Hot dogs: When will they be banned?

That's it! I'm burning all my things and going off to live on an island somewhere.

The circle is complete

Local councils ticket their own cars, then refuse to pay, then sue themselves.

Brain... about... to.... explode!

Death by policy

A five-year old girl remains in critical condition because damnable "health and safety" regulations prevented rescue crews from saving her.

If she dies, someone should go to jail. And I mean the pencil-pushers behind this obscenity.

Third-hand smoke

Oh, for the love of God!

Hot air alert

We are deep into Human Shield territory here. Do you know why the "anti-war" movement never went anywhere? What it really lacked to put it over the top? What could bring our boys home and spark a global Kumbaya moment? A blimp!

Take a look at the site's text as it floats joyously away from reality (glosses added):

Imagine...a "Peace Blimp" (let's not, please.)- defiantly displaying a message of peace across the skies of the nation, unable to be dismissed, ignored or brushed aside (Unless people do). Rallies for peace greet the blimp in every city it visits (Or police and aviation officials wanting to see your permits). Politicians, celebrities, movie stars, athletes, war veterans and peace activists make the call to bring our troops home by boarding the blimp for a ride (Or realise that they have better things to do with their time). Crowds flock to the events (Or not) and are educated about the war (Harangued, is the word you're looking for). With each stop along the tour the momentum for peace grows from a dull roar into an undeniable fervor (Or lapses into the chirping of crickets) until the seemingly endless wars (Which wars? Where?) come to an end (Of course wars can end in defeat, but let's not dwell on that).

Good grief, I know it's fun, but please stop inhaling the helium in the party balloons.

I thought this sort of idiocy died at Greenham Common back in the '80s. I think I'll keep an eye on Youtube for when Herr Hitler finds out about this.

Dr Spacely-Trellis, call your service

It's an historic moment as the go-ahead Church of England bellows "screw Christian doctrine!" and thunders off into irrelevancy.

Expect joyous guitar strumming and tambourine banging at churches interfaith and non-faith, LGBTQQSAAATSQED-friendly, vegan, non-judgmental, dolphin-safe, gun and nuclear-free, carbon-free, sustainable community centres* across Britain.

*Those that still haven't been turned into coffee shops or mosques, of course.

So what's your point?

Paul Mendelle, QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, is opposed to the Conservative proposal to bow to both sanity and morality and allow homeowners to defend themselves against intruders. According to Mr Mendelle, this would lead to burglars being killed.

And the problem with this is...?

Butter ban

They can have my butter when they
pry it from my cold, greasy fingers.

Cardiac surgeon and staunch defender of individual liberty Shyam Kolvekar of London's Heart Hospital calls for an outright ban on butter.

That's it. Time to raise the barricades.

Playmobil Security Checkpoint

Just plain wrong.

Avatar blues

Sleep tight, Europe... If you can.

From The Telegraph:

Baroness Ashton of Upholland will use the values that led her to help to run the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in her new role as Europe’s foreign minister, she said yesterday.

So a woman who has never held a proper job and owes her entire career to a series of appointments, including a peerage and the second most powerful position in the EU, will use the "values", which she refuses to disavow, that led her to become treasurer for a Communist front organisation bankrolled by Moscow and run by the KGB for the express purpose of demoralising and weakening the West in the face of a rapacious, totalitarian Soviet Empire.

From Caracas to Beijing they must be laughing so hard that major organs are dislodging.

Stone-cold idiocy

Oliver Stone's new 10-hour documentary sets the record straight on Hitler who has been “an easy scapegoat throughout history”.

And the Second World War was a slight misunderstanding.

Saving us from the horrors of Christmas

What happens when free men allow themselves to be treated like livestock.

Hellfire Holiday

I've often contended that the problem with modern Western society isn't so much the collapse of morality as the rot migrating from the aristocracy downwards as rich men's vices become those of poor men as well.

Unfortunately, only the rich and powerful can afford to be decadent–and even then it catches up with them in the end.

Update: Decadence is a two-way street and when it flows up, the results can be worse than when it flows down.

Priorities

Britain's Afghanistan mission is without a rudder and public support is plummeting as a result, the Army lacks adequate kit, ammunition is low, proper air support is non-existent, relations with the US forces is frayed, the defence budget faces another round of insane cuts, and there's talk of out-right surrender to the Taliban, but don't worry, the MOD is leaping into action to rectify the situation by... deploying an all-girl Merlin helicopter crew.

Yes, I know I said "girl". I'm doing so because a) I do not subscribe to Newspeak and b) to highlight the utter fatuousness of this stunt–which, no reflection on the ladies, it most certainly is.

WHY?!?

English Heritage wants to save some of the worst architectural eyesores of the 20th century rather than raising valuable funds by raffling off a chance to press the plunger.

Where's the Luftwaffe when you need it?

When the moral compass loses its needle

The fact that this nasty, unrepentant man is addressing Parliament instead of swinging on the end of a rope says a lot about what is wrong with Britain today.

Another nail

From the BBC:

A new character called Lottie the Otter is to grace the new Winnie-the-Pooh book, publishers have announced.

She is described as, God help us, "feisty".

Why am I not surprised?

Be (un)prepared

"Be prepared" used to be the motto of the Boy Scouts, but according to a story in The Times (Which never uses the word "boy" a single time for fear of offending the Ministry of Truth), the Boy Scouts are bowing to the insanity of the era and are changing the motto to "Be unprepared" by saddling the Boy Scouts with restrictions that even a medieval serf would have rebelled against. True, the ignoble peasant may have been forbidden to own the sword reserved for his betters, but no robber baron, no matter how repressive, would have been insane enough to say that a commoner couldn't carry a knife. But that is exactly where the Boy Scouts of the "enlightened" 21st century find themselves. Showing all the spine of a jellyfish doing a Johnathan Harris impression, the Association has effectively said that Boy Scouts shouldn't carry scout knives any longer. Indeed, the scouts have been advised not take knives on camping trips "unless there is a specific need" and that if said knives are carried it should be by the scout master who is to issue them to the scouts at the time of use–no doubt after a dozen forms are filled out in triplicate and then the knife will be accompanied by a pair of burly Securicorp men to whom the knife is attached by a quarter-inch steel cable.

The strange thing about my life is that I spend it caught in a transatlantic limbo between Britain and America and sometimes the contrasts are so stark it's like being hit with a floodlight at 2AM in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats. When I turn away from the computer to think about what to say next about how Boy Scouts are being treated like death row inmates on suicide watch I look out the window and see the road where I live. It's a nice place. The sort where you don't need to lock your door and the kids can play outside unsupervised. Partly this is due to the decent people who live around here. Partly its because most of the decent people who live around here are armed to the teeth and any pimply little creep who tries to break into a house or import Britain's "knife culture" to the neighbourhood will get his ticket to the next world punched courtesy of Smith & Wesson. Even though I live within an hour's drive of the ultra-leftist Seattle, gun control around here means using both hands. And despite having The One in the White House, carry conceal laws are becoming so common that now the next step is citizens learning that in many states they can carry assault weapons strapped openly to their hips.

Why is this? Because after two generations of playing around with gun control laws, the Americans have learned the Gun Free zones translate into English as "Come on in and blaze away. Nobody can shoot back here." Small wonder that gun control in the US is about as popular as Obamacare. And small wonder that the baddies tend to keep the gun deaths among themselves. Gangs in the 'hood may have the gangsta attitude honed to a T, but they still can't shoot for toffee while the plumber on Elm Street can take out the pip on an ace of spades at a hundred yards.

Meanwhile, New Labour's answer to Britain's violent crime problem was to disarm honest citizens, who are then forbidden to defend themselves, and refusing to punish murderous thugs with anything harsher than life sentences that were little more than helpful suggestions. Small wonder then that London and other major cities echo with the melody of gunfire while less enterprising young hoods go around armed with stilettos like throwbacks to 18th century Venice without the pasta. Of course, something must be done about all the shootings and stabbings, but what? What can stem the tide of blood and pain?

Simple: Disarm the Boy Scouts.

This as tiresome as it's sick and pointless. Do you have a problem with violent crime? Then here's an idea: Go after the criminals, arrest them, try them, and if they're found guilty, lock them up for a very, very long time. For the worst of the worst: Hang the bastards and tell the EU to take a flying jump. Don't go after the organisation that is intended to take callow boys (I wrote the forbidden word!) and turn them into decent men (I have compounded my sin!). I have news for you, Mr. Brown, about the Boy Scouts (It burns! It burns!). They aren't the problem; they're the solution. Give them back their knives; formally and with apologies because they were never yours to take away in the first place.

I suppose part of the reason I get so heated on this topic is that though I wasn't a boy scout I've carried a pocket knife on me since I learned to cut my way out of the play pen. I've carried scout knives, Swiss Army knives, sheath knives, pen knives, and I even have a small clasp knife that I can slip into the pocket of my jammies. When I need a blade or a saw or a screwdriver, I deploy it with no more thought than I would using my fingers. And, of course, no cork ever stood between me and a glass of plonk. I would no more leave the house without a knife than without my trousers. A knife, it may amaze the totalitarians, is a tool of the responsible, not a thing of intrinsic evil to be shunned and feared–unless what you really fear isn't criminals, but free men. Remember them? They still exist and they're getting pretty pissed off. The way of a civilised society is that boys should be taught responsibility and that those who do not learn those lessons and resort to violence should be ordinately punished, not that the responsible should be equated with the criminal.

The path taken by New Labour and grovelled to by the Scout Association will have the obvious result: The unintelligent will become prigs, the intelligent will become cynics, and the brutes will remain brutes.

Well done, you twits.

Banned books

The 2008-2009 list of "banned" books has come out and it's a shame that I got it as a PDF file, because it would have been much more useful as a new set of fire lighters.

Now you might think that as a person who uses the Ingsoc stamp three times a week I'd be a big supporter of Banned Book Week and its ilk and I would be–if it had anything to do with banned books, which this linguni-spined week doesn't.

To me, a book banning means exactly that: The government in the form of an official censor makes the publication of a work illegal, removes it from book shops, libraries, Amazon, and the shelves in peoples homes and if the author is lucky, he'll get off with ending up on the next train across the border with a single ticket instead of a bullet through the back of the head. Or it's some newspaper refusing to cover a story because the local Al Qaeda rep says he'll shorten the staff by a head if they run it. That isn't what we get from the likes of Robert P Doyle et al. Instead, it's a tepid list of books that have been removed from shelves of school libraries, "challenged" ( i.e. had a parent daring to say "Hey, should my kid be reading about lesbianism, rape and incest in kindergarten?" And not necessarily with any success) in school libraries, or restricting access by children to certain books.

This would be risible if it wasn't so cowardly. I mean, we're not talking Voltaire here facing an unscheduled holiday in the Bastille complete with complimentary thumb screws for pointing out that the local lord is using peasant infants as a cheap substitute for turkey. This is a load of people with all the common sense of a pack of spavined voles who somehow imagine that letting six-year olds read The Joy of Sex in their school library is striking a blow for liberty when all they're really striking a blow for is their inflated sense of self-righteousness.

It's also hypocritical when it comes to the test. If the local school board decided that along with Catcher in the Rye and Heather Has Two Mommies the school shelves should also make room for Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries, and Liberal Fascism, I'd say that these champions of liberty would be at the front of the queue to sign the removal petition. Meanwhile, the jails of Cuba, Red China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are filled with poor bastards who emailed National Review when the Stasi was watching and this lot can't even be bothered to look up from their fair-trade lattes.

If the Banned Book people were helping the truly oppressed and censored, I'd be with them, but their sort of standards are so ridiculous that I could claim to be a victim of "banning" because none of the major producers in New York would put on my plays. Since when did having a crappy agent count as a human rights violation?

The Banned Book people have got to step back and look at what these "bannings" in the United States are actually about and that's children. There is nothing wrong with restricting what children read. If you haven't noticed, they're children. As in not adults. They aren't ready for some things yet and exposing them too early is like giving them a highball along with the birthday cake and ice cream. You're not doing anyone any favours. When books are being stocked at the taxpayers expense on school shelves where taxpayers' kids are expected to attend by law, then, yes, parents have every right to question if this or that work is appropriate for children. The challenge may be without merit, the banning may be a fat-headed decision that should be reversed, but it may also be a prudent judgment to be accepted as such. There is nothing wrong with this in principle. It's called responsibility. If you don't like a book being removed, then argue the merits of the case. That's called using that grey squishy thing between your ears for more than keeping the draught out. I understand this if for no other reason than that I have a seven-year old daughter and I am very careful about what she's exposed to. Eventually she'll be confronted with all the baseness, selfishness, perversions, complexities, and general nastiness of the adult world, but if I have anything to do with it that won't happen until she's ready. To say I have no right to question an attempt by the government in the form of the school librarian to undo do this because that's "oppression" is turning things solidly on their heads.

And I'm not just talking about sex and violence. I sincerely hope that it will be a long time before the hypersexualised popular culture will do anything except fly right over her head and much as I love Shaun of the Dead, she won't be seeing the likes of Marvel Zombies while I have a say in it. However, I am also going to do what I can to keep Moby Dick out of her hands until she's at least eighteen.

Moby Dick? What the devil is wrong with you, Szondy? What's wrong with Moby Dick–unless you're some Greenpeace nut? We thought it was one of your favourite novels. It is. And the weeks I spent reading it were the happiest of my life. But I didn't read it until I was 28. If I'd read it when I was 14, I'd probably have binned it as boring, overblown rubbish and I'd have hated it for the rest of my life. I wasn't really ready for it in the same way I wasn't ready for a lot of other things until I'd matured enough to grasp what the author was saying. It's a matter of each thing to its proper season. If my daughter took it off the shelf tomorrow, I'd tell her to put it back. If her teacher assigned it tomorrow, I'd ask her to reconsider or give a substitute because I am the final arbiter of my daughter's well being.

As for the posturing, gutless wonders of Banned Books, maybe they should look less to the "censorship" of school libraries that can be circumvented these days with the click of a mouse anyway and spend more time supporting the latter day Solzhenitsyns and Pasterneks of this world or publishers who refuse to publish cartoons out of fear of Jihadists.

I notice that the latter didn't make their heroic list. I wonder why?

The gauntlet is thrown down

The Food Police World Cancer Research Fund demands that ham be banned from school lunchboxes.

My advice to the WCF is to quit now and just walk away clean. Go after tobacco, go after coconut oil, go after sugar, or go after transfat if you like, but go after the ham and you're unsealing a tin of whup-ass on yourself.

Jimmy Carter in spandex

Cranmer discovers The Elders of the Earth, where self-regard meets senility.

I like the name, though. Didn't Stan Lee write the first issues?

And here's how not to wash your car

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Woman marries rollercoaster

When you start redefining marriage, why stop with gender? Or reality?

And I thought I was "out there" when I brought up cheese sandwiches.

Lucky Strike goes to war

"Health experts" want the US military to be "smoke free" in twenty years.

Maybe by that time they'll have come up with a cure for "experts" who have their heads jammed up their fundaments.

Projection

That's what I like about left-wing satire; always a class act.

What does he want? Pillow fights?

Lord Bingham, retired senior law lord, says that UAV combat aircraft should be banned as "so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance".

Given that a UAV is nothing but an aircraft where the pilot is sitting safe thousands of miles away, so the machine can survey and attack areas where a manned aircraft can't, this sort of logic leads to the conclusion that the West's defence strategy should be to issue our people with hunting knives so they can slit their own throats in the event of war.

In other news, Ephemeral Isle asks if Lord Bingham should go and have a little lie down somewhere.

Yet another nail

Burke's Peerage has thrown out principle of primogeniture and will no longer list offspring according to right of succession, but by order of birth. And they'll be including bastards in the lists as well.

William Bortrick, Burke’s recently appointed wet behind the ears Jacobin Executive and Royal Editor, calls this "bring(ing) Burke’s into the 21st century" and apparently regards this as a good thing. The little vandal will be chucking slates off the roof next.

I have another way of describing this, which involves another definition of "burke".

Flying Fish Follies

Having run out of windmills, PETA is tilting at the hideous, immoral practice of throwing (dead) fish at Seattle's Pike Place Market.

Because even a gutted salmon on its way to the oven has "rights".

Yoga Toilet

Faced with this, I'd elect to try the bushes instead.

Water On The Brain

In perfect poetic symmetry, Seattle is ordered by the courts to repay hydrant costs wrongly charged against water customers to the tune of $22 million. And how are they going to pay for this? You guessed it: Raise water rates!

This would be funny, but I live within two hour's drive of this asylum and mining the bridges over Lake Washington isn't that easy.

Pre-Chewed Pencils

There just aren't enough minutes in the day.

Frozen Bubbles

With a cold night, a bit of patience, a little skill, and absolutely nothing else in your life to do, you too can freeze soap bubbles

Fire Hazard

Fire extinguishers are being removed from blocks of flats across Britain because they pose (wait for it) a safety hazard.

Next up, fire exits are boarded up because people might wander off and get hit by a car or fall into a hedge or something.

Tip o' the hat to Neil Russell.

Literary Laughs

According to the Guardian, the latest Nobel prize for literature is meant to "cut America down to size" and is causing American reactions of "We wuz (sic) robbed".

Or it would do, anyway, if Americans or anyone else outside of the chattering classes gave a toss about the whole travesty. At one time, the Nobel prize was actually about rewarding great writing and the recipients were authors who the general public recognised and whose books they read–or at least felt that they ought to. Look at this list of past winners:

• Rudyard Kipling
• Anatole France
• William Butler Yeats
• George Bernard Shaw
• Thomas Mann
• Sinclair Lewis
• John Galsworthy
• Eugene O'Neill
• Pearl S. Buck
• Hermann Hesse
• T. S. Eliot
• William Faulkner
• Bertrand Russel
• Sir Winston Churchill
• Ernest Hemingway
• John Steinbeck
• John-Paul Sartre
• Samuel Beckett
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Saul Bellow

And today's titan of the printed word?

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio.

I have a fairly eclectic taste in reading, but I can honestly state that M Le Clézio is not one who shows up often (okay, not at all) on my Amazon wishlist. Maybe that is because, like 99.999% of the reading public I have never heard of him and odds are never will again, which pretty much sums up the Nobel committee's literary choices of the past thirty odd years. With the notable exception of a Dorthy Sayer, the prize has gone to writers who would need a major media blitz to rise to level of obscurity or darlings of the claret socialists such as Harold Pinter who should be.

Now, if you will excuse me, I'm going to peruse some G K Chsterton to cleanse my palate.

Shedding Common Sense

From DailyIndia.com:

Bristol City Council is urging people to leave their sheds open because padlocks could lead to thieves forcing their way through doors and windows of the council-owned sheds to steal garden equipment.

The council said that its new initiative could save taxpayers' money because fewer sheds would have to be repaired or replaced.

In other news, Bristol City Council is urging banks to pile all their money in the street because sending policemen 'round to deal with robberies is getting a bit "samey".

Tip o' the hat to Charles Palmer.

Men Without Chests

Dr. Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield suggests that drugs can be developed that will improve men's morals.

I really must press this one in my scrap book as a perfect example of not thinking through the implications of one's arguments.

Update: And if you think this is an isolated case, take a look at this "Be Green or it's Room 101 for you, m'lad" argument that the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is advocating.

Bike Bilge

The Guardian has declared bicycles "officially chic".

Cyclist may be aggravating road hogs who block traffic, terrorise pedestrians and feel free to disobey the road rules at will because they are possessed with a staggering self-righteousness about Saving the Planet™ by dressing in Lycra shorts, logo-plastered tee shirts with the pockets the wrong-way 'round and pointless "streamlined" sunglasses in a weird fantasy that they're Lance Armstrong before putting their ludicrously over-priced and impractical machines on top of their Prius's so they can motor thirty miles out into the country where they swarm in tangled packs that make it impossible for anyone to travel more than eight miles an hour on narrow roads without shoulders and exponentially increase their chances of being run over or putting an honest citizen's car into a ditch to avoid flattening the little time-wasters, but at least they're "chic".

PETA Appeasement

Predictable: PETA demands that the bearskin hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace be replaced with synthetic fur.

Insanity: New Labour gives legitimacy to this load of anti-human fanatics by actually meeting with them.

I can only hope it was over lunch at a BBQ rib place.

Boxed Wine

In an attempt to prove that there is indeed one born every minute, the Hotel Byblos markets a box containing a bottle of Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque 1999, four glasses, and a rather cheap looking set of jewelry. All yours for €100,000.

Why, why do I never run into people with that much money and that little sense?

Get a Dust Bin, See The World

On the bright side, at least they've got wheelie bins.

The local council is all heart.

Referendum in Germany Bans Broccoli & Nap Time

Not confining itself to cow farts, Germany demonstrates that it has gone completely off the deep end by putting a bill before Parliament that would lower the voting age to birth.

There is a certain logic to this. If you're going to treat the voters like infants, then why not...

Dr. Zaius, Call Your Service

Lacking a decent dictionary or even common sense, the Spanish parliament made a mockery of the concept of legal rights by granting them to apes.

What could possibly go wrong?

Crab Stressing

It's fun, it's easy, so, of course, it has the local council up in arms.

Besides, cow tipping is so last millennium.

Oxygen Bars

I'm not surprised at the existence of bars that sell oxygen. I am, however, disappointed that the twits gullible enough to part with their dosh for a whiff of O₂ never come knocking on my door.

Time is Really Money

This Patek Philippe wrist watch once owned by race car driver Carlo Felice Trossi was recently sold at auction for $2,157,760. For that price, you could hire someone to follow you around and tell the time for you.

On the other hand, I have a secondhand Timex that I'm letting go for a fiver.

Still runs.

Sort of.

Funky Star Trek Judges

The Lord Chief Justice has unveiled the new "Star Trek" style robes that will be inflicted upon judges in civil cases in Britain.

Not surprisingly, the new kit, which replaces the traditional robes and wig, was created by a woman who also designs "funky British clothes for aspiring funky British girls''.

It's a great comfort to know that as Britain is being shoved into the abyss that at least our judges are suitably "funky".

Nesting Cuckoos

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Harry Lime

I think it wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.

G K Chesterton

Ah, Switzerland! Where plants have "dignity", there are dog licences–for the owners, where the rights and proper care of every pet from goldfish to rhinoceros is enshrined in laws written by politicians who are never anything save altruistic, and soon to be an alpine wasteland because the regulations for raising, keeping or in any way interacting with any flora or fauna makes it simpler to just exterminate the whole bloody lot of them and be done with it.

Cultural Suicide Part XIII

The Swiss government has a bit in its new constitution about the "dignity of plants" that makes PETA look like a barbeque rib restaurant chain.

Stand by for picking flowers to be declared a crime against... I honestly have no idea.

Equal Nonsense

In a display of fanatical blindness, the government plans to force the monarchy into the Procrustean bed of political correctness by abolishing the principle of primogeniture.

Britain's coffin is just about finished.