Tony Blair’s Britain

Great Moments In Socialism 38 Comments

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and “influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created”.

Bitter laughter is my main response to the events of the past week. You are surprised by what has happened? Why? I have been saying for years that it was coming, and why it was coming, and what could be done to stop it.
I have said it in books, in articles, over lunch and dinner tables with politicians whose lips curled with lofty contempt.
So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Heaven knows I have argued for years for the measures that might have saved them.
But I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades.

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 33 Comments

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann is an international non-profit movement dedicated to the preservation and promotion of traditional Irish music. In tonight’s Tips music Pauric Bannon, Aoife and Breege Geoghegan, and Glen Smith (playing flute, banjo, fiddle, and tin whistle respectively) play two jigs during a Comhaltas Live performance at Boylan’s Pub in Kilnaleck, County Cavan, Ireland.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

Slow Day?

More Money Than Brains 52 Comments

“Some people will tell you that slow is good – but I’m here to tell you that fast is better. I’ve always believed this, in spite of the trouble it’s caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba…” – Hunter S. Thompson

h/t Scott, who writes “If you’d want to race you’d have lots of sponsors”. He may be a New Democrat.
(updated with quote)

We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Alternative Subsidy 44 Comments

Over the past few years, Texas has spent about $17 billion on wind turbines. And that doesn’t include the transmission lines.

Consider the afternoon of August 2, when electricity demand hit 67,929 megawatts. Although electricity demand and prices were peaking, output from the state’s wind turbines was just 1,500 megawatts, or about 15 percent of their total nameplate capacity. Put another way, wind energy was able to provide only about 2.2 percent of the total power demand even though the installed capacity of Texas’s wind turbines theoretically equals nearly 15 percent of peak demand. This was no anomaly. On four days in August 2010, when electricity demand set records, wind energy was able to contribute just 1, 2, 1, and 1 percent, respectively, of total demand.

The real tragedy? There are no telephones in Texas, dashing hopes that someone might call our own energy minister to warn him.

No Canadian Politician, Including the Prime Minister, Would Have the Guts to Do This

entitlement generation 26 Comments

After all anti-Americanism is even more rife here than in England:

UK seeks advice of former US ‘super-cop’

More:

…
Last night, in an intervention likely to anger senior officers further, Bill Bratton, the former New York police chief who Mr Cameron said would advise the Government on how to deal with the aftermath of the riots, said young people had been “emboldened” by over-cautious police tactics and lenient sentencing policies.
Mr Bratton said a police force should have “a lot of arrows in the quiver”, advocating a doctrine of “escalating force” where weapons including rubber bullets, Tasers, pepper spray and water cannon were all available to commanders. “You want the criminal element to fear them,” Mr Bratton said…

As for the Canadian criminal justice system, riot section:

Days away from the two-month anniversary of Vancouver’s horrific Stanley Cup riot, no rioters have been charged for their crimes and questions continue to swirl around the pace of Vancouver’s riot investigation…

Meanwhile back in the UK:

Courts in London and Manchester have opened over the weekend as the number of people charged for riot-related offences reaches more than 1,000…

Furiously to think gives one it.

La belle province pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: “this German paper published in French”/PET

Little Known Facts 39 Comments

Jack Granatstein, Canada’s leading military historian, describes the simple and unpretty truth about many Québecois in a book review concerning Canadian censorship during WW II (note also how Anglo-Saxon–now RoC–media attitudes have changed):

…
This story…was different in the French-language media and for all the wrong reasons. Newspapers such as Le Devoir were unabashedly anti-war, anti-British, anti-conscription, anti-Semitic and anti-Charles de Gaulle, and were fervent advocates for the Vichy French government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Le Devoir’s Georges Pelletier essentially outfaced the censors, publishing his claptrap without real checks because, Bourrie argues without providing quite enough evidence, Ottawa politicians, notably justice ministers Ernest Lapointe and Louis St. Laurent, were afraid of a government-media confrontation that could turn Quebec opinion even more against the war effort. Here, the Directorate of Censorship, which frequently viewed Le Devoir as “this German paper published in French … [that] systematically and with gross misrepresentation and distortion of facts continually sabotages the Canadian war effort,” was held in check by frightened politicians…

Not something you’ll have read about much in recent times, eh? Then there was PET:

Trudeau: Intellectual fool; moral imbecile

Reader Tips

Reader Tips 27 Comments

North Carolina natives Scotty Wiseman and Myrtle Cooper were a husband and wife duo who performed in the 30s, 40s, and 50s as Lulu Belle & Scotty. In tonight’s selection, written by Wiseman in 1952, a rather straightforward HUAC-era anti-Communist song, replete with spies and sneaky domestic traitors, turns into an unapologetic protest against the American federal government’s intrusiveness (“Let the government run its business and let me run my own”) and out of control spending (“Our national debt is monster size and grown’ every day / Our children’s children, still unborn, are gonna have to pay”).
Via Bruce Kesler at Maggie’s Farm, here are Lulu Belle & Scotty singing I’m No Communist.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.

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