A Case of Conscience

Reading 'The Corner' is turning into an extremely tedious workaday activity, like shaving or taking out the trash. Just as one does not wake up, eyes glittering, singing 'I'm going to shave today!' before bouncing off to the bathroom, one does not wake up thinking 'Woowwweee! Another day of 'The Corner' to look forward to!'

It has achieved the rather dubious honour of being the last of my daily blog reads, if only because it always reads the same, day after day after day...

There are times, however, when it does not disappoint - and this is one of them.

Yesterday, Bush shill and Duran Duran fan Kathryn Jean "Just call me Rosie the Riveter" Lopez made a rather sarcastic link to an item called 'Vatican astronomer ponders baptism of extra-terrestrials', from 'Catholic News'. It's a review of a pamphlet entitled 'Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life', by Vatican astronomer Bro. Guy Consolmagno S.J. Bro. Guy is an extremely smart cookie, and his pamphlet would certainly seem to be an interesting read for my spiritual brethren's more cosmically inclined .

It's a pity that Lopez spends so much time hacking about Star Trek, because if she ever watched the show, or read the books, she would be aware of the career of James Blish, and of his creation Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez S.J.

Maybe the concept of 'baptising ET' isn't so dumb after all.

Avian Bird Flu (The Lethal Kind)

has been discovered in Romania.

And one is quite sure that we'll still let Romanians enter the UK without any quarantine period - after all, they're great for GDP.

Family Life in the US Military

is put under the cosh by Steven Baskerville in The American Conservative.

I hadn't been aware of GK Chesterton being a prophet of doom in respect of the social dangers of easy divorce, as Baskerville indicates, but he was dead right. As a former divorce practitioner, one's pennyworth on this subject is that there are two simple precepts that would cure all this nonsense in the very short to medium term.

The first is not that divorce should be easier but that the act of getting married should be very much harder that it is in virtually every English-speaking jurisdiction. Why should you be able to marry someone you've only known for seven weeks, as you can in Scotland, when it can take two years to divorce them by mutual consent? That's absurd. There should be a mandatory two year wait before permission to marry can be obtained. If nothing else, it would be a sure test of commitment.

Secondly, the feminists, and feminist ideology, should be flushed out of the family law system like dung from the Augean Stables. They are ideologues, and what business does a wantonly barren ideologue like Germaine Greer have disturbing the dynamics of families through the propagation of political ideology? The women of the second half of the 20th Century must live in constant gratitude to Greer and Gloria Steinem, because, like, before the feminists came along they had no idea how powerful they were....

The laws that Baskerville takes to task are sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance. Why are Dobson, Robertson, Santorum and all the other tent-preachers, snake-handlers and rapture-idolaters who sang with one voice for Middle Eastern war not speaking out against such horrid, oppressive laws and practices, which serve no purpose other than the malicious destruction of American families? Has their shame overtaken them, eating at them in the middle of the night?

Why are they not asking themselves why they have not taken a lead in having all such laws struck down, and why a sexually aggressive Austrian immigrant has succeeded where they have not even dared to tread?

Maybe The Lord was right after all - you know, the bit about the sinners crowding into Heaven before the Scribes and Pharisees.

Never mind, lads - Let's Get Ready To Rapture!

The Myth of British Meritocracy

The ongoing saga surrounding Tory leadership contender David Cameron's refusal to disclose whether he has ever abused narcotics has produced a piece by James Delingpole in 'The Daily Telegraph', entitled 'He'd be weird if he hadn't had a puff'.

It's quite fitting that, two days after the same newspaper raised its arms and sang hosannas to its allegedly meritocratic goddess, it should bust wide open the myth that Britain is any kind of meritocracy. The following is an excerpt - the links are mine:

"Not for even a fraction of a second would it have occurred to any of us that there was anything morally dubious about taking drugs. Our only slight concern might have been the possibility that we might end up among the two or three poor souls who seemed to die at Oxford every year while trying to fly off their college roof. Where are they now, all these people? Well where do you think we are? We ended up where the (alleged) cream of its generation always ends up.

Some of us - a lot of us, in fact, because this was just after Big Bang - went to expensive jobs in the City; some into law or accountancy and management consultancy; some, the most famous being Boris Johnson (who with characteristic perversity I don't think ever took drugs), ended up in the media.

And now we're all just about hitting 40, we've got to that stage in our careers where some of us are finally counting for something. We're MPs; we're newspaper, publishing and TV editors; we're senior partners; we're film-makers; we're managing directors; we're lead counsels; we run public companies; we're pillars of the community with families and big mortgages and big-time respect. And almost all of us took drugs. Often lots and lots of them. We enjoyed it. And few of us have any regrets".

Oh, and yes - you're on top. Most important thing of all, old boy, most important thing of all.

It really will take a miracle to get me to vote Conservative again.

The Maggie

One of the greatest of the 'Ealing comedies' of the 1950's was 'The Maggie', a tale of wily Scots puffer men, straight from the pages of Neil Munro, engaged in one of the reportedly time honoured pursuits of those who plied the old sea-routes of the west coast of Scotland - conning an outsider.

Boats like 'The Maggie' and 'The Vital Spark' don't really exist anymore, swamped as they have been by the wake of the big ferries and regular passenger flights. Like all such ways of life, it was probably good while it lasted - but now it's gone, assimilated for all time into that great big deregulated, homogeneous and oleaginous black hole called 'globalisation', along with the rest of us.

There are times when one wonders whether those who advocate deregulation, specifically the flow of capital across borders to enable it to do the only thing it can do, which is find the place where it can achieve its highest rate of return, actually care about the real damage such deregulation has had upon the lives of those least able to participate in the benefits such outflow can bring. The deregulators seem to believe that such people have no worth - that the value of human life is determined solely by productivity and earning potential.

That mindset found its perfect expression in stupid phrases from the 1980's like, 'They're eating our lunch'. I just can't get my head round that. I make my own lunch, and carry it with me - how could someone else eat it? To all intents and purposes, what does such a phrase actually mean? To get close to such a phrase's true meaning, one must deploy educated guesses and hazardous proximates.

Margaret, Baroness Thatcher, was 80 years old yesterday. Ask the Scots if she ate our lunch, and see just how many nod their heads.

Scotland the Banned

New restrictions on airgun sales are proposed.

Sorry, but I feel a Denis Leary moment coming on...

A New Political Movement

The tone of my proposed new movement, PCCSSO, would undoubtedly be regarded as populist, if not actually demagogic, by those whose invisible hands guide British public policy. However, one could be sure of a groundswell, if not actual tsunami, of public support for its exclusive aim, the safety and protection of some of our society's most vulnerable members.

PCCSSO stands for Popular Campaign for the Castration of Serial Sex Offenders.

Meet Scott Watson, a smokie bandit whose member deserves to be vulnerable.

Quote Of The Day, Part I

"...criticizing the GOP is like dynamite fishing: hardly sporting, but appealing nevertheless when one is in a certain mood."

'Werther', 'Imperial Hacks: Right and Left', Counterpunch (hat tip Antiwar).

Quote Of the Day, Part II

"On the other hand, we can assume that the minority of Iraqis who have battened on to the occupation for their own position or profit already have their visas in order should the plug ever be pulled. Prospectively, they are just one more émigré group poised to drive up rents in Arlington, Virginia."

Werther, 'Imperial Hacks: Right and Left' Counterpunch.

Indeed. And not just Arlington, but also Knightsbridge, Kensington & Chelsea or anywhere else that favours the money of rich international trash while the locals can go scr...fend for themselves...

Andrew Sullivan's Hacker

Andrew Sullivan suffered a hacking incident earlier today, and later linked to Musement Park's musings on the hacker's identity.

But wait - doesn't that photograph look very familiar? Isn't that the 'vulgar and profane genius' Gary Brecher, the so-called War Nerd?

Hopefully his famous flunking of puberty has not landed him in water as hot as Victor Davis Hanson's vineyard...

Bush's Romanian Moment

I can't read another word about Harriet Miers. There's just been too much.

However, the reaction from the Bush-right indicates a complete loss of control over the base. Hurricane Katrina did not deal the mortal blow to the hermetically-sealed Bush Ideology Bubble that one had first anticipated. It wounded it - it didn't finish it.

The Miers nomination has. The opposition Bush is facing from the right, and his reaction to it, is reminiscent of that fateful picture of Nicolae Ceausescu standing on the balcony in Bucharest, waving the people to be silent when he realised he'd lost control.

There is no practical way in which George W. Bush can now ever regain control of his base - not after this, and certanly not without any number of policy reversals and climbdowns. The one thing he could do to save himself, tackle immigration, is the one thing he won't do.

If this continues, prepare for a Democrat Congress in 2006.

A Memo to Polly Toynbee

Dear Polly (send her e-mail),

My blogging friend The Three Gates was kind enough to point me in the direction of your 'Guardian' column of October 11, 'Of course the wealthy want an immigraton free-for-all'.

I thought, just for a second, that we were going to see a resurgence of what used to be called 'the patriotic left'; but you disappointed me.

Firstly, by describing John Bercow MP as 'pragmatic' is to confuse pragmatism with opportunism. Let's not forget that Bercow is the man Tony Blair once described as being "nasty and ineffectual in equal quantity".

If he ever merits a biography, one can't help but wonder whether Bercow's career will be analysed in terms first enunciated by Robert Towne, in his script for Tequila Sunrise; something to do with blaming a compass for pointing north...

He wasn't always so liberal - in 2002, he was asking questions on how many asylum-seekers had been located in his Buckingham constituency. And the following month, he voted for a motion which stated that,

"That this House deplores the failure of the Government over the past four years to negotiate with the Government of France on the re-application of the bilateral agreement on immigration to the case of asylum seekers; and calls on the Government to ensure a more equitable distribution within the EU of the responsibility for assessing and meeting the claims of potential refugees."

So if you're looking for a reasonable conservative immigration spokesman, the wee fella's a bit of a broken reed.

Bercow might indeed argue that 'Migrant workers put in more than they take out, making a net contribution of £2.5bn', although, given the existence of taxpayer-funded services like sendmoneyhome.org, that's a figure for which, like all good sceptics, I'd like to see the workings.

Ah yes, home sweet home...

You do almost seem to get the point when you say,

"Blair and Brown embrace the inevitability of globalisation, but make a deliberately class-blind analysis"; and,

"Migrants add to the profits of the company and thus to GDP": and even,

"They also hold down the pay rate for all other low-paid workers, keeping wage inflation remarkably low and the Bank of England very happy";

but then you spoil it by saying,

"London has the most migrant workers and it also has the most unemployed. Who are they? Many more young people are not in education or work after generations of deprivation. Bangladeshis are among the poorest because 80% of their women don't work".

Sorry, didn't you mean, "British women of Bangladeshi extraction?"

Most of the rest of your piece makes the right noises, and sort of shows a half-understanding of how the mass migraton of people, the issue of the age, affects real people; but you keep spoiling it by referring to 'class'. Your fixation with class prevents you from analysing the problem in terms of the harm it does your fellow citizens; because is concern for all those who share one's nationality less important than continuing to mouth the shibboleths of Marx?

You did a thought experiment- so will I. Ever heard of Fabian Loew? Fabian seems like a real plonker, the sort who would run you over in his Porsche and then charge you for the damage, the kind who might turn to drug-dealing when business is slow and he can't afford to keep both his mistresses and his coke habit. He's German, and runs a website called jobdumping.de, the purpose of which is to enable unemployed fellow Germans to work for the lowest possible wages, a real race to the bottom.

Loew's service is the economic equivalent of 'Bumfights', and in its own way is just as degrading.

Watch this space, Polly, because I'm quite sure some young Tarquin already has an angle for pulling the same kind of stunt over here...particularly with Janusz and Tomasz coming to build the Olympic village...

Tying Up A Loose End - White Slavery

In this post of October 1, I wrote that I was going to try and do some research on people smuggling prosecutions in the USA before 1924 and after 1965.

As it turned out, it defeated me - the whole topic is too vast to investigate with the limited time and resources at my disposal, and alos no doubt through my own failings as a researcher.

I still think the original theory stands good - and those interested might care to have a read of this.

The Crisis in Race Realism, cont - A Perfect 100%

Having been playing catch-up with a lot of stuff over the last few days, it took slightly longer than anticipated to read Steve Sailer's response to Jared Taylor's attack on his views on 'citizenism'.

As I have often stated before, I have no truck with the mindset behind white nationalism; nations are built on foundations more profound than mere skin tone. Taylor himself presents as something of a flawed figure, an able man drawn into certain ways of behaving through the power of his convictions; an apposite analogy, though with very different beliefs and different aims, might be the Hon. George Galloway MP.

As a journalist and social scientist, Taylor, for me, was fatally compromised by his citation of John McNeil, a 22-year old Australian backpacker caught in the New Orleans Superdome, who had previously written to me saying , "By day 3, three year old girls were being raped and killed inside the dome". However, the official version of events does not seem to square with the young larrikin McNeil's, thank God (and I shall say it before Glaivester does - yes, there may have been more crime than the official version recorded, but there does not seem to have been any physical evidence or other corroboration of crimes of the gravity described by McNeil). Taylor's eagerness to cite sources from whatever quarters they could be found, willing to make such lurid and ultimately unsupportable claims, is indicative of a flaw in his ideology so deep that it blinds itself to reason.

Steve scores 100%. The label he gives his doctrine, 'citizenism', is a perfect expression of what the mindset of the mature, civilised, and educated member of an English-speaking society should be, not the anti-civilised leftist separatist multicultural doctrines espoused by the guilt-ridden, self-loathing homunculi of the Guardian, the New York Times, the Labour Party, the DNC and the BBC.

He deserves particular praise for being one of the very few conservative commentators to bother to mention the plight of the working class - not the underclass, but the working class. One is naturally loathe to use such Marxist language, but one's experience of the British working class is that they are the most conservative group of people you will ever find. School uniform and high standards of schooling? They're for it. Death penalty? They're for it. You name almost anything on the conservative agenda - they're for it.

And it's their interests which always come last in any redistributive equation.

Steve has continued the topic here: and in an interesting little aside, to which he hasn't yet hyperlinked, notes the following:

"Thinking about IQ: There are almost twice as many American whites with IQs below the African-American average as there are blacks below that point. Conversely, about one out of six blacks has a higher IQ than the 100 million whites with IQs below the white average."

A very interesting observation indeed.

Kofi Wants Europe to Accept Illegals

Dropping any pretense to neutrality, which one should think would be mandatory for one in his position, the Ghana-born Kofi Annan calls for Europe to accept African illegals:

UN secretary general Kofi Annan called the immigrants' situation "very serious" and asked that international migratory flows "not be stopped drastically. What's obvious is that trying to control these movements drastically is something that will not work, especially in Europe, where migration is necessary so that some countries can maintain their current pace of economic growth." After asking for involvement from the international committee, he announced that the UN's high commission for refugees had sent several teams to the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla, as well as the Canary Islands.

"...something that will not work". A defeatist stance trying to lull the West into complacency. (Oh, wait, we're already complacent.) It's clear that what would work is a Spanish army in Ghana: the place was never so good as when a British army kept order. Now, the disorder and grinding poverty of West Africa are threatening to spread to Europe, and Kofi thinks that it is "necessary... for economic growth".

Some Thoughts on Modernity

I love TCM.

It recently broadcast a fascinating documentary on the life and career of Sam Peckinpah. Some movies from Peckinpah's oeuvre are notoriously violent, yet others, such as The Ballad Of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner, are reflective, more personal works.

It showed the trailer for 'Junior Bonner', and there was a line in it about how the principal character has a problem with the 20th Century. Peckinpah probably felt the same way.

Yet the medium he used to tell his stories was of course a profoundly modern one. Peckinpah could not have escaped the 20th Century even if he tried.

I guess I have the same problem with blogging.

Some Thoughts On The Study Of The Classics

On a post entitled 'Students: don't you just love them?' David Farrer of 'Freedom and Whisky' remarked,

"The more personable of today’s “students” may manage to get jobs as nannies or butlers for Shanghai entrepreneurs, but most of the others will be totally unemployable".

Hopefully David was speaking tongue in cheek. However, some of his commentors have remarked on the futility of studying Latin. I couldn't disagree more.

On March 14 2004, the University of Strathclyde anounced that it would not be appointing another teacher of teachers of the classics when the only one in the country, Dr. Tony Williams, retired that summer. According to Iain Smith, the dean of Strathclyde's Education Faculty, they were, 'ordered to axe the course by ministers because it could not be justified financially.'

At the time, I wrote an article about the incident for 'The Washington Dispatch' entitled 'A Failed State called Scotland'. Published on March 18 2004, it's no longer available online (thanks a bunch, Shane), but in it I wrote,

"Sunday March 14 2004 can be recorded as the day on which the country of Scotland became a failed state. We are not subject, yet, to the Somali experience of 12 year old boys with RPG's roaming the countryside in jeeps, however our failure, though more subtle and far less violent, is no less abject than that of any other hole on the map.

March 14th was the day on which it became public kowledge that Latin and Greek will no longer be taught in public school.

The study of the classics is essential to an understanding of the roots of Western culture and civilisation. Although the advantages of knowing your datives from your ablatives are not immediately apparent when you're studying them, the fact that you are studying them exposes you to the influence of those responsible for producing many of the ideas that still shape our society".

I had occasion to revisit the topic of Scottish education in November 2004. In another article for TWD entitled 'Good Little Slaves' (scroll down past the bits where I stood accused of prejudice against the blind), I wrote,

"Earlier this year, the Scottish Executive took the decision to stop training classics teachers. On November 21, Scottish Television's 'Seven Days' show reported from Cumbernauld, a dormitory town outside Glasgow. One of Cumbernauld's biggest employers is a call-centre operated by, or on behalf of, Morgan Stanley. 'Seven Days' reported that seniors at Cumbernauld High School are being given lessons in how to be call-centre operators, and photographed them wearing headsets and sitting at terminals.

These teenagers have not been taught citizenship; they have not been taught history, except from particularly slanted angles; many have not been taught basic English grammar. They have, however, been taught how to take a call in a call-centre.

They have been taught to be good little slaves, whose only role in life is to be productive, not to be a citizen. Ideology has denied them their history; now economics will deny them their futures".

The market has no place in the school. Ideology has no place in the school. The only items which should be on a school's curriculum are the constant things in life - scholarship and endeavour.

And being taught the classics always score higher on both points than being taught call-centre crap when you're 17.

VDARE needs funds

Being gracious to those whom one opposes is something of a dying skill, one that I've never been good at since the time in 1993 when I dug a fellow solicitor out of the possibly perjured hole one of his clients had pushed him into, only to have him bite my hand off at the next opportunity; but that's Scottish lawyers for you.

For all of VDare's faults, it would be a crying shame to lose the political and economic analyses of Paul Craig Roberts. Roberts is a joy to read, in that he absolutely couldn't care less about what anyone thinks of him, and if he has not yet been acclaimed as the last patriotic economist in America, he certainly deserves to be; so one can do no better than follow Glaivester's example and link to the donations page.

I suppose this could be classed as something of a Prince Metternich moment...

The Secret Fears of Gnomes

I went to the doctor this morning, for a follow-up on my elevated blood pressure.

The ECG I had last Monday was fine, cholesterol (5.1) was, in my doctor's words, 'well below the West of Scotland average' and blood pressure was down from 164/98 to 164/84. No medication was dispensed and I've to go back in three months for another reading.

In the meantime, I need to lose weight (I'm 5'7'' tall and weigh 14.5 stone), and stop smoking.

He advised me that the major factor increasing the blood pressure was stress. Whether it's a consequence of my mild form of Tourette Syndrome or whatever, I do not handle stress well. The She-Gnome is constantly suggesting (hectoring, actually) that I should undertake some form of retraining, such as plumbing or pipe-fitting. Whilst these are perfectly honourable and no doubt very lucrative employments, they are not ones for which one feels any particular kind of vocation. If I didn't have a vocation to be a lawyer, I sure as hell don't have one to spend the rest of my working life unblocking S-bends.

And yet the working life of a call-centre operator is full of stress. The British have become a people the limits of whose consciousness extend only to their own gratification. They expect Rolls-Royce service at Mini Cooper prices. They threaten their fellow citizens' livelihoods if they don't get what they want when they want, and are besotted with every new sensation designed to make them part with their money.

And there you have the classic 'gnome's quandary'- does one persist in submitting oneself to the abuse and depredations of the disgusting, uncouth, foul-mouthed, grasping, venal, hateful, inarticulate British public; or does one, to put it thus, aim higher?

Because is this all there is? Is this as good as it gets?