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Time sure flies when you’re having fun, as Americans say. Seems like it was only yesterday when the actor was sacked as presenter of the satirical show Have I Got News for You.

In fact that unfortunate event happened in 2002 – 13 years ago! The sacking was precipitated by a scurrilous tabloid claiming that Mr Deayton had done cocaine (and who in his profession hasn’t?) and cavorted with ladies of easy virtue (ditto).

That was enough for the BBC, known for its unimpeachable moral probity, not to mention political sagacity, to sack the hugely successful presenter – this though 75 per cent of the public begged the Beeb to let him stay.

I must admit to my shame that, not being a regular watcher of TV programmes, I’ve lost track of Mr Deayton’s career since then. But I’m glad to see that apparently he landed on his feet.

Rather than moaning about his shocking dismissal, Mr Deayton buckled down and changed careers altogether by retraining and taking up the study of economics.

He made such giant inroads on his new field that he has just been awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize. Mr Deayton ought to be praised for taking just 13 years to travel from the novice position at the bottom of his new profession to its very summit.

I can’t say I’m unduly surprised. Economics, after all, is a dubious science. Unlike, say, physics or chemistry that require, in addition to intellect and talent, a command of a staggering corpus of knowledge, economics is a bit of a non-science.

This Enlightenment construct essentially describes ways in which people make a living, an endeavour in which they had been succeeding famously throughout history, and long before the first economist was a twinkle in his father’s eye.

Since then practitioners of this non-science have alternated between uttering either truisms or falsehoods.

The self-evident truisms (sorry about using this tautology) essentially revolve around the observation that people will make a better living if the government doesn’t put obstacles in their way.

The utterers of counterintuitive falsehoods, on the other hand, maintain that the more money the government takes away from the people, supposedly to spend it on their behalf, the better off the people will be.

This is more or less it. The rest is waffle, typically reinforced with computer models and other such arcana. Economists use those as rods with which they fish in the troubled waters of human behaviour, in this instance its economic aspect.

They also use recondite vocabulary to talk about some mysterious ‘paradigms’ that explain why people make a better living when left alone, or conversely when interfered with by the government.

I suggest that, if we listen to these chaps, or especially organise our affairs on the basis of their prescriptions and predictions, we’ll soon all be marching to Depression-style soup kitchens, singing ‘Brother, can you paradigm?’ (I’m plagiarising myself here: this silly pun first appeared in my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis. Sorry about that.)

All in all, I’m not surprised that a sacked comic actor with the gift of the gab took just a few years as a newly hatched economist to collect the Nobel…

Oops, hold on for a moment… My wife has just looked over my shoulder and said that the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics isn’t the actor Angus Deayton but his near-namesake Angus Deaton, who actually is and always has been an economist.

Well, disagreements over a single letter have been known to start religious wars with thousands of casualties, so I’m not surprised that my wife is upset about my negligence.

Actually, as it turns out, Prof. Deaton (sic!) has received his accolade for the earth-shattering discovery that people still buy things even if they’re unsure they’ll continue to have much money to buy things with for any foreseeable future.

Come to think of it, I’d rather give the Prize to Mr Deayton (sic!). He probably didn’t make a similar discovery only because his mind was set on other things – which, one has to admit, are as much use but much more fun.  

 

 

 

 

Though this French poet and philosopher died 70 years ago, he left one aphorism that we are busily proving right even as we speak. “History,” he wrote, “teaches precisely nothing.”

That we fail to learn from ancient Rome or Saxon England is understandable. Our inability to take on board lessons taught a few years ago is rather less so. If the former failure betokens some ignorance and lack of analytical capacity, the latter is a sign of sheer idiocy and irresponsibility.

Unlike our powers-that-be, a reader of mine, a mortgage broker, can put two and two together. He looks at the way our government and banks operate, and realises to his horror that they are doing exactly the things that caused the 2008 disaster.

The practical conclusions he draws from this realisation turn him towards such practical steps as stocking up three fridge-freezers just in case. While envying his foresight, I’m too lazy to resort to such prudent measures. But I do sympathise with his reasons.

Economists agree that the principal reasons for the 2008 crisis were profligate lending by banks and promiscuous spending by governments. My reader is in an ideal position to see that the first problem is as bad as ever.

He observes banks dispensing cheap 90 per cent mortgages with the same cavalier insouciance that they displayed in the run-up to the crisis. “There is no way a bank would get anywhere near its money back on repossession,” he writes. “The mortgage pricing is sheer lunacy.”

The practice of building tottering structures of derivatives on the termite-ridden foundations of unsecured loans hasn’t abated either. At the time I wrote my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, the sum total of outstanding derivatives stood at an amount equal to twice the combined GDP of the whole world. It’s much higher now, which is another good way of ensuring catastrophe.

Our government, which illogically prosecutes freelance operators of pyramid schemes, runs its own finances on exactly the same principle.

Since George Osborne introduced his ‘austerity’ in 2010, much vaunted in some circles and much derided in others, our sovereign debt has almost tripled to £1.36 trillion, making it the only strengthening part of our sovereignty.

To make sure that the debt will never go down, George is consistently spending five per cent more than the Exchequer gets from taxes. Servicing this debt already costs us more than the entire defence budget, a disparity that’s guaranteed to grow because the debt will continue to go up, while the defence spending will dwindle away to nothing.

A tottering inverted pyramid barely balanced on its point is bound to do a Jericho sooner rather than later. If this coincides with the next general election, we may well be regaled with Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister, which will be the end not only of our economy but also of our civilisation.

Actually, I’ve changed my mind on those fridge-freezers. Can anyone recommend a good brand, reasonably priced?

 

 

 

 

If a lottery is a tax on people who are rubbish at maths, this referendum is a tax on people who are rubbish at politics.

Any referendum is based on an idealistic, and hence unrealistic, assessment of the wisdom of vox populi. Yet only the vox of an intelligent and well-informed populo ought to decide vital matters.

A brief conversation with a randomly selected group, say in a pub, will show that the British public doesn’t meet this lofty standard. Most of what one hears is a crude rehash of stock EU lies counterbalanced by a visceral dislike of foreigners.

Exaggerated belief in collective wisdom is based on Enlightenment ideology, not any available evidence. That’s why unlimited, never mind direct, democracy was alien to Britain’s constitutional tradition.

This was encapsulated by Burke: MPs should represent people’s interests, not their wishes. The resulting balance, with the elected power of the Commons offset by the hereditary power of the crown, with the Lords making sure the balance wouldn’t unduly tip either way, was the best political arrangement mankind has ever known.

That has been replaced with the dictatorship of the Commons sustained by an infinitely expanding franchise of increasingly dumbed-down voters. Hence those fit to govern are never elevated to government any longer – unlimited democracy has predictably become unlimited spivocracy.

Plebiscite takes this process one step further, moving from witless to crazy. Taking this particular referendum, the country’s future may well be decided by people who think that, should Britain regain her constitutional sovereignty, we wouldn’t be allowed to travel but stay destitute, isolated and marginalised on our little island.

No one seems to realise that holding an EU referendum is tantamount to staking Britain’s future on a roll of loaded dice.

First, the vote to stay will be irreversible, but the vote to leave won’t be. If the past is a reliable indicator of the future, then the EU will treat such a result with the same disdain it showed for other referendums going against it.

Either dissenting countries were treated like inept schoolchildren and told to try again until they got it right, or else the same measure was resubmitted under a different name. (That’s how, with changes invisible to the naked eye, the European Constitution came back as the Lisbon Treaty.)

Just think about it: Darren votes to stay in the EU because he thinks that otherwise he’ll never be able to go to Ibiza again – and 2,000 years of our constitutional tradition go down the drain.

Or, if Darren’s old enough to remember that Ibiza was open for British orgies even before the Maastricht Treaty, his Out vote will probably be nullified by EU spivs in cahoots with our own.

These are rotten odds – especially since Darren will be deluged with torrents of pro-EU propaganda led by our ‘Tory’ government and supported by every fraudulent means at the EU’s disposal.

One such will be granting a few token concessions at the last moment, enabling Dave and George to claim that Britain’s relationship with the EU has changed so much that we have all to gain and nothing to lose by staying.

Anyone who believes that our public will be able to tell token concessions from real ones lives in a fantasy world. Does anyone seriously expect the people who’ve made Coronation Street our crowning cultural achievement to wade through the fine print of 1,000-page documents written in barely comprehensible Euro-English?

Since both the ruling party and Her Majesty’s Opposition (which hates both Her Majesty and the sovereignty she embodies) are committed to staying in the EU, a privately financed campaign to leave will stand zero chance – even if it presents a united front.

However, since it doesn’t, the chance slips below zero into negative values. Ukip, which after all, forced Cameron to pledge the referendum in the first place, should lead the campaign. And so it does – its own.

A much larger mainstream effort is being fronted by Lord Lawson, him of the family where daughters are named after their fathers. That’s like Sepp Blatter leading a campaign to end FIFA corruption.

For it was Mr Lawson, as he then was, who as Chancellor was in 1987 directly responsible for the policy of shadowing the deutschmark, which resulted in the 1992 disaster of Black Wednesday.

This might have been an honest mistake, and he now sees the situation differently. However, it’s obvious that Lawson has no principled objections to jeopardising Britain’s sovereignty, economic and therefore political, for the sake of what he sees as expedience.

Expedience, however, is fickle. What’s expedient today may look insane tomorrow, and vice versa.

Suppose that by the time of the referendum Osborne’s phoney prosperity has run out of steam, as it almost certainly will. How committed will Lord Lawson remain to the Out campaign? He’ll probably revert to what he saw as a pragmatic pro-EU position back in 1987.

Barring a military coup, British sovereignty can only be regained by parliamentary consensus. Gaining it ought to draw the energy and funding that at present go into campaigning in this doomed referendum.

The odds of succeeding in our lifetime are slim – but trying is still better than letting people sink our constitution with the torpedo of a rigged plebiscite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But for Russia, what news items would pique your interest? Dave’s recipe for pig’s cheeks? A duchess sleeping with her estate keeper? Even weather forecasts on Russian TV are more fun than that.

The other day a curvaceous girl did an impersonation of a Channel 4 weathercaster, complete with a dazzling smile and an electronic map superimposed on the backdrop.

The girl pointed at the map, allowing the viewers a good look at her figure. Thus distracted, they took a few seconds to realise that the map showed not Russia but Syria.

The beauty then conveyed some meteorological data of vital importance to Russians. October, she announced, is an ideal time for bombing raids on Syria.

The average temperature is only 21C, there will be but three overcast days, the maximum precipitation is 7mm, and top wind speed is a meagre 15m/sec.

Any temperature below 35C, she explained, putting the desiccated data into context, is ideal for bombing, especially with little interference from the elements. She sounded like her Channel 4 colleague reassuring Londoners that the test match is unlikely to be rained off.

The bombing the young lady was talking about was old-fashioned blockbusters dropped from high-flying planes. Ever the traditionalists, the Russians only resort to laser-guided ordnance in four per cent of cases.

Other than that, it’s just indiscriminate slaughter. The tactic isn’t all bad, however, since, while high-altitude bombs may fall on wrong people, they’re unlikely to fall on a wrong country.

That’s more than can be said for Russian cruise missiles launched at Syria from 900 miles away. Anything the Yanks could do in Iraq, we can do better in Syria, said Vlad, pushing the button.

Unfortunately, four of his 26 missiles veered off course and hit Iran. The country affected didn’t make a big stink about it because the ayatollahs know that Vlad is their ally. Provided the other 22 missiles hit those infidel Sunni pigs, may Allah turn their mothers into toads, the ayatollahs were happy.

How the US forces will react if accidentally hit by stray Russian missiles is anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say that under such circumstances soldiers sometimes act impulsively rather than prudently.

The danger of accidental conflagration is high, and the choice of possible flash points is wide. Nato and Russia are facing each other in the Baltics, the Middle East, the Ukraine and Turkey. Statistics are beginning to work against us dying of old age.

Political talk shows on Russian TV offer an even greater entertainment value than the weathercasts. Semyon Bagdasarov, MP, the Duma’s Middle Eastern expert, stunned the audience of a top chat show with his erudition, supporting an unassailable syllogism:

Orthodox Christianity was born in Syria, specifically in Antioch. Russia is Orthodox. Ergo, he screamed triumphantly, “Syria is our land!”

This logic is hard to fault but easy to extend. Even though Antioch was indeed part of the Syrian tetrapolis at the time, making the parliamentarian’s claim irrefutable, it’s now in Turkey, which automatically makes this country “our land” too.

Then again, Antioch is only one Orthodox patriarchate. Rome, Jerusalem and Alexandria are others, and hence they clearly ought to belong to Russia by right.

Since Italy, Egypt and Israel may prove recalcitrant in the face of Vlad’s just demand that those cities be transferred to the Russian Federation, these countries must also receive their share of meandering cruise missiles.

Israel in particular should brace herself. Not only is she home to an Orthodox patriarchate, she’s also the birthplace of Christianity in general. Since Russia is the world’s last stronghold of that religion, Israel is clearly “our land”.

Also, let’s not forget the vast number of Israeli Russophones. Didn’t Vlad declare it his sacred duty to protect not just Russia, but the whole “Russian World”, which elusive term is defined in cultural and linguistic terms?

That’s Israel spoken for. And what about millions of Russians living in New York, Paris and London? And weren’t Poland and Finland parts of the Russian Empire? Aren’t Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia Orthodox even now, never mind back in ancient history?

When Russia’s hot, she’s hot. If she ever cools off, we’ll again live in an utterly boring world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night insomnia kicked in and, knowing it’s a losing battle, I decided not to fight it. Instead I got out of bed and read Mr Cameron’s speech in its entirety.

Much to my surprise, every word confirmed the view expressed in my title above. But judge for yourself: here are his key points.

“I have decided to dedicate my life to making Great Britain even greater. To this end it’s essential that my government work tirelessly towards fostering everything that moves us closer to that goal – and eliminating everything that holds us back.

“Hence I propose the following measures to be resolved during the life of this parliament:

“The original – or rather official – purpose of the EU was purely economic: promoting free trade among European nations. It has now become clear that its true purpose is political: the creation of a single European state.

“This end, however, is at odds with our ancient constitution, effectively undermining our sovereignty, depriving HMG of political legitimacy and taking ‘Great’ out of Britain.

“That’s why I intend to campaign with every means at my disposal for our leaving the EU, making its existing laws null and void in Britain and replacing them with a series of bilateral trade treaties.

“This will mean, among other things, reclaiming control over our borders and limiting immigration to sensible levels, as defined by our economic needs – and moral demands we find acceptable.

“While we are on the subject of the economy, so far we’ve been trying to cover cracks in the masonry with Osborne & Little wallpaper, meaning Osborne does little.

“I propose we address the structural defects by rolling back the welfare state, which, in addition to being an economic millstone around Britain’s neck, adversely affects the moral health of society.

“All benefits will henceforth be withdrawn from those who aren’t prevented from supporting themselves by infirmity or old age.

“At the same time, I’ll propose a law obligating the Exchequer to run surplus budgets until such time that our sovereign debt is cleared – and balanced budgets thereafter. Great Britain must pay her way.

“Even considering the increase in the defence and law-enforcement budgets that I’ll touch upon later, this will enable HMG to reduce drastically the tax burden on both individuals and businesses. That measure, like no other, has been shown to boost national prosperity.

“Our foreign policy must henceforth be dictated by national interests and them only. Powerful armed forces are essential to protecting our national interests, and I propose a two-fold increase in the defence budget designed to correct the negligence that governed our policy in the past.

“At the same time we undertake never to use our armed forces for foreign adventures that do nothing to promote our national interests.

“In order to restore the health of our ailing society, we must return to our Christian roots. This doesn’t mean enforcing our faith or persecuting others – but it does mean insisting that other faiths respect Christianity and adapt their own behaviour to the demands of Christian morality, which lies at the foundation of all our laws.

“At present one observes a growing Islamisation of Britain, both demographic and ideological. This I propose to combat mercilessly, to the point of reducing the number of mosques, which in my lifetime has increased by two orders of magnitude, banning Muslim propaganda and those Islamic practices that don’t agree with Britain’s religious, cultural and social tradition.

“Those found in violation shall be summarily deported, even if they hold British passports. Civil rights of which our nation is proud cannot protect our nation’s enemies.

“Law enforcement is another key area we must address. After all, protecting a nation both from external and internal dangers is the prime – some will say only – legitimate function of government. I shall encourage the CPO to seek maximum penalties for crimes, such as burglary, that at present routinely go unprosecuted and often uninvestigated.

“At the same time we must construct more prisons, making sure that lack of capacity will never again be an excuse for suicidal leniency.

“In staffing public offices, I shall promote the principle of equality, whereby all jobs should go to the most qualified candidates, regardless of their race, religion, sex or age. No group will be either discriminated against or – and this is the salient point – receive preferential treatment.

“The same principle will be applied to our universities, whose job should be creating the nation’s intellectual elite, not indulging in social engineering.

“Our primary and secondary education must also return to the standards set at the time when British education was the envy of the world, rather than its laughingstock.

“The false principle of equality ought to be abandoned and we must accept the empirically demonstrable fact that not all pupils are equally capable. Lumping them all together means holding back the intellectually gifted 25 per cent, humiliating the less gifted 25 per cent and boring everyone in the middle.

“Half a century of socialist experimentation has succeeded only in creating a nation of ignoramuses unable to function in any serious professional or civic capacity. That’s why we plan to restore the system of grammar schools, supplemented by a modern equivalent of secondary moderns…”

That’s the point at which I stopped reading, for a good reason. I woke up.

 

 

  

Never since the 1962 Cuban crisis have we faced the same danger of an annihilating world war. The criminal regime whose collapse Putin sees as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ was the menace then. Putin’s own criminal regime is the menace now.

However, conservative media and social networks are brimming with demented panegyrics for Russia’s provocations in Syria.

Putin is being depicted as a fighter of terrorism, striking blows for Christianity and international law. According to today’s useful idiots, the term ungratefully coined by Lenin to describe his Western fans, Putin pursues not a single selfish objective.

Onne finds Putin’s aversion to terrorism hard to believe. He’s a proud and unrepentant officer in the satanic organisation that murdered 60 million in the USSR alone. “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life,” said Putin, for once truthfully.

Putin’s ascent to the Kremlin was precipitated by his alma mater blowing up blocks of flats in Russia, blaming it on the Chechens and bombing their capital Grozny flat – even though Russians made up 80 per cent of the city’s population.

When the Chechens fought back by taking hostages, Putin countered their terrorism with his own. When in 2002 Chechens took hostages in a Moscow theatre, Putin’s men pumped poison gas in, killing, in addition to the 40 terrorists, 140 hostages.

Two years later the Chechens took over a school in North Caucasus. Putin’s troops opened fire, killing 385 hostages, most of them children. The Chechens got away.

Throughout its reign the KGB junta fronted by Putin has murdered, roughed up or imprisoned hundreds of political opponents. In the process Putin pioneered nuclear terrorism, so far on a small scale.

Hence trusting Putin’s supposedly altruistic motives in Syria is hard. Easier to discern are his real motives, falling into several categories.

Economic. Russia’s economy heavily depends on the export of hydrocarbons at the highest possible price.

Even when oil prices were sky-high, those who derived the greatest benefit were members of Putin’s ruling elite made up of the KGB/FSB and organised crime. Most others lived in abject conditions. (Suffice it to say that 25 per cent of Russian dwellings have no sewerage, and 20 per cent no plumbing.)

Now, with oil prices low, pushing them up is the only way to avert disaster, but that’s easier said than done. The fracking revolution in America and the slowdown of China’s economy have combined to keep the demand for Putin’s oil down. Since the law of supply-demand hasn’t yet been repealed, the only way to bring the price back up is to distort the supply.

Hence Russia has a vested interest in converting the Middle Eastern chaos into an all out war, spilling into the Arabian Peninsula. Fanning the Sunni-Shiite conflict, which is the effect of Putin’s air raids, serves that purpose perfectly.

Strategic. Putin’s media are making no secret of the conflict’s nature. Russia isn’t fighting for any particular group. It’s fighting against what they call ‘the Anglo-Saxon world’.

Russia’s greatest ally in the conflict so defined is ‘Death to America’ Iran and its assorted Shiite stooges, such as Hezbollah.

Obama has already cleared the way for the ayatollahs to develop nuclear weapons, which will present a mortal danger to Israel first and the West second. Yet the on-going conflict makes it impossible for Israel to launch an attack similar to the 1981 Ozirak raid. Doing so now would put Israel in the untenable position of appearing to be an Isis ally.

In addition to conscripting 150,000 new recruits, Putin is moving into Syria sophisticated electronic jammers and surface-to-air missiles. Since Isis has no air force, and mobile phones represent its most sophisticated electronic gear, this confirms whom Putin sees as Russia’s real enemies.

Geopolitical. Russia’s aggressive wars have finally turned her into a pariah state. This means she has to seek new geopolitical advantages against the West.

Turning most of the Middle East into her de facto dominion would serve this end nicely. Russia would acquire strongholds on the Mediterranean, something she has sought throughout her history.

Psychological. The Russians traditionally identify fear with respect (boitsa, znachit uvajayet is the Russian proverb to that effect). And respect has been in short supply historically and especially lately.

This always rankles Russia’s despotic rulers (the only kind the country has ever had). Yet Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine turned him overnight into an internationally marginal figure, respected only by his coterie of useful idiots.

Hence the desire to earn respect by fostering fear. And what can achieve that end better than creating a danger of world war, triggered either deliberately or accidentally?

One can only regret that the craven inadequacy of our own governments has pushed so many otherwise good people into the ranks of useful idiots. When one side in a conflict doesn’t even realise there’s a war on, the result is predictable.

  

 

  

 

 

Which cowboy built this economy then? Oh no, gov, can’t pin this one on me.

Look, mate, this house was falling down, like, when I got the call. 2010 it was, when the call came. I was having me cuppa Rosie, listening to N**gaz With Attitude, when me mate Dave called, saying George, I want you to be me builder, mate. Shore the booger up, djahmean?

Off I go like a goodun, and what do I find? The debt is well weak, way down. Not even a trillion, mate, just over a half is all. Ain’t big enough to keep the welfare roof over tenants’ heads, djahmean?

So I put me scaffolding up – it’s made by Austerity, you know them blokes in Westminster – and go to work. Bit of repointing here, some grouting there and look at it now. 1.36 trillion quid and going up well strong! Sorted.

Then them Greeks call me mate Dave, saying Dave, giza hand, mate, every year we go over the budget, half a per cent at least. It’s like we have a grand but spend a grand-five – no good that, ain’t no way to build an economy.

And me mate Dave says too bloody right, can’t build an economy that way. Look at me mate George the Builder, he says. Spends five per cent more ‘n he has every year, that’s 50 quid over every budget grand, and the house is growing like Corbyn’s support.

That’s the way to build, Dave says. Attaboy George. That way you’re guaranteed the debt will stay well up and never fall down.

And people will trust you. They see that Austerity scaffolding on the building, they know George the Builder’s at work. Satisfaction guaranteed, djahmean?

And it ain’t just houses, mate. Roads, railways, airports, power-stations – I can build them all. Just call your George the Builder, show him the dosh, and Dave’s your uncle, Theresa’s your aunt. Sorted.

Where’s the dosh going to come from? That’s your problem, mate, not mine. You make it, I spend it, djahmean? Do what I do when I’m short – borrow. Easy as pie, a right doddle, mate. Things get built, houses go up, so does the debt – sorted.

A new way to build, that’s what I, George the Builder, stand for. Power to the people, djahmean? People like me and me mate Dave.

The other day we was having a swift pint of wifebeater at King’s Head, and Dave says, George me old China, he says, it’s like doing a slag who’s pissed unconscious. You do her, and she don’t even know she got done.

Next morning she wakes up all sore, calls the filth, and you say, who me? She done it herself, gov, she voted to get done, djahmean? Consent of the done, like. Judge gives her a kick up the Khyber, you go down the pub – sorted.

Well smart, Dave is. That’s what the building trade is all about, take it from me. As long as we have them Russians, Chinese and Arabs buying up me houses, things will go up. And when they stop – well, things will still be going up. Don’t know how, but they will. Up and up, that’s what it’s all about, djahmean? Up’s the word, mate.

Just listen to your mate George the Builder. You know what me slogan is? Got it from that Sherman from way back: Of the people, by the people, for the people. And up the people’s.

Sorted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First a little quote for your delectation, see what you make of it:

So I’ma let’em know how a nigga’s livin’

Checking the muthafuckas cause nobody ain’t givin’ a damn thing

To a nigga, a real nigga

So I’m livin’ by the muthafuckin’ trigger

This verse comes from the signature-song lyrics of N**gaz With Attitude, widely known as the world’s nastiest rap band. These lyrics, just take my word for it, are in no way exceptional – they represent this band’s standard fare.

Now what kind of man would describe himself as a devoted fan of NWA? I know what you’re going to say: degenerate, moron, savage, barbarian, all those nice words. But hold your horses: it’s our future prime minister you’re talking about.

For it was Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne who owned up to his affection for these artists in what the papers described as his ‘revealing interview’.

It was indeed that, highly revealing. What it revealed is that, when Dave starts earning his lecture-circuit billions, we’re likely to have as PM a man whom one could describe as a revolting nonentity only at a kinder moment.

There are only two possibilities here: either he’s telling the truth or lying. I submit that in either case he’s unfit to lead our government, or indeed to occupy his present position.

If he is lying, it can be for one reason only: to offset his upper-class image by posing as a man raised in the gutter and anxious to return there – a true man of the people. He needn’t bother: we already know that his ‘class’ is a thin veneer concealing a typical spiv reaching for the brass ring.

Belonging to the upper classes ought to mean more than having a father who sells enough wallpaper for the family to live high off the hog and put their young through expensive schools. It ought to involve espousing and upholding the highest cultural, moral and intellectual values.

This doesn’t necessarily mean being a highly cultured, moral and intellectual individual himself, though that couldn’t hurt. It does, however, mean knowing what makes a country civilised and trying to keep it so.

It’s enough to look at George’s record in public life to see that he doesn’t fall into that category – no man who is systematically taking the country’s economy to the brink of collapse, while pretending that prosperity is in full swing, can possibly be civilised.

But it’s possible that George wants to go even further, to pitch his populism at the lowest level possible, judging correctly that this is where most of the potential electorate can be found. If that’s true, he shouldn’t be allowed within swearing distance of Number 10 – no man who craves an office to that extent is qualified to take it.

The other possibility is that he’s telling the truth, that he really is a fan of NWA. This would mean that he doesn’t even know what our civilisation is – and what he knows he hates.

No man able to sit down and listen to such effluvia (I’d go so far as to say ‘any pop music’, but some may regard such a view as too extreme), never mind liking it, is fit to be a public figure of any kind. This kind of preference betokens much more than simply a lack of aesthetic taste, though this is bad enough.

An NWA fan is ipso facto a barbarian, which word in its original meaning designated a hostile outsider to a civilisation. It stands to reason that such a man should never occupy one of this civilisation’s highest political offices.

And you know what’s the worst thing about George’s public declaration of his taste in music? That he doesn’t even realise how monstrous it sounds.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s start with a simple observation: just about every great thinker in recorded history believed in God – and by history I mean either side of 1858, the year Darwin created the world.

‘Just about’ is an important qualification because, fully applying oneself to the task, one could dig up a few personages who were both serious thinkers and atheists. However, there would be so few of them that they could only serve as exceptions that prove the rule.

Within the civilisation formed by Abrahamic religions, believing in God – especially after 1858 – means rejecting the materialist explanation of being and existence, and accepting the Biblical one.

For thinkers, great or otherwise, this means starting from the original act of faith (referred to as hypothesis in scientific circles) and then holding it to scientific, philosophical and logical investigation.

Hence most serious thinkers must believe that the Biblical version withstands such investigation better than the competing one. That, however, isn’t what our systematically brainwashed public believes.

Anyone going through what passes for our educational system isn’t only not taught how to think logically, never mind philosophically, but is actively discouraged from doing so.

As a result, the people boasting within their ranks Aquinas, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg et al are commonly seen as silly Bible-thumping flat-earthers, whereas the group accepting on faith the incoherent rants of Dawkins et al are rational, sophisticated individuals benefiting from every achievement of modern science.

Yet, by showing that our cherished notion of gradual progress isn’t just excruciatingly vulgar but also intellectually unsound, science blows materialism out of the water.

So how do we answer the question of where our material world, with us in it, came from? Only five common answers exist.

ONE: Billions-zillions of years ago the world was in a state of chaos. Then, for some obscure reason, often described as the Big Bang, the chaos imploded and since then has been evolving from the simple to the complex – from some primary cell all the way to Richard Dawkins.

TWO: The world has existed in eternity.

THREE: The world self-created out of nothing.

FOUR: God originally created the world as some kind of primary matter and then guided its evolution to its present state.

FIVE: The world was created by God in its complete form and has been deteriorating ever since.

Of these, only FIVE doesn’t clash with the Laws of Thermodynamics: the First Law, stating that nothing comes out of nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit), and the Second, stating that, left to themselves, all natural processes develop towards increasing entropy, that is chaos and disorder.

Scientists object that both Laws talk about a closed system, which the Earth isn’t because it receives energy from outside sources, mainly the Sun. However, they flounder when asked how then the two Laws were discovered in the first place – and they are laws, not theories like Darwinism. For that to happen, they had to be proved to work universally, meaning they also apply to the problem at hand.  

Hence ONE contradicts the fundamental, empirically established Second Law of Thermodynamics. Evolution, a spontaneous, gradual increase in the complexity of proteins all the way to man, is impossible – no matter how many trillions-zillions of years we assign to this process. The Law says that under no conditions can chaos develop into order.

TWO also clashes with the Second Law. If our universe had no beginning in time, by now it would have sunk into chaos. No organised structures we observe in such abundance (such as man himself) would exist.

THREE clashes with the First Law, according to which energy, and therefore matter (e = mc²), can’t appear out of nothing. And before things evolve, they have to be.

FOUR, which is theistic evolution popularised, among others, by Teilhard de Chardin,runs into the same objections as ONE. It doesn’t matter whether evolution was started by Darwin or God – if ameliorating development towards greater order and complexity were possible, the Second Law wouldn’t have been discovered at all.

FIVE, thus, is the only version that agrees with both laws. God created matter – it didn’t appear out of nothing by itself, which the First Law says is impossible. Original sin then compromised not only man but also the material world, which since then has been steadily deteriorating in accordance with the Second Law.

Believing in Darwinian evolution as an all-encompassing explanation is therefore tantamount to rejecting the Laws of Thermodynamics, which is a possible position to take. It doesn’t, however, quite tally with the belief that atheism is based on science, while religion comes from nothing but blind faith.

For almost two centuries now Darwinism has been given the benefit of the doubt it doesn’t merit. Since it has wide political and social applications, this slipshod, unscientific theory has been touted as fact.

It isn’t. If it were, it wouldn’t be called a theory any longer. In fact, few theories in the history of science have survived for more than a generation or two. They are either proved to be scientific facts (like the Laws of Thermodynamics) or else consigned to museums of past curiosities.

Darwinism survives because it neatly dovetails with modernity’s other pet theories, such as Marxism. Both equip it with the false notion of progress, on which it depends for self-vindication.

That notion is as vulgar as our materialist modernity itself – for all the sophisticated gadgetry with which it masks its vulgarity and intellectual paucity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lord Sugar, who was given his peerage by the Labour Party, has inadvertently raised a problem to which I, for one, can relate.

Having left the party last May, His Lordship yesterday expressed his horror at the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn ever forming a government: “If they ever got anywhere near electing him… then we should all move to China or somewhere like that and let this place just rot.”

The thought is sound in principle, but wanting in detail.

It’s true that Corbyn, speaking through his shadow chancellor, has pledged to “ferment the overthrow of capitalism.” It’s also true that every attempt to overthrow capitalism, in whichever part of the world it has been made, has been accompanied by a massive cull of capitalists, a term loosely defined as anyone the overthrowers don’t like.

And yes, escaping from such developments is a time-honoured practice. It’s not just an attack on capitalism that can trigger an exodus – any form of oppression is a powerful stimulus for people to run away.

The country in which I had the misfortune to be born provides a useful illustration to this law of history. Russia became Russia (as opposed to Muscovy or Tartary, which was how it was tagged in Elizabethan maps) in the 16^th century, in the reign of the first Russian tsar, Ivan IV.

Ivan the Terrible was one of the most carnivorous rulers in Russian history, which is saying a lot. Hence, when he sent an expeditionary corps under Prince Kurbsky to fight in the west, the corps closed ranks and defected in its entirety, mostly to Poland and Lithuania.

That established a useful precedent. Emulating proverbial rodents, Russians have been fleeing from their perennially sinking ship throughout history. Hundreds and hundreds of diplomats, intelligence officers, writers, scientists, sailors would defect the moment their feet touched foreign soil – this even during relatively quiet periods.

During more turbulent periods, the numbers reached thousands and then millions. For example, when the Russian army entered Paris in 1814, some 20,000 soldiers deserted, having decided they’d be better off as farmers in France than serfs back home.

And in 1941, whole Soviet divisions would joyously march into German captivity. In the first six months of the war the Nazis took over four million prisoners, and many of them sought their imprisonment voluntarily.

After the war, those survivors who weren’t delivered to Stalin’s executioners by the Americans and the British, settled all over the world. Their descendants can be found as far as Patagonia and Tasmania, to say nothing of Western Europe and North America.

There they rub shoulders with the descendants of the millions who escaped from Russia after the revolution – and with a couple of million of those who, like me, got out in the 1970s and thereafter.

Russia is the most graphic example, but far from the only one. Millions escaped from religious persecution and economic hardship in Europe to North America. French Huguenots ran for their lives, with most settling in England – and 200,000 Frenchmen have followed in their footsteps in the last few years. And if we look at the low-rent parts of the world, mass emigration from there has never ceased.

All those migrants have had an infinite number of stories to tell, each story as different as people are, both individually as persons and collectively as nations. What unites all those displaced persons is that THEY ALL HAD A BETTER PLACE TO ESCAPE TO.

This is a sine qua non of successful emigration – and an option that, alas, doesn’t exist for the British.

“China or somewhere like that” proposed as a possible haven by Lord Sugar doesn’t work. After all, Corbyn’s government would be likely to turn Britain into a communist dictatorship but that might take a few years. China, on the other hand, is a communist dictatorship already, complete with concentration camps, government-controlled press and the general aroma of vomit that inevitably wafts through communist air.

And what’s “somewhere like that” like? Where is it? Cambodia? Vietnam? North Korea? As a veteran of two emigrations, one from Russia, the other from the United States, I can absolutely guarantee that those places wouldn’t be preferable even to Corbyn’s Britain.

Where then? Where in the modern world can one hide from the modern world? The question is tautological, and there is no possible answer.

Europe is going to the dogs, America isn’t far behind (and in any case she’s unlikely to welcome a few million Brits), nowhere in Asia would be acceptable for most of us, Israel has a restrictive immigration policy for gentiles, Australia has it for just about everyone – and who’d want to live there anyway, considering that 90 per cent of the world’s deadly creatures reside Down Under, and the humans drink vats of Foster’s?

Our best chance seems to lie in preventing the likes of Corbyn from getting anywhere near Downing Street. Perhaps Lord Sugar could contribute a few of his millions to this cause.