I'm English by ancestry, and that means I am a propenent of the authority of the State by nature, breeding, and inclination. England is not the country most Americans imagine it to be. It is by nature Authoritarian, secretive, and indifferent to the privileges granted, over the ages, by the Crown to the subjects of the Crown's dispensation. Let one small example stand for all the differences between the life of an American citizen and the life of a subject of English Authority. In England,...
It's two days after our latest trip to Norfolk and the Immigration and Naturalization Office there. It's a day after finally being able to renew my driver's license - despite a couple of (to me) heart-stopping moments in which the DMV clerk wandered vacantly away, carrying my passport and its latest endorsement - the one that says I'm legal for another year. Here is an example of the contorted and contracted bureaucratic thinking that, if I dwell on it for any length of time is liable to m...
Today Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, announced that his country has the ability, now, to process uranium on an 'industrial scale'. ( Link ) Ari Larijani, Iranian chief diplomat, claims that there are now 3000 centifuges installed at the Natanz nuclear facility. 3000 centifuges means that in nine months Iran could possess enough highly enriched uranium to create a warhead . Naturally, as the linked article reports, everyone from the US state department to the IAEA is denying ...
Link You'd think, considering the state of American-Iranian relations since the Ayatollahs came to power, that America would be right up there at the top of the Mullah's 'countries we love to hate list'. Nope. America is the Great Satan, but whenever some crisis threatens Iran it's always Britain, the 'Little Satan' or the 'Old Coloniser', that's seen as the Moving Hand of all things sinister and malign. Britain has been involved in the affairs of Afghanistan (where British troops are...
How many of you, I wonder, know about the event in British history referred to by the English as the Glorious (glorious because bloodless) Revolution? How many of you know that the English fought their own Civil War, over issues of religious toleration, orthodoxy and the role of Parliament in relation to the Crown? The fighting concluded in 1660. But the Civil War didn't end until 1668, when William of Orange became King of England as the conclusion to the Revolution. He accepted the claims o...
The most straightforward argument I can think of for 'unthinking', 'unquestioning' support on the part of Britain for America is simply this: without American support there would be no Britain. Without the support of America during WW2 there would, now, be no 'English-speaking' people outside of America. Hitler's Germany would have swallowed us whole - as it very nearly did. Britain owes to America its national life - and this is not a debt that can ever be repaid. That being so, the decis...
Shabby and disgusting. "Mr Bush's new Iraq strategy will have no British involvement, because the White House has recognised both Downing Street's political difficulties over Iraq and the overstretch of the British armed forces, senior officials have made clear to the Guardian. They say that there is neither the political will, nor the manpower, to freeze, let alone increase, the number of British forces in Iraq or to expand their area of operations. "It is a question of blunt realities...
Link Perhaps our newborn Super-Liberal-Man (aka Lucas) would care to exert his Super-liberal-Man powers against Adolf's Children, rather than indulging in wishful thinking about what should have, might have, could have happened in the past. What would they make of him? Short work. But here's his chance to show us his Super-Liberal-Man Megabrain at work. He can tell us how we can go about reforming them before they become a problem. The 15% involved in the article are thos...
Political fiction covers everything from imagined Utopias and Dystopias, to satire like Swift's suggestion that the famine-struck Irish should eat their children, to Apocalyptic visions like the manifesto of the Communist Party. They all conjure worlds which aren't yet but which are based in what is, and which might come to be. What follows was not written by me. It's a dystopic view of the remainder of this century and its value is not in the writing itself, or in its attempt to portray...
Is it simple coincidence that Hollywood in recent years has seen the making of a series of movies that deal with the historical and mythic origins of ancient Europe? First we had 'Troy'. Then 'Alexander'. Then 'Kingdom of Heaven'. And now '300', dealing with the battle of the Spartans under Leonidas against the Persian Empire under Xerxes (if I remember my ancient history correctly). Granted, 'Kingdom of Heaven' deals with the Crusades - but the Crusades, taken as a whole, represent a seminal...
Surfing The Guardian (the English newspaper, not the movie) I found this article, published October fourth (so thirteen days ago at time of writing). Link A philosopher had entered his third week in hiding (at time of publication) due to death threats he received in consequence of writing a comment piece for Le Figaro on September 19. This comment referred to Muhammad, and what the philosopher said was this: that Muhammad was "a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass-murderer of Jews and a ...
Pakistan. That detestable, debauched, disgusting agglommeration of subhuman filth has, once again, legalized rape. I have no interest in Pakistan or Pakistanis beyond their immediate incineration through nuclear fire. They are among the most degenerate, disgusting, corrupt, vile, and abominable of all those creatures that pass for human in these lazy, lackadaisical times. I knew them in Britain and was revolted by them. And now they have provided evidence that my revulsion was entirely jus...
Yesterday I spent a large part of the afternoon working on an article titled 'The Pope, the Muslims, and the Eurodweebs'. JU devoured almost all of it as I attempted to edit it from the forum 'Tools' tab - something I don't recommend anyone else to do. This is not a rant about the shortcomings of JU. I mention it to explain why the truncated remains of that article are still available on my blog (it looks messy and I'd delete it if I could but I seem no longer to have access to that function...
So that I'm not accused of misinterpretation (deliberate or otherwise) nor of letting my fondness for underdogs run away with me, here is the link to the article in which I found this image of childhood 'innocence' gone awry ( Link ). In an effort to ameliorate the abomination thus exposed the journalist in question writes: "[...] the children would not have seen images of dead Lebanese as these kinds of images are not broadcast in Israel, suggesting the children were probably actin...
I've just watched the movie V for Vendetta . Before I say anything concerning the movie I'm going to give you a link to what is perhaps the most sanctimonious, patronising, self-satisfied review in the history of movie reviews. As I read it I doubted I and the reviewer had seen the same movie ( Link ). However, there's nothing unusual in that for me. When I still lived in the UK I used to base my choice of what movies to watch on the depth of loathing on the part of professional reviewers ...