Anyone want to adopt me for next Christmas?

I have to ask. Because as I get older, and Christmases become more grown up and sensible, I am finding myself the victim of ever increasing levels of human interaction viagra. In case you were wondering, that's a bad thing. So for next Christmas, I am throwing open an offer for any one of you cunts to adopt me viagra. You don't have to be nice to me, or have me for long...just get me away from the fuckers I have to deal with for 5 days. I'll tip you grandly.

Why are people such utter cunts buy cialis? I really do find it so depressing. To the point where I want to exile myself even more than I have done cialis. So I wind up living next to a broken chimney, next to a scattering of old rocks on the Moors buy cialis. Let's face it, it can't get any colder up there than it is in my fucking useless house at the moment.

I've decided that any house built in the 19th century, but modernised in the 21st century, retains temperature in the same way that Enron retains integrity and trust amongst its client base.

This Christmas saw me piss my time and energies away on a bunch of arseholes I don't like. You may have heard of this special 'catch-all' term before; let me enlighten you in case you have forgotten or are blessed with good fortune:

FAMILY.

That's right. This Christmas featured Mr and Mrs D. pouring over stoves and all the rest of it, so that ingrate, cynical and boring relatives could sit around, make no effort, and delight me with comments like 'so, John, don't you feel a bit awkward about the fact that when you move, you won't be able to buy a house as big as this?'

Yeah, thanks for that, that's lovely that is. I mean, I'm bursting with possible responses here. None of which answer a question that is, frankly, unanswerable, but still, it'd get me in the festive spirit. You fucker.

At that precise moment, Obo the Clown became a great source of joy and inspiration to me, as I thought of all the things I could do to these rude, imposing and depressing fuckers, purely on the basis that they were doing it all in my home.

My property, my rules (is the Obo Anarcho-Capitalist mantra). Fuck, I've never come so close to agreeing with a political opponent in my life. You may as well have been wearing Stalin pink frilly underpants and dancing around my dreams singing 'I love Greek Schlong, ding dong....ding dong'

So, apart from being reminded about how poor and pathetic I am by tactless, rich, materialistic relatives and in-law type people, it's been marvelous. I've spent a fortune. Done virtually nothing I wanted to do, or that I might enjoy doing, and I've run myself so ragged, I can barely move. Oh, and it's minus degrees outside, and I have over a month till payday.

On the plus side, and there's always a plus, the D met the mighty Boaty over the Period of Wrath (as I shall call Xmas from now on). Here we talked about cunts, more cunts, and some more cunts besides. Some of them are probably you. But don't worry, we're forgiving sorts and will generally bestow you with much love so long as you remark on our brilliance and continue to support Tottenham Hotspurs.

We'll be moving into 2010 on a positive note. Partly because next Christmas is so mercifully far away, partly because our self-improvement drive will take us to new heights.

I know that many of our readers dislike us or are alienated by our attitude. I've thought about this, and have come to a simple conclusive statement on the matter. Something that makes me feel just, I don't know, right about the whole situation.

GOOD. You bunch of stuck up pious cunts. Stick it up your well probed anal cavity and fuck right off wit'cha.

See you in 2010, fellow fucktarians.

Fuck the Met Office and Merry Fucking Christmas

Let's get the pleasantries out the way, shall we?

Merry fucking Christmas. Yeah, that's right. I'm being nice. Savour it. Print this shit out and mount that fucker on your wall. It's probably a lot more interesting than most of your dull cards.

It's that time of year. Season of good will, yule tide log and happiness and smiles and Mistletoe and Cameltoe and wine and song and laughter and children crying. Lovely stuff.

I'm looking forward to it though. No, really, I love having a dozen people lay siege to my house and my drinks cabinet, it's brilliant. It's like peeling fivers from your wallet and letting them feel the breeze as you drive down the M1 with your window down. Be my guest. Here, while you're at it, take the shirt off my fucking back. I was baking here, anyway.

Cold snap? Yeah, just don't piss me off, then you'll feel a fucking sub degree cold snap alright. With my hand coming down on the back of your neck in a fucking chopping motion.

Y'Cunts.

Now on to my second comment of the piece. The Met Office.

I really, really have to get this off my chest...

Dear person who runs the Met Office,

Fuck you. All your site does is predict things one minute before they happen, or not at all. For the last four or five days, I've checked your site, and wading past the endless propaganda about 'climate change' (pass the the fucking bucket), all I see is a sea of 'green', or maybe a tad of 'orange', thus indicating that there's no bad weather of note in the North.

You're wrong. You were wrong on Monday, Tuesday, today and you're wrong going into tomorrow, you fucking losers. All week you've told me that there's no snow, and only a little ice to worry about. No. No, no and thrice, no. It is not -1 degrees, it is -7. There is no clear skies, there is thick cloud and heavy snow.

The road conditions are not OK, they are treacherous. How wrong can you get. I suggest you offer Mark Lawrenson a job, and ask him to do a 'Climate Change in Liveroool Special'. He'll predict 2 degrees to nil rises in temperature between now and the year 2089.

I am amazed at how arrogant your useless outfit is. Because for all your latent government arse-sucking about climate change, you can't predict the weather for shit, and your trendy little UK colour charts and gizmos ain't worth a hill of beans in a Camel Shit Factory.

Fuck off. Do something useful, like get some of your office monkeys to go outside with a thermometer and hold their hands out to see if it is actually snowing. Which it is.

My journeys to and from work have been shrouded in poor planning, because I was dumb enough to trust your cunty site.

More fool me.

Motherfuckers.

Yours Faithfully

John the Don.

What did I say? What did I fucking say?

I'm sorry, but you fuckers had better listen to me in future, because all I ever do is get it right every single time.

I'm right, just about always, about everything. Politics, culture, the media and sport. Particularly football. I don't even know a great deal about football. But I'm just right about it. It's un-fucking canny.

For example, over the last half a dozen seasons, Arsenal have been the kings at being down by half time, only to recover and win a match by full time. They do this a disproportionate number of times. Most bookies offer at least 22-1 on Arsenal losing at 45 minutes to then win by 90. There are, what, 38 games in a season? So all you have to do is lay a bet on this eventuality on each match Arsenal play, using equal stakes, and you are guaranteed a profit by the season's end, even if they only pull this feat off twice.

They invariably do it a whole lot more than twice.

This little trick has netted me loads over the years. Watch out this season, though, they aren't playing like that anymore. Less goals and shit.

Oh yeah, back to me being right.

The other day, I wrote this piece here. It's about predictions, political and football, and a few observations about people who are good, bad and weird at predicting stuff.

In that piece, I said the following:

"...there's another bloke out there who likes making predictions. This bloke makes money out of it. He also happens to be the world's shittest person at making predictions, on account of the fact they are almost always wrong and based on fatuous logic and daft assumptions.

His name is Mark Lawrenson, AKA 'Lawro' and he works for the BBC making predictions on the outcome to Premiership football matches. He's scouse, which adds to the annoyance factor, and he used to play for Liverpool. This means that every week, he has Liverpool to beat whoever they happen to be playing two goals to nil. Which almost never happens. In fact, Liverpool winning almost never happens."

I ended the piece thus:

"Now off you pop to write up your weekend predictions. I predict that you predict Liverpool beating Wolves 2-0 at Anfield this Saturday. Go on, prove me wrong. Bet you don't."

This was before Lawro wrote and published his fresh round of Boxing Day footy predictions. Today, I checked the BBC football site and he's done them.

I ask you to check his prediction for the Liverpool - Wolves fixture.

Ay'thank'yaaaow.

P.s. Please also check his amazing logic behind the prediction. It's alongside 'Spurs don't win in the North West' and '[add manager's name here] is in trouble, so...'.

Yep, that's right. Liverpool 'desperately need to win this game...'

I love that. Because all of the other teams are super blasé about it all. Only Liverpool have realised the spectacularly crucial significance of a desperately urgent win, mid season. And, of course, they wouldn't have had this urge five games ago when they were still doing rubbish and up shit creek.

Sack this man now.

John Hutton is like the Anti-Lawro

Readers of ours will be aware that we like making predictions. Usually on politics, but also other stuff. It appeals to our keen sense of perception of what is around us. It also appeals to me, because I am a betting man. So predicting stuff is sort of instinctive. I'm not amazing at it, but it's fun, so it makes me happy.

There's another bloke out there who likes making predictions. This bloke makes money out of it. He also happens to be the world's shittest person at making predictions, on account of the fact they are almost always wrong and based on fatuous logic and daft assumptions.

His name is Mark Lawrenson, AKA 'Lawro' and he works for the BBC making predictions on the outcome to Premiership football matches. He's scouse, which adds to the annoyance factor, and he used to play for Liverpool. This means that every week, he has Liverpool to beat whoever they happen to be playing two goals to nil. Which almost never happens. In fact, Liverpool winning almost never happens.

He's a grade 'A' useless tit.

But let us swerve over to the world of politics for a moment. For it is in this arena where we seem to have ourselves a bit of an 'Ace' Rothstein in former Defence secretary John Hutton.

To refresh memories and inform the uninformed, 'Ace' Rothstein is a character played by De Niro in the film 'Casino'. 'Ace' was employed by the mafia to run a top Vegas casino, and he fell into favour with the mob on account of his uncanny and amazing ability to predict sporting events and thus win gangsters lots of money by revealing to them his sharp betting tips.

According to the Telegraph piece (see that darker blue font, back there? That's a link to a story in a newspaper. Clever, eh?) John Hutton predicted as far back as 2007 that "he will be a fucking disaster as prime minister".

'He' being none other than Gordon Brown, the PM.

Now, I'm not being cosy with Labour here, or some soppy wet fart, but that's pretty damn good going as far as predictions go. Seeing as the media and the dopey public were firmly wedged up Impresario Magician Prudent Brown Legend Extraordinaire's arse-crack when he took power after Anthony Blair stepped down.

It's easy to say in hindsight, but no-one would have known back then that Brown would prove to be quite such a staggering fuck up of a piss poor excuse for a national Leader.

John Hutton, auditioning for the role of Sam 'Ace' Rothstein in Casino II

But Hutton then went and totally un-redeemed himself. Quite incredibly, after his prediction came to fruition, he retracted his words.

According to the piece: 'Asked if he still believed Mr Brown was a "disaster," Mr Hutton said he had changed his view.

He said: "My opinion has changed. I personally have no criticisms of Gordon's performance as Prime Minister at all."'

What a tool. Retracting this prediction, is like being in the crowd at Aintree for the 2005 Grand National, and watching Hedgehunter pull away from the pack, and as he is about to cross the post, tearing up the winning betting slip whilst proclaiming 'that donkey has fucked it, I knew it'.

"Hey, John, even Lawro had money on me, you stupid cunt!"

What do you mean, 'no criticisms'? Are you mad? Why are you supporting this cock? You're standing down at the election, so is there even a glimmer of hope in us seeing something in the way of balls from you, you insipid, useless joker?

I'm assuming Hutton is holding out for something for himself here, because he cannot seriously go home in the evening and say to his missus 'Oh yeah, I was well harsh about Brown back in '07. The man has clearly come into his own. He's a true success story. A balanced, strong thinker and a leader. Even Mandy backs him...'

So, Hutton did an 'Ace' Rothstein in 2007, and then rapidly turned into a Lawro after the event had taken place.

I guess retracting a winning prediction is possibly to trump even Lawro's mind-boggling, infuriating and astonishing lack of ability in his field. It has finally happened. There you go, Mark. Someone even more ridiculous than you in the art of predictions. I found him.

Now off you pop to write up your weekend predictions. I predict that you predict Liverpool beating Wolves 2-0 at Anfield this Saturday. Go on, prove me wrong. Bet you don't.

Why there was nothing 'natural' about Brittany Murphy's death

Brittany Murphy - A Strange, Lonely and Troubling Death

The news of Brittany Murphy's death was deeply shocking. It was not just that another young star had died pointlessly.

We have recently had to deal with the tragic deaths of Micahel Jackson, Heath Ledger, Stephen Gately and the guy that Rain Man was based on. Dealing with the death of your idols is hard for fans to deal with, particularly if those idols live a life that is shadowed by dark appetites or fractured by private vice.

The one person I could never see this happening to was Brittany Murphy, that funny little thing from Clueless and 8 Mile.

Although famous for a wide range of roles in hit films such as Sin City, Murphy was haunted for much of her life. In her early teens, just as success had found her, Murphy was forced to come out in public as being....heterosexual.

Being straight was not easy and soon a life of debauchery and heterosexual sex with completely consenting partners was upon her. Unfortunately, a weight problem and prescription drugs were part of this oh so tragic tale.

But, hang on a minute. Something is very wrong with the way this tragic demise has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap in the shower, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage - healthy and fit 32-year-old women do not just get into the shower and never to come out again. There must be a more speculative reason for all this....

All that has been made clear from this sad event is that Murphy was not murdered. Other than that we are free to make wild assertions about this public figure's private life and the events that led to her tragic death.

After a night of eating leftovers and then going to bed, Mrs Murphy had a shower. Her mother and straight husband were in the house, we do not know what her true intentions were here but we can presume they were heterosexual.

However, the real sadness about Murphy's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after fantasy that is heterosexual marriage.

Straight activists are forever going on with their demands for tolerance and understanding about different-sex relationships. Not everyone, they say, is like Russell Brand.

This may well be true, although for the purposes of this salacious article it is not. The recent death of Grand Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri and now the dubious, non-evidence based events of Murphy's last night raise troubling questions about what happened and the possibility that being heterosexual had some part to play.

It is vital that the truth comes out about the exact, possibly sordid heterosexual circumstances of her strange and lonely death.

As a champion of straight rights, we can be sure that Murphy would want to set an example, through her death, to any impressionable young women who may want to emulate what they perceive as her glamorous routine of being married and having a shower, but also suffering from issues with her weight and prescription drugs that may or may not at all have had any part to play in any underlying heart condition.

For once again, under the falseness of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.

I can only see this as a direct consequence of being heterosexual and married. You have been warned

Jan Demetriou and Jan Boatang

Libertarianism - So what's the point?

It's been a long year, longer for some than others. As we draw to the end of it and hopefully in a goodwill spirit often so lacking when this question is raised, I will re-visit an article recently posted by John that received quite a lot of interest. By the end it was, frankly, wholly depressing and made me seriously question what the whole point of libertarianism is. Hence why I haven't been about.

Libertarianism is fundamentally about liberty, that is why it has those first five letters. It is about the liberty of the individual for self-determination in this big bad world and for the removal of state control from our lives. If you call yourself a libertarian and you disagree with this, please leave the room.

Many people who are libertarians subsequently diverge over how this is to be achieved. This is both healthy and desired. There are those on the left that want a state to remain, but for the individual to be socially free, there are those on the right that want no state at all and for the individual to be totally socially and economically free. There are those in the middle, like us, that see the merits of both and take a pragmatic approach. As far as anyone on the let is concerned, the right are extremists. As far as the right is concerned, everyone else is a social-democrat.

One of the central methods for creating this freedom are through the individuals right to property. Property is bricks and mortar, but it is also money and stocks and shares. Therefore, a liberty to do with as as you will within your built property as well as your money.

A huge caveat is inserted within libertarianism that is totally ignored, especially by the right: non-aggression.

Non-aggression. Usually this is used by libertarians in our views against war - the removal of a states liberty by force. However, it is also intended as the removal of liberty by any entity at any level.

Libertarianism is about liberty.

The row here is simple. You have the right to your property, in this case land and bricks, and you have the right of self-determination with that space. Fine. And it is fine, it is central. What we have been arguing, however, is that this right does not give you the right for the removal of other's liberty.

I see this as being remarkably simple.

Here the argument usually gets totally bogged down in the most depressing fashion with the definition of public space. This can literally go on for eternity, but to make this fairly clear, by public I am not talking about publicly owned, i.e. state owned.

Anyone has the right to life, liberty and property provided that it does not remove the life, liberty and property of anyone else. This too I see as being incredibly simple to grasp. Apparently not.

Libertarians, in my view, strive to create a better world. One where people are in control of their own destiny through their own lives and exist in peaceful harmony with others. That is the balance we are seeking in place of the state. Why do we have a state? We have it as a protector. I'm talking proper back in time why even created states here. The state is given certain powers by us in order that they protect us.

We then have a contract between us that means we don't attack each other and the state, if you do we go to prison for instance, and the state doesn't attack us, we rebel etc. The whole raison d'etre of libertarianism is to re-balance that contract.

For those that want the state to be limited to a tiny role, the basic requirement therefore is to have that contract between the people themselves. It relies on people trusting and participating. History tells us that this doesn't happen and that is why I am not of this sphere of libertarianism.

But that contract is required to various degrees based on your view. I won't remove your life, liberty or property and you will do the same.

This is where we hit the problem. The hard right of libertarianism, who claim to be the mainstream, state that it is in fact property that is the central line here, not liberty. All that matters is that the individual has the right to do whatever they want within their property, no matter what that property is.

In fact, it goes so far that it ends up with the owner of the property may totally and utterly remove all liberty from those that are within it. No matter the size of this property.

This is terrifying. The natural result of this is that the owner of the property is now the state. The property can be your garden, or it can be the Duchy of Cornwall. It can be entire business developments, or housing estates. The owner has the right to remove all liberty within. The response is often that the market would come to the fore and it would never happen. It has happened, it is happening and history tells us that when it does people do what people have always done, they shrug and they get on with it.

The non-aggression caveat goes out the window, because it gets in the way of letting people do, basically, whatever they want to do.

So, as I ask in the title, what is the point? If this is a widely held view (mainly in American Libertarianism it should be noted), then all we have done is remove the power of the state over us, the individual, and handed it straight, not to the people, but to the property owning minority.

It is that small percentage that actually own pretty much everything who are now in control. They have the right, it is argued, to remove your liberty because it is their property. In fact they have the right to remove your life as well if the comments once made about Tony Martin are anything to go by.

So, what's the point in libertarianism if the only liberty it is fighting for is the total liberty of the few? Is that really liberty? Is that really what we are arguing for?

What I have been arguing is that the non-aggression, non-removal of life, liberty and property caveat be observed. That we don't simply focus on the rights in our living room and look beyond that to the dangers some are embracing. Otherwise, we might as well just keep the system we already have, which would appear, on the face of it, to ensure more of us more liberty than that of the libertarian spectrum's anarchist element.

I refuse to accept that this is what libertarianism is about and I refuse to accept that this is the world in which libertarians from across the spectrum want to see. Libertarianism is about liberty, a liberty secured by your right to determine your own destiny through your own dwelling, your own income, your own life. A liberty that does not at any point reach a stage where you remove that liberty from someone else.

Libertarianism is, fundamentally, about the liberty of you, me and everybody. Not the few.

The RATM achievement over Cowell's Juggernaut is a blip

I am delighted that Rage have soundly thrashed that McElderry 'X-Factor' bollocks for the Christmas number 1 spot.

It is, not surprisingly for our readers, a good thing that RATM did this, and that the grassroots 'Facebook' campaign worked.

Of course it proved a worthwhile point and raised awareness about what soulless, awful, manufactured 'music' is doing to our culture and society. Music is supposed to be beautiful and artistic, not a rigged, money making scheme for air heads and tycoon wankers.

When I was a teenager back in the 1990s, any song that made it to the charts that was a cover was instantly seen as a joke. Covers were automatically viewed, by most people, as a cop out and a sign of a lack of talent.

Now, a cover can come out, not offer any change to the original, and people will either ignore the fact it's a cover, or concentrate on the aesthetic features of the singer. What a damning indictment of our times.

But sadly, the RATM campaign, though a success, is meaningless. Nothing will change. The idiots out there (at least 19 million of them if we take the viewing figures for the X Factor final as an important statistic) will not be swayed or made to think about the meaning of all this.

What has happened is a wholesale change in the psyche of the British. The same change that means that most people are obsessed by celebs and WAGS and shallow, pointless, animalistic shite.

Cowell knows this is just a one off. That his market is massive, that his Juggernaut is on a one way track down a very long Autobahn.

Cowell doesn't have to fear any kind of interesting, up and coming revolution in music. Any underground scene or pirate station or new genre of rave or punk. Those days have seemingly gone.

Music appears to have died and I can't see what can save it. Good bands, good new bands, are so few and far between, and have such a short shelf life, it's hopeless. Records sell a fraction of what they used to. The radio stations emit bulk loads of identikit 'R&B' bollocks, with almost identical lyrics and sample backing tracks.

Even older classics have been bastardised, to the extent that young people don't realise that what they are listening to are covers.

So, either Facebook campaigns will have to keep firing away and keep registering successes, or Cowell will dismiss this RATM upset as a one off and come back next year to claim another manufactured Number 1 'success'.

Part of the blame for all this is the fact that young people today are kept indoors by overzealous parents and the corrupt State has a massive authoritarian stranglehold on everything. Brown has made housing so expensive, that young free and easy types can barely afford to rent together and produce music anymore - they are forced into the job market of eternal precarity.

People are too busy being slaves to the state and slaves to the system to spend proper time on making music and enjoying their youth.

And people laugh at me when I say that Britain was much better off under the Tories in the '90s. At least in the '90s we had shit loads of good bands and up and coming genres and music scenes. After '97, it kind of went a bit downhill.

I tell you what band epitomises the noughties for me - 'Coldplay'.

Bland, boring, headed up by a latte-sipping, fair trade-touting hypocrite tosser with a Hollywood wife and a comfortable, socially aware set of liberal mates. Samey music, depressing songs, and once the platinums are up on the wall, it's into 4x4 L.A. living exile, with the celeb crowd. Sold out in more ways than one.

RATM lyrics are fucking brilliant and I love their music. But the fact they are pretty much a band of the early '90s says all you need to know about the lack of talent today.

In Praise of Peter Tatchell

It is a great shame that Peter Tatchell has decided to ditch his Green Party bid to become the MP for Oxford East at the next election. He took the doctor's advice and pulled out of his campaign. It is to his eternal credit that he continues with his brave, fearless and worthy work despite the injuries he has sustained over the years.

I do not agree with Tatchell on some things. But I am a supporter of his pro democracy and pro human rights campaigns and I also support the gay rights work he has done over many years. He is an ardent left wing libertarian, and therefore I do not always see eye to eye with his position. But the fact he is a grassroots activist and a libertarian means that I regard the basis of his politics with a positive lens.

Tatchell's base position is that things are achieved by people, individuals, in concert with one another. He is a libertarian because he places the importance and emphasis for change and progress with people, not the state. His solutions don't come from trusting government, but by trusting people.

He is living proof that by fighting and campaigning at grassroots level, things can be achieved. Awareness can be raised, opinions can be altered. All without the curse of authoritarian action or transgression from statist forces.

He carries on, where most would have long given up. The beatings he has sustained and the hateful jeering he has endured (often by vicious, rabid elements in the public arena, like the Daily Mail) has failed to deter him.

What a legend, and what a pioneer.

Whether I agree with his aims or not, Tatchell is a true libertarian warrior and should be respected for his principles.

The theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign

When I heard about the theft of the 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from Auschwitz by a mysterious band of thieves, I was genuinely shocked and saddened.

I immediately looked back at my visit there several years ago. An experience that haunts me almost every day. For the overseers and authorities who have looked after this tragic historic site, from the Soviets to the Poles today, have kept the camp in almost its exact original condition.

The punishment cells, that go deep under a certain bunker on the first of the three Auschwitz camps, are left in their sinister form. Complete with dank green slime running down the walls from the small barred windows and the horrific bricked compartments that kept prisoners penned in like sardines overnight. Even the morbid and warped wallpaper is still there. It has a grey flecked pattern, as though designed by a madman with the purpose of making the inhabitants as mad as he.

The sign is important because it has come to sybolise Auschwitz and therefore symbolise the Holocaust. Not just that, but it also symbolises the Nazi attitude and consequently, it is a reminder of Nazism and the mad, deranged nature of this lurid yet strangely alluring 'ideology' (still today many people across Europe pine for the grandfathers of National Socialism, hoping to one day resurrect Hitler's dream).

After the news sunk in, I immediately realised that such an act could only be as a result of one of two motives. The first, is that the thieves will bank on a ransom being offered for a return of the sign, knowing how much value is placed on it by various groups. The second, is that the thieves work for or are themselves, neo-Nazis. So this is one in the eye for the Jews and their co-conspirators.

Imagine my disdain and disgust when several liberal left wingers I know offered their view on the matter. For them, the sign must have been stolen in order for it to be sold as scrap metal. Yep. That's right. Thieves could have robbed a bunch of metal from some random factory on the outskirts of Krakow. But instead they went for the slightly less soft target of a highly protected and monitored historic site, offering a high risk of getting caught and roundly punished.

Amazing, is it not?

I wonder what their reaction would have been, had news broke of thieves robbing the original Uthman Qur'an? Would today's weirdo anti-Semite, dressed up as fluffy anti-Zionist, liberal lefties have shrugged in indifference at the suggestion that the motive for such a theft was to ensure a nice warm fire at the hearth this Christmas?

The tumbleweed around this news about the Auschwitz sign continues to blow down the avenues of the left wing establishment. I bet they are secretly irritated at the amount of fuss currently being made by vocal Jewish groups in Poland, not to mention the offer of much cash by the German government for the purposes of urgent repairs and restoration at the historic camp site.

Out of all the lefties I have met, a majority have shown antipathy and suspicion of Jews. They're experts at dressing it all up. 'The Israeli Lobby', they'll call those rich Jews in Washington. Or 'the Zionists', as they will call any Jew who fails to renounce their people for having the temerity to support their right to a homeland.

The liberal leftist is an expert liar, there's no doubt about that. And their reaction to the theft of the Auschwitz sign is a mere cherry pip in the cherry on the cake as far as evidence goes.

I hope they find the sign, and I hope the liberal left in Britain somehow discovers some shame. There's more chance of the first happening, which I guess is something.

Britain is Ugly

Not that long ago in our Great Island history, we were infused with a huge sense of progress, purpose and potential. Our inventors, architects and artists strove to improve and make things better. What they produced and achieved were works of beauty and greatness.

All this happened in our age of 19th century classical liberalism. An epoch, known to everyone as the age of the Industrial Revolution, where the state did not interfere much, where taxation was low, the family was strong and art and culture was at its best.

We celebrated it in a proper celebration of achievement. Not the fake, bossy, authoritarian, liberal 'celebration' of the type we are told we must perform now by our London elites. Not the 'celebration' of multiculturalism, which has contributed to the misery and downfall of immigrant and Englishman alike. But the sort of celebration that goes down in history books.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 celebrated and showed off our best achievements in industrial design and culture.


The focus was entirely positive. All the way up to the middle of the 20th century, our collective drive has been towards a sense of positivity. Of the worth of the individual, of the worth of society and British achievement.

I'm not saying for a moment that Britain has always been a meritocratic mecca. It has not. But until the left took a stranglehold of the nation, beauty was everywhere.

Now, it is nowhere to be seen.

Last month I wrote a brief review of a fantastic BB2 documentary by the philosopher Roger Scruton called 'Why Beauty Matters'. You can read more from the author and you can watch it on YouTube via Mr Scruton's blog here.

Scruton talks about beauty in art and culture. Why it is important, how and why beauty has evaporated from our society and how it went wrong. He covers modern art, architecture and a whole host of other areas where beauty has been sucked out of the country and replaced with ugliness.

Roger Scruton is right. Wherever you look around society now, it is filled, almost wilfully and purposefully, with ugliness.

I see beauty as being replaced with bitterness, negativity and ugliness, not just in art and culture and in our buildings and soulless, identikit environments, but in the human heart too.

It seems to me that in popular culture, particularly on television but also on radio, in computer games and in our printed press, everyone seems to think it very important to out do each other when it comes to being ugly and horrid to other people.

Our politicians sneer more now than ever, showing a brazen contempt for the people. Newspaper commentators and feature writers have long abandoned their One Nation credentials, in order to pull rank and sneer at sections of society they dislike. Our soap operas, like Eastenders, are institutionalised and part of the fabric of the country, despite putting out a constant negative image of what the country and its people are like. One comes away thinking it par of the course to cheat on others, swear at them and treat them like dirt.

None of this is particularly new, you may say.

But I was prompted to write this piece by what I witnessed of the British Comedy Awards screened over the weekend. I'll be honest, I was shocked, and that takes some doing. Yet after the shock subsided, I realised a sad truth.

Where once this country and its people were all about celebrating beauty, now what we celebrate is ugliness. New ways to express it and new ways to turn it into an art form.

Those who saw it may have detected what I experienced. I found the entire broadcast to be cringeworthy and painful to watch. Jonathan Ross, who presented the show, persisted in trying to be as shocking, offensive and derisory as he could to comedians in and outside of the audience

I usually like Ross, but this just wasn't funny. To make it all worse, the camera man kept filming members of the audience, most of whom were recognisable names like Peter Kay, grimacing or making faces of disdain and contempt.

I don't know who edited that broadcast, but whoever it is needs to be reminded of why production editing is important. Maybe they did, but they could not find many appropriate moments in which to show reaction from the crowd.

Most 'celebrities' who went up to announce the winners had no grace about them. They were just cocky and looking to make their little mark somehow. When winners of awards were announced and called up to collect, the camera would once again pan to the losing nominees, many of whom were visibly unimpressed. No magnanimity or grace at all, just a look of 'what, that cunt won? Jesus'. They may as well have said it to the microphone.

Frankie Boyle lived up to expectations by making a sick remark about leading children out of his room after having sexually abused them. Joke. Funny. Ha-ha. But it really wasn't funny. Boundary pushing and extremely risque, sure. Worth a laugh? It might make you laugh, but deep down, you'll likely feel rather unsettled and depressed.

At one point, some bloke collected an award for something, only to make an unseemly and distasteful comment about there being a general air of hostility towards Michael Mackintyre. Mackintyre is a hugely successful stand up comedian. One of the most successful and popular in modern times, if his ticket sales are anything to go by.

But Mackintyre doesn't swear or try to push boundaries. He doesn't do that cynical, malevolent nastiness that so many stand up acts rely on now. He's a big hit with a wider audience of families. The fact he was singled out for this sneering opprobrium is a valuable clue as to what passes as fashionable comment in public life.

One of the nominees for Best Comedy Entertainment Personality was Alan Carr for his 'Alan Carr- Chatty Man' show on C4. I find Carr deeply depressing. Largely because he isn't funny, but also because his attempts to shock and push boundaries are so obviously that - an attempt to shock and push boundaries. It's not clever or particularly talented to string a lot of rude words into rude sentences and say them to a camera.

He once had Sharon Osbourne on his show, and her behaviour was what one would expect. The hate and bile that came out appeared to make people laugh. But what lay underneath the words was a sense of bitterness. Ugliness. You can put a smile on it, in Carr's form, or a screwed up face on it, like Osbourne. The result is the same. The focus is on the negative, either overtly or subtly. Someone is always penciled for a knock, even if its a section of society alluded to in a comment.

All the rage at the moment is Simon Cowell's X-Factor. It pulled a record breaking 19 million viewers for the recent finale.

'Ha ha ha ha. You mugs'

X-Factor is feel good, right? Nothing negative about it, right? Well, there is, isn't there? Would so many people watch it, if this Kingpin had nothing to do with it? And what is Cowell noted for? Why do people love tuning in to watch this show?

The trouble is, there is a price to pay for all this cosy schadenfreude. We get to live in a country of mutual recrimination, anxiety, mistrust, bitterness, unhealthy obsessions and a country that thinks it is normal and acceptable to be shits to one another.

Civilised norms, out. Derision and judgmental attitudes in.

I ask of you: where is the beauty anymore? Beauty, which I believe is as important and vital to our lives as Scruton says it is, is dying. Replaced instead with a raging lust for its exact opposite. We demand what we don't want or need. Ugliness. We demand it, in the same way as a junkie demands his drug. To feed a fix.

Ugliness helps us to feel better about our lot. To accept what has been done to this country by the elites and to pretend it never happened. If we embrace it and buy into it, then it is normal and not an alien thing enforced by the creators of modern art, architecture, comedy, culture and design.

We are eating ourselves. We buy into this crap, but do we really like it deep down?

The people who work in the entertainment industry and the performing arts constantly strive to break new boundaries. They think they are pioneers. The standard bearers of progress. The reactionaries and stuffed shirts are daubed with paint so that we can all see they are uncool and worthy of the bin. Good work is work that shocks and destroys taboos. Work that makes you gasp and think 'yeah, that's real'.

But what happens when there are no more boundaries to cross? When there is no way of being cruder or harsher or weirder or nastier or more nihilistic? The tarmac comes to an end at some point, does it not?

I wonder when the ugliness will cease. I wonder at what point people will turn their backs on the bitter cynicism and aggression that is portrayed all over public life and in the media.

Let's play 'spot the contradiction', shall we?

Firstly, I am very, very late in writing this. It is quite possibly the least topical and belated response to something in the entirety of Blogland.

I write it, because it has been itching at me, and also my memory of it was triggered once more by Obo's inference that I might be insane (see comments to next article down, and no I'm not offended or bothered and neither is this a dig at Obo).

Your thoughts at the end of this will be appreciated.

On November 6th, Iain Dale wrote this article.

In the article he states:

"Yid. Poof. Paki. Retard. No, don't worry, I haven't lost my marbles or done away with my brake mechanism. Ian Birrell has written an interesting article in today's Independent about the modern day useage of the word 'retard'.

This word seems to be acceptable in modern parlance in a way with other words are not. Ian is the father of a daughter with learning disabilities and explains how he is cut to the quick every time he hears the word..."


He ends the piece, saying...

"I think what Ian says is true - that society finds the use of the word 'retard' far more acceptable than any of the others which I list at the beginning of this piece. If Ian's wish for the word to cease being used is to be realised it is not something which you can legislate for. Society, in the end, will make it so. If it wants to."

Yet, earlier on in the year, on September 10th, Iain Dale wrote this on a comment to a thread on Peter Hitchens's blog:

"The loonies really have come out to play on this thread haven't they?

The reason I queried the phrase "People like him" on Martin Wilkinson's initial comment is because through bitter experience I have come to know that it usually means just one thing. I'm not being sensitive..."

The comment was in relation to a comment made by a contributor who used the term 'people like him' regarding Iain Dale. Iain thought he was being homophobic. As I suspected, and as the contributor clarified on the discussion, what he meant was people with politics like his - i.e. so-called Tories and so-called conservatives who are actually quite wet and lefty.

This isn't important. What is, I think, is that Iain Dale levied the 'loonies' remark at people (including me) who raised an objection to Iain's earlier post:

"Oh, and Martin Wilkinson, are you always such a prat? "People like him"? Gays you mean? It is people like you who have kept the Conservative Party out of power. You disgust me."

This is remarkable, when you think about it. How can we legitimately raise a query over the use of the word 'retard, but not the word 'loony'? Look at the article on Dale's site again, and look at the context. He doesn't want censorship, but he appears to acknowledge that 'retard' is a bad word and not very kind.

'Retard' does indeed infer great disparagement and prejudice, not to mention unkind negativity, towards people tarred as being 'mad'. It is a slur. Possibly hurtful to people with or without mental health troubles.

Is 'loony' any different, then? If so, why? If not, why not?

I guess Iain's 'brake mechanism' only counts for the former, not the latter. Oh well, at least we know where we stand, I guess.

I'm now off to find myself a large man of Indigenous American origins, so I can ask him to pull up my sink and throw it through my kitchen window. I need to get out for some fresh air...

School boy suspended for 'crisp dealing'. A Libertarian dilemma

Here's a Libertarian quandary for you. Is it acceptable to libertarians that a schoolboy is suspended from school and punished, for selling 'Discos' crisps to fellow pupils on the blackmarket?

Well, while you're thinking about that, you might like to read this story in the Mail about just such an occurrence.

A 12 year old lad was caught doing this at Liverpool's Cardinal Heenan High School. According to Wikipedia, this school is a Comprehensive that specialises in Sports, Performing Arts and other extra curricular activities. Steven Gerrard is an ex-pupil.

So, a state-run shit hole, then. No doubt imbued with the usual post-60s left wing values and the corrupt social democratic agenda of the liberal elite that gets foisted onto the young fertile minds by a Socialist, Guardian reading Staff Room.

From the piece...

"...headmaster Dave Forshaw said parents and pupils must abide by the school rules or go elsewhere.

'We are a healthy school and proud of it,' he said.

'If parents are not happy then they are perfectly free to take their children to a school that allows pupils to sell these things..."

I have highlighted certain parts of the quote for a reason.

On the face of it, many libertarians, including myself, would take one look at this story and be disgusted at the outrageous, stupid and draconian authoritarianism of the school policy towards the entrepreneurial youngster. He was selling crisps, a fairly harmless food, to a market that was willing to participate in a voluntary and private exchange of wealth for product. No-one could ever be harmed by this action.

"Quick, pass me a credit card, I want to do a line of this shit before my Chemistry class with Miss Beck......... WOOOOOOO-HEEEEEEE!!!!!!"

However, there is a strong strand of libertarianism that ardently defends the ultimate rights of the owner of a forum, property or establishment over the rights of the people that enter that sphere.

Many libertarians take the private property argument, and take it to the ultimate degree, defending it to the death. So a pub landlord could make up whatever rules he wishes, and punters would have to either obey, or go elsewhere. A landowner could allow, ban, build and behave exactly as he or she liked on their land, and the rights of whoever trespassed would be nullified.

I take a very different view. My libertarian beliefs are such that I cannot accept that it is right and liberal to bar people, on the basis that ownership of a building or land belongs to one person who is making up all the rules.

If you took this logic to the end, you will discover that the Nuremberg Trials of the '40s in Germany were false, and that the Nazi war criminals did nothing wrong, because they were acting according to Hitler's rules. Hitler owned Germany. Everyone within it had, under a sovereign state, pledged allegiance to the Fuhrer, and so whatever happened was just and permissible.

Is this acceptable to libertarians? Would this be justified in a libertarian country?

If we are to accept fundamental rights, liberties and freedoms, they must apply to all people, wherever they may go and whatever they do, so long as they don't infringe on the rights of their fellow man. The lad who got suspended at the school harmed no-one, so in my eyes, the suspension was morally indefensible and a total infringement on his rights.

There is a twist here.

The school doesn't belong to the headmaster, does it? It is property of the state. The state's property, in effect, belongs to the people. The tax payer pays for it. So it could be argued that the private property argument no longer applies. The rules were made up by the Headmaster, probably in conjunction with school governors. They, in turn, derive their powers from educational authorities, who in turn get their powers from the government, who in turn is chosen by the people to represent them.

My guess is that private property obsessed libertarians would be likely to oppose the school's decision, even when considering the words of the school's headmaster. Because the question of private property rights does not exist.

Most libertarians, therefore, would probably disagree with the action taken by the school in this instance.

I believe that the banning of pupils selling crisps is a matter that should be decided by the public.

This is why my belief system is so heavily set up the fundamental importance of referenda. It is why I support the Swiss system, more direct democracy, more accountability and proper people power.

It is why I have much time for strands of left-libertarian thinking, which caters more for the will of the people as a whole, rather than the desires and rights of one off individuals in one off positions of power and influence.

While I would always argue it wrong to ban pupils for selling crisps, taking all the factors here into account, the right and rational solution would be to put matters like this before the people.

My left and right wing libertarian ideals come together to effectively cancel each other out in terms of where I appear on the political spectrum. I am a centrist libertarian, not because I have fluffy middle of the road views, but because I am strongly opinionated except only by taking various ideas and fitting them together.

But Libertarians, of all hues, would diverge from the classic 'conservative', reactionary assessment of the crisp-dealing incident. A Daily Mail reader or a reactionary from the conservative right would either support the draconian punishment as the child broke established rules, or, they would oppose it on the basis that the school is probably lax on drug dealing or other wrongs and misdemeanors, and likely has a sex education policy which is morally wrong.

We would attack the authoritarian right position on both counts. Firstly, just because rules are in place, doesn't mean they are instantly right. Authority must be questioned, and sometimes, it is actually appropriate for children to do the piping up in dissent. The child was not suspended for disrupting a classroom and damaging the education of his peers. He was suspended unjustly. A child would be able to know that.

Secondly, just because a school might have a lot of bad policies and ideas about other things, doesn't automatically make the crisp dealing OK, because the crisp dealing must be a lesser wrong.

Of course, the crisp dealing is OK (I believe). But this is based on its own merit. It is based on an assessment of the case in hand, regardless of other considerations. The trouble with reactionary, social, moral and cultural conservatives, is that they so often play the game of moral equivalents in a very similar way that left wingers do about things like war and western imperialism.

You might despise a Headmaster for allowing sex education and the handing out of the pill and condoms and a whole host of other liberal measures. But that, in itself, cannot logically influence any given position or rule regarding the selling of Discos crisps. To win an argument, you have to take every scenario and question of liberty on its own merits.

Curiously, leftists would probably be divided on the decision to suspend the lad. Your younger, health and safety obsessed, social democratic weirdos (including the very political 'progressive' liberal chef Jamie Oliver) would be likely to agree with the suspension.

Their logic would dictate that obesity is bad. The role of the state is to solve things and intervene with rules and enforcement to make things happen. If you stopped people selling bad food to others, obesity and poor health would decline. Therefore the ends justify the means.

I also think that a lot of lefties, bar Marxist types who despise business and individual effort and initiative, would oppose the suspension for being too harsh and too silly.

I'd be interested to see the results of a survey that asked people for their opinion on the punishment meted out to the crisp-dealing 12 year old, whilst also asking them for information on their political persuasions. I am sure you'd find a link.

Boaty & D: Feedback, Self-Reflection and other thoughts

Dear readers

We are coming up to the first year's anniversary of Boaty & D (the dot com version). As Boaty and I were discussing earlier on today, we have evolved, developed, changed a little and (hopefully) improved much from when we first started blogging back in the summer of 2007.

Our style has moved on a bit, and as time goes on, we keep at the forefront of our minds the importance of constantly striving to improve and to keep writing important, interesting and potent politics-based articles.

One thing has not changed - our passion and commitment to Libertarianism. Our version, interpretation and idea of this great and beautiful political philosophy.

I want to get this across now: yes, we've been bold, brash and sometimes cocky and outrageous. Yes, we have used bad language. And speaking for myself here, yes I have often tipped into full on rants and also attacks on other bloggers.

What I want to convey in this piece is that, whether you know it or not, we have actually taken on board lots of feedback from both occasional and regular readers. You have not been ignored. Be they positive or devastatingly harsh comments (bar abusive and stupid ones), we have listened and learned.

Our writing is slowly but surely improving all the time. We respond and evolve with the times, but without compromising our beliefs. We believe in pragmatism, but also a logic based on libertarian ideals. We are moderate, but we hold no punches and we are brutally and unwaveringly honest, even if that means saying things we and you might not like.

What we want to build on from this point and into 2010, is a style and approach to our blog that takes us to the next level. We want more respect, and we want to write what we want, how we want, but for that to come across in a constructive, positive and forcefully effective way.

We're not just a couple of angry cunts with a computer each, too much time and two heads full of junk. This blog is the real deal, and if you don't think so, you will in time.

I anticipate that Mr. B will add his own unique thoughts to this discussion. But for me, I will be continuing down a certain path with this site. My articles will be less misanthropic and harshly angry. They will be more tempered, and better researched.

Our feedback has also led me to understand that when I slag off other bloggers and go off on mad rants about the Country Club, it is futile, damaging, pointless and detracting of our good work. I realise this now, and there will be less of the venom and none of my former patterns of kicking out at fellow bloggers.

I will also be taking a closer look at my use of language.

2009 has been a great year for Boaty & D. We've gone from zero to hero, but as you know, hero isn't good enough for us. There's a cloud with a harp up there in blogland, and I spy a beardy who needs shoving off to make way for the best bloggers in town.

The thing is, to get there, we know we need to earn it. So in 2010, we'll be earning our wings and achieving more from what we do here on The Mighty Boaty & D.

p.s. If you wish to add any feedback, comments and thoughts on what is good, bad, ugly, needed, not needed or anything else about our site, please do so in the comments.

Why are we so puritanical in the work place about emails?

I have to ask this, and it is prompted by this article in the Mail about a woman who resigned from her City job at Deloitte after she was rumbled for sending emails to female colleagues asking them to vote for the office fitties (male fitties).

According to the piece...

When graduate trainee Holly Leam-Taylor planned an office awards ceremony she thought it would be a bit of festive fun.


She duly emailed a small number of female colleagues at City firm Deloitte asking them to vote on the most attractive men.


With nine categories such as ‘boy most likely to sleep his way to the top’ and ‘most attractive older member of staff’

So what? The thing is, every year I read articles in the press about people either quitting or more often than not, being sacked, because of 'inappropriate' use of emails or 'inappropriate' things said in emails. Be they of a jokey, sexual or risque nature.

This is very odd, because the same rules never ever apply to the spoken word. My language in the office, for example, is absolutely appalling. Totally unacceptable. I know it makes people bristle sometimes, and I know it's not on, and my jokey crazy banter which I sometimes burst into is unprofessional and quite frankly rude and bawdy.

But you know what? No-one would ever do or say anything about it. Largely because people know it's me doing it, and as a result, they don't take it seriously. People know I don't mean any ill-will or malice and I'm a good bloke.

But transfer a fraction of my banter to emails, and you're in a different world entirely. I know damn well I'd be screwed if I used emails to slag off or gossip or make sexual remarks about colleagues (to add here: I don't make sexual remarks about colleagues or do dodgy gossip, my weird banter is something else entirely, but definitely not for the emails all the same).

I've heard water-cooler type chats amongst my female colleagues about blokes and other sorts of matters, just like the sorts of things that get people fired when uttered over email. Everyone catches little sneaky bits of banter. Yet it never goes anywhere.

So what's the deal with email?

My belief is that email is permanent proof, usually held in 'After Mail' type archives and such capture mechanisms in Outlook Express, and because words stare out from a screen far more starkly than they come across when enunciated in real life, it has more impact.

Of course, logically, there is no reason why the workplace should be any more uptight about email banter than spoken banter.

In reality, the worse that generally happens with a loose tongue, is a bit of a quiet word. I'm pleased to say that, despite my incessant grumblings and moanings and insurrectionist, anarchistic, anti-manager/authority talk in the office, I am always allowed to have my say regardless of who is in the room.

Well, to be fair, maybe people know it's better for them not to fuck with me when I'm in a rage or a mood about something. Which is often.

But when I think about the idea of sending my thoughts on things like that round emails? It sends shudders down even my bold and brass spine.

For what it is worth, I think this uptightness over emails is silly and unnecessary. Probably a hangover from an age when the internet and emails were just creeping into the running of the workplace.

It would bother me or concern me not a jot, were a female colleague of mine to send round emails like those sent round Deloitte by Holly Leam-Taylor. Even if I were ranked bottom of the office.

Why? Because if email is allowed for limited work place chat between colleagues (which in most offices, it is) then that's their right. It's their freedom of speech. It's not like they are plotting murder. It's some harmless banter and fun for a number of individuals.

Just because I may not like the content of something, does not give me the right to demand censorship. If the owner of a business wants to change the rules on email usage, well, what can I say? I'd accuse the owner of being an unfair, unreasonable, censorial, oppressive, authoritarian shit bag. But there's not much one can do about that.

Leam-Taylor should not have felt ashamed, embarrassed or compelled to quit. She did nothing wrong. I'd not have done it - I'm married and have never really done stuff like that as I don't see the point.

But what a shame this country is so bloody uptight, full of people with sticks right up their arses, that people can't have a bit of a 'who's hot' banter on the emails without it all going Pete Tong.

Settlers attack the West Bank - A strong response from Israel is needed

We have often been criticised by the Left for our stance on Israel. We have often argued that Israel has a right, like any other sovereign nation, to defend its sovereign territory from outside attacks no matter your perspective on the formation of that state in the first place. This is coupled with us believing that freedom fighters and terrorists are mutually exclusive; the line is often unclear, but suicide bombings and calling for the genocide of a nation are not usually freedom fighting mantras against occupation or suppression.

However, one thing I simply cannot stand are extremists, and in this part of the world that is the overwhelming majority is seems.

Israel is a state and it isn't going anywhere, that is the primary factor. In turn, the Palestinians are a people that deserve their own state after basically having theirs taken away from them for a variety of reasons (not all are friendly as is widely held, such as the European desire to get rid of the Jewish element for instance).

Neither of these factors gives either side the right to murder each other, much less bring the entire region to its knees for decades.

The Guardian reports today that Israeli settlers in the West Bank have attacked, once again, Palestinian property. This time a Mosque. The purpose, other than intimidation and fear, is obvious: by attacking a holy site in this way they hope to provoke a response that will spark more trouble, a response the Palestinians are more than willing to give them.

The settlers are something that disgust me. I'm sorry for the harshness of my language, but they do. They are settling lands that are not theirs because they believe they are by virtue of a series of texts produced over thousands of years telling them the lands are given to them by God. It's not exactly a legal basis is it. There's not exactly a set of deeds setting out the lands and their duties to look after the drainage.

The banners the settlers carried in protest when annoyed about stopping building works speak volumes. “Obama wants us frozen, God wants us chosen,” and “God’s Bible gave us this land.”

They are religious zealots, simple as that. Their perspective is no different to the justifications the Bible Belters in America use to treat black people, or the white South Africans used to subdue the black population. It is a belief in an ordained superiority, a stance backed by religion, or genetics, or a made up ideology based on all of it. What it is fundamentally to blame is a bigoted desire to control others.

The wall, the settlements, the shooting of innocent people, the segregation of families, the bulldozing of homes and communities and stealing that land. None of this does Israel any good at all, in fact it adds petrol to the fire.

The Israeli government needs to simply ignore these people and the Palestinians need to treat them as the extremists they are. When they react, that is what was aimed for. They are doing exactly what the settlers wanted them to do.

I saw a documentary a while back that followed settlers taking houses and lands and arguing why they were right. The language, the tone, the clothes were all exactly the same as a white supremacist in the UK talking about why Indian people are dirt. There is no difference yet they are given political weight because they represent the Zionist cause.

The settlers and their political representatives and the Palestinian extremists and Hamas are the same entity. It is wrong to side with either of them and anyone who stands for freedom, any libertarian should be an enemy of both. The people that need to be supported are the normal everyday peaceful Israelis and Palestinians who want a settlement and a mutual existence. What we have now is the worst of all sides - Palestinians who have lost everything and see Hamas and its promises of Jewish annihilation as a solution and the weak Israeli government trying to calm America's fears in order to retain funding whilst pandering to the settlers and their extremist views.

The West becomes two faced when it refuses to deal, quite rightly, with Palestine while Hamas are in power or until they change their sick and twisted constitution, but will happily deal with Israel while it deals with its own extremist factions who merrily destroy people's lives in their own religious quest.

Would this be tolerated with any other country? I think not. Religious fundamentalism is a disgrace no matter the religion, the people, their history or their cultural links. We cannot continue to make this point to Palestine and the Islamic world as a whole and still put up with Jewish fundamentalists bulldozing Palestinian houses and taking their land. We condemn Mugabe for doing it to white farmers, we should be doing it here.

Obama has made noises to Israel over this situation and that has led to the pause in developments. Except it hasn't. The hard right are carrying on regardless and the state is too scared to act lest it lead to civil war.

The answer, however, is not for Palestine to elect their own set of extremists in Hamas and to start shelling the everyday Israeli public. I still advocate the mass protest method which Palestine seems not to have heard of. March, en masse, through the streets and sit down in front of the gun towers, it would be a brave soldier to open fire and if they did it would lead to the same moral outrage that occurred with South Africa. The march of peace is infinitely more powerful than that of violence.

In turn, Israel must treat the settlers as the criminals they are irrespective of who they are or what religion they follow, else they simply look complicit and exasperate the issue.

TAW comes back for more, looking for a blog war

Fuck me, I've been waiting months to find an excuse to come up with some cheesy rhyming headline, and here it is on a plate. Cheers for calling your blog 'TAW', Tomascz, that's solved that little itch.

Anyway, for those not in the loop, 'TAW' is a computer geek who runs a blog, and guess what? He ain't a Libertarian blogger! Only joking. No, really, he's no libertarian blogger, in fact, he presents himself as the anti-libertarian. A true enemy of the blogger who deigns to define himself as a libertarian.

I recently wrote about his first piece on the subject. Fellow libertarian bloggers (mostly members of the Total Politics top 20 chart) have helpfully responded to 'TAW's attack.

But now we have 'TAW's latest, which I'll be honest, infuriates and confuses in equal measure. He appears to try to scientifically prove that we're all wrong and all fucked in the head.

He doesn't seem to understand that we don't all agree, Libertarianism is not a strictly defined ideology, it often isn't as extreme as he makes out and the UK libertarian blogosphere comprises of individuals who talk about stuff that's important to them. Rather than what was important to some sort of libertarian founding fatherhood in the late 18th century.

To be honest, I'm rather staggered at his latest attack. Readers know how critical I have been of many fellow libertarian bloggers over the last few months. But I have to say that 'TAW' has leveled a series of illogical and unfair attacks on a large number of fellow bloggers, and he concludes that all along, his comment about us being boring was just a footnote to his general scientifically concrete demolition of libertarianism.

Forget the graphs and his random, tangential attacks on perceived libertarian shibboleths - TAW has fucked me off, because his underlying position is that it can be proven, as fact, that all libertarians are fundamentally wrong.

This removes any sense of debate and is an arrogant, if laughable and fatuous, attempt to remove libertarianism from the forum of discussion. He seeks to smash our legitimacy and he supports the age-long movement out there to resign libertarianism and classical liberalism to the dustbin of irrelevant and extremist politics.

TAW, mate, I don't mind if you disagree with me. But don't try and prove that I am invalid, before I've even opened my mouth.

P.S. I notice from your profile that one of your favourite films is 'Bowling for Columbine', directed by Michael Moore. So you've not kept your own politics entirely hidden from view, then.

EU dogma and why politics and food don't mix

The Guardian tells us that businesses will be forced to label food from 'Palestine' and Israel, so that people will know if stuff is from 'illegal West Bank settlements'.

The article is smugly entitled: "UK issues new guidance on labelling of food from illegal West Bank settlements - Stickers could read 'Israeli settlement produce' , but move is not a boycott, says Foreign Office".

As ever with life these days, if the left don't get their answers via democracy, they'll turn to the EU to make sure things are enforced properly towards their ends and that things are concreted into law. What choice doesn't achieve, threats of punishment and criminal conviction is always there to punch you into line. Rather reminiscent of the sort of thing I'm reading about at the moment in a book by Richard J. Evans called 'The Third Reich in Power'.

Here are some relevant paragraphs from the Guardian piece:

The British government recommends such food be labelled 'Palestinian produce', while that produced by Israeli settlers in the territory be labelled 'Israeli settlement produce'.

Britain has acted to increase pressure on Israel over its West Bank settlements by advising UK supermarkets on how to distinguish between foods from the settlements and Palestinian-manufactured goods.

The government's move falls short of a legal requirement but is bound to increase the prospects of a consumer boycott of products from those territories. Israeli officials and settler leaders were tonight highly critical of the decision.

EU law already requires a distinction to be made between goods originating in Israel and those from the occupied territories, though pro-Palestinian campaigners say this is not always observed.

Separately, Defra said that traders would be committing an offence if they did declare produce from the occupied territories as "Produce of Israel".

If you have any kind of heart or soul, you will never buy olives that are cultivated and sold by a particular faction in an inter-communal, historic, land and religion based dispute taking place 2,000 miles away, amongst people who speak another language, don't know you and don't give a shit about you. Because if you do, that will make you a very bad person. Do you hear me?

In other words, the left's desire for people to successfully boycott Israeli goods, for political reasons, hasn't really panned out. So this is a more round the houses way of prodding and pricking peoples' consciences, by shoving the information out there, making a song and dance about it, and by forcing businesses to label products according to what Brussels requires.

This makes my life easier, as I know exactly what to aim for next time I'm down the supermarket. As top US blogger Maddox might say to a Vegetarian: 'for every animal you don't eat, I'll eat three'. When the stickers come out and I know what's what, I'll fill my boots, courtesy of those horrid Zionist bastards out there in Stolenlandville.

I'm not particularly swayed in any one direction in the Middle East debate. I'm no dogmatic follower of either the Palestinians or the Israelis, though I certainly support Israel's right to exist and defend themselves.

But boy do I get majorly fucked off with the loony liberal left in countries like this one who go on and fucking on about Israel/Palestine without any real basis for it, other than their desire to serve their boundless piety and internal guilt-riven insecurities.

Sorry, but fuck off. The fact you care that much, and will go out of your way to avoid certain products because of what is ostensibly a land dispute between two far away peoples, actually somehow, weirdly, brings me into action.

Oh well. I was always a fan of Mediterranean olives and bread.

Slagging off the entire Libertarian blogosphere

Following on from my recent piece about arrogant left wingers who don't know how to debate properly...

I must, er, how do you call it?...'hat tip' a blogger called 'An Englishman's Castle' for bringing this piece from a vehemently anti-Libertarian blogger to our attention.

I've never heard of 'Taw's Blog' before. I won't be rude and presumptuous by suggesting reasons as to why I haven't heard of him before. Maybe he's new, or special interest, I don't know. But he sure seems to have us Libertarian bloggers down to a tee. Or at least so he thinks.

He has done, effectively, a total hatchet job on all the top 20 Libertarian bloggers, as voted as such in Iain Dale's Total Politics competition.

He reckons he has taken a sizable sample of articles from all the top guys, including DK, Obo, Leg Iron, Last Ditch, CF, [edit to add: Dick Puddlecote (to avoid offence ;-)] and of course us, and that we are all loons.

Having ripped ten tons of shit out of us, he concludes thus:

"...the posts I've seen were just so bad that of 100 I've checked I cannot point a single one that had any new insights or was interesting in any way. Few even pass basic sanity tests - not just by being contrarian - contrarian posts are much more interesting to read than ones that repeat the conventional wisdom - but by simply not having any idea what they write about."

So, because he did not like what he read, it is decided: all Libertarian bloggers are boring, mad and stupid.

That's it. Debate over.

And apparently we only write about a narrow range of subjects, which are largely fringe loon issues and such the like. And Ayn Rand is perfectly summed up as a 'shitty book writer'.

I now refer you to the next article down on this blog, which flows pretty much nicely from this one.

I guess my next piece had better be about the Grassy Knoll, followed by a little ditty about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, maybe nicely topped off with a few lines about how the Masons are running everything and that anyone with an income of less than £1,000,000 per year should be shot for being shit and poor.

Bye.

Edit to add: the Taws Blog blogger attacks Libertarianism in much the same way as various liberal leftists are doing. This is an increasing phenomenon and will continue as such, so long as we grow and challenge their dominance in public discourse. I will therefore write a piece about all this soon, covering it in more detail and discussing what Libertarianism actually is, who we are and why the misconceptions and misrepresentations are wrong.

I will also discuss the curious and rather irritating attacks from lefties against Ayn Rand. Most lefties who attack Rand do so purely based on what they think she wrote and said, and on what other lefties have made up about her. Very few lefties have read any Rand. But they feel the need to vent all the same.

This is how the Left does debate

This, ladies and gents, is a great example, in a nutshell, of how the Left conduct debate and argument with their opponents. You will not find these traits in any other political sphere. It is a unique trait, applicable to the far left and the centre 'progressive' Fabian left.

I'm not the first person to notice this. I've spoken to countless non-leftists over the years, from elsewhere across the political spectrum, and they say the same thing. 'Liberals' and extremist leftists use ad hominem tactics, abuse, smears, accusations of insanity and low brow idiocy and most of all, astonishing rudeness and sneers to sideline political opponents.

Quite often, left wingers refuse to let their opponents speak, or to respond. And they won't even countenance challenging the logic and arguments of their opponents, because they automatically think they are in the right, without having the need or obligation to think and articulate.

The article is a piece written in today's 'CIF' (Comment is Free), which is the discussion and blog writer's page on the Guardian Unlimited Website. The article is called 'Boycott Copenhagen' and it is written by Sarah Palin, the Republican former Vice Presidential candidate and former Alaskan governess.

Now, before you throw a wobbly, I might like to remind you of a past Boaty & D article on this woman. We also note that we are prominently on the blog roll of a website called 'Sarah Palin is an Idiot!"

The reason why we are on 'Sarah Palin is an Idiot!' is because we think Sarah Palin is an idiot, hence the articles we wrote on her policies and her behaviour during the '08 US Pres. election.

So we are no fans. I do not write this out of support for Sarah Palin. But this piece is important. Because if you care to scan through the 848 (at the time of writing this) comments on the CIF piece by Palin, you will notice that barely a dozen of the posts out of the mountain submitted actually address, in any meaningful way, anything that Sarah Palin wrote in the piece.

Instead, the hoards of hand-wringing Climate Change obsessive leftists who have laid siege to the article's comment page splutter wise cracks and gleeful exclamations in this sort of weird, writhing fest of left wing pious ecstasy. It's one of the most unseemly displays of arrogance and belittling I have ever read on the net. And that's saying something.

Here are 7 random examples, from the many hundreds...

WTF!!!!!!!

Even I could tear that article apart.
And I'm not even that clever.

But I'm not even going to bother.......

Have fun guys!!!!

- - - -

(from a Guardian contributor...)

With the publication of damaging emails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement....

Wow. Wrong before you'd finished your first sentence. The legends are true.

Its not the "radical environmental movement" that says man-made climate change is happening and needs to be averted. Its not a few scientists who acted inappropriately either. Its the entire science of climatology.

There you go. Done in four paragraphs. One of which was yours, and two of which were me just mucking about. I can see why Obama had such an easy time last autumn.

- - - -

So there it was on the Guardian web-site, an article entitled "Boycott Copenhagen" by someone called Sarah Palin. And yes, it is THAT Sarah Palin, writing for the Guardian (kind of).

I'm looking forward to "Bring back Apartheid" by Nick Griffin.

I have to admit I'm a bit of a climate sceptic but with Palin on the sceptical side I'm inclined towards believing.

- - - -

Sarah, you're in no position to pronounce like this.

Your grasp of the science of climate change is even worse than your grasp of US politics, where your prominence is both deplorable and embarrassing.

Retreat to the homespun stables you came from and let your Warhol-like fame extinguish as it should: without recognition.

- - - -

Sarah please let it go. Do what John Mcain did after the campaign, and just go back to being a financial supporter of the Republican party. Even I support Obama going to this conference and see the need for climate change. Have a good day.

- - - -

The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

You've never articulated anything in your life, dear.

Advocating the boycott a climate conference is a new low...

- - - -

(this piece is a cracking example, written by one smug, pointless left winger in response to another poster...)

I want to dissociate myself from the majority of posters on this thread, the ones who are so tolerant in their outlook that, rather than consider the content of the article, they prefer to rely on personal insult.

You have already proved yourself quite dissociated, Weaselmeister.

Of course, Sarah Palin annoys you because:

(she amuses me, but let's ignore that for now):

a) She is American

Lol

b) She is a Christian

LOL

c) She is proud to be both

LOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

d) She is a conservative

ROFLMAO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

e) She did not attend an Ivy League College

Whassat? Eh?

f) But had the gall to stand for high office

Brazen Gall. Brazen

g) She is more practical than the majority of posters here

HAHAHAHAHA. I can shoot with the best of them, buddy boy.

h) Is more popular than any of the posters here

And prettier, no doubt.

i) And generally is more successful in her life than the majority of the posters here

She knows more wealthy Republicans than we do?

j) Despite not whining about how difficult it all is for her as a woman

Are you serious?

I would also like to point out that the abusive posts do not seem to have been removed at all, although on most "Climate Change" threads a very large number are censored for actually believing that comment is free and that they can dissent from the Guardian's view.

Even I get random posts removed from Monbiot's threads. But I don't whinge about it quite as much as the Deniers do.

And considering that they frequently write so much drivel, over and over again, until the thread becomes utterly impossible to read, then a few more deletions might well be in order.

- - - -

And so it goes on, and on, and on. The whole sorry 'discussion' is utterly unedifying and unseemly. As I said before, we don't agree with Palin. In fact, I am probably about as far away politically from Palin as most people could get. She is an authoritarian, social and moral conservative who believes in protectionism and a fierce defence of religion and patriotism. I am none of those things. I think she is an idiot, but this is based on words she has used and answers she has given to questions. It is based on fact and evidence, and on her policies.

The article she has written on climate change is not exactly Oscar Wilde in motion. It's not a great or particularly lucid piece. But the base points she makes are valid and they are based on a position that exists on climate change and a position held, not just by conservatives like her, but by many other people across the spectrum. Many of whom are very intelligent and in respectable professions.

Infuriatingly, not only are the few people who try to engage with her piece on CIF rude, insulting and bumptious in doing so, they make outrageous and arrogant claims that no-one relevant and no decent or sane expert agrees with the sceptic camp. Anyone who raises an objection, according to their logic, is either a madman, a freak or a right wing piece of shit.

Let me quote from a contribution by a long-standing CIF poster called 'Beautiful Burnout':

"...So what you are saying is that, after all these years, all the scientific research, all these scientists, even some oil companies who agree that climate change has to be addressed, they have all been duped by two guys in Norfolk, on the basis of some emails sent years and years ago. Damn, they must all be really thick, eh? Particularly as the information they were trying to suppress was actually published...

...

President Obama's proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions.

Aww bless. All those poor Mercans not able to drive around in their gas-guzzling 4 x 4s any more. Such a pity. It will be so hard for some people to have to travel in a vehicle that is smaller than their ego.

But lastly, and more importantly, you believe in The Rapture, Sarah. You believe that the Messiah will come again and the world will end. You are also one of the evangelicals who believe that, as a result of that, it doesn't matter if Man brings about the end of the world because, perversely, that means that you will force the Messiah to come and you will all be zapped up into heaven safe and sound before Armageddon. You also believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, and you have had a Nigerian witch-doctor/evangelical pastor who "casts out demons" lay his hands on you and bless you.

Which is why I just point and laugh."

Nice, eh? Lovely bit of bigotry and anti-Americanism chucked in there, for all those tolerant lefty readers of course.

I ask you, how much of that is argument and debate, and how much of it is ad hominem attack, laden with sneers and smears and condescension?

I'm not saying climate change advocates are wrong and that their points are invalid. I am saying that people who advocate different views should be heard. Palin is a prominent political person. Whatever you think of her and her other views and campaigns, she has written an article, and it expounds a position that is out there.

Why can't left leaning people engage with her arguments, without resorting to this kind of rampant abuse?

If you disagree with me, go ahead and read the comments. I dare you to find me a comment from someone that meaningfully addresses what Palin actually says, without resorting to some sort of underhand tactic.

I also dare you to challenge my view that this is a left wing phenomenon. Sure, centrists, libertarians, nationalists and conservatives, amongst others, are far from perfect in debate. But debate with non 'liberals' tends to be far more constructive, meaningful and polite.

We start from a position of strength - the final declaration from Labour

With quite possibly the most absurd opening line in the history of politics, Darling announced an absolutely horrific budget yesterday. The real reasons for it being horrific hidden its vagueness more than the numbers.

What Darling wants is to give people things whilst seemingly punishing those nasty bankers. Of course, it is all the City's fault you see, because they dictate policy and unaffordable spending plans. And that is what he has done.

On Newsnight an economist from HSBC pointed out something that simply hasn't made any sort of wave at all, indeed the media have already moved onto the new expenses revelations - revelations I am incredibly suspicious of by the way. That is, Darling raised £19 billion yesterday at a time when we are staring at a near £180 billion black hole. He spent £22 billion.

The taxes he raised yesterday have nothing whatsoever with sorting out the state of this virtually bankrupt nation. The populist attack on City bonuses is farcical in the extreme and will simply never happen, hence the Tories backing it. Bankers, strange this, spend quite a lot of time coming up with ways to not pay tax and they are never going to take one for the team and pay it themselves.

No, the taxes he raised yesterday were there to give away yet more pointless little presents to core voters, like the bingo tax drop. I can't remember a tax cut offending me so much. He will help you out with your boiler and he will not tax the non-profit you make from your non-wind turbine.

What he has done in the process is the classic Labour mistake of thinking anyone who owns anything must be minted. So poor bastards like me on over twenty large will now get smashed in order to pay, not the debt, but for his presents. If you earn the average £25,000, you will now be paying £4 a week more.

And his forecasts have been taken outside, thrown on the floor and pissed on by every economist alive. -4.75 this year - the worst since 1921 by the way - and +1.5 next year. Of course that will happen! Because six point rises happen all the time don't they...

These forecasts allow him to make wildly optimistic assumptions about future debt and therefore spending. Numbers that will never happen.

Hidden on page 172 of the PBR is a little table about the public finances. In there is a little line about public sector net debt. The sustainable investment rule set up by the government states that "Public Sector Net Debt as a percentage of GDP will be held over the economic cycle at a stable and prudent level". Would you like to see the numbers?

2008-09 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15
44.0% 55.6% 65.4% 71.7% 75.4% 77.1% 77.7%

Yes, it is going to explode.

This government has totally bankrupted this country yet all the media care about, in the blink of an eye, is how much a telly was and was porn on it.

Last week The Times had this page which gave a pretty good list of how Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have utterly fucked this country into not the middle of next week, but the middle of 2020. Every tax decision that has been made has resulted in the poorer getting poorer, the richer getting richer, the debt getting bigger, the tax burden becoming truly mighty and this country now being the 7th richest in the world from 4th in 1997.

Not all of it is bad of course. It can be argued that at least new hospitals and schools have been delivered. But our health is still as bad and our education even worse.

What do we really have to show for all this other than a vast debt?

Our soldiers are fighting a lost cause with Swiss Army knives;
Our education system still can't get more than half the kids to get a C no matter how easy they make it;
Violent crime is getting worse every day;
Our health system has been rated amongst the worst in Europe;
The average couple now pay so much tax that both are forced to work and cannot afford to stay at home and look after their own children;
Our pension system is destroyed, public and private;
House prices are huge - not just because of the population but the amount of stock removed for right-to-buy in a vain hope for a pension;
Food prices are huge because of the absurdity of the CAP and CFP that this spineless party won't stand up to;
The biggest national debt in peace time;
The biggest yearly contraction since 1921;
We can't even have a fucking fag without paying £5 to Gordon and being thrown outside;
We have the most CCTV in the world;
We have 'anti-terror' laws that would make a banana republic blush;
We have so many offenders in prison Judges need to let people off, yet none of them are ever properly punished or rehabilitated;
There is massive unemployment;
The hard right are on the march;
We have whole areas of the country that ravaged with crime and poverty because after 12 years there is still no regeneration;
We owe £178 BILLION.

This is what socialism gets you. Forget New Labour, or Labour or any other name they come up with, it is social-democracy and it has destroyed this country.

Darling's budget yesterday was the last pathetic whimper of a dinosaur on the way out. He didn't even have the guts to stand there and make the hard choices needed to at least try and save this nation from the brink.

The Cameron experiment will be like Heath, sucked dry of any possibilities by a bankrupt economy and by striking unions practicing a bankrupt ideology coupled with the Tories inability to see that proper, hard decisions need to be made that take this country well away from social-democratic thought. The recession was about fighting fires, the after party will see the host thrown out and the gatecrasher left to clear up the mess. And it's one hell of a mess.

A bonkers Pre Budget Report

I'm sorry, but what the hell is going on? The PBR as announced by Darling today in the Commons is so bad, even I've stopped laughing at the madness of it all.

First off, what the hell are they doing attacking earners of £20k a year and over? The press are reporting this as a 'middle class' squeeze. Is the media collectively on another planet right now, because last time I checked, £20k a year was a pretty shit salary and certainly no-where near Middle Class-ville.

I'd say you'd have to be on over £40k a year, and if you're with, a combined of over £70 a year, to count as middle class. The N.I. increase is an attack on workers, regular joes and plebs. Like me.

Elsewhere, as usual, there is nothing to help people who work hard, don't sponge and don't have kids. But if you're a lazy cunt or a professional 'student', who is broke because you are lazy or can't handle money properly, you're in luck.

First time buyers have been given the post 2003 treatment - they continue to take one for the team. Again, that'll be me then: singularly unable to follow my parents' footsteps by buying a home, because housing is still too expensive to buy (if you're sensible and responsible).

But the real winners are...people who play bingo.

Yep. Sums it up, really. The biggest winners in terms of tax and government interference since 2003 have been gamblers. Brown dropped the 9% betting tax back then, and now he offers further relief to habitual gambling junkies and obese women with a love of Lycra and chips.

Well, I guess he needs to nurture some kind of core vote. Why not start with bingo playing grannies and ex-cab drivers who spend their days in some Ladbrokes basement?

Bravo all round.

The Mysterious Buried Climate Change Report

What with a lot of rottenness in Denmark at the moment and climate change being the new-new-new hot topic since a load of dodgy beardies were caught being funny with the numbers, you would think that a press release calling into question the fundamentals would be drawn to our attention. Apparently not.

I am grateful to someone on the Times site for posting this link, and it certainly makes interesting reading. Ed Milliband seems oh so keen to present a face of debate and fairness whilst calling everyone who disagrees a holocaust denier (much like his brother in another context), that I would have though the smug little shit would have presented this to his owners at dinner.

In addition, the Man On Earth series has started, its only notable own goal being having Tony Robinson presenting it. It charts how mankind and the climate are linked through time and the first episode on Monday showed clear evidence of this. But most interestingly, it showed that dramatic cooling and heating can happen very, very quickly. In fact the rise by 5c or so that basically saved the human race about 160,000 years ago happened in 100 years. It then got very nicely warm - very warm - and we walked all over the shop, right up to Russia. It then got very, very cold. Very quickly in fact. This was called, and you may have heard of it, the Ice Age. The cooling, several degrees, happened in 10 years and to such an extent that the humans on the Steppe were burning animal bones to keep warm.

All this is ignored of course.

The Met have presented 'last minute' data that 'shows' that this decade is the warmest on record. Of course, what they mean by that is that it is warmer than the period 1961 to 1990. Yup that's right, that very cold period is the one used to show how warm it is now, even though it clearly isn't and is very easily shown to be cooler then the 90s.

In fact, since 1850 it has become a whole..... 0.7c warmer. That's right, you better sell all those coats people because it's summer holiday time on earth. They go on about it being the biggest increase since the Ice Age, although the current warming period only started 10,000 years ago and will last about 100,000 years; as interglacial periods do. So, weirdly, it's going to warm up a bit.

This is all backed up by the totally buried press release.

This new investigation shows temperature ‘spikes’ within some of the interglacial periods over the last 340,000 years. This suggests Antarctic temperature shows a high level of sensitivity to greenhouse gases at levels similar to those found today.

Fair enough you may say, but we are talking about up to 6c here, not small amounts by any means.

“We didn’t expect to see such warm temperatures, and we don’t yet know in detail what caused them. But they indicate that Antarctica’s climate may have undergone rapid shifts during past periods of high CO2.”

This all points to the major fact that MMGW enthusiasts like Monbiot will not listen to: before the last Ice Age, 125,000 years ago, sea levels were 5 metres higher than they are now. The simple fact is that about two thirds of the way through the last interglacial sea levels and temperatures were significantly higher than they are now. We are now one tenth of the way through the current interglacial period.

Previously I wrote about how people who want to force the debate with regards climate change are opposed to the concept of change itself. They want the planet to stay how it is and see any alteration in status quo as not only Armageddon, but our fault.

The science may very well show that temperatures are increasing over a long period of time, but the geological record clearly shows that this planet goes through these cycles all the time, in fact like clock work.

What Man On Earth showed was that these periods are directly responsible for much of the life on this planet, including our own. The shrinking of the ice caps, the rise in temperature, the warming of the seas - all of these things lead to an explosion in life and evolution. They are the times of great excess, times of bounty that life feasts itself on.

What Monbiot and his clan simply cannot handle is that most people realise this. They call them idiots who don't understand and the decisions must be made on their behalf. Their solution, repeatedly, is to shift vast amounts of power to the state in order to make their policies happen and to prevent 'the idiots' stopping them.

Ed Milliband uses phrases like 'a billion people will face water shortages', apparently by all the ice being turned into water. Their habitat may well become arid, as Ethiopia was at the start of our evolution, but other areas that are currently wasteland will become lush and fertile. The proof for this is huge.

It is this side of the debate, the realities of our geological history and the positives warming brings to life on Earth that is being denied, not climate change.

Oh, no, please don't go the same way as the Mail...

As you may well know, the Daily Mail online edition is utterly barking mad. Inevitably edited and run by a loon, and read by perverted, hypocritical weirdos.

The vast majority of the 'news' content on the front page is totally and utterly sex obsessed. A piece will make it big on the online edition, simply by virtue of it featuring a woman, not wearing very much, and for that woman to either have done something vaguely media worthy over the last 20 years, or for her to know someone who has.

The younger the better - hence their creepy and disgraceful obsession with Miley Cyrus. But what they really want are tits, arses, crotch shots and flesh. On show. With a titillating bit of write up underneath.

Scroll down a bit, and you'll possibly read a few pieces about how society has gone down hill because people are into sex and are obsessed with porn and fornication. The sad thing is, few people spot the somewhat notable irony evident in front of their eyes.

But what's this we have here today? Why, it's the front page piece in the online Telegraph edition. The Telegraph, for our non-UK readers who may not know, is a respectable, high brow broadsheet which is read by your upper social strata in Britain. People with big houses and posh families and Land Rover Defenders.

What is the piece about? It's about Sarah Jessica Parker's 'wardrobe malfunction'. I.e. an actress whose dress slipped a bit, leading to a bit of bother around the jugs department. And that irritating term, 'wardrobe malfunction', is precisely the sort of annoying Kenneth Williamsesque 'OOoooh Suits You, Sir, OOOOhhh!!!' nudge-nudge, salacious, puerile, low brow term that features in the Mail every single fucking day of the week.

No wonder Private Eye calls that pathetic sell out newspaper the 'Daily Mailygraph'.

Forget the 'conservative' press, folks. It doesn't exist anymore. Everyone has gone mad, and everyone are cunts.

P.s. Another infuriating one the Mail uses: 'LBD'. Which is code for 'little black dress' (Oh, Scandalous! Mmmmmm). These people invent a new little cheeky term every day to help sell these shite stories. And then the same readers will pop on the comments section and pour hate and derision at the people in the photos, followed by the totally predictable 'why do I want to read this I'm bored of these people stop writing this!'.

And the next day they are back, lapping it up. Dontcha just love good ol' Middle England.

Will the fickle public forget it was Brown who wrecked the economy?

I sometimes muse on the curious and thoroughly morbid notion that in five, ten, twenty years time, the British public will have long forgotten how the country imploded and shrank into a broken, little, impoverished nation of humbled and shackled men and women.

More importantly, I wonder whether people will forget entirely who was responsible for the whole thing taking place. Will they continue to blame the nebulous and easy target: the banker? Or will it be a greying David Cameron? or 'the rich'? Or the Americans, or the Chinese, or whoever is in the news at that moment?

Let's make this crystal clear here and now, for the benefit of the archives which are already well stocked with the important facts: Brown, as Chancellor between '97 and '07, and Brown as PM from '07 to the present day, is the single most responsible individual in Britain for our spectacular collapse into economic oblivion. This is because he engineered the entire UK economy around reckless debt generation and a false boom based on property prices, for social democratic political motives.

That, in a sentence, is why we are in the hideous state we are in and it is why our futures and the futures of the unborn look so bleak.

Read this article. Look at some of the calculations made by the Study. Calculations which forecast the sorts of things that need to be done, in order to slightly lessen our critical and devastating national debt.

"The Government will borrow more than £175 billion this year and the national debt is on course to reach £1.4 trillion in four years.

Reform suggested that rebalancing the budget will require a 15 per cent cut in the total public sector wage bill, saving around £27 billion a year.

That would be the equivalent of reducing total public sector employment by 1 million jobs.

Reform calculated that in the last ten years, public sector employment has grown by 16 percent, from 5.2 million to 6 million. Both the NHS and the police have had 30 per cent increase in staff numbers. "

This is so bad, I can barely speak. A million jobs. A million. Imagine putting a million people out of work, and then watching as they grope around a job market that resembles a parched desert, bereft of even the tiniest oasis or cluster of cacti. When will it stop? Till unemployment reaches 4 million? 5 million? All the while, the welfare state remains, immigration ceases to abate and the population grows older and also in number.

The figures are even more depressing, when you consider that most of the people set to lose work will find themselves forced to do something they don't want to do - go on the dole and claim money off the state. Which is broke.

Why can't people see that the banking crisis is just a part of the whole picture. Banks encouraged and nurtured bad debt, but so did the government, with horrendous consequences. Banks rely on the state, but these are ultimately wealth generating institutions that with reasonable controls, can liquidate once more and pay back the public for their commitment and support.

The state is not a wealth generating body, but a wealth wasting one, and under Labour it has managed to bankrupt every citizen on their behalf, without much in the way of permission.

Senior civil service pay, despite everything that is happening, is going up. My organisation's boss, for example, got a 20% pay rise this year, taking that person's pay above the soon-to-be 50% threshold. The so called 'fat cat's' salary band. That says it all, does it not?

Doctors, who once under Major were on about thirty grand a year, are now on utterly insane money of over a hundred thou. Nurses who used to get about sixteen to twenty thou a year, much like teachers, have seen their pay double and even treble, before overtime.

When I first started working at the beginning of this decade, I was told this: if you want money, you don't work in the public sector, you go into the private sector. If you want job security and a good pension, but you don't care about the cash, work for the public sector.

That has changed. Now, there are little or no benefits for working in the private sector, and self-employment is something maniacs and Daddy-sponsored mavericks try out. The real pay is in the public sector, and I can attest for that as I have always worked in it and I have seen the oceans of job roles spring up like fountains, many of which pay handsomely.

My own situation is modest, but if you play by the politicised New Labour rules, and you learn the gift of the public sector gab, and you say the right things and know about 'diversity', you can't fail but climb the greasy left wing pole up to the 6 figure salaries.

Anyone with an independent mind, a hatred of hypocrisy, corruption, greed, self-serving stupidity and a mouth that speaks the truth is doomed to stay down the ranks. That's where I'm at. But a job is a job and I am very happy and lucky to have one.

The fact is that Brown has bankrupted us all. 1.4 trillion is a sum that is pretty much non-payable, over any period of time, under most circumstances.

The last country to be faced with a debt like that, under political circumstances such as ours, where corrupt and inept elites fail to listen to the people, was Weimar Germany.

We don't have hyper inflation yet and most people are able to buy enough bread to feed their families, but as soon as that situation changes, you can kiss goodbye to this blog, as Mr B and I will be far too busy fending off looters and maniacs from our front doors and putting out the fires that sweep our streets.

Am I a Philistine?

I don't mind admitting this, but I really don't get modern or abstract art. I have really tried over the years. I'm not one of these Daily Mail dicks who automatically rules out anything new, because it is new. New is not necessarily bad. Newer cars are much better. Great new books come out all the time and the last twenty years has seen brilliant bands come and go and movies screened in more impressive cinemas and on much improved visual and audio technology (i.e. DVDs).

But 'modern' art (which isn't really modern anymore, because it has been around since the '60s) fails to ignite so much as a spark of interest in my entire body.

I've been to various galleries, I've walked every hall of Tate Modern and I've stared at exhibitions and paintings in the same way as a Uri Geller wannabe stares at spoons. Nothing. I'll be there forcing myself to like something in the same was as a gay man in denial stares at pictures of Cameron Diaz with one fist jacking away at his flaccid, hilariously unaroused cock.

I don't get it. I don't like it. It virtually never makes me 'think' or wonder, or muse, or appreciate or understand. It bores me. To tears in fact. To the extent that I get itchy and want to go for a Cappuccino in the bar or even browse the selection of note pads in the souvenir shop.

Today we hear that Richard Wright won the UK's most prestigious art prize - the Turner Prize. His effort was, with the help of four assistants who interestingly didn't get much of a mention on the Channel 4 segment earlier this evening, a gold leaf fresco.

My opinion of it? It's alright.

It is like a fancy bit of pub wallpaper. The sort of thing you might discover in the restauranty bit of Gastro pub in places like Fulham or Angel. Or maybe the type of affair that gets patented and reproduced on cheap canvasses in IKEA. Fairly pleasant, but you wouldn't want to look at it every day. Or, indeed, for much more than a few minutes. Because it would undoubtedly give you a headache, make you feel sick, but more importantly, really rather bored.

Wright's competition was piss poor. Some floppy representations of bodies lying across a mat was one. A weird humpty dumpty head thing on top of a wobbly plinth was another.

It was awesome. No, really, the way it made me leap out of my chair and turn over the channel was something most athletes look for in steroids.

I do not want to get too harsh and condescending. Obviously many people like this sort of thing, or it would fail to attract any attention or interest. Good luck to them.

But for me, I do not see the artistic merit or point to most, if not all, of this sort of art and I am left wondering whether that makes me a bit of a low brow tool, or some ill-educated, uncultured bumpkin.

In a weird, fucked up way, I hope it does. I quite like the idea of being a boorish cunt. It fits with my online persona.

Bye for now, you bunch of shit bags.

What have Amanda Knox and Gary McKinnon got in common?

A lot more than you might well have imagined.

Apart from the stupidity and pointlessness of their offences, these two individuals benefit from huge and utterly illogical waves of support from their countrymen and women - purely on the basis of the fact that they share the same nationality.

There is an oft misquoted line, wrongly attributed to Hermann Goering, which goes along the lines of: 'whenever I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my gun'. In fact the actual quote is "Whenever I hear [the word] 'culture'... I remove the safety from my Browning!"

It is a line in a Nazi play by Hanns Johst and while the play and its purpose were of dubious purpose and origins, the sentiment applied in the quote aptly describes how I feel about both patriotism and nationalism. For whenever I witness acts and sentiments of raw nationalism and national assertiveness, I also wish to reach for my gun, take the shit off safety and happily remove all lifeforms from the room in a hail of well-shaped lead.

I believe nationalism makes stupid people even more stupid, by playing to their emotions and making them excitable and allergic to reason and basic common sense.

Read this brief piece in the Telegraph, and you will know where I am coming from.

According to the piece, swathes of America have erupted in fury and anger at the Amanda Knox trial. They believe it a fix and that the verdict was unfair and wrong.

Here are a few paragraphs from the piece which set out this fact:

"As angry Americans promised to boycott Italian holidays, wine and food, a vociferous support group calling itself Friends of Amanda Knox urged people to email Barack Obama to ask him to support her appeal."

"Sen Cantwell and Knox's supporters can already count on the sympathy of a large chunk of the US media which has always portrayed her as an innocent abroad, a victim of an unfair legal process and unscrupulous prosecutors."

"As they regularly did during the trial, the American media has been quick to wheel out domestic legal experts to rail against the iniquities of the Italian justice system." "Reaction has frequently taken on an anti-Italian sentiment, with people threatening to boycott the country and its products."

"A local New York Times reader commented: "I was thinking of going to Italy for my honeymoon, but now I'm not sure if it is a safe place." Emailing the same site, a Washington DC resident said: "Time to send in the diplomats and twist some arms! A decision of national emotion!""

Many Americans do not like the verdict, because it adversely affected an American. The sole motivation behind the anger is nationalism. It is that simple.

I do not believe for a moment that Americans are passionate about all and any miscarriage of justice cases. I do not believe they would care very much if a court passed a perceptibly dodgy verdict against a foreign national on their soil and I doubt they would comment if Knox were not American, regardless of any attached media hype.

Countless Americans will be boycotting these goods, because a women from the same vast geographical land mass as they, whom they will never meet or know, got convicted of a crime thousands of miles away in a trial they never attended, under a legal system they do not understand.

Burger King from now on it is, then.

But even more important here is the total fact free basis upon which this uproar has arisen. There is nothing to suggest that the verdict was dodgy. The case was complex, heard by a jury, publicised to the maximum and open to journalists who reported the facts and it went on for a long time.

Huge amounts of evidence was heard, notwithstanding character evidence and information about Knox's lifestyle.

Do you seriously believe for a split second that your average American citizen has much of a thorough understanding of the Italian legal system? To the extent that they can possibly pass any form of informed, in depth judgement on their process?

This, from a country that is happy to allow its President to initiate illegal and bloodthirsty wars against peaceful nations. A country where, in some States, 17 year olds and mentally ill people are put to death by the State for capital crimes, regardless of any doubt regarding mens rea.

A country known for its careless friendly fire against its allies in war, a country where police are as quick to pull and use their weapons on people with the enthusiasm and verve of George Michael in a public loo.

A country where, in many of its States, there exists something known as 'The Three Strikes Law', which produces farcical and fantastical results, notwithstanding a huge and unwieldy prison population.

Why don't you sort your own fucking legal anomalies out, before casting knee-jerk, fact-free, nationalistic and stupid assertions against other countries, simply because 'one of your own' got banged up in a foreign jail?

Britain is not immune from this sort of infuriating, nationalist hype and stupidity. Although I doubt Britons get as much of a hard-on about flag waving as your average, dumbed-down, Fox News watching yank.

Over here, a comparable case would be the Gary McKinnon trial, where many right leaning people desperately want McKinnon to stay in Britain and not get extradited to the States for his crimes...because he is British.

What difference does it make, really? Knox is American, McKinnon is British. The first has been sent down abroad, the second under due process and the law should and must stand trial in America.

Is it really good enough to beat the drum for these people based on this lie? The lie being, people pretend they care about justice, but in reality they care about attending to their nationalist pride, knee jerk patriotism and sense of collective, self-righteous martyrdom.

The Knox and McKinnon supporters are hypocritical, stupid and ill-informed mug punters and shit bags.

Proof lies in that fatuous New York Times reader letter, as quoted above and in the Telegraph piece. He was thinking about going to Italy, but he's not sure if it is 'safe'! You have to love that. Tell you what mate, do you know how you will go to Italy and be safer than Amanda Knox? Don't ambush the bell boy in your hotel room and slit his throat while your missus fucks him up the wrong'un with a strap-on.

Reckon you could manage that?

If not, then do try and resist the temptation to do cartwheels and handstands down the cop shop once old Vincenzo has pulled you in for a few words.

Still no dice?

Aw, well, there's always Hawaii.

And as the other reader said: "time to send the Diplomats and twist some arms!"

That's probably the first time I have heard a rally-cry from an American that involved the words 'send the Diplomats'. This is a bit like Hugo Chavez yelling 'send in the Stockbrokers! or an Aussie screaming 'Send the Intellectuals!'

Except, ask yourselves: why do they want to 'send in' anyone? Italy is a sovereign nation with its own legal system and ways of doing things. I did not read any dispute or bad press about their system prior to the verdict. Now all of a sudden it is bent.

At the end of the day, 100% of Americans, minus the Knox family, weren't there to hear the fucking evidence, and so all this faux outrage and patriotic flag flying xenophobic 'boycott 'em!' bullshit annoys me to the brink of criminality.

No-one cares about all that over here, but if Knox were British the press would be having a field day. And the mug punters over here would be distracted from X - Factor for a record 10 seconds in order to rage about it all. It would be carnage.

If that happened, I would be kicking off about it in much the same way as I have slated the American idiots going on about the Knox 'injustice'. Because in reality, no-one really knows or cares and Knox couldn't give two shits about these people railing back in the Homeland. What she cares about is herself.

Which, weirdly, probably makes her more sane and rational than most of the pricks kicking off in La-La land.

A Royal perspective on Climate Change

Climate Change advocates and sceptics have been clashing harshly over recent weeks. This might be because of the current Copenhagen Summit, but in all fairness, this row has been coming to a head for some time now and it is because the issue is not just about science and weather patterns but about politics.

Many libertarians out there, like Boaty & D, are unhappy with the cosy consensus that threatens and bullies anyone who dares to disagree with the paradigm they have forced upon societies across the world, particularly Western countries who are singled out as the source of blame and responsibility.

A couple of decades ago, the left asked us to feel very ashamed of our colonial pasts and our tainted or tacit alignment with Apartheid South Africa. Post colonial guilt is out of fashion, along with unmodish concerns about Nuclear weapons. Climate change is in, and you'll notice that the obsessives are all on the left while conservatives and libertarians dare to ask questions.

Mr Boatang wrote a brilliant article on this subject recently; not because other people have been talking about it a lot, but because he is genuinely fascinated by the debate and he has his own thoughts on the subject.

As much as it galls me to admit it, but Old Holborn had a good piece on climate change recently, and it is to his blog and the original source at 'wattsupwiththat.com' that I must give credit for this graph.

Left wing intellectuals love climate change, because after all these years of trying to baffle and wow people with odd, needlessly complex and utterly useless political philosophy (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan etc) they can now baffle you with science. The science of climate change; which essentially means one thing and one thing only. They are right, if you disagree you are wrong, and almost certainly a right wing reactionary nut who needs re-housing in the quieter confines of a mental institution.

But look at the graph, and you'll see that A) it is quite simple, and B) it shows the climate change obsessives as being hilariously wrong, and not just wrong, but arrogantly, blindly and pathetically wrong. I say arrogantly, because these people assume that regardless of timescales, if humans consume and build and grow, this must be bad. Instead we must smash businesses, stop people doing things and tax the crap out of everyone.

That'll learn us, and there's always the European Union to ensure that what national governments don't do or daren't do, it will do on everyone else's behalf.

Ever wondered why the left wing block is always so dominant in the EU Parliament? It is because that is where the real power and future of deranged socialism lies. Not in national parliaments or the ivory towers of post 1960s left wing politicised universities.

This graph confirms something I have wondered for some time, but have now been able to put into context thanks to this debate. The clothing worn by Monarchs down the ages.

The early medieval period was warm, and one source of evidence for this lies in what famous people wore. One of the few sources of this, for obvious reasons, are pictures of our Kings and Queens.

Look at this picture of King Henry II, 1154 - 1189

He is, effectively, wearing a thin TopMan sweater and a sort of blanket. Bear in mind he probably didn't have central heating or loft insulation, and one can see that even the most pampered and privileged people felt no need to wear clothing that kept out the cold.

He did not wear thick clothing, because he did not need to with or without mod cons, because as the evidence suggests, it was warm.

I have trawled for pictures of subsequent medieval Kings and the evidence is the same. Thin clothing for a warm climate.

How let's have a look at pictures of King Henry VIII and Elizabeth the I in the Tudor period (you might want to refer to the graph again).

and

Look at that. Two words spring to mind: Bloody Baltic.

It was bloody Baltic in those times, to the extent that the Monarchs of those times wore about a thousand different layers. It's a wonder they didn't suffocate under all that wool, leather, fur and velvet.

Average global temperatures only mean something if measured over very long periods of time. In reality, 500 years is not actually a very good sample length of time when you consider the age of the planet. Yet even in this time span, we can see that the Earth was much warmer than it is now hundreds of years ago, and that human influence could not possibly have been a factor then.

So how can we prove or know for sure that it is a factor now? Particularly given the current downward trajectory of global temperatures?

The left wing climate change obsessives are great at changing the rules and framework of this debate, by looking at different aspects to 'climate change' in order to get away from the now defunct concept of 'global warming'.

But as with any other left wing trend, it is based on smoke, mirrors, fashion, a desire to control through fear and confusion and high brow terminology and philosophy and it is based on the overarching desire to crush the individual and strengthen a neo-Marxist world view.

A world where we live very similar lives, where no-one is much richer or better off than anyone else, where individual enterprise is humbled or extinguished, where taxation is high and the state omnipresent. Where 'the people' is a concept defined entirely in their terms, not anyone else's and where everyone is told what to think, do, say or eat.

This is why the Guardian goes ballistic whenever anyone questions climate change. This is why our politicians are queasy and gutless on the subject. This is why the subject is inherently political.

They want your freedom, not your carbon footprint.

Libertarians and conservatives - some thoughts

Daniel Hannan has written and short but fascinating piece on his Telegraph blog, asking 'can a libertarian be a Conservative?'

It is well worth a read. I am slightly annoyed, as my very next piece was going to be on just this subject, except take away the capital 'C' and replace it with a lower case 'c' in conservative - I will shortly be talking about the bonds and divisions between real, proper, 'ideological' conservatives and libertarians.

It is a very important subject. Hannan is right when he says that in Britain today, we live in a country and climate very far away from what conservatives and libertarians want. Our final destinations may be different, but are they really that far apart and are our journeys that dissimilar?

If opposition to the social democratic consensus and hierarchy that stands astride this nation like a colossus is to be broken or at least effectively challenged, my view is that libertarians and conservatives must combine and fight together. Find common ground, whilst accepting and acknowledging our respective differences and motivations.

Why not? This is not about forming an SDP alliance of sorts, it is about the grave and urgent need to smash the cosy consensus amidst our political, media and cultural elites that have decided to rule outsiders and enemies as lunatics and dangerous bastards.

David Cameron's Tories are no good. They are a waste of time and a complete continuation of the centre-left. Why would any conservative, with or without the capital 'C', want that? If that's what you want, do a Shaun Woodward and defect to Labour. That should be the party of the left, not the Tories. Sadly there is no adversarial set up in politics. No choice, no opposition.

As 'Newsweek' might describe it, 'we are all socialists now'.


The blue hand you see is not blue from its natural colour, but blue from cold. The Tories have been out in the cold for years, and are frozen from their time out of office. But as soon as that hand warms up, the frost bite will clear up and the hand will turn as red as its counterpart. The Tories leave and return to office, but politically, conservatives never see real power.

This is not necessarily a problem for libertarians, because we are not conservatives in the true sense, but we should be using our orange or yellow hands to shake the real, true hands of blue conservatives, otherwise we will be weak and ineffective. There just aren't enough of us these days to go it alone against such a formidable foe.

I am currently reading Peter Hitchens's enormously interesting, factual, influential and timely book 'The Broken Compass'. This book touches on so many crucial issues regarding conservatism and consensus politics, and how the media and the Tory Party have fitted in with the post war social democratic project.

When I have finished it, I will write a full, feature length review. I will also make clear my own personal thoughts about conservatives and libertarians and how and why this is the future alliance that might just matter.

What actually are the consequences of climate change?

This is something, as John will testify, that has been bugging me all week. I will now attempt to write up my various and multitude emails ranting on the question into some sort of article after a week of being a tad hectic.

Climate change. I have set out my stall on this previously, most recently here, and stand by my view that whilst climate change maybe true, it is not purely a man made event. But what got me thinking the other day was what is quite literally never, ever mentioned: the consequences.

Say it is true, say it is all true. And what?

Remove a certain degree of emotion form the subject and stop crying over little fluffy animals and people dying and really look at it. What is so bad about the outcomes that means we have to totally alter our entire economic and political, not to mention industrial, landscape?

The actual manifestations of climate change are simple really. It will get hotter in some places and colder in others. Sea levels will rise. Weather patterns will become irregular. The ice caps will reduce in size. And?

And what? That is what I keep asking myself. Polar bears for example are adapted to the Arctic environment, if that no longer exists then they will either die out or adapt. Simple as that. But this isn't because we have hunted them to extinction, it is because their environment has altered and they have failed to adapt to it.

This my friends is called evolution. It's harsh, it nasty, it kills cute little animals and it wipes out entire species. And it has happened constantly for billions of years.

The deserts used to be lush forest. Antarctica used to be lovely and warm. The oil and coal used to be life and we used to be dust circulating around a newly formed star. Change happens, or as economists would see it, creation through destruction.

'But what about the people?', the cry goes up. Well what about them? We have 6.5 billion people on this planet, more than we can really support without industrialised agriculture. In fact, the only reason we have bred so many of us is because humans have the power to shape and control the planet more than any other creature. To be very harsh, a hundred million die, so? This is tragic, of course it is, but from a subjective point of view such losses, as a percentage, are nothing new. The black death and massive wars have smashed the human population for eons.

Many of the people who would die would do so because they live in places that simply cannot support them. Well below sea-level or in completely infertile areas, the only reason they live there is because thousands of years ago it was more suitable.

What strikes me about the Green argument is that, at its fundamental point, it is about the unacceptance of change and evolution. The arrogance of stating that a planet that has existed for billions of years and suffered countless destructive cycles is changing purely because of 150 years of man-made CO2 emissions (that is the changing of solid and liquid CO2 back into a gas) is one thing. Yet even more so is that it must be avoided at all cost because it will change what has 'always' been.

People will have to move from places that would be sea to places that are now temperate. Animals will have to adapt or die in new environments. It may get a bit more windy, a bit more rainy; have they been to Scotland or Norway?

One example is the Siberian peat bogs. Under the snowy wastes is the world's largest peat bog. Ask yourself why that is. Pause. Thought about it? Good. It's because it used to be forests and organic matter and the bogs formed about 11,000 years ago. No, Siberia was not always a desolate arctic landscape. It changed, the animals that lived there died out or evolved new colourings and habits.

When the plates moved and the continents became one, it is estimated that 90% of ocean life was wiped out. Things changed and back they came. It is what happens to a planet, things change, they die, they alter.

I'm not saying that the consequences are to be desired or wanted, of course they are not. But the 'debate' that is going on simply screams 'climate change' and 'global warming' and 'CO2', without ever really saying why that is bad. It shouts at the top of its voice 'We have 100 days to save the planet', but never mentions from what. Will it wipe out all life on Earth? No. Will mankind cease to be? No. Will we all live on boats? No, we won't.

The Left and the Greens, who are one thing, use the phrase 'Climate Change' like the right and the tabloids use 'Immigration'. They are phrases that are used because they engender panic in their target audience. Both solutions are the same: control. Control of taxes to force people to live how you want them to in order to avoid an unspecified outcome, control of laws to stop people from freedom of movement and an unspecified outcome.

But above all it is the control of fear. The fear of an unspecified outcome is the great historical instrument of power. If you do not do this right now then you will all die/starve/suffer. Evidence is presented, statistics displayed in lovely graphs and sure-fire results announced. But the results, when really thought about, may well be horrible and unwanted, but they are not the end of the world as we know it.

But fear is a powerful weapon and their is no arguing against it. That is why they use it. The problem is that it has caused more fear in those that rule us because of the power it gives them than it has in the general population. Why? Because Mr Average stands back and thinks - like me above - 'And this affects me how?'.

Lawro's Prediction Table, 4th December 2009

The latest Lawro table, based upon his predictions so far, is located below. Just click for a proper sized version.

I have noticed a slight problem with Mr Lawro though, other than being utterly rubbish and useless at my expense. He doesn't do Wednesdays. Nope, if a game is on a Wednesday because of congestion or what have you, he doesn't predict it. Great. So... I've had to give him the benefit. It has effected three games so far this season, West Ham v Aston Villa 4th November, Fulham v Blackburn and Hull V Everton, both 25th November. For the sake of it I have given him the results as they were in real life.


Liverpool and Everton are doing remarkably well really, as are Chelsea, Man Utd, Villa, City, Spurs, Hull and Sunderland, all of whom have yet to lose at home. In fact, Liverpool are yet to lose full stop.

On top of that, in the reverse, Tottenham, Hull Stoke, Wolves, Wigan, Sunderland, West Ham, Birmingham, Blackburn and Pompey are yet to win away from home.

Yes, Lawro has a nicely polarised view of how fixtures pan out. Liverpool always win (usually 2-0), he is kind on Everton to avoid bias and the home team nearly always wins.

It's not exactly a system is it.