Scene from the Death Star

Or is it Pyongyang? Or Wolverhampton?

Police taser a ten year old

Wow. And just listen to them talk about it, too. A 94-pound kid vs two burly cops. The lawyer guy saying that there's precedent, as if that makes it OK.



As Alan Watt says, what is a taser? It's a cattle prod with wires. They're now using it on you. What does that make you?

Democracy is slavery

Aaron Russo. Interesting guy? Understatement. Definitely worth watching all the way through. He's been down the rabbit hole, and now he's here to tell us what's going on. It makes you realise that the world we live in is not what we thought - fact is stranger than fiction, every time.

Dangerous grannies

File under: Couldn't make it up:

A great-grandmother has been ordered to wear an electronic tag for breaching new animal welfare laws by selling a goldfish to a 14 year-old boy.

Joan Higgins, a pet shop owner, was caught selling the fish to the teenager in a 'sting' operation by council officials. She was then prosecuted in an eight month court process estimated to have cost the taxpayer more than £20,000.

Under new animal welfare laws, passed in 2006, it is it illegal to sell goldfish to under 16s. Offenders can be punished with up to 12 months in prison.

Mrs Higgins, 66, who thought the boy was much older than 14, escaped jail but was instead ordered to wear an electronic tag and given a night time curfew. She was also fined £1,000 by Trafford Magistrates Court.

Her son Mark Higgins, who was also proscecuted in connection with the case, described the treatment of his mother as a "farce" and "legal lunacy". He said the punishment she had received would prevent her from attending her weekly bingo sessions as well [as] babysitting her one month-old great grandchild.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear

A quick word about the meme that you hear more and more of these days as justification for tearing down freedom:
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from these security measures.
It's a ubiquitous, insidious idea, and has been used to defend everything that's flushing the Western world down the toilet. My local publican said it when policemen came on a random patrol into his pub on a Friday and scared away half his punters. It's what they say about ID cards. It's what they said about airport scanners.
Here's the thing.
It's a false dichotomy. Hide/fear, or Nothing to hide/nothing to fear, is not exhaustive. It takes as a given that intrusion is logically inevitable. It's not, hence it makes the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. That is, there are other scenarios out there. Some of my favourites: innocent until proven guilty, privacy rights, mutual respect, you're our servants not our masters, and leave us alone you fucking cunts.

Why China won't rule the world pt 3

Still there are people going on about China - even guys like like Jim Rogers who should know better. Celente puts it well here. Their per capita income ranks below Albania's, somewhere around the 100th mark. They're a totalitarian travesty:

WA-wah

For all those who think that the housing boom was caused by a "shortage of housing":

With boom times returning to WA, the housing market is once again overheating. The median house price in Perth is now $512,000, according to the December quarter figures from Australian Property Monitors, putting it beyond the reach of any new homeowner without substantial savings or parental support.

It is not difficult to pinpoint the cause of this price escalation.

During the second half of last year, new lots approved for building in Perth and Peel were running at an annual rate of under 9000. This is extraordinarily low. Even in the mid 2000s, when supply was being far outpaced by demand, annual new lot releases were running at more than 15,000.

The reasons for this were shown to lie squarely with the Government's land-starvation policy. The Government just won't allow enough blocks to be developed for housing, thereby preventing competition from driving down prices.

This has stemmed from unfounded fears of the high cost of providing new infrastructure, a mania for central planning and groundless opposition to urban sprawl in a State that has more natural bush and farmland than anywhere else in the world.

Government resistance to allowing land to be used for housing has also been abetted by ministerial dreams of creating a compact city with teeming inner suburbs populated by bohemian theatregoers and by downright contempt for new-homebuyers' preference for McMansions on individual lots.

OK, so we have Western Australia. The most remote least populated area on earth, barring the two poles. All that land, just waiting to be put to use.
But they're not allowed.
So yes, there is a shortage of houses. And no doubt, the government might spin that and say, look, we're going to build a bunch of new houses! In urban areas, so we can all be bohos! But, as with the Credit Crunch and every other damn thing, they were the cause of the problem in the first place. They created a shortage of houses. And they will make it worse with their so-called fixes.

School's Out

From Personal Liberty:

Public schools today are crime-ridden, unhealthful places where children are exposed to sex, drugs and diseases and taught a sanitized version of American history and a loyalty to and dependence on big government, according to James Ostrowski in his book, Government Schools Are Bad For Your Kids.

Actually, I've got nothing against sex or drugs, except that most drugs these days are pale shadows of what they should be (because they're illegal), and I suspect that most kids at school don't get enough sex - the alphas will be getting it all (see Roissy). But the dependence on Big Government is real, and will kill all that is worth preserving in the human spirit.

It ought to be mentioned that it's not just government schools. All schools in this country have to conform to a curriculum. They're all subsidiaries then really, pumping out the same propaganda.

Homeschool your kids. If you love them at all, homeschool them. Find a way.

Using utilisation

One symptom of encroaching totalitarianism is the deterioration of language. Orwell spoke about this in his essay of 1940, Inside the Whale. He related the decline of literature to the decline of freedom of thought, and the death of the individual.

But if you talk to someone who has been employed in the public sector for a while (and this applies especially to women) you notice that they have a strange way of talking. It's not just the words themselves (although it is certainly that), but the way they say them - and as we all know that's the main part of communication anyway.

They tend to have a somewhat humourless monotonous delivery, as though it's a mimicry of what is considered authoritative language. They will not use their hands to express or emote. Their tone will not go up and down, but remain steady. And make your eyes glaze over.

As for the words themselves, naturally political correctness has gutted the range of available vocabulary such that the speakers become almost parodies of themselves. Anything that may offend is off-limits, such that they end up butchering the language itself (which I find extremely offensive).

Then there's the Orwell test for plain English, which they fail. They will say "utilise" instead of "use". They will say in fifty words what could have been said in five.

I also can't help but think that those tired corporate clichés, such as "blue sky thinking", "thinking outside the box", are just that - a sign of corporatism, not of a free market. That is, it's a mimicry again, of how they think a real business would communicate with itself. If it weren't for the fact that the game is rigged and only MBAs, accountants and the credentialised lot can get ahead in these environments, then each business would have it's own character, it's own language, instead of the meaningless, homogeneous drivel you get in most workplaces today.

This struck me just after watching a contestant on some game show. I think it was The Weakest Link, which I generally despise but can't always avoid. And here was this woman, on a gameshow of all places, talking like a robot. She worked in some government department or another, seemed quite pleased with herself for it, and was clearly unable to step outside of that little cubicle she was ushered into long ago.

But we see it everywhere. The problem is, this language is insidiously creeping into everyday talk, such that we only have doubletalk and chavtalk, with little in between. As in 1984, it's the Party or the Proles. You can see this in the City, where the chat veers between the language of the trading floor, fuck this and fuck that, and the automatons of HR and Compliance. You see it on terrestrial TV, which veers between BBC drone and Channel 4 vulgarity - both equally shit. It's Question Time or Jeremy Kyle, choose your sides now.

Faaaaack.

A nation of racist dwarves

From Christopher Hitchens at Slate:

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

Yes - you could also say it's fascism taken to its most extreme, and you may say most successful. After all, it's been extant for a long time now.

Here are the two most shattering facts about North Korea. First, when viewed by satellite photography at night, it is an area of unrelieved darkness. Barely a scintilla of light is visible even in the capital city. (See this famous photograph.) Second, a North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean. You may care to imagine how much surplus value has been wrung out of such a slave, and for how long, in order to feed and sustain the militarized crime family that completely owns both the country and its people.
Unlike previous racist dictatorships, the North Korean one has actually succeeded in producing a sort of new species. Starving and stunted dwarves, living in the dark, kept in perpetual ignorance and fear, brainwashed into the hatred of others, regimented and coerced and inculcated with a death cult: This horror show is in our future, and is so ghastly that our own darling leaders dare not face it and can only peep through their fingers at what is coming.

Pretty much what I alluded to here. But he's right - it's not socialism, and perhaps never was. It's what we have, and the yanks have - the merger of corporate and political powers, fascism. We can all go this way, in fact the whole world is headed this way. Alarm bells are ringing.

There's been a coup, have you heard?

Ron Paul's quite right about the CIA, and perhaps quite brave for saying such things. No doubt they have a lengthy dossier on him!

Bernanke joins the ranks of Hitler & Stalin

Time magazine has made Bernanke person of the year. Jesus wept. Let's leave it to Peter Schiff to tell us what he thinks of that.



By the way, a disappointing thing for me has always been that, while I revere Milton Friedman in many ways, especially his Free to Choose, it's actually his ideas that Bernanke follows. Friedman was, bizarrely, a staunch and articulate libertarian, in every area except monetary policy. He seemed to change his mind in later years, but while writing his most influential works he always suggested that government's big mistake in the Great Depression was not inflating the money supply!

Of course, the real issues here are this. Government monopolised issuance of the currency, making it fiat (i.e. funny) money. They inflated the bubble through policies of easy credit. (By the way, every bubble in history has been caused by government - don't believe theories such as the "madness of crowds" - they were all down to the madness of those in power.) They also took over the role of insurer or lender of last resort in the event of bank runs. They made it illegal for any private body to do this.

So what they did wrong is not performing this role properly. And of course they weren't going to to. They don't have the first clue - their incompetence is unbounded.

But not printing enough money? Just generating more worthless, paper money off the presses? Excuse me? It's a shame, and it's baffling, that Friedman took this view, as it shows he didn't actually understand what money is, at all. And that's a hard thing to say, as he is a great man in many ways. He was a great debater, and by all accounts a genuinely great guy. I'm reminded of an anecdote whereby a fellow academic said he was worried about people plagiarising his ideas. Friedman told him that people plagiarising his ideas was a good thing - it showed his ideas were working.

How libertarian is that? And there are many other examples of his greatness. But if only he hadn't thrown the Fed that bone - that of "stimulating" the economy by printing phantom money backed by nothing. Because a lot of people listened to him. Like Bernanke, who said on the occasion of Friedman's birthday - you're right. we caused the last Depression - sorry, we won't do it again. And instead, they're going to cause a bigger one, by doing exactly what Friedman said to do.