An illustrated and allusive guide to Noto55

Malcolm is frequently convinced that his iTunes feed is hexed: its degree of appropriate prescience is inspired.

He was about to post on the iniquitous 55% rule (see previous posts below) when John Cash started to belt out Remember the Alamo:



Tangentially relevant: Noto55 is a small Alamo. We may not win; but it is a strike for a significant freedom. Anyway, Cash is worthwhile at all times, any pretext to drag him into the discussion should be snaffled. And he is a one heck of a lot more impressive than the dismal prospect of Marty Robbins chirruping up on the same topic, with Paul Francis Webster's doggerel (he did much better elsewhere) to Dmitri Tiomkin's tune:

In the sand he drew a line with his army saber
Out of a hundred eighty five not a soldier crossed the line.
With his banners a dancin' in the dawn's golden light,
Santa Ana came prancin' on a horse that was black as the night ...

Well, we're not that far gone yet. But there is a line-in-the-sand. And, according to the Daily Mail, we have our Colonel Travis:

... a number of MPs want to retain the right to kick out a government by a simple majority of one, in a no confidence vote.

David Davis - once Mr Cameron's leadership rival - is understood to be among a growing number of politicians of the Left and Right opposed to the 'stitch-up'.

Davis is a Tory, and a rank one (so that's two strikes against him in Malcolm's elephantine memory). He is, however, an honourable man. Malcolm had to respect him when he went on his Quixotic by-election campaign against ID-cards and the rest of the surveillance society.

Notice that the iTunes playlist has now segued to equally-magnificent Jacques Brel:



If Davis is mustering, in the backwoods of Tory opinion something stirs. Over on Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service, our guide, philosopher and friend is noting two Tory grandees girding for a punch-up on the same issue.

Good on them all. Sphere: Related Content

Plumbing the bottom of the gene pool

There was this thread running on Slugger O'Toole, where the repartition of Northern Ireland was debated.

One contributor thoughtfully suggested an article from Free Life, A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought. So Malcolm casually downloaded the .pdf. It sat there, on the edge of the screen for a few hours, until Malcolm opened it. And he hasn't stopped pshawing ever since.

Page one is a reproduced wood-cut (right) of a really juicy and instructive hanging and disembowelling, with the caption:

How very convenient for this Government
that it has abolished the death penalty for treason

And how "Classical Liberal".

That, presumably, is preface to "Doctor" Sean Gabb's treatise on Jack Straw, Corruption, and the New World Order. For the record, "Doctor" Gabb's first degree is in History. His published "academic" writings (both of them) are on truancy. Somehow, Malcolm feels that Gabb on the "New World Order" might be a trifle too intellectually challenged challenging for the moment.

But, lo and behold! Who is this, also listed in A Note on Contributors?

Paul Delaire Staines runs a hedge fund in Tokyo. His hobbies are watching the sun rise over Mount Fuji and chasing women [sic]

Can it be? Surely it is! Our one and only Guido!

Now, to be fair, Staines, a.k.a. Delaire Staines, a.k.a. de Laire Staines, a.k.a. "Guido" has already been done over several times. This, then may be gratuitous. But deserved. And fun.

So here, in case all those Fawkes-followers (and Tim Ireland) have not encountered this personal account by Mr Staines & c., & c., of his favourite topic (himself), here it begins:

My parents sold the former family home recently and asked me, not unreasonably, to clear out my books from their attic. I found my copy of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, from Plato to Marx, inside the cover my name was scrawled together with the date 1980. I date my conversion to Libertarianism from the day I put down that book.

I joined the Young Conservatives because they were the only people around who were anti-Socialist or at least anti-Soviet. This was the era of CND and I saw the key battle in terms of the West versus Soviet expansionism. Simon Salzedo was chairman of the local YCs and a Maggie-loving-Wet-hating typical young Tory. He was bemused by this zealous anti-Communist in his midst paraphrasing Popper and Hayek at cheese and wine evenings – it would be a few years before he would lead the charge at Oxford to dry out OUCA on a principled Libertarian platform. He was elitist and it rubbed off on me, by the time I got to sixth form I had revived the double barreled family name that my father had let wither as a sixties Young Fabian. My Anglo-Indian father obviously despaired of me hanging out with Tory crypto-racists whom he loathed (although later he would vote with his wallet for tax cuts and privatization giveaways).

By the time I was an undergraduate in the mid-eighties, having joined the Federation of Conservative Students, and somehow affecting to wear fake bow-ties and cheap suits (whilst endlessly debating the merits of Anarcho-Capitalism versus Minimal Statism), I had at last found a small number of like minded souls. Marc Henri Glendenning the then national chairman of FCS spoke a language I could understand - Thatcher on drugs. Still it was right-wing anti-Communist, anti-Wet and mainly reactionary. Battling in Student Unions to rename the “Mandela Bar” the “Bruce Forsyth Bar”, arguing with CND feminists and generally opposing the left wing campus establishment whilst in the real world the Conservatives won elections by landslides and the war of ideas. Only on campus were we a radical minority and intentionally antagonistic, in fact so obnoxious that the Conservative Party decided to close down its youth wings.

That antagonistic, sod you attitude continued after I failed to get a degree (I was thrown out for being a right-wing pain in the butt who was more interested in student politics than essays) when I went to work in the various right-wing pressure groups and think tanks that proliferated in the late eighties. The deliberately provocative attitude still maintained – I never wore a “Hang Mandela” badge but I hung out with people who did. Why? What did we gain from doing so? Did we make ourselves more popular by calling for the death of a man who was fighting injustice by the only means available to him? Did this “shift the parameters of debate” in our direction?

There's only so much flesh-and-blood can stand. The rest can be accessed here.

The piece on Northern Ireland is equally bizarre, lunatic, and (ultimately) thoroughly boring. Sphere: Related Content

The eye of the beholder

You saw Brad Bird's Pixar film, The Incredibles, right?

You might recall the suit designer, Edna (voiced by Brad Bird himself).

Johnathan Pearce, on Samizdata, listed that film as one of his ten choices for the last decade, because:

I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The "designer" character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand.

Now, Malcolm frets, was he alone in not making the identification? Sphere: Related Content

Such men are dangerous ...

Only on Sunday, posting to Slugger O'Toole (Jun 28, 2009 @ 06:13 PM), Malcolm drew attention to the neo-cons of the Henry Jackson Society. Then he was referring to:

that well-known lefty (no, strike that one: this is now) neo-con, Paul Bew.

Well, as several lyricists have noted, here it comes again.

This time in a very scary article by Neil Clarke, on The First Post.

Inevitably Clarke eventually probes the sleazy mire that has been the single focus of British politics these last weeks: one neo-con (the Hon. Ed Vaizey, Tory Shadow for "Culture") bought antique furniture from the mother-in-law, Lady Annabel Astor, of another (David Cameron), and charged it to parliamentary expenses.

Before that, Clarke clocks in with a remarkable interpretation: that Cameron's enstoolment as Tory leader was engineered to defeat the anti-war elements in the Tory Party:

... the neocon faction within the party started to champion the cause of a young, relatively little known MP for Witney, promoting him as the man who would 'modernise' the party and lead it back to power. The strategy worked a treat, and the little known MP - David Cameron - pulled off a surprise victory.

Cameron's campaign was masterminded by a triumvirate of MPs: Michael Gove, Ed Vaizey and George Osborne.

Gove, who believes the invasion of Iraq was a "proper British foreign policy success", is the author of the polemic Celsius 7/7, which has been described as a "neo-con rallying cry" for its attacks on Islamism, which he describes as a "totalitarian ideology" on a par with Nazism and Communism, and says must be fiercely opposed.

He, along with Vaizey, is a signatory to the principles of the ultra-hawkish Henry Jackson Society, an organisation founded at Peterhouse College Cambridge in 2005 and named after a warmongering US Senator who opposed détente with the Soviet Union.

Furthermore:

Cameron has been closely protective of this leadership cadre:

Gove, the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, who was described by the Daily Mail's political commentator Peter Oborne as "one of the most notorious milkers of the expenses system", for spending thousands furnishing his London home before 'flipping' to a new property and claiming £13,000 in moving costs, came under no pressure from Cameron to stand down. He is likely to play a major role in the next Conservative government.

So too will fellow flipper George Osborne ...

Well, that states the case clearly enough.

There are two possible interpretations here.

One is that Clarke has a hopelessly bee-infested barnet. Malcolm instantly suspects anyone with a publicly-declared penchant for horse-racing may be a snaffle short in the tack-room.

Alternatively, even allowing for a distant rustle of men in white coats, Clarke is on to something.

Putting one's name on a list of sponsors, or signing up to a statement of principles, as these adherents of the Henry Jackson Society have done, invites guilt-by-association. Yet, the connection also merits due consideration.

The prime motive of the HJS is the spreading of a single political agenda world-wide (which, of itself, smacks of being repressive, colonialist, even one-size-fits-all imperialist):

…that liberal democracy should be spread across the world; that as the world's most powerful democracies, the United States and the European Union—under British leadership—must shape the world more actively by intervention and example; that such leadership requires political will. a commitment to universal human rights and the maintenance of a strong military with global expeditionary reach; and that too few of our leaders in Britain and the rest of Europe today are ready to play a role in the world that matches our strength.

Doncha just lurve that "under British leadership" bit? And the blatant Jingoism of "a strong military" with a "global expeditionary reach"?

The HJS, it has to be admitted, has several marks of the nut-house.

A recent posting on the HJS website saw Hillary Clinton in the context of A vast left-wing conspiracy. Another, Guns 'n' Ammo, lamented that:

a pastor in the state of Kentucky has asked his congregation to bring their handguns to the Sunday services in an effort to promote gun safety.

This was misguided simply because:

episodes like this will only serve to deepen suspicion of religious institutions and alienate the gun-bearing demographic from mainstream society.

Oh, and Israel was bang-on bombing the hell out of Gaza: a one-tonne bomb on an apartment building, slaughtering eleven children, is Israel's right, arguably a duty.

Somewhere in there, we are not surprised, was an article assuming that the "mission" in the Middle East would not be complete without Iran being:

compelled by an unrelenting international community to act in accordance with international law and diplomatic norms.

Those are Malcolm's emphases: the previous paragraph had demanded that

Europe and the U.S. need to make much clearer ... that Iran has a choice in this matter. It can continue on its path of self-isolation and belligerence ... or it can cooperate and engage to its benefit... Lax responses from the leaders of the free world only work to facilitate these pursuits; they leave the West with nothing with which to hold over Iran’s head to force compliance with international law and diplomatic norms.

In other words, send the gun-boats. Or the gun-ships. Or the B2 bombers (Jackson, the "whore for Boeing" would approve of that). Dammit: send the lot. It's all in the interests of "world peace"; and, in this misguided, introverted demi-monde, it's not a great distance from Tacitus' thing about desert/peace to Jackson's "The best politics is no politics".

Here's another gem from the HJS which Malcolm cannot resist:

Simply because DDT is a close cousin of Agent Orange does not make it dangerous any more than the air we breathe is harmful because it contains oxygen, which alone is lethal.

Which, of course, is just another fault to be laid at the door of those lefty wimps, who haven't sprayed DDT across the African continent:

... if healthcare is such a worldwide concern, shouldn’t that rising tide lift all boats? When will Barack Obama decide to become his half-brother’s keeper?

Let's bring in one more clown: any chance those "liberal democrats"of the HJS might ponder the origins of their Irish associate? Anthony Mcintyre was a Provo, eighteen years in the Kesh, and resigned only when Sinn Féin signed up to the Good Friday Agreement. With friends like that ...

Noble Romans and well-given?

Malcolm's header for this piece is from Julius Caesar's speech to Antony in Act I, scene ii. It concludes with:

Such men as he be never at heart's ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous...
Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,
And tell me truly what thou think'st of him.

Notice: "on my right hand".

The HJS, too, is largely deaf on the other.

Moreover, Caesar is proven correct.
Antony. shrugging off the threat, gets it spectacularly wrong. Sphere: Related Content

Life, liberty and the happiness of a warm gun?

Our local lunatic scene

A couple of years back Donal Blaney put up a piece on the web. It was the stereotypical juvenile rightist bleat, decrying a Rhode Island school principal's objection to a student choosing to be depicted for the college yearbook complete with body-amrour and weapon:

The humourless principal at Portsmouth High School, Robert Littlefield, has said that the flagrant wielding of a potentially dangerous weapon was a clear violation of school regulations...

What is truly dangerous are the attitudes and actions of men such as Patrick's headteacher, Robert Littlefield. Their zeal in curtailing the rights of otherwise law-abiding people highlights the very worst in the human condition.

It is not Patrick's High School graduation photo that should be removed from his yearbook - it is Robert Littlefield who should be removed from Portsmouth High School and attitudes such as his that should be removed from America's classrooms.

As we all expected, buried in the text is that unoriginal expression:

Surely this is yet another example of political correctness gone mad...

Blaney is, of course, the epitome of the self-regarding "libertarian" Young Tory who cites Enoch Powell on racial topics. Others speak nearly as well of him ("hypocrite, political whore and torture fan") as he does of himself.

Guilty by unfortunate association

The site which gave Blaney space was the alternative mouthpiece of Tim Montgomerie of ConservativeHome. Then it ran under the title of "Britain and America"; last year it was reborn as "America in the World", launched by David Cameron, and puffed by the Daily Telegraph and by saturnine Harry Phibbs (so no conflict of interest there) in the Daily Mail .

The whole libertarian lot seem fixated on guns:

... the argument about guns is still worth having, and the libertarian case about it is still worth putting, if only as part of spreading libertarianism generally. Just because gun laws aren't about to be relaxed, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be. Whatever the crime rate, relaxing the gun laws would lower it, and not to relax them is wrong, stupid and cruel, to the real victims of crime, namely the victims of crime.

And, as surely as darkest night follows bright, shining morning, the irksome Sean Gabb:

As the old saying goes: "God made men equal, and Smith and Wesson make damn sure it stays that way."

... can you seriously agree with the argument that you should be disarmed, and therefore powerless to defend yourself and your loved ones against the armed street trash who are beginning to turn this country upside down?

The wider world

Today, hearing from Winnenden and Alabama, we await to hear from the likes of these pundits why giving the disturbed guns, that they may shoot up the neighbourhood, and schools in particular, is a good thing.

So, in the meantime, let's have the scorecard for previous school and college shootings (only after painstaking effort, compiling this list, did Malcolm discover a more complete one of all shootings, fatal and less so, though not up-to-date):

• Barry Loukaitis, Moses Lake, WA; 2 Feb 1996: 3 dead;
• Thomas Hamilton, Dunblane, Scotland; 13 March 1996: 18 dead;
• Evan Ramsey, Bethel, AK; 19 Feb 1997: 3 dead;
• Mohammed Ahman al-Naziri, Sanna, Yemen; March 1997: 8 dead;
• Luke Woodham, Pear, MS; 1 Oct 1997: 3 dead;
• Michael Carneal, West Padukah, KY; 1 Dec 1997: 3 dead;
• Johnson and Golden, Jonesboro, AK; 24 March 1998: 5 dead;
• Andrew Wurst, Edinboro, PA; 24 April 1994: one dead;
• Jacob Davis, Fayetteville, TN; 19 May 1998: one dead;
• Kip Kinkel, Springfield, OR; 21 May 1998: 4 dead;
• Harris and Klebold, Littleton, CO; 20 April 1999: 15 dead;
• [Unknown], Taber, Alberta; 28 April, 1999: one dead;
• Victor Cordova, Deming, NM; 19 Nov 1999: one dead;
• An unnamed six-year-old, Flint, MI; Leap Year's Day 2000: one dead;
• [Unknown], Branneberg, Germany; March 2000: one dead, one brain-dead;
• Darell Ingram, Savannah, GA; 10 March 2000: two dead;
• Nate Brazall, Lake Worth, FL; 26 May 2000: one dead;
• [Unknown], Baltimore, MD; 17 January 2001: one dead;
• [Unknown], Jan, Sweden, 18 Jan 2001: one dead;
• Charles Williams, Santee, CA; 5 March 2001: two dead;
• Donald Burt, Gary, IN; 30 March 2001: one dead;
• Chris Buschbacher, Cary, MN; 12 Nov 2001: one dead (the gunman, after taking two hostages);
• [Unkown], Freising, Germany; 19 Feb 2002; four dead;
• Robert Steinhaeuser, Erfurt, Germany; 26 April 2002: 17 dead;
• Dragoslav Petkovic, Vlasenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina; 29 April 2002: two dead;
• Robert Flores, Tucson, AZ; 28 Oct 2002: four dead;
• Four teenagers, New Orleans, LA; 14 April 2003: one dead;
• James Sheets, Red Lion, PA; 24 April 2003: two dead;
• John McLaughlin, Cold Spring, MN; 24 Sept 2003: two dead;
• "Raphael", Carmen de Patagones, Argentina; 28 Sep 2004: three dead;
• Jeff Weise, Red Lake, MN; 21 Mar 2005: 10 dead;
• [Unknown], Jacksboro, TN; 8 Nov 2005: one dead;
• Christopher Williams, Essex, VT; 24 Aug 2006: two dead;
• Kimveer Gill, Montreal, Canada; 13 Sep 2006: two dead;
• [Unknown], Bailey, CO; 27 Sep 2006; two dead;
• [Unknown], Cazenovia, WI; 29 Sep 2006; one dead;
• Charles Roberts, Nickel Mines, PA; 3 Oct 2006; six dead;
• Cho Seung-Hui, Blacksburg, VA; 16 April 2007; 33 dead (the current US record);
• Asa Coon, Cleveland, OH; 10 Oct 2007; one dead;
• [Unknown], Tuusula, Finland; 7 Nov 2007; 9 dead;
• [Unknown], Baton Rouge, LA; 8 Feb 2008; three dead;
• Stephen Kazmierczak, DeKalb, IL; 14 Feb 2008; six dead;
• [Unknown], Kauhajoki, Finland; 23 Sep 2008; ten dead;
• [Unknown], Fort Lauderdale, FL; 12 Nov 2008; one dead.

To which we can now add:

• Tim Kretschmer, Winnenden, Baden-Wurttenberg; 11 Mar 2009; at least sixteen.

Now, wait for it!

True libertarians, at least those who have graduated from effort of colouring-in their Margaret Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan biogs-for-teenies, will have their bedside Ayn Rand book-marked with at least a .38 LadySmith.

Expect a further outburst of their all-purpose solution: armed teachers. Sphere: Related Content