Apparently, lots of evil capitalists have been meeting down dark alleys at night and colluding together, by forcing me to come into their stores and making me buy dairy products at the prices offered, which I have mistakenly agreed to pay under the delusion that I am an adult capable of making a rational choice and incapable of opening up a rival dairy business in a free market to out-compete them, having realised their prices can be bettered. Thank goodness for the Office of Fair Trading then, for uncovering this theft and calumny of £270 million pounds! That this 'discovery' has also justified their existence, and may raise hundreds of millions in fines for Toad Gordo, is beside the point, as is the way they keep making these discoveries almost on a regular timetable basis, despite all private businessmen knowing how these immense sporadic fines can wreck their very existence. These business-savvy OFT civil servants are heroes, and deserve everything that's coming to them.
But what about the discovery that Maturin Towers recently made too? Apparently, for hundreds of years now shadowy groups of individuals have been colluding together in dark corridors and then annually stealing up to £2,000 billion pounds a year from the British public in direct theft, through the imposition of monopolies over security provision and numerous other services, and preventing wealth creation in approximately similar amounts by the sheer numbers of mind-numbing regulations they have created to wrap us all up in via these same security monopolies. These 'government officials', as they call themselves, produce hardly anything worth having and if they were all sacked, we would hardly notice their disappearance except that we would all be far wealthier, have far less of these 'sharers and gatherers' going around making our lives an utter misery in monopolies such as the NHS, and be safer due to the removal of their foreign military adventures around the world funded out of the £2 trillion they steal from us annually, either through taxation or counterfeiting (or borrowing, which is delayed taxation or counterfeiting).
When will this news be released?
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Independent Bank of England Agrees To Do What It's Told
Just why exactly do we pay such high salaries to all of these apparatchiks, in the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England, and the Treasury? They always do just exactly what Gordon tells them. So what's the point of them? Why don't we simply replace them all with cardboard cut-outs to save on the salaries and the pensions? Oh, sorry, I was forgetting that Badger Darling already is a cardboard cut-out; of his Lord and Master, Toad Gordo.Make mine a £10 billion pound 'injection' of counterfeit cash and a nationalised banking system with Toad Gordo as chief banker!
I really just can't quite believe that this week has happened, with a nationalised UK banking system feasting upon moral hazard, the sluice gates opened to massive sterling inflation with endless 'injections' of fake paper, and the Federal Reserve pouring away what value remains within the dollar to satisfy its masters on Wall Street. And it's only Wednesday! Ye Gods.
We shall repent at our leisure.
Ponzi-Scheme-U-Like
Oh dear.
When Badger Darling's puppet master, Toad Gordo, saw those TV pictures of all those Labour voters queueing up outside branches of Northern Rock to kick his "golden economic miracle" in the teeth, the response was unprecedented. The taxpayers of Great Britain have now been lined up to stand behind every stupid risky decision taken by the pampered financial elites of the City of London, for the rest of time. Or at least until the Pound Sterling eventually collapses.
Trebles all round boys, and don't forget to take out your usual whopping Christmas bonuses (and thanks for the 40% tax on them too!).
With HMG now placing its taxpaying serfs into this backstop role, expect even more really stupid investment decisions over the next few years, and many more Northern Rock style incidents. No doubt it will all be blamed on capitalism, when once again it is all really down to socialism, or should I say the man behind the green curtain, Toad Gordo.
And it gets worse on the other the side of the Atlantic too. All you'll hear from the elites of Wall Street are the words, "sensible", "balanced", and "pragmatic", when describing the Fed's decision to print even more oomplahs of paper dollars, with its 50 basis point interest rate cut, yesterday. But then these financial elites are facing bonus season, and those yachts and Ferraris are calling.
Just think about it for a moment. What do you do if your paper currency is going down the toilet, becoming more worthless by the hour, the Chinese are dumping your treasury bonds, and any remaining value your paper scrip has is being wasted on idiotic programmes such as the sub-prime mortgage market, because the US and UK governments have made it plain that they will cover all losses with guns placed to the heads of their taxpayers? Yes, that's right; you print even more of the smeggers!
Welcome to Wonderland. The Mad Hatter will be along in a minute, when he's finished chairing the Open Market Operation committee meeting at the Bank of England.
Maturin advice? Buy gold, while you can still get it with this paper rubbish we mistakenly call money, or at least gold stocks. Because all of these paper currencies are going down. They have a few years left in them yet, but it is only a matter of time. How long is debatable. The Soviets managed to keep the paper rouble going for decades. But when the men with guns start insisting upon legal tender laws, and actually have to bring the guns out to enforce them, we will know we are in the end game. Brown's decision to permanently place the UK taxpayer behind the UK's banks may be the first intimation of this.
What would be really funny, of course, is if Putin decided to create a gold rouble to really sock it to the dollar and the pound. But whatever you do, or Putin does, get out of paper and get into real values. Forget "sensible", "balanced", and "pragmatic". Yesterday marked the high-point of a very tall and a very steep rollercoaster. We are about to find out the meaning of the phrase white-knuckle ride. You have been warned.
When Badger Darling's puppet master, Toad Gordo, saw those TV pictures of all those Labour voters queueing up outside branches of Northern Rock to kick his "golden economic miracle" in the teeth, the response was unprecedented. The taxpayers of Great Britain have now been lined up to stand behind every stupid risky decision taken by the pampered financial elites of the City of London, for the rest of time. Or at least until the Pound Sterling eventually collapses.
Trebles all round boys, and don't forget to take out your usual whopping Christmas bonuses (and thanks for the 40% tax on them too!).
With HMG now placing its taxpaying serfs into this backstop role, expect even more really stupid investment decisions over the next few years, and many more Northern Rock style incidents. No doubt it will all be blamed on capitalism, when once again it is all really down to socialism, or should I say the man behind the green curtain, Toad Gordo.
And it gets worse on the other the side of the Atlantic too. All you'll hear from the elites of Wall Street are the words, "sensible", "balanced", and "pragmatic", when describing the Fed's decision to print even more oomplahs of paper dollars, with its 50 basis point interest rate cut, yesterday. But then these financial elites are facing bonus season, and those yachts and Ferraris are calling.
Just think about it for a moment. What do you do if your paper currency is going down the toilet, becoming more worthless by the hour, the Chinese are dumping your treasury bonds, and any remaining value your paper scrip has is being wasted on idiotic programmes such as the sub-prime mortgage market, because the US and UK governments have made it plain that they will cover all losses with guns placed to the heads of their taxpayers? Yes, that's right; you print even more of the smeggers!
Welcome to Wonderland. The Mad Hatter will be along in a minute, when he's finished chairing the Open Market Operation committee meeting at the Bank of England.
Maturin advice? Buy gold, while you can still get it with this paper rubbish we mistakenly call money, or at least gold stocks. Because all of these paper currencies are going down. They have a few years left in them yet, but it is only a matter of time. How long is debatable. The Soviets managed to keep the paper rouble going for decades. But when the men with guns start insisting upon legal tender laws, and actually have to bring the guns out to enforce them, we will know we are in the end game. Brown's decision to permanently place the UK taxpayer behind the UK's banks may be the first intimation of this.
What would be really funny, of course, is if Putin decided to create a gold rouble to really sock it to the dollar and the pound. But whatever you do, or Putin does, get out of paper and get into real values. Forget "sensible", "balanced", and "pragmatic". Yesterday marked the high-point of a very tall and a very steep rollercoaster. We are about to find out the meaning of the phrase white-knuckle ride. You have been warned.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Terracotta Tin Pot Tax Collectors
Am I a sourpuss? But the thought of paying good hard earned paper scrip to take a look at a load of terracotta tyrants representing the armed tax bureaucrats who rammed China into an age of Mandarinic servitude, as they guard their imperial master into the afterlife, in his Mausoleum monument built by 700,000 slaves, fills me with nothing but absolute disinterest.
Show me a marble bust of Cicero or a Corinthian Agora and I'm there, because these represent the rise of law, civilisation, and the market, which are synonymous with the rise of liberty. But show me a vainglorious monument to the waste of tyrannical government and I'd rather eat a plain cheese biscuit and a couple of small grapes. Yes, these mandarins invented paper money, taxation return forms, and the police state, but are we really that much better off with these tremendous advances in criminality?
Bah, humbug. You go if you want to. I have much better things to do with £12 pounds. For instance, how about buying a copy of Wilding's first book of Latin, instead? A much better use of paper scrip, if you ask me. Ave!
Show me a marble bust of Cicero or a Corinthian Agora and I'm there, because these represent the rise of law, civilisation, and the market, which are synonymous with the rise of liberty. But show me a vainglorious monument to the waste of tyrannical government and I'd rather eat a plain cheese biscuit and a couple of small grapes. Yes, these mandarins invented paper money, taxation return forms, and the police state, but are we really that much better off with these tremendous advances in criminality?
Bah, humbug. You go if you want to. I have much better things to do with £12 pounds. For instance, how about buying a copy of Wilding's first book of Latin, instead? A much better use of paper scrip, if you ask me. Ave!
Monday, September 17, 2007
Does Britain Need a Libertarian Party?
Apparently, Sean Gabb is offering a £1,000 pound prize for a 2,000 word essay on whether Britain needs a libertarian party. Well, here's my go...
This country needs a libertarian party like a central bank needs a 100% gold reserve currency. As the experience of Murray Rothbard showed in the United States, the best we can expect from such a conflagration of egos is either a snarling nest of ambitious vipers or an odious cloud of intellectual deadbeats. At worst, we will siphon off the most productive energies of a tiny libertarian vanguard and direct them into the usual Byzantine struggle for ultimate control of the coffee grinder.
The lesson to be learned from the United States experience, where the Libertarian Party has fallen to the thrall of becoming a junior wing of the neoconservative Republican Party, is that we should avoid the revolting world of party politics and its perpetual and internecine beauty contests, where we promise to rob one group to pay off another, whilst keeping a hefty commission for our own underpaid uses. We should leave this envious cornucopia of kickbacks and horse-trading to the parasites and the criminals who currently occupy its foetid territory.
If we find ourselves competing for political power we will have let the socialists beat us. For to accept the rules of their game, where a majority can tyrannize a minority through the sleight of hand of democracy, is to become socialists ourselves in the same way that the mighty Lords of Numenor became slavish ring wraiths to their tyrant king, Sauron, after accepting his golden baubles of power. You may feel you can wield a ring of power to do good with it, but in the end the result is always the same; you become the same snake in the mirror that the rest of them become in their do-gooding bid to save the rest of us from ourselves.
No, it is a far better thing to steer clear of the party political system and to remain unsullied by the foul and dreadful stench emanating from the drains of Westminster. So where does that put me then? Squatting upon an ivory tower, alone, shivering, and afraid, with copies of Tolkien nestled at my feet, and nothing but a giant moth for company, like so many sad libertarians before me? No, because I’ll have my copies of Harry Potter up there with me too!
And what I’ll learn from them is that just as with the Ministry of Magic, if you construct an edifice of what we could call a ‘good’ power, to protect yourself from a ‘bad’ power, it remains only a matter of time before the ‘bad’ power will subsume the ‘good’ one. But we can still build our own Last Alliance of Men and Elves, our last Dumbledore’s Army, without resorting to this fools’ paradise of a repugnant political machine.
Because as Lenin himself realised, the way to defeat a greater military force is not through the process of acquiring force oneself, but to create an intellectual vanguard to undermine the bureaucratic state; for what is the state but a heavily gilded beast resting upon a chariot of mistaken and corrupt ideas? Skewer those ideas, and replace them with your own, as Ghandi did to the British in India, and as Thomas Paine did to the British in the United States, and even the mightiest of empires will collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The best and most successful model of this form, in modern times, is the Ludwig von Mises Institute, based in Auburn in the United States; an organisation far more successful than the United States Libertarian Party and another God-Child of the effervescent Murray Rothbard. Whatever you may think about Uncle Murray, you could never accuse him of ever giving up. Although he failed with the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party, I think he hit it third-time-lucky with the Mises Institute.
So what does the Mises Institute do that is so powerful? They have taken Ayn Rand at her word and have undertaken a multi-decade attempt to infiltrate American universities, particularly the philosophy, economics, and history departments, with their own intellectual products schooled in the best traditions of Hayek, Mises, Raico, Riesman, and most of all, Rothbard. Armed with nothing but the truth, these students have quietly and stealthily begun to acquire one professorship at a time, in one university after another, until in the perceived end game, they will have unseated the positivists and the Keynesians from every important professorial chair in America, and replaced them all with the intellectual descendants of Menger, Baum-Bauwerk, Mises, and Rothbard, many of them home-schooled away from the state’s brain-washing muppet factories, another important component of the Mises Institute plan.
Control the Universities, said Rand, and eventually you will control everything. This process is underway and has been now for two decades and is clearly beginning to bear fruit. The campaign of Ron Paul to become United States President will almost certainly fail, probably due to a series of rigged ballots or a rogue plane going down, but just as with the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, the waters this campaign is stirring will generate lasting undercurrents of freedom which could lead to our own salvation here, on the other side of the Atlantic. Even ten years ago Paul’s campaign would already have been over, but through the underground and unrelenting work of Lew Rockwell et al, Paul’s campaign has achieved a tenacious grip and will almost certainly hold steady until the New Hampshire primary next year.
And even if the worst should happen and Paul should fail to beat such intellectual giants as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Barrack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, Paul should light a fuse which could burn for decades. Being a libertarian, however, means that I’m insanely optimistic about the future, and if Paul should win, we would actually have an Austrian in the White House without their constitution needing to be changed! And none of this would have been possible without the hard work of all those people at Auburn who have spent most of their adult lives creating the underlying substrate of a powerful anarcho-capitalist tradition based upon the Super-Jeffersonian tradition of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, supercharged with the European intellectual powerhouse of the Austrian School. Okay, so even having an honest President conversant with Mises, one who will attempt to abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve, means we’ll still have a long way to go, but it’s been a long time since Keith Joseph and his cataclysmic decision to avoid breaking up the British state school system to keep the Guardianista status quo on-side. The key to all of this is education, as Keith later realised when it was too late, and as the Gramscians have long known. Even if Paul should treat his tenure as nothing more than a four-year education lesson for the American people, we’ll be far further ahead than if we continue trying to persuade the likes of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to think beyond the tendrils of their own vainglorious ambition with a quisling libertarian party.
Rue these Austrians if you will, but they have certainly been more successful than any of the libertarians of Britain, in the last two decades, who seem to delight more in arguing the toss over the meaning of the word ‘epistemology’, rather than worrying about whether we’re actually getting anywhere in an increasingly collectivized Britain. I would hesitate to use the phrase, ‘effete dandies’, but the few times I have managed to break into the carefully ordained inner circles of the libertarian movement in Britain, it has usually only been long enough to be shown the door for daring to have the temerity to question the ancien regime.
The main problem seems to be the general clubbishness of the British libertarian, and their tendency to try to influence our political masters rather than shun them and move on to something better than the broken democratic model. So where the Adam Smith Institute and the others try their best to influence the Labour and Conservative parties, all they do is get sucked into the maw of the same evil machine they are trying to smash until they become as much part of the establishment as a Guards Armoured Division.
A libertarian party would only accentuate this process of acclimatization into the world of power politics, which is why the Libertarian Party has failed so dramatically in the United States, with its legions of members who believe freedom springs from the barrel of an M1 tank. I would also say that a thrill of hob-nobbing with ‘The Great and The Good’ in Westminster may have spiked the guns of freedom in this country and we must break away from this ego-boosting tendency to be on first-name terms with the Paxmans and Neills of this world, which participation in a libertarian party would help promote. To be sucked into their game is to lose sight of the objective, which is to create a world in which the opinions of career politicians and their cronies are meaningless and worthless, affecting nobody, instead of the current situation where if Gordon Brown or David Cameron has a good or a bad feeling in their gut, we’re all made poorer as a result, or if George Bush gets an itch in his toe, half a million Iraqis die. Intellectuals have always been rewarded by the state, to help bring them into the tent, and these rewards are often more than just money; the feeling of being on the inside is often enough for some, and a libertarian party would quickly be co-opted within the warm comforting womb of the state to help foster this feeling of belonging, where Gordon Brown and his orcish ilk appear to become friends and colleagues rather than the pond scum they are.
And let’s cut to the chase, as our American cousins say. There is simply no point trying to form a political party, because the nature of being a libertarian is to move in the direction of independent anarchism rather than collective mono-culture. None of us agree with each other, and most of us are vehement within the comfort of our contradictory opinions, yet the nature of politics is such that to be successful a 49% minority must always bow to a 51% majority to exhibit collective strength, or in the Bolshevik and Menshevik tradition, split up and then spend the next 20 years trying to murder each other, a Monty-Pythonesque process we can already see repeating itself within the UK Independence Party!
It will be much better if we band together to create an ‘Libertarian Institute’ dedicated to promulgating the intellectual tradition of freedom within the universities, one professor at a time, particularly targeting history, philosophy, and economics departments, just as the Mises Institute has done in the United States. We must smash the strangle-hold that the left has upon the intelligentsia in this country by taking those commanding heights ourselves. It is only once, and if, we can control these commanding heights that we will begin to shake this country out of its welfarist lethargy.
Personally speaking, and rather obviously, I would prefer for this institute to be entirely based upon Austrian Economics, to create a cohesive body of intellectual argument, but I am realistic enough to accept that this may be difficult. At first we can concentrate on merely promulgating the best of liberal tradition, from Bastiat through to Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Rand, and Tame, particularly those overlapping traditions on secession, a live-and-let-live process most of us can agree with.
So is it possible to bring together all the diversities of British libertarians under the roof of a single debating hall? Well, we can but try. Let’s first of all try to bring together the two Libertarian Alliances, and their two small hordes of members who find it difficult to even acknowledge the existence of the other organisation. If that proves impossible, the best plan may simply be for us all to emigrate to Texas or New Hampshire and let Britain sink into a morass of socialism, because if two such ostensibly similar organisations find it impossible to build an institute together, or even a loosely amalgamated debating society, what hope is there for 400 years of British libertarian tradition? We may be best off to simply shut up shop and wait for the American libertarians, the intellectual heirs of David Hume and John Locke, to shake us out of our lethargy when they can finally throw off the fascistic chains of their own neoconservative and democratic rulers.
Do we need a libertarian party? Nein danke. Do we need a libertarian educational institute dedicated to help people free their minds of the poison of the state’s compulsory education system? Ja wohl.
Jack Maturin
If by some fluke of God, this article should win the £1,000 pound prize, every penny will be donated to LewRockwell.Com, to help it support the Ron Paul campaign
Ausbildung, Ausbildung, Ausbildung
This country needs a libertarian party like a central bank needs a 100% gold reserve currency. As the experience of Murray Rothbard showed in the United States, the best we can expect from such a conflagration of egos is either a snarling nest of ambitious vipers or an odious cloud of intellectual deadbeats. At worst, we will siphon off the most productive energies of a tiny libertarian vanguard and direct them into the usual Byzantine struggle for ultimate control of the coffee grinder.
The lesson to be learned from the United States experience, where the Libertarian Party has fallen to the thrall of becoming a junior wing of the neoconservative Republican Party, is that we should avoid the revolting world of party politics and its perpetual and internecine beauty contests, where we promise to rob one group to pay off another, whilst keeping a hefty commission for our own underpaid uses. We should leave this envious cornucopia of kickbacks and horse-trading to the parasites and the criminals who currently occupy its foetid territory.
If we find ourselves competing for political power we will have let the socialists beat us. For to accept the rules of their game, where a majority can tyrannize a minority through the sleight of hand of democracy, is to become socialists ourselves in the same way that the mighty Lords of Numenor became slavish ring wraiths to their tyrant king, Sauron, after accepting his golden baubles of power. You may feel you can wield a ring of power to do good with it, but in the end the result is always the same; you become the same snake in the mirror that the rest of them become in their do-gooding bid to save the rest of us from ourselves.
No, it is a far better thing to steer clear of the party political system and to remain unsullied by the foul and dreadful stench emanating from the drains of Westminster. So where does that put me then? Squatting upon an ivory tower, alone, shivering, and afraid, with copies of Tolkien nestled at my feet, and nothing but a giant moth for company, like so many sad libertarians before me? No, because I’ll have my copies of Harry Potter up there with me too!
And what I’ll learn from them is that just as with the Ministry of Magic, if you construct an edifice of what we could call a ‘good’ power, to protect yourself from a ‘bad’ power, it remains only a matter of time before the ‘bad’ power will subsume the ‘good’ one. But we can still build our own Last Alliance of Men and Elves, our last Dumbledore’s Army, without resorting to this fools’ paradise of a repugnant political machine.
Because as Lenin himself realised, the way to defeat a greater military force is not through the process of acquiring force oneself, but to create an intellectual vanguard to undermine the bureaucratic state; for what is the state but a heavily gilded beast resting upon a chariot of mistaken and corrupt ideas? Skewer those ideas, and replace them with your own, as Ghandi did to the British in India, and as Thomas Paine did to the British in the United States, and even the mightiest of empires will collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The best and most successful model of this form, in modern times, is the Ludwig von Mises Institute, based in Auburn in the United States; an organisation far more successful than the United States Libertarian Party and another God-Child of the effervescent Murray Rothbard. Whatever you may think about Uncle Murray, you could never accuse him of ever giving up. Although he failed with the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party, I think he hit it third-time-lucky with the Mises Institute.
So what does the Mises Institute do that is so powerful? They have taken Ayn Rand at her word and have undertaken a multi-decade attempt to infiltrate American universities, particularly the philosophy, economics, and history departments, with their own intellectual products schooled in the best traditions of Hayek, Mises, Raico, Riesman, and most of all, Rothbard. Armed with nothing but the truth, these students have quietly and stealthily begun to acquire one professorship at a time, in one university after another, until in the perceived end game, they will have unseated the positivists and the Keynesians from every important professorial chair in America, and replaced them all with the intellectual descendants of Menger, Baum-Bauwerk, Mises, and Rothbard, many of them home-schooled away from the state’s brain-washing muppet factories, another important component of the Mises Institute plan.
Control the Universities, said Rand, and eventually you will control everything. This process is underway and has been now for two decades and is clearly beginning to bear fruit. The campaign of Ron Paul to become United States President will almost certainly fail, probably due to a series of rigged ballots or a rogue plane going down, but just as with the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, the waters this campaign is stirring will generate lasting undercurrents of freedom which could lead to our own salvation here, on the other side of the Atlantic. Even ten years ago Paul’s campaign would already have been over, but through the underground and unrelenting work of Lew Rockwell et al, Paul’s campaign has achieved a tenacious grip and will almost certainly hold steady until the New Hampshire primary next year.
And even if the worst should happen and Paul should fail to beat such intellectual giants as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Barrack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, Paul should light a fuse which could burn for decades. Being a libertarian, however, means that I’m insanely optimistic about the future, and if Paul should win, we would actually have an Austrian in the White House without their constitution needing to be changed! And none of this would have been possible without the hard work of all those people at Auburn who have spent most of their adult lives creating the underlying substrate of a powerful anarcho-capitalist tradition based upon the Super-Jeffersonian tradition of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, supercharged with the European intellectual powerhouse of the Austrian School. Okay, so even having an honest President conversant with Mises, one who will attempt to abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve, means we’ll still have a long way to go, but it’s been a long time since Keith Joseph and his cataclysmic decision to avoid breaking up the British state school system to keep the Guardianista status quo on-side. The key to all of this is education, as Keith later realised when it was too late, and as the Gramscians have long known. Even if Paul should treat his tenure as nothing more than a four-year education lesson for the American people, we’ll be far further ahead than if we continue trying to persuade the likes of Gordon Brown and David Cameron to think beyond the tendrils of their own vainglorious ambition with a quisling libertarian party.
Rue these Austrians if you will, but they have certainly been more successful than any of the libertarians of Britain, in the last two decades, who seem to delight more in arguing the toss over the meaning of the word ‘epistemology’, rather than worrying about whether we’re actually getting anywhere in an increasingly collectivized Britain. I would hesitate to use the phrase, ‘effete dandies’, but the few times I have managed to break into the carefully ordained inner circles of the libertarian movement in Britain, it has usually only been long enough to be shown the door for daring to have the temerity to question the ancien regime.
The main problem seems to be the general clubbishness of the British libertarian, and their tendency to try to influence our political masters rather than shun them and move on to something better than the broken democratic model. So where the Adam Smith Institute and the others try their best to influence the Labour and Conservative parties, all they do is get sucked into the maw of the same evil machine they are trying to smash until they become as much part of the establishment as a Guards Armoured Division.
A libertarian party would only accentuate this process of acclimatization into the world of power politics, which is why the Libertarian Party has failed so dramatically in the United States, with its legions of members who believe freedom springs from the barrel of an M1 tank. I would also say that a thrill of hob-nobbing with ‘The Great and The Good’ in Westminster may have spiked the guns of freedom in this country and we must break away from this ego-boosting tendency to be on first-name terms with the Paxmans and Neills of this world, which participation in a libertarian party would help promote. To be sucked into their game is to lose sight of the objective, which is to create a world in which the opinions of career politicians and their cronies are meaningless and worthless, affecting nobody, instead of the current situation where if Gordon Brown or David Cameron has a good or a bad feeling in their gut, we’re all made poorer as a result, or if George Bush gets an itch in his toe, half a million Iraqis die. Intellectuals have always been rewarded by the state, to help bring them into the tent, and these rewards are often more than just money; the feeling of being on the inside is often enough for some, and a libertarian party would quickly be co-opted within the warm comforting womb of the state to help foster this feeling of belonging, where Gordon Brown and his orcish ilk appear to become friends and colleagues rather than the pond scum they are.
And let’s cut to the chase, as our American cousins say. There is simply no point trying to form a political party, because the nature of being a libertarian is to move in the direction of independent anarchism rather than collective mono-culture. None of us agree with each other, and most of us are vehement within the comfort of our contradictory opinions, yet the nature of politics is such that to be successful a 49% minority must always bow to a 51% majority to exhibit collective strength, or in the Bolshevik and Menshevik tradition, split up and then spend the next 20 years trying to murder each other, a Monty-Pythonesque process we can already see repeating itself within the UK Independence Party!
It will be much better if we band together to create an ‘Libertarian Institute’ dedicated to promulgating the intellectual tradition of freedom within the universities, one professor at a time, particularly targeting history, philosophy, and economics departments, just as the Mises Institute has done in the United States. We must smash the strangle-hold that the left has upon the intelligentsia in this country by taking those commanding heights ourselves. It is only once, and if, we can control these commanding heights that we will begin to shake this country out of its welfarist lethargy.
Personally speaking, and rather obviously, I would prefer for this institute to be entirely based upon Austrian Economics, to create a cohesive body of intellectual argument, but I am realistic enough to accept that this may be difficult. At first we can concentrate on merely promulgating the best of liberal tradition, from Bastiat through to Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Rand, and Tame, particularly those overlapping traditions on secession, a live-and-let-live process most of us can agree with.
So is it possible to bring together all the diversities of British libertarians under the roof of a single debating hall? Well, we can but try. Let’s first of all try to bring together the two Libertarian Alliances, and their two small hordes of members who find it difficult to even acknowledge the existence of the other organisation. If that proves impossible, the best plan may simply be for us all to emigrate to Texas or New Hampshire and let Britain sink into a morass of socialism, because if two such ostensibly similar organisations find it impossible to build an institute together, or even a loosely amalgamated debating society, what hope is there for 400 years of British libertarian tradition? We may be best off to simply shut up shop and wait for the American libertarians, the intellectual heirs of David Hume and John Locke, to shake us out of our lethargy when they can finally throw off the fascistic chains of their own neoconservative and democratic rulers.
Do we need a libertarian party? Nein danke. Do we need a libertarian educational institute dedicated to help people free their minds of the poison of the state’s compulsory education system? Ja wohl.
Jack Maturin
If by some fluke of God, this article should win the £1,000 pound prize, every penny will be donated to LewRockwell.Com, to help it support the Ron Paul campaign
Don't Panic! Don't Panic!
So, Alistair Darling is so confident that Northern Rock will survive (ha!) that he's prepared to bet my money on it.
That's big of you, Al. While you're at it, would you mind slipping me some of my own money to buy a big G&T to say Cheers? Or get the independent (ha!) Bank of England to print some for me?
That's big of you, Al. While you're at it, would you mind slipping me some of my own money to buy a big G&T to say Cheers? Or get the independent (ha!) Bank of England to print some for me?
The Magic Circle of Moronic Government Stooges
How do you get rich? This is a question most of us have asked at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, some of us think the answer is to become criminals and then steal the property of others to live off the proceeds. Yes, this only works in the short-term, because if we were all to adopt this cancerous lifestyle choice, there would soon be little worth stealing, as the poor buggers in Zimbabwe are currently finding out. However, if you manage the process carefully and only steal the occasional golden egg from the goose, limit the number of parasites you allow into you hallowed ranks, and get yourself a handy monopoly on force and law, this process of wealth-enhancing theft can become perpetual. And so, lo, your happy band of robbers can settle down to become a respected mafia rather than a hated gang of pirates. And if your mafia can hang on for a couple of hundred years to absorb a few other surrounding mafias in an evolutionary process of power accumulation, it can even become a state.
So the answer to the original question would seem to be that one of the proven ways of becoming rich is to become, in this order; a terrorist, a mafiosi, and then a politician. It needn’t even take several hundred years, as the IRA has patently shown in Northern Ireland.
Obviously in the long-run, the effects of this “wetting my beak” thievery are difficult to detect, though most will admit that the effects create less growth in wealth than would otherwise occur. However, in the short-term of one man’s life, the gains for this criminal lifestyle choice can become immense, if only for just this one man.
Step forward Derek Wanless, the UK government’s favourite useful idiot, and former banker (when he was chief executive of Nat West before it was swallowed by its smaller rival, Royal Bank of Scotland, thus suggesting the nature of the man).
Yes, this Derek Wanless is the same Bozo who suggested that the NHS should have its budget doubled to improve its “service”. Remarkably, this chimed exactly with the thoughts of Gordon Brown, who sponsored the original research. Remarkable!
Obviously, the government completely cocked up the Wanless plan, for instance by paying doctors much more to do much less, with short-term careerists such as Alan Milburn and John Reid doing most of the damage, to help their government-supporting chums in the consultancy club to fill their boots.
Even the most generous of surveys has shown an achieved growth of just 10% in productivity in return for this 100% growth in NHS funding. My uncle’s pet stuffed Aardvark, Brian, could have done better than this. But what do you expect if you get other people to spend other people’s money, especially when those other people are terminally stupid socialists and terminally exploited tax payers? Given the increasing difficulty of getting a doctor’s appointment round my way, I would fail to be surprised if this 10% growth in “service” was actually a 10% cut, with the general mantra proving true that all government services become worse and more expensive over time, until in the end they all resemble the endlessly-subsidised London Underground.
However, given the Soviet nature of the NHS, I wouldn’t believe any figures produced by this grotesquely Kafkaesque “organisation”. Let’s just agree that if anyone had to pay directly for what you got from the NHS, the NHS would run out of paying customers in about 17.97 nano-seconds (and even then I’m being generous, with a spread of about 12 nano-seconds either way).
And so what was the opinion of the hapless Wanless, when asked once again by the socialist morons currently in charge of the train set to analyze these astonishingly poor productivity figures? Yep, that’s right. He said the black hole was hungry, so let’s feed even more wealth into its maw until it can’t stand any more.
Simply astonishing.
But here’s the best bit. This Gordon Brown crony, with his beak in about 27 government pies, is a non-executive director of the Northern Rock building society, you know, the one that’s about to go bankrupt, even under a system of fractional reserve banking and even with the Bank of England lending Northern Rock tons of paper and a sterling printing press to literally make more money.
Simply hilarious. The ‘respectable businessman’ responsible for assigning £100 billion pounds a year of tax payers’ money into the maw of the NHS, and recently telling us it needs even more, is one of the same men responsible for placing into harm’s way a business worth hundreds of billions of pounds and shredding its assets into confetti. Gordon Brown really does know how to pick ‘em.
Mises was always worried that liberty would disappear under the thrall of a self-appointed elite of military officers, government bureaucrats, and fractional reserve bankers. It would appear that once again Von Mises was right, as he usually is. At least in the case of Northern Rock, which is about to disappear right in front of our eyes.
Ready. Steady. Pop!
So the answer to the original question would seem to be that one of the proven ways of becoming rich is to become, in this order; a terrorist, a mafiosi, and then a politician. It needn’t even take several hundred years, as the IRA has patently shown in Northern Ireland.
Obviously in the long-run, the effects of this “wetting my beak” thievery are difficult to detect, though most will admit that the effects create less growth in wealth than would otherwise occur. However, in the short-term of one man’s life, the gains for this criminal lifestyle choice can become immense, if only for just this one man.
Step forward Derek Wanless, the UK government’s favourite useful idiot, and former banker (when he was chief executive of Nat West before it was swallowed by its smaller rival, Royal Bank of Scotland, thus suggesting the nature of the man).
Yes, this Derek Wanless is the same Bozo who suggested that the NHS should have its budget doubled to improve its “service”. Remarkably, this chimed exactly with the thoughts of Gordon Brown, who sponsored the original research. Remarkable!
Obviously, the government completely cocked up the Wanless plan, for instance by paying doctors much more to do much less, with short-term careerists such as Alan Milburn and John Reid doing most of the damage, to help their government-supporting chums in the consultancy club to fill their boots.
Even the most generous of surveys has shown an achieved growth of just 10% in productivity in return for this 100% growth in NHS funding. My uncle’s pet stuffed Aardvark, Brian, could have done better than this. But what do you expect if you get other people to spend other people’s money, especially when those other people are terminally stupid socialists and terminally exploited tax payers? Given the increasing difficulty of getting a doctor’s appointment round my way, I would fail to be surprised if this 10% growth in “service” was actually a 10% cut, with the general mantra proving true that all government services become worse and more expensive over time, until in the end they all resemble the endlessly-subsidised London Underground.
However, given the Soviet nature of the NHS, I wouldn’t believe any figures produced by this grotesquely Kafkaesque “organisation”. Let’s just agree that if anyone had to pay directly for what you got from the NHS, the NHS would run out of paying customers in about 17.97 nano-seconds (and even then I’m being generous, with a spread of about 12 nano-seconds either way).
And so what was the opinion of the hapless Wanless, when asked once again by the socialist morons currently in charge of the train set to analyze these astonishingly poor productivity figures? Yep, that’s right. He said the black hole was hungry, so let’s feed even more wealth into its maw until it can’t stand any more.
Simply astonishing.
But here’s the best bit. This Gordon Brown crony, with his beak in about 27 government pies, is a non-executive director of the Northern Rock building society, you know, the one that’s about to go bankrupt, even under a system of fractional reserve banking and even with the Bank of England lending Northern Rock tons of paper and a sterling printing press to literally make more money.
Simply hilarious. The ‘respectable businessman’ responsible for assigning £100 billion pounds a year of tax payers’ money into the maw of the NHS, and recently telling us it needs even more, is one of the same men responsible for placing into harm’s way a business worth hundreds of billions of pounds and shredding its assets into confetti. Gordon Brown really does know how to pick ‘em.
Mises was always worried that liberty would disappear under the thrall of a self-appointed elite of military officers, government bureaucrats, and fractional reserve bankers. It would appear that once again Von Mises was right, as he usually is. At least in the case of Northern Rock, which is about to disappear right in front of our eyes.
Ready. Steady. Pop!
Friday, September 14, 2007
Northern Rock Being Washed Away
Oh dear. Paper, paper, everywhere, and no matter how incompetent the banks are with it all, the Bank of England will still print them more. This, apparently, is called rational modern neo-classical economics.
We're doomed, doomed, I tell ye, aye, we're all doomed...
Well, maybe not just yet. Rome survived its inflation-driven collapse to become the powerful world centre of Catholicism. Maybe we can survive as the home of the equally powerful religion of environmentalism?
Oh, and it was nice that Alistair "Badger" Darling, the Chancellor, was so kind today to tell the Bank of England that they must independently save any banks with Labour voters as customers. How kind of him to remind his pet central bank of their fiercely-held independence.
My advice. If you've got money in Northern Rock, get it out. Now.
But then, all of us have nothing but paper in any bank accounts. Perhaps a flight into real values is the only way out of this mess. Gold bars at the bottom of the garden, anyone? But then again, I visited the Bank of England museum the other day where they let me pick up a bar of gold. Crikey, those things are heavy!
And if you are a Northern Rock depositor and you need a laugh, go there and watch the BoE's video on inflation, in their museum. Laugh? I nearly got escorted from the building. I'll give you a flavour of the commentary:
We're doomed, doomed, I tell ye, aye, we're all doomed...
Well, maybe not just yet. Rome survived its inflation-driven collapse to become the powerful world centre of Catholicism. Maybe we can survive as the home of the equally powerful religion of environmentalism?Oh, and it was nice that Alistair "Badger" Darling, the Chancellor, was so kind today to tell the Bank of England that they must independently save any banks with Labour voters as customers. How kind of him to remind his pet central bank of their fiercely-held independence.
My advice. If you've got money in Northern Rock, get it out. Now.
But then, all of us have nothing but paper in any bank accounts. Perhaps a flight into real values is the only way out of this mess. Gold bars at the bottom of the garden, anyone? But then again, I visited the Bank of England museum the other day where they let me pick up a bar of gold. Crikey, those things are heavy!
And if you are a Northern Rock depositor and you need a laugh, go there and watch the BoE's video on inflation, in their museum. Laugh? I nearly got escorted from the building. I'll give you a flavour of the commentary:
Almost as funny, in a sick stomach-wrenching kind of way, as watching England score no points against Seth Efrica."...and prices started rising in the First World War, so the Bank of England
stepped in to ensure there were enough notes in circulation to cope with these
rising prices..."
Seth Efrica 796, England Big Fat Nil
Christ. No points. What a monkey nut.
Oh well. Two wasted years with that incoherent simian Andy Robinson has taken its with-hindsight-easily-predictable toll. Let's hope we can get home from this world cup with no more total humiliations, and then prepare for the next one with a lot more fire in our bellies.
What an utter banana. And there was I, fool, actually believing we could win before the kick-off. Emotion can be so blinding.
Oh well. Two wasted years with that incoherent simian Andy Robinson has taken its with-hindsight-easily-predictable toll. Let's hope we can get home from this world cup with no more total humiliations, and then prepare for the next one with a lot more fire in our bellies.
What an utter banana. And there was I, fool, actually believing we could win before the kick-off. Emotion can be so blinding.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Fat Man on Bicycle - Still Alive Shock
Yes, I've been trying out my Strida this week in a daily commute from Paddington to Liverpool Street (while I wait for the UK government to build cross-rail, ahem).
By God there have been some hairy moments, but I think I'm almost there with the route, and I've managed to work out, without being killed first, that the best way around Trafalgar Square is simply to walk from The Mall to Northumberland Avenue via the pedestrian crossings. Yes, it's feeble; but effective and quicker than cycling.
So what's the Strida been like? I've really enjoyed the ride, especially alongside the Serpentine and down Constitution Hill. Yes, I'm possibly the slowest cyclist in London, at my one-geared 12mph, but what the heck; at least I can see the leaves on the trees and feel the wind through the ventilation holes in my Star Wars-style helmet. It's also nice that I've caused so much amusement for everyone who's had to witness my daily overland ramblings, with a former blind side flanker partial to the odd cow pie, washed down with gallons of Pinot Noir, lumping along on 10 kilograms of burnished aluminium, framed with spangly orange mudguards, whilst wearing the brightest yellow and orange vest in Christendom. I think the phrase "Circus elephant riding a comedy unicycle" comes to mind. But what could be better than bringing some happiness into the world?
One thing I have been surprised by is the utter lack of camaraderie from my fellow cyclists. No cheery waves or calls of encouragement, just bitter faces as they slice me down for daring to get in their way. What a miserable bunch, for the most part, and nothing as friendly as my fellow motorcyclists all were, when Maturin Towers was propelled along by Honda CBR Power.
Though once you've been cut up by a few buses, taxis, and white vans, I'm sure much of the amusement of life fades from your soul. Plus, many of them are probably communist ecomentalists and that comes with a whole world of anger of its own.
But the best news is that I've made it past three days without sloping off back down into the alternative Soviet wonderland of the Tube! Let's see if that continues into the wind and rain of winter. Pip pip!!
PS> If you do decide to take the plunge yourself, and go cycling across London, a word of warning; Never (and I mean never) go down Fleet Street! I did, and it was only through blind stupidity and comedy recklessness that I managed to make it out the other end with most of my body parts still intact. You have been warned.
PPS> Maturin route from Paddington to Liverpool Street: Down to Lancaster Gate, through Hyde Park, along the Serpentine, across Hyde Park corner, down Constitution Hill, down the Mall, walk around Trafalgar Square anti-clockwise until on opposite southbound side of Northumberland Avenue, down to the Embankment, along the Embankment until Upper Thames Street gets to Cannon Street station, up the hill to Bank and you're just about there. If anyone has any other better routes (with an emphasis, wherever possible, of being separated from buses, vans, and taxis, please let me know). Current Maturin time: A stately 45 minutes, with plenty of rests at lights - though I'm working on getting this down to 35 minutes, the same average time as the Tube (Paddington-Bakerloo-Oxford Circus-Central Line-Bank).
PPPS> I still haven't turned into a socialist yet, as I feared. Though this may only be a matter of time. If you hear me utter the phrase 'saving the planet', please arrange to have me taken out and re-educated with a copy of Uncle Murray's Man, Economy, and State.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
George Orwell Was Wrong
After seeing an excellent article on LewRockwell.com, by Laurence Vance, about the American Empire, I couldn't help but think of George Orwell's seminal work, Nineteen-Eighty-Four. In 1948, Mr Orwell predicted that there would be three main states in the world, as depicted in the map below, ruled over by an overarching secret agreement to forever remain in perpetual war (so in some ways, making up just one de facto super-state):
Alas, it would appear George was wrong. For there are in fact, post-1984, five main states under one overarching de facto super-state.
So citizens of Oceania, in the previous Kingdom of Blighty, arise. For though you once believed you were citizens of Oceania, behold, you are in fact citizens of USEUCOM. What fun! :-)
However, this throws up a problem (aside from the curious melange that was once Alaska), because the three states in Nineteen-Eighty-Four agreed to fight each other forever, to provide the excuse that each was necessary to defend its proles against the other two. So what 'security' excuse can a known single empire use? I know. How about a perpetual war on global terrorism? You can never locate it or ever get rid of it, and given enough CIA funding errors, it will never be short of weapons or training with which to blow up the odd prole. Fantastic! Problem solved.
Yes, life really is becoming more and more like Terry Gilliam's Brazil, with every passing day.
(And not forgetting, as Laurence Vance further points out, the US Space Command for those future off-world military adventures)
US Government Admits Defeat
When a Bush General says a Bush Plan is working, it can only lead to the response, "Gor' Blimey, Guv, who'd 'a thunk it?"
But when the unsubtle underlining motif of this response is that the US should start getting out as soon as possible, after already having achieved victory you understand, it's quite clear that the Pentagon, despite spending perhaps over a trillion dollars, has lost and has thrown in the towel.
There's only a few ways you can take over a country against a hostile populace. (1) Take over an already existing control structure established over a long period of time, often via the other two policies to be described, (2) Exterminate one major group to placate other previously hostile groups, (3) Decimate the entire population to cow them into submission.
So let's see how the Washington DC Imperiocrats could have really 'won' in Iraq:
(1) From a purely empire-building point of view, the Americans could have followed the lessons of the British Empire when it took over India by taking over the previous Mogul power structure. But I suppose in simply taking over the Ba'athist Party and changing a few names at the top, the American government would have looked a teensy-weensy bit cynical, even for Fox News.
(2) They could've followed the Roman Imperial model when taking over Britain, and wiping out a few tribes to placate other pro-Roman tribes, or indeed wiping out the entire Druidic cult in Anglesey, down to the last man, to placate those who had been in thrall to the Druids. But organising lines of Marines to walk through cities slaughtering everyone in their gun sights, as the British also did in Tasmania, would have looked a little too like Vietnam for most people's comfort.
(3) They could've followed the Duke of Cumberland's model in Scotland, after Culloden, when his Highland clearances decimated the Scottish population (which to this day has left large areas of Scotland less occupied than it might otherwise be). But seeing as many of those rebellious Scots under pain of instant execution left hurriedly for the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, to escape Butch Cumberland's tender mercies, wholesale decimations like this probably are too much for an Army which draws many of its modern-day recruits from these same 'rebel' areas.
So where does that leave the US Army? I reckon it has two end games. One, is the familiar 'last helicopter leaving from the roof of the surrounded embassy' scenario, sometime in the next five years. The other is to invade Iran to keep the showboat running. Though unless one of the strategies, (1) to (3) above, is adopted in Iran, it will just be the last helicopter leaving from the roof of the Embassy in Tehran (after the slaughter of a couple of million Iranians), rather than from the rooftop in Baghdad, with perhaps another five years added on to the destructive baby-killing ignominy. And with China dumping US treasuries and the Fed pumping billions of counterfeit dollars into the maw of inflation, I'm beginning to doubt the Americans can afford it. Is this (I hope) the beginning of the end of the American Empire? Let us hope so.
There is one other alternative, of course, and that is for the US Army to march out immediately with its held head high, get onto the boats (or onto the airliners), and get back to continental North America where they belong. Or even better, back into the productive economy of North America rather than the wasteful one of the military. Such a policy is of course that declared by Dr. Ron Paul.
But apparently, Fox News and all the other neoconservative mass-murderers, would prefer the Iranian war option, with perhaps the odd nuke thrown in for fun. It would seem they would prefer more slaughters of innocents rather than admit that in any way they are wrong.
God help us all.
But when the unsubtle underlining motif of this response is that the US should start getting out as soon as possible, after already having achieved victory you understand, it's quite clear that the Pentagon, despite spending perhaps over a trillion dollars, has lost and has thrown in the towel.
There's only a few ways you can take over a country against a hostile populace. (1) Take over an already existing control structure established over a long period of time, often via the other two policies to be described, (2) Exterminate one major group to placate other previously hostile groups, (3) Decimate the entire population to cow them into submission.
So let's see how the Washington DC Imperiocrats could have really 'won' in Iraq:
(1) From a purely empire-building point of view, the Americans could have followed the lessons of the British Empire when it took over India by taking over the previous Mogul power structure. But I suppose in simply taking over the Ba'athist Party and changing a few names at the top, the American government would have looked a teensy-weensy bit cynical, even for Fox News.
(2) They could've followed the Roman Imperial model when taking over Britain, and wiping out a few tribes to placate other pro-Roman tribes, or indeed wiping out the entire Druidic cult in Anglesey, down to the last man, to placate those who had been in thrall to the Druids. But organising lines of Marines to walk through cities slaughtering everyone in their gun sights, as the British also did in Tasmania, would have looked a little too like Vietnam for most people's comfort.
(3) They could've followed the Duke of Cumberland's model in Scotland, after Culloden, when his Highland clearances decimated the Scottish population (which to this day has left large areas of Scotland less occupied than it might otherwise be). But seeing as many of those rebellious Scots under pain of instant execution left hurriedly for the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, to escape Butch Cumberland's tender mercies, wholesale decimations like this probably are too much for an Army which draws many of its modern-day recruits from these same 'rebel' areas.
So where does that leave the US Army? I reckon it has two end games. One, is the familiar 'last helicopter leaving from the roof of the surrounded embassy' scenario, sometime in the next five years. The other is to invade Iran to keep the showboat running. Though unless one of the strategies, (1) to (3) above, is adopted in Iran, it will just be the last helicopter leaving from the roof of the Embassy in Tehran (after the slaughter of a couple of million Iranians), rather than from the rooftop in Baghdad, with perhaps another five years added on to the destructive baby-killing ignominy. And with China dumping US treasuries and the Fed pumping billions of counterfeit dollars into the maw of inflation, I'm beginning to doubt the Americans can afford it. Is this (I hope) the beginning of the end of the American Empire? Let us hope so.
There is one other alternative, of course, and that is for the US Army to march out immediately with its held head high, get onto the boats (or onto the airliners), and get back to continental North America where they belong. Or even better, back into the productive economy of North America rather than the wasteful one of the military. Such a policy is of course that declared by Dr. Ron Paul.
But apparently, Fox News and all the other neoconservative mass-murderers, would prefer the Iranian war option, with perhaps the odd nuke thrown in for fun. It would seem they would prefer more slaughters of innocents rather than admit that in any way they are wrong.
God help us all.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Vote Labour - It Almost Makes Sense
Whilst listening to Sir Terry Wogan this morning, I almost lost the will to live. No, not because of Sir Terry, who helps keep me sane each day, but by a story reported on the 8 o'clock news. Apparently, the Tories think we need less carrot and more stick to raise the quality of our lives (i.e. more taxes, regulations, mercantilism, planning, controls, and generally more banal and wealth-destructive socialism).
Here's their plan. They want to charge me more stamp duty each time I move home, ban me from owning a Plasma TV screen, ban me from having standby facilities on electronic devices, tax me more for using air travel, tax me more for using roads (thereby allowing me, how generous of them, to be allowed to cycle to Edinburgh), tax me for out-of-town shopping car parks so they can use the money to prop up useless local bus services nobody uses, and generally remove me from "the hedonistic treadmill where individuals can never be satisfied".
Or as Professor Mises might have put it, destroy all of my human impulses which drive me to help improve the world through either initial wealth creation or voluntary trade. In a sop to Karl Marx, all of the above plus much more, is to help "improve my quality of life" and "equalize opportunities for all". How my life can be improved by banning me from voluntary activities and taxing me into the ground for daring to go more than five miles from my home is "improving the quality of my life" I have no idea. Though I'm sure it will improve the quality of life of all the extra bureaucrats and other parasites who will be brought in to monitor these regulations and live off these taxes.
Which led me to a rather startling conclusion which almost sent me into an unassuming roadside ditch. I don't vote in elections, as it legitimises these socialist (Tory and Labour) idiots, but if you put a gun to my head and made me vote, I'd only be able to go one way.
Hoots Mon, McBroon, I'm yer man. You can stick the Tory Party up a dog's bum.
My God, that it should come to this. If Her Madgesty Margaret Thatcher was dead, she'd be turning in her grave.
Here's their plan. They want to charge me more stamp duty each time I move home, ban me from owning a Plasma TV screen, ban me from having standby facilities on electronic devices, tax me more for using air travel, tax me more for using roads (thereby allowing me, how generous of them, to be allowed to cycle to Edinburgh), tax me for out-of-town shopping car parks so they can use the money to prop up useless local bus services nobody uses, and generally remove me from "the hedonistic treadmill where individuals can never be satisfied".
Or as Professor Mises might have put it, destroy all of my human impulses which drive me to help improve the world through either initial wealth creation or voluntary trade. In a sop to Karl Marx, all of the above plus much more, is to help "improve my quality of life" and "equalize opportunities for all". How my life can be improved by banning me from voluntary activities and taxing me into the ground for daring to go more than five miles from my home is "improving the quality of my life" I have no idea. Though I'm sure it will improve the quality of life of all the extra bureaucrats and other parasites who will be brought in to monitor these regulations and live off these taxes.
Which led me to a rather startling conclusion which almost sent me into an unassuming roadside ditch. I don't vote in elections, as it legitimises these socialist (Tory and Labour) idiots, but if you put a gun to my head and made me vote, I'd only be able to go one way.
Hoots Mon, McBroon, I'm yer man. You can stick the Tory Party up a dog's bum.
My God, that it should come to this. If Her Madgesty Margaret Thatcher was dead, she'd be turning in her grave.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Why Oh Why Oh Why...
...did all of these American Investment Banks, filled with some of the smartest people I've ever met, waste so much money on subprime mortgages, wrapped up in some of the stupidest derivative contracts ever devised?
This was a question that was puzzling me the other day. Yes, fractional reserve fiat money banking leads to terrible dislocations, misallocations, booms, busts, recessions, depressions, and other gargantuan assortments of perennial state thievery, but surely it hadn't also infected the brains of all these bright ambitious people too, in the Investment Banks, and simply stopped them thinking and plunged the rest of us into such financial turmoil? (And if you don't think you've personally been affected by what's happened in the last month, on Wall Street and in the City, then I'm afraid you need to break out the Cod Liver Oil pills to boost up your own thinking.)
Why had these smart hard-working millionaire bankers invested so much of their investors' money in subprime mortgages? I tried to think up some Austro-economic paradigm to explain it, but nothing fitted. However, this was because I was too stupid myself to realise the answer to the problem was much simpler. It was straightforward government planning and controls that had led all of these bankers to soberly choose an intelligent path of wasting wealth on legions of hopeless cases. Because of the way government had framed the market, this centrally directed wastage became the only rational choice available to Wall Street. How so?
The magnificent Thomas DiLorenzo, explains. Thank you, Professor. I shall break out my own Cod Liver Oil pills, immediately! :-)
This was a question that was puzzling me the other day. Yes, fractional reserve fiat money banking leads to terrible dislocations, misallocations, booms, busts, recessions, depressions, and other gargantuan assortments of perennial state thievery, but surely it hadn't also infected the brains of all these bright ambitious people too, in the Investment Banks, and simply stopped them thinking and plunged the rest of us into such financial turmoil? (And if you don't think you've personally been affected by what's happened in the last month, on Wall Street and in the City, then I'm afraid you need to break out the Cod Liver Oil pills to boost up your own thinking.)
Why had these smart hard-working millionaire bankers invested so much of their investors' money in subprime mortgages? I tried to think up some Austro-economic paradigm to explain it, but nothing fitted. However, this was because I was too stupid myself to realise the answer to the problem was much simpler. It was straightforward government planning and controls that had led all of these bankers to soberly choose an intelligent path of wasting wealth on legions of hopeless cases. Because of the way government had framed the market, this centrally directed wastage became the only rational choice available to Wall Street. How so?
The magnificent Thomas DiLorenzo, explains. Thank you, Professor. I shall break out my own Cod Liver Oil pills, immediately! :-)
Friday, September 07, 2007
Scotland Edges Closer to Freedom
Och Aye, the Noo, as I say when I'm in Edinburgh sampling Glen Morange...
Alex Salmond, of the Scottish Nationalists, head of the state mafia in the Kingdom of Albany, has instructed all of his court bureaucrats to call this mafia 'The Scottish Government'. Gordon Brown, the Scottish head of the state mafia in the Kingdom of Albion, has instructed his court bureaucrats to continue calling Salmond's mafia 'The Scottish Executive'.
Boys, boys, boys,...Now then, now then, now then!
Pity the poor BBC. In its bid to crawl to both courts, it is calling the Scottish mafia, 'The Scottish Government' in Scotland, and 'The Scottish Executive' in England. Such independence of spirit, well worth the licence fee!
Oh sweet happy day when Scotland finally secedes from the rotten British state. It can't come soon enough, dragging McBroon down with it one fervently hopes. And although I philosophically dislike all politicians, the odd rogue like Bonson Jorris or Her Madgesty, still make me smile occasionally, as did 'Slippery Salmon' today. Like all politicians he knows the ultimate power of words, hence his cunning use of the term 'Scottish Government', to slowly slip the leash, one phrase at a time. He is ratcheting in the direction of Scottish secession freedom, therefore I applaud him. Shame about all the other socialist policies he follows, but praise should be given where praise is due.
But won't it be sad if Scotland does slip the leash, and McBroon is left like the last Macaroon at the Party, a Prime Minister without a constituency. Oh my, how I'll weep.
And so, as the afternoon wears on, and my first double-gin-and-tonic of the weekend grows ever closer, along with its ice and its limes, I shall make my toast to Alex Salmond. Slange!
Alex Salmond, of the Scottish Nationalists, head of the state mafia in the Kingdom of Albany, has instructed all of his court bureaucrats to call this mafia 'The Scottish Government'. Gordon Brown, the Scottish head of the state mafia in the Kingdom of Albion, has instructed his court bureaucrats to continue calling Salmond's mafia 'The Scottish Executive'.
Boys, boys, boys,...Now then, now then, now then!
Pity the poor BBC. In its bid to crawl to both courts, it is calling the Scottish mafia, 'The Scottish Government' in Scotland, and 'The Scottish Executive' in England. Such independence of spirit, well worth the licence fee!
Oh sweet happy day when Scotland finally secedes from the rotten British state. It can't come soon enough, dragging McBroon down with it one fervently hopes. And although I philosophically dislike all politicians, the odd rogue like Bonson Jorris or Her Madgesty, still make me smile occasionally, as did 'Slippery Salmon' today. Like all politicians he knows the ultimate power of words, hence his cunning use of the term 'Scottish Government', to slowly slip the leash, one phrase at a time. He is ratcheting in the direction of Scottish secession freedom, therefore I applaud him. Shame about all the other socialist policies he follows, but praise should be given where praise is due.
But won't it be sad if Scotland does slip the leash, and McBroon is left like the last Macaroon at the Party, a Prime Minister without a constituency. Oh my, how I'll weep.
And so, as the afternoon wears on, and my first double-gin-and-tonic of the weekend grows ever closer, along with its ice and its limes, I shall make my toast to Alex Salmond. Slange!
The Golgafrinchams are Coming!
Nurse, the screens!
The injections are continuing, in the best Robert Mugabe-esque tradition of solving a shortage of wealth by ramping up the printing machines, or in the case of the Fed, the Bank of England, and the ECB, by ramping up the insertion of numbers into previously blank computer registers.
Yep, the Fed and the ECB between them have just 'injected' (a.k.a. counterfeited) another £44 billion pounds of extra paper rubbish into their currencies. Once the fractional reserve confidence trick gets hold of that lump of nervousness, we're looking at another £440 billion pounds worth of extra paper notes floating around the world's fiat-money-based economies (or £0.44 trillion), without including what the Bank of England are up to or the Australian Central Bank.
Crumbs. A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Though of course we're not talking about real money (which is gold or silver), but paper scrip of a kind the Weimar republic or modern-day Zimbabwe would be proud of.
I don't know exactly when it's coming. But a 'Big Bang' is coming to an economy near you, real soon. And no, I'm not talking about a theory of Richard Feynman, but the economics of the Golgafrinchams who on reaching Earth a million years ago, began using the leaves of trees as their major currency, before burning down the forests to contract the money supply.
Strangely, in a rather bizarre genetic coincidence, the first Golgafrincham man to suggest the burning down of the primeval forests as an Open Market Operation, has 100% of his genes represented in a handful of men still alive on the Earth day. Though I don't think I'll be giving out any prizes for pointing out that virtually all of these men now work as the heads of state Central Banks. Even a Mungoid like Robert Mugabe could have worked that one out! ;-)
The injections are continuing, in the best Robert Mugabe-esque tradition of solving a shortage of wealth by ramping up the printing machines, or in the case of the Fed, the Bank of England, and the ECB, by ramping up the insertion of numbers into previously blank computer registers.
Yep, the Fed and the ECB between them have just 'injected' (a.k.a. counterfeited) another £44 billion pounds of extra paper rubbish into their currencies. Once the fractional reserve confidence trick gets hold of that lump of nervousness, we're looking at another £440 billion pounds worth of extra paper notes floating around the world's fiat-money-based economies (or £0.44 trillion), without including what the Bank of England are up to or the Australian Central Bank.
Crumbs. A trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Though of course we're not talking about real money (which is gold or silver), but paper scrip of a kind the Weimar republic or modern-day Zimbabwe would be proud of.
I don't know exactly when it's coming. But a 'Big Bang' is coming to an economy near you, real soon. And no, I'm not talking about a theory of Richard Feynman, but the economics of the Golgafrinchams who on reaching Earth a million years ago, began using the leaves of trees as their major currency, before burning down the forests to contract the money supply.
Strangely, in a rather bizarre genetic coincidence, the first Golgafrincham man to suggest the burning down of the primeval forests as an Open Market Operation, has 100% of his genes represented in a handful of men still alive on the Earth day. Though I don't think I'll be giving out any prizes for pointing out that virtually all of these men now work as the heads of state Central Banks. Even a Mungoid like Robert Mugabe could have worked that one out! ;-)
Vote Conservative - Let Us Put Your Children into Slavery
It would seem that not only are we supposed to slave away for our entire lives to support the legions of Ne'er-do-well parasites sucking at the mother teat; David "Slavemaster" Cameron would like us to spend actual time as actual slaves. Obviously, as an anarchist I would argue strongly against foisting legitimacy upon these bums in Westminster and Brussels by ever voting for the scum. But even if I was a democrat, just what would be the point exactly of voting Conservative? No doubt once implemented the six-week plan, just as with an initial 2% initial income tax, would quickly inflate to at least two years (to make the camp logistics work out more efficiently, you understand). And if then Britain were to stumble into yet another imperial war, thousands of miles from home, what better place to get our new recruits than from the reserve pool of the state's slave children? "Vote Conservative - Let Us Kill Your Children in Self-Aggrandizing Imperial Wars Abroad" is hardly a slogan you'll see Cameron broadcasting aloud, but it's right there if you scratch a single millimetre under the surface of this pompous arrogant Blimp.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Fat Man on a Bicycle
In a fit of pique this week, at the striking bums of Metronet, I shelled out on a commuter bicycle, namely, the Strida. Rather strangely, I'm very excited about riding it on Monday, after testing it out this weekend.
The current betting is that I'll last about three days before regurgitating back onto the dreadful London Tube. However, I hope that I can carry it on much longer (if a satanic Transport for London's bus driver doesn't kill me first with a murderous left turn).
So why am I contemplating joining the collectivist herd of socialist-environmentalist-anarchist-take-yer-pick human haters of Old London Town, in their angry waspish uniforms of Lycra? Well, (1) if it's good enough for Bonson Jorris, then it's good enough for me; (2) I really can't hack the sovietism of the idiotic Tube any more, especially the Central Line; (3) I need some more exercise and fresh air; (4) I want to die, killed by a London bus driver.
Let's see if I can do more than three days and can hold out from morphing into a human hater myself, demanding that others be forced to pay for more cycle lanes and be forced to stop using their own preferred means of transport. In the meantime, if you spot a Fat Man on a Bicycle, looking lost as he cycles across Hyde Park on a triangular orange contraption, resplendent in a Henry Hazlitt T-shirt or an England rugby shirt, then wave, say "You are Jack Maturin and I claim my ten pounds!" and then tell all your friends.
Oh, how I'll laugh. And BTW, I may wear a bright yellow helmet for visibility, but I will never wear Lycra. Joining the herd is one thing. Looking like them is entirely another.
The current betting is that I'll last about three days before regurgitating back onto the dreadful London Tube. However, I hope that I can carry it on much longer (if a satanic Transport for London's bus driver doesn't kill me first with a murderous left turn).
So why am I contemplating joining the collectivist herd of socialist-environmentalist-anarchist-take-yer-pick human haters of Old London Town, in their angry waspish uniforms of Lycra? Well, (1) if it's good enough for Bonson Jorris, then it's good enough for me; (2) I really can't hack the sovietism of the idiotic Tube any more, especially the Central Line; (3) I need some more exercise and fresh air; (4) I want to die, killed by a London bus driver.
Let's see if I can do more than three days and can hold out from morphing into a human hater myself, demanding that others be forced to pay for more cycle lanes and be forced to stop using their own preferred means of transport. In the meantime, if you spot a Fat Man on a Bicycle, looking lost as he cycles across Hyde Park on a triangular orange contraption, resplendent in a Henry Hazlitt T-shirt or an England rugby shirt, then wave, say "You are Jack Maturin and I claim my ten pounds!" and then tell all your friends.
Oh, how I'll laugh. And BTW, I may wear a bright yellow helmet for visibility, but I will never wear Lycra. Joining the herd is one thing. Looking like them is entirely another.
Call of the Shrike
If while trundling down some Victorian rails at half the speed of the Victorians, on First Great Western trains or some other fascist transport structure run by the UK state's hapless Department of Transport, you come across any pools of free time, I must recommend a recent favorite read of mine, Hyperion, by Dan Simmons, a novel itself based upon pools of free time.
As a sort of space age Canterbury Tales, it is fairly horrific, with plenty of blood and gore delivered by the Sauronesque Lord of Pain, but remains a fascinating read nevertheless. Obviously as an Austrian I couldn't help but notice the parallels between the odious "Hegemony of Humanity" and the imperial "United States Government", but if you've read all the Neal Stephenson or Bernard Cornwell novels available at your local bookshop, then look no further for future entertainment than Mr. Simmons (though do also buy Fall of Hyperion too, as one book requires the other). Happy shriking!
As a sort of space age Canterbury Tales, it is fairly horrific, with plenty of blood and gore delivered by the Sauronesque Lord of Pain, but remains a fascinating read nevertheless. Obviously as an Austrian I couldn't help but notice the parallels between the odious "Hegemony of Humanity" and the imperial "United States Government", but if you've read all the Neal Stephenson or Bernard Cornwell novels available at your local bookshop, then look no further for future entertainment than Mr. Simmons (though do also buy Fall of Hyperion too, as one book requires the other). Happy shriking!
Wednesday, September 05, 2007
The Elephants are Back at the Waterhole
And there you were thinking that although the Americans and the Europeans are up the spout with counterfeit money, good ol' Blighty had managed to avoid the curse of legal tender scrip.
But, alas, it seems we're about to get 'layered' under yet another splurge of non-existent 'wealth', causing further long-term disruption to our economy by fooling entrepreneurs and investors with lower-than-real interest rates, causing them to falsely believe there are more savings in the economy than actually exist, and thereby causing them to build up a really pop-tastic inflationary bubble. If Gordon times it nicely, this bubble may explode just on cue after the next General Election. Good old, Gordon. He's such a card with this 'independent Bank of England' nonsense. What I love about this centuries-old state counterfeiting scam, is the language which wraps it in such a seeming swathe of 'sensible' business speak. Let's try to process this spam back into real terms:
"Offering to inject" - Crikey! The Bank of England really are heroin pushers, promising the banks who buy Government bonds that it will print up whatever they need, in counterfeit cash, to fool their customers even longer that they invest wealth wisely.
And so state-fed inflationary growth continues, with young people being unable to buy homes, with real-term wages decreasing, with people needing to work longer into their old age, and with more parents needing to leave their children in the hands of state carers so they can get out and earn enough of this rubbish paper scrip to pay off their mortgages from the same banks who are robbing them via the back door of Bank of England "cash injections".
And just look at those numbers. £4.4 billion pounds! And by the time fractional reserve banking kicks in, that will turn into an extra £44 billion pounds floating around the economy. And they're going to do this every week, until the banks are off the hook. Let's say that's 10 weeks, for fun. That will be an 'injection' of an extra £440 billion pounds into the economy, over a three month period. If that goes on for a year, that would be £2.2 trillion counterfiat pounds appearing as-if-by-magic from thin air, benefiting the City and the Government, but correspondingly screwing the rest of us by exactly the same sum.
Thanks, Bank of England. It's so nice to know you can open the floodgates, whenever you need to, to bail out risky investors from the holes of their own devising, especially those who buy up all those bonds from Gordon. Nice one.
But, alas, it seems we're about to get 'layered' under yet another splurge of non-existent 'wealth', causing further long-term disruption to our economy by fooling entrepreneurs and investors with lower-than-real interest rates, causing them to falsely believe there are more savings in the economy than actually exist, and thereby causing them to build up a really pop-tastic inflationary bubble. If Gordon times it nicely, this bubble may explode just on cue after the next General Election. Good old, Gordon. He's such a card with this 'independent Bank of England' nonsense. What I love about this centuries-old state counterfeiting scam, is the language which wraps it in such a seeming swathe of 'sensible' business speak. Let's try to process this spam back into real terms:
The Bank of England has finally stepped into the liquidity crisis by offering to inject additional short-term cash into the system, but has ruled out taking action to address the escalating problems in the medium-term, three month debt markets.
"Offering to inject" - Crikey! The Bank of England really are heroin pushers, promising the banks who buy Government bonds that it will print up whatever they need, in counterfeit cash, to fool their customers even longer that they invest wealth wisely.
Now that we've announced this splurge of fake wealth, you guys can all relax and stop trying to fix it yourselves. We'll be along with the wheelbarrows next week. Please help yourselves. Oh, and if that's not enough, we'll be along indefinitely until you're sated with paper. And in the meantime, could you be so kind as to keep buying up Gordon's government bonds so he can keep paying all of his state-client tax consuming parasites with money stolen via the back door of inflation, from tax generators.The Bank will provide about £4.4bn into the credit markets next week if overnight rates continue to be "unusually high". If the problem persists it has the option of injecting similar amounts in each of the following weeks.
The move should "relieve some pressure on interest rates for overnight borrowing which have" in the past month "been unusually high relative to bank rate," the central bank said. "The Bank's objective is that interest rates on secured overnight borrowing should be close to base rate.""Thank goodness the Old Lady of Threadneedle street has offered to bail us out with all this paper rubbish," said one banker. "It should fool the taxpayers a bit longer, and enable us to have nice big fat bonuses at Christmas, as usual. If they print us enough, we should even be able to buy up some more of that nice Mr Brown's UK government bonds with the same rubbish they give us, less bonus cash, of course!"
Intervention has been long awaited by City financiers, who have accused the central bank of being "Victorian" in its handling of the crisis.Gladstone used to let the wealth of the people fructify in their pockets. How old fashioned! Much better to steal the wealth of the people via the back door of fiat currency inflation. Make mine a double in "The Old Doctor Butler's Head"!
And so state-fed inflationary growth continues, with young people being unable to buy homes, with real-term wages decreasing, with people needing to work longer into their old age, and with more parents needing to leave their children in the hands of state carers so they can get out and earn enough of this rubbish paper scrip to pay off their mortgages from the same banks who are robbing them via the back door of Bank of England "cash injections".
And just look at those numbers. £4.4 billion pounds! And by the time fractional reserve banking kicks in, that will turn into an extra £44 billion pounds floating around the economy. And they're going to do this every week, until the banks are off the hook. Let's say that's 10 weeks, for fun. That will be an 'injection' of an extra £440 billion pounds into the economy, over a three month period. If that goes on for a year, that would be £2.2 trillion counterfiat pounds appearing as-if-by-magic from thin air, benefiting the City and the Government, but correspondingly screwing the rest of us by exactly the same sum.
Thanks, Bank of England. It's so nice to know you can open the floodgates, whenever you need to, to bail out risky investors from the holes of their own devising, especially those who buy up all those bonds from Gordon. Nice one.
Sorry Ladies...
But I'm afraid, for the moment, that I'm unavailable for action. For Miss Knightley has once again acquired all of my attention.
However; Fear ye not! For I'm the most fickle man in Christendom. It will probably be all over well within 72 hours, just like the latest wretched Tube strike.
However; Fear ye not! For I'm the most fickle man in Christendom. It will probably be all over well within 72 hours, just like the latest wretched Tube strike.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
Thank Goodness for Corporate Welfare
Because without corporate welfare, where would the City be today, with all of its major banks sucking up counterfeit money from the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England? Bust, crashed, and burned. Probably.
Oh glorious day of 100% gold reserve banking, with fractional reservists and counterfeiters being tossed into stocks and pelted with rotten credit derivative instruments and other garbage, come to us now!
Though I must say, I was amused when Bernanke said yesterday that his job as chairman of the Federal Reserve wasn't to bail out risk-taking and mistaken major Wall Street investors. I'm sorry, Mr Bernanke, you obviously haven't read your job description. Because that's exactly what you're paid so handsomely to do. You muppet.
Oh glorious day of 100% gold reserve banking, with fractional reservists and counterfeiters being tossed into stocks and pelted with rotten credit derivative instruments and other garbage, come to us now!
Though I must say, I was amused when Bernanke said yesterday that his job as chairman of the Federal Reserve wasn't to bail out risk-taking and mistaken major Wall Street investors. I'm sorry, Mr Bernanke, you obviously haven't read your job description. Because that's exactly what you're paid so handsomely to do. You muppet.
The Ghost of George Lives On
Apparently, all the youth prisoners (a.k.a. pupils) at the UK state's mental conditioning prisons (a.k.a. state schools) are to receive "happiness lessons".
Now call me "Mr Crabby", but are no-one's hackles raised at this? Getting people to self-control their emotions and getting them to thereby be more respectful of authority and the state may float your boat (and it certainly floats the boats of all those tax consumers who are afraid that one day the buried anger and hatred of the tax paying sheep may one day smash all the state's glorious palaces), but do "happiness lessons" not chime a certain chord within, a chord which the state's denizens are always desperate to shut down at the first signs of its ringing?
George Orwell had a name for this chord, and for these lessons. He called them "Thought Control".
Now call me "Mr Crabby", but are no-one's hackles raised at this? Getting people to self-control their emotions and getting them to thereby be more respectful of authority and the state may float your boat (and it certainly floats the boats of all those tax consumers who are afraid that one day the buried anger and hatred of the tax paying sheep may one day smash all the state's glorious palaces), but do "happiness lessons" not chime a certain chord within, a chord which the state's denizens are always desperate to shut down at the first signs of its ringing?
George Orwell had a name for this chord, and for these lessons. He called them "Thought Control".
Monday, September 03, 2007
Politics is Showbiz for Ugly People
Ok, it's humiliating to admit it, but I did watch a little of Big Brother this year. Why? Because I'm really sad. And because of the occasional gem such as that above, which for me succinctly sums up a lot of what politics is about. Especially when I have to look at the ghastly Fizzog of that odious rat, Gordon Brown, preparing to cut and run whilst appearing like he isn't.
What an utter shower we in the client state have become if we're actually prepared to vote for this Stalinist bombast.
What an utter shower we in the client state have become if we're actually prepared to vote for this Stalinist bombast.
No, We're Not Surrendering - This is Victory
Ok, if the British government's pulling out of Basra today wasn't a humiliating retreat for their Army, then why did the squaddie play 'Retreat' on his bugle when the Union flag came down?
The sooner the American imperial legions (including their British auxilliaries) are out of Iraq, to save the lives of our troops and to let the people of that region sort out their own mess, the better.
Bring them all home, now.
The sooner the American imperial legions (including their British auxilliaries) are out of Iraq, to save the lives of our troops and to let the people of that region sort out their own mess, the better.
Bring them all home, now.
Ron's the One
As someone who believes the salvation of the world will, and can only, spring from the Ludwig von Mises institute in Auburn, Alabama, it is heartening to see just how well Dr. Ron Paul is doing in the Republican straw polls over there in the heart of the American Imperial Morass. All we hear about over here is how Hillary is doing with Bill. However, even if Dr. Paul crashes and burns (as is almost inevitable) and doesn't serve for eight years followed by eight more years of President Rockwell, Paul's revolution may have finally lit the fuse under the fascist neocons and marked the beginning of the end for their terrible American Empire. God Bless Dr. Paul, and all who nominate him in the Republican primaries. Go Ron, Go!
Keep the Faith
Yes, it's unlikely, but let's wish England the very best in the real World Cup, the one for real men, rather than all those handsomely paid Mulberry handbag merchants in soccer land. Come on England!
(Though let's face it, the New Zealanders - plus assorted 'integrated' Samoans, Fijians, etc. - will actually win it. Oh well.)
(Though let's face it, the New Zealanders - plus assorted 'integrated' Samoans, Fijians, etc. - will actually win it. Oh well.)
Climate Changing Horror!
Apparently, the climate is changing. This is the first time this has ever happened. This is why the bloody term is shoved down my throat on virtually every single TV programme I can stomach watching, and why the term appears on every second page of every magazine and newspaper on the planet.
Christ.
Though I must say, I had to laugh yesterday in Cheddar Gorge when a man dressed up as a neolithic flint knapper said, '...and seeing as we're in the middle of an Inter-Glacial period, it's going to get about 4 degrees warmer over the next thousand years, and then it's going to start getting much colder, and then we'll really hear all everyone start complaining...'.
If I believed in democracy, I would say 'Make that Man Prime Minister!', despite the heavy beard and the grubby fingernails. And he showed me some wizard flint arrow-heads too. What a star!
Christ.
Though I must say, I had to laugh yesterday in Cheddar Gorge when a man dressed up as a neolithic flint knapper said, '...and seeing as we're in the middle of an Inter-Glacial period, it's going to get about 4 degrees warmer over the next thousand years, and then it's going to start getting much colder, and then we'll really hear all everyone start complaining...'.
If I believed in democracy, I would say 'Make that Man Prime Minister!', despite the heavy beard and the grubby fingernails. And he showed me some wizard flint arrow-heads too. What a star!
The Utter Failure of All Socialist Bums
And while I'm in the mood, I must say on my long walk home tonight, I had to smile in a cavalier fashion when I thought about the latest news of unintended consequences on the government's food policy in their compulsory mental conditioning centres (a.k.a. state schools).
Apparently, forcing schools to force children to eat 'politically correct' rabbit food has sent swarms of children into town centres to look for fried Mars Bars and lard-dripping chips. Quelle shock! Just what on Earth did these morons expect?
No doubt the solution won't be to sack the legions of muppets in the government's department of education overseeing this idiocy, it will be to 'make' staying at school for lunch 'compulsory', and the appointment of yet more fools to snoop on the streets checking for 'renegade' lunch-time Mars Bar eaters.
What an utter shower.
Apparently, forcing schools to force children to eat 'politically correct' rabbit food has sent swarms of children into town centres to look for fried Mars Bars and lard-dripping chips. Quelle shock! Just what on Earth did these morons expect?
No doubt the solution won't be to sack the legions of muppets in the government's department of education overseeing this idiocy, it will be to 'make' staying at school for lunch 'compulsory', and the appointment of yet more fools to snoop on the streets checking for 'renegade' lunch-time Mars Bar eaters.
What an utter shower.
This is What Communism Feels Like
After having schlepped from Angel Court, behind the Bank of England, to Paddington station, tonight, to get home in time to turn round and go back again, I have a few questions about the Metronet strikers who apparently "deserve" copper-bottomed guaranteed pensions fed from my private bank balance for the rest of their lives.
Can these bums be sacked for breaking their employment contracts? Can I sue them for lost time and worn-out shoe leather? Is the Queen an Aardvark?
They should all be given one-way tickets to North Korea and kicked onto the plane. Then they'll be able to find out what a real iron rice bowl looks like.
Thank God for the cold lager on tap at the Globe pub on Baker Street. Cheers.
Can these bums be sacked for breaking their employment contracts? Can I sue them for lost time and worn-out shoe leather? Is the Queen an Aardvark?
They should all be given one-way tickets to North Korea and kicked onto the plane. Then they'll be able to find out what a real iron rice bowl looks like.
Thank God for the cold lager on tap at the Globe pub on Baker Street. Cheers.
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