Blog

Obama, say our triumphant broadsheets, won because unlike his opponent he understands that America is changing. In line with the almost universal faith in inexorable progress, the implication is that she’s changing for the better because all change is vectored in that direction.

I’m not going to bore you with stacks of figures showing how far this is from the truth. Anyone who follows the news knows anyway that after Obama’s first term America is considerably worse off – economically, socially, politically, geopolitically, demographically – than she was at the same point in George W. Bush’s tenure, when things were already far from perfect.

Nor does it take the help of fortune-telling appliances to predict that things are only going to get worse. No economy can survive years of trillion-dollar deficits when it’s already groaning under the weight of a $16-trillion debt. No country will escape a recession by increasing its already high social expenditure and punishing success by higher taxes. No society can get away for long with allowing unlimited immigration of cultural and ethnic aliens, with the concomitant irreversible shift in the nation’s demographic make-up. No state struggling with economic malaise can pursue incessant local wars – unless it hopes to cure said malaise by provoking a deck-clearing global conflict.

With the possible, though unlikely, change in the last direction, there is every indication that Obama’s administration will follow all others as far as the Republican opposition in Congress will allow. That’s why his re-election will hurt the national interests of the United States, and therefore her people. But then Obama was elected not by the nation at large but by those special groups within it that have a vested economic, ideological and racial interest in extending the tenure of the most socialist president in US history.

Any healthy society would disfranchise a welfare sponger who votes for a candidate merely because he promises more welfare, or a member of an ethnic minority (or, for that matter, majority) who votes solely on the basis of a candidate’s skin colour, or an immigrant who votes for a candidate exclusively in expectation of unlimited immigration. Casting a vote responsibly involves a mature ability to ponder the best interests of the whole nation, not the parochial interests of a discrete group. Believing that every post- or sometimes pre-pubescent person is capable of such deliberation is a fallacy that goes back to the great catastrophe of the West, the French Revolution.

Since then the West has been divided into those who more or less welcome a world built on the principles emerging out of that debacle, and those who more or less reject it. That’s the sense in which America is truly divided. The watershed runs not between Democrats and Republicans, but between those who cheer the clean break with two millennia of Western tradition and those who believe that most of it is worth keeping. That watershed will never be filled in and concreted over, it’s much too deep for that.

Obama’s re-election, in the face of an economic plight that would have made any candidate unelectable at any point in America’s past, shows that more Americans now reside on the left side of the watershed than on the right. I use these conventional terms in a rather unconventional sense of transcendental cultural and philosophical, rather than transient political, allegiance. At that level no reconciliation is ever possible, no compromise can ever be worked out.

Thomas Mann once said that all intellectual attitudes are at heart political. I’d paraphrase that to say that all political attitudes are at heart cultural or, even deeper, moral. Politics may be the art of the possible, but the domains of culture and morality can’t by their very nature be relativistic. Rather than doable or undoable, they operate in the categories of good and bad, or else right and wrong. Regarded in that light, there’s no doubt that Obama’s re-election testifies to the ever-growing number of Americans who opt for bad and wrong, rather than good and right.

This is not to suggest that I believe for a second that Romney would have been on the side of the angels. On general principle, I rather doubt it. But of course I don’t know for sure, and neither did those Americans who cast their vote for Obama. Since only a sudden outbreak of a cretinism pandemic would make the majority like Obama’s record, they had to base their choice mainly on comparing Obama’s rhetoric with Romney’s. On that basis, they chose to stay on the wrong side of the divide.

At least the Americans had one. Nowhere in Europe exists a society with even an approximate parity of right and wrong, good and bad. Stupid, soulless, immoral modernity has carried the day here, which explains such remarkable homogeneity of opinion across the full spectrum of political parties everywhere. It also explains why 90 percent of Frenchmen and 80 percent of Brits favoured Obama. They had been brainwashed to accept unquestioningly the ethos he represents – to a point where no serious opposition to it is possible. In Britain, for example, no candidate saying the same things as Romney would be allowed to stand for a parliamentray seat, never mind lead his party.

That’s why all European leaders, including our faux Tory Dave, endorsed Obama. It’s not Obama they supported, nor his Democratic party. Their hearts went out to the rhetoric that was consonant with the noises they heard in the depth of what passes for their souls. Upon hearing yet another clarion call of modernity, they got up and saluted.

What now? My crystal ball looks murky this morning, so I’ll have to refrain from specific predictions. I don’t know what will happen in America or anywhere else over the next four years. But if we were to widen our perspective and look at long-term trends, the general direction in which the West is going, then one sees little reason for optimism. The West just may be suffering from a terminal disease, and the 2012 US election is but one of it symptoms.    

 

 

 

   

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist was wrong when he said, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ As Obama’s triumph shows, it’s not the economy that decides elections these days, it’s the corruption.

For the 2012 US presidential election, along with all others in the West, was utterly corrupt – and the guilty party were not the officials who counted the votes but the people who cast them.

Those who still worship at the altar of universal suffrage must realise that their church was desecrated a long time ago. The building still stands, but it’s an empty shell stripped of any meaningful content.

In the process yet another blow was delivered to the widespread myth of Americans being rugged individuals, firm believers in individual attainment, hard work and the rags-to-riches American dream. They used to be all those things. But they’ve been corrupted to become something different.

They certainly vote not as rational individuals but as ideological blocs. For example, among the Hispanics, who make up 10 percent of the vote, Obama beat Romney by 40 percentage points – a landslide that suggests a collective allegiance free of any consideration of merits and issues. The only thing this group cared about was its own parochial interest: Romney’s tough, and utterly correct, stand on immigration decided the issue.

Yet compared to the 87-percent majority Obama won among black voters, his triumph among Latinos looks like a cliff-hanger. Again parochial interests came into play: Romney was clearly intending to trim welfare rolls, in which Hispanic and black voters are represented out of all reasonable proportion. Add to this the chromatic incidental of Obama’a skin colour, and Romney’s solid 18-point advantage among white voters wasn’t sufficient to offset this electoral racialism, tacitly promoted by the media.

Now that institution is utterly corrupt in that it fails in its mission to cover news in a fair and unbiased way. All major US media, and especially the three main TV networks, traditionally act as the propaganda department of the Democratic party, resembling in their ideological bias our own dear BBC – the difference being that at least American networks aren’t financed by the public.

In the run-up to the election Obama was largely absolved of any blame for the state of the US economy. Yet according to the Media Research Center’s Business and Media Institute, media coverage was much more hostile in 2004, when the economy boasted higher growth, lower unemployment, smaller deficits and cheaper fuel than today.

Back then TV screens were filled with icons of Republican heartlessness: the homeless man, the poor sod without health insurance, the unemployed woman with a football team of fatherless children, the old chap having to choose between medicine and food. This time around, with the economy worse off than at any time since the Great Depression, such tear-jerkers no longer regaled the viewing public.

In parallel, the gaffe hunters had a field day with every mildly controversial remark made by Romney, while ignoring major policy blunders committed by Obama. For example, when the hard-left magazine Mother Jones secretly taped and published Romney’s generally correct remarks about the unsupportable numbers of welfare freeloaders, the networks described them as an ‘earthquake’ and ‘hurricane’. Their self-fulfilling prophecy was that the hurricane would blow away Romney’s chances.

Yet Obama’s idiotic and demagogic ‘You didn’t build that’ speech, in which he explained to the nation that it wasn’t so much private enterprise as the state that was responsible for America’s greatness, was hushed up for four days. Only when Romney attacked this subversive nonsense in his own speech did the networks acknowledge it, and then rather sympathetically.

The latest policy outrage committed by Obama was his reaction to the murder of four Americans, including the ambassador, in Benghazi. He and his staff knew immediately that this was a terrorist attack timed to commemorate the anniversary of 9/11. Yet he and his spokesmen claimed that the carefully planned and successfully executed murder was a ‘spontaneous’ reaction to an anti-Muslim video watched on YouTube by a dozen people.

Now imagine someone like George W. Bush caught in a lie like that. Why, he wouldn’t be allowed even to contest the election, such would be the outrage whipped up by the media. And in this instance?  According to NBC’s flagship Today programme, the event was a feather in Obama’s cap, ‘reminding voters of his power as commander-in-chief’. When this nonsense was disproved by hard facts, the Benghazi story quietly disappeared off the screen.

This election provides yet another proof that America has gone the way of Europe. Popular corruption has reached a point where a thoroughly corrupted electorate is no longer capable of casting their votes in an honest, responsible way.

Corrupt politicians, ably assisted by corrupt media, have created an electorate in their own image. The corruption is self-perpetuating: the more politicians preach and the media extol the virtues of socialism and PC rectitude, the more people will see nothing wrong in having the state supporting them. Once the number of those wholly or partially dependent on the state has reached a certain critical mass, a strong statesman will never be elected – or if by some fluke he is, he won’t be allowed to change anything.

This situation isn’t a transient downturn in the fortunes of one-man-one-vote democracy, but its structural defect. For as long as the vote of a man working his fingers to the bone remains equal to that of a welfare recipient, the crack in the edifice of democracy will continue to grow wider. The task of getting elected will be even further reduced to the ability to make incredible promises credibly, appealing to the basest instincts rather than the highest aspirations.

Obama has proved to be exceptionally good at that. America is in for a tough time.

 

 

 

   

 

 

Before you reach for your TV remote to check what’s going on, I don’t mean that Obama has somehow leapfrogged the electoral process to claim victory prematurely. Moreover, even if he does win the closest US election in history, it won’t be by a landslide.

Yet though the Americans haven’t voted yet, the Europeans have – and Obama’s victory is staggering. Asked whom they would rather see as US president, over 70 percent of all Europeans went for Obama – and in France he polled an unlikely 90 percent.

The French of course have a predilection for socialist politicians, as they showed in their own latest election. But Hollande only won by a couple of percentage points; he didn’t carry 90 percent of the electorate.

This enthusiastic support for an utterly useless president is worth decorticating. Why such affection for a foreign politician who broke all his good campaign promises and kept all the bad ones, who is presiding over an economy with the highest unemployment rate since ‘Brother, can you spare a dime’ was a big hit, whose administration increased the already catastrophic $10 trillion debt to a suicidal $16 trillion?

For one thing, socialism is beautiful, and all beauty is best appreciated from afar. We don’t screw our noses into the glass case protecting Mona Lisa; we step back to admire the masterpiece. Thus almost half of the same Frenchmen who voted against their own socialists enthusiastically support someone else’s. In the same vein, all those Gitane-smokers in the Left Bank used to love Stalinism in Russia but would have hated it in France.

Then of course there’s the cynical belief that a decline of US economic power, which will inevitably ensue if Obama is re-elected, will put France’s own rickety economy in a stronger competitive position. As it is, she’s slipping behind such overachievers as Spain and Italy, and her own recession is deepening with every subversive measure introduced by François’s government.

The Europeans’ hatred of Romney, or rather everything he represents, shouldn’t be underestimated either. The French in particular talk about ‘ze Anglo-Saxon model’ the way they never talked about ‘ze Nazi model’ during the occupation. What is it a model of? Personal responsibility over communal security; small rather than omnipotent state; an economy free of government meddling; high rewards for hard work, no rewards for indolence; flexible labour markets; low taxation and so forth.

Romney preaches all those disagreeable things, which activates in French minds their historical resentment of ‘ze Anglo-Saxons’, who have had the temerity of beating them on every battlefield, including the economic one. In this respect, the French choose to ignore the obvious lack of homogeneity between les yanquis and les rosbifs. Both are Anglo-Saxons which, when enunciated by a Frenchman, is seldom a term of endearment.

Few stop to realise that Romney’s rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. He says all the right things, yet if elected can be confidently predicted to do all the wrong ones. He’s a modern politician after all, and his record as governor of Massachusetts shows that he put through many Obama-style programmes there, albeit on a smaller scale. But he does make ‘ze Anglo-Saxon’ pronouncements, which trigger off traditional Gallic actuators.

Foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is another reason, and here I begin to converge with the French, though for a different reason. The French are torn between two animosities. On the one hand, they are easily the most anti-Semitic nation in Western Europe, which unenviable prejudice provides the basis for their hatred of Israel. I heard more anti-Israeli harangues in France last summer alone than, over a lifetime, in all other countries combined.

Both Obama and Romney pledge support for Israel, but the French sense correctly that Obama’s heart isn’t in it, and Romney’s is. That alone would be enough to swing the French vote to Obama.

On the other hand, they resent their own Muslims more than any other European nation does, possibly because France has more of them than anyone else. Here the same pictorial analogy applies: the French mind Muslims much less when they burn settlements around the West Bank than when they burn cars around Paris. It’s not just absence but also distance that makes the heart grow fonder. I’m not sure the French perceive the common thread running through both incendiary excesses, but then the ability to put two and two together is never thick on the ground anywhere, not just in France.

All these are spurious reasons to cheer Obama and jeer Romney. There are better ones, and they too have to do with foreign policy. Romney is steeped in the ethos of the American religion: US supremacy, manifest destiny and a shining city on top of a hill. His own visceral feelings are strengthened by his foreign-policy entourage, neocons to the last man.

The readers of this blog probably know that I regard neoconservatism as a pernicious and ultimately dangerous trend in American politics. It represents the proselytising arm of the American religion, with its belief that every country in the world must be educated in the magnificence of American democracy. If the teaching aids required for this didactic exercise all have to be laser-guided, then so be it.

Romney, if elected, will do the neocon bidding, and since democracy is demonstrably unachievable in the Middle East (Israel apart), the region will be in the throes of a non-stop war. This creates a vast potential for a major conflagration involving Russia, possibly even China.

The neocons aren’t bright enough to realise that, by agitating for the Arab Spring, they’ve brought the world to the brink of the nuclear winter. They are driven by ideology, which can never coexist with reason – as they’ve amply demonstrated over the last decade.

The French have wisely stayed more or less out; we’ve stupidly plunged in headlong. I for one don’t want to see British youngsters dying to promote America’s manifest destiny, which I fear they may have to do in greater numbers should Romney win.

To sum up, if I still lived in America, I’d vote for Romney. In that I’d be driven by economic self-interest, which, according to Adam Smith, lies at the foundation of civic virtue. As I live in Britain, I think Obama would be the lesser evil.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When bicycles first appeared in the 19^th century, they revolutionised Britain’s country life. Suddenly farmers acquired an easy means of courting girls in other villages, thereby reducing inbreeding and improving the nation’s genetic stock.

Cycling quickly became essential transportation for some, entertainment for others, a competitive sport for others still. So far, so good. Now fast-forward to our own time – only to observe that cycling has become downright pernicious.

Rather than simply being good exercise and a cheap way to travel, it has claimed something to which it isn’t entitled: moral ascendancy. Cycling has taken a place next to wind farms, solar panels, public foreplay with trees and hoodies, not smoking, not driving after a pint, not using private medicine and other merit badges of PC modernity.

Overnight a Londoner riding a bike to work stopped being an irresponsible miser willing to risk his life to save a few pennies, or else a health freak prepared to die for stronger leg muscles, or perhaps an impatient chap outracing a bus in rush-hour traffic. He’s now a secular saint doing his bit for environmental and personal health.

Whenever their PC button is pushed, our brainwashed masses respond with a surfeit of enthusiasm and a shortfall of reason. For example, it never occurs to them that cycling has no environmental benefits over public transport – those trains and buses are going to run anyway, so what’s a few passengers more or less? Of course, if most people rode bikes, there would be fewer buses and trains, but even cycling fanatics don’t suggest that such a development is likely.

Now HMG is launching a cross-party enquiry into ways of making cycling safer. No doubt our politicians will bring to the task the same intellectual rigour and scrupulous honesty they display in most of their other endeavours. I don’t know who is spearheading the enquiry, but George Osborne, with his known commitment to cheaper travel, can do nicely.

One can already see which way the enquiry will go in the way statistics are being massaged in our ‘quality’ press. For example, the figure of 3,192 is being waved about like a red rag before a bull. That’s how many cyclists were killed or seriously injured last year.

Do you smell a rat? Here it is: suppose I told you that last year I drank 95 gallons of water, juice and whisky. Does this make me a pathetic drunk or practically a teetotaller? You can’t answer this question unless you know how much of the liquid I consumed was water and juice, and how much of it was whisky.

Let’s try to untangle this statistical knot. In the first 10 months of 2012, 101 cyclists were killed in Britain, about 10 a month. Assuming that roughly the same ratio existed last year, 3,072 of the 3,192 were injured and 120 killed. Suddenly the statistic can be seen in a different light, and that’s even before we defined a serious injury: a broken wrist is more serious than a broken finger, but less so than a broken spine.

Equally false is the figure of 9% more ‘seriously injured or killed’ than last year. Apart from the same lumping the two categories together, this statistic is grossly misleading because it doesn’t take into account the increase in the number of regular cyclists and total distances travelled. This is considerable. For example, between 2009 and now the former number increased by 150,000, making more accidents highly predictable.

The government has earmarked £30 million to make cycling safer – this on top of the uncountable millions spent already on suffocating city traffic with unnecessarily wide cycle lanes. The one on London’s Embankment, for example, is as wide as a car lane, though not even Boris Johnson’s breadth comes close to that of a Mini.

Instead of squandering more of our money, HMG should acknowledge an obvious fact: the streets of our major cities aren’t designed for cycling. London isn’t Amsterdam, where vehicular traffic crawls along the straight canals at a snail’s pace, cycle or no cycles. We have more drivers, more opportunity to drive at the speed limit and more lorries whose drivers are often unsighted. Cyclists will always be in great peril, and the staff of London’s St Thomas Hospital will always refer to them as ‘organ donors’.

The only way to reduce the number of cycling deaths is to reduce the number of cyclists. This can be easily done by practising fair play, something for which the British are so justly famous.

Cyclists using their bikes for anything other than a pleasant ride in the park or in the country must be tested, licensed and made to pay road tax. As it is, they contribute nothing to the upkeep of the roads, leaving drivers, so hated by our liberal establishment, to carry this burden.

Cyclists should also have their bicycles registered and insured. The insurance premiums alone would probably be prohibitive, what with cycling presenting a much higher actuarial risk than driving. Incidentally, it’s not just cyclists themselves who are at risk, but also drivers who often have to swerve to avoid adding another pair of kidneys to the St Thomas’s organ bank.

Also, cyclists must be made either to obey the same traffic rules drivers do or face fines and disqualification. How many times have you had to jump out of a cyclist’s way on a pedestrian crossing? How many of them have you seen running a red light or going hell for leather on a pavement? This must stop.

These measures would be as effective as they’re fair. The number of ‘deaths and serious injuries’ would go down pari passu with the diminishing number of cyclists on city streets. The Exchequer would be millions richer, rather than another £30 million poorer. Drivers would have a much easier life. And, as an important side benefit, fewer bureaucrats would need to be employed.

And the downside? Simple: our PC sensibilities will be so offended that nothing sensible will be done. God forbid people will be encouraged to use their minds rather than emotions – they just might vote for the best candidate on offer: Mr None of the Above

Nick has delivered himself of a rant against those who wish to alter the UK’s relationship with the EU. Displaying the kind of perspicacity we like to see in our great leaders, he noticed that ‘many of the people who advocate repatriation are the same people who want us out of the EU altogether’.

Since ‘no repatriation of powers would ever be enough’ for that sorry lot, he said, ‘there is no hard border between repatriation and exit’. He’s absolutely right about that, and I for one applaud the X-ray acuity of Nick’s eyesight: he saw right through those nasty naysayers.

Now, according to Aristotle, cognition is founded upon a correct empirical observation. That’s why it was natural to expect that Nick would move on to build an intellectual edifice reaching the dizzying heights of wisdom. Regrettably, what followed makes one doubt not just Nick’s mental capacity but indeed his mental health.  

‘Heading for the exit would be the surest way to diminish our great country,’ he said. ‘To go down that route would be a catastrophic loss of sovereignty for the UK.’

Excuse me? One may agree or disagree on the possible consequences of leaving the EU, with neither position bringing one’s sanity into question. But surely, however misguided in every other way, such a departure would mean recovering, rather than losing, sovereignty?

My trusted Chambers defines sovereignty as ‘supreme and independent power’. If Nick accepts this definition, then he seems to believe that, by surrendering both her supremacy and independence to a foreign body, the UK gains sovereignty, while reclaiming them would spell ‘a catastrophic loss’ thereof. This is an interesting point – from the psychiatric point of view, that is.

Take off your jacket, Nick, loosen your tie and lie on this couch. No, I’m not suggesting you ever tell lies – I’m simply inviting you to assume a horizontal position. There, that’s better. Now explain what you mean, and please don’t get excited.

A departure from the EU would diminish our clout – in the EU? No, says Nick. That is, it will do that, but above all it’ll diminish our clout in Washington.

Now we know he’s not just disturbed but insane: fancy believing that we have any clout in Washington to begin with. But assuming that we do have a teensy-weensy bit, how would we lose it? Back in 1941 the US found it in her heart to side with Britain in her conflict with the EU precursor. If our being at loggerheads with a temporarily united Europe didn’t destroy our relationship with the USA then, why would a more benign separation do so now? Call out for the men in white coats.

As Nick is squeezed into a straightjacket and strapped onto a stretcher, he gets another shot in: ‘It is wishful thinking to suggest that we could give ourselves a free pass to undercut the single market, only to negotiate our way back into the laws that suit us.’

But Nick, no one has ever expressed any hostility to the single European market, not within my earshot. It’s the single European state that people have issues with, and surely even you must see that the two aren’t the same? It’s possible, you know, to trade with others without belonging to the same state.

As to the old chestnut of finding ourselves ‘on the sidelines’, unable ‘to negotiate our way back into the laws that suit us’, this provides further clinical proof of dementia. The whole point of leaving the EU is to disengage ourselves from its laws and to return to our own, thus regaining our sovereignty (see Chambers English Dictionary).

The EU would then become a foreign entity, on whose laws we’d have no influence, regardless of whether or not they ‘suit us’. Neither, and this is a simple logical inference, would its laws have any power over us.

Hence our economic ties with the EU would be similar not to those Yorkshire has with Surrey, but to those Britain has with China or the USA. We have no say in what laws they pass – and quite right too, for those laws have no jurisdiction over us. Yet we seem to be doing brisk trade with those nations – why, I bet even Nick’s tennis shoes are made in China. Why on earth can’t we have exactly the same relationship with Germany or France? Even if they restyle themselves as Germance or Francmany?

Nick then had a few unkind words to say about Labour’s about-face on the EU budget, and here one has to agree. For Labour to reposition itself as an opponent of feeding the EU’s spending habit is a bit like Dr Shipman championing responsible care for the elderly. (Parenthetically, according to today’s NHS the good doctor had all the right ideas – shame this pathway blazer is no longer around.)

This is after all the party that only due to internal bickering failed to drag us into the euro. To compensate, they dragged us into everything else, while surrendering much of our rebate and increasing our net contribution to the EU coffers. In fact, their line of attack against the Tories has always been the latter’s presumed euroscepticism. For exactly the same people (Ed Balls, ring your office) to insist on cutting, as opposed to merely freezing, the EU budget represents the acme of cynical opportunism, but then what else is new?

Aren’t you glad we are governed by people of such towering minds and robust moral fibre? So perhaps I was wrong: Nick et al aren’t really mad. They are simply people of limited intellect, unlimited powerlust and nonexistent morals. Call me a maximalist, but there has to be something wrong with a pond where this sort of substance rises to the top.

 

 

Storm Sandy just may have blown Obama back in the White House. His charitable impulses running riot at this stage in the campaign, the president visited an emergency shelter in submerged Atlantic City and said all the right things.

‘You guys are in my thoughts and prayers,’ stated Obama, without specifying the confessional provenance of said supplications. ‘We are going to be here for the long haul.’

What more would the newly homeless, or indeed the electorate at large, need? A little show of sympathy, and suddenly Obama looks presidential. Looking is of course more important than being in the virtual reality of all modern democracies, and in America especially.

Even New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, who usually feels about Obama the way a lamppost feels about dogs, was effusive. He and the president had a ‘great working relationship’, presumably meaning they toured New Jersey together without trying to push one another out of the car. ‘I cannot thank the president enough for his personal concern and compassion for the people of our state,’ said Mr Christie, who harbours his own presidential ambitions.

Obama’s lead in the swing states of Ohio and Iowa instantly widened to five percent, which probably means his re-election is in the bag. Never mind the economy, feel the compassion.

It is of course the state of the economy that’s supposed to decide US elections, but in order to do so it must be communicated to the electorate truthfully. Most Americans can’t be bothered to peruse long-term trends, indices and indicators – they expect the media, especially the three major TV networks, to do it for them and tell them what’s what.

Now these organisations lean so far to the left it’s amazing they still haven’t toppled over. Compared to CBS, NBC and ABC, our own ghastly BBC is a paragon of objectivity and even-handedness. For example, at the time Ronald Reagan was winning by a landslide, about 98 percent of the networks’ staff voted Democratic, what with Communist Party USA not being an option on offer. So naturally Obama, the leftmost president in history, is their boy.

This is not to say they’re lying about the dire state of the US economy. They would if they could, but alas there are regulations against that sort of thing. Instead they deceive – by omission, spurious analysis and general tone of benevolence towards their ideological comrade.

It is, for example, instructive to compare how the networks are covering the economy now and how they did so at exactly the same point in 2004, when George ‘Yo Blair’ Bush was fighting his re-election campaign.

In September, 2004, the US economy wasn’t doing well, and the federal debt stood at $7.4 trillion, making one wonder exactly how Americans define fiscal conservatism. In this, old Dubya followed the path charted by his ‘conservative’ predecessor Reagan, under whom the debt had tripled. Still, at the end of Bush’s first term the economy boasted a growth rate of 3.3 percent, an unemployment rate of just 5.4 percent and petrol prices at a manageable $1.82.

Such indicators are a cause for commiseration but, compared to Obama’s dismal performance, they are grounds for jubilation. At exactly the same point in the current campaign, US unemployment stands at 8.1 percent, almost 3 percent higher than under Bush. Economic growth is at 1.3 percent and going down. Petrol costs $3.84 a gallon, almost $2 dollars higher. And the federal debt has more than doubled to $16 trillion.

Yet, while in 2004 the networks depicted the economy in apocalyptic terms, today they either hush up or downplay its plight. Then an NBC commentator was saying ‘I really think Bush has ruined the economy. We’ve lost so many jobs, and I haven’t seen him do anything to really fix it.’ More than 25 million Americans are looking for work now, but this is either ignored or described as a sort of natural disaster, on a par with Sandy.

Meanwhile ABC’s George Stephanopoulos let White House adviser David Plouffe get away with bragging that the administration had ‘cut over $3 trillion in spending’. Such a drastic cut would hardly explain a federal debt ballooning to $16 trillion unless we remember that Obama hasn’t really cut anything by $3 billion. He merely proposed such a cut in his budget, knowing full well that it would never in a million years get through either House, where not just all Republicans but even most Democrats oppose it. The cut, in other words, represents political cynicism, not fiscal prudence.

To be fair, these desperate whitewashing efforts are matched by our own leftwing press, which category now lamentably includes The Times. According to today’s issue, Obama ‘deserves a second term’, and his compassion tour of New Jersey ‘rose above politics’. Any unbiased observer would know that, on his economic and overall performance, all that Obama deserves is to be run out of town. And as to his cheap political stunt, it falls not so much into the ultra range above politics as into the infra range below it.

None of this is to suggest that Romney would make a better president. He could conceivably be the lesser evil, but an evil nevertheless. Yet one almost wishes he could pull off a miracle and get elected – if only to spite the rancid alphabet soup of American TV networks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The premises of the 14^th-century Sretensky Monastery in central Moscow have been found to house a hard-working brothel. To the best of my knowledge, the holy fathers provided only their blessing and administrative support, leaving the workaday activities to several young ladies.

This sort of thing is hard to explain even in a Russian context. Perhaps the monks confuse missionary work with the position of the same name, I really don’t know. Those things are sometimes hard to keep apart. Or else they think it their duty to cater to the physical, not just spiritual, cravings of their flock.

The monastic answers to vestal virgins charge £35 an hour, which suggests that the brothers have faith in a low-cost, high turnaround operation. Then again, as men of God they can’t be seen favouring the rich. 

It’s good to see that the concept of monasticism continues to evolve in Russia, mostly in the direction of getting in touch with lay life, as it were. But then, as the Russian saying goes, ‘like priest, like parish’.

The vicar of Sretensky Monastery, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), is Vladimir Putin’s confessor, while Patriarch Kiril is the monastery’s superior. His Holiness, code name ‘Mikhailov’, is a career KGB operative, but then of course the secret police isn’t the mammon that can’t be served in parallel with God.

Nor is he unique in this respect: the entire hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate can boast a similar CV. The recently published reports of ‘Mikhailov’s’ (and other hierarchs’) KGB handlers to their superiors are a good read, detailing as they do the zeal with which His Holiness, then merely a metropolitan, carried out his tough assignments. The prose is deadpan, everything stripped to the bare bone of facts.

While I haven’t seen any documents that Tikhon too is a KGB man, this isn’t beyond the realm of the possible. After all, only a trusted comrade can be allowed to hear Col. Putin’s confessions.

You must remember that Russian Orthodox priests are obligated to divulge to the state secrets vouchsafed them at confession. Solzhenitsyn rightly fumes about this in his Gulag, but he forgets to mention that this fine tradition goes back to Peter the Great (d. 1725).

Now imagine a confession that proceeds along these lines: ‘Father, forgive me for I have sinned. I ordered that Col. Litvinenko be poisoned with polonium in London. Then I’ve also used proxies to amass a pilfered $50-billion fortune. And let’s not forget all those uppity journalists I had knocked off…’ This wouldn’t do, would it? Unless, of course, the confessor is bound by an oath that supersedes the one he took at his ordination.

You may argue that Putin is the state, so no danger there. However, the pack of Russian leaders has often been reshuffled in the past, and there is no guarantee that it won’t be again in the future. So better safe than sorry – Col. Putin didn’t get where he is by ignoring this folk wisdom.

Jesus famously drove money-changers and mendicants out of the Temple. I wonder how He would react to one of Moscow’s oldest monasteries housing a knocking shop. There wouldn’t be one stone left upon another, this is an ecclesiastical certainty.

The Russian Orthodox Church claimed that the monks had no knowledge of the den of iniquity, and I’ll leave you to decide how likely that is. I am however curious whether Putin combined his forays to the confessional booth with a quick stopover at the adjacent facility. That would be in keeping with the image of unbridled virility that the national leader likes to project. Also, at this austere time, why waste a trip to another part of town?

How sincere Christians can still accept the authority of the Russian Church is hard to understand. But then we all know Churchill’s pronouncement on the enigmatic nature of Russia.

 

P.S. Just two days after I wrote about HMG winding nuclear power stations down and favouring instead the useless wind farms, came two important announcements. First, no more onshore turbines will be built. Second, a Japanese firm has been contracted to construct a nuclear power station. Far be it from me to claim that my diatribe had anything to do with this. However…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Tone delivered yet another rousing oration, though I don’t know for a fact that his listeners were indeed roused. Nor do I know if they had paid for the privilege, though it’s a safe assumption that they had. Tony seldom does things for free these days. For all I know he may be trying to charge Cherie for services rendered.

On this occasion Tony correctly, if somewhat unoriginally, identified the situation in the EU as a crisis. Yet it’s one pregnant with opportunity, and Tony is it.

‘Out of this European crisis can come the opportunity finally to achieve a model of European integration that is sustainable,’ explained Tone. ‘A Europe-wide election for the presidency… is the most direct way to involve the public.’

In case you’re Tone-deaf, allow me to translate: Europe’s problems will be solved if, and only if, Tony is elected European president. The speech was perceived by most observers as a job application, and if so we should all offer our unequivocal support.

Just think how much Tony achieved in Britain, where he had to worry about opposition both within and without his own party. In merely 10 years he succeeded in turning a moderately successful country into a destitute, debt-ridden, disarmed suburb of Brussels forced to support Eastern European huddled masses yearning to be on benefits.

Just imagine what he’ll achieve in the EU where even our anaemic checks and balances don’t exist. Why, he’ll run that abomination not just into the ground (that has already been accomplished by others) but six feet under. Where, as I’m sure you’ll agree, it belongs.

In a way one could argue that Tone’s entire tenure as PM was one contiguous application for this post. For example, to earn merit points with the EU, he did his level best to drag Britain into the euro, and only the sight of Gordon rolling on the floor and frothing at the mouth stopped that undertaking in its tracks. Had Tone got his way, Brits would now be fleeing to Romania, not the other way around.

The EU is a quintessentially modern Leviathan and it deserves to have a quintessentially modern politician at its helm. For Tony represents the dominant type of modern life, especially modern public life: the important nonentity.

Bereft of character and intellect, he’s richly endowed with animal cunning and unquenchable thirst for power at any cost – and that’s all he really communicates in his speeches. Who in his right mind would pay to hear him speak defies imagination. Why spend good money? We can get a collection of lies and platitudes from the net, with the added benefit of being spared the sight of Tony’s plastic smile.

He isn’t even clever enough not to let the cat out of the bag, something other federasts do so well. Witness the statement I cited above: ‘Out of this European crisis can come the opportunity finally to achieve a model of European integration that is sustainable.’

In other words, this worthy goal would not have been achieved without the benefit of a debilitating crisis – what’s poison for the people of Europe is meat for the federasts. Unwittingly, Tony has divulged the long-term strategy behind the EU. Even more unwittingly, he put his finger on the key geopolitical feature of modernity.

The strategy was hinted at by Jean Monnet, the St Paul of the federastic religion. In his memoir he called it the ‘strategy of fait accompli’, a sequence of steps creating such tremendous economic problems in each nation that they could only be solved by a supranational Leviathan. The idea was ingenious but hardly new: Lenin had called it ‘the worse, the better’: let the people starve and practise cannibalism as long as the cause triumphs. Europeans don’t quite starve yet, but this is a difference of degree only.

On a broader scale, all modern crises, peaceful or military, have led to a vastly increased centralisation of state power. This holds true for the French Revolution, the American Civil War, both World Wars, the Great Depression and so forth. In each instance the state emerged more powerful and the individual less so. The present crisis in the EU is no different. People like our Tone, unprincipled nonentities desperately needing power for self-assertion, smell a weakness and move in to grab the reins.

Far be it from me to suggest that some kind of conspiracy is afoot. Nor do I think that Tone has studied political science in sufficient depth to work out such far-reaching plans. There is no need. He doesn’t have to use his brain; his nose is all it takes. I told you he has animal cunning, didn’t I?

 

 

 

 

Throughout the ‘Cold War’, the Soviets led a concerted propaganda effort against nuclear power stations in the West. Among other methods, they used the KGB’s good offices to provide surreptitious financing for various anti-nuke groups, such as our own dear CND. Now the Cold War is officially over, though they forgot to tell that to Col. Putin, but that particular offensive has proceeded to a victorious end.

The Soviets, it has to be said, didn’t mind their own nuclear power, even though most of it conformed to the Chernobyl standards of safety and quality control. When that particular one blew up into their faces, the sainted Gorby’s first time-honoured reaction was to declare that any rumours of the accident originated with the CIA and other enemies of progress in the world.

It’s only when westward winds carried the radiation towards the capitalist Sweden, whose Geiger counters went haywire, that Gorby had to own up. Had the winds blown in the other direction, the catastrophe would have been hushed up, just as a much worse one was in the fifties. Then underground nuclear facilities and storage sumps in Siberia blew up, killing 100,000 instantly, and God only knows how many by delayed action.

In those parts of the world where human lives are still held in some esteem, nuclear energy facilities have never had a fatal incident. Nonetheless accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima are routinely described as ‘disasters’ even in our Tory press, leaving one wondering what word they’d reserve for incidents in which people actually get killed.

During the same period, tens of thousands of miners died of black lung and in pit accidents, and hundreds were killed by offshore platforms capsizing. This proved beyond any sane doubt that nuclear energy is by far the safest source of energy available, not just the most effective. As I hope you understand, I’m talking here about the kind of sources that can provide most of our energy needs, not the tree-hugging cloud-cuckoo-land varieties.

Even the most fervent champions of wind farms claim that eventually they’ll supply only 17 percent of our energy, and anyone who has studied the issue seriously will tell you that this estimate should be pasted in the dictionary next to the entry on wishful thinking. But even supposing they are right, where will the remaining 83 percent come from?

Our nuclear industry is moribund, with old stations being decommissioned and no new ones planned. Frau Merkel has declared that all German nuclear power stations will be shut down by 2020. France, which gets 80 percent of its energy from nuclear stations, will soon follow suit, Japan has already done so – what else do you expect after the catastrophe of biblical proportions in which no one died?

That leaves coal as the only viable home-produced alternative, which is good news for lung physicians who are thereby guaranteed more black-lung business than they could handle. Incidentally, even radiation levels around a coal mine are much higher than right next to a nuclear power station, but hey, never mind the facts, feel the passion.

Getting back to Soviet antinuclear propaganda in the West, why did they display such touching concern for our health? Why, for example, did the East German communists churn out nuclear stations like hotcakes, while paying their West German stooges to wage massive propaganda against nuclear energy? Why did Soviet cartoonists draw mushroom clouds over nuclear stations, displaying ignorance of secondary-school physics only matched by their expertise in Goebbels-style agitation?

Strategy is the answer. In those days Arab oil producers were in the Soviets’ pockets, which gave the communists a huge strategic advantage. The greater the West’s dependency on Arab hydrocarbons, the better it was for the Soviets, who could instigate oil crises at will. Unlike our own CND idiots (Tony Blair, ring your office) the Soviets knew that nuclear energy was the only reasonable alternative to hydrocarbons, which did wonders to focus the minds of KGB propagandists.

The situation has changed in details, but not in principle. Now it’s not only the Arabs but also the Russians who have their hands on the tap. Germany, for example, gets 36 percent of her gas from Gazprom (in which Col. Putin is reputedly a major shareholder), and central Europe even more (98 percent for Slovakia, 100 percent for the Baltic states). That gives the Russian KGB government a powerful blackmail weapon and perhaps a greater strategic edge than they’ve ever had.

Characteristically the Americans cottoned on faster than the Europeans, but then they haven’t been distracted by such vital issues as how much money the Germans must give to the Greeks to make them refrain from staging Nazi parades for Angela’s viewing pleasure. The Americans have developed hydraulic fracturing techniques that enable them to produce shale gas cheaply and on a large scale.

Quite apart from going a long way towards easing the country’s economic crisis (by, for example, making the raw materials for their chemical industry cost a third of Europe’s prices), this has largely eased America’s strategic conundrum – and complicated ours. The US is now producing 81 percent of its energy, making it less dependent on the Middle East. As America’s idealism is largely driven by fiscal concerns, this will reduce both her strategic stake and her interest in the region.

That will leave the EU in the driving seat – of a car with flat tyres and no engine. Only someone teetering on the edge of a crack overdose can believe that the EU will be in any position to control the situation in the Middle East. And only someone over that edge can really think that, left to itself, the situation won’t explode into the world’s face.

Meanwhile prepare yourself for the immediate consequences of HMG’s touchy-feely PC affection for wind farms, which are as useless as they are ugly. We’ll all freeze in the dark soon, but at least this will leave us enough time for tree hugging.

 

 

 

 

The other  night I caught out of the corner of my eye a couple of minutes of a ‘serious’ TV programme on archaeology. That was enough to prove yet again that ‘serious TV programme’ is an oxymoron, a bit like ‘a young person’.

Two young women were looking at a man’s skull displayed side by side with several others, supposedly belonging to man’s ancestors. What excited their girlish imagination was that the man’s skull was noticeably bigger, which they redundantly demonstrated by filling all the cavities with grit and then putting the grit into transparent glass jars.

This they held as yet another proof of evolution, not that any proof was needed of something the girls held as self-evident. In the admittedly brief excerpt I saw before switching to footie, they didn’t mention the Iceman, but then even Darwinists laden with degrees and honours seldom do.

The Iceman was discovered in a melting glacier high in the Tyrolean Alps on 19 September, 1991. This chap (Homo tyrolensis) is the oldest man found intact. (Some Egyptian mummies are older, but their brain and vital organs were removed.)

Actually, ‘pre-Iceman’ is a more accurate description of him as he lived before the Ice Age. Radiocarbon dating put his age at about 5,300 years old, but many scientists believe such a number is outside the reach of this method. So in fact he could have been much older than that.

Though the Iceman was only about 5’3”, his skull had a volume of 1500-1560 cm³, much bigger than the head of today’s man. This presents a problem for the evolutionists, even those more accomplished than those TV girls. They have to explain an evolutionary process that would account first for a huge increase in head size compared to apes – and then a gradual reduction to today’s average size of 1200 cm³. Yet again what we observe is not so much progressive development as degradation.

The Iceman had the same skull shape, facial features and DNA composition as the present inhabitants of these regions. But in some respects he was more advanced: even though he was 25-30 years old at the time of his death, his body had not yet reached physical and sexual maturity. This tallies not with Darwin but with the biblical accounts of people’s longevity, much higher than ours.

In fact, radiographic studies conducted by research orthodontists concluded that the Neanderthal reached maturity at age 28-32, with the concomitant increase in his average lifespan. In fact, studies of the characteristic features of Neanderthals’ teeth and jaws showed that they lived to about 200-300 – which casts doubt on the notion of progress implicit in Darwinian evolution.

It wasn’t just the Iceman’s physique that was astounding, it was also his artefacts. The Iceman had in his possession tools that we normally associate with the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age – or even the Middle Age. And yet he used them all at the same time, presaging, say, our contemporary Australian aborigines who are equally adept at using boomerangs and I-phones. This suggests that dating on the basis of artefacts isn’t quite all it’s cut out to be.

The Iceman was armed with flint weapons and a long yew bow resembling both in size and material the English longbow so fondly remembered by the French. Yew doesn’t grow in those parts, so it must have been a foreign import. He also carried an axe of almost pure copper. This was similar in shape to the axes found in Northern Italy and dated 2,700 BC.

His arrows revealed the Iceman’s knowledge of basic ballistics. Carved from viburnum and dogwood branches, they had flint points and feathers. The feathers had been affixed with a resin-like glue at an angle that would cause spin in flight and help maintain a true course. They were carried in a quiver, together with an untreated sinew that could be made into a bowstring, a ball of fibrous cord, the thorn of a deer’s antler probably used to skin an animal, and four antler tips tied together with grass.

The Iceman was also armed with a tiny flint dagger with a wooden handle, a grass net possibly serving as a carrying bag and a pencil-sized stone-and-linden tool that was probably used to sharpen arrowheads and blades. He toted much of his gear in a rucksack with a U-shaped wooden frame.

Amazingly, the Iceman was adept not only at ballistics but also at pharmacology. More than five millennia before Alexander Fleming he carried a medial kit containing two Piptoporus betilinus mushrooms known to have antibiotic properties.

His clothes belie the image of a primitive savage the Darwinists have conditioned us to expect. The Iceman wore a well-cut fur robe cleverly stitched together in a mosaic-like pattern – a far cry from crude skins. He obviously cared about his appearance: his hair was cut and he had highly ornamental tattoos, a grooming idea that scientists believed to be at least 2,500 years closer to our time.

The overall conclusion is that the Iceman wasn’t much different from us, and where he was different he was superior. Progress works in mysterious ways, wouldn’t you say? Charles Darwin, call your office.