Panamanian tango

Through Panama Canal In 75 Seconds - The most amazing bloopers are here

Two tankers race each other through the Panama canal in 75 seconds, from Pacific to Atlantic, doing a crazy twirl-a-bout, half way through.

Spot the difference

British bobby in the station, forty years ago, on the blower to Mrs Miggins about a pie.

British bobby on patrol, yesterday, ready to blow away anyone about to throw a pie.

Ho hum.

UPDATE: A Torygraph article with a similar theme popped up today, so I thought I'd leave one of my highly useful, widely read and agreed with comments (Jack Maturin ... 07:36 PM). Well, it keeps me off the streets! :-)

Why central planners fail

It is interesting to watch Gordon Brown, the central planners' planner, twist in the wind as events unfold around him out of his control. He simply has no conception of what makes an economy work. It does not operate, to his perplexity, via the diktat of the politician or via the simple pulling of the lever to make all the people do what you want, but via the human action of individuals working in what they perceive to be their own personal (dare I say selfish) interests. This applies to angelic socialists just as much as it does to the rest of us devilish proles, though socialists are usually too witless to acknowledge this self-evident truth.

Take for instance the coming disappearance of the CD single.

How could central planning have predicted this and then made provision for it? Let's just take this single product instance and then make a special case for it. If Woolworth's had held a centrally dictated monopoly on the production and distribution of such music materials just 10 years ago, would they have planned for the disappearance of the CD single? Of course they wouldn't have. With all their shop frontage investment and distribution chain execution set up for the display, marketing, and public provision of CD singles, they would have considered it an enormous waste of these invested resources to do anything else but continue to sell CD singles for the rest of time.

But somehow the damnable free market came along and replaced CD singles with MP3 files and other related downloads. How could this have possibly been catered for in a rational 10-year plan?

The advent of the music download once existed only in the fevered mind of one individual, Dieter Seitzer, who wondered what it would take to get a piece of music down a telephone wire within a reasonable cost and time frame. Karlheinz Brandenburg then developed the MP3 file format, following on from the much larger WAV file format, to fulfil this dream. This entire MP3 'paradigm' was consequently immortalized within the design of the original iPod player (amongst many other MP3 player designs), by a Chingford man, Jonathan Ive.

Who can say where Dieter Seitzer got his original idea from? Wherever it was from, however, it was simply another in the long line from Thomas Edison and even further into the past, right back to the first Prometheus who wanted to find out how to make fire (and possibly even to the first Bonobo-like ape which wondered what it would be like to live on the savannah rather than in the trees).

If Herr Seitzer had gone along to the centrally planned United Nations Global Music Board, as operated by Woolworth's, and told them about his revolutionary plans to destroy their business model, they would have at best laughed at him and at worst arrested him. Why had he not considered the dangers of how many people his idea would put out of work? It would have been the socially necessary thing to either shut him up or shut him away.

Perhaps the best known story of this tendency of the centrally planned state to shut down creativity is that of the Emperor Tiberius who reportedly killed the inventor of an unbreakable form of glass, lest the secret get out and force other tax-paying glass makers to go out of business.

However, despite this producer-led self-interest of the central planners, Joseph Schumpeter's creative destructionism always manages to find a way out of the socialists' Platonic cave of fear to continue releasing the spirit of freedom. So let us thank the Lord for these brave pioneers and all those others who have stood up to the centrally-imposed diktat of the backward tribal chiefs, as exemplified by that gorilla amongst gorillas, Gordon Brown.

So what does this creative destruction do in the Woolworth's case? Well, in the short-term it is painful for Woolworth's to liquidate their CD singles shelves, to create an online rival to iTunes, and to re-train their staff. However, in the long run, the new dominance of the MP3 download music distribution model has released the energy and time of all those people formerly employed in the CD singles distribution chain to do other more useful things to help make everyone else, including themselves, better off. It has also released a lot of expensive high street shop-floor frontage, to allow Woolworth's to offer its customers an even wider range of other available goods. Thus, in the long run everyone is a winner, including Woolworth's shareholders, employees, and customers.

This then is the Misesian wonder of the unfettered market allied with the Hayekian wonder of the pool of distributed knowledge, which work best together when they have the least amount of government interference bleeding them and controlling them through communist taxation and fascist regulation. With just the smallest amount of wiggle room, the free market can still work the greatest of miracles, usually in completely unexpected directions. No wonder that great fascist communoid Gordon Brown hates it so much and has tried so hard in the last 11 years to firmly fasten all of this wiggle room within an insane Guardianista straitjacket.

Well, we reap what we sow, Gordon, as the newspapers are now telling you every morning and every evening. This is what happens when you shut down freedom. Welcome to your control freak inheritance. It couldn't have happened to a more loathsome wretch.

One for the crazies - Seeing is believing

A great post by Butler Shaffer, on LRC, discussing recent global warming astronomical reports on other planets, which prove that human beings already live on Jupiter and Mars complete with their own climate-change-creating SUVs! :-)

There are no links to these astronomical reports in Mr Shaffer's article, so here's some I found earlier:

New Storm on Jupiter Hints at Climate Change
Space.com provides excellent details and pictures relating to the new red spots gathering around Jupiter's equator

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
A report you never saw on the BBC's Newsnight programme! - A National Geographic report, from more than a year ago, suggesting that global warming, if it exists, may be a solar phenomenon rather than an anthropogenic one

Mars Emerging from Ice Age, Data Suggest
More evidence from Space.com on how the Martian polar caps appear to be shrinking due to increased solar activity

You can see Mr Shaffer's point. If the Earth is warming up because of human beings, and it's also warming up on Mars and Jupiter, then there must be human beings already there causing it - you would need to be crazy to believe otherwise.

So go out now and pay your £400 pounds road tax and your 85% gasoline tax, and stop complaining.

Pip pip!

Understanding the state

Having now ensconced myself within the financial world to the point where I can make a living within its gilded halls, I now need to re-acquaint myself with our ultimate enemy - the state. Therefore, after having managed to survive De Soto's magnificent Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (PDF link), it is time for Maturin Towers to tackle the following important anarcho-capitalist thread:

The State, Franz Oppenheimer
Our Enemy, the State, Albert Jay Nock
The Rise and Fall of Society, Frank Chodorov

And finally, once I'm ready, a book I've been looking forward to reaching:

The Rise and Decline of the State, Martin van Creveld

In the meantime, for light relief, I'm almost through Book II of L.A.Wilding, having overcome deponent verbs, and once I've tackled Caesar's invasion of Britain in the original Latin, I can get onto Book III. Once I've managed that, I'll finally be ready for the preparation of two mighty tasks; firstly, becoming thoroughly acquainted with the London gold trading market, with a view to eventually seeking some kind of minor position within it (in preparation for the day when central banks finally collapse), and secondly, the big one, attempting to read Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis.

Who needs Cicero? Marvellous.

Breathing out carbon dioxide will be banned next

Here at Maturin towers we like to bring you the very latest in up-to-date news, so I thought you might like to know, in case you missed it, that it is now illegal in the UK to look at a woman's breasts. I therefore forbid you from gazing at the central portion of the photograph of Miss Gemma Atkinson, below:

Now you might have found that tough, but what about the poor politicians who rule our lives? They not only have the difficult task of drowning us in all these taxes and regulations, but they must appear as if they're following all these stupid rules themselves. Most of them can manage this tricky deception, but some are a tad more transparent than the rest. I only hope Bonson Jorris can manage to follow this new law on what we are now prohibited from looking at.

Over to the socialists in the blue corner

Though I can hardly stop myself laughing out loud these days as I think of the dreadful plight of His Majesty Gordon Brown, who appears incapable of taking even the simplest decision without looking like a fool, I still shudder when I think of what the alternative might be: The British Tory Party.

That these people are just a bunch of blue-rinse socialists is fairly clear, with corporate and rural welfare their own particular black holes for public treasury pelf. However, something even nastier lies within the core of this statist group. Take for example Tim Yeo, and I wish someone would, the Tory MP chairman of the Commons environmental audit select committee. He would like us all to be given personal limits upon our carbon-based product consumption.

Forgetting for a moment about the fascist nature of this imposition, just think what this would entail. Every person in Britain would by necessity require a unique government ID to control these 'personal limits' and virtually every product that we bought containing carbon, from charcoal briquettes through to pipe tobacco, would be rationed via this unique number. Your house and car would also need to be monitored 24 hours a day to check that you were complying faithfully with the glorious central government's energy edicts, there would arise an enormous black energy market ruthlessly cracked down upon by a government ecomentalist Stasi, and we would all end up living the bitter life of a ration-carded soviet-style prole. And this, lest we forget, is the Tory party!

Well, you can take the Tory party and stick it into a nuclear reactor if this is the clear-sighted vision of the future that we can come to expect from David Cameron's blue legions of statist busy-bodies. If this is the best they can do, God help us all when they get into government in two year's time.

Torygraph roundup

Global warming sceptics in an unholy row
Harry Mount begins the fight-back against the current plague of ecomentalist religoid fanatics

George Soros: rocketing oil price is a bubble
The man who broke the Bank of England tells us how they have once again delivered us deeply into a financial straitjacket

The answer's obvious: cut taxes and spending
Hilarious article by socialist parasite Denis MacShane - look out for the 3:42am comment by Lord Howe

A brief interlude

For reasons far to dull to bore you with, I have to disappear for a week or so; let's hopes there's something of this country left when I get back! :-)

The lives of writers

An interesting post by Mr Jonathan Pearce, over at Samizdata, on which writers should have their lives turned into films. I thought I'd avoid the usual suspects (Orwell, Rand, Jefferson, etc), and go for something a little more unusual, in one of the comments.

It must be difficult making films of writers, because most of them never do anything more challenging than deciding on whether to eat either grapes or olives, with their Soho lunchtime salad, and then going really risque by having red wine instead of white. But nevertheless, still an interesting range of writers produced in the comment thread.

The right stuff

Thank you God, for giving us the Swiss, perhaps the finest nation in Europe.

In these times of endless pontification and self-introspection, in a society gradually collapsing into a one-state world of chaos and confusion, what we need are heroes who have the bravery and the vision to light up the future with what they believe is possible.

In Maturin World, we will all fly safely to work in either flying cars or with Buzz Lightyear jet packs on our backs. But some Atlas always needs to be the first one to take a step out of the cave of fear and actually do this. So congratulations to Yves Rossy, a true modern day hero, and for one, I will try to be there when you fly over the channel. We have need of more like you.

Ausgezeichnet und Fantastisch, as we cod-German speakers say!

Official - stagflation is back

I have a slight soft spot for Sir Mervyn King, despite his being an architect in our downfall, because he at least calls a banana a banana when he sees one, rather than a softening curvature of overall global food growth demand.

In his latest report this unusually honest central banker admits to having helped Gordon stretch us between the two stools of rampant inflation and rolling recession; Sir Mervyn then admits he has little idea what to do next, which is nice.

Really, of course, he ought to resign to heap further ignominy upon his master, Lord Sauron of Downing Street, but I'm sure the salary, the expenses, and the pension contributions, plus perhaps the kudos, would be too much for most men to give up, so I can appreciate his dilemma.

But it must also be delicious to report to his idiot savant master, who once claimed to have abolished the evil twins of Boom and Bust, that we now appear to have acquired both in double-barrelled proportions!

Tremendous.

Yes, once again, despite the best of them having tried yet another mighty heave to get socialism to work over the last ten years on the back of an enormous credit expansion, we can clearly see that socialism truly is impossible. Will that stop them trying it again in the future? I doubt it, but at least another generation is about to learn the harsh Misesian lesson of human action reality biting back.

You never know, one day they might give it all up and try freedom instead.

UPDATE: There's a splendid related Torygraph article on this, by Edmund Conway. Marvellous. Alas, I was unable to resist commenting, as is my wont, but don't let that put you off reading Mr Conway's excellent piece.

The snake sheds its skin

As the onion layers peel off, the Clunking Fist of Downing Street, Gordon Brown, is gradually reverting back to his central belt communist past:

Gordon Brown puts workers' rights at heart of Labour fightback

Gordon Brown today put new workers' rights at the heart of his attempts to win back voters who have deserted Labour in recent months.

When he talks about workers' rights, of course, he means the rights of workers to be unemployed as the entrepreneurs and risk-takers of Britain emigrate to Ireland, et al, to get away from having to empty their pockets to pay for all of these "rights".

Gordon Brown's put the economy at the centre of the Government's legislative programme in the next parliament.

What economy? The whole kaboose is based upon a credit crunch of insolvency structured upon fresh air. And if Brown hadn't noticed, the whole kaboose is currently tumbling down. Adding a few more thousand pages of damnable FSA-style regulations to this mix may keep the lawyers in Westminster paddling up a creek, but if you believe Uncle Gary North, Niagara Falls is still around the corner and getting closer all the time. Just listen to that roar.

The Prime Minister has unveiled details of his Government's next Queen's Speech as he tries to regain the political initiative after weeks of Labour infighting and negative headlines.

Sorry, I nearly fell asleep there.

Mr Brown confirmed plans for a bill to step up regulation of the banking system and announced an extension of the “shared equity” schemes that aim to help people get a foot on the housing ladder.

Listen, Gordon, it's really easy: Stop printing fiat currency! If you keep it up, we're going to have Zimbabwe-style rioting in the streets before you're done. And for a man of such alleged financial acumen to watch the sub-prime crisis unfold in the U.S. and to then promise almost identical "social access" schemes here, to weave the same destruction, is simply beyond belief.

Saying his “immediate priority” was to help hard-working families, Mr Brown also announced plans he said will make life easier for working parents.

No, his immediate priority is to help Labour-supporting welfare bums by punishing hard-working families with more taxes, more regulations, and more inflation to destroy their savings. It has reached the point now where it is virtually pointless to save anything. And once we do all stop saving, we'll start heading back to the stone age before you can say "capital destruction".

He said that John Hutton, the Business Secretary, will tomorrow confirm that ministers wild adopt new proposals on flexible working, giving parents with children as old as 16 the right to request flexible working.

Thereby making them even more unemployable, pushing more employers into bankruptcy, and forcing even more entrepreneurs overseas in their bid to escape this welfare state insanity. It would also seem that Brown has finally abandoned all pretence of being on the business man's side in his rush back to a socialism both red in tooth and in claw.

Mr Brown also promised “a major new change in workplace rights that will benefit both employees and employers - giving every worker the right to request time to train.”

I'm sorry, I nearly had to gnaw my own leg off there, to escape the boredom.

He said the Government will also offer every adult a “personal skills account.”

Oh Christ, how about just giving them all of their money back and letting them spend it how they want? I know that's a bit revolutionary, but Brown seems to have got himself trapped in a whirlpool where he thinks policy failures can only be solved by giving us more of the same. I think it was Richard Bandler who said if you don't like what you're getting then do something different, but whoever it was, Gordon Brown was obviously talking too much to listen.

On schools, Mr Brown said the Education and Skills Bill would establish the first independent qualifications system to guarantee the highest standards while strengthening the accountability of schools to parents.

Oh no, we're all going to get 'A's for everything and still none of us will be able to write our own names. Ah, what a blessed socialist land that will be.

The Bill would also include a statutory right for every suitably qualified young person to obtain an apprenticeship.

A statutory right? "You will employ me, pay me, and train me, even though I will be of no use to you for at least five years, when I will then leave and get a job with one of your competitors, and I claim this as my statutory right". Nope, it doesn't compute to me. Unless of course Gordon Brown is deliberately trying to destroy every employer in the country. Yikes! That's probably it!

A new NHS Reform Bill would establish an NHS constitution setting out what patients can expect from the health service, including entitlements to minimum standards of access, quality and safety.

How about not losing your limbs or your life due to MRSA infection. That would be a start. I know you've only had eleven years in power now Gordon, but any time soon would be nice to get these doctors and nurses to start washing their hands occasionally.

There will also be moves to make local police commanders more directly accountable to their communities, a policy first advocated by the Conservatives.

Absolutely shameless. But when Gordon says communities, he does of course mean "committees", none of which us proles will be allowed to access without going on the dole and spending 30 hours a week in libraries keeping up with all the other layabout socialist expenses-living councillors who infest this land.

There will also be an immigration bill to make immigrants “earn” British citizenship and the right to claim benefits.

Who would want British citizenship? It's much better to just get permanent residency and keep all the tax breaks and the welfare payments.

Mr Brown told MPs: “Building a more prosperous Britain and a fairer Britain is the purpose of the draft legislative programme published today for debate in this House and the country.”

Drone, drone, drone,....does he really wonder why he's hated so much?

David Cameron, the Tory leader, accused Mr Brown of stealing Conservative ideas. ”I hope when you get up we will get a bit of gratitude from you for all this,” he told the Prime Minister.

Fat chance.

Well, all in all, a witless performance from Gordon so dreary and predictable I started trying to lick the back of my own knees to give myself something interesting to do.

In the name of God, please, Gordon, will you go back to Scotland, lock yourself in a toilet, and stay there; hopefully forever. Bring on Milliband. At least things will get slightly more unpredictable again.

Socialism is magic

Poof! Just when you thought Gordon Brown was finished, he waved a magic credit card and lo, £2.7 billion pounds appeared, as if from nowhere. Why don't they just do this all the time?

So thanks Gordon, for once again crowding out the private sector in a recession with yet another bond issue and heaping the coupon payments onto me in the near-term future, plus the principal payment onto my children.

I suppose the desperation of this move, which hammers upon the door of Brown's own fiscal borrowing 'rules', shows us how close we are to being rid of this marxoid cretin, but once again when faced with the clear choice of either cutting government spending and upsetting his parasite friends or hammering the tax creators yet again, he chose to lump this debt onto the tax creator class.

I think the BBC worked out last night, with generously elasticated figures, that Brown now has the financial manoeuvring room of £100 million pounds in the next fiscal year, which is about the photocopying bill for the average useless quango. Expect this expansive limit to be broken within days, certainly weeks, as the central bank induced recession, as noted by Caroline Flint, comes racing home.

It must be nice to have a billion dollar credit card up your sleeve, in case of emergency. Well, Brown doesn't have to pay the bills when they come due, does he? That's my job, as a tax serf.

Gordon Brown may get a flicker of sympathy

I think I may have worked out what newspaper comment pages are for. Nobody reads any comments but their own (and certainly not the long ones) and the writers never read the comments, so comments pages must be there for a reason. Well, if you flick through the reader postings to this article, I think it becomes extremely clear what that reason is - Therapy! :-)

BTW, if you read down far enough you'll catch my own therapeutic post, too.

UPDATE: The Torygraph seems filled these days with pro-Gordon Brown nonsense. What are they after? Here's another one: Gordon Brown doesn't deserve this. (And I would like to thank LordDraco for his kind words on my own 8:08am comment.)

The Brown envelopes begin

Now that they know the writing is on the wall it would seem that the caretaker apparatchiks of the UK's Labour party are beginning to cash in their chips before they lose control of the train set; just check out the details of this Torygraph article or flick through the Fisk below:

One of Labour's biggest donors is behind a project to build a 15,000-home eco-town, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

D'ya think there might possibly be oodles of cash in this if someone could overcome all of the usual regulatory hurdles to then build thousands of new homes on currently agricultural land?

The Co-operative Group is bidding to build an eco-town called Pennbury on land it owns between Stoughton and Great Glen in Leicester.

How very New Labour that it's the Co-operative group; it's almost like some new form of Kibbutzism!

However, objectors are circulating literature pointing out that Labour received £500,000 from the group in 2005/06 and has a £13.5 million overdraft with the Co-operative Bank, an offshoot of the group.

Quelle surprise, monsieur!

The Co-operative Party, which supports the Co-op Group's activities, sponsors 22 Labour MPs, including Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary. Mr Balls is married to Yvette Cooper, who announced the eco-town project to find 15 sites for environmentally friendly towns last year when she was Housing Minister.

This must all be a terrific co-incidence. I'm shocked, shocked to hear that Ed Balls is involved in all of this.

Phil Hope, the minister for the East Midlands – which includes Pennbury – is also sponsored by the Co-operative Party.

Well, 'tis a small world, mon amis.

Kevin Feltham, the chairman of Campaign Against the Stoughton Co-op Eco-Town, has said that the Co-operative Group has had previous applications to build on its land turned down.

Fear ye not; I'm fairly confident that they won't be turned down again.

"How many people realise that the Co-op Group is a major donor to the Labour Party? It really is at this stage that you think of it as sleaze. That's all that one can think, because it stinks," said Mr Feltham.

No, Mr Feltham, calm down. There must be a perfectly rational explanation behind all of this. And I do hope you're not suggesting that a UK government minister would ever do anything improper with regard to personal gain? That would be a foul calumny.

Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said: "When you consider that this application has already been rejected, it is surprising to see it come back into the list of 15.

Personally, I'm bowled over.

"It is not surprising that local people are starting to draw conclusions from the obvious connections between the Co-op Group and the Labour Party."

I'm confident you will find that the plans for this have been made fully available in the filing cabinet downstairs, in the locked cellar, behind the picture of the leopard.

A Co-operative Group spokesman said: "Our plan for an eco-town is on the shortlist for one reason alone – because we have successfully demonstrated to the Government that we can meet the criteria...

...And that we have bought all of the smeggers hook, line, and sinker, and we'll cut them all off at the knees if they forget which side of the bread their butter is located.

"We have discussed our proposals with local MPs – both Labour and Conservative. We have not, however, held any meetings to discuss them at ministerial level, [with] Phil Hope or otherwise."

Or telephone calls, or dinner parties, or strolls in the park. God forbid, no.

In the fine words of the late great Terry Thomas; what an absolute shower.

Pay up or else

If the Mafia ran Britain, what kinds of things would you expect to see? Well, I would expect to see advertising along the lines of "pay up your protection money, peasant, or we'll break your legs".

Which brings us to the current UK government advert above, which threatens people that if they don't pay their road tax (which can now be up to £385 pounds a year), then their cars will be stolen from them and put into a crusher; I suppose if their legs were still inside at the time, then so be it.

This advert probably tells you all you need to know about socialism and democracy. It demonstrates aggressive threat, senseless destruction, property theft, and massive overcharging, all in one fell swoop (about one tenth of road taxation is spent on roads, almost always on wasteful government pork contracts).

In short, all the hallmarks of the mafia are right there, in your face, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it - Capice?

OK, so this much we know, that government is nothing more than a tenacious long-lived mafia. You wouldn't be reading an Austro-centric web site if any of this was a shock; though personally I still find it interesting that an organisation which typically goes around pretending to be everybody's favourite bumbling uncle, can still occasionally slip into revealing its true personality.

But having said that, why is Gordon Brown still running these government "heavy-threat" adverts, in his personal time of crisis? When New Labour was 10% ahead in the polls, perhaps the Orcs on the outer turf still felt comfortable going around threatening to break everyone's legs. However, now that the Labour party is currently suffering its worst poll figures of all time, you would have thought that Sauron would have ordered his goblins to start kissing up to the proles, rather than still making leg-breaking threats if they fail to defenestrate their wallets on a regular basis?

It's not possible, is it, that Gordon is beginning to lose control of his swarms of minions? I should coco.

The coronation of Capofamiglia David Milliband thus comes ever closer. When he is crowned, expect this kind of government soul-window advertising to stop. Immediately.

The death-heads couldn't take it

Despite quite clearly being the perfect example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis, it would seem someone couldn't handle my Wikipedia addition of 'Global Warming' to the page on falsification. Oh dear, poor loves.

They couldn't even edit it. They just had to delete it. Oh well, if you destroy the truth it will go away forever. Apparently.

Well, when I get bored or the numbers of these hive drones overwhelm me, they'll probably get their way, but for now, let's add it again, and see how long it takes this time before the moronic death-heads of environmentalism remove it, once again proving that they can't stand the truth or even have the intellectual strength to suffer just a single person doubting them.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: It would appear I was perhaps a little heavy-handed in my comments above, for which I must apologize. What really happened was that because of my lack of knowledge of the Wikipedia paradigm, I had rather unfortunately failed to obey about 9 of the their 10 central editing commandments. Thus chastised, and having gained a Wikipedia login and having signed up to the 10 commandments, I tried repeatedly to update the piece, and in a Marxian dialectic the piece has thus been whittled down to three magnificent lines, which appear to be tolerable to the gathered Wiki crowd. OK, so it's not what I would have wanted, but at least it's still on the page, albeit in reduced form, and it isn't being mauled any more. Crikey, those Wiki people have created a heck of thing. Now that I'm partially involved with it, I'm even more amazed than I used to be. I still think their 'Falsifiability' page needs more on Global Warming, and I'm rather suspicious as to the motives of those I was involved with in this dialectical struggle, but I can tolerate the compromise.

The four horsemen of socialism

I wrote a review of Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto the other day, and it was only afterwards that it struck me how my unconscious mind had slipped in a reference to the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I wondered if there was anything behind this, so I investigated these four famous equestrian figures on the Wikipedia web site, and stumbled over the realisation that the pale horse of death is so named because the translation of "pale", from the Greek, is kloros; this can also be translated as green (as in chlorine gas). Like a thunderbolt from the almighty Zeus, I realised that not only is this the perfect colour for death, as used in the Harry Potter novels for all things associated with death such as Slytherin house, the avada kedavra curse, and anything else connected with Voldemort, it is also the blessed colour of the ecomentalists, the same group who want us all to die so that the world can be left in peace to polar bears, blue whales, and magic mushrooms.

In a fit of ribaldry, I wondered whether I could associate any other key emblems of socialism with the other three horses.

The red horse of war proved fairly uncomplicated. This is the horse of imperialism, aggressive attack, pre-emptive war, and the tens of millions of people either killed or displaced from places such as Vietnam, Iraq, or the forthcoming war against Iran.

The black horse of famine is also fairly easy to pin down, as this has always been the horse of scarcity, as represented in the modern age by recurring recessions brought on deliberately by central bank fiat paper inflationists, to cause things such as the recent global food and fuel riots, also associated with the deathly yoke of ecomentalist legislation in areas such as biofuel regulation.

However, it is the white horse which caused me the worst problem, because although we associate the white horse with plague, throughout history the white horse has also been associated with goodness. Just think of Gandalf on Shadowfax, or the white knight on his white charger, or even the White Horse of Uffington, which perhaps represents an early form of the pan-european god Poseidon. (The image of white horse waves crashing on a beach may help if you're trying to get the nautical link there between Poseidon and white horses.)

Any readers of the White Goddess, by Robert Graves, will also know that the three basic colours of the matriarchal Mother Earth/Moon goddess, are red, white, and black, with her sacred beast also being a white horse. (With horse-shoes representing the crescent Moon and the colour white representing milk, the primary foodstuff of humanity - a gift from the matronly aspect of the full white moon goddess - with a crescent-shaped hunting bow also generally associated with the Goddess riding a white horse, this time in her maidenly aspect. The tie to red is that the Moon goddess menstruates in the same period of most women, with the word men-struate (or moon-struate) coming directly from the word moon, which also tangentially gives us the word "measure", for measuring the twenty-eight day Moon cycle, perhaps the first measured period of time after a single day; also of course giving us the word "month" (or moonth). The tie to black, is that this is the colour of the Moon when the old crone Moon disappears for three days at the end of each moonth before being re-born as the new Moon. Confused yet? Try reading the White Goddess.)

By this point I was nearly as mentally frazzled as you may have been reading that last paragraph. What could both be good and bad at one and the same time, both representing bounty and plague in one and the same breath? (You may be ahead of me on this one.) How could I finish my apocalyptic quadrumvirate of socialist emblems?

But with hindsight, how could it have taken me so long? For the white horse of plague must obviously represent "welfare", a morally corrupting blight often seen as good even by people who ought to know better, but always a terrible plague which ultimately causes even deeper poverty, both of the spiritualist kind and of the materialist kind.

I was finished in my quest.

Or was I? For what about the fifth horse? What about the apocryphal horse of Chaos (or Kaos)? What about this black Pratchettian horse who glows slightly red and who accompanies Death in the novel, Thief of Time?

Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, kemo-sabe. For Chaos represents the inability of socialism to calculate.

Global warming deniers - It's time to come out of the closet

Unlike the ecomentalist fanatics who plague our planet, I usually only spend about thirteen nanoseconds a day thinking about environmentalism; the rest of the time I waste on living. So having been forewarned that I may get hit by an army of ecomentalist trolls, who spend every breathing moment obsessing about their religion, I thought I better get some ammunition in to fire back at them when they try to hit me with the appalling pollutive rubbish Stephen Schneider et al have been pumping into the metasphere over the last thirty years.

If you too are hiding your global warming denier status under a bushel, for fear of the unpleasantness of being attacked by these ravening hordes of mindless 'Anthropogenic Global Warming' trolls, and want to fight back because you too think it's all a load of old cobbolds, then fear ye not, for AngloAustria is here. Work your way through the following articles below to immunize yourself against all of their total utter nonsense. Many of the pieces are by Uncle George Reisman, which is an absolute godsend because of his high academic standard, but there's plenty of other good stuff in this list too. Enjoy:

ENVIRONMENTALISM IS RECYCLED COMMUNISM AND NAZISM
A Word to Environmentalists
The Nature of Environmentalism
The Green Recession
Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh
The Environmentalists Are Trying To Frighten the Natives
Standards of Environmental Good and Evil: Why Environmentalism Is Misanthropic
Two Ice Ages, With Up to 16 Times the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere
Britain’s Stern Review on Global Warming: It Could Be Environmentalism’s Swan Song
IS THERE A PROBLEM? BLAME GLOBAL WARMING
Green Idiocracy

And if all of that lot doesn't inoculate you from the madness, then hop on over to Greenie Watch, which although sometimes a little less academic than the stuff above, is still lots of fun. I bet the Greenies just hate it! Just like they hate most other things, especially anyone enjoying themselves, the poor misbegotten hair-shirted self-flagellating buggers.

I must say though that in many ways it was a good thing that one of the self-appointed chief bees from the AGW hive threatened me with his liccle army of worker trolls the other day, because without this stimulus I would have missed out on all of the above and in particular, I would never have otherwise come across Greenie Watch, which from now on will be part of my regular viewing schedule. So thanks, wadard, you made my day. Next time I fly down to Sydney, be sure to look me up in the Four Seasons hotel down at circular quay; they do a cracking steak and chips, which is worth flying 24,000 miles for just to taste the basil sauce.

(Apparently, because I'm an AGW denier, I must automatically be part of the evil fossil-fuel funded global conspiracy, natch. Well, if anyone out there in the evil fossil-fuel funded industry would like to take some time out from making money on the carbon quotas derivatives market to send me a large cheque, or even a small one, please get in touch. With a recession looming here in England, caused by a combination of socialist central bank planners and ecomentalist regulators, I could do with the bunce.)

Manifesto for a world revolution

The following piece should have popped up on Amazon.co.uk, as the first UK review for Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto:

As a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul is understandably a man concerned primarily with the United States, rather than with England or the rest of Europe. However, the ideas expressed in his book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, can be globally applied given a preliminary understanding of the original American revolution and the later construction of the US constitution. The world is suffering from a surfeit of statism, posits the Good Doctor; we have exploding financial bubbles, endless wars, dissolving currencies, and diminishing civil liberties, racing like the four horsemen of the apocalypse across the entire world. With astonishing clarity, Ron Paul exposes how these inter-linked beasts are related and how they can be tamed via the use of a simple ingredient the United States once used to believe in; freedom. The Republicrats of America must hate him for exposing their carefully spun fallacies behind central banking, foreign policy, fiat currency, and the welfare/warfare state. So, if you want to understand what is going wrong in the world and how it can get fixed then you must read this book, especially if you want to know what America should do to become the beacon of hope it once used to be, rather than the imperial aggressor it has unfortunately become. Personally speaking as a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist, and a follower of Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe, I feel that the Good Doctor places a little too much reliance on the ability of any constitution to restrain any government. However, he has written a beautifully crafted piece of work which it is possible to read in one sitting, despite its comprehensive coverage of the entire remit of western world government. The text will also help you understand the basic tenets of Austrian economics, a political philosophy based upon peace, prosperity, and freedom, which may help you remove any scales of state indoctrination from your eyes, if you feel inflicted with the fuzzy feeling that somebody has been hiding the truth from you, for most of your life, about how governments really work. In brief, I believe this book could help save the world as we know it. I hope it does and I hope this review has done it the truly magnificent justice it deserves. Go Ron Paul.

Heat being turned up on global warming fanatics

Another excellent article by Christopher Booker on the sham that is Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Watch the web for climate change truths

Let us pray that the tide is finally turning and that all of the AGW human-haters can now start crawling back into their recycled communist-nazi holes. Though no doubt once they're back in there, they will start cooking up yet another way to kill the rest of us; well, everyone has to have a hobby.

UPDATE: I've got to go out today in my 4x4 to help set up a May day charity fayre, so I would urge any AGW readers to comment on the Telegraph article pages, if they fancy a debate with anyone. I'll try to rejoin you there later, if I get a moment from my pallet hauling activities because, alas, Telegraph comment trolling is my own particular hobby.

The Triumph of Bonson Jorris

With Bonson Jorris being elected Mayor of London, which is pretty much a watershed moment for the UK Tory party, I thought now might be a good time to review the political scene in England, via a Fisk of the Torygraph's main article on his victory. (Incidentally, the above photograph was taken several years ago, when Bonson won his candidate election at Benson, in southern Oxfordshire, to go forward for the Henley parliamentary constituency. Why have I used this picture instead of one of the other far more amusing pictures of my soon-to-be-late MP? Because if you look very carefully - and I'm not telling you where - you can see a certain Jack Maturin, or at least a portion of his body, in the said photograph, in Maturin's former days as a stalwart door-knocking Tory. Ah, those were the days...before the good Professor Hoppe interfered with my beliefs in democracy! If I were also to tell you that I was the first person to shake Bonson's hand as he came of the stage that night, that might reveal even more to you about my personal interest in the man's career, however, I digress...)

Boris Johnson is the new London Mayor

Boris Johnson claimed a remarkable victory in the London mayoral contest on Friday night to cap a disastrous series of results for Gordon Brown in his first electoral test as Prime Minister.

As we said a few days ago, Gordon Brown is a dead man walking. Being the political man he is, down to his fingertips, he will know this too. However, the arrogance and the hubris of all politicians will cause him to make the fatal mistake of carrying on. They all think they're special and that the rules don't apply to them. As the most pompous man in England, expect Gordon Brown to continue until he is dragged out of 10 Downing Street, kicking and screaming, just as Blair was, when dragged out by Brown himself. By God, it's a rum business, politics. They really do all deserve each other.

The Conservative candidate's win over Ken Livingstone followed a calamitous showing for Labour at the local elections - the party's worst performance at the polls for 40 years.

Ah, never glad confident May 1997 morning again! It couldn't have happened to a more unpleasant bunch of lizards.

Mr Johnson's landmark victory, a result that would have been almost unthinkable six months ago, was the most symbolic blow to Mr Brown's authority on a day that left the Prime Minister facing the gravest crisis of his leadership.

Bonson winning is the nail in the coffin of Gordon Brown's tenure as UK prime minister. If Livingstone had hung on, Brown would have been cock-a-hoop. However, for the bought-and-paid-for bus driving population of London to kick out their own welfare champion is remarkable. Ink in a Tory election victory in 2010, so long as Brown remains. You will also witness an equally remarkable turnaround in the attitude of the UK press towards the Tory party, even possibly including the BBC. The Westminster village community knows where its bread is buttered, and this comes in the form of getting juicy news scoops from government departments. So if you want those future scoops (and licence fee increases), after seeing Bonson winning you will know what you have to do; start crawling to the future dispensers. Start doing it now.

By taking City Hall, Mr Johnson becomes the first Tory politician to hold a senior role in British politics since the party was swept out of power in 1997. His win provided a significant boost to David Cameron's bid for victory at the next general election.

As earlier, take it for granted. Unless Brown is replaced by Milliband, the only question now is the size of the majority.

In the local elections, Labour lost more than 300 councillors and slumped to a humiliating third place behind the Liberal Democrats in the share of the vote – a full 20 points behind Mr Cameron's Conservatives.

This means we might actually get to see Milliband heading up the socialist crime commission. Many back-bench Labour MPs, who see a future ahead of them of actually having to work for a living if they lose their incumbent seats, will have now lost their fear of Gordon Brown. The knives will be out. Will they plunge them in, though? There is a strong tribalist tendency in the primitive emotion base of the Labour Party, and the taboo of slaughtering the leader may prove too much. However, once one knife goes in, expect a hundred more. It will be a frenzy. If Brown loses his bill to lock innocent people up for 42 days on the whim of a Stasi officer, I predict that is when the frenzy will start.

The results represented a significant breakthrough for Mr Cameron and were the best the Tories have recorded at the polls since John Major won the 1992 general election. If translated to a General Election, it would see the Tories with a Commons majority of more than 100.

Does it really make any difference? There aren't going to be any tax cuts and the country is ruled from Brussels anyway. However, I will welcome it if I am proved wrong. I want tax cuts, the abandonment of ID cards (as promoted by Bonson), and the rejection of the EU constitution (sorry, ratification treaty). Will we get any of this? Well, this is where Bonson might come in. He now holds a lot of power in the Tory party, and he could start pushing them in the right direction. Will he? I doubt it. Once in office, the trappings of power almost always become too tempting to abuse. "Political Reality" also generally bites, and that means the endless pleasing of pressure groups, who are generally pleased by other people being robbed on their behalf. Don't hold your breath.

As one Labour backbencher gave Mr Brown six months to reverse the party's slide or resign, comparisons were made between his Premiership and the dying days of John Major's tenure.

That sounds about right. Oh how I will weep on the day when Brown leaves England. With tears of joy.

The Tories predicted the results marked the beginning of the end of Labour's three terms in Government. On a night of unremittingly bad news for Mr Brown's administration:

• The Conservatives took a 44 per cent share of the national vote, the Liberal Democrats 25 per cent and Labour just 24 per cent;
• Labour lost 331 council seats – far beyond even their worst predictions – while the Tories won 256;

What the Tories are forgetting here is that we are living in much more politically volatile times than we have ever lived in before. All the rules have changed and nobody now believes anything any politician says (which is an excellent development). People are also switching political allegiance much more easily than they ever did in the past. One wrong policy on the 10p tax rate, and millions now vote Tory rather than Labour. One Tory MP caught in bed with a horse, and millions will switch back to Labour. The Tories will win the next election easily only if Gordon Brown remains in office. But those back-bencher Labour MPs aren't going to give up their endless days of Chardonnay and free lunches so easily. Expect Milliband in by Christmas. Then we will have a real contest on our hands, with one smoothie up against another smoothie. Cameron must therefore be praying that Brown hangs on. Some might even say, if they were being scurrilous, that it would be in Cameron's interest to cut Brown some slack over the next few months, to help him hang on until it gets too late to replace him. Obviously, I couldn't possibly comment on such shocking rumours.

The Tories made key breakthroughs in the North while Labour was wiped out in the South.

The parasites have killed the host. Now the parasites are also beginning to feel the pinch.

A buoyant Mr Cameron hailed the results as a "very big moment" for the Conservatives, with party strategists likening it to Tony Blair's success in the 1995 local elections, which preceded Labour's landslide election victory two years later.

So come on then David, where are the tax cuts? Where are the regulation cuts? Where are the ID card abandonment plans? Where are the EU severance plans? Just what is the point of you? It is now time for you to start telling us what difference it would make if you were in power. I want less to be stolen from me and I want less intrusion in my life. The more of this, the better. So what are you going to do? The problem for Cameron, of course, is that now he is seen as the next prime minister, he is going to have to start answering questions instead of asking them. Is he up to it? Obviously, as a Hoppeian myself, I know the whole business is ultimately a long-term sham, but I'll take tax and regulation cuts where I can get them in this short-term life. If Cameron remains incapable of delivering them, he will deserve the opprobrium he gets.

"I think these results are not just a vote against Gordon Brown and his government," said Mr Cameron, "I think they are a vote of positive confidence in the Conservative Party.

Well, no. Brown is hated and the Tories aren't hated quite so much as they used to be. That's it. I wouldn't go bandying around words such as "confidence". Tell us something first. Give us something to be confident about. Try these for size: "I will abolish inheritance tax. I will abolish capital gains tax. I will abolish stamp duty tax for both housing and investments. I will abolish corporation tax. I will abolish all forms of taxes on pensions. I will abolish any form of tax on investment interest." OK, let me make this easy for you. Pick three of the above from six. I dare you. I double dare you. With a cherry on top.

"This is a very big moment for the Conservative Party. I don't want any one to think we would deserve to win an election just on the back of a failing government. I want us to really prove to people that we can make the changes that they want to see."

You can virtually always tell what a politician is thinking by examining their negative statements. It's very difficult for the unconscious mind to process negatives and such phrases are almost always windows into the minds of people such as David Cameron. So when he says, "I don't want any one to think we would deserve to win an election just on the back of a failing government," you know that this is exactly what he is thinking. Come on David, try harder please.

George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, said the results were a "very, very good springboard". By 10pm Mr Johnson appeared well on course for victory but he did not manage it on the first preference vote when the result came at midnight.

So it would seem Ken ...errr..., you know, what's his name, Ken ...errr..., Stanley, sorry, Livingbone, anyhow, you know the bloke, managed to make it to the second round. Well done, Ken. It only cost the rest of us billions in stolen pelf handed to all of your client voters in London, but at least it shows they cared.

He was short of the required 50 per cent share, but after the second preference votes were added he was declared winner by 1,168,738 to 1,028,966.

BTW, don't expect Ken to disappear. This odious snake, "liked by everyone but those who know him", in the immortal words of Neil Kinnock, still harbours the ambition of becoming the Labour party's next leader. He won't get it, because Milliband will, but expect him to try, perhaps by helping Brown hang on until Ken can get another parliamentary seat. What else is he going to do? Work for a living? There are far too many attractive political underlings around in need of getting pregnant for that almighty calamity to happen.

Downing Street attempted to blame its catastrophic losses on the economic downturn.

I'm sorry, did I miss something here? Didn't Gordon Brown once claim to have abolished "Boom and Bust"? Surely the Great Decider is not implying that "Bust" is back again? Crikey. Well, if you will go setting yourself up as Lord God Almighty, holding back the waves, expect to eventually get your knees wet. Ho hum.

Mr Brown said: "It's clear to me that this has been a disappointing night, indeed a bad night, for Labour. I said I was going to listen and lead. "We are in difficult economic circumstances. I think people accept that we're going through some of the most challenging times we've seen in many years. The test of leadership is not what happens in a period of success but what happens in difficult circumstances."

I bet all of Brown's enemies in the Labour party are overjoyed this morning, that this slobby wretch of a man is suffering such humiliation. Me? I just want Brown and all other politicians out of my life. I don't want to know who they are. I don't want to know what their plans are for my life. And I don't want them living off my back or telling me what to do. I just want all of them to disappear. So although I'll admit that there is a little unnecessary joy in my heart at the utter demise of Brown, it is tempered by the knowledge that the rest of them are no better.

If the result were repeated in a general election, the swing would potentially unseat seven Cabinet ministers including Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary.

Oy Vey, so now there's a lot of joy in my heart. Especially if that [words deleted] Ed Balls gets a good drubbing at the next election. My only problem is that I want all of them to lose their seats, whether Tory, Labour, Liberal, or whatever. I would like a solid majority of MPs to be "none of the above". I would even volunteer to lead them in Parliament. My first act would be to burn the 100 volumes of British law, which currently reside on the statute book. My second act would be to burn the 6 volumes of British tax regulation currently foisted upon the rest of us by the Treasury. My third and final wish fulfillment act would be to sack myself. This would be a truly glorious day.

Ministers admitted that Labour had been trounced and needed to "listen more" to people's concerns over the economic turmoil.

Oh, pur...lease. The writing has been on the wall for at least two years, and yet they have still had the arrogance to push through one bad law after another, with every Labour MP signing up to the platform. Now that their salaries, pensions, expenses, and graft are now explicity burning on the line, they finally wake up! C'est Incredible!

The decision to abolish the 10p rate of income tax was blamed for much of the reaction against Labour. Mr Brown is now under intense pressure to try to relaunch his faltering government amid allegations that he is out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.

This just shows you how much power corrupts. All Labour MPs, I'm sure, start out with the noblest of motives, including Gordon Brown, to "help" the poor. Yes, the answer to really help the poor is to adopt the economic policies of Ludwig von Mises rather than those of Karl Marx, but at least their hearts kick off in the right places. And then 20 years later they find themselves formulating and executing policies deliberately designed to hurt the poorest in society - Que? In many ways it is a tragedy that these people go so wrong in their lives as to end up like this. But not as much of a tragedy as it is for the rest us, of course.

He is expected to unveil detailed policies this month, including plans to help first-time buyers and people who face having their homes repossessed.

Oh God, will the idiocy never end? It is because of such past policies that we are in such a mess. Does nobody in the Labour party have the slightest idea of how economics works?

There will also be significant constitutional changes. Downing Street aides have indicated that they may rethink proposals to sharply increase car tax.

The plan to charge people £500 pounds a year to drive around cars suddenly worth £300 pounds because of these unannounced tax charges, thus preventing them from being able to afford lower-taxed cars, has a certain slight logical flaw in it, don't you think? And the people thus afflicted may not think any of this is a good idea. Is any of this rocket science, guys? You can imagine the conversation in Downing Street: "Damn, the peasants are revolting. They've spotted us fleecing them for no good reason!" However, what's worst about this is the sheer unprincipled nature of it. Either it is good to tax people heavily to use cars because this prevents "global warming" or it is bad to tax them because "global warming" doesn't exist. But to swing between the two policies purely on the expediency of short-term political gain is simply nauseous.

Mr Balls, one of Mr Brown’s closest colleagues, said: "Voters have been cross with us."

D'ya think?

"They think their tax bills are going up, their fuel bills are going up, their food bills are going up. They need to know we are on their side. We have to do more to show we are delivering for families."

Dear Jesus, "think" their tax bills are going up, "think" their fuel and food bills are going up? Mr Balls is obviously living in a different Universe to the rest of us. On our side? No, Mr Balls. At our side, helping yourselves to our exposed wallets. Delivering to families? Surely you mean, delivering the pelf stolen from families into the hands of our clients.

Ian Gibson, a Labour backbencher, set Mr Brown a deadline of this September’s party conference to show that he was the right man to lead Labour into the next election.
He said: "I will give him six months. That takes us up to the autumn conference. If we think that we could lose the next election and we are not moving forward then a lot of people will get rather angry.

As discussed earlier, Cameron must be praying seventeen times a day that Brown makes it past the next Labour party conference. I think it should be all over by then, with Milliband getting the leadership just before Christmas. However, you never know with politics, what with all those snakes in the bag. You just never know which one which will possess the most virulent venom. Well, you do actually - it's Ken Livingbone! He will return. Unless he's caught in mistaken Ugandan discussions with one of his inumerable children.

"If Brown’s the man to do it then he’s got to give us the right policies. Leaders have to listen to the people below them. It is no use trying to make excuses."

Oh please, just stop with the policies. We have 100 volumes of law. Do you really think we need any more? Expect some swingeing attacks on those of us with any money left. In times of crisis the tribal Labour party will almost certainly revert to type.

However, despite many Labour MPs privately admitting that they face general election defeat, there appears little prospect of a serious leadership challenge to Mr Brown. Complicated electoral rules and the lack of a heavyweight challenger make a contest unlikely.

Don't make me laugh. The Tory backbenchers scuttled the Blessed Margaret when they imagined their MP-related directorships going down the pan. When a Labour MP wakes up tomorrow and pictures his life back lecturing in the polytechnic, I think we'll then see a horde of such people capable of removing even the redoubtable Gordon Brown. My money is on Milliband by Crimbo.

The results surprised even the most optimistic Tories. They won control of key target councils in the North, including Bury and North Tyneside.

The Labour party will be back in the north once the host in the south is back on its knees. What we really need is secession. First we let Scotland go free, then Wales, and then the North of England. Let's call this new English country by its old name, "The Danelaw". Within ten years I predict it would be one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, once they are off the morally disastorous pipe of "Angleland" welfare which the Labour party destroyed them with.

Mr Cameron said "the Conservative Party is back in Wales" after advances in the Vale of Glamorgan, Monmouth and Cardiff.

Let's just hope he doesn't appoint John Redwood again as the governor.

The Tories also seized control of Southampton. The last time they controlled the city was in 1984. But they still do not have a significant presence in many northern cities including Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle.

The welfare pipe was first aimed at all four of these cities, when it was constructed back in the early part of the 20th century, hence why they still can't bring themselves to shake off the socialist habit. Only secession and the cutting of this pipe will enable these four great cities to regain their former glory, which they achieved before the emergence of the Labour party.

Labour announced on Friday morning that it had lost Reading, its last council in the South outside London. However, it retained some ground later by winning Slough.

They can keep it.

Heads it's global warming, tails it's global warming

An interesting post over at Choice Cuts discussing some tax-funded eco-scientists; they're claiming that if over the next ten years global temperatures go down, stay the same, or go up, it will definitely be global warming to blame.

So, Sir Karl Popper, God rest your Austrian soul, I hereby challenge you to falsify your way out of that one. Good luck!

UPDATE: I have added the following section to the Wikipedia page on falsifiability. I even tried, despite myself, to be even handed! Let's see how long the piece lasts in an un-shredded state before the eco-worshippers get themselves into a frothy lather about it (thus, of course, proving the point).

Global Warming
Both believers and deniers of global warming could also be accused of falling into a Popperian lack of falsifiability and the related Kuhnian trap of the locked paradigm (or in this case, two locked paradigms). In recent years, the theory of global warming caused by mankind has become extremely popular to the point where no matter what evidence is presented, whether on variations in the sun's energy output, or various other ice age volatility models caused by the circulation of the solar system through galactic dust clouds, it generally "proves" global warming caused by mankind to the believers, or "disproves" global warming caused by mankind to the deniers. For instance, to the majority camp of believers, the evidence generally points to global warming caused by mankind, whether the various bodies of factual evidence indicate global warming, global temperature stasis, or even global cooling; the minority denier camp use the exact same evidence to argue the opposite case. Unfortunately, science has become very emotively intertwined in this arena with politics and state funding of science, as well as a whole range politically correct or politically incorrect orthodoxies, both for the global warming believers and the global warming deniers. This whole area may take several decades to unravel with independent Popperian-minded scientists using a falsification-based approach to get to the truth of the matter (or at least, to the least false conclusion).