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I wish I were only talking about this: “Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury” (This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.) But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this: “Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans” November 10th, 2024 | 23 comments
 “Why has the American center right disappeared from the ballot box?” asks Jan-Werner Müller in the Guardian. Along the way, he takes a minute to say this about Ronald Reagan:
This line of thinking seems odd. Sixteen years had gone by between the murder of the civil rights activists – almost certainly a crime carried out by Democrats – and Reagan launching the Republican campaign at a place nearby. Evidently Professor Müller thinks that a place where a crime occurred must remain off-limits for political activity for longer than sixteen years, lest having a campaign event there be taken as endorsement of the crime. If one took seriously the argument made by Tim Walz and Hillary Clinton that the infamous pro-Nazi German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 meant that Trump’s rally in the same venue in 2024 was tainted by co-location, then the time for which a place must not be used for political activity after a crime or extremist political event would be at least 85 years. This would rule out almost all of America. Good thing the limit only seems to apply to Republicans. Update: having written the post above, I found that the point I wanted to make today had already been made far better in 2011 by David Kopel, writing in the Volokh Conspiracy website (now at Reason magazine): “Reagan’s infamous speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi”. November 9th, 2024 | 13 comments
Dale Vince, the green oligarch and wind turbine tycoon, is suing Guido Fawkes for reporting what he said about Hamas on Times Radio when he compared the Hamas terrorists to freedom fighters. Dismal tax trougher Vince is suing the editor Paul Staines personally for daring to publish the actual words Vince said in an interview with the Times Radio’s Stig Abell. This is pure distilled lawfare and for the first time in 20 years Guido is asking contribution to their legals costs. As a longtime fan of Mr. Fawkes, I have chipped in and I urge anyone else who dislikes the Green Mafia to do likewise here. November 7th, 2024 | 26 comments
The meltdown of the centrists is a wonder to behold. This is America’s ‘darkest dawn’, cried rhyming-slang-in-waiting, Ian Dunt. Emily Maitlis yelped on live TV that Trump is ‘batshit’, which is rich from someone who is essentially a Halloween version of Princess Diana. The Guardian put out a news notification that said, ‘Trump becomes the first convicted criminal to win the White House’. This really is all they have left, isn’t it? Sly asides to titillate depressed posh people on X? Smug jokes aimed at tempting suicidal liberals off the ledge? Utterly incapable of understanding Joe Public – both here and in the US – the Guardian opts to become the court jester of the cunterati instead. – Brendan O’Neill is in rip-roaring form 😀 November 7th, 2024 | 29 comments
Trump has long argued it was unreasonable for US taxpayers to be subsidising Europe’s defence when European governments are unwilling to stump up to defend themselves. It seems that today, many European pundits are now belatedly in agreement with Trump, yet I have encountered quite a lot of annoyance when I point this out. It is hard to not laugh 😀 November 6th, 2024 | 17 comments
How to tell if the people in Europe making predictions of doom if Trump wins actually believe what they have been saying: Europeans defence expenditures go to 4%+ (i.e. Polish levels) within the next few months. Otherwise it’s just so much verbal flatulence. If Trump does indeed abandon Ukraine and tries to force a de facto surrender of occupied territories on them, and Europe still does not rapidly ramp up defence expenditure, then maybe Trump and the USA was never the problem. November 6th, 2024 | 8 comments
“Donald Trump closes in on victory with two crucial swing-state wins”, reports the Guardian. I am glad that lawfare and censorship did not prove to be winning tactics. November 6th, 2024 | 18 comments
“Elderly litter picker who voluntarily cleans up local area fined for forgetting walking stick”, the Telegraph reports.
And this is typical:
In the end Walsall Council did rescind the fine, although the story does not say whether Mr Davies ever got his walking stick back. Some aspects of this story reminded me of the raid a few days ago by multiple agents of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation on Mark and Daniela Longo’s home, which ended with the authorities killing a pet squirrel and raccoon. Why have officials in English-speaking countries become so sluggish in pursuing criminals but so dogged in the pursuit of harmless people? There has always been some incentive for cops and officials to go after someone who will not resist in preference to going after a criminal who might stab them, but why has it got so much worse in recent years? Perhaps it is because the number of bureaucrats has so multiplied that responsibility for a process is always divided. November 5th, 2024 | 17 comments
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed. November 4th, 2024 | 10 comments
I was just old enough to read the blue sign bearing the word “POLICE” – and I thought my parents had gone mad. We were on a family walk, going past the local police station when, to my horror, my parents stopped. They stopped walking and stood outside the police station looking at the posters and casually talking about grown-up things. Didn’t they realise the peril we were in? Didn’t they understand that at any moment the door could be flung open and policemen could come rushing out to arrest us and drag us off to the cells? Well, time went by and eventually my seven year-old self was able to chuckle at the foolish worries of six and a half. I realised that I had misunderstood what was being depicted in a fragment of Dixon of Dock Green that I had glimpsed despite it being on after my official bedtime. I came to understand that, whatever might have been the case in the time of King Herod or Henry VIII, that sort of thing didn’t happen nowadays. The authorities in modern, civilised countries do not randomly decide to ruin the lives of ordinary people. The young couple who owned Peanut the squirrel and Fred the raccoon probably assumed the same thing.
The alternative possibility – that I was right to be fearful standing outside the police station all those years ago – is not pleasant to contemplate. As a twitter user called “Mason” said,
November 3rd, 2024 | 24 comments
I know, I know. That’s three things. But there are two more items listed later in Peter Walker’s article for the Guardian, which he probably thought of as a list of things not to like about the newly elected Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Although I have never called myself a Conservative, and have never joined a political party, I do like her. She is my local MP. I have written to her and got a reply that was clearly written with some thought. That is rare. Someone in my family used to be a member of the local Conservative party and I have met her several times at party events, at which she always came across as friendly and convivial. That said, I also like the fact that her smile is not jammed in the “on” position. In their current state the Tories need a leader who will fight – who “would cross the road to bite your ankles” as one of her admirers put it. Sir Keir Starmer had better put on thick socks. Obviously, the incident in 2008 when Badenoch guessed the password of Harriet Harman’s website, hacked into it, and changed it to say that Harman had defected to the Tories and that everyone should vote for Boris Johnson as Mayor of London was an unspeakably wicked assault on Our Democracy and not funny at all. November 2nd, 2024 | 34 comments
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