Women pay

Here's another one to file under "No shit, Sherlock"...

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women — even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

Really. Well, that is a surprise.

Who'da thunk it, eh?

The Olympics Tickets Balls-Up

NB: I am not the Devil

Still the whining goes on about Olympics tickets, and still no-one seems to have identified the problem.

Look. I was given a ticket for an event which I won't be attending as it has no value to me. Ain't I the hideous one, eh?

Its original price, according to what I can find out, was £87 if you were to buy it from the official site. I'd have sold it for a fiver and been ecstatic about it, except that I'm not allowed to by law.

The unauthorised selling of Olympic tickets is a crime under the Olympic Act punishable by a £20,000 fine, and police have warned they will take tough action against touts.

It therefore resided, until recently when the council picked it up, in my recycling bin.

We know very well why this approach was taken. It's because there is an attitude in our country which is so fearful of "the privileged" sucking up tickets by virtue of being rich, that every effort has been taken to stop them doing so. It's easy to concede that there is some merit in that, even if it can arguably be seen to be driven by ugly envy.

However, it's been done in such a cack-handed way that they have forgotten how good humans are at sorting themselves out and ending up with a mostly decent result.

The London 2012 organisers had already priced anyone without a massive deposit account from buying the vast majority of the popular tickets anyway, quite rightly too as they are obliged to get return for the tax cash they have spent.

But while those who seem committed to egalitarianism and (presumably) re-distribution of wealth, are happy to see the rich restricted from buying seats at the expense of the less well off, they have woefully overlooked the more important aspect of re-distribution of value.

The value I placed on that ticket was quite literally zero. I would have happily given it away but for the fact that I had no-one to give it away to as no-one in my social circle was interested in one adult ticket (the spectre of over-bearing security and oppressive restrictions on what is allowed on the day of 'celebration' may have contributed to the disinterest, I reckon).

Someone, somewhere, would place a different value on it, though. If I was able to offer it for sale - in a free market - the person who valued it most highly would be able to see the event and be just as ecstatic as I would be for receiving, say, a fiver for something I personally thought was worth nothing.

They might believe it's a steal as they were prepared to pay only half of the £87 asking price, but got it for a fiver. I'd be dead happy that I got £5 for something which wasn't absorbent enough for me to even find value by wiping my bum with.

If the organisers are so dead set against re-distributing the natural value of Olympics tickets - by way of brutal laws involving £20k fines, no less - how on Earth can they be surprised that they are left with empty seats all over the place?

The only possible result is that just about everyone is left unsatisfied. Except, oddly enough, the privileged and the rich who the rules were meant to frustrate in the first place.

Meanwhile, Mrs and Mr SportsFan are allowed to believe that it's a corporate failure, instead of a massive mistake by those who swallow our taxes and refuse to recognise that a free swapping of value could have put bums on many of those empty seats the BBC, and others, are scratching their muddled heads about.

The FIFA Poppy hoo ha - yeah but no but yeah

N.B. It's me, The P-G

Right. it's a while since I have had to come out of hiding to tell everyone what's what, but seeing as it is Armistice Day today and it's been in the news, it's time I did so.

Here is your important P-G corrective for today. Repeat after me:

FIFA is right, but for the wrong reasons.
Jon Snow is wrong, but for the right reasons.

UPDATE
And just for the record, completeness and rather pleasing symettry,
Theresa May is wrong for the wrong reasons.

The right reason is that wearing a poppy is and must be a voluntary act of remembrance and thanksgiving to those who gave their lives in the defence of our freedom.

Thus, FIFA is right to object to a poppy being embroidered on the England players shirts - it destroys the voluntary nature of the act. They are wrong however to suggest that the wearing of a poppy is a political act.

Conversely Jon Snow expounds on the right reasons. Here he is in the linked article:

"Additionally there is a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism out there - 'He damned well must wear a poppy!'.

He is right to point this out. Those who declare that you MUST wear a poppy are wrong.
However, he is a tosspot for then refusing to wear the poppy. It is as though he thinks the "poppy fascists" have thereby tainted the poppy and he must rise above it. In this he is wrong.

So here's what should have happened:

• Once FIFA kicked up a stink, the FA - and for good measure the Duke of Cambridge - should have confirmed that the wearing of the poppy is voluntary and run up a batch of shirts without it.
• The players then make their own choice of shirt. If they choose the one with the poppy, it's clearly their own choice
• Wait for FIFA to try to take action against any player that does so choose...
  

Players get to wear the poppy, the FA avoids a row and stands up for the individual freedom - the defence of which is the whole flipping point - and FIFA gets to look stupid.
For good measure, just imagine the value of those original shirts with poppies: if players do stick their necks out, those shirts become extremely powerful symbols in support of the whole thing. Auction them off in aid of the Poppy Appeal and everyone really does win.

With this manacle, I thee wed

Over at the Commentator, Hannah Stuart has lauded Dave Cameron's plans to make forced marriage illegal.

In a speech on immigration today, Prime Minister David Cameron announced plans to criminalise forced marriage, a move that is likely to have a strong impact on tackling the wider issue of honour-based violence in this country.

Forced marriage should not be conflated with arranged marriage: individuals enter into arranged marriages voluntarily; whereas people forced into marriage are usually tricked into going abroad, physically threatened and/or emotionally blackmailed to do so.

No, Hannah—no, no, no!

One of the tendencies that we all used to excoriate NuLabour for was their mania for making law after law after law.

"Don't make more laws," we cried. "Just bloody well enforce the ones that we already have!"

The same is precisely true for this case. Much as I deplore forced marriages, the laws to tackle such things are already on the statute books: both kidnapping and slavery are illegal already (as defined in a number of different offences)—simply enforce the laws that we already have!

And I don't care whether this will help tackle the "wider issue of honour-based violence in this country": assault, rape and murder are already illegal—once again, simply enforce the laws that we already have!

Further, it will more shame the perpetrators of these, frankly, fucking horrible crimes to be tried as common criminals—seen to be no different from any other rapist or killer—rather than as martyrs to their own special law.

If you want to send a strong message to certain people that their barbaric cultures are not special, that their actions are not somehow exempt because it is part of their "traditions", then prosecute them to the full extent of the criminal law as it currently exists.

Prosecute them as rapists; prosecute them as women beaters; prosecute them as murders. But, for fuck's sake, don't introduce yet more special laws: charge and convict these scum under the existing laws, so that they understand that they are not exempt from the law of this land.

And, in the name of all that's unholy, Cameron, fulfil your own promises and start cutting some laws—not imposing more!

Yet more fantasy...

George Osborne: prat. [Yes, yes, I know—but he's not even worth a decent swearword.]

Yesterday, it was reported that little Georgie Osborne was pledging to "inject unspent money into capital projects".

The chancellor of the exchequer is working on pooling unspent money from across Whitehall to inject into extra capital projects to kickstart the economy, the Guardian has learned.

George Osborne has earmarked spending that Whitehall departments have failed to meet—further to a £500m pot already created by his Lib Dem colleagues—which will be redirected to "really useful projects, capital R, capital U," one Conservative cabinet minister told the Guardian.

Really? Well, tonight, the BBC has a rather different story to tell...

A council tax freeze in England will be extended to 2012/13 under plans to be unveiled by the chancellor on Monday.

The £805m move will be paid for by a Whitehall "underspend", aides said.

The government cannot force councils to freeze bills—but it is offering to give those which limit spending rises to 2.5% the money they need.

Wow. Thank goodness for that "underspend", eh?

But I thought that it was going to be spent on "capital projects"? Funnelling more money to councils in order to shore up their expenditure is not, by any definition, "capital projects".

In any case, as I pointed out somewhat vociferously yesterday, there is no fucking "underspend".

What "unspent money", George? Your Coalition has borrowed more money in the last year than any government in history; the structural deficit is bigger than ever, and you have reduced this country's debt by precisely bugger all.

Approximately £180 billion of the cash that you are burning through this year is money that you didn't have in the first place, you fucking cock.

Repeat after me, George: there is no "underspend", because you are overspending by about £500 million every damn day.

As it happens, I would rather that Georgie used the money to avert tax rises than squander it on a pointless high-speed rail link or a fucking statue of a giant ice-cream or something, but even so...

Not that desperate, then...

Via Timmy's Other Place, I see that a number of defence charities have turned down some £3 million donations.

Defence charities have snubbed the News of the World by refusing to accept millions of pounds in donations in protest at the alleged hacking of dead soldiers’ families’ phones.
...

Paul McNamara, the paper’s fomer defence correspondent, said he had to make “50 phone calls” to charities before Barnado's, the Forces Children's Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity agreed to take donations.

Timmy, of course, makes the obvious and ancient point that "money doesn't smell"...

Pecunia non olet*, after all.

What the people who used to run the paper did is one thing and that the paper has now closed would seem to be at least in part a compensation for that. Yet that last issue of the paper did raise £3 million for charity and it’s that money that is being refused.

Personally I’d take money from pretty much anywhere, judging neither the source nor the reason for donating, looking purely at the good that could be done with it. Clearly it’s me that’s out of step though.

These charities may well be snubbing the News of the World but it is the beneficiaries themselves who will suffer—you know, those brave troops who are supposedly the raisin d'être of these organisations.

I don't know how many wounds could be stitched up for £3 million—or how many prosthetic limbs, or psychological counselling sessions—but I bet it's a lot.

It's so fucking pointless too: if these charities had any common sense they would have taken the money as compensation for the damages done to their clients by the News of the Screws—you know, like the damages payments that those assorted pointless s'lebs got out of the paper—which the charities were keeping in trust in order to try to right the wrongs done by these evil people, blah, blah, etc. (Do be careful not to condemn the government that sent your brave beneficiaries off to die on the basis of total lies at this point, of course.)

The most egregious thing is that, apparently, charity funding is being colossally squeezed and, we are told, any moment now, hundreds of charities will collapse and millions will starve on the streets. At best.

But, apparently, these defence charities can afford to turn down £3 million that could have helped awful lot of people; obviously, they cannot spend their funds fast enough or something...?

And just remember, next time that any of these organisations tell some tragic story in order to solicit a tenner from you, they turned down £3 million from News International—which makes them either stupid or wasteful.

Either way, it means they'll get nothing from me...

Jill Duggan: epic FAIL

Jill Duggan: "I open my mouth, and rubbish pours out..."

Today seems to be the day for car-crash media, so let us move on from Charlie Sheen and cross over to Australia, where they are having something of a debate about whether to introduce a cap and trade carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), similar to the one that has lined the pockets of government bureaucrats and transnational corporations in Europe.

Generally speaking, the Aussies are not overly keen on making everything more expensive on the unproven threat of Armaggeddon: they are also up in arms about the fact that the government is about to spend millions of Australian tax dollars on a softening up exercise marketing campaign to "inform" Australians about the scheme.

All of this you can hear in this Australian radio show, broadcast on the 9th of March and featuring Andrew Bolt.

The highlight (and I use that word advisedly), however, is the interview with a British woman called Jill Duggan.

You probably haven't heard of Jill Duggan before, but she is an EU apparatchick who is responsible, amongst other things, for Britain's ETS.

And she gets absolutely slapped, politely but repeatedly. I have an MP3 [2MB] of the relevant section, thanks to His Ecclesiastical Eminence, who describes Duggan's performance thusly...

The Australians who are conducting the interview are worried that perhaps an ETS is not such a good idea.

Having heard the interview you will understand why they feel this way—Duggan's performance is truly catastrophic, with our the woman from Whitehall apparently unable to quantify either the costs or the benefits of the scheme she runs. It's hilarious, toe-curling and utterly compelling.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the Rolls Royce minds that run the UK these days.

Just in case you are unwilling or unable to listen to this epic failure from this idiot, thieving EU moron, via The Englishman, you can read the transcript of the whole interview in Andrew Bolt's Herald Sun column—I have reproduced some of the best bits below...

Jill Duggan is from the European Commission's Directorate General of Climate Action. She is the EC's National Expert on Carbon Markets and Climate Change. She was head of Britain's International Emissions Trading. She is in Australia to tell us how good Europe's emission trading system is and why we should do something similar [PDF].

No one, therefore, should better know the answers to the two most basic questions about this huge scheme. The cost? The effect?.

Well, you might think that, Andrew, but obviously you haven't had many dealings with the EU before: as Strange Stuff has eloquently pointed out, the EU doesn't give two shits about cost (after all, it's not as though the EU Commission have to answer to the electorate, member governments or anyone else, for that matter) and nothing is going to stop them carrying out batshit insane ideas regardless of whether those policies will achieve the stated aims or simply beggar everyone in Europe.

Andrew Bolt: Can I just ask; your target is to cut Europe's emissions by 20% by 2020?

Jill Duggan: Yes.

AB: Can you tell me how much—to the nearest billions—is that going to cost Europe do you think?

JD: No, I can't tell you but I do know that the modelling shows that it's cheaper to start earlier rather than later, so it's cheaper to do it now rather than put off action.

AB: Right. You wouldn't quarrel with Professor Richard Tol—who's not a climate sceptic—but is professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin? He values it at about $250 billion. You wouldn't quarrel with that?

JD: I probably would actually. I mean, I don't know. It's very, very difficult to quantify. You get different changes, don't you? And one of the things that's happening in Europe now is that many governments—such as the UK government and the German government—would like the targets to be tougher because they see it as a real stimulus to the economy.

AB: Right. Well you don't know but you think it isn't $250 billion.

JD: I think you could get lots of different academics coming up with lots of different figures.

AB: That's right. You don't know but that's the figure that I've got in front of me. For that investment. Or for whatever the investment is. What's your estimation of how much—because the object ultimately of course is to lower the world's temperatures—what sort of temperature reduction do you imagine from that kind of investment?

JD: Well, what we do know is that to have an evens chance of keeping temperature increases globally to 2°C—so that's increases—you've got to reduce emissions globally by 50% by 2050.

AB: Yes, I accept that, but from the $250 billion—or whatever you think the figure is—what do you think Europe can achieve with this 20% reduction in terms of cutting the world's temperature? Because that's, in fact, what's necessary. What do you think the temperature reduction will be?

JD: Well, obviously, Europe accounts for 14% of global emissions. It's 500 or 550 million people. On its own it cannot do that. That is absolutely clear.

AB: Have you got a figure in your mind? You don't know the cost. Do you know the result?

JD: I don't have a cost figure in my mind. Nor, one thing I do know, obviously, is that Europe acting alone will not solve this problem alone.

AB: So if I put a figure to you—I find it odd that you don't know the cost and you don't know the outcome—would you quarrel with this assessment: that by 2100—if you go your way and if you're successful—the world's temperatures will fall by 0.05°C? Would you agree with that?

JD: Sorry, can you just pass that by me again? You're saying that if Europe acts alone?

AB: If just Europe alone—for this massive investment—will lower the world's temperature with this 20% target (if it sustains that until the end of this century) by 0.05°C. Would you quarrel with that?

JD: Well, I think the climate science would not be that precise. Would it?

AB: Ah, no, actually it is, Jill. You see this is what I'm curious about; that you're in charge of a massive program to re-jig an economy. You don't know what it costs. And you don't know what it'll achieve.

Let me just underline this point for you: Jill Duggan—the arsehole who is theoretically in charge of this enormously expensive ETS programme—does not know what the costs are, nor the supposed benefits.

That's a pretty stunning admission, isn't it?

After all, regardless of whether one believes in the whole catastrophic anthropogenic climate change theory (CACC), surely any steps that we do or do not take should be properly assessed?

Let's imagine that CACC is real and we need to act: well, given that premise, we need whatever we do to be effective, and to be as low cost as possible. And we should do that by means of a quantifiable cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Without an effective CBA, you could be pissing many billions of pounds up the wall whilst absolutely not achieving your aims at all.

Which is, of course, precisely what has happened with the EU ETS.

But it gets worse (believe it or not)...

JD: Well, I think you can look at lots of modelling which will come up with lots of different costs.

AB: Well what's your modelling? That's the one that everyone's quoting. What's your modelling?

JD: Well, ah, ah. Let me talk about what we have done in Europe and what we have seen as the benefits. In Europe, in Germany you could look at, there's over a million new jobs that have been created by tackling climate change, by putting in place climate policies. In the UK there's many hundreds of thousand of jobs.

Jill, Jill, Jill: even if this were true—and I know that Timmy will be proud of me for pointing this out—jobs are a COST not a fucking benefit, you moron.

But, unfortunately for Jill, it is not true, as Andrew Bolt is swift to point out.

AB: Actually, that's not right, is it? I just saw research. Did you see this? It came last week. Verso Economics saying that, for example, in Scotland the investment in green power has cost 3.7 jobs for every one green job created [BBC link inserted by me—DK]. And there are similar figures; I'm looking at Italy here, Germany, Spain. They're all the same figures.

One can almost hear darling Jill physically reeling as she is slapped down once again. But she's got her script and she's going to stick to it... [Emphasis mine.]

JD: They're not all the same figures. You can pick figures to support any argument. What I'm saying is that the experience in Europe is we've done things well and we've had some things which we wish we'd done differently at the start. The impact on the economy has been that it has stimulated growth in jobs that will last. It's not been noticeable in the impact on households. Not compared to gas and oil prices and the impact that they have on households. And that we actually have governments in Europe including the UK, Germany and France who are asking for tougher targets now. Now governments aren't in the business of trying to undermine their economies. They want their economies to grow. If the UK, Germany and France did not believe that this was good for their economies and good for the planet they would not be asking for tougher targets.

Really? Andrew Bolt is sceptical (to put it mildly) and comes in for the kill—using a brilliant tone of naive wonder...

AB: I wish I could believe that. We’re talking about a region—Europe—that has unemployment at 10% and a growth forecast this year of 1.6%. I don’t know what we could learn from Europe actually.

Boom! If Jill hadn't been struggling before—and she was—she could hardly bounce back from that. And sure enough, she just wibbles on about nothing until she is unceremoniously cut off.

But Jill Duggan's statesmanlike assurance delighted at least one listener, who was moved to call in...

Paul: Where do I donate money to get this interview published? Can it be an advert? Can it be run during "An Inconvenient Truth"? Please, I’m praying, where do I give money?

Let us hope that Jill Duggan realises that she is now an international laughing stock and slinks quietly away to cry in her room. Maybe she will even be moved to slit her wrists in a warm bath.

Do go and listen to the interview [2MB]—listen out particularly for the bit where poor Jill is rendered utterly speechless—and reflect on the major point here: this woman and her EU colleagues have committed the people of Europe to a colossally expensive programme without, apparently, doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.

Or, if they have done a CBA, they are so incompetent that have sent someone who doesn't know those figures to lecture Australians about how wonderful this ET scheme is.

It would be funny if it wasn't costing us billions of pounds...

Ed Miliband: which losers flushed his head down the loo?

Your humble Devil has been taking a well-earned, enjoyable rest from the sordid, depressing shit-pit that is British politics, and so it was The Appalling Strangeness who alerted me to the fact that David Miliband had admitted that he was a total loser.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has revealed he was a "bit square" as a youth, eschewing drugs and under-age drinking.

In a GQ magazine interview with Piers Morgan, he said his greatest talent was being "good at the Rubik's Cube".

Really? I reckon that Ed cheated by taking the stickers off and putting them back in the desired places. And he probably had to get his mummy to help him with that.

Asked if he had ever been in a fight, he said: "Well, I may have been hit a few times. I went to a tough school."

Oh, I bet you had your head flushed down the loo a few times, eh? Although not enough to drown you like an unwanted kitten, apparently.

The wonder here is that Ed makes David "Batshit"* Miliband look cool—well, relative to his idiot brother that is. And yet David Miliband is actually so massively wonkish and uncool that he makes everyone in the world want to beat him up behind the bike sheds.

Alas, the poor little Greek boy's blog is no longer publically available, so I must delve into my own archives to find Mr Eugenides' classic summing up of David Miliband's status in life.

David Miliband is the sort of guy that we used, in our un-PC schooldays, to describe as a spastic. He was the kid on the chess team that you bullied incessantly (or at least, you did if you were a bully when you were at school; I myself was, er, on the chess team). His is an eminently punchable face; the sort of face you want to grab and hold down in the toilet for flush after gleeful flush, roaring with joy that there are such geeks in the world for you to torment.

But David never stood up and described himself as "square": Ed Miliband has just done so, immediately putting himself lower down the pecking order than his loathsome brother.

So, if David Miliband was "the kid on the chess team that you bullied incessantly" then where does that put Ed Miliband? That's right, Ed Miliband was obviously the twat that the chess team bullied.

In short, Ed Miliband was at the bottom of the pecking order: in fact, I imagine that he was the only boy that it was considered acceptable for David "chess club" Miliband to bully.

Which puts a neat little spin on their relationship, don't you think...?

* Note for newer readers: "batshit" as in "batshit insane". Your humble Devil first used this term to describe Miliband back in July 2006, when the speccy tit was proposing "personal carbon points": it was Dave himself who immortalised it when he quoted my post at The New Statesman New Media Awards a few days later. David Miliband's involvement with the preservation of actual bats, whilst at DEFRA, led to the adoption of Batshit as his name and accompanying tag here at the Kitchen. I have yet to decide on a suitably mocking name for Ed, though "Beaker" is definitely in the running...

Suggestions in the comments, please.

Welcome to the stupid

The fact that arts students possess almost no conception of science is a regular joke amongst those of us who have actually studied hard sciences, and so one doesn't have high hopes for any magazine the tagline of which is "Arts. Culture. Spirit".

Even so, this piece of ignorance—spotted by new environmental blog Haunting The Library—is quite brilliant.

The entire planet is affected by global warming, and polar bears in Antarctica aren’t the only ones facing changes.

Indeed. Because polar bears don't actually live in the Antarctic—they are exclusive to the Arctic. If polar bears are moving to the Antarctic, then that would certainly entail a great deal of change.

But they aren't. So, Chronogram magazine wins the Pig-Ignorant Loser Of The Day award.

Well done!

Of course, one shouldn't be too hard on the poor dears—after all, one of the main reasons that the whole Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change (CACC) fraud has so captured the imagination is that those who report on it in the media have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

As both your humble Devil and the eminent Bishop Hill have reported a number of times, the BBC, for one, seems to be extremely short of reporters who are actually trained in science.

Iain Dale says "all your business are belong to the state"

Iain Dale is complaining about Chris Grayling's contention that B&B; owners—though not hotel owners—should be free to reject gay couples (even though Grayling voted for the legislation that prohibits this. A Tory MP who is a massive hypocrite—who'da thunk it?).

Now, Iain can fight the corner of his own little vested interest all he likes—and, let's face it, he's never pretended to be a libertarian—but he calls this so wrong that it's worth giving his wee face a little slapping.

I fundamentally disagree with him on the main issue. This is not about property rights. If you open your house to paying guests, it is no longer just your house.

BOOM! Wrong! This is why libertarians fundamentally disagree with the smoking ban, whether they be smokers or not: because a pub is, in fact, a private business.

You are running a business, just the same as anyone else, and you should be subject to the same laws as anyone else.

Sure. But maybe—just maybe—businesses should not be bound by these laws either. Ever considered that, Iain?

If you do not wish gay people, black people, Jews or anyone else in your house, don't open it to the public. Simple as that. No one would accept a shopowner refusing to serve a particular type of person, would they?

No, Iain. And that's why public opinion is rather more important than the law. These days, a shop that displayed a sign saying "no blacks, no poofs and no Etonians" would be boycotted by anyone who isn't a colossal bigot. Now, it might be that a large proportion of the British public are bigots, but...

... perhaps you should leave the decision to individuals, rather than slapping blanket laws of people to force them to live by your personal morals.

Now, to a dedicated statist like Iain Dale this is, of course, unconscionable. The state should force private businesses to behave like Iain wants them to—in short, that private businesses should belong to the state (as long, of course, as that state is run by the party that Iain hero-worships).

Get a grip, Iain: businesses are private entities, just as individuals are. In fact, they are recognised as private individuals in the law that you are suddenly so fond of.

And so, once again, Iain Dale shows himself to be an oppressor of individuals' rights, and a statist of the most disgusting type—a man who claims that he believes in personal freedom, except when your morals are opposed to his. In which case, of course, he will use violence to ensure that—at least outwardly—you agree with him.

Wake up! Freedom means tolerating those things that you dislike, as well as those things that you do like.

Iain Dale has failed that test—and not for the first time.

UPDATE: for the benefit of commenter Phil Dickens, here is a brief 101 on how libertarianism applies to this case.

• The central tenet of libertarianism is the non-aggression axiom: that is "you shall not initiate force or fraud against someone's life, liberty or property".


• Inherent in this is a strong belief in property rights—your body is considered to be your property and, thus, so is your liberty and the property that you have justly acquired through the application of your life and liberty.


• The shop that you run is your property. Anyone who tells you how your shop should be run is infringing on your property rights, thus violating the non-aggression axiom.


• Blacks, gays and Etonians do not have a right to buy stuff from your shop—you do have the right to refuse to serve them. It would make you a bit of a shit, but that is, nonetheless, the case.


• The disgusted community do not have the right, for instance, to show its displeasure by throwing bricks through your window. It does have the right to boycott your shop because of your unpleasant ideas; nothing says that anyone must buy from you, or give you their money, and they can refuse to buy from you and thus make your business fail.

Of course, someone might set up a rival shop, selling anything to anyone—they will not be closing off a large section of the market as the bigot is. That person might be, for instance, an Asian who also happens to work harder than the bigot; the Asian thus not only serves the whole market, but also prices his goods more cheaply—money talks and people go to his shop and realise that maybe these Asian fellows are not the demons that they've been painted as.

The Asian's shop thrives, whilst the bigot's becomes less and less frequented. Indeed, as the Asian community grows bigger and the surrounding community less fearful of the interlopers—realising that Asian people are, in fact, humans just like them—the Asian shopkeeper starts to branch out. Instead of stocking only traditional corner-shop goods, the Asian shopkeeper starts to import the exotic fruits and vegetables that he is used to in his land of origin.

The Asian community start to flock to his shop and the indigenous community start, slowly but with increasing momentum, to discover the diversity of foods out there. Instead of buying the usual carrots, potatoes and other earthy vegetables, the wider community starts being introduced to mangoes, okra, sweet pumpkin, taro and other assorted delicacies.

People also start being introduced to new ways to cook things—the concept of "curry", for instance, might become so ubiquitous that it's almost seen as something indigenous. Further people who might never have become curious about far away places are, as travel becomes cheaper (partly as a result of enterprising Asians taking holidays back to their countries of origin), able to visit these places and further appreciate the culture that the Asian shopkeeper has come from.

And so on and so forth...

At the end of all this, the community has become enriched, by trade and the interaction of human beings—not by laws handed down from on high and enforced by violence. In the meantime, of course, the bigot's shop has long gone bust, and the bitter old cunt has joined the BNP.

UPDATE 2: more on this by the Libertarian Party's Head of Policy.

Rats are not people

(nb. I am not the Devil's Kitchen)

Christ, The Daily Telegraph usually waits until the end of the week to publish this kind of trash...

Junk food 'as addictive as heroin and smoking'

Here we go then...

Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found laboratory rats became addicted on a bad diet just like people who became dependent on cocaine and heroin.

Did they really? Well, here's some news: rats are not people, so fuck off.

While the findings cannot be directly transferred to human obesity, it found that overconsumption of high-calorie food triggered addiction-like responses in the brain.

But the study, published online in Nature Neuroscience, suggests for the first time that our brains may react in the same way to junk food as it does to drugs.

For the first time? I don't think so, sunshine. That's dopamine you're talking about there. It's a neurotransmitter that rewards pleasure and we've known that it gets released naturally by eating food for many, many years. 

Dr Paul Kenny, a neuroscientist who led the research, said the study, which took nearly three years to complete [the experiment lasted 40 days - TFS], confirmed the "addictive" properties of junk food.

"Obesity may be a form of compulsive eating,” he said.

What the hell does that mean? Obesity is a physical characteristic. Compulsive eating is an activity. Compulsive eating may lead to obesity. It's not a form of obesity.

"The new study explains what happens in the brain of these animals when they have easy access to high-calorie, high-fat food.”

You are, are you not, the same Dr Paul Kenny who was banging on about this last year in the, er, Daily Telegraph? Alright then, you publicity hungry rat-fucker, let's hear about your little experiment.

In the study, the research team divided the animals into three groups.

One got normal amounts of healthy food to eat, another was given restricted amounts of junk food and the third had unlimited amounts of cheesecake, fatty meat products, cheap sponge cakes and chocolate snacks.

There were no adverse effects on the first two groups. But the rats which ate as much junk food as they wanted quickly became very fat and started bingeing.

You don't say. You gave unlimited tasty, high calorie food to a bunch of stupid rodents and they ate it and got fat. Thank God for scientists.

Since you can't believe a word ill-informed Telegraph hacks say about scientific research, it's necessary to read the actual study. In it, you'll find that the first group was given nothing but standard, unappetizing laboratory chow pellets to eat. The other two groups were given what the researchers tellingly describe as "palatable food"—or the "cafeteria diet"—which consisted of "bacon, sausage, cheesecake, pound cake, frosting and chocolate." One of these groups had 1 hour's access a day, the other group had 18 to 23 hours access.

When researchers electronically stimulated the part of the brain that feels pleasure, they found the rats on unlimited junk food needed even more stimulation to register the same level of pleasure as the animals on healthier diets.

Yeah, after 40 days of feeding them sugary puddings that have no place being in a rodent's diet and would never be in a human's diet at anything approaching that level. But they also found (not mentioned in any news reports)...

Consistent with previous reports, there was a tendency for consumption of the cafeteria diet to decrease over time in the extended-access rats. This may reflect the development of tolerance to the palatability of the food items provided as part of the cafeteria diet over time.

In other words, the rats got bored of eating nothing but bacon and high-fat desserts, got less pleasure from doing so and—despite unrestricted access—ate less of them. Hardly "as addictive as heroin" that, is it?

"They always went for the worst types of food and as a result, they took in twice the calories as the control rats,” said Dr Kenny.

The worst food being the "palatable" food, yes? You'd be eating the laboratory chow, I presume, Dr Kenny?

"When we removed the junk food and tried to put them on a nutritious diet – what we called the 'salad bar option' [laboratory chow - TFS] – they simply refused to eat."

"The change in their diet preference was so great that they basically starved themselves for two weeks after they were cut off from junk food."

This statement is—there is no other word for it—a complete lie, unless the good doctor chose not to mention it in his study, where it merely states that...

After 40 days, rats were no longer permitted access to the palatable diet but continued to have ad libitum access to standard laboratory chow... There was a marked decrease in caloric intake and a gradual decrease in body weight in extended access rats.

Nothing there about the rats "simply refusing to eat" or "basically starving themselves". If the scientist can't describe what happened in his own experiment, what chance has some twat from The Telegraph got?

The scientists fed the rats a diet modelled after the type that contributes to human obesity: easy to obtain high-calorie, high-fat foods. Soon after the experiments began, the animals began to bloat.

Let's say it one more time. Rats are not human beings. Rats might be intelligent by the pitiful standard of other rodents but, let's face it, they're still incredibly fucking stupid. If you give unlimited cocaine to a rat it will be dead within days because it will forget to eat, drink or sleep. Even the worst coke-heads don't do that, because they belong to the most intelligent and self-aware species on earth.

Unlike rats, we know that over-eating will make us fat and unattractive. We know that eating nothing but chocolate is unhealthy. Unlike rats, we have to pay for our food. Unlike rats, our dietary choices are more sophisticated than a toss up between chocolate cake and chow pellets. 

Above all, we have free will. The trouble with neuroscientists is that they spend so much time dicking around with mice and rats that they start to think that human behaviour is as easy to predict and manipulate as that of pea-brained vermin. The same mentality has infected the medical establishment, who view the population as rats and themselves as scientists in control of a giant experiment. Restrict access here, provide incentives there and, bingo, behaviour can be manipulated in whichever way they wish. Idiots.

All this experiment shows, for the umpteenth time, is that pleasurable activities produce dopamine. Or as Leg-Iron puts it:

The results prove only that rats have a sense of taste and smell, and don't like the crap they are routinely fed. It's junk science.

The frequent references to cocaine and heroin are there purely to allow excitable journalists to declare that tasty palatable 'junk' food is as addictive as hard drugs which—and this fact that has not gone unnoticed by the obesity crusaders—are illegal. It is the same line used by cranks like John Banzhaf and David Kessler (both former anti-smoking campaigners, incidentally. Enjoying that slippery-slope yet, nonsmokers?) 

Similarly, references to "easy access to high-calorie, high-fat food" are there only to encourage scum-bag politicians to clamp down on what and when we can eat, as if giving rats endless high calorie snacks for 40 days and 40 nights is comparable to having a McDonalds down the road. 

From the study itself:

Ease of access and consequent overeating of cafeteria-style diets in humans is considered an important environmental contributor to the current obesity epidemic in Western societies.

Geddit? Sentences like that don't appear in scientific journals by accident. And how well the media have responded, with much more to come later in the day, I'm sure...

Bad diet is like a drug habit say scientists (The Mirror)

Revealed: Junk food is just as addictive as drugs (Daily Record)

Junk Food Is As Addictive As Heroin (preventdisease.com)

The stage is set. By now, you should know what to expect.

Cosmo: stupid name, stupid guy

Cosmo Landesman in the Times has a very silly pop at smokers. There's not much of originality in there—mostly it's the usual bitching about butts and smells—but there are a couple of sentences worth pulling out.

I notice that right-wing critics of the nanny state never call for the legalisation of drugs on the grounds that adults should be free to choose to be addicts or not.

Er... I do. Indeed, I was at Exeter University last week, giving a speech advocating that very thing.

When it comes to choice, we demand to be left alone; but when our choice leads to cancer or liver failure we demand that the state — in the form of the NHS — takes care of us.

Er... I don't. I have private health insurance. It costs me about £51 per month for the very best cover that they could offer me. And, interestingly, Cosmo, the fact that I smoke does not affect my premiums.

Some years ago, I was researching what my National Insurance premiums cost versus what those same services would cost privately. Inevitably—and even at the lower wage that I was then earning—taking out private insurance for medical care and unemployment, and paying into a private pension cost far less than the NICs*.

However, when talking to the insurance rep—to whom I had given the background of my research—I got a quote (which was based, mainly, on my age) and asked whether the fact that I was a heavy smoker (a fact that I had to volunteer) made a difference to the premium.

The answer was that, no, it didn't: basically, because I was likely to die earlier—even if I needed treatment for a smoking related disease—such treatment was likely to be considerably cheaper than having to spend years in a nursing home. Oh, and the insurance companies also recognised that there was an inverse correlation between smoking and Alzheimer's (one of the most expensive diseases as far as insurance companies are concerned).

Just thought I'd share that with you...

But the idea that we are living in a Britain where personal freedoms are curtailed as never before seems bizarre. I never hear young people complain about the nanny state. Why? Because they’re all out of their heads on booze or stoned on weed and having a wonderful time.

Uh huh. Which is why such a high proportion of the Libertarian Party is made up of people under 30.

And being consistently sober is tedious and stressful. Which is why, when you ban various drugs, it doesn't stop people taking those drugs, or looking for legal alternatives—such as the hilariously named "meow meow".

So, tell you what, Cosmo: you fuckers let me opt out of the state healthcare system entirely—let me keep my NICs and stick with my private insurance—and I'll not be a burden on your precious NHS.

Except, of course, that isn't going to happen, is it? Because, for all your whining, National Insurance is a fucking Ponzi Scheme and it is actually my subs that are going to pay for your treatment.

So shut the fuck up.

* There are caveats that I'm sure A&E; Charge Nurse will, no doubt, point out. However, my medical insurance premium could double and I would still be paying less for those three services privately than I am under NICs.

Michael Foot: bollocks

Look, one doesn't want to come over as too curmudgeonly, but why this sudden outpouring of gushing tributes now the silly sod's dead? Here's Iain Dale, for instance...

Michael Foot has died at the ripe old age of 96. Whatever one's politics, he was a true political great.

What. The. Fuck?

If you don't understand why I am so incredulous at these tributes, perhaps you'll bear with me whilst I indulge in a little melodramatic editing of Iain's words.

Joseph Stalin has died at the ripe old age of 75. Whatever one's politics, he was a true political great.

Or...

Adolph Hitler has died at the tragically young age of 56. Whatever one's politics, he was a true political great.

Whatever else you want to say about me, my politics are born of a conviction that freedom is not only practically the best outcome for mankind, but is morally right too.

What this means is that I despise those—like Hitler and Stalin—who believe that, actually, individuals should be shackled by the state and their rights and freedoms subsumed to that greater purpose: I not only think that they are practically wrong but that they are also morally suspect (at best).

The Nameless Libertarian maintains that Foot was an idiot.

Foot was a man of deep principle and passionate idealism.

Of course, what Foot believed in was abject nonsense. It was the sort of cliched left-wing bilge that should be abandoned once someone moves beyond the naive surroundings of student union politics. His ideas were soundly - and rightly - rejected by the British people in 1983.

And yes, it would be excellent if the politicians of today had such deep commitment to their political ideals.

I do have such a commitment.

And that is why I believe that—great orator or not—Michael Foot does not deserve any gushing tributes at all: he was one of those people who believed that the wider community (represented by the state) had a right enslave the individual.

Thus, Michael Foot was not only a stupid man, but an evil one too.

As such, it would pay one to be deeply suspicious of any person who espouses freedom with one breath, whilst praising Foot—or any other socialist—with the next.

UPDATE: it is, of course, entirely possible that I have called this one wrong. Dan Hannan, for instance, seems to believe that Foot was a reasonable man.

True heir to the English radical tradition, he had little time for “-isms” of any sort, and was one of the few Lefties of his generation never to have flirted with either Mussolini or Stalin. Although he was wrong about many things – his economic policy would have ruined us every bit as comprehensively as Gordon Brown’s wastrel clottishness – he got the big issues right, eschewing fascism, Communism and Euro-integrationism as intrinsically un-English doctrines.

As you like, really. But I won't be weeping any bitter tears for the man's passing, frankly.

The Pirate Party: contradictory morons

A number of people have asked me why—apart from the fact that I am the leader of another political party—I do not support the Pirate Party, so I thought that I would discuss this quickly with reference to their headline aims.

We have 3 core policies:

• Reform copyright and patent law. We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing and reduce the excessive length of copyright protection, while ensuring that when creative works are sold, it's the artists who benefit, not monopoly rights holders. We want a patent system that doesn't stifle innovation or make life saving drugs so expensive that patients die.


• End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.


• Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

Let's take these one by one, shall we?

We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing...

Look, this is a contract law issue. I have taken a random CD down from my shelf—Morcheeba's Big Calm, as it happens—and printed, quite clearly, on the back of the CD (not on the inside, but on the outside back) are the following words:

Unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, public performance and broadcasting of this recording prohibited.

These same words are printed onto the CD itself.

This is a contract. I buy the CD and I can listen to the music, but I shall not copy, broadcast, hire or lend the recording—nor will I indulge in any public broadcast of same. In any case, I have signed up to a contract by buying the CD, and I am bound by that contract—this isn't a very difficult concept.

Now, one can argue that there should be—as in the US—a "fair use" clause that allows me to copy the CD onto my iPod, or computer, or whatever. But uploading and sharing it—for free—with others? No.

Is the above contract unfair? Possibly. But then I didn't have to buy the CD—I won't die in agony if I don't have Morcheeba's soothing tones to calm my once drug-addled brain. As with anything else, if I don't like the contract I can refuse to buy the product.

... and reduce the excessive length of copyright protection...

There is definitely a case for this. With the

caveat

that I shall come to later on.

... while ensuring that when creative works are sold, it's the artists who benefit, not monopoly rights holders.

And if the artists are the monopoly rights holders? Which, of course, they would be.

I think what the Pirate Party are trying to say here is that it is OK for the artists, maaaan, to be the rights holders, but not eeeeeeeevil corporations. Well, maybe so: but, once again, this is contract law, isn't it?

The artists sign up with the music corporations: those artists sign away the rights to their music (in whole or in part, in perpetuity or for a limited time) in return for fats wads of cash. In other words, the artist sells the (very slim) chance of future earnings in return for fat wads of cash now.

The artist is also getting marketing expertise, leverage, connections and all of the other things that give them some chance of making any money at all in the future. Some artists make it: the majority don't. In many cases, the music corporations lose money: in a few cases, they make millions.

Obviously, there are various subtleties and differences in the way that these contracts work but, fundamentally, it is a private contract between the artists and the music corporations.

It is certainly no business of the Pirate Party's. And that goes for any contracts—the terms of said contracts are none of the government's damn business. The Labour government should certainly not be ingratiating themselves with the music companies, nor should the criminal law be used to punish file-sharers. This is a civil issue—a contract issue.

We want a patent system that doesn't stifle innovation or make life saving drugs so expensive that patients die.

Riiiight. OK, there is something of a problem here and, once again, the Pirate Party are rather dishonestly conflating a number of issues. No one wants a patent system that stifles innovation—the very point of patents and copyright are to encourage people to innovate.

Patents and copyright allow inventors to be assured of getting money from their inventions so that they, or others, will go and invent other valuable things.

Now, in the US, the patent system is being heavily abused: there are companies that buy up smaller organisations simply for their patents. These patent "trolls" then break up and liquidate the company, and use the patents to get payouts from large corporations. These trolls are, quite obviously, a drain on society and a drain on innovation.

We do not have this same problem in this country, yet, because we do not have the same loony patent system as exists in the US. The EU has been attempting to bring one in, but they have so far failed. This is A Good Thing.

However, there are certain things that really do require patents to make money, and drug research is one of those things. As Timmy has consistently pointed out, by the time you take into account research and development, testing, several rounds of trials (on animals, and then humans) in varied jurisdictions, bureacratic barriers (such as the EU's REACH Directive) and other hurdles, the average drug takes some eight years and $1 billion to bring to market.

The patent on drugs is, I think, fourteen years. So, the drug companies have six years to make back at least $1 billion—more is needed if the other drugs that they are researching (many of which will yield nothing) are to be paid for. So, yes, the drugs are expensive. Much of this expense is absorbed by the USA (who tend to get them, and pay for them, first)—which is one reason why the US health system is so expensive.

This is why "Big Pharma" companies are so big—because small companies simply don't have the cashflow to bring drugs to market. I know a couple of people, both in Scotland as it happens, who run small companies doing research into a number of different drugs: when they find something, they sell the patent to Big Pharma because only Big Pharma have the money to bring those drugs to market.

Anyway, the point is that the short patent period is one of the reasons that drugs are so expensive—because there is only a short time to make back the vast costs of bringing said drug to market. So, one way of reducing the cost of said drugs would be to extend the patent period.

But the Pirate Party wants "a patent system that doesn't stifle innovation or make life saving drugs so expensive that patients die" and it also wants to "reduce the excessive length of copyright protection".

Er... Let's move on, shall we?

End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.

OK, I agree with this. Although I am not sure that the Pirate Party does, really. After all, they want surveillance of private contracts so that they can stop music corporations and artists making private deals that the Pirate Party doesn't like. But that might be pushing it slightly, so we shall move on...

Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech...

OK, I agree with this, totally.

... and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

Er... I'm sorry? Whose shared culture?

The Pirate Party originated in Sweden and whilst I am sure that the Swedes are lovely people, I don't know how much culture I share with them. I don't have a shared culture with the majority of people in this country, let alone Sweden.

And what if I don't want to share or participate in this shared culture? What if I want to sign my song rights over to a "monopoly-rights holder"? What if my culture is one of honouring property rights and contract law?

You can, Pirate Party people, stick your fucking shared culture up your collective arsehole, frankly.

So, let us sum up, shall we? The Pirate Party:

• supports "a strengthening of the right to privacy" except as far as your contract with a music company or other "monopoly-rights holder" is concerned.


• supports the breaking of voluntary contracts at one party's convenience thus undermining property rights (and why don't you go ask the Africans how well economies develop without property rights?).


• wants us all to participate in some imaginary "shared culture", unless that culture is one of property rights and contract law.


• wants to get cheaper medical drugs but supports measures that will make those drugs more expensive, and


• spouts some hippy shit about artists being able to make money (somehow) unless, presumably, the artist is a "monopoly-rights holder", or signs a contract that the Pirate Party doesn't happen to like the terms of.

Yeah, that sounds like an excellent party—let's go for that, eh?

The stupid thing is that, with the internet, much of what the Pirate Party wants is happening anyway: artists are becoming able to sell their music directly to their audiences and this trend will only increase. The music companies have been forced away from DRM and their sucking of Peter Mandelson's saggy old scrotum is the last gasp of an industry that is going to have to reform or die.

The simple fact is that the Pirate Party's outlined aims are nonsensical, interventionist and authoritarian; the party will happily ride roughshod over contracts and property rights that they don't happen to agree with—much as the Labour Party is doing with the bankers right now—and their attitude to drug development is utterly counterproductive.

So, whilst I support one or two aims of the Pirate Party—such as the right to free speech and the ending of tracking and surveillance of people—I find the rest of their policies, most especially their attitude to contracts, to be repugnant.

On the other hand, I imagine that I shall have a giggle whilst they annoy the fuck out of the rest of the political Establishment...

In a strop

Kevin Boatang (left) and John Demetriou: "I'm sorry, but I can't help noticing that we are considerably more libertarian than yeeeeoooow."

First, if anyone isn't interested in blogging flame wars, I suggest that you skip this post. If, however, you enjoy pseudonymous wankers throwing insults across the web at each other, then read on, dear chap, read on...

Anyway, I don't normally pay any attention to blogging minnows Boatang and Demetriou: not because they are blogging minnows, you understand, but because they are strident, tedious, can't write for shit and, moreover, appear to be vying for the Most Unpleasant Shits On The Interwebs Award.

However, they have been slagging me off quite vociferously recently—and slagging off LPUK—so I have felt it incumbent upon me to wade into the tedious cesspool that is their comment threads—threads usually characterised by one or other of these fractious fools telling perfectly reasonable people to "fuck off".

Another classic trope for Boaty & D (as they like to style themselves) is to maintain that they are, in fact, considerably more libertarian than yeeeooooow. Yes, yeeeooow. Which is why, of course, this pair of numpties spend the majority of their time slagging off libertarians and libertarian bloggers.

Unless, of course, they are just whoreing for visitors—which means that I have just fallen into their cunning trap. But fuck it, this is fun...

So, anyway, as you might imagine, this "more libertarian than yeeeooow" meme is somewhat tiring—especially since the both of them favour considerably more government intervention than I do (your humble Devil is, apparently, "an anarcho-capitalist extremist and possibly a feudalist") and I tend to favour optimum outcomes over pure libertarian ideals.

Still, ever eager to point out hypocrisy in those who set themselves up as leaders of men—as Boaty & D most certainly do—I thought it might be appropriate to highlight a thrilling piece of idiocy from Dumb-ty and Dumber-ty.

It starts with this gem, from J Demetriou, over at the gruesome twosome's place... [Emphasis mine.]

Seriously, we don't think we are the most libertarian out there, and all others less so. We are fucked off that libertarianism has been cornered, hijacked and exclusively defined by a small number of people on the hard right. We seek to expand what it means, not constrict it, and we don't have this 'you're not a libertarian' thing going on, as much as you keep arguing it.

And again, here's J Demetriou denying the truth with all the force of his wee lungs...

You've made the same 'mistake' (or is it more deliberate than that?) as DK. We do not think we are 'more libertarian than yeeeaoow', and we don't seek to arrogantly decide who is and who isn't libertarian.

I ask you to point out any evidence of where we have done that.

Which is weird. Because, you see, I have decided to pick up the gauntlet and... wait! What's this? Oh, on my bad-tempered union post below, the great J left the following comment.

You're no libertarian, you're a joker.

As I said, they are considerably more libertarian than yeeeoooow.

In fact, of course, JD is absolutely right: Boaty & D are not "the most libertarian out there"—they are barely libertarian at all. Which is why, of course, the great JD can post horseshit like this...

But all I see in the LPUK is AnCap [Anarcho-Capitalist] ideals and philosophy. I have not witnessed any reasonable minded, realistic compromise. It is all about destroying anything that vaguely sniffs of people coming together, and the state.

... and actually mean it. This man claims to have been a member of the LPUK and yet he has, apparently, never read the LPUK manifesto: the entire document is a compromise between true libertarianism (or even anarcho-capitalism) and real-world feasibility.

If LPUK were anarcho-capitalist then we most certainly wouldn't support a state-funded voucher system for schools, would we? And as many commenters here have pointedly pointed out, our immigration policy is very far from the open borders ideal of AnCap.

As for the idea that the party is "all about destroying anything that vaguely sniffs of people coming together"... Well, this is just laughable—as anyone who has had to sit through one of my enthusiastic lectures on Friendly Societies will, no doubt, testify.

Mind you, one can hardly expect clarity of thinking from bloggers who claim to be "minarchists" and simultaneously think that minarchism is somehow analogous to—or requires—democracy.

Still, they're pretty hot stuff at Boaty & D, as J Demetriou modestly attests...

At Boaty & D, we do things differently, and I would argue, much better. Much better than most.

"Differently"? I dunno... It looks like the same old ill-informed aggression and petty hypocrisy to me (of which the morsels above are but the tiniest examples).

But do Boaty & D do hypocrisy, aggression, ignorance, contradiction and vapidity "much better than most"?

You bet'cha!

Lord Tebbit: socking it to them...

It seems that I am very much going to enjoy Lord Tebbit's blogging efforts: today's post—snappily entitled Why won't the two main parties do anything about the madness of taxing the poor?—is one that I agree with whole-heartedly.

One particularly pithy line struck me as very neatly encapsulating something that I have been railing about for years.

It is madness to claim that people so poor that they need welfare payments are at the same time sufficiently well-off to pay income tax.

I like that line, and I suspect that I shall refer to quite often.

Anyway, do go and read the whole post: apart from being absolutely spot-on, it's rather well-written—direct, punchy, true and approximately 80 trillion miles from Call Me Spam's limp-wristed, touchy-feely eco-wibble.

Pater Devil speaks of Tebbit as "the best Prime Minister we never had" (often followed by a systematic cursing of the IRA); maybe the fact that Lord T has grasped this new media lark will encourage the Pater to engage with the world of the splenetic online rant...

UPDATE: some idiot commenter named London Gas (no link, so: Jan 13th, 2010 at 1:54 pm) has raised some objections at Lord T's post.

Your analysis is lacking some vigour. I earn a lot, my wife holds a noble position but earns little. We can claim no benefits. With a higher tax threshold we will gain under a scheme you are designing to help the poorest. How can that be right?

As you know, I like to be polite when guesting at other people's blogs, which is the only thing accounting for the restrained nature of my reply (Jan 13th, 2010 at 2:09 pm).

London Gas,

You do know that the Treasury takes voluntary tax donations too, don't you? You could simply send the money that you gain to: The Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. I am sure that you will feel much better for doing so, since you will be able to help the poor.

Alternatively, and as a better option, you could give what you gain to some charities that help the poor (you could even give some time too).

You do know, don't you, that you are allowed to help your fellow man without having to ask permission of the state; nor does the state have a monopoly on helping the poor.

Indeed, that is the point of Norm's excellent article: the state is actively, deliberately and perniciously harming the poor through the deliberately low Personal Tax Allowances of income tax and NI. Lord T would like to change that—as would I.

Are you really asking us to believe, because you might gain a little (which you could, as I have said, give away to the poor), that you support taxing people who don't even earn the National Minimum Wage?

Are you really supporting the current system under which the poor have their money extorted from them by the state, and must then become supplicants to that very same state in order to beg for some of it back?

I find that a very surprising attitude.

DK

I find London Gas's argument pretty repulsive—although it's hardly without precedent. His point boils down to "you can't stop shafting the poor because I might then be better off, even though—if I actually gave a shit in the way I pretend to—I could give any gains away to those self-same poor."

What a total fucknuts.

Heresy Corner has lost it

Yes, OK, I know that this is a guest post but that doesn't alter the fact that when your article starts out with something that's totally wrong, it really doesn't help the credibility of the rest of the post.

It was a Nobel prize-winning Swedish chemist by the name of Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927) was who first discovered the greenhouse effect. And it didn't take him long to conclude that burning coal (oil was just coming into widespread use as a fuel in the late 19th century) would cause a surprisingly strong increase in that effect. In other words, the earth would heat up.

Unfortunately, as we know, Arrhenius's theory was incorrect.

Never mind, let's plough on anyway.

Thousands of scientists from Arrhenius onwards could all be wrong and the world’s climate will not become substantially warmer. Suppose that's what happens—yet the government introduces measures to avert the catastrophe anyway. Would that be such a bad thing?

Oh look—it's the precautionary principle rolled out again! But the principle is here distorted because there are substantial costs involved in trying to avert this possible problem.

Because we know what measures the government wants to introduce and they will seriously constrict our freedom; further, they will make us all poorer—and poverty causes death. Especially in the Developing World.

Perhaps I am being unjust; after all, it may be that the author, Valdemar, feels that the deaths of millions of people is a price worth paying—although I doubt that Valdemar anticipates being one of those who are killed.

But if you do think that millions of deaths is a bad thing then "the government [introducing] measures to avert the catastrophe" which doesn't actually exist is probably not something that you'd support.

So the answer to Valdemar's question is, "yes, it would be a bad thing".

The rest of the piece is a sort of self-indulgent hate-piece about drivers: apparently driving is the root of all evil.

Did I hear some old reactionary ask about evidence-based policies? Well, I appeal to common experience. I can’t present a UN-sponsored scientific report to support my viewpoint, oddly enough. I just think that our car-based society is very effective at suppressing what has long been considered civilized behaviour. And I think we’ve lost something important; something nebulous, and certainly something that’s hard to quantify, but something real and good, nonetheless.

Or, to sum up, here's the shorter Valdemar:

I don't know what it is that we've lost, I have no evidence that we've lost it and I have no data on what might have caused us to possibly lose this thing that I can't define. Ergo driving is definitely evil.

Fucking hellski.

Fail.

Son of a gun!

One of the things that I have consistently maintained is that the criminal law should be reserved solely for those who have done harm to others—not potential harm. Indeed, under a libertarian government, the only criminal law should be...

No person shall initiate force or fraud against another's life, liberty or property.

Quite apart from the happy fact that this would allow us to imprison every single MP, it is only right that criminal sanctions—the removal of property or liberty from convicted offenders—are done in response to their initiation of force or fraud.

I bring this up again in order to point out that—under a libertarian legal system—a disgusting fucking injustice like this could never happen.

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty".
...

The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.

In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.

"I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.

"At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall."

Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.

Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke's garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly lower than his neighbours.

He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station, which included "reporting found firearms".

Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke, he asked: "Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police, or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it by telephone, and not take it into a police station?"

To which, Mr Garnett replied: "No, I don't believe so."

Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge – therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.

Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.

This is, of course, utterly irrelevant: the jury, had they had any balls whatsoever, should have returned a "not guilty" verdict—and they would have been perfectly within their rights to do so. They chose not to.

And now this man faces a minimum of five years in gaol—and not only was he doing "the right thing" but he had not initiated force or fraud against anyone. Do you see?

I can only echo the anguished and furious cries of bloggers such as Constantly Furious and Dick Puddlecote: seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this country?

The police behaved like utter, utter cunts and the jurors were disgustingly craven. But the people really at fault were the stupid, corrupt, piss-poor politicos who drafted this piece-of-shit law.

As usual, it is the politicos who are destroying this country—when do we rise up and hang the fucking lot of them?

UPDATE: the normally sensible Stuart Sharpe just doesn't get it. Oh, and he quite obviously hasn't bothered to read the news article either.

Thing is, I don’t see what the outrage is about. If you find a weapon in your garden, the correct thing to do is surely to leave it alone, call the police, and let them come and collect the weapon. Not to go traipsing down to the local police station and produce a shotgun in front of the startled receptionist with an Errol Flynn style flick of the wrist.

Besides, what kind of idiot discovers that a shotgun has been thrown into his garden – most likely being disposed of by a criminal – and goes and picks it up? Has he really never heard of fingerprinting?

So, here are a couple of facts that, it seems, Stuart couldn't be bothered to read:

1. Paul Clarke did not "produce a shotgun in front of the startled receptionist with an Errol Flynn style flick of the wrist": he phoned ahead to the Chief Superintendant and made an appointment; then, in an interview room, took the gun out of the plastic bin-liner.


2. The gun was found in a plastic bin-liner: that means that his handling could be, and probably was, minimal. In any case, fingerprints are actually quite difficult to remove because they are laid down in fats—even tried to clean your frying pans simply by wiping it with a cloth?
   
   As such, any fingerprints left by the original owner—provided said thug wasn't sensible enough to wear gloves—would not have been destroyed. As such, Mr Clarke's fingerprints would have been found but could be discounted.

But there is a wider issue here, and it concerns the role of the police. The seventh of the Peelian Principles of policing is:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

Under this fucking stupid law a policeman can handle a gun with impunity, but a citizen goes to prison for five years for doing so. This totally undermines the concept that the police are citizens and the citizens are the police: it undermines the Peelian Principles of good policing because it elevates the police above the level of ordinary citizen, paving the way for a police state (were we not effectively living in one anyway).

That is why Stuart's post is wrong at a fundamental level. On a more elementary level, as I said over at Sharpe's Opinion, anyone who thinks that someone should get five years in prison for being an "idiot" is simply not worth listening to on any level.

UPDATE 2: via Mark Reckons, here is a similar story from a few weeks ago—except that the finder was, in this case, told to take the gun to the police station himself.

A man who found a loaded gun linked to a gangland shooting was told by Scotland Yard to carry it across south London to a police station.

John Leary came across the weapon in a playground where it had been abandoned days after the crime. But the Met refused his request for a plain-clothes officer to collect it from his home.

Today the force admitted major failings over the matter.

Disabled Mr Leary, 51, found the weapon inside a plastic bag near his home on the Hemans estate in Stockwell. Speaking for the first time since the find, he said: "I was going to hang the bag on the railings until I felt its weight. When I looked inside there was a big revolver, a passport and some cash. It had a long barrel and I could see the chambers were loaded. There was no question of leaving it where kids play."

Immediately after finding the revolver he was confronted by gang members who tried to get him to hand it over. But he refused and called police.

Officers suggested they send a patrol car to his house, but he refused for fear of reprisals from the gang members who had seen him carry the bag away. "I told them it was more than my life was worth," said Mr Leary.

There's nothing like a consistent application of the law, eh?

UPDATE 3: a lot of people are suggesting that maybe the jury did not think that Paul Clarke's story was entirely believable. If that is the case, then it should have been reported; furthermore, he should have been charged with something other than simple possession of a firearm.

It is not good enough that justice be done: it must be seen to be done in a transparent way. Of course, since cameras are not allowed in our courts, we proles must rely on the press...