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October 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
 Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. October 21st, 2002 | Comments are closed
In response to the increasing public concern at the spiralling rate of violent crime, the Home Office, acting in concert with the Association of Police Chiefs, have prepared this pamphlet containing advice and guidelines that will help you and your family avoid becoming victims of violent crime. Further, and as a direct result of the high number of complaints from members of the public about slow police response times, we have established the Crime Reaction Emergency Team Initiative Networks (CRETINS), a specially constituted force tasked with providing a swift and effective response to emergency calls from members of the public in danger. The most important step to take in order to avoid being a victim of crime is to ensure that you live in abject poverty. A number of government studies have proved that most criminals are motivated by the desire to obtain other people’s possessions by force. Whilst having no possessions at all cannot guarantee your safety, the less you have, the less criminals can steal from you. However, if you have been careless enough to amass material wealth, the following helpful tips listed below may be of some assistance. → Continue reading: A Guide to Self-Defence in the UK October 21st, 2002 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
And British eyes are crying. The Irish have voted ‘yes’ in the second referendum on endorsing the Nice Treaty. Depressing, but predictable given the weight of the government support and the quantity of EU bribe money behind the ‘yes’ campaign. I don’t suppose a ‘no’ vote would have scuppered the EU or even slowed it down in any material sense, but it would have dented their own sense of inevitability. Seems now that resistance is, indeed, futile. The bad guys are winning. Bugger. October 20th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I went on a random blogwalk, as you do at Sunday lunchtime if you live alone and are still wearing your pyjamas, and came across The Spleenville Journal – A Subsidiary of Spleenville World Domination Enterprises. Aaah, world domination … First reaction: nice looking, witty, a fine answer to what Michael of the 2Bs was saying about envy and aesthetics, see here, I should tell the 2Bs. Anyway I scroll down, and find this. Everyone has already been introduced, and here’s me introducing them to each other all over again. Imagine. But, it’s all being done so loudly and pretentiously that all you little people out there can’t possibly miss who we all are. October 20th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael, one of the Two Blowhards, has a great … well he calls it a “rant”, but all I take that to mean is that it took him only ten minutes to write it. Whatever it is, it’s very good and very true, and is about the inadequacy of envy as the explanation of leftism. Michael offers another:
Michael is kind enough to exclude Natalie Solent and our good selves (“slyness, elegance and perversity”) from these critical generalisations. If they haven’t already the Blowhards should also have a read of the sly, elegant and perverse Alice Bachini. By the way, thanks again to the 2Bs for making me read Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, which I took with me on my recent holiday that I promised not to keep going on about. It’s over a thousand pages long and weighs about four and a half tons but I didn’t regret taking it with me for a single second. Had I left it behind I would have pined dreadfully. I’ve already done (since we’re on the subject of aesthetics) Athens, Florence, Shakespeare’s London, Vienna (twice – at each end of the nineteenth century), Paris (also end of C19) and post WW1 Berlin. Then it was on to the techies: Manchester (cotton), Glasgow (ships), Berlin again (electronics), and I’m now in Detroit doing Ford and his Model T. Great stuff, and there’s twice as much again more great stuff to come, including Hollywood (Hollywood) and fifties Memphis (rock ‘n’ roll). I will surely be saying more about this fabulous book. “Arts and Entertainment” doesn’t really do all this justice, but it was the best label I could find. There isn’t a samizdata subject category for “not pussy stuff”. October 20th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us. October 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It had to come out eventually. This week “soldier 027” gave testimony on the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry. He is under careful protection for now so his buddies won’t get a chance to silence him. Those events of long ago were target practice. The Para’s were told by an officer before they went out “they might get kills”. And they did. They opened fire on unarmed civilian demonstrators and killed thirteen people. Intentionally. With careful aim. Soldier 027 said he believes one soldier was responsible for up to ten of the body count. While his buddies were dropping demonstrators, he was scanning the line of them with his scope, unable to find any threat. His buddies agreed to a story. His own statements after the event were modified without his knowledge. This shows his superiors were involved and culpable. It is as if the US National Guard sent to Selma, Alabama did so in hopes of either getting their first kill1 or adding to their tally, shot a bunch of civil rights workers… and then Johnson claimed the unarmed NAACP demonstrators fired on them… and then by the time an inquiry of “appropriate persons” was convened, the US Army had forged the written record to back up the claim of innocence. One must note the Paratroop Regiment simply did not belong in Derry. They are an elite war-fighting group intended for serious kill or be killed combat, not police work. I should like to see the persons responsible for that deployment tried and hung for the cold blooded murder of 13 people and the responsibility for all of what came after. It is not hard to understand why a community would rally around those who would fight back, and I know from discussions over beers in West Belfast that back in those early days of the insurrection the Para’s were particular targets. And they brought it on themselves. 1 = Unfortunately the Ohio National Guard corrected this oversight. The State is not your friend. October 20th, 2002 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
The next time one of you says that “The so-called war against Al Qaeda has got nothing to do with us in the United Kingdom, we must just leave the Yanks to sort out their own problems”, please wait a moment while I read the following list of British names to you:
Jon Ellwood Ian Findley Marc Gajardo Paul Hussey David Kent Peter Record Chris Redman Clive Walton Douglas Warner Tim Arnold John Beaumont Daniel Braden Chris Bradford Matthew Chappell Rachael Edwards Lucy Empson Emma Fox Laura France Tom Holmes Chris Kays Annika Linden Daniel Miller Natalie Perkins Stephen Speirs Edward Waller All these British people were murdered in Bali by Islamic terrorists whilst on holiday. Add them to the 67 British reasons from September 11th as to why this is not just a matter for the United States .. and then please shut the fuck up. October 19th, 2002 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or ‘The Naive Idiot’ as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise. As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making ‘landmark speeches’ about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, “Sinn Fein’s” political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:
And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party’s private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody ‘domestic’ demographic solution (i.e. the way it was ‘solved’ in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware. So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain’s incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to. I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years… but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do. October 19th, 2002 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 19th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is well known that Sweden has the highest taxes in the Western world (one should always been careful to remember that it is the Western world – the corrupt regimes and plundering rebels in much of the rest of the world make their ‘tax as a percentage of G.D.P.’ stats quite meaningless). However, as the Adam Smith Institute has reminded us, it is Britain were taxes have gone up the fastest (in the European Union and, I believe, in the Western world generally world) since 1997. There is one good thing about this. At least now people will stop talking about there being an economic concept behind ‘New’ Labour. There may be many new things about the present government, but its economic policy of tax, spend and regulate is not new. Paul Marks October 19th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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