The G-Gnome Is Being Outsourced

to his creator's new, slightly less anonymous blog.

I always hated the serene, fat little bastard anyway...

Some Initial Thoughts On The British Government's Proposed Illegal Immigrant Bonus

Blogging rule of thumb; a relevant story about a topic that interests you always appears when you have the least amount of time to dissect it.

I'll be coming back to this. However, some initial thoughts:

As reported in The Times -

"ASYLUM-SEEKERS and illegal immigrants are to be offered a £3,000 bounty to leave Britain voluntarily as part of the Government’s efforts to increase the number who are returning home. ..."

The Scottish Daily Mail, headline January 12 -

"WE'LL GIVE YOU £3,000 TO LEAVE SCOTLAND"

As reported in The Daily Telegraph -

"The Government expects to spend about £6 million over six months encouraging around 3,000 refugees, who have been refused permission to stay or are awaiting decisions, to return home."

Altogether now, from the top - when is a criminal not a criminal, but a 'refugee' ?

When The Daily Telegraph is writing about them.

Some Thoughts On My Role In The History of Evolution

If I were a dinosaur, I'd be the one contemplating the beauty of the ball of light coming towards me.

Foreign Criminal Of The Day - Bail Jumping Billy

Even the most ardent admirers of onshore offshoring must despair at the conduct of Adam Zugaj.

Zugaj, a Pole, today failed to appear at Edinburgh Sheriff Court to answer charges of dangerous driving and drink-driving, offences alleged to have been committed last December 17.

The offences were allegedly committed while he was driving a bus.

He was one of a job-lot of 700 Eastern Europeans recruited overseas by First Bus, which is in turn part of First Group - the same First Group which operates First ScotRail, whose commercial director Gordon Dewar is one of Scotland's Haughty Immigration Tsars.

Zugaj has been sacked and the BBC reports that,

"His solicitor told the court that he was unable to explain his client's failure to appear."

Indeed.

An Unhealthy Speculation

In a Strangeloveian column for today's Daily Telegraph entitled 'We should be very worried about Iran', Sir John Keegan wrote,

"Iranians may well be the missing link for which MI5 is searching behind the July 7 bombings in London."

Indeed they might be - as also might the Martians be responsible, for the logic behind throwing about wild suggestions concerning the nationality of those responsible for killing 52 people without displaying firm evidence is certainly otherworldly. It will play well with the neocon moon-howlers who go up to the cusp of accusing British generals of treason, and then back away; but with few others.

You never know, it could all have been the work of the gnomes...because you don't really think they spend all night just sitting about your garden looking decorative - do you?

The Connected World of Jack Abramoff

The huckster extraordinaire appears to have been in league with everyone from Israeli settlers to Montenegrin nationalists.

The whizzing sound you can hear is the pebble going down the well - and one thinks it will be a long time before anyone finally hears the splash.

Quote Of The Day

"People here want to work for 60 rands (£5.60) per day. But the Zimbabweans will work for 30 rands or 20 rands so the businessmen hire Zimbabweans and they take our jobs."

Timothy Mbanba, 57, a resident of Choba, South Africa.

That pretty much puts mass immigrations's most personal negative effect in a nutshell.

What A Friend We Have In Allah

The Devil's Kitchen has been having a merry old time with this drivelling, authoritarian post from Neil Harding, a Labour supporter from Sussex.

However, a quick shufti round Harding's blog revealed this classic post - 'The Truth about Hizb ut-Tahrir'.

The post contains the following comments -

"Hizb ut-Tahrir.

It is a legal, non-violent organisation that has no links to terrorism and no terrorist has ever been a member of it.

Yes, it has extreme irrational views. It wants the unification of all Muslims into one state- the Caliphate under Sharia law.

There are many such groups of all religions. There are far worse organisations than this, arguably the BNP, Jehovah's Witnesses, countless scientology cults etc etc".

Hold on a minute. The Jehovah's are oddities for sure, but worse than Islamist extremists? One cannot recall a single incident of a Jehovah's Witness blowing themself up on a Tube train; or expressing sympathy for Jehovahs who have blown themselves up in other countries; or, indeed, calling for all Jehovah's to be united in one land, under one law, under one leader.

Whay would such a leader be called? 'The Great Jehovie's Boabie'?

On can almost hear the strains of the new Hizb ut-Tahrir anthem wafting from the minarets of Muswell Hill:

"What a friend we have in Allah,

He says Jews are good to hate,

And the gates of Heav'n will open

When we all self-detonate.

What a friend we have in Allah,

He rules how we live our lives,

And he says 'Yes' to honour-killing,

Taking slaves and beating wives.

And the stage of Allah's drama

There, for all the world to see,

Is where the mighty feared Osama

Would shout "one-nil" at Highbury!

What a friend we have in Allah,

He guides us along the road,

And we all shout 'Discrimination!'

That's our one-note default mode"

And you did read the date on Neil Harding's original post correctly.

It is dated July 22 2005.

Into The Shell

Jeff Randall, the Daily Telegraph's business columnist, has today published a typically honest and forthright column on the UK's pensions crisis, entitled 'How pensions treasure has slipped from our grasp'.

Unlike many others, Randall has the guts to the spread the blame for the crisis in five equal measures; between Labour administrations; Conservative administrations; avaricious pension scheme operators; fund managers; and the regulators.

Yet such honesty only brings home the really shocking truth about the crisis; it was entirely avoidable. That is its great shame; an explosive mixture of the destructive ideologies of both left and right, greed and wilful failure to follow the most basic rules of prudent investment has resulted in the futures of many British people looking very bleak indeed.

As for myself, I am reconciled to working until I die. My own pension arrangements are unsatisfactory, I have neither the drive nor aptitude to run a business and it is highly unlikely that anyone's going to be offering me a good pensionable job anytime soon, with an increasing pool of young graduate labour (in itself a consequence of both Labour and Conservative maladministration) and a labour market rigged in favour of the foreigner over the native. The limits of my talents seem to extend only to banging out crapulous and repetitive weblog entries; and by their blogs shall ye know them.

Yet, without wishing to sound in need of urgent psychiatric treatment, virtually everything one writes is motivated by something best described as amorphous love of the nation. I can vividly recall hearing Peter Hitchens describe himself as a 'British patriot', on an edition of 'Question Time' broadcast from Cardiff in 2003, and thinking that it seemed glaringly immodest, not the sort of phrase one should use to describe oneself.

However with all British political movements now geared to hanging on to the fictional 'centre ground', but in reality offering only different shades of big-state-big-business neoconservatism, one can't help but wonder why any of their leaders have gone into British public life.

They all possess very vivid authoritarian streaks. They are all 'internationalist', which seems to mean little other than greater interest in alleviating suffering abroad than at home. They are more interested in abetting absolute any policy which advances the chimera of 'globalisation' rather than in ensuring the United Kingdom can stand on its own feet by growing the food it eats and producing whatever it consumes through manufacturing; while the Armed Forces, funded by us for the defence of the realm, are deployed to ensure that other societies are fractured along cultural and ethnic lines in order to try and make them more like us, when they have not subjected to themselves to the same stresses and influences which got us to where we are now.

It hasn't worked. It was never going to work.

We owed Iraq nothing prior to 2003. Thanks to our abetting in the country's destuction, we do now.

Where do we fit into all this? Down there, on the bottom, in our place. And I can't think of a time in recent British history when the interests of the governing seem to diverge so markedly from the interests of the governed.

Forget them all. The Britain they have made is just like them, ugly and vicious; and they can keep it. If that means one must reside in the Britain of one's mind, so be it. Let the mandarins play for now - our day will come.

In the meantime, it would be a good idea to return this crap to its previous owners.

A Daily Telegraph Article Of Interest To Readers Of iSteve.com

In its issue of December 9 2005 (Eye 1147), Private Eye wrote the following concerning Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer's ideological battle with David 'Swampie' Cameron -

"Despite the best efforts of Simon Heffer, the Daily Telegraph eventually came out for David Cameron. It could hardly do otherwise, given how many Cameroonies work at the paper.

Telegraph columnist Alice Thomson wrote a long, adulatory profile of 'Dave' last Saturday - though she forgot to mention that she and her husband Ed Heathcoat Amory are close friends and neighbours of the new boy-wonder, as leading lights in the New Age cult known as the Notting Hill Set".

The same Alice Thomson has an article in today's Telegraph entitled 'When everyone meets in the middle, whom do you vote for?'. She kicks off thus:

"Politics is no longer red, blue or yellow; Left or Right; Tory, Labour or Liberal Democrat. It's all about sets now. There is the Notting Hill Set, the Primrose Hill Set and the Orange Book Set."

So much for liberal representative democracy. She concisely encapsulates the grinding homogeneity of their collective 'centrism':

"The three sets pretty much agree on the nature of that centre. They all champion localism while being naturally paternalistic. They prefer talking about the environment to immigration. Members of the Notting Hill Set chat happily about wealth redistribution and want to be Compassionate Conservatives. The Orange Book Set call themselves Tough Liberals and talk easily about market forces. And Labour's Mr Miliband and his friends are still following the primrose path towards Mr Blair's Third Way - that hard-to-find political nirvana that David Miliband and Douglas Alexander recently insisted should be described as "traditional values in a modern setting".

All three groups agree on the little issues as well as the bigger picture. They have a shared dislike of Turkey Twizzlers and are determined to tackle obesity while admitting to the occasional McDonald's and kebabs themselves. They prefer Richard and Judy to Punch and Judy politics, and are as happy answering questions about Mini Cheddars as the minimum wage".

However, it's at this stage she gets interesting -

"To stand out without abandoning the middle ground, these politicians need to find ways of making themselves exciting, relevant and innovative. One answer to this conundrum could be found in a new bestseller, Freakonomics - the book they have all been reading over the Christmas holidays. Written by Harvard economist Steven Levitt, it comes up with radical solutions to everyday problems".

One ears start to prick up. She goes on,

"He meticulously examines all the statistics and data to turn preconceived wisdom on its head, which is why he is consulted by everyone from General Motors to the New York Yankees, and Presidents Clinton and Bush. His results are not always comfortable reading, to wit his deduction that relaxing the abortion laws in America was the main reason that crime subsequently fell."

As one of my countrymen once remarked -

"RIGHT FULL RUDDER! REVERSE STARBOARD ENGINE!"

When he is bad he is horrid - but when Steve Sailer is good he is very, very good, and never better than when demolishing the 'Abortion cut crime' theses propounded by Levitt in 'Freakonomics'.

Think Alice reads Steve? She really should, you know.

Juan Mann On 'Operation Iraqi Asylum'

US lawyer Juan Mann has a piece on VDare today, relating to the continued growth in numbers of Iraqis seeking US asylum three years after the fall of Saddam.

He quotes the readers of a previous piece on the subject as saying,

“I get the feeling that refugee status for both politically persecuted and economic migrants alike and resettlement to one of these three industrialized nations (the US, UK and Canada) is being viewed as a virtual right by third world countries who view with envy the refugee status and new lifestyles granted to those who came before, to those who had the good fortune to get a ticket to America. As evidenced in this sad case (of the Sudanese asylum-seekers massacred by Egyptian police), even resettlement to Egypt is not considered "good enough." They don't just want protection and the basics, they want the big score, a wealthy industrialized nation.”

That seems to be precisely the attitude expressed by Somali asylum-seeker Warsame Ali Garare when asked for his opinion on finding himself beached in Malta rather than Italy.

However, Mann's most telling example comes from the files of the so-called Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc (CLINIC). He quotes them as writing,

"Mrs. B, a Christian Chaldean who fled Iraq and received asylum in the United States, filed an I-730 Asylee Relative Petition for her husband in March 2003. …

Mrs. B and her attorney were told that Mr. B's case was undergoing a "security screening" and that he just had to wait. Despite additional inquiries to DHS, Mr. B's case continues to be pending and he and his wife remain separated":and notes,

"So according to the Treason Lobby’s henchman in the immigration bar: send more Iraqis!

But why isn’t the alien’s husband serving a tour of duty defending his homeland in the Iraqi National Guard, at least in the meantime? Will someone also please remind the “Catholic Legal Immigration Network” that family reunification can work both ways, that is, outbound as well as inbound into the Untied States"

Indeed. As Sir Andrew Green has noted (HT- Adam Lawson) almost 25% of those detained in the UK upon suspicion of plotting Islamist terror attacks have been asylum-seekers.

The asylum game's a bogey, and the party's got to stop.

Glasgow's Domination By Its Underclass

It has transpired that Sharon McMillan and Andrew Morton, whose three-year old son Andrew was murdered by Mark Bonini, are drug-dealers.

They are exemplars of everything that is wrong with Glaswegian culture - not Scottish culture, but specifically Glaswegian culture; the over confident strut; the blatant disregard for the rule of law; the wilful failure to understand or even acknowledge the primacy of personal responsibility; and the aggressive, in-your-face attitude, their faces twisted into sneers of perpetual anger, a rage only leavened by the continuous consumption of drink and drugs.

They are of a type which sprang fully-formed from the head of the welfare state, rapidly and alarmingly usurping and displacing the old respectable working-class, the last vestiges of which can be seen doddering into the Post Offices to pick up their pensions; the old men ramrod straight, the old women with not a hair out of place.

The Mortons and McMillans have ascended to dominate us and our way of life. Scotland's, and especially Glasgow's, politicians, will always seek to place the blame for the carnage they cause elsewhere, and a case can be made that the levels of poverty we endure, reflected in our declining life expectancy, have been induced by macroeconomic trends well outwith local control.

Yet even the poorest households can elect to live respectably. Too many of Glasgow's don't, preferring to live like animals.

And when misery, the only consequence of such behaviour, is the result, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Notes From A Wonderful Country

Scared for Blighty's Future?

Pah!

Your psyche dulled by the death grip of Seasonally Affected Disorder? Are you ready for the revolver and the bottle of whisky after being back at your work for a day?

Don't want to know!

Enough of pessimism!

'Notes From A Wonderful Country' will be an occasional series outlining what a bloody marvellous place the United Kingdom really is, where, if the odds are on your side, you can get anything, you can do anything and really be the person you want to be.

The first example of how marvellous we are is provided by Anita Ho.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled that Ho did not receive a fair hearing at her initial industrial tribunal case against Crystal Services, against whom she lost her claim for unfair dismissal, race discrimination and victimisation, because the chairman of the original tribunal rather crassly remarked that her skin was "as white as the English".

Ho is a native of Vietnam - the land which gave the world the punji stick, a place with no historic connection to the United Kingdom and one where the local idea of sex discrimination seems to be based more on age than gender.

God, we're a wonderful country!

San Juan, County Antrim

There seems to be a remarkable similarity between those Puerto Ricans who spew hatred of the gringos while pocketing the gringos' welfare cheques with those republicans in Northern Ireland who praise the memory of Bobby Sands while cashing the English giro.

Keeping An Eye on Russia, cont - The Great Alternative Sources of Energy Smokescreen

It seems that the practicalities of Russian public life continue to induce hysteria amongst our opinion formers.

In today's 'Telegraph', at the end of a discussion of alternative energy sources Ruth Lea of the Centre for Policy Studies declaims that,

"The country's economy could be held to ransom at any time by Mr Putin and his friends".

Attempts like this to paint the Russians as wannabe Saudis, willing to turn off the spigot if they don't get their way, are nonsensical.

What does Russia have to sell?

Resources.

What do we want to buy from them?

Resources.

A willing buyer and a willing seller - bingo! You have an energy market.

Now compare the behaviour of the Russians over the last two weeks with the behaviour of the Saudis and Iranians during, say, the Yom Kippur War.

Were the Russians trying to annihilate the Ukrainians? They were simply trying to get a fair price for the goods the Ukrainians buy from them when they aren't stealing them.

In 1973, however, the Umma was trying to annihilate the Israelis. And in order to do this they put the world economy in peril by manipulating the price of crude oil, a commodity capable of many more purposes than natural gas and therefore of much greater strategic importance, to record levels.

Ruth Lea refers to our economy being held to 'ransom' by 'friends' of Putin. Putin doesn't have many friends; as George Trefgarne noted yesterday, he doesn't seem to be interested in having friends. What interests him are the interests of Russia - how can the leader of any nation be blamed for pursuing that goal?

Putin's behaviour throughout this fiasco has been that of a guy who wants a fair price for the resources under Russian control. He has given no indication of wanting to dominate his buyers; that would be the action of an economic madman, and he is not that.

And if he did - well, he has the gas and we want the gas; the perfect recipe for a little price-gouging.

The diversification of its natural supply is always a perfectly sensible measure for any country to take, if only on the basis that you shouldn't place all your eggs on the one gas hob. In that respect, we clearly need more nuclear energy, and now.

But one can't help but think that we wouldn't be having this debate if we hadn't so cavalierly abandoned our coal industry 20 years ago. No doubt smashing the miners felt good at the time; but perhaps our lust for doing everything on the cheap may just have turned round and bitten us.

It's certainly put a lot of people's gas at a peep.

Muggings Of One Sort Or Another

is now up on No Compensation for De Menezes.

Abuse Of Science Notes

The Little Rajahs Ride Again.

Think of all those delicious curries lost forever...and of the souls of their makers...

Calling Sir Iqbal Sacranie!

The voice of moderate Islam's input is clearly required in this inflammatory dispute.

Given his expertise in managing 'certain sensitivities', one looks forward to receiving the dispensation of his wisdom.

Hopefully all Saudi visitors to the United Kingdom will be advised to leave, in no particular order, their Korans, robes, swords, whips, spouses (or multiples thereof), whores or slaves at home for the forseeable future.

I'll Give You Odds Of 2-1 They're Romanians

This is a favourite stupid motherf-Romanian wheeze.

(Update 9/1/2005 - And I was right, bejaysus! The original RTE page I linked to this morining was before their court appearance, and didn't refer to their nationality. It's been updated after their appearance, and it appears they are indeed stupid motherf-Romanians.

How vibrant Dublin's crime scene now must be. )

South African Notes

It's seems that a life on the ocean wave might not be much fun if you're a Tanzanian stowaway.

About as much fun as trying to buy a drink in Cape Town.