Saturday, February 23, 2008

Friday, February 22, 2008

Shock horror etc.


Apparently, the British government has been caught telling lies about assisting the American government in systematic acts of ongoing torture.

I was horror struck. This 'news' apparently meant that the liars, thieves, crooks, parasites, rogues, bums, second-handers, ne'er-do-wells, pimps, little Hitlers, criminals, ecomentalists, bandits, do-gooders, control-freaks, highway pirates, tax men, child kidnappers, fraudsters, busy-bodies, scroungers, socialists, swindlers, kleptomaniacs, looters, counter-feiters, bullies, fascists, gangsters, murderers, cheats, freeloaders, bloodsuckers, and all of their associated ilk who typically make up the key personnel of any state, are sometimes presumed to be actually telling the truth.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that truth-telling is going on here!

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Who is God?

I think I have the answer. Yes, he's gay, he's from Cumberland, he's rude, and he's a Tory who grew up on a council estate. However, as I too grew up on a Cumberland council estate where I grew to become extremely rude, and because I used to be a Tory, I am quite thoroughly innoculated against such charges. Alas, although I spent a fabulous evening out recently in Sydney Australia, with two gay Dutch men, in the gay quarter, at a gay-favourite restaurant called "Bill's", I am, unfortunately, thoroughly heterosexual (and no, I'm not protesting too much). Yet, I still think this man is God, despite my Hoppeian tendencies. So who is he? Qui homines erat Deus Iuve? (As we cod-latinists say.)

Well, if you don't know, you've obviously not been watching a re-run of Monarchy, perhaps the greatest English history program ever made, or at least the best one I've ever had the privilege to watch. For God is, of course, His Majesty David Starkey, England's current Greatest Living Englishman. Marvellous.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Three word combinations #1

In an occasional series, where I thought I might try to break the gloom of living in McBroon's dreadful England, in which the New Labour government has forgotten why it was voted in and is now merely hanging onto power and trying to please its busy-body supporters with ever more draconian socialism, by trying to find the best three word combinations which most sum up what it means to live in this appalling soup of do-gooders, health fascists, and enviro-morons; and then later by finding their counter-factuals which can give us hope.

Now, I'm just going for a gambit here, but I will be very surprised if you can beat me on the negative front. Because the worst three-word combination in English, in England, which can sap the soul from the most stiff-upper-lipped of the denizens of Henry the V's isle, has to be:

"Bus replacement service"

Ye Gods, it brings tears to my eyes even typing it. Can you do better? I fear not.

So to balance this, what three words are the most refreshing and the most positive? Here's my opening gambit. Can you do better?

"Von Mises Institute"

Yes, it's a bit crawly-arse-bumlick, but what the heck. Those three words really do give me genuine hope that the English-speaking world will one day be rescued from socialism. Let's just hope it's in our lifetimes.

Monday, February 18, 2008

It's worse than that, Darling

For sheer mind-numbing stupidity, I think it's going to take quite some future effort for three British politicians to once again prove so imbecilic as prime minister Gordon "McAvity" McBroon and his two hapless stooges, the butter-fingered chancellor, Alistair "Badger" Darling, and McBroon's myopic head counterfeiter at the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn "Lender of Last Incompetence" King (who was at least brave and honest enough before the weekend to tell us we're all going to get a lot poorer under Brown's socialists.)

In the biggest British state nationalisation of all time, dwarfing British Steel, British Leyland, and British Airways all put together, they have now made the British people liable for £100 billion pounds of Northern Rock's jerry-built mortgage book - this enormous figure reads easily enough on the page, but it is a fifth of the national tax take each year, an enormous sum even in these fiat-money days of telephone-number money. Being the government means of course that they will blanche at sacking Northern Rock's 6,000 employees in the Labour stronghold of Newcastle (as Jack Maturin would do immediately) or repossessing properties from feckless mortgage customers, both of which the government ought to start doing immediately if the blighted taxpayer is to come out of this with any change at all in their pocket.

What really sickens me, however, is that the whole £100 billion pounds is simply a gigantic exercise in preserving McBroon's personal reputation as a financial wizard, when in fact all we Austrians know him to be an economically illiterate and incontinent buffoon - it's an expensive price to pay with someone else's money to prop up a collapsing emotion.

What McBroon should have done, of course, is absolutely nothing. He should have stood by and watched Northern Rock go to the wall, taking the employees and shareholders with it. The beauty of real free market capitalism and its creative destruction of badly-managed or unwanted business, is that it rewards success and punishes failure (both defined by people's wants). The employees will quickly get other jobs and the shareholders should have been watching their board more closely. Having a "share" means you have a share in the losses as well as in the profits - these blinkered shareholders should have been made to take their medicine and to take the role of being an assiduous shareholder more seriously.

To keep these 6,000 voters in a job and to give these lazy shareholders anything for their shares in a failed organization, with my money, taken from me by force, is a crime. Yes, appeal to my charity, and beg me to prop up a failed organization through pity, but Gordon "McThief" McBroon, if you want to be Father Christmas, use your own money, not mine.

Even in a statist's terms, McBroon's nationalisation of Northern Rock is an utter catastrophe. And as the credit crunch deepens and the western world hits a prolonged bubble-collapsing depression created by all of that easy fiat credit pumped out over the last 50 years, then my hard medicine above will seem like a blessing rather than hard-hearted curse. Because if house prices do collapse (as I predict), and Northern Rock's mortgage book collapses in value to only £75 billion pounds, then each and every person in Britain including tax payers, pensioners, welfare bums, political parasites, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, will be bled white to pay for the damage when all Gordon had to do was walk away and say it really was a situation with nothing to do with him.

This would have also encouraged les autres in the Square Mile to behave a lot less rashly in the future. But now having seen this political action, the brakes will once again be off on risky financial behaviour. Even now, financial companies are queueing up for special government privileges with the line, "if it's good enough for Northern Rock, then it's good enough for us." This truly is an epic disaster of collosal proportions and nothing I can say here can highlight strongly enough what a calamity the last 24 hours has been for this country.

Will the last non-sponging person to leave Britain, please turn out the lights.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning


Discontent with merely being a hated prime minister in a government of record incompetence, captured by swarming bureaucracies, Cavity McBroon will never cease from rest until he has turned Britain into a land fit for the Inner Party of 1984. With all the disastrous failings of his government falling down in front of him and plunging opinion polls crashing left and right, he still remains able to find time to slam the rest of us with yet more hateful policies rather than try to do something that voters might actually like.

So this week, children have been hit by two more policy proposals designed to build the edifice of the state's desired ant farm. The first is the stomach-churning "5 hours of culture" policy, as set out by that well known bon vivre, Gordon McBroon. Why we don't just head straight for an Orwellian daily "Hate Hour" each day, to save time, I fail to understand, but in a line which would make Herr Hermann Goering proud, McBroon's government has announced that it "intends all children to have access to five hours of culture a week as a right". (Stand by for hundreds of millions of your tax pounds to be hosed onto the legions of bed-bound incompetents who label themselves as "frustrated artists" - i.e. talentless jerks whom nobody will patronize with their own money - using an hour each day to indoctrinate children in socialism.)

As Simon Heffer has stated, this thinking in fives (5 year plans, 5 fruits a day, 5 taxes before you get out of bed in the morning), really does mark McBroon out as an unreconstructed Stalinist.

But what's even worse is the "Child numbering" policy, also set out this week by Big Brother McBroon, in which all British children are to be tagged for life with a number, which will be used to monitor their "development". Why we don't just get the blue ink out and tattoo it straight on, is once again beyond me.

Apparently, this whole apparatus is necessary to enable employers to avoid being misled by fake C.V.s. Yeah, Gordon, really. And I actually really like you. Yes, I do. Truly.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Judge Dredd alive and well and living in Britain


In what be one of the most insidious legislation ideas to yet come out of the poisonous socialist government here in Britain, a new proposal is taking shape which is so horrific I can barely believe it has arisen in the same land which gave us habeas corpus and Lord Denning.

You can read the details in this Torygraph story, but the gist of it is this: The government is going to order Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police every packet of information which comes to you over the Internet. If the ISP suspects that a single packet is “stolen” copyright information, it will be mandated to send you a warning email (which your spam filter may gobble up before you receive it). If you ignore this email (or never receive it), and get three such emails, the ISP will be obliged to cut you off from the Internet. It may even become illegal for any other ISP to offer you an Internet service.

Though this sounds fully in line with New Labour’s increasingly fascist approach to jackbooting this country, if you examine the proposal in more depth, it gets worse with each twist.

No evidence will be presented to the accused individual. The accused individual will be unable to defend themselves in a court. There will be no jury of peers (if you’ll excuse the potential Peer-to-Peer pun). The ISP will be forced to take up the role of judge and jury. There will be no appeal. The individual will be denied a service which is becoming as increasingly as important as air and water, in this interconnected world. The individual may fail to learn they have been cut off until after it has happened (and after this denial of service has become permanent.) If someone in your household is targeted in this way, you will also be cut off, despite having nothing to do with the alleged crime. The ISP is being forced by the state (at the behest of its lobbyist masters) to stop serving their customers, thus losing business, in order to prop up the wishes of the copyright industry. There will be a further massive intrusion into the privacy of the individual. A mechanism will be created to enable massive state censorship of the Internet (which will no doubt be abused in the future and which no doubt is part of the reasoning behind the whole thing.) And this all comes out of a first skim-level analysis.

What exactly is the role of the state? It demands a monopoly on the provision of justice and in return for this monopoly the ability to tax us to pay for this “service”. All of the above, however, is a huge provision of injustice, thus invalidating the state. But we live in such a rotten government-dominated age, this latest legislative proposal hardly makes you blink.

I won’t even begin to argue the Kinsellian case for an anti-copyright stance. Let’s assume for the moment that copyright laws are morally justifiable. If so, the state should gather evidence without infringing your privacy or gather such evidence with a warrant signed by a judge; then accuse you with this evidence in a court, thus allowing you to defend yourself; also organize your peers to be a jury in the case; then allow you the chance to appeal if the case goes against you; and then punish you with a sentence to fit the crime should you be found guilty by your peers (such as a three-month Internet ban rather than an indiscriminate lifetime ban.) The state should also do all of this itself, to prevent commercial pressures interfering with the provision of said justice. And all this is in the terms used to justify the state’s monopoly of justice provision, without arguing about whether copyright itself is valid under natural law.

But the British state doesn’t want to bother itself these days with evidence, juries, appeals, justifiable sentencing, individual privacy, or even the boring process of administering justice, any longer. It has become so bloated, lazy, arrogant, and aggressive, that it simply wants to take its subsidies from its copyright industry lobbyist paymasters, so it can then sit back drinking a large gin and tonic on the terrace at the House of Commons while we, the common people, are thus inflicted with this perversely twisted legal system.

To my mind, the rotten and malicious proposal above completely invalidates the justification of the existence of the state, such as it is. (Though admittedly, these days not much doesn’t!)

If Gordon Brown should manage to ram-rod this horrible proposal through Parliament, I can’t wait to see the mess created when the first European human rights case comes up opposing it. I also look forward to seeing the effects of several million ecomentalist “young adults” being cut off from their downloads (plus the several hundred thousand “older adults” being spuriously cut off from the Internet by mistaken ISPs.) It should create a welcome tsunami of anti-state feeling, thus loosening the fingers of the state on our throats, even further.

In the meantime, welcome to Judge Dredd Britain.

Friday, February 08, 2008

And then there were three

Finally, we can pinch the title of the best Genesis album ever recorded, with Mitt Romney throwing in the vanity towel. Now it's just McWar and Tax Hike Mike standing between the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and the next American Depression. Okay, so Our Man is looking at a hugely complex sequence of scenarios to actually make it into the Whitehouse, but like the ghost in MacBeth, he's still there, and his ideas ain't goin' anywhere real soon.

With so-called front runners (Ha!) Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney now out of the way, these ideas are right there plumb in front of anyone with more than three brain cells to see, just waiting for their chance to be unleashed. Alright, so the God of Democracy has created millions of voters around the world with just two brain cells, labelled Welfare and Warfare respectively, and the American MSM has tried to make Our Man invisible, but that gets harder to do when there are so few contenders left.

The original American revolutionaries managed to generate one hugely unlikely scenario a couple of centuries ago, when they defeated the greatest Welfare/Warfare empire of its day. Can lightning strike twice with the descendants of these revolutionaries? Well, that's what I'm still hoping, despite the Hoppeian in me cocking a snook at the rest of me for daring to believe that democracy might actually work, albeit temporarily. But before my Inner Demon Hoppe cashes in his chips with me, let's just hang on for one more throw of the dice.

Go Ron Paul!