It Must Be Nice

To have as much spare time as these guys.

"Okay, so there’s this girl with a sick cat and she falls in love with the veterinarian who tries to save this sick cat’s life. After the veterinarian’s heroic efforts, the cat dies anyway. She becomes his assistant but he has suddenly become an asshole. He doesn’t let her help with the medical work and just tells her to get him coffee and food and stuff. This goes on in a humorous manner as we notice him becoming pale and constantly fatigued. Then he starts coughing up blood. Towards the end, as he’s dying of an undefined illness, we realize he picks up chicks by poisoning their pets but acting so super nice and stuff. Then, at the very end, we realize that she already knows this and has been poisoning him all along. The working title is Munchausen by Pussy."

Sorry, I'm Working Late

If you aren't, such excuses will soon be a thing of the past. Quick ! Switch the phone off ! Mobile GPS tracking is coming.

Death And The Maiden ...

Some bloggers have remarked on the recent amazing scientific discovery that sexually transmitted diseases were - well, transmitted by sex.

Alas despite regular checkups this hideous fact is now being being brought home to the US porn industry. After the deaths of John Holmes and others, the 'industry' became very safety conscious. But no industry involving the intimate exchange of bodily fluids can be totally safe, and there appears to be trouble in paradise with an HIV outbreak among US porn stars.

I'm a bit dubious about this comment from one producer, who said that if a two-month ban on shooting films were called, people 'would continue to shoot underground'. Kinky or what ?

And for those who think that non-penetrative sex is the answer, disturbing news in this somewhat tastelessly titled piece from Japan.

UPDATE - more trouble in paradise.

Happy Birthday

To Adrian Warnock, whose blog is one year old tomorrow. Great Christian site with excellent blog links.

And hello to Faute De Mieux and the wondrously titled Way Of The Intercepting Fisk.

Another Three Months Gone ....

But at last the new City Journal is out.

The great Dalrymple has an opposite view of Islam to Niall Ferguson's. He believes it will wither away in the style of Christianity when exposed to the temptations and fleshpots of the West.

I'm not sure I agree - it's a strange argument for one who chronicles the moral and cultural collapse of the West to use - that the collapsing society (in shorthand sex, drugs and rock'n'roll) will in the long term prove irresistable to 'the religious'. And I think he's writing off Christianity prematurely.

But he's right about the secularisation, in the worst sense, of many Muslim youth. In my hedonistic Bradford youth, the drugs trade was in the hands of whites and Afro-Caribbeans, with the occasional middle-aged Asian businessman importing 'black' or Nepalese hashish. There were very few Asian 'retail' dealers. If, walking late at night in the city, you saw a gang of white kids on one side of the road and a gang of Asians on the other, you'd walk on the side with the Asian kids. They rarely meant trouble.

I spent a few months recently working on an IT project with a young Muslim analyst from a Bradford street near my old house, who told me many young Muslims were now dealing heroin, attracted by the instant wealth and status of a 'gangsta' lifestyle. There were. he said, a lot of guns about.

Dalrymple writes of Winson Green's Muslim prisoners :

"The young Muslim men in prison do not pray; they do not demand halal meat. They do not read the Qu’ran. They do not ask to see the visiting imam. They wear no visible signs of piety: their main badge of allegiance is a gold front tooth, which proclaims them members of the city’s criminal subculture—a badge (of honor, they think) that they share with young Jamaicans, though their relations with the Jamaicans are otherwise fraught with hostility. The young Muslim men want wives at home to cook and clean for them, concubines elsewhere, and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. As for Muslim proselytism in the prison—and Muslim literature has been insinuated into nooks and crannies there far more thoroughly than any Christian literature—it is directed mainly at the Jamaican prisoners. It answers their need for an excuse to go straight, while not at the same time surrendering to the morality of a society they believe has wronged them deeply. Indeed, conversion to Islam is their revenge upon that society, for they sense that their newfound religion is fundamentally opposed to it. By conversion, therefore, they kill two birds with one stone.

But Islam has no improving or inhibiting effect upon the behavior of my city’s young Muslim men, who, in astonishing numbers, have taken to heroin, a habit almost unknown among their Sikh and Hindu contemporaries. The young Muslims not only take heroin but deal in it, and have adopted all the criminality attendant on the trade."

But it's a long way from that observation to the theory that sex, smack and Sky will inevitably sap the strength of Islam. And I prefer a pious Muslim to a smackhead criminal any day.

BBC Fail To Understand

Listening to the World At One on R4, where reporters seemed unable to understand why Chinese people should be kidnapped. After all, China opposed the war, didn't they ?

The other theme of the Iraq report was how much better things would be if the UN were there. After all, they wouldn't be hated like the Americans, would they ?

London Is Safe

From the kind of attack (dirty radiation, suitcase nuclear, major biological) that would make the city uninhabitable. After all, if you're running jihad you need somewhere with decent communications to run it from. And if at the same time you can use the place as a recruitment and training centre, you're quids in.

Offing the local kuffir may be tempting, but why cut off your nose to spite your face ?

Iraq Attacks 'Organised In London'

Make what you will of this Glasgow Sunday Herald report, but there are precedents. For years the Hamas military command was based in London.

The meeting, entitled 'Islamic Movement and Iraq' was instigated by the Iraqi Islamic Party without the knowledge or approval of the US-appointed governing council in Iraq, was subjected to a complete media blackout and held under maximum secrecy.

The Iraqi Islamic party is London-based but works underground in Iraq, and is currently in contact with a number of Iraqi opposition factions inside Iraq to 'come together to stand up to the occupation and its agents'.

'Those present at the meeting asserted that Sunni resistance alone was not enough for turning the balance of power with the occupying forces, so, they agreed to find the necessary means and move the Shiite resistance from peaceful protests to a much more effective role', said the source.

'Some were already resident in the UK, but many travelled from cities in Europe', confirmed the French source.

Asked how, given British security concerns, such movement would have been possible, the source said: 'It would have been easy for some because many represent legitimate moderate Islamic groups, but in reality are connected to militant organisations like Hezbollah to whom they would report back directly'.

There's also a report in Islam Online. According to the BBC the Iraqi Islamic Party have a seat on the Iraqi Governing Council, held by Mohsen Abdel Hamid.

There's a useful link to the various groupings at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

I Can't Decide ...

If this is deliberate or a mistake. The National Front (a small UK far-right party) demonstrated outside Finsbury Park Mosque yesterday, where Abu Hamza (aka Captain Hook) preaches on the pavement each Friday to an audience of far-right Islamists, having been banned from the mosque. Half a dozen news sources, including the Guardian, report the demo as by the National Front. But the Guardian's headline reads "Police step in as BNP rallies at mosque "

UPDATE - Straightforward lies, as in the Guardian above, are one method of attacking the BNP, and I think a counterproductive one. But this method doesn't seem any better - 'vote Tory - we care as much as the BNP do'. Nothing like squarely confronting their ideas and agreeing with them !

UPDATE2 - nine days later the Guardian issue a correction. Not in headlines.

There seems to be some kind of tectonic plate-shifting in British politics of late, perhaps triggered by the scholarly, reasoned work of people like Robert Rowthorn and David Goodhart in Prospect, perhaps by other things. Imagine the furore if a person of pallor in charge of a government budget said that ethnic minority projects which didn't promote a British identity should be scrapped. Yet that's the CRE's current position. Volte-face - sorry, about-turn or what ? And when you get the secretary of the Fabian Society saying 'perhaps Enoch was right', even if only in theory, something has changed. Celebrating diversity doesn't seem to be flavour of the month and people are starting to worry about unity and social cohesion. Not before time.

So the great and the good are suddenly interested in Britishness. Only one problem - rather a serious one. As people like Spiked point out again and again, our ruling class can't agree on a definition any more. They know that 'we British are characterised by racism, genocide, colonialism, sexism and homophobia' isn't a good branding proposition, but that's what they learned back in 1976 sociology class, it's what our children are taught, and it's the only narrative they know.

UPDATE 2 - and right on schedule, here's Munira Mirza on Spiked to tell us about it.

"We need to acknowledge that the crisis of identity is not caused by the strength of Islam, but the weakness of our own society. If we do this, we can begin to realise that the solution starts here, too. If we really want to create a common culture, we need to ask the awkward questions of what our society believes in and be prepared to fight for hearts and minds."

Just so, and just as most of the problems of race in the UK are not caused by ethnic minorities but by the collapse of British culture, of which white liberal self-loathing is one symptom. Walter Williams' words about white American liberals apply to Brits too.

"Americans of European ancestry can stand straight and proud knowing they are without guilt and thus obliged not to act like damn fools in their relationships with Americans of African ancestry."

UPDATE3 - Jennie Bristow, also in Spiked. While the good people there have no answer to "the identity crisis within Western society, brought about by the collapse of common values, national institutions and traditional political solidarities", they certainly describe it brilliantly.

"An elite that is unwilling to make judgements about why any one cultural practice is better than another, to set universal standards about what role individuals should be expected to play across society, and to promote a distinct set of values that a society should agree upon, finds a useful tool in multiculturalism. This is why it has been so well-suited to Western societies in the past few decades, increasingly disorientated by the erosion of cultural and political certainties."

Spiked have no answers. For the Melanie Phillips and Peter Hitchens the answers lie in restoring the values which those of us who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies spent a great deal of time attacking. My personal view is that the cultural destruction may have gone too far to be reversed.

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Times has an answer. Perhaps Al-Muhajiroun aren't so far-fetched after all.

This Will Mean Nothing

To those who aren't aficionados. Taken on the Liberty and Livelihood March in September 2002. It made oi larf.

Reactionary Filth

What would good liberals do without the Mail and the Sun to get their juices flowing ? They'd be lost. It's political porn for the right-on crowd. But I think this Weekly Worker report is a bit too upfront about it.

Of the Sun website, "You can search the online archives for the xenophobic content it is infamous for, but disgracefully you have to pay for access."

For those of you missing a fix of rabid, filthy Sun-on-asylum-seeker action, try this. Isn't it disgraceful the way they're persecuting the poor guy ?

An AL Kennedy Primer

"Forget the mindless celebration of Murdoch's media as Christian tank tracks crush the DMU-irradiated Iraqi baby's skull and Halliburton shares rise on hopes of a cholera outbreak in Basra. Go to work, covet the neighbour's wife's girlfriend, watch the home shopping channel and spend everything you borrowed at exorbitant rates from a bank investing in the pharmaceutical companies that are drowning millions of Africans in their own (unfortunately non-Caucasian) blood. You know it makes sense."

Oh, alright. I made that one up. But I flatter myself that a couple more paragraphs like that, and you have the essence of AL Kennedy's Guardian work. This woman makes John Pilger look like a cautious, analytical sort of chap.

A fixation with blood (good to spill if it's English, otherwise bad), hatred of Christians (hypocritical murderers), reality TV (the new opiate of the people), consumer culture (T.N.O.O.T.P. II), the tabloid press (TNOOTP III), democracy (the deluded peasants keep voting for the wrong guys), above all Bush and Blair. For a good internationalist she has an alarming tendency to believe that a command of English is the mark of a civilised being, and she's not above stereotyping foreigners - seeming, for example, to be unaware of the fact that there are nearly a million Christians in Iraq (note - this originally read 'three million' - got from an old encyclopedia - the exact number seems a little uncertain).

22/8/2000 - "The Edinburgh Festival much increases my hatred of humanity"

29/8/2000 - on computer helplines - "they are exorbitant replacements for free information websites; they are based in foreign countries and haunted by alarming pronunciation mutations" Do we detect a hint of xenophobia ?

17/1/2001 - on rebranding. "Private individuals should model their behaviour on the sparkling examples offered by government and industry. Sadly, the opportunity to poison, swindle, murder and mislead thousands of complete strangers has never come my way". But you can poison their minds as best you may.

2/2/2002 - the online chat. In which we detect a self-aware, courteous and sensitive individual. Maybe the Guardian is where Ms Id comes out to play.

24/8/2002 - Edinburgh is really good, although "Boringly, the cobbles of Auld Reekie are not running with Sassenach blood"

25/11/2002 - Polly Curtis reports - "Renowned Scottish novelist to teach at St Andrews. Speaking to EducationGuardian.co.uk today, she said she intended to work 60 hours a year at the university." Can I have a job there please ?

9/12/2002 - Germany is so civilised that she can address an audience in English. "Two generations ago, they allowed themselves to let racist pride, paranoia and greed force them into appalling crimes on a worldwide scale. Now they're looking at the UK and the US and recognising all the symptoms of the same disease." I wonder if she told her German audience why Bush and Blair are like the Nazis.

10/1/2003 - war turns Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheyney, Kissinger on. I don't know why, but when AL gets down and dirty with middle aged white enemy males it makes me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she just seems to get into it too much. Her dreams she daren't remember - or tell us what she's seen.

"Every woman loves a fascist
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you"


13/2/2003 - war turns Bush and Blair on.

7/5/2003 - Blair prays - "If innocent civilians weren't intended to die, then Thou wouldst have saved them - and made them proper Christians." You see, all Iraqis are Muslim.

10/6/2003 - "Iraqi children are also having fun, scampering about between the cluster bombs"

10/7/2003 - Depleted uranium - our gift to Iraq

13/8/2003 - She's been away to civilised Europe and isn't glad to be home. But it's not long before she's settled in. Add to this the liberation that wasn't, the democracy that isn't and the glee on the New York Stock Exchange when 200 or so imaginatively armed US troops take hours to kill four Iraqis (one of them a teenager) and you'll realise that we're living in a world of fun.. I think we're referring to the deaths of a teenager with a Kalashnikov and two renowned psychopathic murderers. So unfair of those Americans not to give them a sporting chance.

14/8/2003 - At the Edinburgh Festival, where "the most important, moving event so far has been a reading and discussion from Anthony Swofford .... a marine in the "first" Gulf war, (who) explained how his feelings would not allow him to be a marine now. "

Funny how caring liberals never consider that a war counts unless the west is involved. The First Gulf War was of course fought between Iran and Iraq. Over a million died. Bush Senior's war was the Second and Bush Junior's the Third. No matter.

10/9/2003 - counting pints of Iraqi blood. For a full fisking click here.

8/11/2003 - how to be a writer. Miraculously, no depleted uranium nor hatred of Bush/Christians/reality TV appears to be required.

20/12/2003 - What new topic will she write about today, we wonder ? The legendary plastic Thanksgiving turkey trots out.

7/1/2004 - "let's not even talk about Gulf war syndrome and depleted uranium". If only.

10/1/2004 - on her countrymen, "administrators and cannon fodder for the empire, enthusiastic slave traders and killers with a centuries-long tradition of lunacy and genocide"

Ms Kennedy is certainly following one of those traditions.

11/2/2004 - "you've got to justify every drop of blood spilled by US and UK foreign policy. Don't think of mercy or justice."

18/3/2004 - "turning Iraq into an almost inconceivable hell ..." As compared to the conceivable hell of the previous Iraqi administration ?

7/4/2004 - "we didn't want to evaporate Iraqi civilians or irradiate Afghan infants, but our government made sure we still did. "

An Afternoon With Tony Martin

How did I miss this ? Sean Gabb on meeting a modern martyr, among other things.

Over by the Countryside Alliance stall, I fell into conversation with an old woman. She was 87, and had lost her husband and both brothers in the War. One of her sons was settled in America with his family. But another had a farm in Oxfordshire. He had been threatened repeatedly by intruders. He had lost crops and machinery to them. The Police had told him they were unable to help, but had warned him not to "take the law into his own hands". She was safe in her own home. She had good neighbours who kept an eye on her. But she looked about her with quiet despair. "I have been coming to this fair and to others like it all my life" she said. "I used to think it would go on forever - always changing with the times, but continuing generation after generation. It will see me out, I suppose. But I don't believe it will go on much after that. You should think yourself lucky you have seen it while you can. There will be nothing for your children. They will have neither country nor freedom. Sometimes nowadays, I almost regret I survived the bombing."

If The Victim Hadn't Been White ....

Would this be all over BBC News ? Must have missed it.

UPDATE - On reflection there must be some other factors at work here than simply liberal white self-hatred. This particularly disgusting murder didn't get big air either despite the alleged perpetrators being persons of pallor. Yet a few years back you couldn't listen to Today or open the Indie or Guardian without reading about Ricky Reel or those two poor guys from Telford who may or may not have committed suicide. Are racist attacks last year's thing for news editors ? Seems unlikely. So what's going on ? Don't you just hate it when the facts refuse to fit your preconceptions ?

Here We Go Again ....

PM to stage immigration summit. "Blair takes control of immigrant crisis". Blair calls immigration summit. Blair targets prolific criminals. Oh - sorry. That last one is the latest from the BBC's 'crime crackdown' archive.

I think Blair's left this one a bit late for the spin treatment (although the BBC can be relied upon to stay on-message. Remember, the BBC will only attack a Labour Government from the left).

Especially when he's in it up to his neck.

UPDATE - it gets worse and worse. Even such a cynic as I can't quite believe the unique blend of dishonesty and incompetence.

It's entertaining to see that Andrew Rawnsley can't get his head round this. It's "a relatively minor controversy". Beverley Hughes was rated by Alice Mahon and the Lib Dems. What was all the fuss about ?

It could have been worse though. Ms Hughes could have been replaced by Millie Tant.

Islamofascism ?

BNP leader Nick Griffin in the Spectator (registration required).

"I’m not necessarily saying that our ways are superior to those of Islam. In many ways they do things better than us, in my opinion. For example, they’ll cut the hands off five or six thieves a year, and as a result virtually none of their elderly folk are burgled in their own home by some scumbag who pushes them over and they die from shock a year later. So we’re squeamish about five scumbags having their hands cut off, and we’re not at all squeamish about hundreds of our pensioners dying in misery as a result of a few scumbags running around. Islam can teach us a lot."

Trouble is I think I agree with him. Scarier still, in a Weekly Worker item on the roots of Hamas ideology, I agree (mostly) with this, by Sayyid Qutb, executed theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood. And with one or two caveats I think Melanie Phillips would agree too.

" ... [the] family provides the environment under which human values and morals develop and grow in the new generation; these values and morals cannot exist apart from the family unit. If, on the other hand, free sexual relationships and illegitimate children become the basis of a society, and if the relationship between man and woman is based on lust, passion and impulse, and the division of work is not based on family responsibility and natural gifts; if woman’s role is merely to be attractive, sexy and flirtatious, and if woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children; and if, on her own or under social demand, she prefers to become a hostess or a stewardess in a hotel or ship or air company, thus using her ability for material productivity rather than the training of human beings, because material production is considered to be more important, more valuable and more honourable than the development of human character, then such a civilisation is ‘backward’ from the human point of view ..."

Not that there's anything wrong with lust, passion and impulse, mind you. They have their place in a well-ordered society. I hope. Goodnight.

Phew - She's Gone

I had that woman's card marked ever since an interview she did on the Today Programme three years back. As this website says :

"Junior minister Beverley Hughes, now thankfully moved, put up a display on the Radio 4 'Today' programme which boded ill for the future. Interviewed on 17th August 2001 with Frances Crook of the Howard League on the subject of the prison population, she seemed not to have been briefed. Jack Straw - who, if he couldn't 'walk the walk' could certainly 'talk the talk', would have made mincemeat of Ms Crook's arguments. Earlier in the year, when the usual 'highest imprisonment rate in Europe' question came up, Mr Straw fired straight back that he was more concerned about the highest CRIME RATE in Europe that was a direct cause of the imprisonment. Ms Hughes, faced with the same question, floundered hopelessly."

The mighty Littlejohn says it all :

"The truth is quite simple. Labour's policy is to allow in anyone who wants to come here while talking tough and pretending to enforce strict immigration controls.

When rumbled, they tell lies, fiddle the figures and smear their critics. "

Painted with a broad brush, but not unreasonable.

PS - don't expect too much of Ken Sutton's proposed report, if his first one is anything to go by.

"in none of the periods I have examined have I found evidence of the practice amounting, literally, to one of granting every case. Sheffield staff continued to refuse cases even during the period covered by the most recent guidance."

That's a bit like saying the good news is Harold Shipman didn't kill all his patients.

New Home Office Migration Scandal

Who Says That Minorities Can't Integrate Successfully ?

From BBC News 'Have Your Say' page.

I think the government has lost it. I am a 2nd generation Bradfordian. The number of new faces I see in Bradford city centre - all eastern Europeans has significantly increased over the past few years. I lose over £600 from my pay packet every month in taxes and when I go to the post office I see queues of eastern European queuing for state handouts without having contributed anything to society. Is there any wonder that there is quiet discontent in the country?

Tendukar Gill, Bradford

You Won't See This In The Guardian

What happens to taxpayers 'investment in communities'.

Aston Pride was formed in June 2000, under the Government's New Deal for Communities initiative, with the aim of tackling crime, poverty and unemployment in one of the country's poorest inner city areas.

By March 2003 the Aston Pride board, which had achieved little, was disbanded on the orders of the Regeneration Minister and replaced by a new delivery partnership.

The scrutiny report warned: "The board of the Aston Pride partnership was plagued with mistrust and hostility that eventually left it dysfunctional and ineffective, despite the commitment and passion of its members.

"It became a battleground between conflicting interests rather than the centre of effort on the huge task of transforming Aston.

"Members of the board lacked the experience, skills and understanding necessary for the effective leadership and direction of a complex £54 million ten-year regeneration programme, and were not provided with effective training and support to assist them in their onerous task."

Oh well. They'd probably only got through £15 million or so before being disbanded. Plenty more where that came from.

UPDATE - I recommend NewStart magazine - most entertaining.