Month: December 2015

My ‘the-world-has-gone-mad’ mantra is so repetitive that you may think it’s some kind of idée fixe – that, regardless of the world’s mental state, I’m the mad one.

If that thought has crossed your mind, I suggest you scan various comments made immediately before and after the RAF raids on Syria… sorry, I mean ISIS strongholds.

Pope Francis got the ball rolling by stating that Christians and Muslims “… are all God’s children, we all have the same Father… we need to live peacefully alongside one another, develop friendships.” Stoutly spoken and absolutely true.

The Pontiff then owned up to the lamentable fact that Catholics have their share of fundamentalists too. “Fundamentalism is a sickness that is in all religions,” said His Holiness. “We Catholics have some – and not some, many – who believe they possess the absolute truth…”

One would think that belief in possessing the absolute truth is inherent to faith in Christ, but other than that the statement is irrefutable. There are indeed many Catholic fundamentalists about and, I’m man enough to admit this, some of them are my close friends.

These chaps do all the fundamentalist things. They despise Vatican II, attend Latin mass every Sunday at least, go to confession once a week, pray several times a day, fast at Lent, eat fish on Fridays. One or two have even taken the vow of chastity.

There are, however, some fundamentalist things my friends don’t do, and I haven’t heard of others like them indulging in such things either.

They neither kill nor hate those who have the misfortune not to be a fundamentalist Catholic. They don’t stone adulterers. They don’t throw homosexuals off tall buildings. They don’t castrate, rape and abuse women. They don’t behead infidels on camera. They don’t blow up public transportation. They don’t mow people down by indiscriminately firing automatic weapons at crowds. They don’t fly planes into tall buildings.

Since Muslim fundamentalists do such things on an ever-increasing scale, and have been wreaking non-stop mayhem for 1,400 years, then perhaps the Pontiff’s feel-good message – and I hope I won’t be smitten by lightning for saying this – is pretty much meaningless, at best.

To reconnect with reality, His Holiness should look up the speeches made on a similar occasion in 1096 by Urban II and St Bernard. So don’t call me mad.

Not to be outdone, our illustrious PM Dave opined that Islam is “a peaceful religion hijacked by fundamentalists”. Now please re-read my above comment about the 1,400 years, which, unlike Dave’s logorrhoea, is based on factual evidence, and decide which of us is mad.

Islam seems to have a pronounced propensity to be hijacked by mass murderers, which isn’t surprising considering that, rather than being a crucified martyr, its founder used to behead hundreds of people with his own hand.

Since Dave seems to have drunk his way through university, allow me to explain something for his benefit. Namely that mass violence is always galvanised by an inner core of fundamentalists, a fact as universal as it is irrelevant.

Most Muslims don’t do the things I mentioned above. Neither did most Russians murder millions of other Russians. Neither did most Germans kill millions of Jews. Neither did most Japanese commit unspeakable atrocities. In each case the initiative came from a cadre of truly evil men – yet in each case there was something about the ambient populace that made them acquiesce.

And acquiesce they did, actively or passively, propagating evil into a global menace. That’s why the Allies bombed Germany flat, producing a huge amount of collateral damage before the term was even invented. That’s why A-bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. That’s why Nato was prepared to do the same to Russian cities.

So who’s mad, Dave or me? Who’s guilty of maniacal divorce from reality and every piece of historical and current evidence? Don’t answer that.

Then there’s Tim Montgomerie of The Times, currying favour with his American neocon friends. The neocons combine Trotskyist temperament with American jingoism and adolescent minds, which means they regard any bombing campaign as ipso facto splendid, provided it’s America that does the bombing.

They also like Britain to join in the fun, if only to remind their erstwhile metropolis who’s boss now. 

“That is why,” complains Mr Montgomerie, “the rise of nativist voices in British politics, such as Jeremy Corbyn, Nigel Farage and Nicola Sturgeon — an unholy trinity of withdrawalists — has unsettled America’s foreign policy establishment.”

I’m sure Mr Farage will be overjoyed to find himself lumped together with the other two. In any case, considering that Corbyn and Sturgeon want to transfer their country’s sovereignty to Brussels, I’m not sure how they rate the adjective ‘nativist’.

“Fortunately,” continues Mr Montgomerie, “there are signs that America may be getting over the exhaustion and loss of self-belief caused by the Iraq war.”

I’d be tempted to add that the Iraq war was in its turn caused by exactly the same neocon urges as those Mr Montgomerie is hailing in such a sycophantic manner. It’s largely because of the neocons’ maniacal and ill-founded self-belief that we got into this mess to begin with.

This is yet another example of any touch with reality hopelessly lost, and it’s not to be found anywhere one looks. So I’ll say it a thousand times if I’ve said it once: the world has gone mad. It’s the only sane thing to say.

 

 

 

 

 

The more immigrants we admit, the better George Osborne will look to posterity – and presumably to the voters in the next general election. This observation may sound counterintuitive, but only to those who haven’t lost touch with reality as irrevocably as our spivocrats have.

You see, keeping promises isn’t essential to getting elected and re-elected, but it helps. George knows this, which is why he has done some simple calculations. On that basis, having announced his spending and deficit-cutting plans, he has made promises he has no way of keeping unless net migration stands at 180,000 a year or higher.

Anyone who draws from this the conclusion that the more Syrians and Romanians we welcome to these shores, the healthier the economy will be, would only betray his ignorance of how HMG works. For our spivs operate within virtual reality, where perception is everything and truth is, well, less than nothing – it’s a big negative to be avoided at all costs.

Those who still remember what actual reality looks like won’t understand how admitting millions (the 180,000 number is only the point of departure – for the moon) of cultural aliens maladjusted to life in the West can possibly make us better off.

Wouldn’t they put a huge pressure on the social budget? Well, yes. And the NHS? Yes, now that you mention it. Education? Yes, unfortunately. And the overall infrastructure? You can say that again, though please don’t. And haven’t the government’s own figures shown that the net economic effect of immigration from the low-rent parts of the world is negative? Now that depends on how you look at it.

Here we’ve reached the crux of the matter. For such figures indeed depend on who’s counting, and how.

Of course all those migrants will cost us a pretty penny, trillions of pretty pennies. But none of the rubrics from which the debits will come are George’s department. His performance will be assessed on how the Exchequer is doing. So if the NHS has to stop treating patients altogether, that’s not George’s problem, is it? Let the Health Secretary worry about that.

George’s concern is to make sure the deficit looks small as percentage of GDP, for that’s how it’s calculated. And there George’s logic can’t be faulted: indeed the greater the number of people operating within an economy, the greater its GDP – and the smaller the absolute amount of overspending as seen in relation to it.

This is chicanery on so many levels that even listing them would try your patience. The most obvious one is that, though GDP does give some vague indication of the state of the economy, it can mislead as easily as inform.

For GDP is calculated on the basis of all products and services changing hands within the economy. For example, if you borrow £10,000 from NatWest, Britain’s GDP will increase by that amount. And when you repay the debt, GDP will go up again. Hence though this indicator has gone up £20,000 plus whatever interest you had to pay, it’s not immediately clear how the economy has become any healthier.

Of course adding a million new arrivals every couple of years will increase GDP – they all have to consume even if they don’t necessarily earn. George will then be able to continue spending like a beached sailor, driving the economy towards those huge rocks out there, without fearing for his electoral chances.

QED. That the economy is running the very real risk of ending up as flotsam on a beach is no concern of his – provided the wreck doesn’t happen within the next four years.

And we haven’t yet begun to talk about the irreparable social and cultural cost of mass, uncontrolled immigration. But let’s not. It’s just too depressing for words.

 

 

 

 

 

There has never been such a rotten deal in history, but then there has never been such a rotten contrivance as the EU either.

There have been other evil empires, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the most immediate past, but those were held together by violence. The EU, on the other hand, is more or less a voluntary association, even though blackmail and bribery had something to do with its founding.

This means that the Commission, headed by my friend Junk, as Mr Juncker likes to be known, governs by consent. Not of the governed, mind you: I for one can’t recall consenting to this arrangement. The blanket consent was given on our behalf by monumentally corrupt and mentally challenged spivocracies known as national governments.

On the logical Lockean assumption that consent means pre-agreeing to anything, including collective suicide, the European spivs now feel empowered to destroy what little is left of European civilisation (provided they themselves are sitting pretty).

This laudable aim can be achieved in any number of ways but, not to leave anything to chance, the surest method is to kick Europe’s door open to millions of cultural aliens full of hatred for everything Europe stands for, except perhaps free access to social services.

This is precisely what the EU has done by offering a huge bribe to Turkey.

Of course bribery is coded into the EU’s DNA, going back to the days of the Prussian Zollverein on which the EU is largely based. But at least in those days the suicide element wasn’t the prime motivation.

The bribe starts with offering Turkey €3 billion on the nail and then as much every subsequent year for the promise to keep 2.2 million Syrian migrants off European welfare rolls.

This monetary compensation strikes one as rather excessive – especially since it’s not immediately clear how Turkey can fulfil such a promise against the background of an endless deluge of huddled Muslim masses yearning to receive benefits, while occasionally murdering the benefactors.

Yet all those billions are only a start. In exchange for kindly agreeing to accept the money (a big chunk of which will come from us), the Turks will be allowed to travel anywhere in Europe without visas. For all intents and purposes this means illegally settling anywhere in Europe, yet even this isn’t the whole deal.

In addition, Turkey will be fast-tracked into the European Union, presumably on the strength of her strong attachment to European values, an affection going back to the days of the Ottoman Empire and rapidly growing under Erdogan’s aegis.

In other words, in exchange for the disingenuous promise to bar 2.2 Syrian Muslims from Europe that Turkey neither can keep nor has any intention of keeping, 75 million Turkish Muslims will be allowed to settle in Europe.

I’m sure that keen students of Islamic intricacies will point out the fundamental differences between Syrian and Turkish Muslims, something that regrettably escapes me. However, even such arcane knowledge can’t possibly trump arithmetic.

For, however fundamental the differences between the two groups are, they can’t possibly outweigh the mathematical disparity between 2.2 million and 75 million, or even a significant portion thereof.

In other words, a distinct possibility exists that all of Europe will in short order begin to resemble Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city. A third of its population is Muslim, and the city has more violent crime than the rest of Scandinavia put together.

One detects a causative link between these two statistics. One can also foresee that in a few years all of Europe will be constructed on this proven model, courtesy of the EU. Can’t wait.