is rightly be supported by the latest United Nation’s Development Program key statistics.

1. Infant mortality

In the Middle Ages more than 200 infants out of every 1,000 live births died before their first birthday. In the middle of the last century 157 per 1,000 died within the first year. By 2003 this number had dropped to 57 per 1,000 live births with average global life expectancy increasing to 66.8 years and in the developed nations 78.5 years. These facts are even more remarkable when you consider that the average global figure was only 31 years in 1900.

2. Nutrition

As a result of increased global agricultural productivity, the inflation-adjusted price of food commodities has fallen 75 percent since 1950. This is despite the fact that the world’s population has increased during that period by more than 150 percent. With global daily food supplies currently at 2,804 calories per capita, the average person on this planet has never had the opportunity to be so well fed if only we can institute a genuine free market trading system.

3. Wealth creation

From the year 1 to 1,000 A.D., the average person on this planet lived on the equivalent of a dollar a day. By 1800 this figure had doubled to $2 a day. In 2000, the average world per capita annual income stood at $6,000.

4. Education

Between 1970 and 2003 global illiteracy fell from 46 percent to 18 percent of the world’s population.

Moreover during the last 200 years the world’s population has increased from 900 million to 6.3 billion. As such, modern capitalism with all its creative dynamism has meant that when it comes to key areas of concern capitalism has substantially increased the well being of an ever growing majority of the world’s people.

This is not to deny the fact that there are still more than 1 billion people in absolute poverty or that more than 50 million new cases of malaria occur in Africa each year alone.

What these facts from the United Nations do highlight is that there are truly profound historic reasons for libertarians to be cheerful and optimistic when thinking about the future.

In preparation for last Friday evening’s LA Putney Debate with Tom Burroughes - who was excellent on the subject of ‘investment banks, hedge funds and private equity firms: what they are and what their wealth says about modern financial capitalism’, I picked up and read in advance a copy of the magazine that he writes for.

Aptly named The Business and edited by the classical liberal journalist Allister Heath I found it to be generally a better read than The Economist.

If you are a British libertarian and you are interested in commerce, investments and current affairs then I highly recommend this publication. You can currently get the first five editions for only £1. 

The Grauniad has made it onto this bolg! Here. Never thought I would do that, but the positively palpable plangency of Polly’s prose permits publication.

It ought to be more like “Boris Johnson for Prime minister”, insofar as we are forced to have one of these plus all the attendant and increasing governmental burden of bureaucrats. But I suppose we shall have to wait quite some time for a party to form, with sufficiently liberal-capitalist values and the accompanying minimalist programmes, to carry him. The Tories won’t do at all; they are in fact finished, dead, gone***; perhaps Boris knows this and is sliding out gracefully while he still can, to the possibility of winning the “next best thing” in power terms.

Paul Johnson, in the spectator about the time of Major’s premiership, predicted the current state of the Conservative Party. There is clearly no hope any more for popular, talented individuals with the merest streak of humanity left in them. I can’t think, moreover, what David Davis is still doing there.

***In many towns and cities here in the North, there is now in fact no functioning Conservative Party organisation “on the ground” whatsoever. Replacing them are “Lib Dem” offices, often in converted shops, acting as permanently manned “drop-in” sites, with a girl (or sometimes a young man) just out of “Uni” and with no job to go to, a computer, tea, and the usual stuff. The MP (often a libdem now, not just boring old Labour) uses it as his surgery, and campaigning is conducted quite efficiently. I can’t see the Tories managing this any time soon.

Perhaps the time has come for London to elect a Mayor that looks like the city thinks it does, in the way that Reagan got elected in 1980 as he looked and behaved like America’s image of itself. At least he only had Carter before him.

Making slime  Mix 200 ml water, 200 ml “white glue” and 10 drops food colouring, in a medium bowl. In a larger bowl, dissolve 4 teaspoons of borax in 250 ml water. Slowly pour the contents of the first bowl into second. Use a wooden spoon to roll the glue based solution around in the borax solution 4 or 5 times. Lift out the glue mixture and knead for 2-3 minutes. Store in airtight container or a self-sealing plastic bag.

 Warning: The mixture is not edible and children should avoid touch their eyes after handling.

We, The West, if our Mediocracy and our Enemy Class can have anything to do with it, are about to lose a (big and important) war, in public, in the face of an enemy which does not share our system of value-judgements about what wars are for and when you go in and go out.

I have just got this from the Paleo Blog. It seems to state among other things that 

Excuses changed, shifted, and transformed from day one of the Iraq War. Paramount, in the long run, to the reasons of The Why to the war was the idea of spreading the democratic spirit. Given that we are constantly told that democracy is completely equivalent to liberty it sounds all good and wonderful. It is said that democracy can be substituted for liberty or freedom. They are one and the same. It is an interesting notion. If so true, as Wilsonian neocons tell us, then why is it not applied to the fact that the overwhelming majority in Iraq want us out? If democracy is so clean and wonderful, time and place should not stop it from “working.” 

I felt I had to quote this bit in full, or you would not get the full flavour of how far off-reality I think the Rothbardians have trangressed on this one.

Everybody forgets exactly how in favour of “us” being there all the inhabitants were in early 2003. And the “Western media” too. I have all the press cuttings still. It is not so long ago but now seems an age. The reason that “the overwhelming majority in Iraq” now want us out is that we have not demonstrated sufficient will and ruthlessness against the real people who actually want us out. This is now becoming an unendurable burden for the inhabitants who are always the tragic secondary casualties of the continuing war - fought as we may suspect by importees from neighbouring states that shall for now be nameless - and that they think the price of us going, to be supplanted by people much like the fascist butcher Saddam, is thought to be less that that for us to stay.

We are not thought to have much resolve anyway (this is clear from what our enemies say publicly and frankly about us, and what we seem to communicate to them by our own Mediocracy.) Therefore to call for “our” withdrawal seems to the poor inhabitants to be the quickest and cheapest option out of their misery. It saves us aggravation and gold in their eyes; it saves them much blood and terror and misery when they go shopping in public places; it (may possibly) placate(s) the local pre-capitalist barbarian warlords in countries near them. And yes, it is in one sense “about oil” - the warlords might want to “control” (access to) it.

 The Rothbardians mistake how the world works today. They are not living in a box, which is inviolable if they remain true to their ideals, theoretically admirable in themselves. It reminds me of the joke about the man who went to Heaven and was shown around by St Peter. He asked about the tall, large, round enclosure with no windows or doors, and barbed wire at the top. “It’s where we put the Roman Catholics” said Peter. “Then they can think they are the only people in here”.

I think it was the right war. It was meant to make an example of a very, very bad man, entirely without any human or redeeming features, who killed millions of people, “his” and others, without unduly hurting the other many, many bad men around him for the moment.

(They have not grasped the lesson, and we have not applied enough visible and harmful pressure for them to do so, which is why we are seeming to fail.) These will still need teaching about real life, and ”their” people will still need to be shown positively how to live a liberal life full of uncharted choices (although the internet is starting to do that) whether we like it or not.

Wars have two exit strategies; victory, and defeat.  If we have, as we did, chosen to go to war to start to redeem the world from tyranny, properly, in our lifetime, against the present threats that face it, then we ought to have done it properly at the start. It matters not a whit whether “he” had “weapons of mass destruction” or not. (He did, actually.) The point was that he publicly supported people who killed 3,000 other people from the sky, and who were glorified publicly by others in his position plus those whom they terrorised into chanting orgasmically about the joy of it. To upend “his” regime, and supplant it (if we had the will) with a ”proper” one (as a Libertarian, I do wonder if there is any such thing!) in the face of other neighbouring barbarian warlords, was a noble, and good, and a right objective. It need not have cost much at all, if we had looked serious on 12th September 2001. The UN has cost us a vast amount of blood and gold, and will have to go. (I will talk further about the UN shortly.)

If we were even now to be honest, with ourselves and in public, about who is doing all the “roadside bombs”, and “improvised explosive devices”, then there is a chance that victory could still be grasped from the jaws of Western Mediocratic defeat.

There is no reason for Western armies to be defeated by third countries who use weapons provided by themselves, or even weapons provided by France or Russia; I am sure we have stolen the designs for all of them, or we ought not to be there with our Soldiers.

My stance on this War, how it was begun, and why it was necessary, may not be popular with Libertarians, but I would even go so far as to say it was the only honourable and right decision that Tony Blair took - and I dislike him as much as any right-thinking man. 

I don’t really know what to post about this as it appals me, but something ought to be said. Hot Air flagged it too. This place, referred to, seems to be a gigantic (probably Swiss, but I stand to be corrected here) oil-money-recycling facility, posing as a modern “nation”, but run by pre-capitalist warlords. I can’t think why otherwise its “rulers” would want or need to own hundreds of advanced warplanes and tanks and ancillary stuff to go with same, unless they are afraid of the other kinds of warlord sitting opposite them, sort of in a kind of, er, you know, north-easterly direction, over the ditch.

The inhabitants seem not to want to do any kind of normal work whatsoever, like rearing their own babies. They contract it out to slaves, and then complain whe said slaves do some bad things, and execute them publicly.

If, as “Suhaila Hammad, of Saudi Arabia’s National Society for Human Rights” says, execution is a “deterrent”, then how come they have to do it so often and so graphically, to so many foreign nationals employed by them as slaves?

There is no point whatsoever “doing the usual amnesty stuff” on them; the result both highlights our own inability to save this poor girl at all, and also further and more deeply engrains the West’s wimpishness in the face of barbarous behaviour by peoples who it is our duty to educate and change for the better, whether they will or no. It also implicitly accepts, in the face of the accusers, the alleged guilt of the “suspect”, which under our jurisprudential code, centuries old also, is unnacceptable.  Furthermore, if the said behaviour is masquerading as “religious law”, then it is because they know they can get away with that justification for a thrilling mediaeval public spectacle, and there will be no consequences applied from outside.

I am not at all sure that States in any case ought to be allowed to take life judicially. This can only be the case if the individual right to do the same existed previously, AND that individuals who had chosen to put themselves under such a State had voluntarily delegated that right upwards. I do not think this is the case with the “nation” to which I refer.

“Allah, our creator, knows best what’s good for his people,” does not, I think, Cut the Mustard as a juridical cover.

All I WOULD add, as a warning for the West in its Hour Of Need, is that such behaviour in the face of what passes today for “international condemnation”, signals a culture that feels very very secure in its beliefs and its imagined place in the future of Mankind. We would do well to take lessons from such barbarous people, before we change them for the better, in the specific topics of how well we project our own self-confidence, and to what extent we are prepared to thumb our noses (like the French do for their own interests, God bless them!) at “international” and internal critics of what suits best the propagation of liberalism and liberty.

Their behaviour towards this poor girl, and the hundreds of others they have done, are doing and will condemn to a disgustingly conscious and painful death, in public, is entirely un-admirable, in all respects. However, their resolution, coupled with their sheer brass neck in yet expecting to be allowed to buy our wonderful planes and other weapons, is entirely commendable, and should be emulated by us in our forthcoming defence of our own beliefs.

David Farrer, whose blog you can find here, had kindly drawn my attention to this, from the FT.com site. I totally agree that there has been and is a lot of new development of older, brownfield buildings and sites, much of it very good. But as I pointed out in my comment replying to his, the areas involved are still tiny - a few dozen acres at most - and any visitor to Liverpool will be struck by how much of its urban residential districts resemble Glasgow in the 1970s.

Top-class renovations of, say, waterfront warehouses, into penthouse flats for the thick end of a million, are not going immediately to benefit your average terrorised single mum in Toxteth, trapped on benefits and as the probable serial baby-mother for “youths”, similarly trapped. Unless socialists with a vested interest in maximizing the population of these people suddenly decide altruistically to go and break rocks in China, instead of continuing to staff the “welfare” agencies and Town Halls, thus freeing up the economic and the political horizons for myriad small businesses, to get these people back to work and self-respect, the main problem will, er, remain.

Lord Black’s evisceration today, on the front page of the paper he once owned, signals at least the second ruination of a British peer made by Thatcher.  Nobody of course remembers who Jeffrey Archer was, but he was in fact de-paroled for going to a slightly-better-than-average dinner-party with other humans while on parole, and you can’t get much more sick socialist than that, when it comes to one law for the rich and another for the poor.

I don’t know what’s got into the West in the last 20 years or so, particularly Democrat typw lawyers in the USA (the last people who ought to be stirring shit INSIDE the tent) but I think the prevailing death-wish is to do with “graduates” of “universities”, thoroughly marxistized due to the rest of us oldies being asleep and not having the correct dons sacked in time for their abused students not to get into important places like public prosecutors (well, that’s what the buggers are, isn’t it?)

There’s a great risk now that anybody who “does well” in a non-political way, under any sort of centre-left administration in the Anglosphere, will end up having the book thrown at him. Rupert Murdoch, being by now too powerful and important as a channel for the buggers to publicize themselves, may prove an exception. But if I was him I would consider taking out Chinese citizenship soon. 

Here’s a picture of it (copyright Google Earth.) You can read all about it here. There is too much about the slave-trade on that link for my liking but the rest is accurate enough. The general picture is of a large collection of ageing relics, in search of a reason to exist. 

In about 50 words then; once, it was a marsh. There were a few fishing bothies, and the occasional landing of Norse traders, settlers and raiders, probably from Ireland, just a couple of fast longboat days away. Apart from that, nothing much happened for a millennium. 

Then, King John needed a harbour under English control, to deal with Ireland (he was a much better and fairer Overlord to the Irish than is realised, better than his father, or his successors.) It got its charter in 1208. “Liverpool” meant at the time “the yellowish tidal salt marsh”. 

With the Empire, Liverpool became the 2^nd or 3^rd most important/richest port in the world. The Germans duly demolished large parts of its docks and shoreline in 1940/41 and sporadically later. With a coastline like that, you could hardly miss, unlike the Ruhr. At the time it had (I recall) eight MPs, seven of whom sat for the Tories. All seats are now safe Labour, with the sociable democrats always second. 

Then socialism came, undefeated and now crouching malevolently, behind the understandable and widespread groundswell of popular feeling that, with the War “won”, no human being really ought to have to do any real work under pressure, whether economic or mortal, ever again. My father, a returning soldier in 1945, confirmed this; he and many believed in a “Brave New World” and voted for it – his words not mine. The restraint-of-Trade Unions, exacting their pound of flesh for war work, got in on the act big-time.  

The dockers, an especially important group in Liverpool, helped with their mates elsewhere to ensure the destruction of the city’s main reason for being. High taxation post-war, plus the aforementioned restrainers, put paid to the Lancashire textile manufacturers which created most of the port’s tonnage. The importation of Asian labour, in the hope that this would cut costs, has only served to let the Enemy Class do a multicult on what is left of the UK. 

Then came Derek Hatton in the 80s, the Jag-juggler of gerrymandering junta-justice. This man could even thumb his nose at Thatcher, and he mostly got away with his further destruction of this once great city. 

So, what’s left? (No pun intended there.) Well, er, there are quite a few imposing museums in the modern idiom; vast spaces, odd directional lighting, coloured steel staircases, wall-2-wall DVDs featuring something or other, and a few-widely-spaced items, guarded by miscellaneous and forbidding artificial policemen, who are impersonating the staff.

The Maritime Museum in the Albert Dock is not as Politically Correct as the one in Greenwich, since there is not too much about slavery, and, still quite a good bit about the Battle of the Atlantic. Occasionally, The Navy turns up and becomes a static exhibit for a week or so, when the ship is not under repair or its crew have been captured by the Iranians. 

Recently, Liverpool became the “European capital of culture 2008”. I can’t find a local who knows what that is going to mean; except that there is much large building work going on, mostly of hotels and tower-flats – the city centre is chaos – and the Soviet has put up a number of £19,000 illuminated metal signs at its borders, welcoming you to “A Capital City”. No solar cells or little Cameroonian windmills on the tops of these – they are connected to the grid! 

The Catholic Cathedral, “Paddy’s Wigwam”, is an inspiring religious building, and has arguably the finest modern cathedral organ in the world. Libertarians ought to be wetting themselves with joy, as this church was built entirely by individual private subscription, of pennies and shillings at a time, over decades. 

There are three Universities. If I objectively judge what think about two if them, I could get “Boris’ed”. Apart from that, 2-shags-Prescott was going to demolish all the Victorian and Georgian terraced housing he could find, and turn the entire city into what Toxteth looks like, or Bucharest started to be under the ghastly “a-suit-a-second” pig Ceaucescu. Prezza didn’t succeed very well, thank goodness, as some of the Georgian stuff is finer than London’s. 

So, what can these poor people do, trapped on benefits in a museum?  The first thing is take responsibility for their condition, and stop wallowing in self-pity. I’m going to get “Boris’ed” now, I can tell!  This is true, even though it may not be the fault of those currently alive to take it. If they don’t, then the Hatton-heritage harpies who think themselves nominally in charge of these people’s destiny, charge them (or us,) use them, and abuse them, certainly will not. These poor people ought to, at every opportunity, vote early and vote often, very often each time, on every day they can, to eject those buggers. As my reader knows, I regard the failure to not elect a socialist, any other kind of political imbecile, including nazi collectivist psychopaths, as a personal failure of responsibility. If they don’t know how to vote or what box to tick, then we should be like the SAS and pick up the weapons of the Enemy Class, for our use, and they should be “helped”. Whatever has become of the ancient Tory custom, which I knew as “kindly driving hundreds of old ladies to the polling station(s), and back” ? Perhaps Cameron does not get this, or perhaps Steve Hutton or whatever that guy’s name is does not want him to win, and is a plant? 

Secondly, education ought to be entirely denationalised. This post is already way too long for me to go into the reasons here, and with which my Libertarian reader will already agree anyway, so it will be another time. But suffice it to say that people ought not to be forced to learn about how absolutely great governments are, in schools owned and run by the said governments. This would, slowly, lead us forward into the past, to a time when schooling was non-compulsory, taught what was important and needed, and caused a greater flowering of more ability in more people than at any time in Man’s history. The peak of Britain’s moral, spiritual and economic domination of the world – and I list them in that order on purpose – came probably just before the first Education Acts began to be able to muddy the waters, and when the state was yet small. As I said Enoch Powell said; “The rot sets in, but it takes quite some time”. Denationalised education will make better people, in time.

We would not live to see that even if we started now, but to get somewhere you have to start somewhere. So I fear there is no hope in our lifetime for poor old Liverpool. At best, it will become a “hot” conference destination, for a few years. It might even last until the Olympics 2012, if we are still so unfortunate as to have to host them. I hope Boris will cancel them for us, and cut our already considerable losses as a nation and as a people, in our rulers’ self-narcissistic chasing after this increasingly fascistic event.

In Liverpool, then, the bureaucrats, and a few of the “developers”, will make some money. I expect there will be more, and prettier, “escort” girls, for the same time interval, for the abovementioned, and for some visitors. So at least a little money may flow back into the local economy where it belongs. Things often get old, because they are good, and last long. But can we say this of poor Liverpool, at the moment? Not unless libertarian solutions are applied to it and soon.