Caledonian Retreats

I won't be posting until next Sunday, because I am going away for a week, up to Scotland.

On the subject of Scotland, Wendy Alexander's resignation marks the end of a career that could easily have been saved if she hadn't done Gordon Brown's bidding. The rumour was that when the giant gobbed Scottish Labour leader's funding irregularities emerged she wanted to resign but was persuaded not to by the prime minister and her brother Douglas Alexander. If she had gone then the reaction would have been she made a mistake and paid the price, her honour would have been in tact and in a few years she would have returned to top level politics. Instead she has been seen to cling on to office for months as though the rules don't apply to her, so there won't be any comebacks, she is finished for good. Good work Gordon.

Agent Harman, Your Work Is Done.

Harriet Harman's announcement of her new (In)Equality Bill yesterday, right before the Henley Bye-Election was surely designed to ensure that the BNP got more votes than Labour. This bolsters the 'Harriet Harman as a BNP mole' theory rather than as just a simpleton as I had previously assumed.

Labour To White Male Voters- You're Scum.

You have to hand it to Harriet Harperson, with a government that is deeply unpopular and struggling to maintain it's traditional bedrock support of white working class men most ministers would go out of their way to avoid antagonising them further. Not Harriet though:

Equality Minister Harriet Harman has defended controversial plans to encourage firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minorities job candidates.

The new Equalities Bill is also expected to force employers to disclose salary structures in a bid to make the pay gap between men and women more transparent.

Responding to criticism that the plans could discriminate against white men, Ms Harman said "you don't get progress if there isn't a bit of a push forward".

And sure enough the voters will give Labour a bit of a push forwards, over the cliff of electoral oblivion, in 2010. It goes without saying that no serious study of the 'gender pay gap' has concluded that it is caused by evil sexist employers, but facts don't actually matter.

Update: Anonymous in the comments raises the question, is Harperson a BNP mole?

Update: I've just watched the BBC news coverage of the story, basically they declared with zero evidence that ethnic minorities and women need help in the workplace and are being discriminated against. For balance they said that critics of the law had accused the government of 'political correctness', which is no doubt true but is hardly the central criticism is it? It's an old BBC trick to present the left's case as being factual and evidence based but to present the right as basing their positions on emotive gut reactions.

John Simpson Swoons.

Is it me or does John Simpson come across as being just a little bit too enthusiastic about Robert Mugabe:

Back in March, when the first round of voting took place, he was humiliated by being beaten into second place in the presidential race, and by losing the parliamentary election outright.

Now he's the sole effective candidate in Friday's presidential run-off, and he cannot fail to win with an overwhelming majority.

His opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, has been completely . The outside world, which mostly sympathises with him, can do nothing whatever to help him.

'When someone with the power of the Zimbabwean state at their disposal uses it to simply brutalise the opposition then 'outmanoeuvred' is hardly the right phrase. The 'victory' isn't a testament to Mugabe's cunning, given the massive odds in his favour it is hard to imagine how he could have done worse than losing control of parliament, pushing even his African co-leaders into condemning him and having to admit to losing the first round of voting.

Update: Daniel Finkelstein noticed the same report and also found it sinister.

Race Baiters 1 - Human Jellyfish 0

When Boris Johnson was smeared as a racist by having his words ripped out of context during the mayoral campaign, a great many people went out of their way to rebut the smears and to refuse to allow someone's reputation to be tarnished by them. So the ingratitude of Johnson in joining the lynch mob when an aide's words are misrepresented in an almost identical manner is striking. Appeasement doesn't work and when the details of this nonsense are forgotten, the fact that Boris Johnson got rid of McGrath will simply confirm to casual observers that he once employed an adviser who told blacks to go home.

Incidentally I feel sorry for this bloke with the unfortunate namesake.

Onwards.

The funeral was yesterday, it was easier than the build up because there was something to focus on. Thanks once again to everyone who has offered condolences and sympathy.

I'll probably resume regular posting here again in the next couple of weeks, and will begin commenting elsewhere almost immediately.

Life & Death

I will not be updating this site for a while, because I shall have little or no inclination to drone on about current events for the next few weeks.

Last week I had to take my mother into hospital to be looked at, over the following week the doctors diagnosed what was wrong with her and had begun treating an infection that she had and so over the weekend her condition had improved significantly and she was a lot more comfortable so I was feeling very upbeat about her chances. Then this morning I learned that she had become very unwell early this morning so had been taken to Intensive Care. By the time I got there she was sedated and being made ready for and emergency heart valve replacement. Unfortunately her body was simply not strong enough to take it and she died. She was 64.

I had woken up that morning planning on visiting her again and feeling as happy about her health as I had for a very long time, and less than 12 hours later she was gone, I am still in a state of disbelief and raw grief as I write this, so goodbye for now.

Update: Thanks for the many comments of condolence and support, it really is appreciated more than I would have anticipated. The funeral will be on Friday and I am not looking forward to it after that I will begin to think about how to move forwards, at the moment I'd rather not do anything but sit down staring at the wall but I know that she would not have wanted me to do that.

10 Reasons To Support McCain Over Obama

• Iraq- McCain advocated the Surge years before it was implemented and supported it even when it was extremely unpopular.
  
• Economy- Obama is a demagogue who offers up xenophobic protectionism as a panacea to the financial difficulties some people are facing, even though he doesn't believe it himself. McCain has the courage to tell the truth even when it is unpopular.
• Ethics- The near trebling of Michelle Obama's salary shortly after Barack directed federal money to her employers reeks of corruption.
• Associates- With deep personal associations to racist cranks like Jeremiah Wright and long term political alliances with a terrorist, William Ayers, Obama has almost no moral qualms about who he mixes with. Whenever McCain's allies have had something unsavoury exposed he has swiftly renounced their support.
  
• Courage- John McCain was a POW for almost six years at the hands of notoriously brutal captors but refused to yield to them and refused to accept early release ahead of his fellow POWs. Obama can't even stand up to Jeremiah Wright.
• Integrity- McCain is a long term proponent of solutions to the problem of pork barrel politics.
• Independence- Whereas Obama is a quintessential machine politician who has risen by making alliances with the power brokers of Chicago politics, John McCain has always been perfectly willing to buck the party line when he thinks that his side are in the wrong.
• Veep- Well we can at least be sure that McCain's Vice President won't be Hillary.
• Inclusive- You couldn't imagine John McCain chuckling away to a San Francisco audience about the bitter rubes in the Midwest.
• Life Experience- McCain's career has been extraordinary, he was a pilot, POW and businessman before he entered the Senate, whereas Obama's only job before politics was as a 'community organiser'.
  

Comprimise

Who said comprimise with Al Qaeda was impossible?

Appearing in public for the first time after five years in captivity, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Col Ralph Kohlmann, a US military judge, that death was "my wish".

It's my wish that he dies too, it's amazing how much common ground there is between us.

Questions That Answer Themselves.

Over at Labour Home a commentator under an article about a recent deselection attempt against the heretic Kate Hoey asks:

just how is advancing the Tory cause and being chair of an organisation that is seeking the downfall of the Labour government "working for the good of the country excatly"?

Links

Bit busy for the last couple of days, so here are a few things worth reading:

• The Mark Steyn show trial has begun.
  
• If you include the words 'Cornish' and 'inbreds' you can drive up your readership, although mostly by Cornish inbreds {via Julia}
• Is the reason that Hillary Clinton lost because she was so arrogant as to hire a straegist who couldn't be arsed to learn the rules of the contest, this post at Political Betting would suggest so.
• Speaking of the US presidential race this article features a state by state prediction of the result, currently they are predicting a to electoral college votes victory to McCain over Obama.
• According to Janet Daley the BBC now want to extract a license fee from anyone who owns equipment capable of receiving a BBC broadcast, including mobile phones. Fuck that, I guess that 'll have to dodge that fee as I do with the rxisting one. {via Harry Haddock}
  
• John East at Choice Cuts has found the perfect politician for the modern age. Unfortunately he has been dead for over 2000 years.
• Even the NUT would balk at supporting this bloke.
• Gun + Beer + Back Itch = Pain.
  

Whiteygate.

For the last couple of weeks a rumour has been going around about the existance of a tape of Michelle Obama in the pulpit of Jeremiah Wright's church denouncing 'whitey'. According to the story the Republicans supposedly have the tape and are preparing to use it.

This story seems like a hoax to me though, whilst Michelle Obama does appear to be a resentful moonbat the word 'whitey' doesn't sound like something an actual black racist would say, it sounds more like what someone writing a script about a black racist would have the character say. It's like whenever there is a hate crime hoax the imagined racist abuse always sounds rather cliched, unnatural and lacking any subtlety, the same is true of the supposed Michelle Obama tape.

The other reason to believe that it's fake is that the rumours initially appeared on pro Clinton websites but claimed that the Republicans had the tape. If the GOP had a tape that could derail an Obama bid like that then the absolute last thing they would do is leak it before the Democrats had made their nomination. If the Republicans had the tape then it would be leaked in November on the weekend before the election, if Clinton had it then it would have come out about two months ago.

the end result of one Democrat trying to smear another will be that the credulous will use the smear as an example of Republican dirty tricks.

Killing Terrorists Is A Surprisingly Good Counter-Terrorism Strategy

In the 1990s the idea took hold that terrorists were just misunderstood and you had to negotiate with them to solve the underlying problems. This approach has proved disastrous in many countries with armed groups being given space to commit more and more terrorism. In the last three or four years a new approach to defeating terrorists has enjoyed immense success in Colombia, Sri Lanka and Iraq. Instead of talking to them you kill them, it turns out that far from breeding more terrorists, the whole 'being killed' thing really puts off potential recruits.

As this excellent WSJ article from bret Stephens puts it:

When military strategies fail – as they did in Vietnam while the U.S. pursued the tactics of attrition, or in Iraq prior to the surge – the idea that there can be no military solution has a way of taking hold with civilians and generals eager to deflect blame. This is how we arrived at the notion that "political reconciliation" is a precondition of military success, not a result of it.

{via Centre Right}

Claim To Fame.

I spent most of the day visiting someone in hospital. The patient in the bed opposite had a visitor whose friend and/or relative who had recently bought a car that had previously belonged to Jackie Stewart. I mingle with glamourous company.

Another patient in the same bay was a 100 year old woman who had broken her hip and needed to have surgery. This might sound like a bad thing but from her conversation with the doctors I learned that she had last needed to have an operation when she was 53, having gone through her 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s without any major medical procedures which is pretty impressive.

Quote Of The Day.

Today's Telegraph's editorial makes an important point:

Put bluntly, spending more in an area makes its inhabitants likelier to look to the state for their livelihood, which in turn makes them likelier to vote for the high-tax party. Higher expenditure rarely regenerates a region - on the contrary, it traps communities in the squalor of dependency - but that is not its purpose.

This is an important point, because taxations is not only bad for the people who are forced to hand over large chunks of their income, but it also harms the recipients of state largess, in the long run, as any semblance of self reliance is undermined.

Understanding.

Yaz in April after the convictions of some Islamist terror plotters:

We must learn more about these murderous men

Yaz today:

Local election results show the country lurching right, in some parts even embracing the BNP. Instead of condemning the scum, Britons are instructed to "understand" why these voters are "driven" to vote for neo-Nazis.

Delayed Reaction.

This is technically true:

Barack Obama has resigned his 20 year membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in the aftermath of inflammatory remarks by his longtime pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright

But it's a bit like claiming that the Cold War ended after Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision Song Contest, the chronological order is correct but their isn't an immediate causal relationship.

In "the aftermath of inflammatory remarks" by Jeremiah Wright he remained with Wright for years on end, married his wife at Wright's church, had his children christened by Wright, wrote two autobigraphies both of which praise Wright extensively including using one of his sermons for the title, appointed Wright to a position in his campaign, backed Wright when the remarks went public and only then resigned from the Trinity United Church.