How soon will the Euro implode?

UPDATE:- I said this the other day, too.

David Davis

About 12 years ago, or it may be 13, I bet a YEM* person £25 that the Euro, recently issued, would sink to UD$1.00 by that Christmas. It did fall, a bit: my prediction was only wrong in degree -  but I lost my bet and ponied up.

Now Peter Oborne thinks the project is at last about to come undone.

* “YEM” was the “Young European Movement”. God knows what’s happened to that.

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.

I think we could profitably watch this space

David Davis

Here.

James Lovelock talking vaguely sensibly…

…in here…you can respect his intellectual honesty about eco-fashion green-ness etc.

David Davis

…but not here, where he buys into totalitarianism. h/t Samizdata.

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.

The Falklands, the Treaty of Lisbon, and the EU

David Davis

I have also facebooked this to “try it on the dog” as it were.

Good blog, just spotted

David Davis

Coldsteelrain, heart in right place, what more can a man want? I cannot tell exactly, but I suspect it is written by a soldier.

Here is one good observation for a start – and yes I am being provocative here. And I share his dislike of the unloveable, un-nice and smelly Piers Morgan. if “Britain’s got Talent” is some sort of show in the Wireless Tele Vision, and the man Morgan is involved, then I don’t think that ordinary functioning humans ought to have anything to do with it.

Shun him, for he likes Gordon Brown. There will have to be an “Independent Safeguarding Agency” register of such people, and the Police will have to phone us all when one of them moves in nearby, in case we object.

GOSH this will be fun to watch – POLITICAL STREET THEATRE -

Micheal Winning

Too dakr to do the pigs now anyway, so,

David Cameron to take on the Trades Unions! Bring the boxing-match on man!

We cant admit it and we’ll get put in prison for saying so, but everybodyknow that “trades Unions” have been subverted by the Gramsco left [on purpose as the Boss says, and it makes sense to do it for you'd win in a liberal society that's kind and forgiving] to undermine and reverse the trend towards civilisatiion and prosperity for all. And to get it for those that threaten and fight most. Barbarians.

He’ll have to do it, but he’ll go down. Like that other guy. Not thatcher, he was a good guy.

And furthermore (to the last post)…

David Davis

Simon Heffer talks sense about our universities (too many) and history (too little and too truncated and deliberately-not-joined-up) as commanded to be taught by the GramscoFabiaNazis. The connection between this and misunderstanding the more serious parts of my post below, is obvious.

Gordon Brown saves and runs the world…so…

David Davis says “what the hell are we doing, and WTF is he doing, allowing “truckloads of explosives” to be driven about anywhere near places like Yemen?”

He’s up there, trying to be what we used to call “all big”, and yet he has no forces to deploy that can even stop themselves being blown to bits, let alone other people elsewhere.

Perhaps if he took all the UK Police (who will have, anyway, to go) and who function quite well as an occupying army here, not detecting real crime but merely terrorising motorists, and simply tramsplanted them to the Yemen, they’d have something worthwhile to do at last.

That’s all very nice then

David Davis

Gordon Brown has said it’s inappropriate, so that’s all right then.

I was intrigued and then also simultaneously amused by the antics of Anjem Choudary, in stating – and then recanting -  the theme that he and his might march through Wootton Bassett with a number of empty coffins.

There is no reason why these fellas ought not to march there, or anywhere else for that matter. But it’s intended to be an insult, for they know we will take it lying down, and a slap in the face. I think it is impolite and is meant to be on purpose. If I was a GramscoFabiaNazi,  then I would do this to the enemies of a  socialist polity, if I possibly could. It is the right strategy to demoralise and upset them.

Poor old Wootton Bassett. Its torments will end with the appointment of another Foreign Secretary: I can’t think who it would be right now, but it would have to be someone good and tough. This town was never meant to have to do, what it now feels it has to do out of ordinary civility and politeness – since nobody from the dead chaps’ employers feels able to turn out.

My amusement of course was unlike what is now perceived by the majority of Middle England, which, owing to its current pre-occupations with celebrity and Wireless Tele Vision, is suddenly surprised and hurt by what the mountebank has said.

This stunt, which Choudary has admitted latterly, does not surprise me in the least, and I was expecting it. It is what I would do, in his position and with his belief-system driving me.

The comment thread here is illuminating and worrying for the future. The volume is staggering. And – they have not even got round to moderating mine, and I posted it 36 hours ago.

This is what I was trying to say the other day

…but Charlotte Gore said it better.

David Davis

I just contented myself with this.

Iranian Waters…a very important place

David Davis

A British Libertarian State (a tautology in 2009 as I always point out) might want to consider under what justifications it would “hold possibly for weeks” those harmless people “violating” its “territorial integrity”, by yachting into its “waters”.

I have no problem with “territorial waters”. Apart from anything, it means I could protect my fish stocks from robbers whose warlords run their serfs’ lives under a different penal code from mine. But if I was I’madasadinnerjacket, then I would be looking for friends and not alienating them. Not right now when I want to get some toys to play with Uranium Hexafluoride in public.

This “sailors business” smells to me like some ploy for commanding: “We’ll give you back your sailors if you agree to oppose any measures to prevent us playing with Uranium Hexafluoride in any amount and at any time we choose. If you do that, we’ll then agree to only parade them in public in ill-fitting suits for five minutes at a time, to coincide with the “News At Ten” for one full week only, and we’ll ensure the patriotic demonstroids pretending to want their blood will only burn your flag three times out of seven for the benefit of BBC TV reporters, and will only each fire a maximum of 20 AK-47 rounds into the air per News Bulletin.” I bet you 50p that this sort of guff is the stuff of “intense Foreign Office negotiations”.

The buggers think we’re toast, and are treating us like it, to the delight of mountebanks throughout the UN.

People like these governments, staffed as they are by people who like to twist the tails of long-suffering enemies whom they disrespect, are storing up trouble, in my opinion, if and when the powder-keg of Christian liberal toleration fnally blows. There were some rather short windows of opportunity, during the 20th Century, to settle conclusively several questions of this sort, and sadly I feel they were not taken.

The foreign-policy-cost rises with each new incident.

They are playing with us

David Davis

I don’t much care if the Iranian government wants to have nuclear weapons or not. I don’t think it’s worth going to war over…..yet. Not unless they actively threaten Israel, which is the primary point of the things.

A firm, well-morally-grounded and self-confident libertarian foreign policy, actively Jihadizing liberty everywhere regardless, is the enemy of any wannabe “rogue state” which gets guns and stuff.There are no “rogue states”: all States are rogues and ultimately have to be re-rogued, and many simply dismantled.

But it does irk me that we as a nation are seen as a plaything-target by people like I’madasadinnerjacket.

I wonder to what extent Gordon Brown tipped off the Iranians to do this thing to us and ours, to take everyone’s eye off him.

How many Vietnams do the Enemy Class want to inflict?

On us, the West?

David Davis

I was always afraid this was going to happen, and now it has. We ultimately lost in Vietnam because our morale was sapped by the fathers and mothers of today’s Enemy Class at home. Even in short preventive cauterisations and dictatorectomies, such as Gulf-I and Gulf-II ought to have been, the well-orchestrated and articulate chorus of negativity, based as it was and is on our supposed non-socialist failings as a society rather than on how much better we are than our enemies, took centre-stage.

Today, we don’t even have for this the excuse of Enemy Foreign Powers paying people in our midst to say these things. Organisations like the Grauniad and the BBC would willingly badmouth Western Civilisation for nothing. Sometimes I despair.

As a libertarian, I’m not supposed to be in favour of wars, I suppose. I’m not, but in the end, if enemies of liberty ask for war, we ought to give it to them.

The sums differ but the principle’s the same

David Davis

You have to wonder: why do bureaucrats, working in safe offices, not under any sort of stress and not bound to any “targets” (although some penny-pinching ones will probably have been invented for them) need astonishingly generous bonuses? The story’s the same here but the sums are hyperbolic.

It would be less sad if the poor bloody squaddies were actually receiving adequate modern kit, and not having to get their mums to buy what they can for them instead. While we as minimal-statists are stuck with State Armies and Forces, we might as well try to make a good job of the thing.

One would like to think these over-rewarded pen-pushers will get somethng like the right come-uppance in the End-Times, when all wrongs are righted by a Libertarian revolution, but in practice the world does not seem to work that way. The Enemy Class triumphs all the time, it gets all the money, and then everyone else dies.

 

World War 1 and 1918, 91 years on

David Davis together with Michael Winning, over some beers

We try to mark these events on here because we want to: sometimes we remember, sometime we forget. Unlike all those parsons who are said to have recycled their sermons for an easy life, one tries to write something original each time. The almost universal remembrance of lives lost, 100-odd years ago nearly, and in our wars since, seems to need something fresh to be said each year. The wounds never seem to heal, and it’s nothing to do with today’s almost cunstomary imerative of ritualised collective emoting, forced on us all by Popular Culture and the Enemy Class.

Earlier this year, the two surviving oldest Tommies, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, both passed on. About 2004 I believe, the last German Tommy also died (was he a “Fritz” or a “Berti” or a “Hans”? Who can tell?) as did the French chap, a poilu perhaps, or just “Jaques”. All were significantly over 100. Nobody knows when the last Russian or “Austro-Hungarian”, Italian or Turk – or any of the others – shared their fate: I suspect in some cases records were scant. To this day nobody even knows for sure how many Turks died.

History is useful: we _can_ know what was in the minds of those alive in 1914, and in the decades before. They told us all the time, and for 200+ years we today have never had it so good where primary historical source material is needed. Comparing the two times, why did they cheerfully go into the terror, the noise, the filth, the lice, the mud which seemed ever to hinder and engulf and drown, into places of terrible danger and risk of anihilation, for week after week and for month after month: and why did their civilian populations at home, put up with the counterpart conditions, of fear, sorrow and privation?

Today the notion of engaging sincerely in a totally-absorbing struggle, for what one thinks is the right way as opposed to the wrong way, seems alien. What is there now to struggle for? We seem to have enough to eat (no thanks to anybody on this continent, though), there is enough of different sorts of Wireless Tele Vision to watch, created for anaesthetic purposes by members of the Enemy Class, all of whom are “producers of edgy/good Television”. We can strut about on Facebook and “My Space” and other such places, showing everyone how great we are. What was the point of World War 2, if we here, although entirely Jewless, Gipsyless, Bourgeoisless, Kulakless, cripple-less, bedwetter-less, and Slavless, could still have sat about in front of our monochrome State TV (waiting list 26 months, price 30,000 GospoEuroFrancs, all TVs to be prodiu by the Glorious People’s State Television Tube Factory in Skelmersdale) to watch “Great heroes of yesterday and for ever: part XIV: Zhukov, the General Who Saved The World”, and “part XXVIII, Joachim von Ribbentropp, Giant Father of the People’s Global Foreign Peace and Love”? We’d all be told via the street-looudspeakers that State-approved mobile telephones with a range of at least 20 kilometers, would be available from 2046, to all those who had voted correctly for at least eight elections in a row, and had who had also lodged “significantly more than” 100,000,000 GospoEuroFrancs with the Gau-Voivoda-Prefecture’s People’s-High-Representative’s “Controller of Expenses and Justifiably Good Disbursements for The People’s Good”.

The penalty for being found to have watched US or Australian television channels would have been some time spent in a “People’s State Health Farm”, the death penalty having been abolished on Human Rights grounds. This “holiday” might have been in North Eastern Siberia, or even behind barbed wire, an anti-vehicle-ditch and trip-wires in somewhere like Kraliký. (Look up how near home that is.)

There can be not a lot of substantive difference between the sort of life we’d have led here, if either the Kaiser, Stalin, Hitler, or Jean Monnet and his other fascisto-Gramscian mountebanks had won, in 1918 or 1945 or the 1980s: who remembers “Euro-Communism now? But how different would it have been from any of the other kinds?

Perhaps the thousands and thousands and thousands of poor wretched chaps, from Preston, from Accrington, from Norris green, from Halsall, and Formby and Scarisbrick and Battersea and Pluckley and Slaidburn and Banks, and from Tunbridge Wells and Bromley and Bridge of Gair and Trefriw and St Enodoc and Trim and Wheddon Cross and Dunblane, and Port-Laoise and Ballintoba, and Bengal and Sydney and Jew-Burg and Pretoria and Mackenzie and Kingston and even Buenos Aires and Denver and so many others, who disappeared without trace in the second decade of the 20th Century, were more prescient than we can know. Yes, they were opposed by similar poor wretched souls who were there either because they thought otherwise or because they were forced so to be. Hayek says markets operate by virtue of myriads of small individual decisions, all affecting a macroscopic result, far more accurately than a single Gosplanner or “State Planning Department” can ever hope to do. Perhaps the idea of individual liberty was more strongly articulated then, or perhaps it just was more under threat then,  than we think it really is today.

We try to go on remembering these poor chaps, their descendants of two, three, four or more generations still turning up, in ceremonies in which we do not customarily parade weapons or missiles or tanks and guns, let alone in phalanxes of tracked monsters, such as in Red Square, because innately liberalism is good and right and compassionate, and the opposite is not that at all. Liberalism celebrates the individual over the herd or the State-directed-collective, whether that latter be penal (as is mostly the case in history) or directed-by-threats, for PR reasons.

Although we could not begin to wish for a scenario in which we’d have to behave as they did (we hate war, remember??? We are libertarians!), we look to their example as individual humans who endured more than the ultimate, in return for trying to do what they thought was right and therefore their simple duty.

There is no reason why an intellectual could ever justify that people ought to give up their lives for an idea. Since we cnanot know whether God allows the Afterlife or not (nobody has returned to tell us) then life has to be better than death. But it depends what the competing ideas are, and if it’s worth trying to live under them. Mostly it might have been…just… but what do we think about the future now that New Labour will be in power for the next few centuries?

My quote of the day: from Charles Moore in the DT, on Afghanistan

David Davis

I have called this one _MY_ quote, because I know that a majority of libertarians, especially in Britain, think we ought not to be militarily involved in Afghanistan – or anywhere else for that matter. Therefore I will not annoy and insult these people by calling it the “Libertarian Alliance Quote of the Day” (although it ought to be.) I take responsibility for it instead of the august think-tank for which I have the privilege to be allowed to blog.

These libertarians, and others, know that I have never failed to support war in Iraq, or Afghanistan, and that I say [regularly] that the West _must_ take war, if need be everywhere that is required, to all those who cheerfully, frankly and materially oppose individual liberty anywhere. The people the West is trying to resist are not “insurgents”. They are not even “terrorists”, which is why the notion of “The War On Terror” is so glib, shallow and meaningless – these people are willing soldiers for a cause, they really believe what they are saying and they mean to destroy us: they are the willing agents of purposeful and committed deconstructors of everything they think we stand for and love.

Here’s Charles Moore:-

If we truly want to win the war in Afghanistan, we need to challenge its opponents much more fiercely. Politicians such as Nick Clegg, who congratulate themselves on asking the necessary, awkward questions, need to be interrogated about what they actually want. Do they want the first defeat of the most powerful military alliance in history at the hands of a small band of fanatics armed with little more than rifles and IEDs?

Do they have any conception of what such a defeat would mean for the world order, for the stability of countries in the region, or for civil peace in every European city? Do they not understand that this fight will be seen all over the world not as a battle for control of some jagged mountains, but between values, and that, if our values do not win, they will lose?

Please read old Charlie Moore on the whole thing: he puts some sharp perspectives on war, its roles – good or bad they may be – in intercivilisational conflict, and where we ought to go from here. I already said a couple of days ago that the alternatives are only (and ever) victory or defeat, and what it will mean. He’s probably read Sir John Keegan. I doubt most of our present politicians have even heard of the bugger.

…and MPs: preparing the world for hegemony

David Davis

The problem of an existing Enemy-Class, and – as a corollary to that – its tendency to Bathe its Hands in the Till, will continue until a revolution in the way individuls view “public service” is accomplished.

In London, at the Libertarian Alliance Conference last weekend, my boy and I, walking about Pimlico in the company of the admirable Brian Micklethwait, spied a number of quite utilitarian but suitable buildings for the battery-housing of MPs. Nothing fancy, just serviceable, warm, fairly comfortable and presumably facilities to make coffee, get up some toasty-cheese sandwiches and tea-without-sugar early before a brisk trot to the House, power the odd electric blanket in winter, and watch “Question Time” if they had to. (But they can’t, because I’ll make them be in the House…for all debates…all the time. And they won’t be able to “claim” for a “VCR machine” because I’ll opine that they ought to be able to afford one already.)

The expenses row gets better: now the bastards are whingeing that they can’t employ their wives or claim for mortgages. Look, if they didn’t think they could afford to be MPs, why ever did they stand at all? Anyway, I thought the point of being an MP away in London is that you could shag your “researcher”? She/he might hope to be your wife in due course, but that was under the Tories: we have moved on now, this is 2010, sonny.

MPs should “enter Parliament” only  _after_  they have had a comprehensive education in reality and proper work, and in living like the people who will be employing them. That might mean they are all conservatives – with a small “c” -  and are cynical and pessimistic about what good the State can do, if even any at all. But that’s good, surely. It will end once and for all the cultural hegemony in modern British politics of the fascist-lefty, professional-activist-Gramscian, all of whose influences have been entirely malign and without any redeeming features at all. These people were only good for acting as Pol Pot’s murderers, and have now truly become what they always were.

Incidentally, I have been politely and informally approached by Various August Libertarians, regarding my use of the term “GramscoFabiaNazi”. As a result I explained, perhaps a bit too forcefully and with a little too high conviction, not only what this term means which they fully understood, but why it is 100% accurate and will continue to be applied at appropriate points, and why it should gain traction. Thus there will be a short digression soon, and I will pen an essay to justify the word intellectually, which will be on here. But I will continue unfailingly to be the eternal foe of these bad, bad, wicked, evil sub-humanoid murderers (who deserve the punishment defined as “Eternal Life” [I explained this OK, didn't I?] ), and I will call the GFNs names and throw insults at them to the end of my strength keyboard.

But for MPs, who clearly do understand the problem but whose grasp of delightful power now exceeds the reach of morals by so much that they can find the brass-neck to protest at the protestations against them? They may find that in the end, we the People “have not the facilities to properly take their surrender”. They better watch out.

Things you didn’t know about Trafalgar Square

Michale Winning

You could have a little look ere it is quite entertaining.