Life versus art

It has been reported that pressure groups representing the survivors of rape, sexual violence and childhood sexual abuse have called upon the BBC to remove a statue by the sculptor Eric Gill that adorns its London headquarters. The statue, from 1932, is a depiction of Prospero and Ariel, the latter depicted as a naked boy. This is not a new demand.

While the BBC has, entirely properly, refused this demand and pointed out that Gill, for all his sins, remains a major British artist whose work is widely regarded as of importance, this situation illustrates a phenomenon among the Left that is worth examining further.

What is “Wireless tele-Vision” for? Discuss.

David Davis

[late edit...] [ I have suddenly wondered to myself what it's for, given that the global % penetration of small handheld (or not much larger) devices that can access news, comment, blogs and the opinions of millions, is approaching a majority. ]

One the one hand, the British Political EnemyClass has created what it seems to be admitting is a monster - this says “ban television for the under-threes” (or words to that effect.) Yet on the other hand a modern repressive police state would be a more difficult one in which to manage thought-control, regulate the opinions of, and generally farm for eliciting the “correct public responses” without this machinery. I have drafted a few of my own thoughts, rather fast this morning, in response to a typical Daily Mail mob-hysteria-inducing breakfast-article.

Of course, an invented device can’t be uninvented. The Wireless Tele-vision [WT] (and quickly also with post-receive injected sound subcarrier) was a marvellous development of the pure Sound-wireless, but like all technologies it’s been stolen and corrupted, Morgoth-style, by governments for their own purposes.

In the British State’s case,  WT’s purpose was to anaesthatize and render uncurious “The Masses”, over decades so nobody would notice except

The “Football Association” is now a “Court” – official.

David Davis

A private “Sports Governing Body” (whatever that is for) has set itself up as a “Sondergericht”. It has issued a “judgement – a Fatwah, if you like -  and attached a “fine” – a strange sum: £220,000….Makes you wonder how it was arrived at? No?

When I’m Principal Secretary of State For War, in the Democratic-People’s-English Revolutionary-Liberalist-Party’s*** first government (minimal-statist, conservative, libertarian) private institutions that have previously and triumphalistically-set themselves up as “judges and juries” under the current climate of rampant GramscoFabiaNazism, will find themselves “under investigation”.

I do not believe in amnesties for socialist behaviour, adopted and deliberately pursued with malice-afforethought, and in the face of all empirical evidence that such behaviour was designed on purpose to kill, destroy the effective lives of or otherwise harm as many people as possible.

The FootBallAssociatioNazis will be “hauled in for questioning” by the War Secretariat’s “Operational Services Department Personnel (Domestic Division)”. A version of a reverse-PPI-Claim will be applied to their staffs, who will be “invited to re-imburse John Terry the sum of £220,000 plus interest plus 8% plus a “sum to be decreed” for “damages”.”

I said something similar on Facebook a couple of minutes ago. In case any blogreaders here can’t read Facebook, I have posted the text of my piece there:-

I wonder if they did it on purpose

David Davis

[Subsequent edit by author] Further to receiving one-star ( = very poor) I should just rectify my omission, which was clearly observed by the respondent. I forgot to mention the requirement, that will encumber any incoming Libertarian or Revolutionary-Liberalist administration, whether in England, or the UK, or elsewhere, to criminalize and proscribe the existence of any bodies calling themselves “Trade Unions”, which behave in ways shown by the 19th- , 20th-  and 21st-Century British models of same. These outfits have proved themselves, through the deliberate policies and actions of their “officers”, to be far far more insidiously dangerous to life and liberty than any “terrorist” organisation, even the IRA and “Al-Quaeda” (whatever that might be), both of whom might be thought responsible for the deaths of up to 10,000 people each. The deaths probably attributable to the prevalence of “Trade” “Union” and “Workers’ Council” actions within the past 120-odd years probably run into the millions, aside from the planned and avoidable destruction of the UK’s heavy industries, docks, mining industries, railways and shipyards. (None of this needed to happen: the ability to fire all redundant labour upon the advent of better technology, thus keeping wage rates and hours to JapoChindoBraMexican levels, was prevented.)

Roll on the custard pies and rotting tomatoes….but Libertarians ought to begin speaking for real people, not just metropolitan political intellectuals like ourselves.

The coagulation-government is getting stick and rotting-cabbages from various quarters, for seeming to allow Francis Maude (who is, I admit, a bit of a slimy toad at times) to suggest that people should stock up on motor fuels before any putative strike by tanker drivers.

But I wonder…there could be a subtext here. Perhaps some clever Tory strategist thought that by artificially creating a fuel shortage at the pumps before any strike took place, the mass of inchoate but not negligible public opinion could be turned angrily against “UNITE”, whatever sort of GramscoStaliNazi front-organization that might be. I mean to say, it describes itself as a “Trade Union”, although it’s f**k-all to do with trade, and isn’t a union in any meaningful sense with regard to its members’ welfare – only its “officers’ ” wefare, power and prosperity.

Some of this unfocussed but very public mob ire might then rub off against the “Labour Party”, which predictably has failed to come out condemning the “union” – only mouthed platitudes about “the way to solve the crisis is by the negotiations”, as if there was anything meaningful for the drivers’ employers to talk about.

I just wonder if it’s a “cunning plan”. Of course, the predictable mainstream-media-response has been to toast the coagulation for its incompetence and “dangerous advice” (I mean to say! We used to keep old Duckhams 1-gallon oil cans and keep petrol in them for year after year – I always had 6 gallons in the house at any time, when in London years ago – about two-thirds of a tankful). But them the MSM is not on the side of any administration that is not overtly and aggressively GramscoStaliNazi. Perhaps because it thinks that most people viscerally are that, inand to their very bones….and they may sadly be right. Hitler got in, after all, by not misreading the mood of the German general public.

Dear me, the BBC at the anti-capitalist-sauce, again….

David Davis

I couldn’t just let this one go: the subliminal message just chimes in so well with today’s British-State GCSE/A-level “Geography” “syllabuses”. Everyone probably believed it wholeheartedly – it was said on the “Telly”… After all, the “educationists” who produce the syllabus-twaddle just love maundering on about TNCs based in MEDCs exploiting the Pull-Factor among MDPs in LEDCs.

You couldn’t make it up: the use of so many acronyms guarantees the unemployability of any British-State-geography student in any capacity other than a Soviet Metropolitan Council planning department.

“Free markets” and “free trade” as a religion, by Robert Henderson – Replies, Anyone?

Anyone fancy responding to this? An obvious response is to ask RH to define the laissez-faire religion he is attacking, and to distinguish this from corporatism, and then to ask if he knows anything about the economics of public choice and regulatory capture, or about the effects on business scale and morality brought about by infrastructure subsidies and the tax and regulatory burden….SIG

http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=590

Free marketeers fancy themselves to be rational, calculating beasts. In reality, their adoration of the market is essentially religious. They believe that it will solve all economic ills, if not immediately, then in the medium to long term. Armed with this supposed objective truth, they proselytize about the moral evils and inefficiencies of public service and the wondrous efficiency and ethical outcomes of private enterprise regardless of the practical effects of their policies or the frequent misbehaviour of those in command of large private companies. Their approach is essentially that of the religious believer.

Like the majority of religious believers, “free marketeers and traders” are none too certain of the theology of their religion. (I am always struck by how many of them lack a grasp of even basic economic theory and are almost invariably wholly ignorant of economic history). They recite their economic catechism sublime in the concrete of their ignorance.

The religion has its roots in the first half of the 18th century when there were occasional attempts to suggest tariff reform, but the idea only became a serious political policy in the 1780s with the advent of Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in 1784 who long toyed with “economical reform”.

The 18th century also provided the religion with its holy book, The Wealth of Nations by the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith. This strongly argued for “free markets” and “free trade”, but Smith also recognised the demands of national security, the need for government to engage in social provision such as road building and maintenance which would not otherwise be done and, must importantly, the nature of a society and its economy. Here is Smith on the Navigation Acts: “…the Act of Navigation by diminishing the number of buyers; and we are thus likely not only to buy foreign goods dearer, but to sell our own cheaper, than if there were a more perfect freedom of trade. As defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the Act of Navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of England.” (Wealth of Nations Bk IV. ch ii)

But Smith and his book suffered the fate of all those who found religions, secular or otherwise. As the decades passed Smith’s cautious approach was redrawn in the minds of his disciples to become a surgically “clean” mechanical ideology in which all that mattered was the pursuit of profit and the growth of trade and industry through the application of the “holy edicts” of open markets and comparative advantage. The disciples, like other religious believers, avidly quoted the passages from their holy book which suited their purposes and ignored those which did not. They also found a further holy text in Thomas Malthus’ Essay on Population of 1802, whose predictions, although unproven by events, could be used to demonstrate that economic expansion was vital if widespread starvation was not to occur.

The clinical, soulless and inhuman nature of the laissez faire idea as it evolved is exemplified by the English economist David Ricardo. Here is a flavour of his mindset:”Under a system of perfectly free commerce each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to both. The pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most economically, while increasing the general mass of the production it diffuses general benefits, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse the universal society of nations”. (David Ricardo in The fall of protection p 174).

The Napoleonic wars largely foiled Pitt’s wish for broad reform and placed “free trade” in suspended animation as a serious political idea until the 1820s, when cautious attempts at tariff reform again were made. But underneath the political elite was a radical class who were very much enamoured of wholesale economical reform. With the Great Reform Act of 1832 they were given their opportunity to become part of the political elite. They took it with both hands, their most notable and extreme proponents being John Bright and Richard Cobden backed by the intellectual power of David Ricardo – all three became MPs.

Within a dozen years of the first election under the Great Reform Act’s passing, Parliament had been captured by the disciples of Adam Smith and the pass on protection had been sold by of all people a Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, an action which kept the Tories from power for most of the next 40 years.

Such was their religious credulity that the “free traders” advocated not merely opening up Britain’s markets, both at home and in the colonies, to nations who would allow Britain equivalent access to their markets, they advocated opening up Britain’s markets regardless of how other nations acted. The consequence was, as we have seen, disastrous for Britain.

Disraeli in a speech on 1st February 1849 cruelly dissected this insanity:” There are some who say that foreigners will not give us their production for nothing, and that therefore we have no occasion to concern ourselves as to the means and modes of repayment. There is no doubt that foreigners will not give us their goods without exchange for them; but the question is what are the terms of exchange most beneficial for us to adopt. You may glut markets, but the only effect of your attempt to struggle against the hostile tariffs by opening your ports is that you exchange more of your own labour each year for a less quantity of foreign labour, that you render British labour less efficient, that you degrade British labour, diminish profits, and, therefore, must lower wages; while philosophical enquirers have shown that you will finally effect a change in the distribution of the precious metals that must be pernicious and may be fatal to this country. It is for these reasons that all practical men are impressed with a conviction that you should adopt reciprocity as the principle of your tariff – not merely from practical experience, but as an abstract truth. This was the principle of the commercial negations at Utrecht – which were followed by Mr Pitt in his commercial negotiations at Paris – and which were wisely adopted and applied by the Cabinet of Lord Liverpool, but which were deserted flagrantly and unwisely in 1846″. (The fall of Protection pp 337/8″).

Ironically, the “free traders” make the same general errors as Marxists. They believe that everything stems from economics. For the neo-liberal the market has the same pseudo-mystical significance that the dialectic has for the Marxist. Just as the Marxist sees the dialectic working inexorably through history to an eventual state of communism (or a reversion to barbarism to be exact), so the neo-liberal believes that the market will solve any economic problem and most social ills. Neither ideology works because it ignores the reality of human nature and its sociological realisation.

The one track economic mentality of the early “free traders” is well represented by the father of J S Mill, James Mill:”The benefit which is derived from exchanging one commodity for another arises from the commodity received rather than the from the commodity given. When one country exchanges, or in other words, traffics with another, the whole of its advantage consists of the in the commodities imported. It benefits by the importation and by nothing else. A protecting duty which, if it acts at all, limits imports, must limit exports likewise, checking and restraining national industry, thus diminishing national wealth.” (The fall of protection p 174). And to Hell with any social or strategic consideration or changing economic circumstances.

After the Great War and the fall of “free trade” as public policy in 1931, the religion went underground for nearly fifty years. When it re-emerged as a political idea in the 1970s the politicians who fell under its spell were every bit as unquestioning and credulous as those of the 1840s. Tony Blair’ statement on Globalisation, ie, free trade, at the 2005 Labour Party Conference shows that it is alive and kicking today. Scorning any attempt to discuss Globalisation, Blair said of those who wished to oppose it “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer”. (Daily Telegraph 1 10 2005.)

None of this would matter very much now if those who believe in “free markets” and “free trade” were without political power. Unfortunately, theirs is the elite ideology of the moment and the past 25 years. In Britain, the Tories may be more fanatical in their devotion to the market as panacea, but Blairite Labour have caught more than a mild dose of the disease. A good example of this is their response to house price hyperinflation where they desperately and futilely attempt remedies within the constraints of what they perceive to be “free market” disciplines rather than opting for the obvious state generated remedies such as restricting immigration, building a great deal of social housing and forcing developers to release land for building.

Both the traditional Left and Right have been duped by globalisation. The Left initially welcomed globalisation as a dissolver of national sovereignty, but they are discovering by the day just how restrictive international treaties and membership of supra national groups can be. As things stand, through our membership of the EU and the World Trade Organisation treaties, no British government could introduce new socialist measures because they cannot nationalise companies, protect their own commerce and industry or even ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent in Britain with British firms. A British government can have any economic system they like provided it is largely free trade, free enterprise.

The Right are suffering the same sickness with different symptoms. They find that they are no longer masters in their own house and cannot meaningfully appeal to traditional national interests because treaties make that impossible.

But there is a significant difference between the position of the two sides. The traditional Right have simply been usurped by neo-Liberals in blue clothes: the traditional Left have been betrayed by a confusion in their ideology which has allowed their main political vehicles to be surreptitiously by the likes of Blair.

The left have historically objected to “free-trade” on the grounds that it destroys jobs and reduces wages. But what they (and especially the British Left) have rarely if ever done is walk upon the other two necessary planks in the anti-”free trade” platform: the maintenance of (1) national sovereignty and (2) a sense of national cohesion. The consequence is that the Left has been and are still struggling with two competing and mutually exclusive ends: internationalism and the material improvement of the mass of the people.

Bradley Manning: One Soldier Who Really Did “Defend Our Freedom”, by Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5587

When I hear someone say that soldiers “defend our freedom,” my immediate response is to gag. I think the last time American soldiers actually fought for the freedom of Americans was probably the Revolutionary War — or maybe the War of 1812, if you want to be generous. Every war since then has been for nothing but to uphold a system of power, and to make the rich folks even richer.

But I can think of one exception. If there’s a soldier anywhere in the world who’s fought and suffered for my freedom, it’s Pfc. Bradley Manning.

Manning is frequently portrayed, among the knuckle-draggers on right-wing message boards, as some sort of spoiled brat or ingrate, acting on an adolescent whim. But that’s not quite what happened, according to Johann Hari (“The under-appreciated heroes of 2010,” The Independent, Dec. 24).

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans. When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.” The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government. When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam: trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.

For exposing his government’s crimes against humanity, Manning has spent seven months in solitary confinement – a torture deliberately calculated to break the human mind.

We see a lot of “serious thinkers” on the op-ed pages and talking head shows, people like David Gergen, Chris Matthews and Michael Kinsley, going on about all the stuff that Manning’s leaks have impaired the ability of “our government” to do.

He’s impaired the ability of the U.S. government to conduct diplomacy in pursuit of some fabled “national interest” that I supposedly have in common with Microsoft, Wal-Mart and Disney. He’s risked untold numbers of innocent lives, according to the very same people who have ordered the deaths of untold thousands of innocent people. According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Manning’s exposure of secret U.S. collusion with authoritarian governments in the Middle East, to promote policies that their peoples would find abhorrent, undermines America’s ability to promote “democracy, open government, and free and open societies.”

But I’ll tell you what Manning’s really impaired government’s ability to do.

He’s impaired the U.S. government’s ability to lie us into wars where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners are murdered.

He’s impaired its ability to use such wars — under the guise of promoting “democracy” — to install puppet governments like the Coalition Provisional Authority, that will rubber stamp neoliberal “free trade” agreements (including harsh “intellectual property” provisions written by the proprietary content industries) and cut special deals with American crony capitalists.

He’s impaired its ability to seize good, decent people who — unlike most soldiers — really are fighting for freedom, and hand them over to thuggish governments for torture with power tools.

Let’s get something straight. Bradley Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state. But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals. And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.

So if you’re one of the authoritarian state-worshippers, one of the grovelling sycophants of power, who are cheering on Manning’s punishment and calling for even harsher treatment, all I can say is that you’d probably have been there at the crucifixion urging Pontius Pilate to lay the lashes on a little harder. You’d have told the Nazis where Anne Frank was hiding. You’re unworthy of the freedoms which so many heroes and martyrs throughout history — heroes like Bradley Manning — have fought to give you.

Libertarian Alliance Christmas Message 2010

What is liberty for, and why should people be free?

David Davis

Merry Christmas, ladies and gentlemen. May God rest you merry, and perhaps tight this year. Get tight while you can still afford it – for governments, specially this one, would like to think they can “combat drinking” by over-taxation, freely and cheerfully admitted to.

Well, this year, among other things, the awful and totally-unelected Gordon Brown zeppelin-thing-in-the-ether, foisted on us by Tony Blair and possibly his worst single act, imploded finally. We voted, and guess what? Nobody won, and the Government got in, again. This may be a good thing in the short term, in that the coalition can’t actually do anything to hinder people much more, let alone help. But strategically in the battle for universal individual freedom, we here are certainly no better off than before.

In fact, a little worse, for some of us like me and Sean see the Clock ticking…. We know that however relatively more slowly than before we are being marched to the living-gas-chambers of sustainable socialist greenery, and to the concentration-camps of more intricate and closer repression, the available decades of living people’s lifetimes in which they might do something to reverse The Big Modern Managerial State, are slipping away like sand in a glass. Time, literally, is running out for liberty in the UK for sure, and so it would seem also for other Anglosphere nations. I gather that you can get fined for speeding in Australia, if you are tracked by a police helicopter…I thought helicopters were foreign-policy-war-winning-weapons, for machine-gunning GramscoStaliNazi “freedom-fighters”, until I researched Australian Policing.

So, what’s wrong with liberty? Why exactly are we under assault? And given the seeming consensus ranged against individual freedom, not only among the governing Enemy-Classes of the world, but also among populations who you think should know better, what is the point of freedom? Why should people be free?

If slavery seems to make so many people happy, why should bother to resist? Why continue to accept the nonplussed opinions of our contemporaries? Why bother any more to bear their frank uncomprehension at our persistent criticism of statist ideas and outcomes? Why should we endure the perpetual status of outsiders and deranged wierdos?

We do have the comfort of course, of knowing that everyone else is mistaken. We know we are right: we also know there is objective truth, about why liberty is good, and all the alternatives are evil.

But, why is it that in the presence of large measures of individual liberty, Men seem to advance and the nett sum of human comfort – not to mention the absolute amounts of energy able to be deployed – go up? Along with life-expectancy, freedom from hunger and want for more people than before, and the like? And that the converse is true: tyrannies actually produce cars, such as the Trabant, whose specification actually _declined_ as the years went on?

The world must thus divide between those who think as we do, and those who think that progress is a zero-sum-game. We know that market-based co-operation of Men produces absolutely more wealth, able to be spread by trading and money. To do this fairly, money must be “sound”, which is to say: unable to be corrupted and debased by outsiders and agencies (such as monopoly government issuers, which see a way to “have more” to spend, on “projects” or on themselves.) We also know that we think the Enemy-Class knows that for one man to succeed, many must fail. That’s why they have abolished failure in education, schools, and increasingly, non-Olympic Sport. (They like the medals, you see, “for the People”….)

What’s wrong with liberty, as seen by our Enemy-Classes the world over, is exactly that it makes Enemy-Classes redundant. There can be no purpose in such a Class, so long as individuals can sink or swim by their own efforts and forge, or fail to forge, their own destinies, by their own considered efforts and also while happy to accept the outcomes as they fall. Furthermore, many of the Enemy-Class are against what they call “religion”. Specifically this means Judeo-Christianity, for they do not seem to be against other ones although I bet you 5p this will change, before too long, say about 5-15 years. And they’re only “against the Jews” because the “Palestinians” being exotic and phantasmal have captured the imagination of those that shape public perceptions, and also because the Holocaust has now almost faded from living memory, and Europe is returning to its traditional 16-century-old let-out of Jew-hating.

I give British Muslims until about 2025 before they suddenly find themselves physically inside real enclosures looking out, rather than outside the hegemonic-discourse-enclosure looking in. And it won’t be liberals and libertarians who put them there, it will be their erstwhile friends in the Political Enemy-Class, and they will cry “foul!” and there will be nobody left to speak for them.

As for Christmas? I always like to make the point that Liberty is not the daughter of order but its mother. For those libertarians who believe there is a God, well that’s fine, and I just remind the others that He gave Man free will, as a gift. OK, OK. We all know the concept evolved along with an ever-increasingly-ramified brain and the ability to comprehend self-hood, accumulate Memory, and use Learning, in the fulfilment of the brain’s biological brief, which is to “do what you think best in the next seconds of time, all the time, to keep us other cells alive, using what you know”.

As in 1.John i:- In the beginning was Order. Order was God, (which means God exemplified Order), and Order was “with” (which is to say “by” or “created by”) God. In other words, Order pre-existed everything observable in the Universe, which of course makes perfect sense to any good scientist. (The “science” is settled! Ha ha…) Now, we say that Liberty is Order’s mother, which is logical in a political sense and is always and everywhere shown to be true in history. This makes liberty the greatest of all gifts. So, all Men should be free, for in that state a civilisation founded on Order, freely arrived at, not needing “police”, or “cameras” or DNA datatbases, or other such low stuff, can arise.

 

Governments and price-fixing: pot calls kettle black

Michael Winning

I learn that supplies of heating oil are running low. Worse, we have this:

Charles Hendry, the Energy Minister, said that ministers would work with suppliers to ration supplies to make sure that customers could get through the festive period, and confirmed that the outlook was potentially “very serious”.

Pres Reagan said “the most dangerous words in the English language are “I’m from the government and Im here to help”.

Of course there are more broken promises and bribery in the pipeline (sorry) as in this:-

Chris Hoon, the Energy Secretary, promised that no customer would be without oil over Christmas, adding: “The Energy minister has been in constant discussions looking at any way in which those who need heating oil, and are short of heating oil, get it. That is absolutely essential.

Not helped by “moochers and looters” as in this:-

Pat Glass, Labour MP for North West Durham, accused oil suppliers of “utter exploitation”.

And Conservative backbencher Neil Parish, representing Tiverton and Honiton, added: “Isn’t it time you took on the oil companies and ensure constituents get a fair deal as many of my constituents have no choice but to have oil?”

I am learnng to be more careful about my typing.

Tail-chasing

David Davis

UPDATE: I note now. 16.12.10, that Iain Dale has handed in his cyberpress and has ceased blogging. It’s a pity: although nobody in his right mind would call Iain a libertarian, he writes well and knows which targets to assault.

The trouble with being retired is that you have so many things you have to do. So, writing has been a bit light, held up here sporadically by Michael and Sean Gabb mostly: they also have family duties and stuff like that.

I wonder if serious blogging is really, in the end, only for people who nobody much likes, such as those fellows at Labourlist or whatever it’s called? Or, else it is for those so powerful and prominent that they can make time to think (it’s not the writing, it’s the thinking that costs time) or have people to do stuff for them while they think/blog, like Guido and Iain Dale and that lot. I have worked out that the “half-life of a blogposting” is somewhere between 20 and 36 hours, depending on the prominence of the writer. This half-life is the time in which the “hit rate” (absolute new page views per unit time) declines to half the value it was at the moment when the first regular stopper-in noticed it. Guido is on about 36 hours. We manage around 20.

Or it’s for people like Brian Micklethwait, who don’t much mind how few or many read their thoughts, but have interesting things to say about cats, cricket, photography, buildings and finer points of liberal philosophy.

Sometimes too, I wonder at the state of the Political Domain of human endeavour, and consider what more it’s worth saying that we have not already said. There are only so may thousand ways you can justify your ire at the scumbags and fascist time-servers that blight our lives in return for taking all our money and using it to oppress us more….

….well, that was exciting…The LA tab I was on, just…well…disappeared right out of the browser, throwing me back to the Waily (“coalition” ) Torygraph. Lucky that WordPress had pre-saved a draft with most of the text on.

I’ll trail the Christmas message though: it’s becoming a LA-Blog tradition, and I’ll be starting soon to try to find time to think of something interesting and relevant to say about this year’s Enemy-Class-machinations. If any of you disgusting and dysfunctional reprobates would like me to talk about something in particular, please state so in the comments!

I don’t like it….it’s too quiet…

Michael Winning

Not much about poor Ireland right now, perhaps the journos are all stuck in the snow.

It says over at Conservative Home blog (HOward Flight, he of the comments about paying the underclass to beget more labour voters) that Germany might leave the Euro. I can’t see a problem myself, the Merkel-Hilda just has to say the word. I think most of “her” people are baying quietly for he to do it.

Man is the Lord of creation: we must, however, stop the socialists from harming him

David Davis

I am groping at the Problem of Evil.

“Los 33″ have been rescued, flawlessly, in less time than estimated, from deeper than ever before. Not even a GramscoStaliNazi (or at least I hope not? Although I view these people slightly less orgasmically-charitably than Sean Gabb does) could grudge the thanks that first of all must be due to heroic and un-named scientists and engineers.

OK OK OK…I admit it….I’m a Catholic. It’s a fair cop and you’ve got me bang to rights, honest, guv, officer. I’ll come quietly.

But I also know with every fibre of my being that God never intended us to be barred from learning how to know, and then knowing, What Is In His Mind. Adam may be “fallen”, but as a scientist I am quite sure that God never meant to hide what He has Indicated to us, (“order”) through Science and Englineering, the things and stuff which might be available in the Universe, and which we could use on our orienteering-challenge to discover Him and understand His Mind.

Yeah-but-no-but…I mean…What else can there be for a sentient being to aspire to? X-factor? (I thought that was a 70s-USA-cosmetics firm, until I discovered other people’s interests…)

The things and stuff we could use? Like copper and silver and gold in the Atacama Desert. Who’d have thought, a mere 5,400 years ago, that you could do such stuff as we do, with stuff from the funny little molten streams of red-hot-thingy that flow from smelted rocks, eh, when you get the guys to jump up and down hard enough on their bellows? You could make axe-heads that would last a few hours rather than seconds, and…then you could remelt and reforge them when they went blunt! I think it’s marvellous, and worth every penny, and we’ll get to the Stars using it, some day.

Nobody’s thanked the mining-engineers yet, but I hope someone will. And the Germans who sent the steel cable: ought not someone to thank them too? The Chilean President, who seems like a good sort of bloke with whom one could have a drink in a pub (non-smoking, as is allowed under the present terms of discourse), might set the ball rolling – after all, he can’t fail to profit politically right now, can he.

Man may be tiny and insignificant as an animal. But his mind is a giant structure, entirely capable of demolishing anything that GramscoStalinism, and its wimpish and stealthily-gradualist little handmaiddroid GramscoFabiaNazism can put in our way. I do not know if all these nasty little post-renaissance socialist “isms”, which serve no purpose but to hold individual people back singly and in droves, are accidental artefacts of the Universe, or whether there is a Devil. As far as The Devil goes, I am an agnostic. It may be that the Vector Sum of all interactions of all kinds in the Universe is zero over its lifetime, and that it is “neutral”, and that therefore “evil”  minus “good” means that its angular momentum turns out to be zero.

But I hope that the P/L account, on the Last Day, shows a credit balance in favour of Order. Liberty is its mother, you know.

Perhaps the British State wants pubs to close

David Davis

h/t VelvetGloveIronFist

I’m not a conspiracy-theorist – really, honest, guv! But you wonder about the juxtaposition of the increasing rate of pub closures, coupled with a nationwide smoking ban in buildings used by the public and also with the feeling that “they” don’t want you to be able to plot gainst them and whinge about them to your friends, in places where “they” can’t bug you easily.

The pub closure stats make astonishing reading.

Here’s even more statistics from the same place.

Middle-Class lefties

David Davis

Ed West of the DT comments here.

The joke of the day

Michael Winning

Had a hard day on the farm todasy, so here’s some light reliefe.

North Korea to elect a new leader.

Some very nasty people are NICE

David Davis

Spotted this just now.

Prince Charles has been at the Philosopher-Juice, again

David Davis

I chanced upon this in the Times. Also, I find that Nick@CountingCats has done a good fisk of the silly old loon. Here’s a bit more detail about what the bugger said…

It’s a great pity really, for the poor British, who have striven mightily over the centuries to achieve something resembling the outer shell of a pre-capitalist-barbarian warlord-polity, but with “added freedom” and some goodish bolt-ons… This sort of social structure I guess gives comfort to some, if not most, people whose main past-time is trying to just get by while avoiding thinking too deeply about much.

But one of the goodish bolt-ons is that this model also delivers a modicum of personal liberty to the vast mass of the subjects – sadly often against their will. They will live to regret this lacuna in their perception of reality.

Now, however, although the British have at last painstakingly evolved, within this structure, the grand tradition of being able to get rid of their “king” and hire another one from somewhere else if they don’t like the first one, and so although they have now got a more-or-less-harmless strain of hereditary “Heads Of State”, the supposedly-chief male heir now proceeds to go batchy on Global Wireless Tele Vision – and he does it often as well, which is worse.

It’s all rather sad. If the concept of republicanism wasn’t so innately un-conservative and redolent of philosophical rootlessness, I might be more in favour of it for the British. I’ll have to reflect a bit.

If arms offer power and protection, they belong in the hands of the People

David Davis

And no I didn’t invent that myself: it is the formal policy-position of the Swiss “Government” (if that word is not slightly tautological.)

Paul Goodman at ConservativeHome nicely articulates the position most of us take on here, which is that now is definitely not the time to do kneejerk, Tabloid-Million-Moms-driven legislation to further restrict, or even ban entirely, all firearms, thus taking us as a people into the territory of the Third Reich, wherein Himmler said that private gun ownership and licensing was “inconvenient” for the State. Except for Göring of course.

I have been excoriated on Facebook, for saying that these periodic massacres, ostensibly by lone crazed lunatics, are set up by the “authorities” every time they want to ratchet up the gun controls here. With hindight, I’m prepared to suspect (but only suspect) that I was wrong in this particular case. But my major thesis still stands I think. We will anyhow know the truth about Dunblane in about 80 years’ time.

Well what an absolute surprise

Michael Winning

So we are to be told, now, to “put books in the home”… I wonder what we are to be told that the books ought to be about, then? Is not that the crux or nub? Bettre watch out you book-people, for your books may not measure up, all 20 of them.

If they are not about David Beckham or Cerril Coal and called “my life”, then they perhaps arent allowed. And what if you have more than 20? Are you a dangerous conservative?

You’d be forgiven for thinking the State knew all along about how to educate. Thats what they have always said anyway, is it not?

Cameron Year-Zero caption competition

David Davis