ANGRY TEEN

1 year!

2011-03-18T22:43:00.000Z

I would like to take a break from not blogging today, to point out that it has been exactly a year since this blog began.

I'd like to thank all 11,880 of you for putting up with my bullshit (and apologize if you accidentally came here, while searching for, uh, more explicit material).

All 403 posts of it!

Not in love

2011-03-05T12:35:00.000Z

An article by Becky Akers has brought to my attention a quote from Haley Barbour, Republican governor of Mississippi.

"Believe it or not, we love our constituents as much as you all do, and we want to do right for them..."

Of course, as Becky says, anybody claiming that the government has love for it's citizens is completely full of shit.

Indeed, we might easily confuse politicians’ "love" with a farmer’s for his hogs at butchering time. Thanks to Our Rulers, 4439 Americans lie dead in Iraq, we’ll "pay more taxes in 2010 than [we spent] on food, clothing and shelter combined," the Transportation Security Administration gate-rapes us at airports, and "1 in every 32 [American] adults" is "on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole ... " And those are just a few from government’s infinite list of evils. What the bozos in office show us is about as far from love as John Edwards was from a faithful husband.

I have long puzzled over the fallacy of the "caring" politician. It’s such an absurd contradiction in terms – sorta like a "compassionate serial murderer" or a "thoughtful thief" – that you’d think even the public schools’ semi-literates would scorn it. And yet some taxpayers crave these warm, fake fuzzies from their predators; let a ruler cry crocodile tears, and he can plunge his hand into their pockets and nose into their lives as deeply as he pleases.

Heck, he can even slaughter families at a religious compound or shoot mothers holding babies so long as he prattles "Ah feel yer pain." ... Only morons believe sociopaths professing affection as they lie to, rob and murder us.

It seems that it has taken a little longer than we had hoped for people to realise that their vote doesn't count, and that these well-spoken scumbags in suits do not care about them, do not help them and sure as fuck don't love them. These are the people who have set up an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, sent many a young man to war where thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed, and continued to undermine the parts of the economy which actually do serve us.

Self-interest, like the perfect love St. Paul describes in I Corinthians 13, never fails: your parents may disown you, your spouse divorce you, your friends scold and shun you, but an entrepreneur will accept your money every time. After a nasty fight at home, you can head to the nearest restaurant – or, depending on the severity of the squabble, the nearest hotel – and know that a friendly welcome awaits though your kin aren’t speaking.

That’s part of the market’s magic. It persuades – but never forces – folks with little in common, from other sides of the world, of various temperaments, languages and ethnicities, to get along as harmoniously as a loving family. Nor does it allow even momentary departures from that standard. The entrepreneur who offends his customers as frequently as your in-laws insult you will soon declare bankruptcy.

What does the state offer? Crippling taxation and harmful regulations such as the minimum wage, the existence of which has greatly contributed to the fact that Britains youth unemployment rate is 20.5%, compared with a general rate of 7.9%.

And, naturally, the situation is only going to get worse when the 2% rise in National Insurance kicks in—it is, after all, a direct tax on job-creation at a time when the economy is struggling. Brilliant.

It's because the government loves you.

Is government action essentially forceful?

2011-02-27T18:26:00.000Z

Jan Helfeld asks a politician:

Name fail

2011-02-03T19:16:00.000Z

Via b3ta, this...

Great comment on net neutrality

2011-02-01T20:18:00.000Z

Via Counting Cats, Mises.org posts an excellent comment on net neutrality...

So let me get this straight….the government, the same government that punishes success through the tax code, prevents innovation through burdensome regulation, can’t spend within its means, bails out billionaires with working people’s money, and has created a ponzi scheme in the form of social security to threatens to bankrupt the nation, and generally screwed up everything it has ever touched, getting involved in regulating the internet, is going to help increase speech, entrepreneurship, and innovation? Pardon me for being a little skeptical.

I’ll tell you what will really happen. The first 6 months will be fine. Then, first you will see federal taxes on internet purchases, then you will see ‘fairness’ controls that will restrict the content of what you can say, then you will see political speech regulated in the name of ‘campaign finance reform’, then you will see federal business licenses required for selling goods on the internet, required encryption backdoors, required technologies, national ‘internet IDs’, mandatory content filtering, a ban on anonymizing technologies, and 1,000 other terrors that I can’t even imagine right now. Regardless of the pure intents of the people wanting to push government enforced net neutrality, this will make the internet subject to politics and big money interests.

Here is what you will really get… Boy MP3′s sure are disruptive technology, not anymore! The president just appointed the head of BMG as the ‘internet czar’ (czar=no senate approval required!), after a $5 million campaign contribution, and he just decided that MP3s only exist to facilitate copyright infringement, and therefore must be filtered by all ISPs. And you just thought it would make your netflix download faster.

Government enforced Net neutrality is a dangerous idea that only serves to open the door to the destruction of the internet at the hands of government regulators. A better way would be an industry consortium that self-regulated net-neutrality and ostracized companies that didn’t play ball. Plus, people need to vote with their dollars. Your ISP is throttling Netflix? Don’t do business with them.

Quite.

Who is really harming the children?

2011-01-28T18:22:00.001Z

What a load of shit...

The Arkansas Harp grocery store deemed the picture – on the cover of magazine Us – too ‘offensive,’ and revealed they added the special cover to ‘protect children’ in response to several complaints from customers.

Gay teenagers are four times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexuals as a result of constant harassment by homophobes.

Which is why portraying to children that homosexuality is wrong and abnormal, making them grow up viewing themselves as sub-human and subject to abuse from their peers, making them more prone to suicide, while ALSO claiming to do it to "protect children", and "protect the family" just boils my fucking piss.

UPDATE: Johann Hari writes on the same issue a little more eloquently than I managed to...

Here’s what is actually happening. A detailed study by the Schools Health Education Unit found that in Britain today, 70 percent of gay children get bullied, 41 percent get beaten up, and 17 percent get told at some point in their childhood that they are going to be killed.

I’ll tell you the story of just one of them. Jonathan Reynolds was a 15-year old boy from Bridgend in South Wales who was accused – accurately or not, we’ll never know – of being gay. He was yelled at for being a “faggot” and a “poof”. So one day, he sat a GSCE exam – later graded as an A - and went to the train tracks near his school and lay on them. He texted his sister: “Tell everyone that this is for anybody who eva said anything bad about me, see I do have feelings too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust to me, see I do have feeling too. Blame the people who were horrible and injust to me. This is because of them, I am human just like them. None of you blame yourself, mum, dad, Sam and the rest of the family. This is not because of you.” And then the train killed him.

I guess nobody told Jonathan Reynolds that, as the columnist Melanie Phillips put it, “just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.” The great Gay Conquest didn’t make it from her imagination to his playground, or any playground in Britain. Gay kids are six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight siblings. Every week, I get emails from despairing gay kids who describe being thrown against lockers, scorned by their teachers if they complain, and – in some faith schools – told they will burn in Hell. Every day they have to brave playgrounds where the worst insult you can apply is to call something “gay”. They feel totally lost. This could have been your child, or my child, or Melanie Phillips’ child.

However, I did have a problem with this bit:

They can’t choose to offer a service to the general public, and then turn people away on the basis of race or sexuality. They can’t put up de facto signs saying ‘No blacks, no Irish, no gays’ at their B&B.

This issue is more about property rights than anything else – if you are not allowed to let whoever you want onto your property, who really owns it?

Johann Hari claims that he believes in freedom, but when your personal morals disagree with his, it is suddenly justifiable to use force to make you agree with him. Liberty means not only being able to do things you want to do without harming others, but also tolerating the things you vehemently disagree with. I—as you can probably tell—find the concept of denying people service because of who they are absolutely repulsive – and so do many others, which is why a boycott could bankrupt such a business very easily.

Despite Hari's much-needed words about the culture of homophobia in schools and the need to tackle it, I still despise him for being a statist shit. When that changes, I'll start to like him.

Good intentions

2011-01-28T16:17:00.000Z

Via The UK Libertarian, here is a good Walter Williams documentary, which gives us some of the reasons why minorities had not progressed as much as they would have hoped, due to the obstacles the state places in their way.

Pervert update

2011-01-19T16:36:00.000Z

It's been a while since I've done one of these.

So here they are... the very strangest search terms used to access this blog.

father christmas with teens fuck in bed

amy personal fuck pussy blogspot

christmas day teen fucked father update free video

christmas students fuck my pussy

father christmas fucking teens

father fuck kids vagina

fuck that i wish you loads of sex for christmas

fully dipped dick in the pussy

genuine photographs of teenage vaginas

mother gets vagina fucking from own son 9video clips)

occasional pornography

open cunt and angry face

spotty teen cunts fuckin

teen playing dangerously with pussy

what the fuck happened in saffron walden at 7pm on sunday 16th jan 2011?

"what the fuck happened in saffron walden at 7pm on sunday 16th jan 2011?"

How am I supposed to know that?

The State Is Not Great

2011-01-18T21:13:00.000Z

Reasons to tax

2011-01-17T18:07:00.001Z

I haven't seen this video yet, but if it was made by Richard Murphy, it's bound to be full of bollocks.

A proper fisking may come later. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: ...and it was.

Artificially setting the price of goods using the tax system can create either surpluses or shortages in said goods. See rent control and the minimum wage as examples. And rather than make the price of "socially essential" goods cheaper by not taxing them, putting areas of life such as healthcare and education under the government's control creates a level of waste not seen in the free market. The private sector has the profit motive to keep costs under control – the state doesn't.

And contrary to the claims of the Spirit Level authors, inequality does not necessarily beget social problems.

But it is "reorganising the economy" where Dick has it most wrong. Monetary policy has been proven to be a fucking disaster (in 1931 the New York Fed cut its discount rate to 1.5%, whereas in the 1920-21 depression, interest rates were raised to 7% and not cut until it was over), as has fiscal policy.

So, same old bollocks then. I was, however, impressed by how well-spoken he was. Good job.

I think I'll pass...

2011-01-17T17:04:00.000Z

Same shit, different arsehole

2011-01-16T19:13:00.000Z

Nothing is quite as irritating—especially on Twitter—as a Tory supporter – stopping at nothing to defend the government's every action, and spending all of their time kissing David Cameron's arsehole.

Will the Tories cut unnecessary spending? Not fucking likely.

Just take a look at Foreign Aid.

Millions of pounds of foreign aid earmarked for impoverished countries is being spent in Britain, it is revealed today.

Despite budget cuts in almost every other Whitehall department, the Department for International Development (DfID) was spared, and has announced £3million spending over the next three years to raise awareness of poorer nations.

In March last year, during the final days of the Labour government, the Department launched a scheme called Global Community Links (GCL) to raise awareness of third world countries.

...

Grants awarded under the scheme range from £1,000 to £10,000, and some of the projects funded by the the scheme include a malaria awareness workshop in Plymouth, and Afro-Cuban dance gala in Cambridge and an exhibition in Reading about epilepsy in Sierra Leone.

The waste will go on. Tory? Labour? Lib Dem? It doesn't matter. The state is the state is the state.

In other news, this government's plans to change the benefits system may lead one incapacitated person to commit suicide.

Where are their priorities?

The state-caused floods

2011-01-16T18:02:00.000Z

For a long time, environmentalists have been warning us about the disastrous effects global warming will have in the future – citing drought as The Disaster That Will Devastate Australia If We Don't Take Action.

But it the end, it wasn't drought that proved catastrophic, it was flooding. Of course, those libertarians among us will realise that the state is utterly shit at planning and making investments, and—as Christopher Booker says—this case is no different.

For years, Australia’s warmists have been advising the authorities that the danger posed to the country by global warming is not floods but droughts: not too much rain but too little. One result, in Brisbane, was a relaxation of planning rules, to allow building on areas vulnerable to flooding in the past. As long ago as 1999, this was seen as potentially disastrous by an expert Brisbane River Flood Study (which was ignored and for years kept secret).

Now, this doesn't concern me much – planning permission laws are bullshit anyway, and anyone who's thick enough to build their house in a vulnerable area should be perfectly free to take that risk.

What does matter is when shitloads of money are malinvested.

Instead of investing in its flood defences, Australia spent $13 billion on desalination plants. (Queensland’s was recently mothballed because of the excess of rain.)

But out of all of the things the state did before the crisis, which was most disastrous? The orders given to the water company from Anna Bligh, the Premier of Queensland.

Last week’s most disturbing revelation, however, was the contribution to Brisbane’s flooding by the South East Queensland Water company’s massive release of water from its Wivenhoe dam upstream from the city (for details see “Brisbane’s Man-Made Flood Peak” on the Regionalstates blog). Instead of controlled releases through the previous week, the company allowed the level to rise to within a few inches of the top of the dam before releasing a vast volume of water, with devastating consequences for Brisbane 36 hours later.

Last spring, Queensland’s Premier, the drought- and warming-obsessed Anna Bligh, ordered the water company not to allow any releases from the dam because water was such a “precious resource” that none must be wasted.

You dun goofed up. What do you have to say for yourself?

"Hundreds of families across Queensland have been hard hit by the worst flooding in decades - in some cases, the worst on record," she said.

"The resilience of these Queensland communities is certainly on display but the worst is far from over and they need our help."

She said the flood crisis was "an unprecedented situation" in the state and urged Australians to donate what they could.

It's very nice of you to make an appeal for these desperate people, Mrs Bligh. But next time, will you make sure you don't cause any floods in the first place? Thanks.

Blame everything except the parents

2011-01-16T14:51:00.000Z

More shocking than the Tuscon shooting itself was the mass of people who rushed to make political capital out of the disaster.

The left jumped upon the events instantly, using it as another argument for gun control. A lot of them even went as far as to blame Sarah Palin.

TBogg of FireDogLake wades straight in and blames Sarah Palin for the shooting because of a graphic of crosshairs placed on the districts of moderate Democrats who voted for healthcare reform. Was the Palin graphic clever? No. But martial imagery is standard political fare and, as Matt Lewis points out, there’s no shortage of Democrats who’ve engaged in it (VerumSerum has found a Democratic Leadership Committee target map).

It becomes less surprising that these people can believe such fucking retarded shit when you realise some of the other moronic things these people believe – one example of which being the sinister twisting of logic which makes protecting yourself from theft immoral, and theft something which must be done!

Equally batshit, however, was the reaction from the right, with Peter Hitchens blaming the tragedy on...

Guess what?

Look at the strange picture of the alleged killer Jared Loughner. He has just been arrested for a crime for which he could be put to death, if convicted. And he is smiling. From this, and from many other things we already know about this man, it seems likely that he has lost his reason.

Why and how? The most likely cause is Loughner’s daily cannabis-smoking habit. The link between this drug and serious mental illness grows clearer every day. Wickedly, the dope lobby still tries to deny this and seeks to legalise it.

Loughner has been, for much of his short life, a habitual smoker of this so-called ‘soft’ organic drug. This is not in doubt. Police records, the testimony of U.S. army recruiters who rejected him partly on these grounds, and the accounts of several friends confirm that Loughner is a marijuana victim.

Yes, I know. Not all cannabis-smokers lose their minds. And not all cigarette-smokers get cancer. But in both cases the risk is enough to cause concern.

All of these factors are at best completely fucking irrelevant. Campaign ads do not suddenly fill someone with an urge to murder, and millions smoke cannabis without killing anyone.

Pete might look at this guy and say "He's a murder, and a cannabis smoker, therefore the cannabis must have led him to murder." This closely resembles those times when a high school student goes on a shooting rampage and after the attack, violent video games are found in their home. So what? You also found toothpaste, clothes, food, a bed, etc. These are all normal things most people have – gunmen do not stand out from the general population in this regard.

What does make Loughner stand out, however, is his childhood, which was one that is said to have been plagued with abuse. It is well documented that bad parenting leads to social problems later in life [PDF], so the fact that nobody in the media is talking about his upbringing is strange. But here's our favourite Canadian anarchist to explain why this is not happening.

Astroturf environmentalists

2011-01-02T20:48:00.000Z

Hallelujah! DK is blogging again. Among his most recent postings was this, pointing out—via a new environmental blog, Haunting the Library—the stupidity of some of the people within the green movement.

The entire planet is affected by global warming, and polar bears in Antarctica aren’t the only ones facing changes.

This new blog, as it turns out, is a very good one – and I suggest you check it out. Not only has it clocked this shining example of idiocy, but it has also made quite clear the hypocrisy of one George Monbiot.

You see, Monbiot has a bit of a problem with "astroturf libertarians", explaining what he means here:

An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised

I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.

...

The internet is a remarkable gift, which has granted us one of the greatest democratic opportunities since universal suffrage. We’re in danger of losing this global commons as it comes under assault from an army of trolls and flacks, many of them covertly organised or trained.

Now, the key word in the phrase "astroturf libertarians" is libertarians (let's leave aside for the moment that corporatism and libertarianism are not the same thing). Because, while Monbiot doesn't like the organised astroturf campaigns of people he disagrees with, he just can't get enough of his own...

Monbiot is the “honorary president” of an internet organisation called The Campaign Against Climate Change (CCC). And what does the CCC do? Well, it scans the internet for articles on global warming and directs its army of supporters to the comments sections in the hope of influencing the debate.

The website of the CCC brazenly declares that “We are trying to create an online army”. An “online army”? But surely, that’s a threat to internet freedom? Well, maybe, but like the crusaders, Monbiot’s army knows that its cause is just and so any action it takes is also justified.

So, what will enlisting in this “online army” involve then?

You will receive one e-mail alert per day containing links to various climate change news articles. We need you to politely explain in the comments section why global warming is actually happening and why it’s not a big conspiracy. You can contribute to as little or as many articles as you like, just dive in.

The purpose of this online army, according to Monbiot’s CCC is to “tip the balance back in the favour of scientific fact, not scientific fiction”. They want people to accept the ‘consensus’ on global warming, as represented by the IPCC’s reports.

Well, that’s what they start by saying. Just a little further down the same page, and the online army are invited to go even further, to go “onto the offensive”:

One last suggestion from us - you can also consider going onto the offensive and explain that the real uncertainty about man-made climate change is not whether its happening but how fast its happening and that in fact there is increasing evidence that the mainstream science of the IPCC is actually underestimating the scale and imminence of the threat.

Having recruited an online army with the alleged aim of tipping the balance towards the ‘scientific fact’ of the IPCC ‘consensus’, Monbiot’s online army is being exhorted to argue against that “mainstream science” and to persuade people that things are even worse than the mainstream scientists tell them.

...

Monbiot argues in public that “An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations but which has in reality been organised” but is at the head of an organization that declares “We are trying to create an online army”. Hypocrisy? You decide.

As the president of this organised astroturf campaign, the only thing we can be sure of is that George Monbiot himself is a "threat to internet democracy".

Dear fucking god – does the fuckwittery and unapologetic hypocrisy of this man never end?

Top 10 myths about Afghanistan

2010-12-30T20:06:00.000Z

Don't believe the propaganda.

Father Christmas fucked my pussy

2010-12-20T12:51:00.000Z

For many years, the world was in dire need of a new, family-friendly Christmas song. Luckily, Majela ZeZe Diamond is here to give you just such a thing:

Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina, oh,
Vagina, vagina, eh
Christmas pussy, pussy
Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina, oh,
Vagina, vagina, eh
Christmas jiggy, jiggy

Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy

Father Christmas, lover boy!
Come over here, give me your dick
Dip it in, in my cunt,
Dip it in, in my cunt

Father Christmas, lover boy!
Dip your dicky in my cunt
Dip your dicky in my cunt

Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina, oh
Vagina, vagina, eh
Christmas pussy, pussy
Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina, oh
Vagina, vagina, eh
Christmas jiggy, jiggy

Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy

Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy,
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy
Father Christmas fuck my pussy, fuck, fuck my pussy

This is Christmas,
We gonna have lots of sex
This is Christmas,
We gonna have lots of sex
This is Christmas,
We gonna have lots of sex
This is Christmas,
We gonna have lots of sex

Father Christmas, lover boy!
I'm here, I'm over here

Dip your penis in my pussy,
Dip your penis in my pussy,
Dip your penis in my pussy

Father Christmas, lover boy!

The failure of statist "privatisation"

2010-12-20T03:03:00.000Z

When is a privatisation not really a privatisation? When the state remains heavily involved...

"Buckley," over at the UK Libertarian, gives us a perfect example of this sort of pseudo-privatisation – the "privatisation" of Britain's railways in the 1990s.

In the 90s the service went from being nationalised to privatised. In the time since ‘privatisation’ the quality of service has gone down, accidents have gone up and taxes have been increased too, yet despite all of this ticket prices continue to rise. So that’s the case solved then surely? Privatisation has failed us, it’s time to nationalise the service again, right? Wrong.

Privatisation hasn’t really seen the government step away from controlling the industry, what they’ve done is actually far simpler than that. Instead of controlling the company that runs the rail service, they now sanction contracts to various private companies, a process of franchising services. Most people are familiar with franchises in chain stores such as fast food restaurants. Franchising is a clever way of operating a business in an area by allowing a private individual or company to run it. The franchisor sets the provisions by which the franchise must be run, and must also calculate the costs and benefits of allowing the franchisee to run their business. In private industry this works effectively because the franchisor has to make sensible decisions, or else face the prospect of their business failing. Not only that, but all interactions between the franchisor and franchisee are completely voluntary, they both enter into the agreement freely. When a government privatises an industry this is not the case.

The government has no incentive to run an efficient company. They have a monopoly on the industry; they decide who gets the contracts and if the service is failing they face no competition due to the coercion they use to maintain control of the industry. As well as this they also absolve the responsibility of the failing industry by allowing their franchisees to take the brunt of the blame for the business model failing, thus providing all the justification that those who call for nationalisation need. We can now plainly see that the private interests are not to blame here.

Very often, libertarians and free-marketers face a bum rap for the past failings of policies which appear to be free market, but were actually nothing of the sort. It seems to me that the most important thing for libertarians to do is to make very plain the difference between real free market economics and phoney "free market", neoliberal economics.

Many people on the left seem to think that "free market" means an economic system run by corporate power, for corporate power – while everyone else faces a bad deal (like the high prices and shit service you find in the rail industry). What they must realise is that this system is not free market—this is a form of state capitalism which, because of government power, benefits an elite at the expense of the majority—and that a genuine free market would produce a better outcome for everybody – not just the people at the top.

We failed!

2010-12-20T00:11:00.000Z

Sadly, Surfin' Bird didn't make it to number one, beaten in the charts by Rihanna and X Factor winner Matt Cardle. But number 3 is still pretty good, even though I wanted it to occupy that all important number 1 spot. I suppose I should have just bought the damn thing...

I also congratulate the Cage Against The Machine campaign, which got John Cage's 4'33'' to the #21 spot.

However, for me the highlight of this chart was the song which managed to make it to number 66...

Next year, we ought to launch a campaign to get this track to number 1. Who's with me?

Politicians' Promises Gone Wrong

2010-12-19T22:48:00.000Z

Here's another John Stossel documentary, and it's a good one. Our selfless representatives promise us many things, but what really happens when they do them? The answer—as you will see—is that they go horribly, horribly wrong.

Enjoy.

What the hell...

2010-12-19T20:10:00.001Z

...is this bollocks all about?

Ed Vaizey, the communications minister, has called a meeting with the country’s biggest broadband providers, including BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk, to explore changing how pornography gets into homes.

Instead of using parental controls to stop access to explicit websites, the tap will be turned off at source, meaning adults will have to ask to receive the images.

Oh for fucks sake! This was supposed to be the government that was going to restore civil liberties lost during Labour's 13 year reign of terror. So what the fuck happened?

Those with half a brain will know exactly what happened. We are ruled by bastards that are just as statist, just as totalitarian, just as pro-nanny state as Labour were. The government has decided that pornography is bad, so they have decided to force the population not to watch it, unless they get special permission from the state. Never mind the fact that software already exists for this sort of thing, with parents able to regulate their own children's internet use.

But the sacks of shit who rule over us have decided that the responsibility of taking care of children must be transferred from parents to the state. After all, governments only killed 170 million people last century – what could possibly go wrong?

So what's the government's justification?

Mr Vaizey told the Sunday Times: “This is a very serious matter. I think it is very important that it’s the ISPs (internet service providers) that come up with solutions to protect children.”

Of course! It's for the cheeeeeeeeeeeeldren! Any awful, horrible, disgracefully totalitarian legislation can be justified if it's for the children. That's why you can't light up in a pub or restaurant, and why smoking will soon be banned in cars – so that your kids will no longer suffer from all your filthy carcinogens. You dirty, sub-human bastard.

And what's the fucking point of this legislation anyway? I, and almost everybody (well, every male) I know dabbles in pornography, and it has no negative effects on any of us. It's really nothing more than a bit of harmless fun. Like drugs.

But there are other problems with this insane policy, which the Grim Reaper has highlighted.

Firstly, how the hell are you going to categorise every website on the internet? There are billions of the fucking things. There's then the issue of who is actually going to be doing the categorising. Is it going to be yet another quango? If it is, I can see the Mail complaining if it's someone who's too "liberal" - either that, or we'll end up with some humourless, puritanical Mary Whitehouse style cunt who hasn't got a fucking clue how the internet works. Oh, and what about people who use their mobile phones to obtain internet access?

As an aside, I'd love to know how they'd categorise this blog. There's no pornography on here, but there's a hell of a lot of swearing. So where exactly would The Grim Reaper Writes fit into all this?

Secondly, why the fuck should the government be allowed to know whether people are using porn or not? If I wanted to access pornography from my computer, I see absolutely no reason why I should have to sign a form and then submit it in order to receive permission for the right to access such content. I'm a fully-grown adult, I'm entitled to make such a decision for myself. As it happens, I don't use pornography myself, but I would have the right to do so if I wanted, and I see no reason why the likes of Ed Vaizey wants to, or needs to know that I wish to access such sites. Can you give me a reason, Ed? Any reason at all? Thought not.

Obviously if I had children, I'd make sure there was a filter in place to reduce the risk of them coming across adult material to as low as possible, but there is no way you can avoid it altogether. Even when you do searches on Google Image Search and put the moderation settings on their highest, the occasional pornographic image can still get through. It would most likely cause some awkwardness when the parents find out, but kids are curious about the world. They're going to eventually come across content they don't understand or don't like, and as parents, your duty is to try and help them understand what they're seeing and doing. Not to act as some sort of state-appointed policeman.

Spot on.

So what has Vaizey got planned for the future?

He continued: “I’m hoping they will get their acts together so we don’t have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years.”

Oh, do fuck off – I'm sure everybody is getting sick and bloody tired with all this endless, liberty destroying legislation piling up to ruin our lives. It's actually quite dull to see the same shit we suffered with under Labour happening all over again.

What more proof do you need that all major political parties are the same, and voting makes no difference whatsoever?

The Grumpy Old Twat quits blogging

2010-12-19T13:30:00.000Z

Sadly, it's true.

Nothing has changed. So it's time to call it a day.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read all my blog shite and/or leave comments on all my blog shite and I'm also grateful to those who have recommended all my blog shite to others. A special thanks to others in the blogosphere who have helped me to make this blog the success that it has become. You know who you are.

A sad day this is too. Gotty's blog was everything you could ask for – vitriolic, shocking, unique, funny, and fucking brilliant.

Meanwhile, you might see less frequent postings here, but it will be quite a long time until I end up finally biting the dust.

Let the blogging commence!

Take out your wand, Potter

2010-12-15T22:57:00.000Z

Via someone on Twitter, I have found this hilarous page showing all of the innuendos in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. So without further ado, here they are...

"What d'you mean, I'm not brave in bed?" said Harry, completely nonplussed. (14)

"...I know you did Mark Evans two nights ago --"
"He was asking for it," snarled Dudley. (13)

"I heard you last night," said Dudley breathlessly. "Talking in your sleep. Moaning." (15)

"Ah well...wand still in your jeans?" (53)

"JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE ALLOWED TO USE MAGIC NOW YOU DON'T HAVE TO WHIP YOUR WAND OUT FOR EVERY TINY LITTLE THING!" (84)

"You two just Apparated on my knees!"
"Yeah, well, it's harder in the dark --" (97)

"There was a groan of bedsprings, and Harry's mattress descended a few inches as George sat down near his feet.
"So, got there yet?" said George eagerly. (100)

"...screwing up her eyes each time with the same pained expression she had worn back in Harry's bedroom." (85)

"Ron was lying sprawled on his back with his mouth wide open." (121)

"Quite astonishing, the way you contrive to wriggle out of very tight holes." (154)

"He's having a go at my mother!" Seamus yelled. (218)

"Or any part of your body, really, we're not fussy where we stick this." (343)

"...when it appears, it is always equipped for the seeker's needs. Dobby has used it, sir," said the elf, dropping his voice and looking guilty, "when Winky has been very drunk." (387)

"She's somethin' when she's roused, Olympe...fiery, you know...'spect it's the French in her..." (432)

"He was rather taller than Snape, who, Harry noticed, had balled his fist in the pocket of his cloak over what Harry was sure was the handle of his wand." (520)

"Stand up and take out your wand, Potter." (533)

"I thought not," said Snape, watching him closely. "You let me get in too far. You lost control." (535)

"Manners, Potter," said Snape dangerously. "Now, I want you to close your eyes."
Harry threw him a filthy look before doing as he was told. He did not like the idea of standing there with his eyes shut while Snape faced him, carrying a wand. (535)

"He was on all fours again on Snape's office floor." (536)

"Ron wrenched the hangings apart, and Harry stared up at him in the moonlight, as he lay flat on his back." (586)

"Yeah, Montague tried to do us during break," said George.
"What do you mean, 'tried'?" said Ron quickly. (627)

"Well, we'll soon find out, won't we?" said Snape smoothly. "Wand out, Potter."
Harry moved into his usual position... (638)

"But whether James really did take off Snape's pants, Harry never found out." (649)

"...did things with a wand I've never seen before..." (711)

And they call this a book for children?

Who cares?

2010-12-15T20:26:00.000Z

Not me.

If ever you get the time...

2010-12-12T17:16:00.005Z

NB: This is not Angry Teen

Listen to this guy:

His name is Nick Margerrison and he has a show on LBC that starts at 1am and goes on until 5am on the weekends. He has an enjoyable show and is a self proclaimed Libertarian.

Update: Turns out he's got a blog too on the LBC website.

We are being ruled by morons

2010-12-12T11:17:00.000Z

John Stossel reports:

UN delegates have been in Cancun, Mexico over the last two weeks obsessing passionately about climate change and preparing for the next Kyoto-style climate treaty at this year's Climate Change Conference – the COP16.

That alone is bad enough. But what makes this climate conference worse are the types of petitions that these evil fuckwit UN delegate cunts would sign.

This year, CFACT students created two mock-petitions to test U.N. Delegates. The first asked participants to help destabilize the United States economy, the second to ban water.

The first project, entitled “Petition to Set a Global Standard” sought to isolate and punish the United States of America for defying the international community, by refusing to bite, hook, line and sinker on the bait that is the Kyoto Protocol. The petition went so far as to encourage the United Nations to impose tariffs and trade restrictions on the U.S. in a scheme to destabilize the nation’s economy. Specifically, the scheme seeks to lower the U.S. GDP by 6% over a ten year period, unless the U.S. signs a U.N. treaty on global warming.

This would be an extremely radical move by the United Nations. Even so, radical left-wing environmentalists from around the world scrambled eagerly to sign.

The second project was as successful as the first. It was euphemistically entitled “Petition to Ban the Use of Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO)” (translation water). It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused.

Despite the apparently not-so-obvious reference to H2O, almost every delegate that collegian students approached signed their petition to ban that all too dangerous substance, which contributes to the greenhouse effect, is the major substance in acid rain, and is fatal if inhaled.

If that wasn't enough of a piss boiler, take a look at this video.

If these highly odious bureaucunts are willing to ban water and deliberately destroy the wealth of America (where even the poor have a good standard of living), it makes you wonder what else these parasitical decivilizors would be willing to do.

Anarchist lunacy

2010-12-11T17:43:00.000Z

We ... got out for the day early to join in the protests against the tripling of university fees and EMA being abolished.

But you're anarchists, aren't you?

Abolish the state, stop the theft and coercion – whatever happened to that?

If you were real anarchists, you would think differently.

Any time the price of a service is set politically, there is a massive amount of systematic violence going on. A mere riot pales in comparison. Free the market.

Are you pro-force?

2010-12-10T18:11:00.000Z

A bloke named Eric Peters has recently written a piece about the two homogeneous herds in politics—conservatives and "liberals"—pointing out the common trait they share.

The common denominator is – force. We demand that you do This or That and if you do not comply, we shall literally assault you.

It is never put quite that plainly, but it is the bottom line.

Refuse to be drafted to kill and maim strangers in another country who have done you no harm (or fund the system that does it in your name) and the "conservative" authoritarian will insist that you be imprisoned. Fail to "purchase" the heaf cayuh insurance that the "liberal" authoritarian demands you "purchase" and he will be pleased to first fine you and, should you decline to pay the fine, eventually, seize your assets or (failing that) seize you.

The "conservative" authoritarian assuages any misgivings his stunted humanity might still cling to by telling himself that Security, or The National Interest (or even worse, "protecting our freedoms") justifies the open-ended, never-to-be-questioned sacrificial offerings to the arms merchants and war profiteers.

The "liberal" authoritarian tells himself that he is working for equality – or toward a just society.

Neither takes the time to ask himself: Would I put my next-door neighbor in prison (or threaten him with violence) if he declined to do as I wish and asked that I leave him in peace?

Because probably 90 percent of the population has never even thought to ask themselves this crucible of a question, we find ourselves living in what amounts to a (somewhat) controlled orgy of reciprocal looting and assault lacquered over with euphemisms about "democracy."

It pulls one way or the other, but in the end, the result is always the same.

"Liberal" authoritarians win a legislative victory one year – and millions are forced to buy the product of a private, for-profit business (heaf cayuh insurance). "Conservative" authoritarians seize control and, suddenly, we are literally assaulted by government agents before being allowed to get on a commercial airplane.

From the Macro at the federal level to the Micro at the local/county level, this is the nature of the process – and the system.

The question that is never asked is: Do I have any right to impose my will on my neighbor, who is doing me no harm? For to ask that simple but penetrating question – and to come to grips with the moral implications of the answer – would cause the "conservative" and "liberal" authoritarian alike to suddenly see the blood each have on their hands.

So, the question is never asked.

Couldn't be closer to the truth.

I, for one, am getting pretty sick and tired with all this endless bickering between people of different statist ideologies. Changing the party in power merely changes who the gun is pointed at. While the left has an axe aimed straight at entrepreneurs, the right seeks to keep immigration to a minimum.

Why?

In a widely acclaimed 1989 book entitled The Economic Consequences of Immigration, University of Maryland Professor Julian Simon demolished virtually every fallacy of the seal-the-borders mentality. He proved that immigrants do not subtract from the total number of available jobs, are net contributors to the public treasury, do not commit more crimes than natives, and generally work harder, save more, and are more likely to create businesses than native Americans. All things considered, newcomers add wealth, culture, and human capital to the economy.

Simon has demonstrated that immigrants are really not the huddled masses, helpless and dependent, that many people think. Instead, they are usually young and vigorous adults with excellent earnings potential. His detailed studies show that on balance, even accounting for all public welfare and other government “social service” costs imposed by our homegrown nanny state, each immigrant still contributes far more than he “takes” by being here.

I should also point out that once communism began in Cuba, ending mass immigration, it ceased to be a thriving Western economy, with the people having less to eat than an 1842 Cuban slave.

The author goes on to tell a story about a Russian immigrant to the USA called Constantin, who "acquired nothing except by his own efforts or by voluntary charity."

What rightful claim over the disposition of his life could the U.S. government possibly have? That anyone could force him to vacate the country and get away with it was, to me, an unthinkable invasion of his individual rights and of my freedom of association. Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but it could have, and it does happen to others all the time.

Indeed. And if you think it's morally justifiable to use force to prevent people like him migrating to Western countries – why, you're just as big a piece of scum as the violent, faux anarchist anti-fees protestors, or the UK Uncunts.

Religion—The Bad Parent

2010-12-08T16:40:00.002Z

No need to correct yourself

2010-12-07T17:59:00.000Z

You were right the first time!

At least it wasn't as bad as the time a newsreader compared David Cameron to "TV cop Gene Cunt."

This sort of thing restores ones faith in the mainstream media, doesn't it?

So why is WikiLeaks a good thing again?

2010-12-07T17:16:00.000Z

Here's why.

It's time the government had a taste of its own medicine. If they have nothing to hide, they have nothing to fear.

False Economy's false economy

2010-12-03T21:38:00.000Z

A new lefty campaign has sprung up, arguing to stop—guess what?—the Coalition Government's spending cuts. To make their philosophy quite plain, here's the video they made (which was so full of shit it could have been mistaken for scat porn).

Call me a tight-fisted, Iron Chancellor, Scrooge bastard if you must, but I really don't see the urgent necessity of a new playground for those kids – especially after 13 years of Labour Investment. And the cut in the disabled woman's allowance, despite paying taxes all her life? Serves her right for trusting the government's outrageous Ponzi schemes. Let's get out of NI while we still can.

And in a country where crime has never been more scarce, it perhaps makes sense not to employ so many Bobbies.

The main argument False Economy use in this video is that the recession was not the fault of all these poor people – it was the fault of the bankers.

Well... yes. However, they would have found it a bit more difficult to completely screw up the economy if the state was not offering them bargain interest rates and protecting them from their losses if they ever risked going bankrupt. ~~Despite~~ Because of government regulation and government protection, they were not exposed to the same risks as they would face in a completely free market – risks which smaller businesses have to face all the time. Big business is protected, small business is fucked up the arse, and—hey presto!—greater inequality is created. If they are to achieve an egalitarian society, the left must dump its allegiance to regulation.

And what's all this about public sector job losses, and the negative effect of spending cuts on the economy?

The money used to pay for this new social housing will be coming from the pockets of taxpayers, meaning that they have less to spend on goods and services themselves. Which means that the business they would have paid to receive those goods and services will lose revenue, meaning that they will have less to invest, meaning that workers' productivity cannot be raised as quickly as it could be, meaning that their wages grow at a much slower pace, and... well, you get the idea by now.

Because the state will always spend money less efficiently than an individual would ("if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get." – Milton Friedman), wealth will be destroyed on meaningless, useless public sector waste, rather than spent on things which truly benefit consumers.

In short, government spending and stimulus does not create a multiplier effect, but a negative multiplier effect.

And how do we know?

In a 2010 paper published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center (where I work), economists Robert Barro and Charles Redlick showed that in the best-case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth—between 40 and 70 cents. If that was the rate of return on our private-sector investments, America would soon cease to be a leading economic force.

Barro and Redlick also looked at the economic impact of raising taxes to pay for spending increases. They found that for every $1 in tax-financed spending, the economy actually shrinks by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases damages the economy.

But what about all those poor public servants who are about to be laid off?

A 2002 paper in the Economic Policy Journal, written by the French economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andre Zylberberg, looked at the impact of public employment on overall labor market performance. Using data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, they found that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs, decreased by a slight margin overall labor market participation, and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers.

...

Basically, public jobs, especially ones that also exist in the private sector in fields such as transportation and education, offer higher wages and benefits, require low effort, and therefore crowd out many private jobs. When these new employees are paid with taxes it negatively impacts the economy.

Robin Hood tax to pay for public servants? Massive fail, proven to negatively impact the economy.

But for the government, some things never change.

The mistakes of the great depression are key examples. The most obvious ones are Herbert Hoover's batshit crazy high wage policy—creater of mass unemployment, not unlike the minimum wage today—his protectionist tariffs on foreign goods and the massive increase in the deficit undertaken during the cunt's presidency. Laissez-faire he definitely was not.

Let's also not forget the tax increases, anti-business sentiment and expansion of state power that prevented the American economy from recovering in the thirties – exactly what (the perhaps appropriately named) False Economy want to introduce in Britain, thereby ensuring that our economy will be forever fucked.

One example is their devotion to green jobs. But does it work? Evidence from the USA suggests otherwise.

President Obama's announcement earlier today of an additional $2.3 billion in federal tax credits for creating approximately 17,000 subsidized temporary jobs in the green energy industry is drawing a less than enthusiastic response from Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research:

Show me one other industry that requests and receives a nearly 30 percent taxpayer subsidy. That's what the wind and solar industries require - at a minimum - to exist. All the president did today is throw more money at an unproven technology that is not economically viable in the marketplace. Unfortunately, the only winners in this latest taxpayer giveaway will be Wall Street money managers and corporate interests in the wind and solar industry.

The state and big business – a disgusting, never-ending relationship.

And it is a relationship which must end immediately. A better, more equal future is not one in which the state has a greater budget and a perpetually rising amount of power. Instead, it is a future with truly free markets, free from all of the burdens placed on its shoulders by the state—taxes, regulations and intellectual property to name but a few—and a society in which all people are free from force and state coercion. Free to decide their own destiny.

Now that would be a future fair for all...

If only it were true!

2010-12-02T22:03:00.000Z

Sadly, it's just satire.

In a historic sign that Washington finally understands what the American people want, Congress today voted to go fuck itself.

The bipartisan bill, which passed unanimously in the House and the Senate, came about after members of both parties — frustrated by endless bickering and obduracy – polled constituents and asked what their top priority was.

“We explained to the voters what needed to be done to fix this country, then we told them there was no way we were going to do those things,” said GOP House leader John Boehner. “Their answer was clear: ‘In that case, go fuck yourselves.’”

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the mandate crossed racial, ethnic, and gender lines. “America is the most dynamic, most diverse country in the world, but today the American people spoke as one, and we listened,” Pelosi said. “I am proud to be part of the first Congress in the history of the United States that will go fuck itself.”

Prior to the vote, the same legislators who had failed to agree on tax cuts, Social Security, the deficit, and dozens of other issues, urged one another to unite behind a single cause.

“At this critical time in our nation’s history, do we just sit back and do nothing?” asked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “Do we allow partisanship and special interests to keep us from fucking ourselves? No. We were sent here to do a job, and we’re going to do that job. I say that euphemistically, of course.”

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), recently censured by the House for numerous ethics violations, chose to soften the blow for any colleagues who were unsure.

“The American people want us to go fuck ourselves. That’s a fact,” said Rangel as legislators listened in silence. “Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Hmmm, I don’t know. Does it hurt?’ Well let me tell you something. I have fucked myself pretty bad, and I’m still standing.”

The motion passed unanimously, although the two parties were at odds over which should get credit for the legislation.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, (D-CT), insisted President Obama originated the idea, telling Democratic House leaders to go fuck themselves as early as 2009. “The last time he even had pictures,” she said. But Rep. Michelle Bachman, (R-MN), scoffed at that contention.

“Republicans like me caused this gridlock, and Republicans like me can take credit for this bill,” she said. “And please, let’s dispel the notion that this is some new Progressive idea. Everyone knows people have wanted Congress to go fuck itself for years.”

Bachman has history on her side. In fact, the desire for a representative body to go fuck itself predates the United States.

...

The modern day interpretation to “go fuck itself” was first suggested in 1948, during the 80th Congress. Known as the Do-Nothing Congress, its legislators refused to introduce a bill even though 52 percent of the voters and President Harry Truman wanted the legislature to go fuck itself, the latter 219 times a day, still believed to be a record.

But all that ended today as the 111th Congress put its stamp on history.

“Today we join the ranks of the Civil Rights Congress, the New Deal Congress, and the Suffrage Congress,” Rep. Joe Barton (D-TX) said on the House floor after the votes were tallied. “Today we are forevermore the Congress that fucked itself. I yield the remainder of my time to my colleague from Pennsylvania, who will demonstrate.”

President Obama is expected to sign the legislation Monday in a Rose Garden ceremony closed to the public for decency reasons.

Brilliant!

There are valid reasons to oppose the TSA...

2010-12-02T18:06:00.000Z

...but this is not one of them.

Eugene Delgaudio, a Republican and an official on the Loudon County Board of Supervisors, sent out an email complaining about the controversial security measures in his position as president of the conservative non-profit Public Advocate organisation.

In it, he attacked the Transport Security Administration (TSA) for having a non-discrimination policy and claimed that gay staff could be “getting pleasure” from patdowns.

He is said to have claimed that this is part of the “wide-scale homosexual agenda”.

Mr Delgaurdio wrote: “It’s the federal employee’s version of the Gay Bill of Special Rights… That means the next TSA official that gives you an ‘enhanced pat down’ could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission.”

Right. So if a heterosexual man gets pleasure from groping a woman, then that's just fucking fine then? Right?

Cunt.

They're out to get you

2010-12-01T20:18:00.000Z

WikiLeaks is doing humanity a great service by exposing what is going on behind the scenes in the government. Now they know what it's like to receive one of their pat downs. But some people are not happy. Not very happy at all.

Kathleen Troia McFarland, who held national security posts under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan governments, backed the calls, saying Private Bradley Manning – the chief suspect of leaking the files – should face treason charges and possible execution.

Pvt Manning, who is in prison accused of passing a quarter of a million sensitive papers to WikiLeaks, is currently charged with transferring classified data and “delivering national defence information to an unauthorised source".

Writing on the Fox News website, Ms McFarland said: "It's time to up the charges. Let's charge him and try him for treason. If he's found guilty, he should be executed."

She also called for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to face terror charges, claiming: "He’s waging cyberwar on the United States and the global world order. Mr. Assange and his fellow hackers are terrorists and should be prosecuted as such."

Will she prosecute Bush and Blair first, for their crimes against humanity?

No? I fucking thought not.

The comments came as a former adviser to Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, suggested a different solution to the international diplomatic crisis – assassinating Mr Assange.

Prof Tom Flanagan said Barack Obama should “put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something” to rid the world of Mr Assange.

These cunts manage to do something which the state does so effectively every time it tries – the perverse twisting of morality. Good is evil, and evil is good, according to these statists.

The actions of Wikileaks pale in comparison to the utterly reprehensible actions of the US army – including killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, millions of Vietnamese, and the military intervention in the Middle East which the CIA claims was a primary cause of 9/11.

Almost all acts of American military intervention can be viewed of as acts of terrorism, on a much more grand scale than the terrorism the USA is currently fighting.

It should not surprise us that these neoconservatives have reacted in such a sinister way. For the sort of people who justify mass murder committed by the US army, assassinating Julian Assange is not exactly beyond their moral standard. It is time for them to wake up and realise who the real terrorists are.

Just look in the mirror, you evil cunts...

Irate black guy calls himself

2010-12-01T17:15:00.000Z

Funny as fuck...

Trilogy of fail

2010-11-29T18:46:00.001Z

Learn From My Fail is a hilarious site, featuring the fails in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. Featured earlier this month was this teacher, who was impressed by the consistently good grades of a particular student.

So, what was the best way for them to express their delight?

I am impressed by your A-ness!

Oh dear.

Still, I suppose it's better than the time when a women liked the "peaness" that was going on in her meal.

Meanwhile, why not catch up on the events on board an Ansett Australia plane—found via B3ta—when one Mr Gay found that somebody had taken his seat.

Priceless!

The humiliation can only get worse...

2010-11-27T21:47:00.000Z

...if this report from Taiwan is anything to go by.

Quote of the day #4

2010-11-27T21:28:00.000Z

The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. …The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.

So who said that?

Mises? Hayek? Friedman? Rand?

No.

FDR.

Our North Korean allies

2010-11-24T18:27:00.000Z

You know what? I think Sarah Palin is just as much of a bumbling fuckwit as George W Bush.

Just take a look at this interview on Glenn Beck's radio show. Audio is available via the link.

CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]

PALIN: But obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies. We’re bound to by treaty –

CO-HOST: South Korean.

PALIN: Eh, Yeah. And we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies, yes.

Let's also be blunt about the fact that Palin is a truly evil and dangerous woman. Bad things happen when devoutly religious neoconservatives become president of the United States.

I really, really hope she isn't elected.

Not just an invasion of privacy, but useless too

2010-11-22T18:57:00.000Z

Following yesterday's post about airport security and terrorism comes more news about the radiation produced by those machines which TSA agents use to photograph you naked.

It seems that they may not save any lives after all.

The bizarre warning stems from a statistical coincidence which apparently shows that you are just as likely to die from radiation allegedly emitted by the scanners as you are to die due to a terrorist bob on your flight.

Peter Rez, from Arizona State University, said the probability of dying from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack are both about one in 30 million, making body scanners redundant.

He said: "The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn't."

A potential malfunction could increase the radiation dose, he said.

Rez has studied the radiation doses of backscatter scanners using the images produced by the machines. He discovered that the radiation dose was often higher than the manufacturers claimed.

Rez suggested that the statistical coincidence means that there is really no case to be made for deploying any kind of body-scanning machine – the risk is identical.

But he added: "They're both incredibly unlikely events. These are still a factor of 10 lower than the probability of dying in any one year from being struck by lightning in the United States."

Critics say the low level beam used delivers a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin—one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body—that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.

A number of scientists have already written to to the Food and Drug Administration to complain that the safety aspects have not been properly addressed before the nationwide rollout of the scanners.

What a bunch of incredibly thick authoritarian cunts. What will it take for them to simply bugger off and leave people alone? Is it absolutely necessary for them to screw everything up with their unintended (I hope) consequences, like they always do?

The famous Benjamin Franklin quote...

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

...is proven correct once again.

Don't touch my junk!

2010-11-21T19:34:00.000Z

The state fucks you. The TSA is merely the foreplay department.

Comment is Free writer Richard Adams is not at all perturbed by the TSA, inviting them to "touch his junk anytime."

The pathetic mewing set off by the "Don't touch my junk" airport screening incident tells you pretty much everything you you want to know about the teenage grudge-bearing and solipsistic whining of modern society.

...

It's bizarre that a nation that has largely rolled over and acquiesced in allowing its government to tap its phones and internet traffic – the Patriot act, a far graver assault on civil liberties – should get so exercised about this instead.

Of course. The Patriot Act was an unacceptable expansion of state power to spy on citizens, and eliminate many of their liberties. The US government has decided that, to make its citizens safe, they must give up a sizable chunk of their freedom.

And the recent screenings and searchings are an extension of this bonfire of liberty. Just take a look at this video. It shows a child being strip searched by a TSA agent. Or how about the humiliating ordeal that a disabled woman was put through while being pat-down in an airport? [emphasis mine]

Sawyer is a bladder cancer survivor who now wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine from a stoma, or opening in his stomach. “I have to wear special clothes and in order to mount the bag I have to seal a wafer to my stomach and then attach the bag. If the seal is broken, urine can leak all over my body and clothes.”

On Nov. 7, Sawyer said he went through the security scanner at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. “Evidently the scanner picked up on my urostomy bag, because I was chosen for a pat-down procedure.”

Due to his medical condition, Sawyer asked to be screened in private. “One officer looked at another, rolled his eyes and said that they really didn’t have any place to take me,” said Sawyer. “After I said again that I’d like privacy, they took me to an office.”

Sawyer wears pants two sizes too large in order to accommodate the medical equipment he wears. He’d taken off his belt to go through the scanner and once in the office with security personnel, his pants fell down around his ankles. “I had to ask twice if it was OK to pull up my shorts,” said Sawyer, “And every time I tried to tell them about my medical condition, they said they didn’t need to know about that.”

Before starting the enhanced pat-down procedure, a security officer did tell him what they were going to do and how they were going to it, but Sawyer said it wasn’t until they asked him to remove his sweatshirt and saw his urostomy bag that they asked any questions about his medical condition.

“One agent watched as the other used his flat hand to go slowly down my chest. I tried to warn him that he would hit the bag and break the seal on my bag, but he ignored me. Sure enough, the seal was broken and urine started dribbling down my shirt and my leg and into my pants.”

The security officer finished the pat-down, tested the gloves for any trace of explosives and then, Sawyer said, “He told me I could go. They never apologized. They never offered to help. They acted like they hadn’t seen what happened. But I know they saw it because I had a wet mark.”

Humiliated, upset and wet, Sawyer said he had to walk through the airport soaked in urine, board his plane and wait until after takeoff before he could clean up.

“I am totally appalled by the fact that agents that are performing these pat-downs have so little concern for people with medical conditions,” said Sawyer.

Don't you just love civil servants?

It seems the government took seriously the idea that terrorist attacks (like 9/11) happened because the terrorists hate the freedoms and liberties that America has. So the problem is being solved by confiscating from the people as much of their liberty as possible.

Of course, this idea is pure horseshit. Terrorists have a wide selection of other countries to attack that are just as "free" as the USA is. The reason you don't often hear of Switzerland or Sweden being attacked by terrorists is because those countries are much less involved in war, not trying to police the world by killing thousands—easily millions—of foreigners. A couple of years a go, Jack Hunter wrote a piece about "blowback" for the Charleston City Paper, concisely explaining the reasons terrorists hate America. And they have jack shit to do with liberty. They have more to do with the use of violence, coercion and force – the state's bread and butter.

We haven't been minding our own business for a very long time.

As described in a 1987 PBS documentary, when the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, decided to nationalize his country's oil supply in 1953, the CIA secretly orchestrated his overthrow and installed the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Under the shah, U.S. oil companies took over half of Iran's production. The shah was also a ruthless dictator, who through his secret police, tortured and murdered thousands of his own people. These atrocities took place with the full support of the United States.

Chanting "death to the American Satan" in 1979, the Iranian people overthrew the shah, empowering a new dictator, the Ayatollah Khomeini. Most Americans of a certain age can remember well the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, in which Iranians held dozens of U.S. citizens hostage for 444 days. What most probably didn't realize was that the hostage crisis was provoked by decades of U.S. intervention. It was caused by "blowback."

During the ensuing Iran-Iraq war, the United States backed the president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, as a bulwark against Iran. From 1983 to 1990, the U.S. government approved around $200 million in arms sales to Iraq. It was during this time that Hussein committed horrible atrocities against his own people, with weapons we sold him. So between 1953 and 1983, America had sponsored two murderous dictators, living side by side.

Our relationship with Hussein changed in 1991 when Iraq invaded Kuwait. In a matter of months, the U.S. declared our former ally a world menace on par with Adolf Hitler or worse. After kicking Saddam out of Kuwait, the U.S. continued to bomb and impose economic sanctions on Iraq throughout the decade.

When Congressman Ron Paul suggested that American intervention overseas, or "blowback," contributed to 9/11, Rudy Giuliani immediately insinuated that Paul was crazy. But is the CIA crazy? The 9/11 Commission? Both cite blowback as a primary cause of 9/11.

One need not be a foreign policy expert to understand this basic concept. Imagine if Gov. Mark Sanford had to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin every time South Carolina passed a new law. Imagine if Russia had thousands of troops stationed in Charleston. Imagine your own family starving, dying, and suffering because Putin had a beef with Sanford. This has been the perceived relationship between millions of Muslims and the United States for a very long time.

The solution, then, is blatantly obvious. Get the fuck out of Iraq. Get the fuck out of Afghanistan. Pull those soldier's arses out of every foreign country they currently are – terrorists' hatred of America is a hatred of violence, not of liberty. The sooner the majority of people understand this, the better our chances of avoiding terrorist attack.

In the meantime, you can shut the fuck up about liberty being a price worth paying for a false sense of security.

The golden age of video

2010-11-20T21:43:00.000Z

Still hypocritical sacks of shit

2010-11-20T12:10:00.000Z

Eric Joyce: Very happy to criticise the proles for "drinking too much", while drink driving himself.

Eric is a man of double standards – but according to him, it is not he who is a hypocrite, but the voters.

Earlier this week Mr Joyce came under fire for launching an astonishing attack on middle-class voters who attacked lying politicians, claiming they may be hypocrites "living lies" at home.

On the Labour Uncut website, Mr Joyce condemned "articulate and intelligent" parents for putting the interests of their own children over those of the poor.

He accused parents of hypocrisy for condemning drug use while drinking too much and said that MPs were right to appeal to the worst instincts of voters, including racism.

It may not surprise you to discover that the latest politician to be found drink driving was one Eric Joyce.

A security guard at the Ineos plant in Grangemouth reported that Joyce, driving a Rover estate, smelled of drink and was "not compos mentis".

Falkirk Sheriff Court yesterday heard that guards on duty at the Ineos plant called police after the MP approached their gatehouse around 11.15pm.

The politician told the guard: "I think I hit something, maybe that roundabout back there."

When police arrived, he was arrested and taken to Falkirk police station. Mr Joyce told police he was tired and had just flown up from London.

Asked whether he had been drinking, he said: "I had one of those bottles of wine on the plane, but not excessive."

Unshaven and tieless in the dock, Joyce, of Falkirk, pleaded guilty to failing to provide a sample without reasonable excuse. Banning him from driving for a year and fining him £400, Sheriff William Gallacher told Mr Joyce: "You brought this situation on yourself."

Pleas of not guilty were accepted to two other charges: failing to take a preliminary roadside police breath-test; and causing an oncoming car to swerve out of his way and colliding with and damaging a roundabout road sign.

If Eric thinks there should be high standards for parents not to be hypocritical, and set a good example, he should be willing to set that example himself. But he doesn't do that – instead, he spends a night in jail for breaking the same rules he wants the rest of Britain to abide by.

I am pretty sick and tired with these politicos who justify the handing over of power from the individual to the state by warning that individuals cannot be trusted with power, while at the same time, proving to all of us that they themselves cannot handle the responsibilities they want to heap upon our shoulders.

Stop drinking and set a good example, unless you're a politician who preaches this very doctrine.

Cut your spending and consumption—which only makes you more miserable—and live a more frugal life. Except if you're the state – in which case, excessive spending must be preserved, no matter how much the wasteful use of resources is a burden on the planet.

Fuck you, and your government too. It can never be the virtuous institution you want us to believe it is – if humans are naturally violent and self serving, it makes no sense to create a large group of people with a monopoly over the use of violence and theft, and it means that the government can be nothing other than violent and self serving.

These dangerous individuals should leave people the hell alone, or simply end the existence of the violent monopoly. However, since these individuals profit from further state expansion and lose a lot from state abolition, I wouldn't hold my breath on either happening any time soon. Not until we make the moral argument for their loss of power.

Cuntry Driver

2010-11-20T11:07:00.001Z

Caption competition

2010-11-18T17:57:00.000Z

Intellectual property: retarding progress

2010-11-17T21:00:00.001Z

From Spiegel Online, a piece of historical evidence showing the devastating effects of intellectual property on the economy.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers.

The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain," Höffner states.

Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time—10 times fewer than in Germany—and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900.

Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development – in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom.

Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

Do go on and read the entire thing. Few things are more annoying than the idea that intellectual property is necessary to encourage creativity and economic growth.

The inflationary apocalypse is nigh

2010-11-14T12:01:00.000Z

The Bank of England has done terrible things to our currency over the years. On their website, the Bank of England says that they want to "preserve the value of your money." This sounds a lot like the Fed's "strong dollar policy". As Peter Schiff has said many times in his video blogs (which are well worth subscribing to), they're just words, and not action – the Fed is acting like the class-skipping pothead who has a "Straight A policy". If the central bank continues printing money, the strong Dollar policy turns into weak Dollar results. In fact, since it was nationalised in 1946, the value of the pound has decreased by over 97%.

The BoE's tendancy to be wrong does not fill one with confidence about oncoming years. Wat Tyler, over at Burning our Money, sounds a severe warning about future inflation.

A couple of weeks ago we blogged the alarming explosion in world commodity prices. At the time we noted that the Economist's commodity price index was up by 35% over the preceeding 12 months in sterling terms. That was bad enough, but the picture now - just two weeks later - is even worse. After a further 6% hike in the last week alone, the 12 month increase in commodity prices now stands at a 1970s apocalypse-style 44%.

44%!

In just one year.

And understand this - the bulk of that increase has not yet fed through to us in our homes and high streets.

Meanwhile the inflation rate in China has jumped by nearly one percentage point in just one month.

Frankly, we're scared. What can we do?

We turn to the appointed guardians of the Pound in Your Pocket - the Bank of England. How do they propose to protect us against the inflationary dragons rising in the East? What do they have to say in their latest Inflation Report [PDF]?

Here's what:

... recent increases in commodity and other world export prices could lead to renewed upward pressure on inflation. That upward pressure could be heightened if some companies need to rebuild their profit margins, which were compressed during the recession...

...there is a risk that commodity prices will continue to rise. That would cause further increases in companies’ costs, and lead to higher inflation over the forecast period... That would also exacerbate the risk that the prolonged period of above-target inflation might cause companies’ and households’ expectations of future inflation to increase. That could feed into price and wage-setting decisions, offsetting the downward pressure on prices from spare capacity.

Hmmm...

Could... would...?

Is and will, more likely.

And, as Tyler says, this BoE madness will have very serious consequences (emphasis added).

But while that may give some comfort on the prospects for inflation, it does nothing for those who are currently being squeezed by inflation itself. Obviously that includes pensioners and others whose savings income has plummeted, but it also includes those still at work. Because since the crisis broke back in 2008, inflation has already exceeded average pay growth by 2%, implying a 2% cut in real living standards (even before taking account of higher taxes).

This squeeze is set to get worse as inflation ticks up. Those with inflation linked incomes (such as public sector pensioners) will be protected. Everyone else - including those still in work - will be squeezed.

So next time you get whacked in the wallet by some headline grabbing price rise, don't blame British Gas and don't blame Mr Sainsbury.

This is being done to you quite deliberately by those at the very top. Somebody has to pay, and they've decided it should be you.

I'm so glad we have our selfless, elected public servants to serve us and improve our lives. Aren't you?

The forces of evil

2010-11-13T18:27:00.000Z

This article on Spiked—found via Bella Gerens—explains just how insane, sinister and dangerous the Malthusian ideology is. In the past, I have linked to this, but I feel it's also worth giving you Brendan O'Neill's article.

Thomas Malthus himself, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep pace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat. Malthus’s problem was that he also saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.

It is their limits-obsessed outlook which means that Malthusians are always spectacularly wrong. You would be better off listening to Mystic Meg than the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Malthusians pose as a science-based, rationalist movement that has worked out through equations and pie charts what the carrying capacity of the Earth is. But actually they continually make a schoolboy scientific error. Their error is to imagine that population is the only variable, the only thing that grows and grows, while everything else – including resources, society, progress and discovery – stays roughly the same.

But the truth, as history shows us, is that population is not the only variable. Resources are a variable, too. So is mankind’s vision, determination, and ability to rethink and tackle problems. These things grow and change just as population does. Malthusians’ mathematics doesn’t add up, because their social pessimism means that they fail to factor in possibly the most important and decisive variable of all: mankind’s ingenuity.

Do go on and read the rest. It's well worth it.

Stateless in Somalia

2010-11-13T16:17:00.000Z

Public services and democracy

2010-11-13T14:34:00.000Z

Yesterday, I posted this, linking to Channel 4's excellent documentary, showing common sense on mainstream television. It was definitely a welcome change from the usual bollocks.

Indeed, it was so very good that only an evil, moronic, batshit crazy fuckwit with no brain could ever disagree with it.

Yes, you're right. It's Dick Murphy, and he's not at all amused.

We heard two arguments. The first was that only the private sector generates wealth.

Ah, so education is useless.

And so is law and order.

And all that healthcare.

Let alone those roads.

Let alone all those social services for the elderly, the disabled, those with learning difficulties and more

And on and on.

All useless.

Of course.

There is no reason why any of these services can't be provided by the private sector. Competition and the profit motive have served us well with other areas of our lives, so it is untrue to claim that these currently state-owned services could be any different.

At present, state-run education is not the best route we could take at all. Over half of adults in Britain have a low literacy level, double that of Sweden, which has a "free school" voucher system revered by small state libertarians. Bullying appears to be so prevalent in schools because the entire school structure is based on bullying. More problems with public education are pointed out here.

It seems as if one of the main purposes of public education is to brainwash children with a left wing, pro-state doctrine. This theme is prevalent in most subjects, from history to geography and even french. But there is a lesson specifically dedicated to the purpose of brainwashing – citizenship. During a citizenship lesson, you see more bullshit than you would watching bestiality scat porn.

What this subject teaches is how individuals can use the political system to expand the power of the state over other individuals. The fucking textbooks they use are the most easily fiskable things on the planet. They actually tried to portray the state's manipulation of interest rates as a good thing, and not the cause of the boom and bust cycle. Fucking ludicrous. This subject must end immediately. But of course, the state is in control of the curriculum, and that wouldn't be in their best interests, would it?

It is not necessary to have the state in control of law and order either – law under anarchy is perfectly feasible. Arguments in favour of it are shown here and here.

And healthcare? Wasn't Murphy watching the programme when it was said that Britain, under the NHS, had a healthcare system lagging behind that of many other countries? A system which would be far better if it were replaced with a private sector alternative.

I also have no doubts that social services could be funded voluntarily in a free society, with an insurance system. Or charitable donations for those who could not afford insurance.

You do not need violence or coercion to solve these problems, Dick. A lot of money will be squandered on sub-standard services, instead of being used efficiently in the free market. The public sector does not create wealth or prosperity, but destroys it.

Did he also miss out the point in the documentary which pointed out that front line services make up only a fraction of public servants? There is a great deal of room for cuts, while still providing these services.

But then, secondly, the paranoia of the Right came out. Choice is apparently the god they worship (although most people of course are denied it – and that would be much more the case with the divisions in wealth they advocate).

What the fuck?

The private sector is the most virtuous and pure form of democracy. Millions of people submit their "votes"—pounds, dollars, euros, yen, et cetera—in order to receive what they want. And unlike political democracy, the democratic free market gives everybody exactly what they want. Its aim is to improve people's standards of living and give us all a better standard of living. And, rather than saving us from inequality (incorrectly blamed on the free market), the state is the reason why so much of it exists.

But choice ceases to be virtuous when it comes to democracy. And that’s because it is very clear that democracy is in their opinion oh so very dangerous because state employees might make the choice of voting for state supplied services – because that’s what they want – because they know they provide real value, meet real need, service real obligations...

Has it never occured to you—it probably hasn't, as you are a stupid cunt—that public workers vote to keep public services because they are afraid of losing their pointless public jobs? The same public jobs which destroy 150 private jobs for every 100 created?

...But that choice must be denied to them as a consequence. No democracy – the ultimate expression of free choice (I hope) is definitely bad if it results – as it has, time and time and time again – in state spending and services.

Political democracy is different – each vote is a vote for the coercion of others—the public worker voting for public services being an excellent example—and the destruction of our economy. In every election, politicians attempt to bribe the electorate with stolen money to win votes. But, of course, there is only so much money which the state can steal from the current generation of workers. To be able to provide much more expensive promises to voters, it must borrow money from the future to bribe the electorate of today. This Ponzi scheme is, of course, unsustainable. The Cobden Centre wrote, back in August, about what might happen if this moronic, idiotic, dangerous fuckwittery continues.

The long-term, even medium-term, outlook is therefore deeply unpleasant. Taxes will rise, sharply, but these rises will not be enough, and will leave younger people with little incentive to work or to save. Benefits across the board will be cut, massively: the government will renege big-time on many of its commitments, breaking its health, pensions and other promises on a huge scale. The social and economic consequences don’t bear thinking about. And of course there is the very real danger that even these draconian measures will not be enough: that the government will lose all control of its finances and end up printing money to pay off its debts, so leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse.

Britain started out, as many countries do, with a relatively free market with few regulations. But one all this additional wealth piles up, the greed of the electorate increases and the size of the state will pile up too, building up unsustainable debt until the Ponzi scheme collapses. Democracy is not the answer. Nothing is better for us than a free, stateless society.

Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story

2010-11-12T20:20:00.000Z

Perfect, absolutely perfect.

I am, of course, referring to this documentary, Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story, which brought sanity, reason and common sense to primetime mainstream television.

Just fucking watch it, OK?

Once a fuckwit, always a fuckwit

2010-11-07T01:41:00.000Z

Richard Murphy: he'll never learn, will he?

It's good to know that Richard Murphy is still being outrageously idiotic in his blogging output. Because he is an easy fisking target, you see, and I am lazy.

It was not created by Labour: they did not borrow consistently throughout their period in office; when they did it was almost entirely to fund investment.

Really? Not if this graph of government debt interest is anything to go by. Note how debt interest rises from 2002-03 onwards, long before the financial crisis.

And what investment, might I ask? Does Dick mean the "investment" which has put this country in a £7.9 trillion black hole? The bankrupting investment which isn't even necessary?

And it was not created by lax regulation: Labour could have been better on the issue, but they were fighting against a world dominated by neoliberal thinking, wholly endorsed by the Conservatives, that said all regulation was harmful.

A search for a Conservative saying that "all regulation is harmful" would be futile.

And it was not caused by low interest rates: let’s be unambiguous about the fact that low interest rates are good and no excuse for irresponsible lending by banks who were (and are) recklessly indifferent to the outcome of their actions so long as bonuses are paid.

What an unbelieveably stupid thing to say. I am ashamed that this man even has the audacity to call himself an economist.

Artificially low interest rates allow certain types of malinvestment to happen, which would not ususally happen under the market-determined interest rate. A large supply of cheap credit during the Noughties led to the housing bubble, which spectacularly crashed a couple of years ago, leading to the current recession.

And low interest rates are not always good. Low interest rates discourage savings and encourage consumption (i.e. they lead to a higher time preference). But it is savings which fund the investment which raises marginal productivity and makes the economy grow.

The wealth of this country is built on the back of the labour of those who live and work here: with declining oil resources the truth is it is only by our own efforts that we do at the end of the day keep ourselves. And very many fewer of us are going to be working. Which means that we’re all going to be much worse off. [emphasis added] Another recession looks virtually inevitable as Labour’s fiscal stimulus begins to run out and ConDem cuts ratchet up the paid.

I have already dealt with this fallacy in a previous post. Have a good read of it if you wish.

My research shows that they have massively underestimated these figures – which are really £70 billion a year for tax evasion and maybe £25 billion a year for tax avoidance

Oh dear. Confusing tax evasion with tax avoidance, are we? Let me leave it to DK to explain what tax avoidance is.

Tax avoidance, however, is taking advantage of the specific tax exemptions that Parliament, through legislation, has created and approved.

One could therefore say, were one going to take a ridiculously binary position, that not to take advantage of said exemptions is actually "subverting the will of Parliament".

Now, I know that Richard has previously maintained that tax evasion and tax avoidance are effectively the same thing, because he is a statist wankshaft, but Richard Murphy does not make the law (thank fuck)—Parliament does.

I would love to declare, unilaterally, Richard, that Being A Whingeing Socialist Shitstick is illegal but, alas, the fact that I have declared Being A Whingeing Socialist Shitstick illegal does not actually make Being A Whingeing Socialist Shitstick illegal. Unfortunately.

Because, you see, there has actually been no law passed by Parliament that says that Being A Whingeing Socialist Shitstick is illegal. Do you see?

And, if all the income parliament allows you to keep is tax avoidance, then everyone is a tax avoider. Even Dick Murphy.

Richard, could I point out that you actually indulge in tax avoidance? Parliament has said, through various legal instruments, that you have to pay about 40% of your earnings in tax. These laws say that you are allowed to keep the rest.

These same legal instruments set the law regarding those tax avoidance schemes that you consider to be wrong. Why is it that you consider some of these laws to be right and some wrong?

Let us see you put your money where your mouth is, Richard; you are allowed to pay extra tax (in 2007, six people did: were you one of those, Richard?).

Simply send your contribution to:

The Accountant, HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ

If you believe that tax avoidance is wrong, Richard, I fully expect you to send all your money to that address. Do remember to say what you'd like your contribution to be used for, Richard; they will send you a thank-you letter, which is nice, isn't it?

I also call on you to publish the proof of doing this on your blog—you could publish the thank-you letter, for instance. Either publish the proof that you have sent all of your money to HM Treasury, Richard, or shut the fuck up about tax avoidance being wrong.

What else has Dick got to say?

There is £120 billion of missing tax in the UK economy. Of course we can’t get it all back. It’s realistic to assume that the crooks will always be with us. But if we spent £1 billion a year on extra staff at H M Revenue & Customs we could have 20,000 staff working to collect tax in the UK.

And when all that money is sucked up by the state, we will lose money that could be spent on ivestment, and have it spent on public waste, hence making economic growth slower, meaning our living standards will rise much slower. Nice one, Richard.

But lets also not leave out Murphy's reference to tax avoiders as "crooks". Firstly of all, he himself is a crook. But more importantly than that – the state has decided that it can take up to half your income (probably more) to spend on services inferior to those you will find in the private sector.

Who is really the crook? Really?

This country has not got an industrial strategy and we need one if we are to restore widespread prosperity and wellbeing without increasing employment in our economy. That means we have to invest now, and keep up that investment for some considerable time to come so that we build employment opportunities based on new products and services in the private sector and provide the essential infrastructure that the state must build, whether it be transport systems, or energy, or housing, or schools or hospitals that is essential if those employment opportunities are to be created – and all of them free of the curse of PFI.

I've got an industrial strategy for you Richard: leave the private sector the fuck alone. Cut its taxes and cut the burdensome regulations it has to deal with, and generally leave it to serve customers rather than deal with bureaucracy. We do not need to call in the state to invest in public works projects or "build employment opportunities". Whenever that happens, it goes horribly, horribly wrong.

"Real gross domestic product per adult, which was 39 percent below trend at the trough of the Depression in 1933, remained 27 percent below trend in 1939," the authors write. And, "Similarly, private hours worked were 27 percent below trend in 1933 and remained 21 percent below trend in 1939."

This should be no surprise to anyone who has studied the reality of the Great Depression, for US Census Bureau statistics show that the official unemployment rate was still 17.2 percent in 1939 despite seven years of "economic salvation" at the hands of the Roosevelt administration (the normal, pre-Depression unemployment rate was about 3 percent). Per capita GDP was lower in 1939 than in 1929 ($847 vs. $857), as were personal consumption expenditures ($67.6 billion vs. $78.9 billion), according to Census Bureau data. Net private investment was minus $3.1 billion from 1930–1940.

I do not have the patience to continue fisking this terrible blog post. Needless to say, Dick Murphy is still a cunt, and still doesn't know his economics, and still wants the state to hamper the economy, fucking everything up and devaste our lives.

Some things never change.

In praise of Tesco

2010-11-07T00:19:00.001Z

Via Burning Our Money, behold the beauty of the private sector.

It shows how Tesco rode to the rescue of those poor Cumbrians who got hit by the floods last winter.

A collapsed bridge meant that thousands of people were cut off from their regular Tesco store in Workington and faced a detour of 40 miles to get their shopping. So Tesco simply built a new one - a new 13,000 square feet store built from scratch on a brownfield site and operating in just 13 days. Not rain, nor wind, nor local planners could stand in their way - they just got on and did it. Watch the vid and clock the happy customers.

Thank fuck for private enterprise. Such a feat could not be accomplished by a hideously ineffective public sector, unaccountable to taxpayers or voters. It could only be done by a business, an institution which relies on the continued satisfaction of its customers, rather than theft, for its revenues.

Sure, they may be corporatist, [UPDATE: And their staff might be complete cocks] but they are a damn sight better at getting the job done than the state is.

I'm flattered

2010-11-06T22:40:00.000Z

Angry Teen is an evil, awful young man who ought to be put it jail, or in a psychiatric ward. Why? Because he reads ME!! This proves beyond doubt that this poor Angry Teen is a seriously disturbed young man, who ought to be locked up for his own protection, and the protection of everyone else! On top of THAT (if that weren't bad enough) he MAKES SENSE IN HIS BLOGS!!! What the hell? Actually, it might be better if we just put him up between a wall and a firing squad, and be done with him already. We would all be SAFER!! Angry Teen is *unsafe*

God bless you too!

The Unschooled Life

2010-11-06T02:35:00.000Z

The art of self levitation

2010-11-05T21:29:00.003Z

The story of spending

2010-11-05T21:23:00.002Z

Via An Individual Voice.

The importance of growth

2010-11-05T19:09:00.000Z

Non-surprise of the week? This new research, quoted by Dan Mitchell.

The countries that have been most successful at increasing their economic growth rates, and therefore at raising the living standards of their population, have all shared a commitment to increasing economic freedom, limiting the role of government, stamping out corruption, and strengthening the rule of law. They relied on free markets, rather than on central planning. They lowered their tax rates, and some even adopted a flat income tax. They made their labor laws more flexible, and allowed their firms to hire new workers more easily. They privatized their inefficient state-owned enterprises. They lowered tariffs, and opened up to trade and international competition. They courted foreign investors, and created a favorable business environment to lure them in. In other words, growth miracles have occurred in countries whose governments have adopted policies that reflect the classical liberal ideals of economic freedom, limited government and rule of law. Our brief survey of economic successes around the world shows that this lesson is universal: Countries as diverse as China, Estonia, Germany, India, Chile, South Korea and Slovakia have benefited from applying a similar set of market-oriented policies.

This, of course, should be undeniable conventional wisdom. Free markets produce faster growth, hence faster improvement of living standards for the country's poorest.

Of course, the difference in growth rates may be small, but a little bit of extra growth every year can have a big impact on living standards over the long term.

If China sustains the eight percent annual GDP growth rate that it has achieved since its market-oriented reforms began in 1978, its inhabitants will double their living standards every nine years. By contrast, in the United States, which has grown at an average annual rate of about two percent, a doubling of living standards would require thirty-six years.

This is an under-appreciated observation. The author cites a rather dramatic example, but the key observation is that even modest differences in economic growth can have a big impact on relative prosperity with a couple of decades. Here’s a chart I include in many of my Powerpoint presentations. It shows how long it takes to double GDP based on different growth rates.

[click to enlarge]

Let’s look at a real-world example. Hong Kong has been growing by more than 5 percent each year for decades, while France has been growing by less than 2 percent annually. Now let’s ask a couple of big-picture questions. Why have Bush and Obama been trying to make us more like France? Do they fail to understand that this means less future prosperity for the American people? Don’t they realize that this means a loss of relative competitiveness?

What is needed to promote growth in this country is a dramatic cut in government spending, taxes and regulation, and letting the free market do its work, unhampered.

Why won't this commucunt just shut the fuck up?

2010-11-05T18:23:00.000Z

In this picture, there are four mass murderers and five cunts. Can you spot them?

That picture was not shopped by me. It was shopped by this cunt himself, on his Photobucket profile. It's called "My Comradial Romance", if you can imagine a thing so ghastly.

So let's take a look at the cunts this cunt-worshipper worships, shall we?

Stalin was an evil, mass murdering tryant of a man, who killed about 62 million people.

Lenin was responsisble for the deaths of millions too:

Lenin's purpose was to move from a capitalist free market to a socialist one—to a command economy—as Lenin declared. This was Lenin's plan to nationalize the peasant, although not in the total way that Stalin would do a decade later through his collectivization of the peasant, as you will see below.

Nationalization [of farms] and its attendant forced requisitions was a solution to the problem of getting the peasant's grain without paying for it; and of preventing the peasant from keeping his grain and other crops from the Party. And it made many new laws to assure that the peasant would play his proper role under communism. These set low prices for his produce, banned private trade, and established a system of rationing. Unlike a free market, they provided little motivation to produce; notwithstanding the likelihood of new detachments of workers coming through to expropriate or loot whatever was in a field or house. Understandably, the harvest of 1921 was only 40 percent that of 1913, before the revolution.
This disastrous harvest, along with the peasant having lost or in hunger having eaten the reserve food supplies needed to survive the periodic draughts, had human costs far beyond the hundreds of rebellions this all caused. In 1921 a drought that in some Russian provinces formerly would have at most created a minor famine, then triggered one of the worst ones in modern times: starvation faced over 30,000,000 people.

Faced with a calamity that could threaten the survival of communism, the Party began to provide some aid to the starving while requesting urgent international help. International relief, particularly from the United States through the American Relief Administration (ARA), was soon forthcoming. But even in the face of this historic disaster, Lenin wielded aid and food as a socialist weapon. Said Lenin, lacking any feeling for the victims:

...it is necessary to supply with food out of the state funds only those employees who are actually needed under conditions of maximum productivity of labor, and to distribute the food provisions by making the whole matter an instrumentality of politics, used with the view of cutting down on the number of those who are not absolutely necessary and to spur on those who are really needed.

Also, Lenin at first ignored the counterpart famine in the Ukraine. The Party must have known as early as August, 1921, that the southern Ukraine was verging on famine, but Lenin refused to allow a transfer of food from the north to the south. This was to pacify Ukrainian nationalism and defeat the many rebellions there--to crush peasant resistance, a goal that Stalin would resume by famine in the early 1930s...

The next dictator to appear in his picture is Mao, killer of between 49 and 78 million people.

And finally, the most commonly praised mass-murdering cunt of them all, Che Guevara.

Before communism, Cuba had the third highest protein consumption in the Western hemisphere, a huge influx of immigrants (between 1903 and 1957 65,000 Americans moved to Cuba) and a higher per capita income than Austria, Japan and Spain. Farm workers in Cuba earned a higher wage than farm workers in France, Belgium, Denmark and West Germany. In 1958 Cuba had the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere. In 1950 more Cubans visited America than Americans visited Cuba (which is funny, because all I hear about is that Batista's Cuba was a "playground" for wealthy Americans).

After 1962, Cubans lived on rations which entitled them to less food than an 1842 Cuban slave. There was hyperinflation after Che Guevara took charge of Cuba's economy. In 1963 Cuba's sugar production was less than half what it was before the revolution.

It wasn't just his economic incompetence that was evil. Che also ordered children to be killed, and his workers carried out some quite inventive forms of torture as well.

Evelio Gil Diez was seventeen years old when Che signed his death warrant and Marks blasted his skull apart in La Cabana's killing ground, with Che watching from his window. Luis Perez Antunez was also seventeen when he stared his executioners boldly in the face, seconds before the volley riddled his body and ended his young life.

...

"When they were in a playful mood, some of the guards' favourite punishment was to rip all the clothes off a prisoner and tie him up to the fence at dusk, totally naked, totally immobile. The UMAP camps [Unidades Militares del Ayuda de Producción – a kind of Cuban concentration camp] were in the countryside, not far from the coast. And you know about Cuba's salt marsh mosquitoes...

...the guards loved to watch these bloodthirsty mosquitos completely cover the bodies of the helpless naked prisoner, dig in for hours at a time, and drive the prisoner to the point of agonised insanity. The prisoner might hang on that fence for two days without food or water, too. Oh, how the guards would laugh!"

Their "crimes"? Liking rock music, being a Jehovah's Witness, Protestant, or Catholic, homosexuality, refusal to do the work the state gave you – any one of these "offenses" could justify being sent to one of Che's concentration camps.

The incredible irony is that many of Che's fans like rock music and are religious or homosexual.

So there you have it, the men this cunt worships are mass murderers and complete cunts. Which makes this guy a complete cunt as well. A century of the brutal, failed communist experiment has not convinced this turd of the batshit stupidity of his ideology.

My attention was drawn to him—unfortunately from his point of view—by the Mises Institute's linking of one of his videos on their Facebook page.

Here's his utterly worthless critique of this post.

A couple of points I'd like to raise.

Parents in the third world make their children sit in front of a loom for ten hours a day because that is what brings food to the table. It is not the ideal economic situation, but it beats starving to death because of a lack of money. Or working as a child prostitute.

Where does he think the money for school and education will come from? Will it fall out of the sky? Or will it be taken away from the productive, wealth-creating private sector activities which build an economy? Does he know that the industrial revolution—which came with greatly increased living standards—happened in Britain before compulsory public education?

Furthermore, free market education provides better results for these children than the state can manage.

But aren’t they exhorbitantly expensive? The simple fact is that the average independent school costs half as much per pupil as the average public school: $3,116 versus $6,653 during the 1993-94 year (the most recent year for which national private school data are available. These averages, however, hide significant variations within the private sector. Schools affiliated with religious organizations spend considerably less than nonsectarian schools. Independent Catholic schools charged an average tuition of $2,178 in 1994-94, while other religious schoos averaged $2,915, and nonsectarian private schools averaged $6,631.

[Coulson, Market Education: The Unknown History, p277]

Coulson does point out that whilst these religious schools are subsidised, voluntarily, by parish subisidies and endowments, this cannot account fully for the difference at all. In catholic elementary schools in 1992-93 parish subsidies only accounted for an average of $700 per year per student, and endowments from alumni and community members only accounted for 2 percent of Catholic school income in that year.

The idea that science and schooling will become more expensive is ridiculous on the face of it. The state getting involved in anything has never made that thing cheaper. Why would it? On a free market, the owners of a school run for a profit could not increase their profits by jacing the prices up, because then they would lose customers to cheaper competitors. They would have to increase profits by reducing costs. And once they do that, it is only another step to increasing revenue by increasing the number of customers they serve, by passing those costs on to customers, so that they can increase market share, and increase the size of the market itself. This is how business works. Increases in costs for a business result in lost revenues, either because passing them onto customers means losing business, or because not passing them on means smaller profit margins.

Meanwhile, do you think that the depeartment for education will lose income if the costs of schooling goes up? Do you think that the bank accounts for the MPs or secretary of state take a hit if costs rise?

And what's this "worker struggle" bullshit all about? A "better life" is delivered only by entrepreneurs investing in more efficient forms of production, as Mises himself will now tell us.

In the capitalist society there prevails a tendency toward a steady increase in the per capita quota of capital invested. The accumulation of capital soars above the increase in population figures. Consequently the marginal productivity of labor, wage rates, and the wage earners' standard of living tend to rise continually.

Meanwhile, what do unions do?

Unemployment in the capitalist countries is due to the fact that the policy both of the governments and of the trade unions aims at maintaining a level of wages which is out of harmony with the existing productivity of labour.

That's right – cause unemployment. Which this utter cockshaft claims to be opposed to.

But this cunt is right in one way – we do not want to send our children down the mine for a little extra income. But in desperately poor countries, it has to be done. Otherwise, starvation and death result. Poor countries are in no position to fund an expensive public education system. They need the investment and the economic growth which lifts them out of poverty. You merely need to watch Johan Norberg's Globalisation is Good to realise that it is capitalism, not a lack of capitalism, that turns poor people into rich people. Ludwig von Mises once said that capitalism "deproletarianises the common man and elevates him to the rank of bourgeois." Nothing is greater proof than that documentary.

Now, as you might expect, the cunt was completely inundated by anarcho-capitalist trolls (god bless 'em). Here's his reaction to our reaction.

Look at the way this utter fucking wankstain rubbishes the aforementioned mass murder of hundreds of millions of people. And just watch how he blames murders caused by the state on the anarcho-capitalists.

"They're the greatest murderers in history", this fucking fucktard whines with a stupidly juvenile imitation, as if it it didn't fucking matter that those millions were brutally murdered by a cruel, totalitarian regime.

Earlier I mentioned the concentration camps in Cuba that people would be sent to if they didn't do the work that Che Guevara forced you do to do. Yet this utter CUNT worships his fucking image, despite evidently being opposed to slave labour. Have I emphasised enough yet that this guy is an utter, utter cunt?

I think that this guy needs a taste of his idol's medicine. For being a rebel—and rebellion is what Che hated more than anything else—this man deserves to be strung up a fence and have mosquitoes sting at his body all fucking day long until is body is as red as his political ideology is. Then, he should be anally fisted by this guy....

...before being tossed inside the mass grave of communism.

The ideology that has killed millions. The ideology that causes poverty on an enormous scale. The ideology that must be stamped out.

In the 21st century, this is what some people will believe?

P.S. It's also worth having a look at this comment on his "Mises cultists attack!!!" video.

I have been working since I was 8. My first business started out as a lemonade stand but when the local office building was more interested in buying ice, I went into the ice business. I used the profits from the business to buy more ice trays and was supplying some of the people at the studio across the street. Child "exploitation"? I was having fun and making money. I still get paid for having fun.

Meanwhile in Soviet Russia, the government pretends to pay you, while you pretend to work.

Bullying is not for kids. It's for adults. And governments!

2010-11-02T19:39:00.001Z

One of his more sweary videos...

It made my day

2010-11-01T20:46:00.002Z

Very NSFW.

What will kill creativity?

2010-10-31T19:25:00.000Z

If it's not intellectual property?

Training up for the Murphy-Krugman debate

2010-10-30T22:41:00.000+01:00

I could have done without watching that...

2012: Year of the economic apocalypse

2010-10-30T21:30:00.002+01:00

Gonzalo Lira has hit his blog with yet another one of his predictions. It appears that he always carries an Austrian School crystal ball with him whenever he writes a post.

Here it is.

So to sum up, we have:

Rising commodity prices, the effects of which (because of hedging) will be felt most severely in the period January–March of 2011.
A beggar-thy-neighbor race-to-the-bottom Currency War, that might well devolve into a Trade War, which would force up prices on imported goods.
A Federal Reserve that does not seem to know what it is doing, as regards another round of Quantitative Easing, which is making the financial markets very nervous—nervous about the Fed’s ultimate responsibility, which is safeguarding the U.S. dollar.
A U.S. economy that is weak to the point of collapse, where not even 0.25% interest rates are sparking investment and growth—and which therefore prohibits the Fed from raising interest rates, if need be.
A U.S. fiscal deficit which is close to 10% of GDP annually, and which is therefore unsustainable—especially considering that the total U.S. fiscal debt is well over 100% of GDP.

These factors all point to one and the same thing:

An imminent currency collapse.

Therefore, I am confident in predicting the following sequence of events:

By March of 2011, once higher commodity prices reach the marketplace, monthly CPI will be at an annualized rate of not less than 5%.
By July of 2011, annualized CPI will be no less than 8% annualized.
By October of 2011, annualized CPI will have crossed 10%.
By March of 2012, annualized CPI will cross the hyperinflationary tipping point of 15%.

After that, CPI will rapidly increase, much like it did in 1980.

What the mainstream commentariat will make of all this will be really something: When CPI reaches 5% by the winter of 2011, pundits and economists and the Fed and the Obama administration will all say the same thing: “Happy days are here again! People are spending! The economy is back on track!”

However, by the late spring, early summer of 2011, people will realize what’s going on—and the Federal Reserve will initially be unwilling to drastically raise interest rates so as to quell inflation.

Actually, the Fed won’t be able to raise rates, at least not like Volcker did back in 1980: The U.S. economy will be too weak, and the Federal government’s balance sheet will be too distressed, with it’s $1.5 trillion deficit. So at first, the Fed will have to let the rising inflation rate slide, and keep trying hard to explain it away as “a sign of a recovering economy”.

Once the Fed realizes that the rising CPI is not a sign of a reignited economy, but rather a sign of the collapsing dollar, they will pursue a puerile “inflation fighting” scheme of incremental interest rate hikes—much like G. William Miller, the Chairman of the Fed from January of ‘78 to August of ‘79, pursued so unsuccessfully.

2012 will be the bad year: I predict that hyperinflation’s tipping point will be no later than the first quarter of 2012. From there, it will accelerate. By the end of 2012, I would not be surprised if the CPI for the year averaged 30%.

By that point, the rest of the economy—unemployment, GDP, all the rest of it—will be in the toilet. By that point, the rest of the economy will no longer matter: The collapsing dollar will make 2012 the really really bad year of our Global Depression—which is actually kind of funny.

It’s funny because, as you know, I am a conservative Catholic: I of course put absolutely no stock in the ridiculous notion that “The Mayans predicted our civilization’s collapse in 2012!”—that’s all rubbish, as far as I’m concerned.

It’s just one of those cosmic jokes that 2012 will turn out to be the year the dollar collapses, and the larger world economies go down the tubes.

As cosmic jokes go, all I’ve got to say is this:

Good one, God.

All your earnings are belong to the state

2010-10-29T22:54:00.000+01:00

Johann Hari: "Violence solves problems. Just look at the proof!"

Some of you may have heard about UK Uncut – a bunch of seriously unpleasant statists protesting so that the state will intensify its violence against the private sector.

Johann Hari explains why the hardcore lefties are so pissed off.

[Vodafone] – which has doubled its profits during this recession – engaged in all kinds of accounting twists and turns, but it was eventually ruled this refusal breached anti-tax avoidance rules. They looked set to pay a sum Private Eye calculates to be more than £6bn.

Then, suddenly, the exchequer – run by George Osborne – cancelled almost all of the outstanding tax bill, in a move a senior figure in Revenues and Customs says is “an unbelievable cave-in.” A few days after the decision, Osborne was promoting Vodafone on a tax-payer funded trip to India. He then appointed Andy Halford, the finance director of Vodafone, to the government’s Advisory Board on Business Tax Rates, apparently because he thinks this is a model of how the Tories think it should be done.

By contrast, the Indian government chose to pursue Vodafone through the courts for the billions in tax they have failed to pay there. Yes, the British state is less functional than the Indian state when it comes to collecting revenues from the wealthy. This is not an isolated incident. Richard Murphy, of Tax Research UK, calculates that UK corporations fail to pay a further £12bn a year in taxes they legally owe, while the rich avoid or evade up to £120bn.

I'm sorry? Is this the economically clueless—not to mention tax avoiding—Dick Murphy of Statist Propaganda And Lies UK we're talking about here?

In his article, Johann Hari talks about protests for gay rights, and against the horrible, genocidal atrocity that was the Vietnam War. And all of these protests were done for a good cause – trying to get the state out of the way and allow people to live free lives and, in the case of Vietnam, stop mass murder and all of the other horrible, unpleasant things that were going on at the time.

However, there is a big fucking difference between those protests, and this kind of protest.

Many people emailed me saying they were outraged that while they pay their fair share for running the country, Vodafone doesn’t pay theirs. One of them named Thom Costello decided he wanted to organize a protest, so he appealed on Twitter – and this Wednesday seventy enraged citizens shut down the flagship Vodafone store on Oxford Street in protest. “Vodafone won’t pay as they go,” said one banner. “Make Vodafone pay, not the poor,” said another.

It is not. Your. Fucking. Money.

Do you understand? Or do I need to patrionise you some more?

It is not your fucking money. You did nothing to earn it, you just stole it.

I wrote about this in a previous post about... well, you can guess who.

The idea that taxes which aren't paid by corporations are "loopholes" is very sinister – it implies that everything which the state doesn't tax is a "loophole". "That 50% or more that you are allowed to keep? Yep, that's just a loophole. There's nothing stopping us from looting all of your fucking money. Every last fucking penny..."

All of your net-tax income is a loophole granted to you by politicians. There's nothing stopping them from taking it all if they wanted to. In a way, it's a form of slavery.

And violence is a terrible way to try to solve problems. Just as voluntary interactions provide superior goods and services, lower unemployment and a greater level of wealth, so too does coercion provide shitty goods and services, higher unemployment and a lower level of wealth. From the minimum wage to the negative multiplier effect, the central bank caused boom and bust cycle and the government's regulatory stranglehold of the American healthcare system, the state takes an economy and rips it apart, ruining lives along the way. There will be more lives ruined if Johann Hari and Dick Murphy get what they want – with all that extra tax money confiscated and spent on government waste, what will there be left for private sector investment? As the great Mises noted, it is this investment which keeps the economy going.

In the capitalist society there prevails a tendency toward a steady increase in the per capita quota of capital invested. The accumulation of capital soars above the increase in population figures. Consequently the marginal productivity of labor, wage rates, and the wage earners' standard of living tend to rise continually.

A.T. can only assume that these UK Uncunts are either stupid, economically illiterate, or evil.

Or maybe all three?

Don't like it? Then fuck off, simples.

2010-10-29T19:54:00.007+01:00

Few things have been pissing me off lately, in particular those people who say that they are being 'force fed' halal meat. I've heard cries of people telling me how they are secretly being fed Halal meat in places like KFC and Pizza hut. Am I bothered? No, not in the slightest bit.

I feel that if private restaurants such as KFC want to sell their meat as Halal, then it's their choice. If you don't like it, take your money elsewhere, what could be more simple than that? What people usually look beyond is the sole reason why restaurants decide to make their meat Halal, there obviously has to be some demand for it in the first place. From the KFC website itself:

1. Why have you decided to trial Halal in these stores?

Feedback from consumers has indicated that there is a significant demand for Halal food from KFC, and we've chosen these stores as they are in areas where we expect demand for Halal restaurants. Wherever possible, we have taken steps to ensure that these restaurants are within range of a non-Halal store in order to cater to all of our customers' needs.

Halal meat has no difference in taste at all. The only thing different is the way in which the animal is set out and slaughtered. The animal is slaughtered with a knife across the neck and the blood is let to dry out, there is a quick loss of blood pressure and the brain is instantaneously shut off. As the good'ol reliable Wiki says:

Thabiha or Dhabiha (Arabic: ذبيحة‎), is the prescribed method of ritual slaughter of all animals excluding fish and most sea-life per Islamic law. This method of slaughtering animals consists of a swift, deep incision with a sharp knife on the neck, cutting the jugular veins and carotid arteries of both sides but leaving the spinal cord intact. Furthermore it causes all the blood from the animal to gush out leaving negligible amounts of blood remaining in the body, the principle being that blood is a good medium for germs

Whether or not the animal suffers more or less pain from this method is a on-going debate, many studies have been done and you go and check them out yourself if you're really that bothered.

It is my own personal belief that 'humanely slaughtering' and animal is an oxymoron and a ridiculous thought. No matter how "humanely" you kill the animal it still suffers a great deal of pain. The end result is still the same.

And just so you know, I completely agree with KFC's decision to trail halal food in their stores. If you actually put yourself in the restaurants shoes you could understand where they're coming from. You are the CEO of KFC, you've found that there is great demand for Halal products in your chain of restaurants, you acknowledge that Muslims cannot eat non halal food but other people can. Now, to cater for all the customer's needs and save costs and raise revenue you need to change the type of meat you currently distribute. You also make sure that the customer knows that the food is halal- and in most cases people wouldn't give a flying fuck.

So as the title quite clearly says: don't like it, then fuck off- or even better create some competition and set up your own business selling non halal meat if the incentives are there.

Update: Thanks to AT, I'm now informed that only 12% of halal meat has not been stunned.

Epic Comic

2010-10-29T18:25:00.003+01:00

Click to enlarge.

H/T to the UK Libertarian

Sorry

2010-10-27T20:22:00.000+01:00

You will have nightmares tonight.

BSF is BS

2010-10-25T22:58:00.000+01:00

I remember watching Question Time last week, for the first time in many months, when a left wing student in the audience started talking about the government's spending cuts. Since I cannot be arsed to look up the episode on BBC iPlayer, I'm going to have to tell you what he said from memory.

The coalition claims that it is making these cuts for the future of the next generations. But it's cutting Building Schools for the Future! You're harming the next generation by doing this.

That student's barmy left wing beliefs have been quite excellently knocked down by this blog post by Katharine Birbalsingh—the teacher who "exposed the failings of the comprehensive school system at the Conservative Party conference this year."—about some Etonian Sixth Formers applying to university.

Read it all. It is well worth it. But this is my favourite part.

Later, I am with one of the boys’ teachers and I cannot stop talking about how wonderful a school it is. He is flattered, but not convinced.

He sighs. “It’s all very well coming here, wandering around the old buildings and presuming that it is excellent. But all you’ve seen is old buildings.”

Old buildings? In a school where...

...two thirds of their year group are applying to Oxbridge and ... nearly a third of their year group will gain a place...

Impossible!

As I have said before, the only thing BSF gives future generations is a mountain of debt.

One recent estimate suggested that a UK citizen born in 2011 will inherit, on birth, a debt of perhaps £200,000, and it could easily be much more.

The left is always crying about overconsumption, so why not support this wasteful, resource-wasting project being cut?

After all, weren't you once the ones rioting for austerity?

This man is epic

2010-10-24T22:47:00.000+01:00

Very funny, and an awesome accent.

Just watch it, OK?

Government lies and propaganda!

2010-10-24T21:13:00.002+01:00

Particularly interesting was the section about JK Galbraith.

Food, shelter and sex are probably the only inate wants. Everything else is brought to our attention by somebody else, including the books of John Kenneth Galbraith.

...and the books of Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett, Oliver James, Naiomi Klein and Johann Hari.

Go fuck yourselves, you austerity-loving hypocrites.

Beware: Green Police!

2010-10-24T15:31:00.009+01:00

Absolute non-surprise of the day

2010-10-24T15:06:00.000+01:00

According to studies, if you took better care of the environment you would be more likely to be a selfish, lying, cheating and stealing douche bag.

Well, you didn't exactly need research to find that out, did you?

The Tea Party is not libertarian

2010-10-23T22:49:00.000+01:00

Well, that is stating the obvious.

But many people still think it is libertarian. Which makes this post on Lew Rockwell's blog even more important.

I’m currently at a tea party rally, at the encouragement of a family member. I thought a bit off play-by-play might be fun.

The way it has unfolded so far: a prayer, mostly lauding the war dead, then a moment of silence, for another, recent victim of the Iraq atrocity. When I didn’t stand or remove my cap for the national declaration of adoration, I got a few dirty looks. Twenty minutes into it, every local two-bit politician has made their patriotic fervor known on the stage. Then a woman with a beautiful voice stands and sings “To God Be the Glory” followed by the most deranged version of “Change Our Heart Oh God”, mutated with the pledge of allegiance inserted in the middle, then the hymn transitioned into “God Bless America”. Again, everyone was told to stand. More dirty looks my way. When did this gathering, advertised as a rally for economic sanity, turn into a state church?

The secretary of state spoke briefly about his current initiative to require all voters to have a valid, presumably federal, ID to vote.

They now have a 12-year-old boy reading about the importance of caring for the war ruined with tax money. Also about the importance of using our tax dollars to pay for the retired generation! He wrapped up by advertising for Americans for Youth Patriotism. Yes! Indoctrinate a new generation of hosts for the parasitic state!

I’m sad to say that this rally has nothing to do with liberty or decreasing the tax burden on the American populace.

As well as that, why not check out this blatantly biased piece in The Atlantic? Pay special attention to the sections which call Ron Paul an "isolationist", and that part which says that "Mises's passion for free-market capitalism was barely distinguishable from Ronald Reagan's."

Be thankful I don't take it all

2010-10-23T21:41:00.000+01:00

Richard Murphy: "all your monies are belong to the state."

Richard Murphy, writing in Comment is Free, is appalled that Vodafone has "got away" with not paying their "fair share" of taxes.

But what seems much more likely is that Vodafone had expected to pay much more than the £1.2bn it will finally settle. Reports suggest that they had put aside at least £2.2bn to cover the payment and they must, as a result, be laughing all the way to the bank.

What would Rothbard and Mises say?

It is clear that if a certain burden is unjust, blame should be levied, not on the man who escapes the burden, but on the man or men who impose it in the first place. If a tax is in fact unjust, and some are exempt from it, the hue and cry should not be to extend the tax to everyone, but on the contrary to extend the exemption to everyone. The exemption itself cannot be considered unjust unless the tax or other burden is first established as just.

...

In the literature on taxation there is much angry discussion about "loopholes," the inference being that any income or area exempt from taxation must be brought quickly under its sway. Any failure to "plug loopholes" is treated as immoral. But, as Mises incisively asked:

What is a loophole? If the law does not punish a definite action or does not tax a definite thing, this is not a loophole. It is simply the law.... The income tax exemptions in our income tax are not loopholes.... Thanks to these loopholes this country is still a free country.

Quite. We do not need any more taxes, or any more closed "loopholes". Furthermore, the idea that taxes which aren't paid by corporations are "loopholes" is very sinister – it implies that everything which the state doesn't tax is a "loophole". "That 50% or more that you are allowed to keep? Yep, that's just a loophole. There's nothing stopping us from looting all of your fucking money. Every last fucking penny..."

Richard Murphy continues writing:

These big companies' tax rate will fall from 28% to 24% over the next four years – a move that seems generous, but quickly becomes ludicrous when it is appreciated that the effective tax rate of the largest companies in the UK is now 21%. This means that over the next four years, it is likely that their effective tax rate (that is, the rate they really pay) will fall to 17%. That's a lower tax rate than small companies will pay. It's lower than our VAT rate will be. It's also lower than our basic rate of income tax.

Is this tax justice? Is this "fairness"? Angry people, upset by the prospect of cuts for the poor and vulnerable in society, are rightly asking this question of what seems like a bastion of corporate privilege – the right not to pay the tax that the state should expect seems to be just that.

As Rothbard says, it is the big corporations' lower rate of tax that should be extended to smaller businesses, not larger taxes on big corporations. Yes, this corporatism is awful, and incredibly unfair – it gives power and privilege to those who most closely associate with politicians.

But it is the large size of the state and the larger rates of tax that fund it which allow corporatism to expand and thrive. The more taxation and regulation the state can heap upon the shoulders of small businessmen, the greater the advantage of the big businessman – and the greater inequality will become. As David D'Amato writes:

The growth and aggrandizement of the state compounds the problem of concentrated wealth rather than mitigating it, facilitating the payola politics of the state-corporatist American system. Reich’s “vision of bigger government,” notes Timothy P. Carney in Obamanomics, “is also the dream of corporate lobbyists,” his “anti-corporate rhetoric ... precisely the opposite of reality.” Tea Partiers worries about the redistribution of wealth, then, are completely valid, but as Ashbrook piercingly inquired of another guest, “Don’t we already have income redistribution in an upward direction?”

...

Free markets—an economic configuration to be distinguished from American capitalism—are the pathway to equality because they preclude the economic system of authority; inside such a system, argues Kevin Carson, “the wielder of power is able to externalize the costs of his decisions on others, while appropriating the benefits for himself.” Applied to centralized wealth and power, competition is a caustic substance, an abrader that wears down the violent adhesives holding America’s undeserved elitism together.

...

The poor and the powerless, those most conspicuously maltreated by the current economic approach, could expect to benefit most dramatically from the deposition or displacement of the state-corporate elite. Robert Reich, however, only fortifies the outcomes he decries—and the power of the people who produce them—when, in his new book Aftershock, he cautions against “the cost of [government] inaction.” Assuming he really believes as he writes, that “[b]oth [big business and Wall Street] have been able to enhance their profits by exacting money and other favors from government,” it defies reason to campaign on behalf of more coercive, political solutions. [emphasis mine]

Richard Murphy's campaigning for more coercive "solutions" will deliver the exact opposite of equality. Even though inequality may not necessarily be a bad thing, it is worth pointing out that the corporatist structure of our economy is what's building it. A truly free market would greatly reduce inequality, and be a blessing for our standard of living.

Not, of course, that Dick Murphy is capable of understanding any of this – we're talking about a guy who thinks that "the New Deal laid the foundation not just for growth at the time but for post war growth too".

Idiot.

Dropping the mask of Ecofascism

2010-10-23T13:32:00.002+01:00

ABC says to Australian children: "You are wasting the world's resources – now hurry up and die, you selfish cunts."

The Mises Institute has covered some of the most chilling examples of eco fascism seen in recent times. They write about Greenpeace's skinhead thug child video...

Watching this video, I can't help but think of myself replying in my best talking-to-a-baby voice, saying "What a gorgeous little ecofascist you are! Yes you are! Yes you are!"

But I guess that would be patronizing, and according to the video, this young man will not be patronized. Oh yes, and in case you didn't quite understand the thinly veiled message, he may just be a kid today, but tomorrow, he will be a full-grown ecofascist hoodie-wearing skinhead thug, and you, dear viewer, will be his enemy.

...and they also write about the 10:10 climate terrorist video.

But interestingly, there is a third exhibit. Step forward, Australian Broadcasting Corporation!

The Planet Slayer game features, among other things, a cartoon pig game used to calculate carbon-dioxide emissions. It helpfully informs children when they should die in order to ensure they do not use more than their "fair share" of the planet. Other helpful information for children includes some harsh words against "cultural imperialism" (i.e., the free choice of people in other countries to adopt certain products and practices from Western countries) and this helpful instruction: "Organise and socialise comrades. Together we can save the world!"

Like other pieces of ecofascist propaganda, this one was also funded with taxpayer loot, and is also recommended for primary-school teaching by several government education departments. It has now been taken down from its previous home at the government media provider after some parents found its content, hmmm, how shall we put it, less educational than was intended. Again, jokes about exploding children (even in pig form) are only funny when you are not actually touting an authoritarian ideology.

There is something more than a bit scary about a game for children which says
things like "you should die at age 9.3", but maybe that's just me...

The "multiplier effect" misnomer

2010-10-22T13:04:00.000+01:00

Via Timmy, this absolute jem from Johann Hari, explaining why we the state should be building more social housing.

By a happy coincidence, house-building is one of the best stimulators of the economy: it employs a lot of people on average wages, who then spend their money quickly in a “multiplier” effect.

Really?

Where does Johann Hari think this money is coming from?

The money used to pay for this new social housing will be coming from the pockets of taxpayers, meaning that they have less to spend on goods and services themselves. Which means that the business they would have paid to receive those goods and services will lose revenue, meaning that they will have less to invest, meaning that workers' productivity cannot be raised as quickly as it could be, meaning that their wages grow at a much slower pace, and... well, you get the idea by now.

Because the state will always spend money less efficiently than an individual would ("if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get." – Milton Friedman), wealth will be destroyed on meaningless, useless public sector waste, rather than spent on things which truly benefit consumers.

In short, government spending and stimulus does not create a multiplier effect, but a negative multiplier effect.

The negative multiplier effect has evidence to back it up.

In a 2010 paper published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center (where I work), economists Robert Barro and Charles Redlick showed that in the best-case scenario, a dollar of government spending produces much less than a dollar in economic growth—between 40 and 70 cents. If that was the rate of return on our private-sector investments, America would soon cease to be a leading economic force.

Barro and Redlick also looked at the economic impact of raising taxes to pay for spending increases. They found that for every $1 in tax-financed spending, the economy actually shrinks by $1.10. In other words, greater spending financed by tax increases damages the economy.

But what about all those poor public servants who are about to be laid off?

A 2002 paper in the Economic Policy Journal, written by the French economists Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and Andre Zylberberg, looked at the impact of public employment on overall labor market performance. Using data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, they found that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs, decreased by a slight margin overall labor market participation, and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers.

...

Basically, public jobs, especially ones that also exist in the private sector in fields such as transportation and education, offer higher wages and benefits, require low effort, and therefore crowd out many private jobs. When these new employees are paid with taxes it negatively impacts the economy.

Do not let the statists justify their tax n' spend ideology be claiming that public spending creates a multiplier effect. Instead, kindly remind them that the effect is negative, and it's making us all poorer.

Excellent

2010-10-21T20:31:00.000+01:00

I am quite happy with my track record of saying that we should not have bailed out the banks. We should have let Northern Rock go to the wall, even if we'd had to pick up every penny of deposits as a protection of customers (and we wouldn't have, because the Rock had a shitload of assets) letting some other bank pick up the Rock's assets would have cost the tiniest fraction of the mass bailout and making a better business out of it is exactly what capitalism does best.

The decision to secure the banks' liabilities was nothing other than a massive nationalisation in all but name for the Labour Party agreeing with a massive grab of public funds by corporate interests who decided that rent-seeking was a better way forward that actually facing the market the hard way.

The thing that fucks me off more than anything is that the same people calling for more "regulation" of the banks (which will only protect the same thieving incumbents from the competition that would really keep them honest) are the very same people who fail to see that the regulatory state is at least 50% responsible for the fact that vast quantities of our money were handed over to reckless business, completely absolving said reckless businesses from the responsibility for their recklessness, not just now, but in the future as well.

Well said, Obnoxio!

The left: rioting for, and then against, austerity

2010-10-21T18:50:00.001+01:00

These people need to stand on the edge of the grand canyon, hold hands with the person next to them, and then jump in.

Strong stuff? I don't think its strong enough. Not for the same bunch of fools who have the very nerve to attack the coalition for its "austerity" (which is anything but), while praying for austerity, economic decline, and the suffering of the poor for years.

Via Old Holborn, this article on The First Post caught my attention (edited slightly).

This week, the Guardian's George Monbiot wrote an angry piece about the Tory-led cuts agenda, claiming that it will help the rich and hurt the rest.

When we stagger out of our shelters to assess the damage, we'll discover that we have emerged into a different world, run for their benefit, not ours

This is the same Monbiot who wrote a piece in 2007 titled 'Bring on the recession'.

I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises

...

A recession in the rich nations might be the only hope we have of buying the time we need to prevent runaway climate change.

A recession would hurt poor people, he acknowledged - but that was a price worth paying to halt out-of-control economic growth.

Inspired by Monbiot, in 2008 some deep greens kick-started a campaign called Riot 4 Austerity - which says it all.

Their reactionary demand, dolled up in radical garb, was for a 90 per cent cut in carbon emissions - a move which would have a far more devastating impact on people's daily lives than any of the slashes Osborne has come up with.

In 2008, the Independent's green-tinted columnist Johann Hari called on the government to enforce wartime-style rationing in order to save the planet from almost certain fiery doom.

Just as the government in the Second World War did not ask people to eat less voluntarily, governments today cannot ask us to burn fewer greenhouse gases voluntarily...

..said Hari. No, it must "force us all" to live more frugally and sensibly.

Yesterday, the Independent headed its coverage of Osborne's big day 'Axe Wednesday' and carried a cartoon of the Chancellor as Edward Scissorhands, cutting all around him.

Elsewhere in recent years, Oliver James, the lefty psychologist beloved of the liberal press, has diagnosed Britons as suffering from 'Affluenza'.

That is, our desire for "stuff" - nice cars, big houses, fast food - is apparently making us mentally ill and the only solution is to learn to live with less.

In 2008 and 2009 there was unadulterated recession porn in the broadsheet papers, as well-to-do writers said there would be an upside to the downturn: people would become poorer but happier.

Writing in the Times in 2008, the English-Nigerian poet Ben Okri said recession would help us to develop a "new social consciousness", adding:

Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.

In the Sunday Times, India Knight wrote: "Aah, what a relief the boom has turned to bust". The recession, she argued, had...

an especially sparkling silver lining

...that is, it would force us to be thrifty.

So whenever one of these loonies cries out for people to be "saved" from the cuts—a stupid thing to say, because more government spending makes a country poorer—remind them that for years, they were the ones advocating such measures – with some even taking part in Riot 4 Austerity, for fucks sake.

And now we're rioting against austerity? Wat?

Evil rich people!

2010-10-20T22:27:00.000+01:00

Moronbiot

2010-10-20T20:14:00.000+01:00

Nobody can be this deluded. George Monbiot must be evil...

First of all, I would like to congratulate Monbiot on his analysis of the "bonfire of quangos". Some of the most evil and corrupt government agencies have not been burned.

If the government's aim had been to destroy useless or damaging public bodies, it would have started with the Commonwealth Development Corporation. It was set up to relieve poverty in developing countries, but when New Labour tried, and failed, to privatise it, the CDC completely changed its mission. Now it pours money into lucrative corporate ventures, while massively enriching its own directors. Private Eye discovered that in 2007 this quango paid its chief executive just over a million pounds. The magazine has also shown how the CDC has become entangled in a series of corruption cases. Uncut. Unreformed.

The same goes for the Export Credit Guarantee Department. The ECGD effectively subsidises private corporations, by underwriting the investments they make abroad. At one point, 42% of its budget was spent on propping up BAE's weapons sales. It also pours money into drilling for oil in fragile environments. A recent court case showed how it has underwritten contracts obtained with the help of bribery. Uncut. Unreformed.

The Sea Fish Industry Authority exists "to help improve profitability for the seafood industry". Although it is a public body, all but one of its 11 directors work for either the fishing industry or food companies. They seek to "promote the consumption of seafood", to "champion the industry in public debates" and to "influence the regulatory process" in the industry's favour. Uncut. Unreformed.

Amen to that – this is the advice the coalition needs from this loony leftist.

However, Monbiot's streak of brilliance does not last long, as he goes into writing one of the biggest piles of shit I have ever read.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how disaster capitalism was conceived by the extreme neoliberals at the University of Chicago. These people believed that the public sphere should be eliminated, that business should be free to do as it wants, and almost all tax and social spending should be stopped. They believed that total personal freedom in a completely free market produces a perfect economy and perfect relationships. It was a utopian system as fanatical as any developed by a religious cult. And it was profoundly unpopular. For a long time its only supporters were the heads of multinational corporations and a few wackos in the US government.

Ah, yes, The Shock Doctrine. Because that book really isn't full of bullshit, is it?

Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain [Milton] Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement "Friedmanite to the core," and identifies the Iraq war as a "careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology" over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention--not once, not anywhere, in her book--is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of "aggression."

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement. And Klein's mistake exposes the deeper flaw of her thesis. Friedman opposed the war because he was a libertarian, and libertarian conservatism is not the same thing as neoconservatism. Nor are the interests of corporations always, or even usually, served by war.

Indeed. Anybody who tries to place libertarians and neoconservatives in the same group is—to be quite frank—a retard.

Back to Monbiot's load of absolute wank.

The first such opportunity was provided by General Pinochet's coup in Chile. The coup was plotted by two factions: the generals and a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago and funded by the CIA. Their ideas had already been comprehensively rejected by the electorate, but now the electorate was irrelevant: Pinochet used the crisis he had created to imprison, torture or kill anyone who dissented. The Chicago School policies – privatisation, deregulation, massive tax and spending cuts – were catastrophic. Inflation rose to 375% in 1974; the highest rate on earth. Even so, Friedman insisted that the programme was not going far or fast enough. On a visit to Chile in 1975 he persuaded Pinochet to hit much harder. The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful.

By 1982, Friedman's prescriptions had caused a spectacular economic crash. Unemployment hit 30%; debt exploded. Pinochet sacked the Chicago economists and started re-nationalising stricken companies, whereupon the economy began to recover. Chile's so-called economic miracle began only after Friedman's doctrines were abandoned. The Chicago School's catastrophic programme pushed almost half the population below the poverty line and left Chile with one of the world's highest rates of inequality.

Chilean hyperinflation during the early 1970s—before the reforms—was covered in detail by Gonzalo Lira. I urge you to read his piece – it will teach you about how socialism destroyed Chile's economy.

If there was a cash shortfall, the Allende government would simply print more escudos and give them to the now State-controlled companies, which would then pay the workers.

This is how hyperinflation started in Chile. Workers had plenty of cash in hand—but it was useless, because there were no goods to buy.

So Allende’s government quickly instituted the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios (“Unions of Supply and Price Controls”, known as JAP). These were locally formed boards, composed of loyal Party members, who decided who in a given neighborhood received consumer products, and who did not. Naturally, other UP-loyalists had preference—these Allende backers received ration cards, with which to buy consumer goods and basic staples.

Of course, those people perceived as “unfriendly” to Allende and the UP Government either received insufficient rations for their families, or no rations at all, if they were vocally opposed to the Allende regime and its policies.

Very quickly, a black market in goods and staples arose. At first, these black markets accepted escudos. But with each passing month, more and more escudos were printed into circulation by the Allende government, until by late ’72, black marketeers were no longer accepting escudos. Their mantra became, “Sólo dólares”: Only dollars.

The only things stopping a total collapse from happening due to this money-printing madness were reforms that pushed Chile's economy further in the direction of freedom.

And while the region's economies had long groaned under the weight of heavy handed governments, things became worse during the 20th century as such regimes were further encouraged by the theories of European and American socialists of the New Deal variety (i.e., John Maynard Keynes & company) who preached that new trade barriers, price and wage controls, and vast redistribution of wealth would solve the economic problems of the world. Such barriers, it was believed, would free Latin America from international competition and corporate "meddling" and bring prosperity to the whole region.

As has now become obvious, such policies bring anything but prosperity, and the more the Latin Americans attempted to pursue autarky by government fiat, the more their populations sank into poverty and economic ruin. For decades, Chile had remained relatively resistant to Dependency Theory as trade-minded governments under Eduardo Frei and Jorge Alessandri attempted to keep their economies relatively open. Yet the zeitgeist of the time overwhelmed them, and with the ascent of Salvador Allende in 1970, international trade collapsed, private firms were confiscated and nationalized, and hyperinflation took its hold on the country.

The economic disaster all ended badly, as such things tend to do, with a military coup and the Pinochet dictatorship. The downward spiral did not end merely with the end of the Allende regime, however. As even its sympathizers will tell you, the military junta was not a big fan of free-market economics. They preferred an economy that would "obey orders." Yet, protectionism and the controlled economy had proven to be such an abject failure that something had to be done, so with few other options Pinochet turned to disciples of what was then considered the radically free-market Chicago School of Economics. A total economic meltdown was avoided. The budget was balanced, regulations were lifted, the health care system was freed, and international trade resumed. Markets, as they will always do when given the chance, moved toward providing more goods at cheaper prices, and economic growth quickly began to outpace other Latin American economies.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the relative freedom of the Chilean economy has been its resilience during these thirty years since the coup. Naturally, once the Pinochet junta found that the middle classes were prospering under its economic plans, it continued the policies in order to maintain its precious political capital. As a junta, it was able to ignore the incessant calls from the left throughout the region to raise taxes, control the economy, and cut off trade. Yet, even after the junta finally fell into undeniable disfavor, the free economy continued, and significantly, even after the election of President Ricardo Lagos, an outspoken opponent of the junta who calls himself a socialist. The economy of Chile has only become more focused on good business, sound money, and extensive trade.

Also note that Chile was nowhere near a free society. As Monbiot notes, dissent was not tolerated in Chile, the Pinochet government would commit all sorts of unspeakable crimes against the Chilean people.

Yes, the situation was bad, but would this turd sandwich rather have an economy completely destroyed by socialism and government control?

Actually – yes, yes he would. Because economic growth is simply superfluous consumption—driven only by advertising—which destroys the planet, this arse would do all that was in his power to destroy growth and ensure many more millennia of poverty for those living in the third world.

Thank fuck nobody takes him seriously.

The campaign against Capital Gains Tax

2010-10-17T15:17:00.001+01:00

Via Dan Mitchell...

A special treat for all my readers

2010-10-17T14:53:00.000+01:00

Like The Nameless Libertarian,

I make no apology for posting this. It is your choice whether or not you listen to it, and your responsibility to deal with consequences if you do

Now, TNL's video is pretty disgusting, but the one I'm giving you is far, far worse.

You will need some pretty fucking strong mind bleach after listening to it.

10:10, yet again

2010-10-17T11:45:00.001+01:00

Remember that 10:10 video, which suggested that climate sceptics, including apathetic children, should be blown up?

Well, 10:10's UK director has issued a statement, saying: [emphasis mine]

This media coverage for this film was not the kind of publicity we wanted for the cause of saving the climate, nor for 10:10, and we certainly didn’t mean to do anything to distract from all the efforts of those in other organisations who are working so hard to secure effective action on climate change.

If you have been in touch with us personally about the film, we will be replying to individual emails over the next few days. I’m sorry not to have emailed you about this more quickly - although I have followed developments closely, I’ve been working from home with a four-week-old baby. I thank you for your patience and your support for the 10:10 campaign.

Eugenie Harvey

Director 10:10 UK

hello@1010uk.org

It would be hilarious if this cum-feltcher's baby came out one day as a climate change sceptic.

Then they would have to face the reality of what their video said. These are peoples' own children that they fantasised about blowing up. Do they want the same for their own kids if they were sceptics?

I think the clown says it well.

You fucking little shit-stained cooze. How fucking DARE you fucking imply that it's perfectly fine to kill kids who don't believe in climate change and then have the cock-sucking whore's temerity to fucking schlep your own little bundle of cunt joy into this as a desperate attempt to fucking get the fucking sympathy vote?

You fucking little cock-jockey.

I hope Social Services take your child away for your being unfit to be a human being.

You utter, utter CUNT.

Eugenie, rather than blowing up your baby, I have a different suggestion for what you should do.

Firstly, grab a large, sharp knife from your kitchen.

Then...

...and let it all drain out.

Obnoxio is blogging again!

2010-10-16T21:59:00.001+01:00

In which Sainsbury's piss him right off.

The shopping was OK, I guess, but when I got to check out, there was exactly one fucking till open. One.

The queue of people trying to get their shopping out of the way early reached right across the fucking shitty store. Frantic announcements for "till-trained staff" or "shift leaders" were met with ... well, nothing.

Of course, the little knob jockeys were dead keen for us all to use their cock-sucking, anally fistulated, rancid cunt pus-filled, camel felching self-checkouts. Which were, of course, entirely fucking unused, precisely because they are so cock-suckingly, anally fistulatedly, rancid cunt pus-filledly, camel felchingly cunting useless.

So the little cunt bag assured me that she'd be right there to help me if there were any problems. I stopped counting after the twentieth fucking pointless cunting whorebagging fuckspaz arsebiscuit required her to log in and fix the useless gobshite piece of shit.

But that really wasn't what fucked me off. What really, really fucked me off was the little jobsworth whore CUNT telling me that it was MY FUCKING FAULT FOR NOT USING THE CUNTING TILL CORRECTLY!!!!

FUCK YOU, YOU LITTLE BAG OF RANCID PENSIONER'S PISS!!

Sainsbury do not fucking pay me to do your fucking work for you. And Sainsbury (and Tesco), get to fuck with these shitty fucking self-checkouts. They fuck your customers off and pretty soon no fucker is going to want to subject himself to this shit. YOU ARE GOING TO LOSE CUSTOMERS!

And of course, the final fucking kick in the teeth is reclaiming the 2 hours' free parking from them. Which meant I had to go and stand in another queue while the dumbfuck cunt behind that till had a nice chat with one of her colleagues.

Sainsbury, it's increasingly clear to me that your shops are staffed ignorant, arrogant, cockbag jobsworths who are even worse than the simpletons in Tesco.

Tonight, I'm going to get smashed as fuck and eat loads of vegetable curry and tarka dal. Tomorrow, I'm going to drive to Sainsburys, shit into one of their fucking useless orange bags, set fire to it and lob it at the store window.

Hateful, arrogant, awful, loathsome camel-cock-sucking, rat-corpse-raping fucktarded CUNTS!

This cunt needs to get blogging regularly again. I miss his one-line blog posts, YouTube videos and incredibly sweary outbursts.

Nobody does it better than Obo!

Start those printing presses!

2010-10-16T21:45:00.002+01:00

The Federal Reserve's helicopters: coming soon to a street near you...

While not being as unbelievably, breathtakingly stupid as Dean Baker (thank fuck), Ben Bernanke is much more dangerous. Unlike Baker, Bernanke is actually in a position of power – and a frighteningly large amount of power at that.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, told an audience in Boston yesterday that "the risk of deflation is higher than desirable" and that "high unemployment is currently forecast to persist for some time".

The trouble I have with his statement is this: why does he fear price deflation? There is no reason to do so.

The Wall Street Journal's James B. Stewart claims deflation is bad because "deflation erodes profits and asset values," in his "Smartmoney" column.

People wait to buy expecting lower prices, reducing demand. Lower profits cause companies to cut expenses, including employees. It is a downward spiral that, if Japan's experience is any indication, is difficult to arrest.

Mr. Stewart is wrong on all counts. Profits are the difference between the price we sell a good for and the price it costs to produce that good. As Jörg Guido Hülsmann makes clear in his book Deflation & Liberty, "In a deflation, both sets of prices drop, and as a consequence for-profit production can go on."

And while asset values may drop, the assets don't go away. The real wealth of the nation — assets used for production — are still available to produce. However, it may be that because the debt is liquidated on those assets as prices fall, new owners will own and operate the assets, but commerce and production will certainly carry on.

Lower prices increase demand; they do not reduce or delay it. That's why more and more people own flat-screen TVs, cellular telephones, and laptop computers: the prices of these goods have fallen, and people with lower incomes can afford them. And there are more low-income people than high-income people.

Lower prices don't mean lower profits; nor do they mean that employees will be laid off. More demand for a good or service means more employees needed to produce those goods and services. "There is no reason why inflation should ever reduce rather than increase unemployment," Hülsmann writes.

People become unemployed or remain unemployed when they do not wish to work, or if they are forcibly prevented from working for the wage rate an employer is willing to pay. Inflation does not change this fact.

Instead of being willing to bask in the benefits of price deflation, of which there are many—from 1839 to 1843 the US money supply fell by 34% and prices by 42%, yet during the period, real consumption increased 21% and real GNP by 16%—Ben Bernanke wants to take us down the path of inflation, which has much less satisfactory consequences.

America's central bank faces its toughest policy challenge in decades as it weighs the risks of embarking on another round of quantitative easing (QE) – or printing money. Financial markets are now convinced that the Fed will add to the $1.7 trillion (£1.1 trillion) it unleashed during the depths of the recession. Some Fed officials fear that persistently low inflation is causing consumers to hold back from spending in the belief that prices will eventually drop further.

But if consumers save more, surely that means there is more money that will be invested into more productive machinery and better business practices?

And if someone puts money into a savings account—assuming inflation is low—the returns on the investment will allow them to be able to spend more money in the future.

All that happens with lower inflation is that people develop lower time preferences – consumption may be postponed, but it is not put off forever.

There's something else I want to add. The belief that consumption is "the sole object of all economic activity", and that we should be doing more consuming and less saving, is one which John Maynard Keynes held.

But guess who didn't practice what he preached? Quoted from Where Keynes Went Wrong...

After Keynes has accumulated investment capital, he did not spend it, but instead carefully nursed and tended it until, after several major investment setbacks, he finally became rich. When rich, he seems to have lived off his income, and did everything he could to become richer.

Hypocrite!

"The stage has been set for a QE programme to be launched in early November," said Kevin Logan, chief US economist at HSBC. "Now we can await hints to see what form it will actually take."

There are reasons to be alarmed at the Fed's announcement. The extraordinarily excellent Gonzalo Lira says it all here.

For its part, the Federal Reserve has been busy propping up all assets—including Treasuries—by way of “quantitative easing”.

The Fed is terrified of the U.S. economy falling into a deflationary death-spiral: Lack of liquidity, leading to lower prices, leading to unemployment, leading to lower consumption, leading to still lower prices, the entire economy grinding down to a halt. So the Fed has bought up assets of all kinds, in order to inject liquidity into the system, and bouy asset price levels so as to prevent this deflationary deep-freeze—and will continue to do so. After all, when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

But this Fed policy—call it “money-printing”, call it “liquidity injections”, call it “asset price stabilization”—has been overwhelmed by the credit contraction. Just as the Federal government has been unable to fill in the fall in aggregate demand by way of stimulus, the Fed has expanded its balance sheet from some $900 billion in the Fall of ’08, to about $2.3 trillion today—but that additional $1.4 trillion has been no match for the loss of credit. At best, the Fed has been able to alleviate the worst effects of the deflation—it certainly has not turned the deflationary environment into anything resembling inflation.

Yields are low, unemployment up, CPI numbers are down (and under some metrics, negative)—in short, everything screams “deflation”.

Therefore, the notion of talking about hyperinflation now, in this current macro-economic environment, would seem . . . well . . . crazy. Right?

Wrong: I would argue that the next step down in this world-historical Global Depression which we are experiencing will be hyperinflation.

Gonzalo then goes on to describe how hyperinflation will happen – as I quoted yesterday.

So this is how hyperinflation will happen:

One day—when nothing much is going on in the markets, but general nervousness is running like a low-grade fever (as has been the case for a while now)—there will be a commodities burp: A slight but sudden rise in the price of a necessary commodity, such as oil.

This will jiggle Treasury yields, as asset managers will reduce their Treasury allocations, and go into the pressured commodity, in order to catch a profit. (Actually it won’t even be the asset managers—it will be their programmed trades.) These asset managers will sell Treasuries because, effectively, it’s become the principal asset they have to sell.

It won’t be the volume of the sell-off that will pique Bernanke and the drones at the Fed—it will be the timing. It’ll happen right before a largish Treasury auction. So Bernanke and the Fed will buy Treasuries, in an effort to counteract the sell-off and maintain low yields—they want to maintain low yields in order to discourage deflation. But they’ll also want to keep the Treasury cheaply funded. QE-lite has already set the stage for direct Fed buys of Treasuries. The world didn’t end. So the Fed will feel confident as it moves forward and nips this Treasury yield jiggle in the bud.

The Fed’s buying of Treasuries will occur in such a way that it will encourage asset managers to dump even more Treasuries into the Fed’s waiting arms. This dumping of Treasuries won’t be out of fear, at least not initially. Most likely, in the first 15 minutes or so of this event, the sell-off in Treasuries will be orderly, and carried out with the idea (at the time) of picking up those selfsame Treasuries a bit cheaper down the line.

However, the Fed will interpret this sell-off as a run on Treasuries. The Fed is already attuned to the bond markets’ fear that there’s a “Treasury bubble”. So the Fed will open its liquidity windows, and buy up every Treasury in sight, precisely so as to maintain “asset price stability” and “calm the markets”.

The Too Big To Fail banks will play a crucial part in this game. See, the problem with the American Zombies is, they weren’t nationalized. They got the best bits of nationalization—total liquidity, suspension of accounting and regulatory rules—but they still get to act under their own volition, and in their own best interest. Hence their obscene bonuses, paid out in the teeth of their practical bankruptcy. Hence their lack of lending into the weakened economy. Hence their hoarding of bailout monies, and predatory business practices. They’ve understood that, to get that sweet bail-out money (and those yummy bonuses), they have had to play the Fed’s game and buy up Treasuries, and thereby help disguise the monetization of the fiscal debt that has been going on since the Fed began purchasing the toxic assets from their balance sheets in 2008.

But they don’t have to do what the Fed tells them, much less what the Treasury tells them. Since they weren’t really nationalized, they’re not under anyone’s thumb. They can do as they please—and they have boatloads of Treasuries on their balance sheets.

So the TBTF banks, on seeing this run on Treasuries, will add to the panic by acting in their own best interests: They will be among the first to step off Treasuries. They will be the bleeding edge of the wave.

Here the panic phase of the event begins: Asset managers—on seeing this massive Fed buy of Treasuries, and the American Zombies selling Treasuries, all of this happening within days of a largish Treasury auction—will dump their own Treasuries en masse. They will be aware how precarious the U.S. economy is, how over-indebted the government is, how U.S. Treasuries look a lot like Greek debt. They’re not stupid: Everyone is aware of the idea of a “Treasury bubble” making the rounds. A lot of people—myself included—think that the Fed, the Treasury and the American Zombies are colluding in a triangular trade in Treasury bonds, carrying out a de facto Stealth Monetization: The Treasury issues the debt to finance fiscal spending, the TBTF banks buy them, with money provided to them by the Fed.

I recommend the entire article.

To conclude this post, I give you today's Schiff Report.

It is wishful thinking to believe that more quantitative easing will be anything other than a disaster.

Very, very dangerous

2010-10-15T22:40:00.001+01:00

Dean Baker: what on earth has he been smoking?

Most CiFers try not to make their stupidity too explicit. But Dean Baker fails to do that. In an article called Why printing money makes sense, he makes some pretty dangerous assertations.

The basic problem we face is a lack of demand. Note that this is the exact opposite of the deficit fixation – budget deficits are a problem when we have too much demand.

To better understand this demand problem, suppose that we had a super-effective counterfeiter: someone who could make near perfect copies of $50 or $100 bills. Suppose this person printed up $2tn of counterfeit money and began to spend it on all sorts of items. Our counterfeiter buys up houses and cars. They pay for incredibly lavish parties and trips. They hire all sorts of servants, groundskeepers and investment advisers.

What would be the effect of this counterfeiting scam on the economy?

In the current situation, it would provide an enormous boost to GDP and create millions of jobs. After all, everyone thinks the money is real. It is no different whether the counterfeiter and his underlings spend $2tn of counterfeit money or if firms suddenly start investing their hoards of cash or households begin to spend again as though the housing bubble had never collapsed.

Bullshit.

In The Mystery Of Banking [PDF], Murray Rothbard imagines a similar scenario – but comes to a different conclusion.

To show why an increase in the money supply confers no social benefits, let us picture to ourselves what I call the “Angel Gabriel” model. The Angel Gabriel is a benevolent spirit who wishes only the best for mankind, but unfortunately knows nothing about economics. He hears mankind constantly complaining about a lack of money, so he decides to intervene and do something about it. And so overnight, while all of us are sleeping, the Angel Gabriel descends and magically doubles everyone’s stock of money. In the morning, when we all wake up, we find that the amount of money we had in our wallets, purses, safes, and bank accounts has doubled.

What will be the reaction? Everyone knows it will be instant hoopla and joyous bewilderment. Every person will consider that he is now twice as well off, since his money stock has doubled. ... Everyone rushes out to spend their new surplus cash balances. But, as they rush to spend the money, all that happens is that demand curves for all goods and services rise. Society is no better off than before, since real resources, labor, capital, goods, natural resources, productivity, have not changed at all. And so prices will, overall, approximately double, and people will find that they are not really any better off than they were before. Their cash balances have doubled, but so have prices, and so their purchasing power remains the same. Because he knew no economics, the Angel Gabriel’s gift to mankind has turned to ashes.

Quite.

Baker continues...

That may sound troubling, but this is because the current economic situation is so extraordinary. In normal times, the economy is, at least partially, supply-constrained. Collectively, we want more goods and services than the economy is capable of producing. If our counterfeiter manufactured his $2tn in normal times, it likely would cause a serious problem of inflation. There would be more demand for cars, houses and other goods than the economy was able to supply. This would push up prices and wages, leading to a cycle of inflation that would persist until policy measures were taken to slow the economy – or the counterfeiter was caught.

In our demand-constrained economy, however, there is no problem of inflation. The economy can produce more of almost anything right now. The reason that we are not doing it is simply the lack of demand.

Contrary to the belief of Keynesians, the laws of economics do not suddenly change because of our economic situation. They are like the law of gravity, as William L. Anderson says:

Keynesianism is based upon a belief that the laws of economics hold only in special conditions, and when those conditions are not met, then governments need to act as though the Law of Scarcity does not exist. To Austrians like me, the laws of economics are like the Law of Gravity: they are immutable and always apply.

It would be barking stupidity to assume that counterfeiting $2 trillion would be a good idea – yet Baker says that is what the Fed should be doing.

While it is unlikely we will see a successful counterfeiter on this scale, the government and the Federal Reserve Board can imitate the counterfeiter's actions. This is the story of fiscal stimulus: safe, fun and legal. Instead of putting people to work filling the counterfeiter's frivolous whims, we could have them work to build up the economy and meet important needs.

It is more likely that the inflation will create either a bubble or very high inflation, ultimately resulting in an economic crash.

As is the case with the counterfeiter's illicit stash, the stimulus spending need not even create any long-term debt burden. The Fed could simply buy and hold the bonds issued to finance the spending. When the economy returns to more normal levels of employment, the Fed would raise interest rates, as it always does, to prevent inflation from posing a serious risk.

I'll leave this one to Gonzalo Lira.

The Fed’s buying of Treasuries will occur in such a way that it will encourage asset managers to dump even more Treasuries into the Fed’s waiting arms. This dumping of Treasuries won’t be out of fear, at least not initially. Most likely, in the first 15 minutes or so of this event, the sell-off in Treasuries will be orderly, and carried out with the idea (at the time) of picking up those selfsame Treasuries a bit cheaper down the line.

However, the Fed will interpret this sell-off as a run on Treasuries. The Fed is already attuned to the bond markets’ fear that there’s a “Treasury bubble”. So the Fed will open its liquidity windows, and buy up every Treasury in sight, precisely so as to maintain “asset price stability” and “calm the markets”.

The Too Big To Fail banks will play a crucial part in this game. See, the problem with the American Zombies is, they weren’t nationalized. They got the best bits of nationalization—total liquidity, suspension of accounting and regulatory rules—but they still get to act under their own volition, and in their own best interest. Hence their obscene bonuses, paid out in the teeth of their practical bankruptcy. Hence their lack of lending into the weakened economy. Hence their hoarding of bailout monies, and predatory business practices. They’ve understood that, to get that sweet bail-out money (and those yummy bonuses), they have had to play the Fed’s game and buy up Treasuries, and thereby help disguise the monetization of the fiscal debt that has been going on since the Fed began purchasing the toxic assets from their balance sheets in 2008.

But they don’t have to do what the Fed tells them, much less what the Treasury tells them. Since they weren’t really nationalized, they’re not under anyone’s thumb. They can do as they please—and they have boatloads of Treasuries on their balance sheets.

So the TBTF banks, on seeing this run on Treasuries, will add to the panic by acting in their own best interests: They will be among the first to step off Treasuries. They will be the bleeding edge of the wave.

Here the panic phase of the event begins: Asset managers—on seeing this massive Fed buy of Treasuries, and the American Zombies selling Treasuries, all of this happening within days of a largish Treasury auction—will dump their own Treasuries en masse. They will be aware how precarious the U.S. economy is, how over-indebted the government is, how U.S. Treasuries look a lot like Greek debt. They’re not stupid: Everyone is aware of the idea of a “Treasury bubble” making the rounds. A lot of people—myself included—think that the Fed, the Treasury and the American Zombies are colluding in a triangular trade in Treasury bonds, carrying out a de facto Stealth Monetization: The Treasury issues the debt to finance fiscal spending, the TBTF banks buy them, with money provided to them by the Fed.

In these dark economic times, the last person we should be listening to is Dean Baker.

Krugman's excellent mine rescue

2010-10-15T21:45:00.000+01:00

Firstly of all, I would like to direct you towards Krugman in Wonderland, a blog which features William L Anderson's constant—and excellent—bashing of Paul Krugman.

Secondly, I would like to provide you with this smashing new idea from Krugman, to help restart the American economy.

On August 7th, 33 Chilean miners were trapped 2300 feet underground. They were located 17 days later. The problem was – how to get them out? The Chilean Government contacted the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman for advice.

“Keynesian theory dictates that you dig a hole in the ground – a big hole - and that you keep on digging.” The Chilean Government took his advice. Finally, on the 12th of October, the trapped workers were reached and the rescue started. On learning the good news, Paul Krugman was ecstatic. “We have been waiting 75 years. Now, finally, we have an unequivocal vindication of Keynesian economic theory.” He added –“as a further bonus, Keynesian Economic Theory predicts a massive stimulus to the economy when the hole is filled in.”

Flushed with the success of this venture, Paul Krugman was asked whether he saw any domestic application. “Actually, I have already been on the phone to the governors of Kentucky and West Virginia to see if we could dig a hole and rescue workers trapped down a coal mine. Obviously, we cannot deliberately trap workers down a coal mine – we would need volunteers. So far The United Mine Workers of America will endorse the idea provided that the workers are paid extra for overtime, night shifts, and weekend in accordance with the Union Contract. They would also require paid time off for all accumulated breaks while the workers were trapped underground.

In West Virginia the governor suggested that the unemployed could volunteer to be trapped underground. “We have a growing problem with unemployment in the state. This would reduce our unemployment numbers – it is hard to claim that you are “actively looking for work” when you are trapped 2000 feet underground.”

However, this plan has run into stiff resistance from the UMWA and Democrat politicians running for re –election. A Union spokesperson said – “this is union work – all the unemployed would need to join the union.” An anonymous Democrat Congressman was quoted as saying – “kick-backs from union dues are a major source of political contributions to democrats – we are desperate – we need this money now – we don’t have much time left – we are behind in the polls – the election is only weeks away.”

Meanwhile, OSHA has been getting involved – they claim that they will need a plan and will need to review and study the plan before they can give their approval, and this will take time.

The Governor of West Virginia is furious – “our State economy is in the tank and we need this stimulus now, not later. I am going to ask President Obama to sign an Executive order to fast-track this project”.

Keynes would have been proud...

Friends of the Earth, yes, but are they friends of the poor?

2010-10-15T19:25:00.000+01:00

With the average British fuel bill climbing to well over £1,000 a year – for many pensioners the largest bill they have to pay all year – a worryingly large number of people are struggling to keep their homes warm.

...

In 2003 the number of households hit a low of two million, but it climbed to four million in 2007 and then 4.5 million in 2008, the figures for which were published today by the Department of Energy & Climate Change.

This figure suggests that one in six households were fuel poor during 2008, a year which saw energy bills shoot up by 45 per cent.

DECC pointed out that since then the figure was likely to have fallen to 4.1 million, thanks to energy companies trimming their bills. However, this is still twice the level it was in 2003.

Pretty alarming stuff.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused cries of outrage.

Dave Timms, Friends of the Earth's climate campaigner, said: "It's a national disgrace that over four million people are still living in fuel poverty in the 21st century, as a result huge numbers of vulnerable families, pensioners and children are suffering from ill health and high energy bills."

The Friends of the Earth can go screw themselves, to be quite frank. They are the ones who are causing this "national disgrace" (emphasis added).

We shall be paying this through soaring 'green taxes' on everything from air travel to the £3,300 tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

Environmentalists are absolute weapons grade cunts – they take every problem caused by their own philosophy and seek to blame it on the market.

Let's not also forget the slower growth and higher level of poverty that would exist under the Greenies' ideal scenario – sustainable development.

2100 A1 Golden Economic Age (GEA)
Annex 1 per capita income = $100,000
Annex 2 per capita income = $70,000
Average global per capita income = $76,000

2100 B1 Sustainable Development (SD)
Annex 1 per capita income = $60,000
Annex 2 per capita income = $35,000
Average global per capita income = $40,000

So for all the Barts out there thinking they are trying to help the world’s poor and saying things like “it is not a workable strategy to tell the have-nots that they can’t have any more” and that it’s “morally wrong to not allow others what we allow ourselves,” you do just that with your supposedly good intentions by getting on board the economy-punishing, poverty-prolonging, global-taxation CO2 mitigation bandwagon. You would think with all of that redistribution planned the poor would fare better but they do not. Look at those figures again. The world’s poor will have a 2100 PCI of $35,000 under B1 vs. $70,000 under A1. So I ask you again Bart, does that qualify as “very disruptive to the global economy?”

I wonder if halving wealth will have any negative effects on poverty. Duh! Let’s get real. Prolonged poverty is an absolute death sentence for millions. Poverty currently kills about 18 million people per year in mostly the poor nations, and a majority of them are children. So for every year that economic growth is slowed you can be ensured that the poverty rate will be unforgivably elevated.

Put it in perspective. About one-quarter of the world’s population still has no electricity at all; 1 billion people still have inadequate access to water; 2.6 billion still lack basic sanitation; and 2.5 billion still use biomass to cook. And about nine million children under the age of five die each year from largely preventable causes, and the overarching cause of most of those deaths is poverty. Six million children die annually of hunger alone. That sounds compassionate. Let’s build some wind farms and call it a job well done.

These people are an absolute joke. Why do so many still take them seriously?

The final words of Anna Raccoon

2010-10-14T17:16:00.001+01:00

Published by the Grumpy Old Twat...

I am humbled, truly.

Reading through these comments I am reminded of the many exceptional people that exist on the internet. Good people, talented writers – yes, you Gildas – don’t you dare give up! – and big hearts.

Unfortunately, there are also a myriad of talentless, embittered souls, the pimply faced youths of Andrew Marr’s comment, spewing bile and negativity, metaphorically pulling the legs off any spider they happen to pass – just because they can. Because it’s free. Because it is a lawless area. As it should be – and that very freedom that they abuse will be at risk one day because of them.

I am not speaking of the obsessive adolescent ramblings of John Demetriou and his imaginary friend - ‘only I can see you Kevin’. They are pussy cats compared to the truly deranged that are out there in the blogosphere – I understand they are claiming credit for the demise of my blog – unfortunately I never read them, it was only after I had closed the blog that they wrote their latest poison missive and someone pointed me in that direction thinking that they had punctured my hide terminally. No such luck Demetriuzela.

No, out there in the ether, there are some seriously dangerous people, who targeted me many months ago for daring to hold a different opinion from them. They didn’t just ‘out’ me, they have continued to dig obsessively into my life, fantasising where they were unable to obtain information. They imagine, I suppose, that they were hurting me, punishing me for not agreeing with them. In fact the damage is far wider than that. They also cause intense pain amongst those I am related to. For although I have not known my family, they are out there, and had started the long journey of truth seeking which is a search for far flung members of your family.

They too, were Googling, and reading that I was a paedophile, a government agent, a ‘sleeper’ planted in the blogosphere to prevent the truth emerging (Jesus!) – faux psychiatric reports on me emerged, discussing the severe mental illness that apparently occasioned my adopting ‘different disguises’ – the allegedly ‘eminent psychiatrist’ responsible for that one had obviously never come across a woman who had been married three times and changed her name each time in accordance with British law! My National Health records were accessed - I know there are laws against this sort of thing, but the people concerned are mentally ill. Laws won't stop them.

My unknown family learnt that everything I did was in shallow pursuit of ‘hits’, that nobody ever linked to my work because they liked it, only because I had ‘brown nosed’ them. They learnt that I only ‘claimed’ to be a Quaker.

I could go on but I shan’t. Suffice it to say, that nervous as they were about making contact anyway, they have decided that it would be better not to have contact with such a patently despicable creature as me. That pains me for myself and them. I, in turn, realised that much of what has been written about me is because I had become better known. Others have had dissenting voices, but not the thousands of readers, so I became a particular target – and that could only get worse as time went on.

It has been like a lead weight on my shoulders, knowing that every day as I tried to write, amongst you good people there were also these utter snakes who visited the blog only to see what they could purloin, twist, plagiarise, take out of context, cause mischief with, denigrate. Last week-end I was plagued with e-mails demanding this and demanding that as the price of not writing any more about me. It completely overshadowed my delight at the Sheila Martin result. I stared at the screen for hours, feeling very, very alone in my battle with these people, and finally decided to just 'pull the plug'.

There is an intensely negative side to the Blogosphere; confrontational, aggressive. I had hoped to establish a political blog that was not so testosterone driven, where women – 50% of the public – were welcome. Some will say I should have stood up to the bullies, that letting them win is, well, letting them win – but the personal price I was paying was too high for me.

I have stood up to them for a long time, my illness started at the end of last year; there have been many days when the only thing I have done is write the blog, only to read from Demetriou that there was nothing wrong with me, my ‘alleged illness’ was merely a ‘drive for hits’, and then creep back to bed, pausing only to throw breakfast up on the way as I struggled to live through the treatment. Hashimoto Disease for your information you pathetic little dolt Demetriou.

I didn’t make any closing statement for precisely that reason – I knew that anything I said would be quoted and misquoted, pilloried by the likes of Demetriou. It wouldn’t have been my choice and was not with my permission that Obnoxio made the statement he did; but now that he has done and it has engendered this gracious response from Gildas and the many kind comments, it is only fair to say farewell. I shan’t be back, there is no cache of my work, no record, nothing for anyone to tease apart and take another meaning from, no more fun to be had baiting Anna Raccoon, she no longer exists. Nor will I be writing under any other name or on any other web site as some have suggested.

The air is fresher in the real world, it is full of real people (here in France anyway!) that wish you nothing but well. They seek to heal, not hurt, to help not hinder. They are honest and truthful, not furtive and secretive. When they do have feuds it is over something important like the menu for the Rugby Club dinner.

So if you’ll excuse me folks, I’m back off to gulp great lungfuls of fresh air.

Fare thee well folks ....
you were some of the best commentators to appear on any blog.

I regret not reading Anna's blog as much as I should have. I would read her archives, if only her site was still up.

Isn't it depressing?

I'm so sick and tired with banks...

2010-10-13T22:27:00.000+01:00

If enough mortgage-paying homeowners realize that they may be able to get out of their mortgage loan and keep their house, scott-free? Shit, that’s basically a license to halt payments right the fuck now. That’s basically a license to tell the banks to fuck off.

What are the banks gonna do—try to foreclose and then evict you? Show me the paper, motherfucker, will be all you need to say.

Sounds like a good idea to me...

Climate change craziness

2010-10-12T20:23:00.000+01:00

While writing my latest post, it had slipped my mind that parliament had passed this fucking idiotic, insane, stupid, moronic, disastrous, fuck-up of a bill called the Climate Change Act.

The only real contribution David Miliband's little brother has so far made to our lives in his meteoric political career was to put through the 2008 Climate Change Act. This commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, at a cost estimated, on the website of his old Department for Energy and Climate Change, at up to £18.3 billion every year for the next four decades. In cash terms this amounts to £734 billion, making it far and away the most costly law ever put through Parliament. It will equate to more than £700 a year for every household in the land, as we pay for thousands more useless windmills and other quixotic gestures through fast-rising taxes, soaring electricity bills, draconian regulatory costs and heaven knows what else. Furthermore, neither Mr Miliband himself, nor any of his Act's supporters, could begin to explain how that 80 per cent target is to be attained without closing down virtually our entire economy.

May I emphasise that our political class are the very worst sort of complete fucking scum?

There are cunts, and then there are MPs...

Climate corruption

2010-10-12T20:07:00.001+01:00

Who is Harold Lewis?

Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President's Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)

Lewis has been in the news recently for writing a rather damning resignation letter to the American Physical Society.

He starts by writing about the past successes of the APS, successful because the scientists were working for it independently – each report "would be attacked from both sides".

Then, he begins to weep at what the APS has become:

The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d'être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford's book organizes the facts very well.) I don't believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

Quite.

Climate alarmists often accuse sceptics of supporting their position only because they are funded by organisations such as oil companies, only looking out for their own greedy self interest – fuck everybody else.

However, there is a lot more money—a lot of it from the state—going into alarmist science. Because why should climate science be given so much attention if there is no apocalypse nigh?

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer "explanatory" screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind---simply to bring the subject into the open.
To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members' interest in a TGTG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

Climate science is corrupt?

Coming up next on the news: the Pope is Catholic and bears really do shit in the woods.

Lewis concludes thus:

This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don't think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I'm not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

Sceptics care very much about this corruption, because it allows our deeply odious politicos to make all sorts of horrid interventions which can have a profound impact on people's lives. The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CACC) is used to justify massive expansions of the power of the state over the economy. Alarmists often point to the precautionary principle as a reason for taking action, but the precautionary principle should only be used when taking action has little or no cost. The cost of taking action on CACC using statist methods is very high. Economic growth in developing countries, for instance, will be slower. This will mean more people will be in poverty for a longer time and, inevitably, more dead bodies, caused by hunger or lack of vaccination.

This is sometimes rebuked by an alarmist claim that CACC is already killing 300,000 people a year.

Climate change is already responsible for 300,000 deaths a year and is affecting 300m people, according to the first comprehensive study of the human impact of global warming.

...

Nearly 98% of the people seriously affected, 99% of all deaths from weather-related disasters and 90% of the total economic losses are now borne by developing countries.

I take the 300,000 figure with a pinch of salt, but let's assume it's true.

Rich countries have fewer deaths from CACC than poor countries. Therefore, rich countries are better equipped to cope with changes in climate.

The solution seems obvious – develop. Develop quickly. Make sure growth is as fast as it could possibly be (which means pushing the state out of the way), and adapt to any future climate changes.

That, gentlemen, is how you combat climate change.

Here's ranting at you

2010-10-11T21:58:00.003+01:00

Andrew Marr: old, odious, ugly, thick-as-fuck balding twat, with ears the size of fucking satellite dishes.

Well, that's what "proper journalists" look like, isn't it? Andrew Marr isn't the only one who can insult his competitors for their appearances.

Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all.

If real journalism involves being an authoritarian cunt, or being a fucking liar, or being an economically illiterate arse, then yes, bloggers are nothing like these oh-so-intelligent, educated, real journalists.

A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people.

OK – the country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. Some of us are angry and drunk. But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.

I think I will leave this one to The Grim Reaper.

Marr clearly knows next to nothing about the political blogosphere. From what I know, a good chunk of the bloggers around now are middle-aged men who are either married or divorced. That destroys most of his first statement in one go. Next, he talks about blogging being too angry and too abusive. Does he have a point? Possibly. However, bloggers don't blog out of the goodness of their own hearts. Many of them do it because they're incredibly angry with the way politics is going in this country, and the way lazy journalists like Andrew Marr fail to hold our politicians to account. In those circumstances, it's no wonder some swear words are uttered. Myself, I'm surprised I don't swear more on the blog than I do.

The other problem is that bloggers believe in something which Andrew Marr doesn't. Free speech. Most of us believe people should be allowed to say what they want without anyone using the law to stop us. Andrew though, doesn't. He believes you are entitled to use the law to make sure people don't find out unflattering information about you. Hence why he went to court to obtain a super-injunction to prevent the press from reporting "private information" about his life.

Quite.

So, Andy, what's with the attack on bloggers?

Marr was giving a talk about how modern technology is rapidly changing the way people receive news and current affairs information.

He said change is happening frighteningly quickly with newspaper sales slumping as people turn to the internet.

It was a sad fact that the media would be employing fewer journalists as sales of hard copies declined, he said.

What an enormous surprise that was, eh? The mainstream media's monopoly on delievering (often statist) news and opinion—not to mention Andrew Marr's "progressive" documentaries—is quickly coming to an end.

Meanwhile, libertarianism and anarchism are spreading quickly through the blogosphere, which is no good news for Andy.

If the BBC were privatized tomorrow, it is easy to imagine that its "stars" would take half or even less of the money that they receive now and that at least half of its bureaucrats would be sacked immediately, with the rest receiving 50% pay cuts — and all of those billions of pounds of taxpayers' filthy lucre taken out of the game.

Still, at least Marr does give swearblogging credit where it's due.

It is fantastic at times...

Amen to that! I'm sure he just loved reading this...

UPDATE: DK has more to say. Do go over there and read the entire thing – it is excellent. Here are some extracts.

Your humble Devil lives in a third-floor flat many miles from his mother, has a full head of hair, distinctly unpimpled skin, finely-hewn aquiline features and is most firmly attached to a similarly prepossessing wife (whose opinion may or may not have been sought in the previous description).

Andrew Marr, however, is a bald, jug-eared, media whore whose pathetic and slavish devotion to NuLabour may or may not be influenced by his employment by the extortion-funded BBC and his marriage to Jackie Ashley, the raddled-looking harridan daughter of a life peer who writes for both The New Statesman and The Grauniad.

...

"Terrible things are said on line because they are anonymous. People say things on line that they wouldn't dream of saying in person."

Indeed, Andrew. Perhaps, when we meet, you can repeat your assertions about bloggers and I shall read this post back to you. And then we can all get back to doing what we do best: I can return to insulting media whores like yourself, and you can go back to licking Ed Miliband's bumhole.

In the meantime, how about you try to shut the fuck up...?

Excellent...

Tax crushes productivity

2010-10-11T21:11:00.000+01:00

From Reason.com.

Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article. If there were no taxes of any kind, this $1,000 of income would translate into $1,000 in extra saving. If I invested it in the stock of a company that earned, say, 8 percent a year on its capital, then 30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000. That is simply the miracle of compounding.

Now let’s put taxes into the calculus. First, assuming that the Bush tax cuts expire, I would pay 39.6 percent in federal income taxes on that extra income. Beyond that, the phaseout of deductions adds 1.2 percentage points to my effective marginal tax rate. I also pay Medicare tax, which the recent health care bill is raising to 3.8 percent, starting in 2013. And in Massachusetts, I pay 5.3 percent in state income taxes, part of which I get back as a federal deduction. Putting all those taxes together, that $1,000 of pretax income becomes only $523 of saving.

And that saving no longer earns 8 percent. First, the corporation in which I have invested pays a 35 percent corporate tax on its earnings. So I get only 5.2 percent in dividends and capital gains. Then, on that income, I pay taxes at the federal and state level. As a result, I earn about 4 percent after taxes, and the $523 in saving grows to $1,700 after 30 years.

Then, when my children inherit the money, the estate tax will kick in. The marginal estate tax rate is scheduled to go as high as 55 percent next year, but Congress may reduce it a bit. Most likely, when that $1,700 enters my estate, my kids will get, at most, $1,000 of it.

HERE’S the bottom line: Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With taxes, it yields only $1,000. In effect, once the entire tax system is taken into account, my family’s marginal tax rate is about 90 percent. Is it any wonder that I turn down most of the money-making opportunities I am offered?....

Now you might not care if I supply less of my services to the marketplace — although, because you are reading this article, you are one of my customers. But I bet there are some high-income taxpayers whose services you enjoy.

Maybe you are looking forward to a particular actor’s next movie or a particular novelist’s next book. Perhaps you wish that your favorite singer would have a concert near where you live. Or, someday, you may need treatment from a highly trained surgeon, or your child may need braces from the local orthodontist. Like me, these individuals respond to incentives. (Indeed, some studies report that high-income taxpayers are particularly responsive to taxes.) As they face higher tax rates, their services will be in shorter supply.

....don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.

Don't panic

2010-10-11T20:56:00.000+01:00

Liam Halligan thinks that—if it happens—Britain will experience worse stagflation than the United States will.

This time last year, the Conservatives took a brave stand on this issue, questioning the use of wildly expansionary monetary policy. In his 2009 party conference speech, David Cameron was pointedly lukewarm about QE. "Sometime soon, it will have to stop," he said. "Because in the end, printing money leads to inflation."

Back then, of course, Cameron was in opposition. Now he is running the country. Maybe the responsibility of high office is clouding thought processes among Tories' upper echelons. Or maybe not. The reality is, though, that Cameron's observation remains just as true today as it was before he entered Downing Street – if anything, even more so.

Consumer price inflation is at 3.1pc – way above the Bank's 2pc CPI target, as it has been for many months. There are clearly more price pressures in the pipeline. Barely noticed figures, also released on Friday, show that UK producer input inflation is now 9.5pc.

While the US has doubled its monetary base over the past 18 months, the UK's base money supply has tripled. That's right – UK base money is now three times bigger as a percentage of GDP than it was at the start of 2009. Given all that money-printing – sorry, QE – the danger is that inflation expectations take hold, and price pressures spin out of control.

For now, a lot of the UK's QE money remains "inert", and therefore not yet inflationary, seeing as the banking sector has so far refused to lend it on to firms and households – one reason the UK economy remains so weak. That will continue to be the case, in my view, until the banks have blackmailed the British Government into following America's "lead", and expanded QE to include the purchase of toxic corporate "assets" as well as Government bonds.

Eventually, though – and it may not take long – the huge expansion of the UK's base money supply will cause broader monetary aggregates to balloon as well, even if credit creation multiples remain relatively subdued. The QE money is out there and is almost impossible to withdraw. Once that money gets into circulation, and is leant against many times over, the UK could face "stagflation" – when high and rising inflation combines with an economic slump.

Britain has been fucked up the arse good and proper by the Bank of England. Since its nationalisation in 1946, Sterling has lost over 97% of its value. And I'm not pulling facts out of my arse either: see for yourself if you don't believe me.

Don't fret too much though – the disaster will be unpleasant, but something good will come out of it. Inflationary Keynesian/monetarist policies will have been tested to destruction – nobody will want to go back to the unenlighted statist ideas of the past.

And we will be absolutely, 100% sure that sound money will deliver a better economy.

Politicians will always suck

2010-10-11T20:23:00.000+01:00

Fraser comments about the impossibility of an informed electorate.

They're are to busy wanking off to x-factor or following some cleb cunt! But of course they will still bang on about how great democracy is, and at least we live in a free society, blah blah blah, it's a fucking sham every four/five years depending on what dictator was elected by default. Or what bunch of dictators have been elected by the muted masses, on the back of promises they cannot keep, or elected on the back of whatever propaganda sheet news paper the proles read which then tells them who to vote for.

But it's not just the electorate who have something wrong with them.

A study of personality types once found that as a group, serial killers scored highest in "superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others." The other highest-scoring group for these undesirable traits? Politicians.

The above quote is from a Cracked article titled 5 Scientific Reasons Powerful People Will Always Suck.

I recommend the entire thing, but here are a few extracts.

Power and Self-Absorption Go Hand in Hand

Science says there is a very logical reason that those in power don't actually give a damn about you: They are too busy thinking about themselves. There are several reasons for this, according to research.

First, researchers found that in leaderless situations, those with high opinions of themselves will take charge, for better or for worse. Well, that makes sense -- they think they're awesome, so of course they think they should be in charge. The problem, though, is that this same, often unwarranted, confidence also persuades the followers to follow them. And so they climb through the ranks by basically being the biggest loudmouth braggarts in the room.

The other problem is that the narcissistic types can manage to lead effectively -- for the short term. They're great at convincing everyone they have all the answers, but at the end of the day they can't take their eyes off their own self-interest long enough to focus on long-term goals such as "not losing all of our money."

Feeling Powerful Makes It Easier to Lie

Researchers at Columbia Business School used a similar setup to the "E" experiment above, where they did a role-play that divided subjects into leaders and subordinates. Leaders were even given a fancy, large office; the underlings got a small, windowless room. All of them were then tempted to lie (they found a $100 bill and were put in a situation where they'd have to lie about it to the people running the experiment if they wanted to keep it).

After a nice round of vigorous lying, both groups of subjects were tested for stress hormone levels. Researchers also studied a video-tape of the subjects lying their asses off. The result, in their words:

"Low-power individuals showed the expected emotional, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral signs of deception; in contrast, powerful people demonstrated no evidence of lying across emotion, cognition, physiology, or behavior."

...

In fact, instead of negative emotions, the study found that a powerful person actually experiences a positive internal response. These people feel joyful relaxation as a result of lying their fucking faces off.

It's almost as if the feeling of being in power made them think the normal rules of morality didn't apply to them.

Experiments Show Power and Hypocrisy Are Linked in the Brain

In one experiment, he took random subjects and had them role-play in a fictional government, so that some would have positions of power (aka prime minister) while others would be peons, like in the previous experiment. But other groups would, for instance, be asked to vividly describe a time when they held a position of power, in an effort to get them into the same mood they experienced when they were in that role. No one involved knew what the experiment was trying to uncover.

Later the subjects were given a questionnaire with gray-area moral questions (such as, is it OK to exceed the speed limit if you're late for an appointment). After just that brief period of feeling powerful, the role-playing prime ministers were more ready than the peons to say they would bend the rules if they needed to. But when asked other hypothetical questions that tested whether they thought it was OK for other people to skirt the rules, the prime ministers were harder on the rule-benders than the peons.

Power Gives You a False Belief in Your Abilities

This next study happened at Stanford University. The setup was similar to the hypocrisy experiment, in that researchers got the subjects into a powerful mood by having them write about a situation where they had power over another person. Then there were two control groups: One wrote about a time they felt powerless, and another wrote nothing and probably just made doodles of dongs on their notebooks. Again, these people were assigned to the powerful and powerless groups at random. It had nothing to do with their station in life or how much power they actually had in the real world.

Then the researchers made them an offer: They could roll some dice, and if they correctly guessed their roll, they'd get cash. But they had the choice of either rolling the dice themselves or letting someone else roll for them. The choice was nonsense -- dice is not a game of skill. That's the point of dice. If there's some guy who's really good at making dice land a certain way, he'd be at a craps table now putting a casino out of business.

Yet, while both the less-powerful and the control group gave up the responsibility 30 to 40 percent of the time, a full 100 percent of the empowered subjects chose to roll themselves. Drunk on their little scrap of completely fake power, they assumed they could control a completely random outcome better than someone else. All because a guy in a lab coat tricked them into feeling powerful.

But it doesn't end there. Another study found that people with power see the world more positively and are therefore more likely to take risks based on the pure blind faith that things always work out for them because they're awesome.

Feelings of Power Trigger a Lack of Compassion

A study in an issue of Psychological Science set out to test this idea. The method was a little different, as instead of a role-playing exercise, the researchers actually surveyed subjects about how powerful they felt in their own lives. Then they were divided into powerful and powerless based on their answers.

The subjects were then paired up, and one was told to relay an emotionally scarring event that had happened to him. The listener was hooked up to an ECG machine, and all of his stress responses were measured.

The powerless people reacted the way you'd expect people would react when told a heart-wrenching tale. The powerful, on the other hand, felt nothing. Or at least, their responses couldn't be measured, whether they naturally felt no empathy or were just better at regulating their emotions.

The researchers had all of the subjects fill out a survey at the end and inquired about whether they'd like to stay in touch with the other experiment subjects after the experiment was over, to see if maybe they'd made any friends during this ordeal. The powerless subjects were into it. The powerful were not.

Yet you trust these scum with almost every aspect of your lives?

No porn to be found here...

2010-10-10T19:28:00.000+01:00

This post prompted me to have a look at some of the search terms used to access this blog. The most unusual, WTF? search terms are listed below:

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george monbiot cigarette conspiracy

richard murphy too cute [this one really fucked with my mind]

research on twats

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teens fuck for money blogspot

the second test average was a d! no one was happy

teens wet cunts

video teen fucking.blogspot

I won't ask.

Science: a public good?

2010-10-10T02:56:00.005+01:00

NB: This is not Angry Teen

I think this is a good clip reminding us all why Scientific research doesn't have to be funded by big Government.

Terence Kealey - 'The Myth of Science as a Public Good' from oxford libertarian on Vimeo.