Another crook caught with both slimy hands in the till

What can you say? When the Home Secretary herself is caught thieving from the taxpayer for all she is worth, then you know that you are living in la-la land.

In some ways, however, I do rather pathetically feel sorry for Jacqui Smith. She is such a talentless sack of offal, a real two-bagger, that she can't possibly have expected to become a Cabinet Minister.

She would have been fine on the backbenches helping herself to an endless stream of expenses and then getting herself kicked upstairs into the House of Lords to continue the merry thieving scam of keeping her snout jammed firmly in the trough.

But to be thrust into the limelight of senior government, due to an absolute dearth of talent on Labour's boneheaded polytechnic lecturer back benches, must have been quite a shock. She could hardly say 'No'. I bet she wishes she had though.

Prediction: I think this goose is cooked. Her only hope for hanging on must be the same force which got her there; i.e. the absolute desperation of the Labour Party to find anyone fit to sit in a British Cabinet. If she does go (and Maturin Towers rates that as a 75% buy) then we will all once again have to bow our heads and hail the mighty Guido Fawkes, who really ought to re-name himself the Grim Reaper.

The "Ceauşescu Moment" approaches

Maturin's First Law of politics:

"Always believe the exact opposite of what any politician ever says about anything. Occasionally they do tell the truth, but only by accident."

So let's have a look at the following extract from The Torygraph:

The Prime Minister brushed aside the suggestion that he was tempted to become the "world's financial regulator". He said: "There is no possibility anyway of a job called Global Financial Regulator. I want get on with the job I'm doing."

Let's translate that into English, rather than political gobbledegook:

The Prime Minister wants to become the "world's financial regulator". He said: "There is the possibility of a job called Global Financial Regulator, which I will be trying to engineer at the upcoming G20 conference, which is why I have delayed this year's budget. I want to get this job more than anything else in the world."

It would seem that we are going to be tax-bound with this one-eyed Scottish idiot for far longer than we had hoped, once he takes his trough-seat with the IMF, the World Bank, or the new World Reserve Bank we predicted a couple of weeks back.

It would also seem that Brown has delayed his budget by a month, not just because he has no idea what he's doing, but also because he wants to focus on nailing this escape route together before the entire economy goes nipples up.

I wonder what his excuse will be for getting out of Downing Street early? Health, eyesight, or gross hatred of the entire British population except for the 28% rump of his client state? Whatever it is, at least Ceauşescu had the decency to shuffle off this mortal coil once he knew the game was up.

It would seem that McCavity Mugabe wants to inflict even more of himself upon us, once we have got rid of him, by hiding behind the tax-fed skirts of international government.

Is there no way he can force him to go back to Scotland and stay there, perhaps sweeping the streets of Edinburgh? Would he even be able to do that? I mean, what use is this man? What job would he be able to hold down in the private sector? I wouldn't even hire him to clean my car. He would use too much soap, he would make a right mess of the polishing, he would overcharge me, and then he would smash the windows out of envious socialist spite when I paid him what he was worth.

The man is an utter shower.

What's the betting on M4?

Tomorrow sees the release of the provisional M4 figures for January. With Mervyn King, the man behind the green curtain, almost proudly announcing that he's about to flood the British economy with more paper monopoly money to counter the hobgoblin of price deflation, I wonder if M4 is finally going to go over 17%?

By looking at the chart here, it seems that 17% is a bit of a ceiling, even for inflationist King. If M4 does go through this 'ceiling', I would further bet on 20% being hit next month. If the base rate also goes down to 0.5% by next month, this would take the real UK interest rate to -19.4%.

After that, we can expect M4 to start heading north of 25% and the base rate to then disappear at 0% as McCavity Mugabe's government turns on the full taps of the proper 'Zimbabwean' solution, forcing nationalised banks to disgorge more of this filthy lucre.

Yes, Ladies and Gentleman; we must really fear deflation. It's going to destroy us.

Draper's Downfall

The video below is becoming similar to the 'I am Spartacus' moment from the famous Kirk Douglas movie. No matter what the situation, this pivotal Downfall clip can be adapted to drive home whatever point you feel like making.

I think I first saw it being used with Arsene Wenger as Herr Hitler, criticizing the Arsenal football team for losing to Spurs, their long-time rivals. But below, it is being used to prick a hole in the pomposity of Derek Draper, the poor-man's Peter Mandelson and editor of the UK's 'premier' socialist blog site.

As an 'anti-socialist' UK blogger, I therefore feel compelled to propel this video further onward, in case you haven't seen it yet, to further tickle the amusement of Dolly Draper.

(For much more on Derek Draper, see the ongoing series of Guido Fawkes posts.)

The Teutonic Knights: A Military History

The typical historical education of an Englishman used to go like this:

Greece, Rome, Alfred the Great, 1066, Sir Francis Drake, Nelson, The Duke of Wellington, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Rommel, El Alamein, Winston Churchill, ...errr... that's about it.

Although not always completely xenophobic - with an open admiration for characters such as the plucky Rommel, an Englishman fighting for the wrong side* - in more modern times, the British History curriculum has been updated somewhat to reflect a greater humanitarian empathy with the oppressed masses. It now goes something much more like this:

The Peasants Revolt, The French Revolution, Underlying Social Conditions of the Peruvian Basket-Weaving Industry, Das Kapital, The Evil of Adolf Hitler, The Magnificence of the Welfare State, How Mankind has destroyed the Planet, Hairstyles of the 1960s

Either way, there is very little most Englishmen know about how Switzerland drew itself out of the Holy Roman Empire, or what the Holy Roman Empire was, or even why the Third Reich was called the Third Reich, as opposed to being called the 27th Reich**.

As a student of Mises, these things matter, because wondering how his German Jewish family ended up in Galician Lemberg, a Polish enclave of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which for complicated reasons is now a major city in the Ukraine, greatly informs your understanding of how he came to write so great a treatise as Human Action.

Part of that understanding is enhanced by learning about the Teutonic Knights, the German Order crusading division of the Catholic Church, which spent much of its time slaughtering pagans in Prussia and the Baltic area, until it started dwindling after the monstrous Battle of Tannenberg in 1410. (Harry Potter fans may like to note that this was also known as the Battle of Grunwald.)

The Teutonic Knights eventually became the seed around which the state of Prussia was formed, with their last Grand Master, Albrecht of Hohenzollern-Ansbach, also becoming the first Duke of Prussia, that most modern of states, whose formation led eventually to the inspiration behind Herr Karl Marx, the Prussian court philosopher, Hegel.

Although the Wikipedia pages on the Teutonic Knights are very good, to get a fuller flavour of their 400 year crusading adventure, you really need a much fuller book, such as the excellent one by William Urban depicted above. If the Teutonic Knights have ever fascinated you, then I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Along its magnificent roller-coaster ride, you encounter several Hermanns, quite a number of Habsburgs, and as many Ottos as you would ever wish to meet in a single lifetime. There is blood, gore, pity, hatred, anger, love, and as much human destruction and humiliation as any soap-opera fan could ever wish for; it's certainly far better than any Indiana Jones film (except perhaps the Last Crusade).

There are also tax insurrections galore, peasants revolts, and as many monarchist intrigues as it is possible to have within the myriad of castles and kingdoms discussed. At times, the book's writing style almost reminded me of Uncle Murray's magnificent Conceived in Liberty quadrumvirate of books detailing the American Revolution, with intense detail where it was necessary, and broad sweeps where it wasn't.

Just to give you a flavour of how important the Teutonic Knights were, if you've ever wondered where the Prussian Iron Cross came from then look no further than the main emblem of the Teutonic Knights, a black cross pattée upon a white background, a form which even Indiana Jones was familiar with, on his quest to find the road to Alexandretta.

Even to this day, each vehicle of the German armed forces still bears this infamous legend of the Teutonic Knights:

As a former "Young Hegelian" myself (which is a cool socialist way of avoiding the blood-stained hands of Marx), I had never thought before about where Prussia came from, so to finally find out was quite a revelation.

If you want to know more yourself, William Urban's book is the place to go. However, if like me you sometimes find reading too much of a chore, you can always get the upgrade pack of Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms, which has a playable Teutonic Knights faction. That way, if you don't like the way history panned out, you can always change it.

Learning history by playing blood-thirsty computer games really is the way to go.

* You can always tell when 'foreigners' are English heroes regarded as secret Englishmen under the skin; they will be played in films with completely straight English accents, surrounded by nincompoop cod-speaking compatriots, hence why the most English-sounding man the world has ever known, James Mason, played Rommel in an age when every other German character would otherwise sound like Auric Goldfinger drinking Kriek-schnapps at the Munich leder-hosen festival.

** The Holy Roman Empire was the First Reich (or the first empire - a direct descendant of the original Roman Empire) and the Bismarckian "German Empire" was the Second Reich. Interestingly, the last of the Holy Roman Emperors was an Austrian Habsburg, and the name of Austria itself, Österreich, is an anglicised corruption meaning "Eastern [Part of the Holy Roman] Empire".

McCavity Mugabe finally gets something right shock

I nearly choked on my porridge this morning when I read the following story:

=> Gordon Brown to scrap final salary pensions for MPs

But we must give credit where credit is due.

For the moment I will forget that Gordon Brown has deliberately destroyed the British pension system, stealing $175 billion from it in the last 12 years, thus wrecking the pensions of millions, so he could pump up the gold-plated pensions of the coercive sector.

If it is actually true that he is putting MPs on the same footing as the people who are forced to pay their wages, so that he can then get all coercive sector people off gold-plated pensions too, so that they then own a stake in growing the economy rather than wrecking it, then I will be fulsome in my praise.

Obviously, if this is just a stunt to grab a headline, and this plan runs into the usual sand of all such plans designed to shrink the state, then Maturin Towers will be obliged to heap the usual pile of offal upon Gordon's fat head.

Let us see which it will be.

Prediction: This is just a stunt and MPs will vote the measure down. If for some bizarre reason it does get passed, due to political pressure, coercive sector strikes will then keep the rest of the coercive sector on gold-plated pensions. What's the point being in the coercive sector if you can't coerce a gold-plated pension for yourself? You may as well do something productive for a living.

Great Peter Schiff radio show this week - video blog coming!

Der SchiffMeister was bang on form this week, with perhaps his best show for a few months. Check it out:

=> Weekly Radio Show Archives

Also news that Mr Schiff will soon be running a video blog, with several posts a week. I'll post a link as soon as he's online.

Before that's ready, you might want to watch the great YouTube below, where Schiff talks about Geithner, Ron Paul, and the Fed:



And while we're at it, let's try the speech he made to the Saudis a couple of weeks ago, which perhaps caused last week's US Treasuries wobble:



What's really surprising about the above video, is why the US government let him back in when he flew back! :-)

Let us just hope that he can keep broadcasting and speaking the truth, for as long as possible, before they fling him in the same federal cage they keep his father in, for daring to speak truth to power.

All hail Peter Schiff. We are not worthy.

Bit by bit, Brown's fantasy is being pulled apart by the facts

Splendid article by Mr Randall.

At last! - Airbus consider bunk beds on planes

On virtually every long-haul flight I have ever been on where I have endured the torture and ignominy of cattle class, I have wondered why airlines never got around to introducing bunk beds on their planes.

The six-foot-five South African rugby players I always seem to get put beside on these flights, usually have a theory based on the ability of airlines to safely get people off a plane in an emergency, or planes needing seats to soak up the impacts of emergency landings. I have always suspected that some stupid government regulation lay behind the failure of bunk beds to appear on planes, but these South African theories have usually squashed my heretical thoughts, except for me wondering perhaps how safe anyone can be crashing into a stormy mid-Atlantic on a dark winter's night at five hundred miles an hour; I'd rather have risked it and had a bunk bed!

But no, it seems all of my South African friends were wrong. It is possible to put bunk beds in cattle class, to enable whole rugby teams of massive South Africans to fly cheaply in comfort, from one continent to another. Who would have thought it?

Although luckily in the last few years I have had clients willing to ship me about the place in the Byzantine luxury of business class, you can keep all of your fancy cheeses, chilled champagne, sleep suits, and all of the other superficial nonsense that you get in business class to keep the price up. Yes, it's a nice treat, but all I have ever wanted is the ability to lie down flat. Give me that, and I'll take cattle again, with perhaps half the cost difference between that and business class split between me and my client, which I can then buy some more gold with.

My last flight cost £4,000 pounds, with cattle costing around £800. That's a 500% price hike for the ability to get a decent bit of sleep. If I did get half the difference, with my clients better off to the same amount, that would be two ounces of gold each, banked into our respective accounts.

So let's thank the Lord that the idea of bunk beds has finally emerged from the incredibly creative minds of the airline industry. Travel will become easier, cheaper, and more comfortable, with less resources wasted on flying around all of those bottles of champagne to justify these enormous price differences in class upgrades; I would reckon with my two ounces of gold I would be able to more than make up for the lack of flight champagne with something bought on landing.

And let's really hope that some government nerk, who gets business class automatically already, due to their civil service grade, doesn't ban bunk beds due to some spurious health and safety nostrums, which will really be because of some background corruption and lobbying from an interested party, or annoyance that the plebs are getting uppity.

I still think the reason that bunk beds haven't already come about must be because of some stupid intrusive government regulation. Bunk beds in steerage are such a no-brainer, and will make so much money for whoever first introduces them, probably Virgin, that there must have been something unseen holding them back. I suppose we will never know, but for all of those like me who can never sleep in cattle, or for all of those business people who are being downgraded to cattle due to the credit crunch, including probably yours truly too, let's just be pleased that the age of Cheap Sleep is coming.

UPDATE: See here for more on economy sleeping solutions. (Yes, it does look a little like the sort of travel solutions they had on slave ships, but come on folks, it's only for 12 hours, not 12 weeks.)

TractorStats: The Lord forgives you

In mourning at the mysterious passing of TractorStats, I thought I might post the occasional pictorial interpretation of Big Brother Gordon Brown, if only to persuade TractorStats to come back, to show us how it's really done, and to blow us away again with his mind-bendingly brilliant work.

If you're quick, you might be able to track down his work here.

There's also a discussion here, at Obo's place, to try to determine what has happened to our digital maverick genius. Come back soon.

Bank of England will buy gilts to boost economy

It would seem that the lunatic-in-chief at the Bank of England, Mervyn King, is hell-bent on following Gordon Brown's wishes, by destroying the pound:

=> Bank of England will buy gilts to boost economy

Mervyn King said the Bank would start buying commercial paper this week, and would most probably move on to full-scale quantitative easing, which involves buying securities but printing money to pay for it, before long.

They have actually been doing this for decades now, but usually via a surreptitious back-door process called open-market operations. Doing it via the front-door will propel us into hyper-inflation.

In a further surprise, Mr King said the Bank was prepared to buy government debt in an effort to bring the economy back on track - something which, so far, neither the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank has embarked on.

What is Mr King going to "buy" this government debt with? Yes, that's right. Paper from out of thin air. If you or I were to "buy" sweets from a shop in such a way, we would be quite rightly arrested as counterfeiters.

Why is counterfeiting wrong in private hands but right in government hands? Answers on a postcard please.

He said: "The projections imply that further easing in monetary policy may well be required. That is likely to include actions aimed at increasing the supply of money in order to stimulate nominal spending," adding that the Bank would consider buying gilts - government bonds - as part of the scheme.

The civil servants at the Bank of England really do need their heads examined. It is impossible to create wealth on a printing press. Real money is supposed to represent real savings of real resources. This paper rubbish represents nothing but the vain ambition of Gordon Brown to become an elected prime minister through the purchase of votes with counterfeit money.

What this cabal of Treasury and Bank of England civil servants have failed to realise, however, is that this "deluge" technique of the post-war stop-go economy, has stopped working. It has failed because the markets have sussed them out. Diluting the value of every pound in the world through counterfeiting is a game which no longer fools anyone. The deluge technique only used to "work" because it kept putting off the fateful day when the bill would eventually have to be paid.

That fateful day has now arrived. It is now standing outside knocking on the door with a sledgehammer. It is time to pay this piper, and there is only one currency that he accepts.

That is the currency of production. We must produce our way out of this. We must make real things and sell them. To cut our production costs we must slash government spending and government regulation. To generate the capital required to fund new factories we must save real money and tighten our belts. We must stop inflating the money supply.

This is the only way out of this which avoids military dictatorship and war. It requires some pain. If we take this path to life, liberty, and property, this pain will be over with relatively quickly. If we continue down this road of printing paper fiat rubbish to chase the same number of scarce economic resources, the pain will increase and endure, eventually turning into the suppression of all liberties and possibly war. And not war in some distant land. But war on our streets, whether of the people against the government, or just everyone against everybody else.

The news - alongside a Bank economic forecast which was far more pessimistic than many City analysts - sent the pound careering downwards against other currencies.

Gotcha.

Sterling dropped by well over 3 cents against the dollar to $1.4352, and the euro was up more than a penny against the pound to 89.89p. The pound's fall coincided with sharp falls in gilt yields, indicating that traders had bought more of the government bonds in anticipation of the Bank's unconventional measures.

The traders know. Everyone knows. The Bank of England should be abolished and replaced with nothing. We need a 100% reserve gold standard and free banking and we need it now.

The Bank's Inflation Report predicted the biggest undershoot of the Monetary Policy Committee's 2pc consumer price index target in its history, warning that unless more is done to stimulate the economy, CPI will drop to around 0.5pc later this year.

And Gordon Brown has the gall to say that this is a 'failure of capitalism'. It is nothing of the sort. It is a failure of government-controlled central banking. End of story.

City economists took this as a sign that the Bank will cut rates even further below their current 1pc rate in the coming months - as well as embarking on unconventional measures. It came as a surprise to some economists, who assumed that the MPC had little leeway to cut rates.

I hate to shock the Keynesian economics 'profession', a.k.a. the dunderheads, but the MPC can cut interest rates to anything they want, including large negative figures.

Now that they have cut the 'headline' base rate to virtually zero, which gives us a real sterling interest rate of -15.45%, the MPC merely has to switch to another golf club in the bag, i.e. quantitative easing, to take it down even further.

If you are someone who cares for the United Kingdom and you wish to see it survive as an independent entity, you must do everything within your power to stop this madness. You must start a blog, comment on newspaper articles, talk to friends, subscribe to Mises.org, read the collected works of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, write to your MP, or do anything else you can think of, within your power, to stop this. If you are doing so already, then you are a hero.

If not, why not? Are you too busy developing your business? Making contributions to your pension? Earning a living? Playing golf?

When this country is a basket case in ten years' time because we didn't stop this, all of the above will either be irrelevant or impossible. We are looking at Zimbabwean style hyperinflation and our 'rulers' seem compelled to take us there, like rabbits frozen in the headlights, trapped by the instinct of state-worshipping Keynesianism.

This mass-hypnosis madness is either due to pure evil or more likely to the scribbled ideas of their favourite defunct economists, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.

Either way, we must stop them.

It's either that or leave the country. There is that choice. Take one of them before the border controls come down.

Have you ordered your copy yet?

Just in time for Tim Geithner's staggeringly stupid bid to destroy the American economy, with a $2 trillion dollar injection of heroin fiat paper, comes the new Thomas E. Woods' book, Meltdown, currently number two on the US Amazon non-fiction listing.

If you're really sick of Gordon Brown's constant 'market failure' refrain, and you want to explain to your friends what has really been going on, then this looks like the book to get.

Alas, your humble Maturin Towers correspondent has not yet seen a copy himself, but if it's anywhere near as good as The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, then it will be well worth the entrance fee.

Read more here:

=> Why the Depression

Thomas Woods, I salute you. Congratulations on getting this book out so quickly, to give the rest of us much needed reinforcement in these dangerous times.

In the meantime, while I'm waiting for my copy to arrive, I'm just finishing off another superb book by AngloAustrian hero, James Turk:


=> The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It

Frightening, persuasive, depressing, and exhilarating. What a book! If you want to learn how to end up with investments that are actually worth something, once the Tim Geithner and Peter Mandelson crowd have deliberately tried to destroy your wealth to preserve their power, then this must be the book.

Do however read it with caution; I'm currently stuck, because I'm too frightened to keep turning the pages.

UPDATE: A great YouTube plug for Thomas Woods and Meltdown:

A Sun God has come among us

I think Helios was the first of the major Greek Gods to receive a holy halo of goodness, coming naturally from his association with the Sun. Gradually poor old Helios was blended into the rampant transcending God, Apollo, who nicked the aura of Helios to form a sort of dual God (who of course starred in the fantastic original Star Trek episode, Who Mourns for Adonais?):

Obviously, this halo was stolen most notably by Sol Invictus, the Roman God, and then by the fully-transcendent Christian God, Jesus H. Christ, a sort of combination of Horus, Sol Invictus, and Apollo-Helios, who was never officially a "Sun God", just a "Son of God" (a pun memorably played upon in the original Star Trek episode, Bread and Circuses):

But neither of these original Gods is a patch on our modern Sun God wonder, who is now being photographed, without shame, under a halo of His very own:

I wandered around the Egyptian temples in Karnak and Luxor once, wondering how the Egyptian people could fool themselves into thinking that each new Pharaoh truly was a reincarnation of Amun, their major Sun God.

Surely they could not have been that deluded, I thought to myself. But now I think I know much better.

But why has the land which gave us the modern miracle of Star Trek, allowed itself to mentally regress so far back, by almost 4,000 years? Captain James T. Kirk, a true God if you ask me, if he came back again, would be truly ashamed of them. No wonder when he did come back, a few years ago, he preferred the company of whales.

Fortunately, the Egyptians were not always fooled by their Pharaohs. The one who took Sun worship to the extreme, Akhenaten, made them move their capital, and almost taxed Egypt out of existence. He claimed divine powers from the Sun, as in the photo below, in which he is praying for a bail-out:

After a period in which he was worshipped as a living God, the Egyptians eventually grew tired of Akhenaten's waste and profligacy and tossed him off his throne. But what's really remarkable is who he looks like, close up. Who does this remind you of?:

Out of Africa, indeed.

Surely there's got to be a Hollywood movie script in there, somewhere, involving the Starship Enterprise, time travel, and the rescuing of Akhenaten before the mob broke down his doors? And what better job for a former real-life Egyptian Pharaoh could there be other than US President?

If this plot-line does ever turn up at a movie house, near you, remember you read it here first.

It's squeaky bum time for Bernanke

Are the global bond markets, particularly for US Treasuries, about to go bust?

Ambrose thinks they might be:

=> Bond market calls Fed's bluff as global economy falls apart

As Voltaire once said:

"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero."

All of the rest is merely detail. Yes, it has been a 75 year detail, since the world came off a particularly weak version of the gold standard in the early 1930s, and a 35 year detail since the last vestige of gold was destroyed by Richard Nixon in 1971, but details they remain, nevertheless; Voltaire was right.

The only question now, is how can we get to a strong 100% gold reserve standard as quickly as possible, and with as little pain as possible?

No doubt our regal politicians will make this process as slow and as painful as they are able, because the more money is gold, the less power they have; but in the end game they will be unable to prevent its emergence.

Let's hope they don't blow us all up first, though, in WWIII, before this move back to real money can finally come to pass, a few hundred years after we left it.

UPDATE: Uncle Gary North has written a great article on how the Fed has dug itself into the world's biggest ever fiscal hole:

=> The Federal Reserve's Self-Imposed Dilemma

(I think when the French Mississippi Bubble collapsed, its inflationary instigator, John Law, was kicked out of France and died penniless in Italy. One wonders whether a similar fate is in store for Bernanke and his mentor Greenspan!)

UPDATEII: Lew Rockwell has been sent a hilarious Marc Faber video in which the Good Doctor tells it like it is:

"The US Government should be [rated as] junk [bonds]".

Check it out. The CNBC presenter winces as if punched, when the Good Doctor delivers the accurate news. Key quote at 1 minute and 47 seconds:

Sorry I called him one-eyed and Scottish but ... he is an idiot

Just in case you missed it, here is Jeremy Clarkson 'unforgivably' calling Gordon Brown a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot'.

According to the The Sun, he is repentant about the one-eyed Scottish bit, because he doesn't want to offend people with disabilities or Scottish people, but he refuses to retract the bit about Gordon Brown being an idiot:

=> Sorry I called him one-eyed and Scottish but ... he is an idiot

Obviously, as an anarchist I am completely opposed to anyone being Prime Minister. But if Jeremy Clarkson stood, I really would have to vote for him.

Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy

Uncle Gary North offers some rather relevant pension advice, if your pension hasn't been destroyed yet by government incompetence.

Thank the Lord for 4x4 cars

I don't know where I would have been this week, if I hadn't had access to my 4x4. Probably stuck in a ditch somewhere. With British councils spending untold billions on cultural awareness programmes, translating road signs into Bengali, and pumping up their exorbitant pensions, little was left over for road grit or road salt.

So when they predictably ran out, 2-wheel drive cars were virtually incapable of getting through my part of Oxfordshire, for hours or even days at a time.

Fortunately, I was able to give lots of children lifts to schools, get the food shopping in, attend a couple of crucial business meetings, and various other paraphernalia generally known as life. And all because of a 4x4. Marvellous.

Just for the record, I won't bang on about how useless British councils are, because it is axiomatic that all socialist organisations are useless.

But if any ecomentalists are out there who benefited from the use of someone else's 4x4 this week, especially if it was something really important such as a hospital appointment which was only left uncancelled because their consultant had a 4x4, I would like them to say after me:

"Anthropogenic global warming is complete nonsense and even if it wasn't, Thank God for 4x4 cars to help us cope with ongoing government failure"

Fat chance, obviously. But it's the thought that counts.

No doubt the lunatics will be out again in the Spring berating people at the road side for daring to have safe and dependable transport.

I do wish they would all go and live in Sweden, where of course, 4-wheel drive cars are often a year-round necessity.

Clarkson labels PM 'one-eyed idiot'

Apparently, AngloAustrian semi-hero, Jeremy Clarkson, has got into hot water for making 'unforgivable' remarks about Gordon Brown.

Personally, I prefer highly pressurised steam baths when talking about our feckless useless incontinent effeminate tyrannical lunatic Stalinist one-eyed idiot Prime Minister.

So well done Mr Clarkson. You may be a parasite living on millions of pounds of taxes taken from BBC licence fee payers, thus only gaining semi-hero status, but when the revolution comes, brother, I'm sure you'll still be on the right side.

Blair pips Brown to the post

What is Edmund Conway smoking?

Apparently, in Edmund Conway World, everything is fine and dandy:

=> The Bank was right to cut rates

I wish I knew what Edmund is smoking, because if he's got any spare, I'd like to have some. Obviously, Maturin Towers refused to let this utter nonsense go by without comment:

EnglishJack February 06, 2009 08:10 AM GMT

As a Keynesian shill, Edmund, I would have thought you would have avoided talking about Japan. They went into their financial slump with one of the best savings rates in the world and only really borrowed from themselves, with Japanese citizens buying up the bulk of the Japanese Government Bonds used to prop up zombie Japanese banks.

When we finally get down to zero percent, we will be using the same methodology as the foolish Japanese government (i.e. government bond sales to prop up zombie banks, quantitative easing, and zero percent interest rates), but we have no savings and all of our bonds are being bought by foreigners.

The prognosis for this country therefore will be much worse than it was for Japan, not better, as you seem to be suggesting. With an effective negative interest rate (with M4 at 16.6% and the base rate at 1%) there is no point anybody in this country saving at all, in terms of pound sterling. They really ought to turn all of their spare cash into real physical goods, to prevent the dilution of their wealth.

Buying gold or silver, or any other durable commodity, is probably the best course of action for most savers. They should certainly get out of the pound. With a MINUS 15.45% interest rate, (M4+base rate) anyone holding their savings in pounds is going to be wiped out, especially once the Bank of England start helicoptering fiat paper directly into the veins.

I think most sensible people will realise this, and spend their cash as fast as they can get it, on whatever physical goods are available, especially the monetary metals. Fortunately, for most people who do this, the central banks will try to massage down gold and silver prices, to try to hide what they are doing on the quantitative easing side, until they eventually run completely out of metal, when the government will then try to seize it all back again. So if any of your readers do decide to buy gold or silver, especially gold, I suggest that they either hold it outside of this country, or take physical delivery and store it where no government agents will be able to find it. If this government keeps going with its horrific Keynesian plan to destroy everybody's savings, we are heading towards a full crack-up boom, rather than a gently-massaged recovery. We will then see punitive interest rates which may go high enough to spark outright rebellion, or hyperinflation, leading to price controls, shortages, and martial law. If we are lucky, we can put a stop to this nonsense now and 'only' have five to ten years of stagflation. But the course of action you are proposing, Edmund, is going to destroy this country. You won't have been taught about any of this on your Keynesian economics degree, where you learned about mathematical modelling rather than how people behave. I would therefore suggest that if you want to stop embarrassing yourself even more, by having Liam Halligan and Iain Martin laughing at you, you go to Mises.org and find out what is really going on.

I recommend you search for "A Theory of Money and Credit" (L.v.Mises), "Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle" (L.v.Mises et al), "The Causes of the Economic Crisis" (L.v.Mises), "Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles" (J.H. de Soto), "The Mystery of Banking" (M.N.Rothbard), "America's Great Depression" (M.N.Rothbard), and "What Has the Government Done to Our Money?" (M.N.Rothbard).

All of these books are available either to buy or download freely as high-quality online PDFs. If you go to my blog site and look down the right-hand side, I have links to them all.

=> angloaustria.blogspot.com...

I seriously recommend that you start reading them. Then you may be able to refute them at your leisure. Good luck. No other Keynesian has.