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.

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.

I really, really think that you ought to go here, and do it now

David Davis

Here.

The GramscoFabiaNazis know precisely what they are doing, and they are emulating the destruction of “Old Nichol” on purpose. So that they can create worse places.

Good new blog spotted. Run by angry teenagers

…and quite libertarian!

David Davis

New UK Libertarian forum spotted!

Michael Winning

I was over at The Last Ditch’s place and I spotted this just now. Do go, I’m going to give it a try now and then, even me.

Either we’re about to pull out, or else there’s an election coming

David Davis

So, Gordon Brown has just popped in for a brew with the lads, over on the front, eh? Bet they’re pleased.

The effing bastard will either win the election, or there’ll be a hung-one. You just watch. He’s a wicked socialist scumbag schemer and shyster and snake-oil-salesman, just like his mate Stalin, and you see if I’m right or not. If he gets in again, you just see if he doesn’t end up having people murdered in dank cellars, in the “Ministry” of something or other. Read my friend Richard Blake’s novel “The Terror of Constantinople”, which is prophetic.

Bet each reader of this 1p that Gordon wins, and that the election will have been rigged. You can pay the Libertarian Alliance by paypal when you lose.

Wonderful-pun corner

Michael Winning

About Michael Foot I mean…

Obnoxio the Clown said something too about “one foot in the grave“.

I’d like to say something nice about Michael Foot

…but I can’t.

David Davis

He died today. He was 96: I’d be happy to reach that, but I probably won’t, owing mostly to high living, wild women and too much alcohol drunk while too young.

The problem with socialists is so, so easy to solve. As a human being, you have free will. You can, well, just walk away. Just like people give up smoking or drugs or drinking. In the end, they walk away, or die.

Foot never did. Perhaps the “feminist”  Jill Craigie was just too sexy to shag (I am sorry, I do not know either way) and he never fancied any of the Tories’ (young female) “researchers”. We always knew about “researchers”, and they were always at least vaguely pretty, or even better than that: many of them “had family money”,  and some were even the daughters of “Officers” (these only married “rising stars” and you were of course out of the running big-time – “look, you’re a really really super fun friend…but….”): but we being penniless, we could never get any.

In the end, Foot didn’t walk away – he just became an old socialist. He could not even not wear a “donkey-jacket” to the Cenotaph. Not that it really really matters at all what you wear while paying your respects to the War Dead, so long as you mean it.

But it was, well, just “impolite”. Socialists, ultimately, know that they “are serious” and so they don’t even want to disguise how they despise.

It is cold here tonight yes

Michael Winning

But the market will sort it out if let to. The price of grit and salt will rise as more people want to buy it if they are allowed to. Then more will be made available.

It is already -8C and falling.

I’ve brought in the free range pigs for the umpteemth time, its too cold for te poor buggers and we only have now about 20 of this sort. Some are actually in the house, in the scullery, the smaller ones and one sow was actually shivering when we brought her in. The others are in the outside enclosed  lobby with some bubble wrap and lots of old newspspers. They will cope till the morning.

The socialists won’t learn. Or perhaps they will, and deliberately as the Bosss says, don’t want to play. Copenhagen has been truly rained on as a parade for them, with this what I’d have called “normal” weather for the time of year. they’ve just had it easy with all the mild winters since 1980 while all they Green-protesters was growin up.

Ken Clarke rubbishes Harriet Harmperson rubbishing George Osbore

Michale Winning

You couldn’t make it up if you tried.

I’m holding the frot today for the Boss who is doing chores he has to do sometimes.

The trouble with Labour’s reversion to “class war” in the coming election campaign is that it WILL work as a strategy. People are brought up under the school system to believe all that tosh.That’s why Labour are playing the class card because they know it will get them lots of votes.

You have to believe it’s deliberate. Just one look at what the poor blighters in schools, the childrenm of my farming colleagues, have to learn for English GCSEs and exams, tells you what theyre supposed to come out believeing. In two ticks you can persuade people educated like this that the Tories and toffs and Labour are “on the side of working people”. All that twaddle.

There’, Ive tried to write an intellectual essay. I hope its worked!

L is for Labour, L is for Lice

Stalin’s obituary form the New York Times, 6th March 1953

Michael Winning

It says over on a comment thread at Samizdata that this piece exists, and it does. It also shows that we in the West still don’t get the seriousness with which our own Enemyclass, as the Boss calls it, goes about its business of shoving us all back ot the Dark Ages.

Looking Back in anger

The following essay has been cross-posted from Samizdata to here, by kind permission of the author.

Adriana Lukas

It’s been twenty years since my firm belief in a better way of life was vindicated. 17th November was the beginning of the end of an era shaped by collectivism, brutality and industrialised inhumanity. I have written about my experiences of communism on Samizdata before. Today I’ll use someone else’s words to describe the wasteland communism leaves behind.

In 1992, Peter Saint-Andre has written a disturbing, brilliant and accurate description of what communism does to the soul:

…the hunger that I found most disturbing was not of the body but of the soul. [...] The socialist state cared nothing for the life of the individual, and this was driven home in innumerable ways.Yet the overall effect was not merely physical — it was a deeply spiritual degradation. It is difficult to put that degradation into words. To me, the most striking sign of it was what I called “Eastern eyes”. I could see and feel the resignation, the defeat, the despair, in the eyes of people I knew. It was an all-too-rare occurrence to come upon a person with some spark of life in his or her eyes (the only exceptions were the children, who had yet to have the life beaten out of them). If it is true that the eyes are windows onto the soul, then the Czech soul under socialism went through life all but dead.

It is tough for me to come up with something to say 20 years on that is not tinged with bitterness and disappointment and if not for the significant anniversary, I would have left this memory unturned. Despite the amazing change 1989 and its aftermath brought to my life I feel no closure over the past and a sense of proportion in the way the fall of communism has been ‘handled’. Today we should be looking back at the last 20 years counting the many communists who died in prison or are still rotting there… I can only hope that future generations will revisit the past and will have far lower tolerance of collectivism and totalitarianism. It may be a futile hope as today’s teenagers have little knowledge of the world my generation grew up and my parents lived in. And so I am bitter and disappointed that people can say the word “communism” without spitting.

I am also bitter and disappointed because those who opposed communism have not won. It is still with us, in the idiotic juxtapositions of Nazism and communism, or socialism and free-market, used by those who aspire to communism and justify it by positing Nazism as the greater evil. It still raises its ugly head in those who despise free-markets and attempt to put a human mask on socialism by pointing out ‘failures’ of capitalism. Rather hard as socialism, like all totalitarianisms, has no face. It is the ultimate denigration of humanity, destruction of individuality, and subjugation of human beings to the vast merciless machine of control and power.

Communism is still with us in China and North Korea. One befriended by the West, the other frowned upon… but neither is ever challenged because of the oppression of its people, and only when it manages to ‘inconvenience’ the rest of the world. Once it falls, it will be horrifying and beyond belief to examine the monstrosities committed by the communists in the light of day. Again, I can only hope that the world will be shamed and aghast at letting this happen for so long. Until then, we only have testimonials such as this: Undercover in the Secret State

I am grateful to those who remember, struggle to understand and explain communism, and especially to those who have managed to capture something of the nature of the beast. Here are the ones I found. Please feel free to share yours.

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression – the reference book of the communist evil with a tag line “Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit”

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

The Lives Of Others captures the paranoia and danger of an Orwellian world where everyone is monitored and, unusually for such world, shows impact of the individual as making a difference. Here is my review.

Burnt By The Sun (Unaveni slnkom) from a sunny day to Stalin’s terror… One of the most powerful films I have seen for a long time. Possibly ever.

No End (Bez konca) – a complex, subtle and haunting film set in Poland 1981.

Repentance (Pokayanie) – for the more surreal amongst us. The first ‘anti-stalinism’ film I have ever seen and will never forget. I remember sitting through the entire credits at the end, stunned and shaken. For context, this was screened in Czecho-Slovakia, publicly, in a cinema in 1987!

The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Terror in the 1930s – from the book review:

It is impossible, of course, to undo the tyrant’s crimes. But one of the tasks writers have set themselves, in the last 50 years, is at least to preserve the memory of the dead, and so to resist the tyrant’s historical arrogance.

The book’s opening paragraph makes the history come the full circle, back to the suffering of the individual:

The dead cannot speak. Can one retrieve their voices? Death under I.V. Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953, has been written about but the dead themselves remain elusive because their voices have been lost to us. The present book is an attempt to recover the voices of those executed under Stalin.

Andrew Marr’s trousers removed by Charles Moore

Update, Andrew Marr replies in the DT.

Michael Winning

Good one Charlie! Go bite the bastard in the ankkle!

But it’s a shame, Charlie my old fellow, that you have got things so wrong about cameron, who is not going to do diddly-squat about the EU, hes just said so.

The Boss=man is right, we shall now just have to start attacking the terrible Tories, I think I’ll make it my special business to do that from here on.

Maybe nothing can now be done for these people

Michael Winning

I meant the hoddies, not the woman and her daughter. Labour’s artificially-created client-underclass may contain many individuals for whom there will be no earthly use. It is a tragic and useless waste of human potential.

And ive just found this here.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100011721/24-hour-drinking-is-not-to-blame-for-broken-britain/

I,ll reprint it just in carse, I’m sure the man won’t mind. The blog master says it should be in red to show its been lifted.

Ed West Politics Last updated: September 29th, 2009

8 Comments Comment on this article

Well, this is possibly Labour’s last ever party conference in power, so I was expecting some big gimmicks, but Gordon Brown’s attack on 24-hour drinking is weak.

The move will be part of a wider package of crime measures that the Prime Minister will unveil in his crucial pre-election party conference speech. He has previously indicated that he is unhappy with parts of the licensing law changes that were brought in while Tony Blair was Prime Minister but has stopped short of overhauling the legislation.

As a teenager the one cause I really felt passionate about was not global warming (as we called it back then), third world poverty or the Rwandan genocide (which I don’t even remember) – it was 24-hour drinking. I hated the fact that all pubs shut at 11 and we then had to find a nightclub, queue for ages, and then pay over the odds to stand around somewhere so loud you wouldn’t hear Ian Paisley if he was standing next to you. Lloyd George ruined my teenage years.

Conservatives, who win most arguments through the law of unintended consequences, were strangely averse to the obvious fact that our First World War-era licensing laws only encouraged people to drink quickly and then head to even boozier venues. It was left to New Labour, in a rare moment of liberalism, to change the law.

The phrase “24-hour drinking” is misleading, creating the image of some Oliver Reed-style epic bender – often it just means theatre-goers popping in for a couple or people choosing to stay in their local past 11 rather than making a night of it. And it does not make alcohol-related social problems any worse – it doesn’t make them hugely better, but it doesn’t make them worse. In fact the number of venues open 24-hours is tiny, and the number of pubs open past 1 am is not huge, either.

The Government knows this, of course, but the real problems with alcohol are too difficult to deal with. The initial inconvenience is that too many city centres are dependent on alcohol – if they raise the duty on alcohol or arrested drunks wholesale or did anything to reduce the number of rubbish chain pubs then they may as well evacuate Liverpool or Newcastle.

Secondly, and more importantly, too many members of the violent community are also part of Labour’s 5-million-strong welfare army, people who do not pay fines because they know the authorities won’t chase them, and who do not modify their bad behaviour because they know the state won’t kick them out of their taxpayer-provided homes. This is why “drink Asbos” won’t work:

The measure will be part of a wider package of anti-social behaviour policies that the Prime Minister will unveil. It includes “drink anti-social behaviour orders” being extended to force courts to consider imposing a Drinking Banning Order against anyone convicted of a crime who was under the influence of alcohol.

The Drink Asbos will give magistrates the power to bar problem drinkers from bars and off-licences, Mr Brown will say.

Parents of any child guilty of anti-social behaviour will be given a parenting contract and where they refuse to comply with them, their benefits will be stopped. He will also announce a four-fold increase in the number of families covered by ‘family intervention projects.’

He will say: “These are binding contracts which require people to take one to one support or lose their benefits. We will double the number of these family intervention projects so that for the 50,000 most chaotic families and their 100,000 children there will be clear rules, and clear punishments if they don’t comply.”

But Asbos have been a terrible failure – half of them are breached and most of the time the authorities simply give the hooligan another “last chance” warning, like some ineffective and weak teacher. On the other hand they are genuinely illiberal and can and have been used by the authorities to persecute the merely eccentric or children with serious disorders.

This issue is relevant to the suicide of Fiona Pilkington, driven to her death by yobs while the police did nothing (for fear of “criminalising” the bullies by sending them to prison), because even if the authorities did intervene to stop her ordeal, they would still be bound by the law to re-house Miss Pilkington’s tormentors, the Simmons family, and scumbags everywhere know that.

If Labour really wanted to get tough on anti-social behaviour, whether committed drunk or sober, it would change the law so that the state no longer had to find a home for criminals among ordinary, decent people. But then, you wouldn’t want people to actually take personal responsibility for their behaviour, would you?

Tags: 24-hour drinking, Fiona Pilkington, gordon brown

Can a Llibertarian also be a conservative?

Michael Winning

I am thinking about writing a candidate essay on this for the Chris R Tame Memorial Prize, as I could do with £1,000. It’s also to me a hot topic as I know some libertarians who have come to the position from being socialists, and I wonder how they’d react.

“National walk and shop day”

Peter Davis

Er?

That’ll be how you go buy and collect your new fridge/freezer, then.

Ta to Manwiddecombe. Not seen him before, hes quite funny

Global warm-mongers and some light bulb jokes

How name DEFRA bureaucrats does it take to change a light-bulb?

About 165,000, and they’ve lied about it being duff.

David Davis

Christopher Booker has discovered that the ban on Tungsten incandescent bulbs is actually not legal.

Or…

How many well-brought-up young Jewish men studying Law does it take to change a light bulb?

“It’s all right my dear son, your poor old mother doesn’t mind sitting in the dark already”.

I would like to see…

…a political party that has the courage to say:-

WE  WILL  PUT  FEWER  POLICE  ON  THE  STREETS  AND  ON  THE  “BEAT”,

for the solution is Good People and NOT more police.

David Davis (not that one, Ephraim Hardcastle)

Everybody likes to throw rotten cabbages at poor, innately good, motivated Iain Duncan-Smith. But what else would you suggest right now?

“More Police” may look like a sign of success: their presence may indeed locally and transiently resist the rise in figures for acts of  bad-ness. But their existence is an effect of failure, and not success. People should think more, and so they ought to read more books – and I did NOT mean winners of the “Booker Prize” books.

There ought also to be a way for the Free Market to discover how there might be lots and lots of money to be made for James R Murdoch, by having less Wireless Tele Vision. Or preferably none at all for a few years.

Oh, and we could restock “Libraries” with a couple more books each, by having strong thugs on the premises who could lift wheelchairs full of the Disabled up to a height of about 8 or 9 feet.

Just look at the sad buggers

David Davis

Where are they now? Some are dead, some live in retirement and one or two partially redeemed themselves.

My God, the _dreadful_ suits....

Libertarians recognise these guys’  ideological features, sadly, in the minds and hearts of today’s British and European bureaucrats. The fact that these seven called themselves “communists” is almost irrelevant to the ideological war we find ourselves in now.

Sean Gabb and Tim Evans will of course be able to confirm theories about their mundane and repellent taste in prime office furniture and decor.

The main struggle today is against the hold these dudes and their ideology has over the thoughts and actions of our home-grown apparatchiks and GramscoSalariat.