Everyone said “You can’t unseat the Political EnemyClass by voting them out. Well, I say: “it has never been tried before, and we shall have to see.”

David Davis

Clown or fruitcake?

(from Matt at the DT)

Today, for the first time a rather historically large number of British voters get to be able to elect, if they like, candidates for “Council Seats” (this to say in honest countries – “socialist Soviets”) from the United Kingdom Independence Party. Now, the Libertarian Alliance goes out of its way to be perennially nasty to all the parties extant in the UK, from time to time, and sometimes all at once. But it’s natural that a little more of our ire and frustration is reserved for those which are more truly socialist than others: for I at least can’t figure out how it might be possible to be what some people call themselves, which is “libertarian socialists” (yes I have heard that one) or even “left libertarians”, although that might just be possible.

This round of elections for regional soviets councils is notable for the frantic and public attempts by other parties, particularly the Tories, to make direct and sometimes ad-hominem attacks on the reputations and backgrounds of rather a lot of UKIP candidates. I’ve been watching British elections since 1959, more or less, and haven’t noticed any such thing on this scale ever before. If they occurred, such assaults tended to come from the socialist left.

The entire British political-class, ably egged on by the BBC, appears to have taken fright at the idea that, for once, letting people vote for who they’d like might actually change things, and not to that class’s liking. As I type, there are no results yet from vote-counting, but the morning may be interesting.

I want to continue by offering a libertarian-based policy position document for a party such as UKIP, were it to, let us say, win a majority in a regional soviet, or even a general election. But as rheumatoid arthritis is making my elbows increasingly non-functional tonight, typing is a little strenuous and exciting. So I’ll save that for a post in the next couple of days or so when the painkillers have kicked in.  Meanwhile, commenters might like to add their own suggestions.

 

(Incidentally, the headline owes a little credit to Air Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris”, who used a similar expression when someone suggested that “you can’t win a war by bombing the enemy alone”.)

How states set bad examples of behaviour

David Davis

I don’t follow foot ball, and I have had to be told who John Terry is. But this keeps on cropping up on my screen.

It is not for a State to decide what people can or cannot say, or think. Even I, who’d like to muzzle GramscoFabiaNazis – because they are _objectively_ wrong, not just misguided – cannot justify doing it, even under the auspices of the War Secretariat.

People ought to be free to think or say, things that might be offensive to others. There are Natural Rights: but there is no right to not be offended if someone says or thinks something that offends you – or worse – “may offend” third parties not even present at the time. This is utterly ridiculous.

Oh, and YOU MUST NEVER use the phrase “political correctness gone mad”. Doing that legitimises “political correctness” as a credible way of dictating the terms of public discourse in a liberal civilisation. You must not do it. Ever. (I know that no readers of the Libertarian Alliance would ever do such a thing, but you must tell others. We’re wasting our breath and time otherwise.)

The poor bugger will probably go down for £2,500, and then we will be forced to watch the

All around is fire, and yet the buggers won’t leave the burning building

David Davis

These are very interesting times. The Euro is toilet-paper, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus are really absolutely quite fully-bust, Germany’s central bank is saying “sort yourselves out”, and yet….and yet….

This country’s government has already given £14 billion in aid to a currency that we don’t belong to, were nearly bullied into joining, and have no interest in….and furthermore, it says “there is no popular support for a referendum on the European Union”.

The current shift of Chimpanzee-Type-writers in the draughty Lancashire Nissen Hut is really not sure what to make of this. Or perhaps they are: When this government (or any for that matter) says the magic word “The People”, it probably means “the people that it has victoriously elected in the latest round of _people’s elections_ “, which is to say: itself.

I don’t recall any recent polls asking about the EU that said anything other than a clear majority of the British People would like to leave it. Does anybody else have any different information?

As Brutus said…”I pause for a reply”.

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!

UN Global-Warm-Mongerators…always wrong, all the time

David Davis

We’ve come to expect it, since they do it on purpose.

BUT..

The pretence, of course, of appearing manfully to try to shore up a wrong position (although based on falsified data – a fact still not widely known or believed, despite the Climate-Gate scandal) is a good position for them to take. It makes them look like heroic, altruistic martyrs in the service of “The People”.

These droids are very, very clever, far-seeing, and have planned their strategic and fundamental assault on civilisation for a very, very long time.

WE must never, ever underestimate their resourceful and ferociously-focussed pursuit, in the face of all opprobrium, of their objective of irreversible enslavement of all people: this will be in a living hell encompassing the Whole Earth, where all except the bastards themselves will endure the torments specially reserved for the damned.

A caption competition from me

Michael Winning

I haven’t done one of these, but how about this which I found over at Old Holborn?

Apologies, OldH, I now see it was for yours too. Oh we,ll

Extremely funny pic

David Davis

This came by just now over at Legiron’s place. Perhaps it deserves a caption competition: we don’t seem to have done one in a while.

Oh dear, a spat with Pakistan, again

David Davis

UPDATE: I forgot to include a link to the report – apologies.

Our Coagulation-PM has got into hot water, it seems, with certain nationalist elements in the Pakistani Intelligence Services.

Apparently this is what Cameron said:-

”But we cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror whether to India, whether to Afghanistan or to anywhere else in the world.”

The problem of interpretation centres on TWO WORDS…”able” and “promote”. If his advisers had said to him to say “unable” to “prevent”, or even “finds it difficult to prevent”, then I don’t think the ISI could have complained – for that would, as we all know, be substantively true.

Perhaps the coagulation is going to founder on the rock of the British Political Enemy-Class, which still owns the Terms Of Discourse, which wants our culture and civilisation dead, which believes what it is saying and thinks we don’t think that, and still, sadly, briefs Cameron’s speechwriters.

Pakistan is a surprisingly large place, like neighbouring Afghanistan, and it is difficult to police much of it, even had its government the strategic will and vision to supress “certain elements”.

“Johnny-Taliban” is clearly getting his gear (even if not his squaddies) from somewhere, and nearby – given his logistics-set-up – is the obvious place. I don’t think the Russians’ writ quite runs as well as it did in those parts in the 1970s/80s, so “north” is probably out: furthermore, ShootinPutin187 knows, to a nicety, how far to push us or not, and this is not something he’d go the the stake over.

France always makes trouble for the Anglosphere on principle, whenever it can. That’s how it is: it’s France’s job and has been for 1,000 years. So I’m prepared to believe that money might be coming from there, if not explosives and IED-technology. But Occam’s Razor does, sadly, point to our old chum “West Pakistan”.

If the ISI geeks want to flounce, let them.

Middle-Class lefties

David Davis

Ed West of the DT comments here.

But now for something nice

David Davis

I’m going to buy one of these.

Mine's a six-pack

Some very sad news

David Davis

Here, from the USA. H/t Samizdata.

Educashun, educashun, educashun

David Davis

Someone “high-up” in the British Political EnemyClass has suggested that the State monkeys yet further with end-of-school qualifications, to play to the different skills of boys and girls. This is the wrong solution addressing the wrong problem. The problem is that there is nothing left worth learning in British State GCSE exams. This ought to be addressed first.

As the Irishman said, on being asked the way to somewhere: “If I were you,

I wouldn’t be starting from here!” The problems with GCSEs are these:-

(1) the ones that really matter (Maths, English, Science, History, Geography,

Latin) have been deliberately stripped of real content, partly to make them

inclusive and partly to deliberately de-educate more than two succeeding

Generations of English people especially males in particular.

(2) The droids which run exam boards, “Local Education Authorities”,

teachers’ “Trade Unions” and also whatever the Ministry of Education

is currently called, are GramscoFabiaNazis. They know and believe and wish,

with all their hearts, that our culture (here) and our historiography must die,

and plan to ensure it. They can’t logistically round up 60 million people at

gunpoint into cattle trucks bound for…(…where would they put us all!) so

they do the next best thing. (For example: for his GCSE “Religious Education”

(full course, higher) my boy ought to have watched “East Enders”,

whatever that is.) These mountebanks got to where they are on purpose, to do

exactly what they have done. Our backs were turned at the time, facing the

homologous military threat by their real masters (it pretended to cave in in

1989, and so the strategy was brilliantly clever. Never, ever underestimate

these thugs.

(3) The syllabuses of these have been captured the discourse-owners of the above GramscoFabiaNazi ideology. GCSE “Biology” module 1, is all about alcohol abuse, dangers of smoking, misuse of drugs, and a woman’s mentrual cycle coupled with “fertillity control”. Clearly designed to impress boys. Nothing about comdoms, but then they were forced to learn that in primary school. In maths, “Bhavneeta conducts a survey about how her friends travel to school. She finds that 98% travel by bus or bicycle. What fraction travel by other means?”

(4) Other distractions, such as “Media studies” and “PE”, fill time which could be used to teach proper science, or read several Shakespeare plays in full, part for part, over a week or two for each one. Then they could act it. “Food tech” is all about risk-assessing the preparation of a “healthy lunch” for a wheelchair-bound vegetarian, using “local ingredients” and no salt or sugar – does that mean you only use what’s in the pantry then?

(5) The “mark schemes” are totally prescriptive. You may not even describe something correctly but in different words from the MS.

(6) The Government adjusts the grade-boundaries (usually down each year, trust me, I mark stuff) to be able to trumpet that “the better-than-ever results reflect the efforts of our pupils and teachers, harder-working and more successful than ever before!”

None of that could be true unless the papers were getting really harder, really longer, and containing more content, than ever before. Which they are not.

The whole system needs to go, and we need to start again. With the papers from 1950 which have been considerable lengthened to contain the next 60 years of real added knowledge, to test. About 1% of all takers will pass at all, but that’s how we will learn what the real papers ought to look like: those who fail will just have to step back and learn more things.

You could get out a lot pf TV programs about thermodynamics, transition metal chemistry, and subnuclear particles, in the daily Eastenders slot.

(5) You’d be shocked at the “poetry clusters” in the English syllabus.

…that GCSE stuff’s not a “science paper”…THIS is a Science paper!

David Davis

A little time ago I published a recommended High School Science test paper, designed to better prepare those who were planning to pursue Natural Sciences of all kinds at a “University”. It’s been revisedf a little:-

Improved science paper for GCSE, devised by David Davis for the Libertarian Alliance, a free-market, civil liberties and Classical liberal education think-tank and publishing house in London, originally issued in Sept 2009.

PAPER ONE

TIME ALLOWED: THREE HOURS

1                                            Estimate the DC current, flowing in a one-turn copper coil which follows the earth’s equator, which would cancel the Earth’s magnetic field at either pole. (Take the horizontal component of field at lat 86^o 30` N and longitude approx 30^o W to be 0.18 gauss: vertical component = 0.9 gauss. State the relationship between the c.g.s Gauss unit and the MKS Telsa unit.)

2                                            Calculate the cross-sectional area of a square copper turn, smoothed and unblacked but not polished, and fully suspended, whose surface temperature will not exceed 800 K in dry air temperature of 310 K. Assume the specific conductivity of the supports to ground as being 0.2 Joule m-2 sec-1. If the young’s Modulus of the supporting material is 50GPa, calculate the minimum cross-sectional area of each support assuming you place one every five metres of copper conductor. State how many supports will need to be ordered to circle the Earth at your designated line, and, in still air, their minimum height to prevent the ground temperature rising more than 5 K.

3                                            Calculate the gravitational field strength existing between the Milky Way and a hypothetical galaxy 13 billion LY away. Use 2E42 Kg for the mass of the Milky Way: make an informed estimate of the mass of your further galaxy, stating clearly any assumptions you have made. Using your figures thus obtained, and your informed estimate of the mass of Galaxy M31 whose data regarding mass, position and relative speed you already will know, decide where approximately to place your spacecraft so that the resultant vector of gravitational forces from the three galaxies on it is zero, assuming no other interactions.

4                                            Estimate the cross-sectional area of each of two Duct-tape fixtures, (tape is of 48mm width and 0.5mm thickness) applied always parallel to the direction of force, which would be required to separate reliably two opposite charges of 1C each at a distance of one meter in free Space. (Young’s Modulus of Duck Tape is assumed to be 4E9 Pa.)

5                                            Estimate the number of moles of human DNA on the Earth as of now, its total estimated mass, and the molar mass of human DNA. (Assume that one haploid human genome, complete, = 1 molecule. Also assume that the mean volume of all human cells is about 1.9 picoLitres.)

Ignore human gametes in this answer, but also estimate the total number of human gametes present on the planet at any moment. Use your knowledge of human population trends and age-band-statistics to derive as accurate an estimate for this number as possible, differentiating male from female gametes. State the assumptions you have made about the relative frequency of each gamete.

6                                            Calculate the reduction in heat capacity of the Gulf Stream over a calendar year, caused by a wind farm of 10,000 turbines directly in the path of the airstreams above it at latitude 55^oN, each turbine having an installed generating output of 100Kw, at a height of 100M and operating at a 16% duty cycle. Use your own knowledge of geography, natural climate movements, astronomy, the heat capacities of water and moist air. (You may assume that the Sun’s radiated power output is about 3.92E26 Watts and is deemed for this question to be constant.) Estimate the extra mass, surface area and volume of North Polar ice that would build up in the Barents, Norwegian and Greenland Seas in one year, assuming that no other areas are affected, as a result of this set of turbines. (For quickness of solution, assume polar ice above latitude 65 radiates IR into space at 25 Watts/M² at all temperatures above 230K.) Specific heat capacity of water in liquid phase = 4.18KJ per Kg per degree K.

7                                            You are to deliver a shell weighing 1.5 imperial tons, at a range of 60 miles, from a barrel of diameter 460mm, at a target at the same elevation as the emplacement. (g = 9.81m/s²) Devise a suitable mathematical model from which the answers could be derived, and then calculate, in no particular order:

(a)   The barrel length

(b)  The time of flight

(c)  The maximum height reached by the projectile

(d)  The required muzzle velocity at 40^o barrel elevation

(e)   The mean gas pressure (assume uniform) in the barrel

(f)    The acceleration of the projectile in the barrel

(g)  The muzzle velocity (you may neglect air resistance for this question.)

8                                            Calculate the number of 25Kg sacks of rice that would be required, and also the total volume of rice grains in cubic miles, if the Great King had been able to grant the wish of the Resident-Court-Mathematician who had invented Chess for him. The inventor asked for “one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, sixteen on the fifth…..”. Assume a grain of rice is a cylinder of length 7mm and diameter 1.25mm and that they pack approximately efficiently. State your grain-packing-density assumptions in your answer.

If the sacks used above are made of polythene, and must be 850 microns thick, estimate the area of film to be manufactured including excess cutting-flash needed on the packing lines, this amount’s mass, and the number of barrels of Saudi Heavy Crude that may have been used to make it. Use your knowledge of thermal cracking procedures, the mean composition of linear alkanes in Saudi heavy Crude, and also of the average mass of a “barrel” and how much of this is realistically convertible into monomers for this question’s use. Density of polythene (MDPE type) is about 0.932 g/cm³.

9   Calculate the rate of change of mean global temperature, stating in which direction it will move, if unbroken polar ice caps cover the Earth down to latitudes 50 North and 50 South. Assume the boundary is a straight line in both cases. State what percentage (to 3sf) of the earth’s current land area would have to be moved by tectonic drifting to be below latitudes 50N/50S, to bring about the cooling you have calculated.

I think we could profitably watch this space

David Davis

Here.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

David Davis

The Cameroid has appointed old George Young (remember him from thousands of years ago, when history was going to end and the West had Won?) to “review H&S legislation and scumbag pointless regulations brought in to destroy this culture and enterprise.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

All they have to do is simply repeal the regulations. In a block. All of them. Them we can buy pipe-cleaners again, and take school parties to steel-foundries again, which is rather more important. I wanted to do the latter a few years ago, just about five of them in a car. But I could not, for the steelworks, although keen to have us, would have got closed down by force if one of the little buggers’d injured himself on a piece of white-hot rolled-steel. (You just have to say “careful with that, sonny, it’s a bit warm!”)

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.

Reasons to smoke, revisited

David Davis

Rather more than two years ago, I suggested on here, at this place, some reasons why you might choose to smoke.

Things have moved on, the GramscoFabiaNazis have moved forwards and we that defend liberty and sovereign individualism are retreating still. This is sad but we did predict it.

However,  Over at this blog (which has some excellent photos on it every day) is one of an embattled smoker, in London. The comment thread is interesting as it reveals the emotions of some “antis” towards other fellow human beings. WE here did warn you all, time and time again, about the ineffable evil-ness, and astonishingly detached inhumanity, of “anti-smokers”, which are droids that we have always said that we would conflate with sub-humans, for they do not register human emotions or responses to individual behaviour. Hitler, for example, was a vegetarian anti-smoker. I am sure that Pol Pot and Mao-tse-Tung did not smoke either.

Found commented, at Legiron’s place. Read him, GramscoFabiaNazis, to find out about the seething undercurrent of hatred towards you, that by your repression and by your surveillance-state, and by your control-philosophy, you are stoking – as a fire, for yourselves.

When you will have “won” in your eyes, and there is nothing, for anyone, amywhere, then we shall simply have to come for you, and kill you and eat you.

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

Bank Holiday caption competition

David Davis