For those of you with children, how to recreate a tiny bit of socialism harmlessly, in your own home.

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.

I’ve never said much about the Iraq War, but I was “reading around” and I have just been stung.

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’m not sure I want States to be allowed to take Life; certainly not pre-capitalist ones which require regime change first.

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.