Consider the question begged

Moliere, begging the question earlier today

There are many misused phrases in modern journalism. Journalists of all stripes really should know better. If you work with words, you should respect the protocols that come with the creative use of language. Don't mix metaphors. Don't split infinitives. Avoid, or at the very least embellish, cliche. And for heaven's sake understand what a phrase or literary device means before you use it, grasp its function and make sure it is playing its correct part in your sentence or paragraph. One misuse is driving me up the fuzzy tree just at the moment.

'Begging the question', is the trope in question, and modern journalists have lost sight of its original meaning. Examples.

'A charity cannot account for one million pounds. This begs the question, what happened to the money?'

No, it doesn't. It suggests or prompts the question. 'Begging the question' means to restate the question in lieu of an answer. A classic example is provided by one of the characters in Moliere, the great French playwright, when a doctor is asked why a particular potion causes the drinker to go to sleep. 'It has', pronounces the doctor, 'dormative qualities'. The doctor has done nothing but reiterate the question using synonymic language. That is begging the question.

But a begged question is moving centre-stage. Adults are suddenly dying, for no apparent reason, and this phenomenon is being referred to as 'Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS)'. This bland, anodyne, meaningless and question-begging invention is doubtless intended to give a name to something the authorities would rather not be named. An alternative diagnosis, for example, might be 'Post-Vaccine Death Syndrome'. This would be presumptuous, as is the title of SADS. A syndrome has more than one causal factor. What frightens the authorities, so much so that they have unleashed the attack dogs of big tech, is that the vaccine might be the single cause of death.

For many months now, perfectly fit young athletes have been dropping dead all over the globe. Deaths with no apparent cause have spiked since the start of this year, Birth rates have tumbled too, incidentally, that decline starting almost exactly nine months after the first wave of vaccines.

Vaccines are supposed to be tested for years and it feels like the various ones on show were trialled for about 20 minutes. In the UK, the first compensation has been paid out to people who have lost loved ones after vaccination, so there is an admission that could open international floodgates.

Of course, although governments will say that this compensation will be paid from 'government money', as though it really was their gift and not taxpayer money of which government is, or should be, merely the steward. The drug companies must be forced to pay this compensation. They made extreme and obscene profits from the misery of others during the pandemic. This suggests - never begs - the question as to whether they have even the scraps and tatters of humanity.

A rose in Spanish Harlem

 

Republican Congresswoman Mayra Flores

Occasionally a politician emerges who is not a product of the Washington machine, Donald Trump being the prime example. But a modest record was set last week by a woman who looks the real deal, with the caveat that we all know how politicians love to fool us, exchanging optics for reality.

Mayra Flores is the first sitting Congresswoman (representing Texas' 34th District) to have been born in Mexico, which she was, to migrant farmworkers. Her family moved to the USA when she was six and she gained citizenship at 14. Her husband is an ICE border guard.

She brings two things to the job. Firstly, she is a refreshingly honest and authentic personality. Secondly, her victory reminds - or should remind - the GOP that time spent chasing the black vote is time wasted (it was for Trump in 2020), and it is the Hispanic bloc that could well decide any future Presidential Election.

Where blacks have more or less guaranteed their vote as a bloc to the Democrats, the Hispanic vote has always been very much up for grabs, and the salient point is that Hispanics are very much not in alignment with the ideology of America's ruling class.

In a shameless neo-Stalinist manner, the American establishment has attacked the nuclear family since the 1960s. Single parenthood has been encouraged and incentivised, there is no natural respect for the elders of the clan, and families are treated as though they are one of Mao Tse Tung's 'Four olds'.

This does not sit well with Hispanics. They are almost all Roman Catholics, with a strong family ethos, which very much includes the grandparents.

Next, the whole 'woke' agenda is not going to fly with Latinos. Attitudes towards homosexuality and transgenderism are not the same in Caracas and Guatemala City as they are in Manhattan, and Hispanic parents are going to be even less forgiving of the current regime of sexual and gender indoctrination than their white counterparts.

LatinX. About 5% of Latinos have even heard heard of this stupid, clunky phrase, and even fewer use it. It was produced by some pampered academic woman from the safety of her tenure, and you can forgive Hispanics for flipping the bird to gringos on this one.

Church. The church is another institution under fire from the liberal progressives, and again that is not going to please Hispanics. Multiculturalism means the different cultures get to practice their beliefs, and just because the government thinks it is well on the way to banning the church for white Christians, it will find Latinos a tougher prospect, more of a church militant.

One of Trump's problems was that he focused on Latinos as gang-bangers, MS-13 members, Fentanyl smugglers, gun runners and general nogoodniks. He forgot about the Hispanic work ethic, the centrality of family and church, the natural community spirit. If he runs again, he would do well to remember it next time, and play to them rather than waste his time trying to court a black vote which is not his to court. Hispanics will respond to a little conservatism.

And keep an eye on Mayra Flores, as she is a flower still blooming.

Apocalypse soon?

How far are we from dustbowl 2.0?

One thing you can rely on concerning government is that if there is a complete financial breakdown coming, they will not tell you until the very last minute. They will then spend time explaining how it was everyone's fault but theirs. Then, when the inevitable societal breakdown comes, they will fail to police the inner cities, leaving those inside to fend for themselves like some science-fiction movie. It is said that we are only ever ten days away from anarchy.

And unless the signs are misleading, there is a complete financial breakdown coming. And this is not 1929. The economies of the West are phenomenally more complex than they were just before the dustbowl, and the fractures and fissures will be correspondingly more serious.

This eventuality is why the American government is trying to sideline the Second Amendment and take away the guns of honest Americans. The last thing the deep state wants during a crisis of this magnitude is a well-armed militia, as detailed in the Second Amendment. It wants an unarmed, compliant population of serfs happy to eat bugs and powerless to do anything about power outages, gasoline shortages, and gangs. They can't have the public trying to defend itself.

If it does become a question of the survival of the fittest (in the physical not the Darwinian sense), then we will see the advantage that has accrued to the preppers, the civilian militia, the backwoodsmen, the hewers and drawers of water. In an urban hellscape in which you have to fight your way to what is left of the store, a graphic designer is going to fare less well than a Proud Boy.

And when bartering begins, those who have stocked up will effectively have savings. It is time to be like the ant in Aesop's tale, who toiled away during the summer months and had provision for winter, and not the grasshopper, who spent summer playing his music in the glorious sunshine, and when the winter came had nothing.

The supreme court, earlier today

Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health could have been just another workaday dispute, but it led to the biggest supreme court ruling for many years. The overturning of Roe v Wade, a ruling upheld for 49 years, means the decision of whether to make abortion legal or illegal devolves to the states rather than central government. This makes it a double win, it would seem.

Obviously it is a victory for 'pro-lifers'. Whether for religious reasons or based on another moral system, those who believe that abortion should be a last resort, and limited to those who have been rape or incest victims, or where a serious birth defect has been detected.

But it is also a victory for proponents of small government. That said, the Venn diagram for these two groups would show a pretty large overlap, if not a complete overlay. Central government and its increasing power is one of the real 'challenges'. we hear so much about, only the challenge is not to the governments but to the people they govern. Ronald Reagan famously said that the most frightening nine words in the language were, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'.

The reactions were all-too-predictable. Pro-lifers are overjoyed, and showed their approval in the usual decent, sober, reasonable way. Pro-abortionists acted like people who should be strait-jacketed, medicated, and thrown into a rubber room.

What is it with the Left? They live in a state of constant rage, waiting only for something to trigger it and take it to the next incandescent level. And it doesn't matter what the current issue is. Transgenderism. Gun laws. Roe v Wade. Just make these people aware of it, and that it hasn't gone their way, and stand back. You have just thrown a lit match into a box of fireworks. It is reminiscent of the famous line from the early Brando movie The Wild One.

"What are you rebelling against, Johnny?"

"Waddya got?"

In all the fire and fury of social media debate, all the TV punditry and op-ed pieces, and the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, there is one aspect of the whole abortion debate that has not been stressed. Why are people not educated to realise that abortion is not just another form of contraception, just along the shelf from the condoms these people didn't use, or like the birth-control pill, convenient, there when you want it, and very much in keeping with the modern disposable consumer lifestyle?

There have been threats of violence, as you would expect, and it could be only a matter of time before a judge is killed. Antifa are a serious organization, organized and extremely violent. They have shown this often, and the truly frightening thing is that the police have never tried to stop them in any meaningful sense.

America's civili war 2.0 is hotting up.

Jan 6 committee hearings well below par

A golf ball, earlier today

The January 6 committee hearings dominated the American media (with the notable exception of Fox News) to such an extent that the only comparison which can be made is with the former Soviet Union's newspaper Pravda. The word means 'truth' in Russian, but because a state-sponsored media outlet is the only one available, it does not mean that what it contains is necessarily true.

It was, apparently, full, live, and unutterably tedious, as the first TV company to blink switched to the US Masters. Now, I apologise to any golfers out there, but it the case that a poll found 70% of TV viewers find golf the most boring sport to watch.

If you think that's bad, in the UK we have darts on TV.

At least it's not Fentanyl

A quick addendum to a recent episode in which I discussed the growing problem of Fentanyl overdoses killing users.

I then watched a couple of pieces on American TV about a company providing all the paraphernalia for a good, old-fashioned vape.

But not from a company called Juul, who the FDA effectively ran out of town, ordering the company to remove all their products from all the retail outlets they do - did - business with. The only way you will be able to buy a Juul fake ciggy now is on the street. As if that would ever happen. Oh, wait.

These vaping units have indeed began to appear in the hands of street criminals selling them on the black market, if you are still allowed to call it that. Well, I thought. It could be worse. At least it's not Fentanyl.

Then I saw a random piece - always go random on YouTube, just for a bit - which featured a woman called Pam Bondi, apparently the ex-Attorney General of Florida. She shed more light on how the gangs worked, how they obtained the goods, and one other thing. What was it? Oh yes, I remember. It has to do with the capsule required to make your vaper live. Dealers are getting hold of those, too.

And they are putting Fentanyl in them.

A mad world, my masters.

Business principles v free speech

 

The master of business principles

Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter seems to be going through the form. Musk is obviously a consummate businessman, and he applied a basic principle to his bid, which is that the board are beholden to the shareholders. This is why they voted unanimously to accept Musk's $44 billion offer.

Predictably, the Left are having conniptions because they fear the freedom of speech Musk would introduce to the platform. It is alarming to watch Leftists melting down over what should be a straightforward liberty. I think some people in the democratic West might be happier living in China or North Korea.

Of course, what spooks the horses for the Left is not that folk will be free to speak their minds, but that they will wriggle free of the constrictions they would like to place on anyone who disagrees with them. Control, power, coercion. These people are practically Stalinists.

Musk has also announced his intention to get rid of fake accounts and bots, in other words to clean house. This type of healthy approach to business should be emulated, not criticised. Twitter is a huge concern, and if Musk can put it in order then it will be a victory both for free speech and for business efficiency. So many businesses are sloppy, and Musk clearly has no time for that. Perhaps he should be put in charge of the Federal Reserve.

He has also made an interesting prediction, that there will be a financial collapse lasting up to 18 months, and that far from being a disaster, this is both necessary and will be a good thing. Partly this is because companies who use resources inefficiently will go to the wall, but a financial meltdown will also reform the absurd welfare systems that exists across the West.

Musk was a hero to the Left all the time he was producing electric vehicles. Now, he is a threat, and you will see the media - mostly Leftist shills - turn on him in the months to come.

Cool in the pool

 

A woman, earlier today

The world governing body for the sport of swimming has finally struck out for the shores of sanity. After the fuss about Lia Thomas, a biological man who claims to be a woman, FINA (actually a French acronym) has banned such chaps from competing against women. It is to be wished that other sports will follow. But it is important to understand exactly what is happening here.

The recent absurd situations in which public figures from the British Opposition Leader, Sir Keir Starmer, to American Supreme Court Justice nominees don't seem to be able to define the word 'woman' has nothing to do with their grasp of biology. Rather, it is a compound of coercion and fear.

The demand that this absurdity, whereby a man can 'become a woman' simply by stating he is, has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with epistemology.

The Left are not interested in transgenderism in itself, but in telling both those in power and those controlled by the powerful that they will name reality as they are instructed to name it. Power and control are two sides of the same coin, and the value of that coin is coercion.

If you can change reality, you have genuine power. This is the meaning of the end of George Orwell' s 1984. When O'Brien shows Winston Smith four fingers and explains to him that Smith can see five, Smith does not agree merely to save his life. That is what he actually sees.

If you can change reality in the framework of individual experience, you control that person. I wonder if the world swimming body knows that it is not merely changing rules but dealing in metaphysics. I imagine they do. They are French, after all.

Fall guy

 

Sleepy Joe. Bumblin' Biden. can't finish a sentence. Stumbles about like a drunk at a carnival. We all know the form. But I am not buying it.

Oh, I think that cognitively he is failing, but it looks intentional to me. If the American deep state puts an old man like this in charge, they have done it intentionally.

Biden's gaffes and howlers take the media eye off the ball, and there is always a reason for that. Hey, everyone. Don't look at gas prices or MS-13 coming over the border, watch ol' Joe falling off his bicycle. Also, don't whatever you do look at his son.

Does anyone believe that a competent government press office would have let Biden take a bike ride in front of the massed media unless they wanted him to fall off or take some kind of tumble? Of course not.

It is a similar situation with Kamala Harris. She is obviously utterly useless. If the Democrats wanted someone competent who ticked the diversity boxes, they could have had Tulsi Gabbard.

No, this is all a red herring, I'm afraid. Biden will continue to stumble about, and Harris to cackle, while the economy collapses. Watch the other hand.

Fighting talk

 

A British army officer, earlier today

General Sir Patrick Sanders is the new chief of staff of the British Army. I suppose it is a relief that his opening address to the troops did not stress the importance of transgenderism or using your commanding officer's preferred pronouns. What he did say, however, is even more ominous.

He told his soldiers to prepare for the possibility of land war in Europe, stating the following,

"I am the first Chief of the General Staff since 1941 to take command of the Army in the shadow of a land war in Europe involving a continental power. Russia's invasion of Ukraine underlines our core purpose - to protect the UK by being ready to fight and win wars on land".

Anyone who understands the European Union, Vladimir Putin, and the role of the United Kingdom in this conflict will see that these statements lack integrity. Let's start with Putin.

A lot of nonsense gets talked about this man. He is undoubtedly a bastard, but no one ever got a job with the Soviet Union's not-so-secret police, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (a bit of a mouthful - we know them as the KGB) by being a nice guy. But I have heard respected American commentators describe Putin as 'the ex-head of the KGB'. He was no such thing.

Putin was a middle-ranking KGB officer who was posted to Germany early in his career and wanted to go to Berlin for the nightlife. Instead, he was posted to Dresden, a city so boring that the British tried to bomb it off the map in World War 2. He never got over the perceived snub, and has been working out his resentment ever since. Never underestimate a frustrated man who has even a tiny bit of power.

His invasion of Ukraine is being presented as some sort of European power grab. Again, this is nonsense on stilts. He wants Ukraine because he feels it is a part of Russia, the same reason China wants Taiwan, exactly the same reason, in fact, and the Chinese will be watching the action in Europe with their usual inscrutable interest. Putin doesn't want Finland or Byelorussia or Azerbaijan, and the idea that the British Army is somehow defending the UK from this new Peter the Great is just absurd.

So, why is General Sanders so exercised about the possibility of land war? Essentially, because the EU wants him to be. The fact that the European Union wants an EU army is no secret. The fly in the ointment is that the British Army - still regarded as the best troops on the planet - left the bloc along with the Brexit vote. So, they are being called in not to protect London against Putin's tanks - which would require a longer haul than even Napoleon made in the opposite direction - but as a sign that Britain will do the EU's bidding. There is another aspect to this, and a seriously unsavoury one.

War, as the song goes. What is it good for? Well, two answers spring immediately to mind. Firstly, profits for arms manufacturers, always a motive force behind war. Secondly, a bloody good war deflects and distracts the public's attention from the decline and fall of the British empire.

Putin is not Hitler. Adolf wanted lebensraum for the German people, room to live, who he felt to be superior to all other races. It's all in the book My Struggle, the accepted English translation of Mein Kampf. This book, incidentally, is a long read - and don't read it on the beach - but worth your time if only as a study in psychosis.

Putin does not want this for Russia, which is the largest country on the planet, covering 11% of the earth's land mass. He wants what he thinks is his. Why should Britain be so concerned? The British Army couldn't care less about Eritrea, where essentially the same thing is happening.

If there is land war in Europe, and Putin has to be stopped, why do the British have to rush over from the farthest point West from Vladivostok before Ireland, next stop being the USA? I suppose there is one answer. You can't exactly rely on Sweden to do it.

There's a killer on the road (from Mexico)

 

A pharmacist, earlier today

Despite the horrors the media-junkie (such as myself) finds every day, it takes a lot to shock me. I seem to have developed a second immune system which inures me to some of the stories that used to make my head reel and my stomach retch. It could just be that it is a sort of psychical adjunct to my ordinary immune system (pleasingly robust as it has been over the years) and designed to keep one's blood pressure down. But I read, and heard, something this last week that staggered me.

It concerned the number one killer of people aged 18 to 45 in the USA. My immediate suspects were obvious. Auto accidents? Firearms? Suicide? If it is anything like the UK, even domestic mishaps could have a chance at top slot. You would be surprised at the amount of people who die falling off ladders in the kitchen or attempting to do their own re-wiring. But is was none of the above.

It's Fentanyl overdose.

Note I don't write 'drug overdose'. This is specifically the drug Fentanyl, although street drugs are usually the delivery system of death.

Fentanyl was synthetically produced in the 1970s and originally designed as an anaesthetic for use during surgery. Now, it is both the ultimate street drug as well as being the angel of death for many as lungs collapse and hearts stop.

Fentanyl is increasingly being found in every street drug from cocaine to heroin to Xanax, and overdoses have quadrupled in the last two years.

The first question here has to do with basic business economics. Now, I am no businessman and can barely haggle for mangoes at the local Feria, but even I can see that killing your customer base is perhaps not a four-square business model. But, hey, when demand is high, piggy goes to market.

Fentanyl is shockingly powerful. The average coke addict would have to snort a hell of a lot to wind up in the morgue. With Fentanyl, a few grains will send you to the country from which no traveller ever returns. The government - always traditionally ready with a war on drugs - make this their top priority, right? Wrong.

In the past month, the White House has let us know that they are pushing for an Asian-Pacific museum, they have made a number of bathrooms on Capitol hill gender neutral, and Kamala Harris is being made some sort of online Tsar (Tsarina?) with a brief to stop cyber-bullying.

Harris, of course, was famously put in charge of the southern border between Texas and Mexico. She visited once, some quiet sleepy town about 800 miles from the hot-spots on the Rio Grande where thousands of illegal immigrants cross into the land of the free every day.

Many of them carrying Fentanyl.

The famous English politician Sir Enoch Powell once stated that the job of the politician was the prevention of avoidable evils. The only possible conclusion to draw from the fact that America's borders are Fentanyl portals is that they are quite happy with the death rate. Gender-neutral toilets in the West Wing are, I think we can all agree, more important than dead people dying from a drug which could be apprehended at the point of entry.

At what exact point will the American people realise that their government doesn't just want them subservient, in some cases they want them dead?

Shot, hung, or knighted

 

Lord Byron, earlier today

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one likes a mercenary except the government they are fighting for. The British mercenaries who fought in the Belgian Congo in the early to mid 1960s, for example, were widely despised at home. Fighting for your nation is honourable. Fighting for someone else's money is not.

However, a number of young British men went to fight in and for Ukraine when Putin invaded that country over three months ago. Far from being dismissed or dissuaded by the British government, however, they were encouraged.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss gave her blessing to young British men with a Flashman-style taste for swashbuckling adventure when the invasion first happened. She was warned that this implicit call to arms was both unethical and very probably illegal, but anyone wishing to virtue-signal at that time needed to look no further than the Ukraine, despite the fact that the country is a nasty and fascistic little regime. Putin is more than welcome to it.

Now, however, there is silence from the Foreign Office for the simple reason that some of these British guns for hire have been captured by the Russians and, rather than being given a comfortable jail cell in St. Petersburg, with a nice bunk and a warm samovar full of chai, they are going to be executed.

What the hell did they expect? As a matter of fact, pro-Putin Ukrainian separatists are going to the be the ones putting on the show trial before the two men are likely put up against a wall and shot. Putin is out-sourcing his death squads.

Putin is not a nice guy. Neither is Ukraine's Premier, Zelensky. If it were a sports game, you would want both sides to lose. But don't travel thousands of miles to fight for a country which is not yours and expect lenient treatment if you are stupid enough to fall into enemy hands. I don't imagine Putin has the Geneva Convention framed on the wall of his Kremlin office.

I feel no sympathy for these men, who really should have paid more attention to Lord Byron's lines on the subject.

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home

Let him combat for that of his neighbours.

Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,

And get knock'd on the head for his labours.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,

And is always as nobly requited.

Then battle for freedom wherever you can,

And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted.

Sorry gentleman but, in another age, Hunter S. Thompson did say, buy the ticket take the ride.

Crosstown traffic

 

The Mexican flag, which a lot of Californians

will have to get used to. Just not in the way that you think...

When the American government tells you that inflation is at 8.6%, take that with a pinch of salt. The Fed has changed its measurement of inflation on an absurd amount of occasions, each one designed to fool you into feelgood, or at least not feelbad. The calibration has altered something like 30 times in 4 decades.

The inflation rate for the average American, interested in buying staples and gasoline, could be up to twice as high. And this is leading to a migration which may come as some surprise given the current crisis on the Texan border and the direction in which the immigrants are arriving in record numbers.

Californians are beginning to leave their state for - wait for it - Mexico. The main reasons being given are the rising cost of living in the US, especially in high-tax California.

Apparently undeterred that in some Mexican towns it is not impossible that you will find the head of a slain drug cartel member in your trash-can, increasing numbers of Californians are financially downscaling by moving to Mexico. This is producing a bizarre situation in which, while thousands of Mexicans are wading across the Rio Grande towards Texas, Californians are passing them on the freeway overhead heading in the opposite direction.

I have said to anyone who is prepared to listen that property where I am (Costa Rica) might be worth some investment, as a lot of gringos will be fleeing when the US inflation rate hits that of Zimbabwe, Venezuela, or The Weimar Republic.

The Biden administration can try to divert your attention from climbing prices (which are also now hitting Latin America, so it won't be the low-rent Shangri-La it used to be), but there comes a time when a family has to relocate, one of the founding traditions of the USA. Once the Fed hikes rates - an inevitability - it will hammer the housing market (as well as pricing a lot of Mexicans out of their properties, although landlords will prosper when the first wave of gringos arrives) and as increasing immigration hobbles wages in the USA, it may be better to start those Spanish lessons now.

One word of warning. If you do take the high road to Acapulco, it might be best to take some rosary beads and a Kevlar jacket.

I am the law

 

A judge considering British immigration police, earlier today

The British government has been prevented, literally at the last minute, from removing illegal immigrants to the African nation of Rwanda for the processing of their asylum applications. Despite British judges at the The Royal Courts of Justice (Britain's supreme court) ruling the first flight legal, this ruling was overturned by judges at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg.

I know what you're thinking. What about Brexit? Well, that was only the European Union (EU). The union remains firmly tethered to the ECHR, and these two entities are two sides of the same malevolent coin.

This seems embarrassing for the government of Boris Johnson, but it is all smoke and mirrors. The anarcho-tyrannists of the British deep state want more immigration, as illegal as possible, because they know they are managing decline and need as many distractions as they can conjure up. This will keep the media busy for days while everyone forgets about Johnson's recent scandals and his unconvincing 'victory' in a Parliamentary vote of no confidence (a sort of equivalent of an American recall vote, but with the voting limited to party members).

Illegal immigrants, almost all Muslim men of fighting age, continue to pour into Britain. The country's health services are already under strain after COVID-19, none of these men are tested and none have passports (they throw them into the English Channel from the boats they arrive in). They are immediately given money and telephones, then housed in good hotels.

The ECHR may still be the law, but how long before the British people decide they have had enough and take the law into their own hands?

Power to or from the people?

 

Aristotle discussing democracy earlier today

The Congressional hearings concerning the laughably named 'insurrection' in Washington on January 6, 2021 (which have been compared to Pearl Harbour, 9/11, and the American Civil War by deranged Democrats) have featured one word probably used as much as the definite article. This 'attack', we are told by the Pelosi-Schumer political street gang, are 'an attack on democracy'.

Democracy. If I have heard that word once on the American media in the last week, I have heard it a thousand times. I wonder if these chuckleheads know the provenance of the word.

Like so many terms which still make actual sense, it is an Ancient Greek portmanteau word. 'Demos' means 'the people', 'kratos' means 'power'. Democracy implies that power resides with the people. Increasingly, in America and across the West, this is coming to mean power to the right people, the ones who think - and vote - in approved ways,.

It is quite clear that the Democrats (who despise America) are using the Jan 6 detainees as fall guys and gals. Many are still in jail, while the BLM rioters who burned down police stations and actually killed people during the rioting they fomented were mostly released quietly when the media had stopped looking, which was pretty quickly.

The Democrats are even called 'the Democrats', but more and more they wish to remove both First and Second Amendment rights. With every day that passes, power is being drained from ordinary Americans (at least, the ones who have voted the wrong way) like blood from a vampire's victim. I know I bang this drum a lot, but this cannot end well, and there will be blood.

If people fail to hold on to the reins of their nations, those horses will become an increasing menace to their well-being. When ordinary, conservative Americans have no guns and no free speech, it will be much, much too late.

It is time for real Democrats to take control of the chariot.

America. Home of the knave?

Peter Navarro. Clap 'im in irons, Mr. Christian!

Something strange is happening in the USA. This country, the first experiment in democracy in the world and by far the most successful, is turning in on itself and eating not just its young, but its founding principles of freedom, liberty, and a country founded on constitutional rights.

In the last week, the January 6th committee hearings, the FBI's purging of conservative elements in its ranks, and the extraordinary arrest of economist and ex-Trump advisor Peter Navarro, have served only to confirm that a deep-state putsch has gone from warm to hot.

Navarro lives more or less opposite the offices of the FBI. When he was arrested for failing to respond to a subpoena to attend the Jan 6 hearings concerning the events which are laughably termed 'an insurrection', a deliberate spectacle was made of his arrest. The Feds could have strolled across the street, had a coffee with Navarro, and invited him to come over for a chat. He is hardly going to go on the lam. Instead, they trussed him in handcuffs and leg-irons - they really did - in a public place. The Left are getting serious now. Look up the French phrase from the Revolution of 1789, pour encourager les autres, and all will be revealed. The deep state is starting to show conservatives what it can and will do.

America is moving inexorably to a civil war. They won't be wearing grey or blue this time, but suits and wing-tips and dark glasses.

At what point did the American political class begin to hate the country whose libertarian system put them where they are? It is happening in Europe too, and as mentioned in yesterday's episode, those who resist this type of self harm, and express love of country and people instead of the new agenda of anarcho-tyranny, are despised by the various deep states operating across the globalist West.

If they are not trying to foment American Civil War 2.0, then as we used to say in England, I'm a Dutchman. There is a fractious feeling about the USA at the moment. There has been an accelerant poured on the bonfire over the last two years - partly hidden behind the smokescreen of COVID, an entirely manufactured crisis - and it is not hard to see what the play is.

If the American Left were hell-bent on destroying the country that used to lead the world, you know, like the conspiracy theorists claim, what would they be doing any differently?

If the breakdown comes - or rather when - there will be an overload and the wild animals will be let into the arena to face the gladiators. I don't believe the US deep state realises how many people are out there packing heat and prepared to defend the ranch. Let a thousand Ruby Ridges bloom...

Be very careful, O American Left. You may despise your country like some poor self-harming gal cutting her own arms, but you could well be kicking a hornets' nest.

And the Pelosis and the Schumers and the Joy Reids may find out that they are about to reap the whirlwind.

Hungary for success

 

Hungary's Prime Minister, Viktor Orban

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a thorn in the flesh of the European Union. Here, in TakiMag, I explain why.

Political theatre

Sir Robert Walpole, Great Britain's

first Prime Minister, in the 17th century.

Those of us who pay close attention to politics are well aware that there is a large element of theatre involved. Parts are played, speeches are made, and the actors walk the stage. It's like Shakespeare but without the genius, and certainly without any pleasure for the people at large, which the Bard certainly provided.

The latest act in Great Britain's tragi-comedy is the vote of no confidence in Conservative leader yesterday and, therefore, Prime Minister, Alexander Johnson, better known by his middle name of 'Boris'. (Actually, it's only one of his middle names. The other one is Pfeffel, which sounds like a French cake).

Under the rules of Britain's Conservative Party, the leadership can be challenged if a sufficient number of the Party's MPs (Members of Parliament, the representatives of their respective regions) write to a body called the 1922 Committee, who I suppose should be celebrating some kind of anniversary, although they don't look like the partying type). 

Johnson clung on, although not convincingly, with 41% of the 359 Conservative MPs voting against him. The rules of the party mean that there can be no further challenge to his leadership for a year. I doubt he will last that long, not because he will be deposed, but because he will get bored. Politics - once memorably described as 'pop music for ugly people', although I forget by whom - is a game which only entertains busy minds for so long. Also, politicians thrive on adoration, and increasingly they are getting less and less as ordinary people (despised and yet needed by the political class) are starting to cotton on that this whole scam is a cross between a gravy train and a Ponzi scheme.

The famous British comedy series, Blackadder, had one series set in the British Regency era. In one scene, Prince George explains to Blackadder that he is popular. 'Why', he says, 'only the other day I was in my carriage, and the people were shouting, "We hail Prince George! We hail Prince George!"' Blackadder (played by the comic genius Rowan Atkinson) replies, 'Sir, I think you will find they were shouting, "We hate Prince George".

Johnson and his wife arrived at the Platinum Jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II (mentioned in the last episode) and was booed by sections of the crowd. He is not a man who takes well to criticism. Most politicians don't. And I think he will tire of the gig before long.

Johnson is, shall we say, a rather randy old ram, and has either seven or eight children. The newspapers won't confirm. See my piece here at Taki's Magazine a year or so ago for more information.

https://www.takimag.com/article/out-damned-symonds/

God save our gracious Queen

 

Queen Elizabeth II as a land-girl

during the Second World War

This last weekend has seen the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, who ascended to the throne of England 70 years ago on the death of her father, King George VI.

Monarchy is something of a mystery to Americans, their country having always been a Republic (albeit seized back from the monarchist English). As the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his noted mid-19th-century book, Democracy in America, the USA was always intended as an experiment in democracy and, until quite recently, was a very successful one.

But the Queen of England is, I believe, the world's longest reigning monarch. Long to reign over us, as the lyrics to the National Anthem say. She has served with an enthusiasm, a devotion, and a quintessential sense of what it is to be English, that is moving to every true-born Englishman. To be born an Englishman, said Sir Cecil Rhodes, is to win first prize in God's lottery. I am not sure that is still the case, but Elizabeth Windsor sometimes makes me believe that we were once an Empire on which the sun never set, and that this was a good thing. The world now is doing without the British Empire. Good luck with that.

Of course, there are voices in the UK who despise the Queen, the Royal Family, and all that goes with the concept of monarchy. Not least is the BBC, who manage to suck all the glory and pageantry out of the weekend celebrations by noting that Her Majesty is looking fragile and has mobility problems. She is 96 years old, you fucking mutts. Let me know how you are walking when you are four years shy of 100 years old.

But the people of England adore the Queen, which is why the Left instinctively despise her and everything she stands for. Admittedly, she is the matriarch of one of the world's most dysfunctional families, one which makes The Simpsons look like The Waltons, but that is hardly her fault.

So, God save our gracious Queen.

Long live our noble Queen.

That's entertainment!

Sheet music from a jazz version

of Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer',

written in 1902

Mark Dice is an American YouTube content provider, and a good one. He is on the money with the stories, and his videos rarely run over six or seven minutes. Note to YouTubers, by the way, some of us don't have time to watch your 37-minute video. We have lives and work to do. Keep 'em short and punchy.

Dice mentioned some of the mainstream Left-wing American media heavyweights the other day - Carlson, Gutfeld, Watters et al - and I felt he was rather unfair in dismissing them as 'entertainers'.

When the British Broadcasting Corporation (more usually known by its acronym, the BBC) was set up in 1922 under the auspices of rather a stern man, Scottish calvinist Lord Reith, its mission statement (or 'remit' as it was called in those quainter days) was 'to inform, educate, and entertain'. Today, the BBC is a sorry affair, and fulfils none of the three elements of its original purpose.

Entertainment is a very good delivery system. It is why Aesop wrote his fables. We all know of the story of the ant and the grasshopper, the former working when the weather was fine to store food for him and his ant family when the weather turned cold, the latter fooling around and playing music. Then, when winter descends, the ant has his food all laid up while the grasshopper has nothing. (What a metaphor that is for current times. I recommend Aesop's Fables, for your kids as much as for yourselves). We take the moral message because we enjoy the story.

But my point is this. We live in a hedonistic era, whether we like it or not. We would probably not take to the type of dry, joyless Calvinistic lectures Lord Reith would have had to endure (much less fun than Aesop). We like a bit of pazazz and ring-a-ding-ding with our moral instruction. Which is why we watch Fox News, various YouTubers, and The Simpsons (when it was good) instead of reading The New York Times, which is about as enjoyable as a lecture from a nun.

The BBC is so joyless now that during the celebrations for Queen Elizebeth II's platinum jubilee - which means she has been on the throne for 70 years, longer, I believe, than any other monarch in history - they chose to ignore the street parties and cheering crowds and flypasts of Spitfire aeroplanes, and instead concentrated on how frail Her Majesty was looking. She's 96 years old, you fucking bastards. How do you think you will look when you are four years off a century?

I believe fundamentally that in a world becoming increasingly dark, lightness and humour and entertainment are essential components if we are to keep what Juvenal, the Roman poet, called mens sana in corpore sano. For those of you who were too busy fooling around at the back of the classroom during your Latin classes, that means 'a healthy mind in a healthy body'. I believe you will find it in the 10th Satire.

So, why should out information and education come wrapped in the tomb-shrouds of seriousness? The news is not good, I grant you, and we are whistling past the graveyard, but at least we are whistling. It is better to be informed than ignorant, but being entertained at the same time is the cherry on the cake.

The galloping engine

 

A Zimbabwean bank note, earlier today

Janet Yellen is the Secretary to the Unites States Treasury, and has stated publicly (or at least on CNN) that she was wrong about inflation. In November of 2021 she was of the opinion that this financial event was the equivalent of a bad cold or perhaps a touch of COVID-19. Transitory, was the key word used at the time. It now appears that it is much worse than that.

I have to say that economics has always fazed me. I simply don't have a mind that deals well with mathematics and the kinetics of figures, being a thinker who works better in the atmosphere of the abstract. I wish that I could find the provenance of the greatest description I have ever read of economics, which is as follows.

"Alchemy became chemistry. Astrology became astronomy. I wonder what economics will become".

It has been suggested that the great scholar of the history of Islam, Bernard Lewis, came up with this stroke of genius, but I can find no proof, and it seems somewhat off-piste given Mr. Lewis's area of expertise. But I digress.

What we do know is that quantitative easing (aka printing money) leads to inflation. More money is worth less. The end of this process is hyper-inflation, where ridiculous denominations of currency leads to a bucket load of coin and note for a loaf of bread.  Now, when this happens in countries such as Venezuela and Zimbabwe, it is a tragedy for all concerned, but it is not a global threat. However, when it happened in Weimar Germany in the 1930s, there was a rather more serious chain of events, usually referred to as the Second World War.

So, what happens if America succumbs to hyper-inflation? Perhaps a possible scenario might be best illustrated by the metaphor of the galloping engine.

Twenty or so years ago, I owned and lived on a canal boat in England. It was powered by a low-revving diesel engine made in the 1970s by the famous British engine makers, Lister. This engine is well known to boat owners, and Listers can be found in strange places. A London acquaintance of mine went to India on business in the 1980s. There, he saw a Lister engine at the head of a mine-shaft and there to pump out rain-water. The engineer proudly told my friend that the engine had been running continuously for 25 years. Any necessary repairs were made by taking the revs down as low as possible and then making the necessary changes while the engine was still running.

I used to be able to get my engine down to 60 RPM, and it would still push me along the canal. Mind you, the speed limit on these British waterways is 4 MPH, so the propellor doesn't have to turn that fast, but it is testament to an engine manufacturer that it can produce an engine that seems almost not to be working at all, but still does what it was installed to do.

Then there is the other end of the RPM scale. Diesel engines can 'run away'. or 'gallop', and they become uncontrollable and one boat engineer told me he had run away from a galloping engine because they will blow and bits of cast iron will start flying in all directions. So best make yourself scarce.

What if the US economy becomes a galloping engine? As noted, with Venezuela and Zimbabwe there are local effects - Zimbabwe was often described as 'the bread-basket of Africa'. because of its maize production, and Venezuela has oil - but the ripples are not going to reach the banks of the mill-pond. But the USA, in terms of the Western economies, G7 etc., pretty much is the mill-pond. They used to say that when America sneezed, the world caught a cold. In this age of the pandemic, this image may be more pertinent than ever.

As we are all well aware, governments manipulate statistics. Crime rates, immigration levels, unemployment, all of these stats are air-brushed to give cosmetics to the current regime, which seems to change but remains the same. As English rock band The Who sang, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But inflation is a tricky genii to keep stoppered up in the bottle. If you use an aggregate, you soon realise that no one gives a damn about the rise in prices of rivets unless you run a business that needs some rivetting done. And when there isn't much rivetting being done because demand is down, rivets stay the same price because demand is low, even I can see that.

But housewives - if they still exist in this modern Gomorrah - don't go to the store for rivets, they go to the store for food, on the whole. When that starts to leap in price, there will be hoarding and, effectively, runs on shops the same way there are runs on banks. Americans are paying record prices for gasoline - or 'petrol', as we Brits call it - but the thing about gasoline is you can't hoard it like like you can rice or tinned fruit. If hyper-inflation hits food, there will be food riots and armed guards at supermarkets.

I hate to be what the great English journalist Julie Burchill called an 'amockalyptic', a sort of prophet of doom just trying to get attention, but mathematics has a way of getting away from the mathematician, just like the falcon cannot hear the falconer in the poem by Irish poet W B Yeats and which is so famous I have forgotten its name. We must hope that the engine doesn't gallop.

A tale of two Luthers

 

Both of these men had a dream.

Only one came true.

In 1517, German pastor Martin Luther famously nailed a list of 95 propositions onto a cathedral door in Wittenberg. These theses, as they were known, were critical of the Catholic Church, particularly the practice of plenary indulgences, which simple people believed would help you buy your way out of hell. This action - at great personal risk to Luther, who stood trial in Rome - gave birth to the Protestant Reformation, exposing the corruption of the Catholic Church and allowing Protestant nations such as Holland and Great Britain to begin free trade free of the hypocrisy of religion, quite apart from more metaphysical concerns.

Four and a half centuries later, the black pastor Martin Luther King gave one of history's most famous speeches, in which he gave his opinion that people should be judged on the content of their character and not the colour of their skin. There are tremendous similarities between these two moments in history, not least the exposure of hypocrisy and prejudice. How sad that only one of the dreams has come true.

Protestantism was of course a necessary corrective to the corrupt Catholic Church. And it is corrupt. 30 years ago I visited a cathedral 50 km outside of Budapest in Hungary, still then a relatively poor country after its occupation by the Communists of Soviet Russia. I have never seen so much gold. And the church is supposed to be a friend to the poor. Also, Protestantism is by far the more reasonable branch of the schism in the Church, adopting a measured mix of Platonism and Aristotelianism (which is what St. Thomas Aquinas strived for) instead of the wilder shores of metaphysics the Catholic Church had long set sail for.

With Martin Luther King's thesis, things were much simpler. His dream was that human beings - that's us, homo erectus and, for the most part, homo sapiens - would one day be judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin.

It is difficult to fault either Martin Luther, so why did the first succeed in his reformation and the second so lamentably fail?

Partly, the answer lies in will and knowledge. The Catholic Church was so obviously corrupt at the turn of the 16th century that even the ordinary folk were starting to scent it. It may be that Gutenberg's invention of the movable type printing press 50 or so years before (essentially as important as the internet, and the Church hated it) played a part in exposing the Catholic operation. It has to be remembered that people were largely illiterate at that time. Those old Catholic churches you have been into, those pictures on the wall, the stations of the cross and so on. They weren't art, they were there to teach the poor people who couldn't read the story of the crucifixion. But I digress.

Also, the world was ready for Protestantism economically, which tends to trump everything else. So where did Martin Luther King miss out?

To begin with, the contemporary political - and metapolitical - elites thrive on division, mutual animosity between tribes, and the seeding of the idea that the races should naturally be at war with one another. It is a horrible concept.

But it is being pumped into the ideological water supply by the American media, who will soon doubtless be followed by the slavish European press.

Who wins from the promotion of racial division? Certainly not the ethnic minorities the Left claim to care so much about. Giving more black people Oscars will not bring down the black-on-black kill count in Chicago next weekend.

And even blacks who are Conservative - Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, for example - are called Uncle Tom and worse by a media phalanx which is rabid with animosity as well as being - ironically - largely white.

If a race war ever takes place it will be the fault of no race but the political one, a breed unto themselves, and one we could well do without.

Enemies of the people

 

Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen's play

An Enemy of the People,

was written in 1882.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the last two years, during the COVID-19 pandemic, was not necessarily the way in which the political class commandeered the opportunity to chip away at the freedoms of tax-payers in the West by not allowing a good crisis to go to waste, but the sheer contempt they showed for them while doing so.

The political class has for some time been showing all the symptoms of a strange hybrid of psychological afflictions, seeming to be both quasi-autistic and psychopathic at the same time. The Venn diagram between these two conditions nests of course with one common element - empathy.

It is not difficult to imagine the majority of Western politicians quite happily pulling the wings off flies. Their feigned empathy is not convincing, particularly when you examine their ruinous policies. Ruinous, that is, for the peons, the serfs, the little people, not for their own cabals and fraternities.

Probably the most-quoted book over the past few years is George Orwell's 1984, which is becoming as central to dissident thinking as the Qu'ran is to the Islamic world. So we will leave it be, and turn our attention to Orwell's 1945 political essay about England, The Lion and the Unicorn. In that piece, Orwell writes that 'England is a family with the wrong members in control'. This maxim can now be extended to the world as a whole.

In passing, it is a great example of what the English 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy called 'cosmic jokes' that the most malevolent British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, shares a surname with George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair. That may seem extraneous information, but by the same token it might win you a bar-room quiz one day, that fact. Every day is a schoolday.

And it certainly is if your chosen subject happens to be the political class. A combination of punitive and ever-increasing taxation, the increase in ideological control of what people can and cannot say, the neutering of Western police forces, quantitative easing (aka printing money) which will lead to inflation as surely as night follows day (see Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and the Weimar Republic), allied with a ruinously liberal approach to immigration both legal and illegal, and you will witness an attitude displayed by the political class to the rest of us which verges on hatred.

And of course it doesn't help to say that you can vote them out. There are two major parties in most civilized countries in the West, but they generally differ about as much as one brand of soap powder does from the one next to it on the supermarket shelf. Henry Ford famously said you could buy his cars in any colour as long as it's black, and now you can have your politics in any ideology as long as it is globalist, neo-socialist, high-tax-and-spend oligarchism.

What the West has now is a sort of hybrid between what Samuel T. Francis described as 'anarcho-tyranny' and the four-stages of the internal destruction of states described by the brilliant Russian defector Yuri Bezmenov in the 1980s. These men are absolutely worth your time, as chilling as their conclusions might be.

What is it that drives human beings to be so morally profligate with the people they are supposed, constitutionally and electorally, to represent and give a voice to? I will give you one instance of something happening in England which is so disturbing I wonder if the country of my birth is not trying deliberately to start a civil war.

A pretty village called Linton-on-Ouse (meaning that it sits on the river Ouse) has a population of 700 people. Until next week, when an RAF base (Britain's Royal Air Force, slowly being dismantled along with the rest of the Queen's armed forces) will be filled with 1,700 mostly young male Muslim immigrants awaiting the results of their asylum applications. They will be allowed to go into the town. This is so clearly a recipe for disaster that it is impossible that the British government cannot see what is coming.

When a government becomes the enemy of its own people, one of two things happen. You either have utterly repressive regimes, such as North Korea, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China, or you have civil war.

Pick one card. You can't have both.