Phase Two of the Obama disaster has already started

We were told that the markets were expecting Obama to win - as I certainly was and as too, for better or for worse, was 99% of the rest of the human race.

Analysts and investors are expecting incumbent Democrat Barack Obama to retain the top seat in the White House, with such an outcome believed to be priced into markets.

A surprise Romney win could therefore cause a significant jolt.

“There would be an initial market bounce of perhaps 500 points on the Dow because a Romney victory is not priced in,” said Douglas McWilliams, chief executive of the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), today.

Well, we couldn't have that, now could we.

And of course we haven't. Forget careless talk of the "fiscal cliff". The second phase of the great Obama disaster has seemingly started straightaway.

VICTORIOUS President Barack Obama addressed adoring crowds in Chicago yesterday after winning a second term at the White House, yet was hit by an immediate reality check as markets crashed on the back of renewed tensions in the Eurozone.

In New York the Dow Jones crashed by 2.36 per cent to end the day at 12,932.73 as violent protests erupted in Greece and investors also fretted about America’s own levels of government debt.

Yeah, yeah! Blame it on the Greeks. It can't possibly be Obama's fault.

In truth, the fiscal cliff will probably be something of a non-event. A bit of fudge here, a bit of compromise there, nobody wanting to face reality, and the can will just end up being kicked a little further down the road. The big story of next year will be the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan again - which the MSM will try to ignore, but which will eventually leak out into even America's public consciousness. And with any luck Bashar al-Assad will hang on in Syria.

The best summing up that I've read so far (and I'm not intending to read many) of what went wrong with Mitt Romney's campaign has been Stephan Shakespeare's one here in City AM. But then as City AM is pretty much the only "serious" newspaper I really read any more, perhaps that's not so odd. For what it's worth, about a third of Shakespeare's piece is spent crowing on behalf of AnthingYouWantGov, and only the third about the "phantom swing" to Romney after the first debate is really credible. But it's worth a look.

Shakespeare's almost certainly wrong about Cameron's being able to rely on incumbency at the next General Election in this country. For one thing, Cameron doesn't really have incumbency, given that the Tories didn't actually win the last election. For another, at the next election the Lib Dems will flock to Labour. And Cameron's assumption that the small-c conservatives he has been assiduously alienating for the last two years will have nowhere else to go is not a wise one. What we're left with therefore is the Tories' pinning their hopes on the questionable electoral "genius" of Lynton Crosby, whose mudslinging tactics may work in Australia (thanks to compulsory voting there) but tend to backfire in this country (as they did for Michael Howard in 2005).

When Shakespeare is almost certainly correct though is in demonstrating that there really was no "Mitt momentum" thanks to the debates. (Nate Silver really was right about that one.) And in fact debates really don't make any difference to people's voting intentions. Neil O'Brien is absolutely correct in his Telegraph column when he says we should abolish them in this country as quickly as possible.

Blair's New Neo-Stalinist Friends

A recent article in The New Republic about Tony Blair's recent, lucrative business adventures in "the Stans" is priggish and pretentious, but quite possibly genuinely well meant.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev has led [Kazakhstan] since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991; in 2011 he was reelected with 95 percent of the vote. The rubber-stamp parliament has granted Nazarbayev the permanent right “to address the people of Kazakhstan at any time” and to approve all “initiatives on the country’s development.”

Yet Nazarbayev has found one important Western cheerleader. Last year, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared in a dreary neo-Stalinist propaganda video produced by a Kazakh TV station and exclaimed that Nazarbayev had displayed “the toughness necessary to take the decisions to put the country on the right path.” The movie features extensive interviews with Nazarbayev and Western energy executives praising him, as well as fawning interventions from Blair. “In the work that I do there, I’ve found them really smart people, capable, very determined, and very proud of their country,” he enthuses.

Blair’s fondness for Central Asian dictators is not limited to Nazarbayev. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, is the man that a WikiLeaks cable compared to Sonny Corleone, thanks to his thin skin and temper. His domestic critics have been imprisoned, and less than sycophantic media outlets have been harassed. But none of this seems to have bothered Blair, who traveled to Azerbaijan in 2009 and saw a leader with a “very positive and exciting vision for the future of the country.”

Why is Tony Blair, the man who embodied liberal hawkishness and democracy promotion, shilling for these dictatorships?

What the goofballs at the NR miss about Blair of course is that this sort of behaviour - advising former Communist dictators about "governance", for which read "how to be even more badass and have the Americans like you" - is exactly the sort of thing one expects from a man who took over a mainstream, mostly harmless Old Left political party like the Labour Party (even if back in its opposition period in the 1980s it did have more than its fair share of crackpots - Livingstone, Bernie Grant, Militant, etc.) and turned it into a Stalinist political juggernaut led by a tiny clique of neo-Marxist fanatics.

The whole point of Marxism, and the reason why it appeals across all classes, ages, races and sexes (and "sexualities") is its infinite malleability, not to mention applicability. Any gripe or grudge against any system in any context can be turned into an occasion to further "the Revolution". Any action, no matter how wicked, from legalising sodomy and foeticide to bombing some far off country that has never done you or anyone else any harm whatsoever, can be done in the name of "freedom" and/or "democracy".

And of course stamping down on freedom and democracy can be just as easily justified in the name of "progress" and "the Greater Good" (or, if you're an English Catholic bishop, "the Common Good"). If all else fails, rest assured that history will be your judge.

Yuri Bezmenov on Subversion

I'd never heard of Yuri Bezmenov until I saw this video. He is reasonably legit though (and he's in the book), and what he says here about Communist subversion in America during the Cold War does sound fairly convincing - especially when he makes the point that what the KGB were really trying to do most of the time was simply push America further along the road it was already heading down by itself anyway.

According to Bezmenov there are three areas in which public opinion is formed.

1.      Religion

2.      Education

3.      Social life, including the mainstream media

4.      Law enforcement

5.      Labour relations

And where has all this "subversion" got us, so far? Well, each one of us can be the judge of that, I think.

The Archbishop and "the Bankers"

I suppose one ought to try to be charitable about the Archbishop's sermon yesterday, reported in today's Daily Telegraph and elsewhere, which implicitly accused bankers of being "immoral". What Archbp Nichols seems to have said is that bankers ought to behave the same way at work as they do at home, which, morally speaking, is of course quite correct. When it comes to the Ten Commandments, there can be no disinction between the professional and the private any more than there can be between the sacred and the secular.

The paradox here is that self-proclaimed public moralists usually contrast professional probity with private vice. Vicious politicians can normally be expected to write off any number of hidden sins - especially when they are uncovered by the tabloid press - as belonging to their "private lives". Members of the Royal Family too are apparently expected to maintain quite different standards of decency depending on whether they performing public duties or by themselves (Prince Harry's recent difficulties notwithstanding!). Nichols therefore is perfectly correct to point out that what is sauce for goose is also sauce for the gander, and vice versa. (And I use the word 'sauce' advisedly!)

His thesis then surely is that a banker may very well be more reckless with his clients' money than with his own, or indeed than with his friends'. If one contrasts recklessly spending one's friend's money with careful and prudent consolidation of one's own, then the moral point is well made: Do unto others as you would be done unto by them.

The problem therefore is with the nature of modern banking and modern corporate ethics. Whereas it was the division of labour that sparked the Industrial Revolution, unlocking individual talent in different fields and enabling huge economic growth and prosperity, it does seem to have come at the expense of individual responsibility. Whereas technically speaking a professional dealing with money may be expected to take greater care of his clients' wealth than of his own (just as he would of his friends'), it is in the nature of the limited liablity company - whose liability is by definition limited and which in and of itself is not limited either by religious scruples or by standards of common decency - to be rather more reckless. The rules puporting to control corporations really do need to be more rigorously enforced than those governing ordinary decent indivduals.

Not that any of this explains the current "financial crisis" - which hacks are apparently now referring to as "the Great Recession" (presumably ongoing, and for some time to come)! Which is really why the Archbishops' remarks make me bridle. The implication is that "the bankers" (which is, bear in mind, code for "the Jews") have caused our current economic woes by their "greed" (code for usury, cheating, stealing, and all the other thing that Jews have been accused of down the centuries).

The truth, as usual, is rather more complicated and rather less politically palatable.

Following on from the story of the police taking the highly unusual step of actually investigating a case of anti-Catholic bigotry, a British judge has done was long thought to be unthinkable and jailed a women for eight years who murdered her unborn baby.

Wait for it. Wait for it. You'll be waking up again in three... two... one...

UPDATE: Right on cue, The Guardian unleashes the unpleasant Simon Jenkins. (These people are virtually automated.)

“Uncivilized Behavior”

At about the time of the so-called “riots” in London just over a year ago, Gary Potter at Catholicism.org had the following reflection to make about what, in his opinion, was the matter with western young people nowadays.

That word — barbarians — was carefully chosen. These “youths” (as the media call them) know nothing of civilization. They do not read. The “music” to which they listen is not music. In fact, they can’t stand these and other civilized activities. They hate them.

Here’s proof: When bands of “youths” began to gather at a downtown Metro train station in Washington, fighting one another and harassing and attacking Metro riders, authorities solved the problem by piping in classical music! It drove out the barbarians.

If that strikes anyone as somehow amusing, reflect on what it must mean that human beings cannot bear to hear Mozart. It means not simply that they aren’t civilized. It says they are beyond the reach of civilization.

Interestingly, for a couple of years now the authorities over here have been trying the very same strategy of playing classical music at Clapham South Underground Station, near where I live. I've noticed they do it in Vienna as well, although there it’s safe to say it’s probably for slightly more openly commercial reasons.

The effect, of either civilising the uncivilised or of driving them away, is not one I can particularly object to. In fact one rather wishes that the authorities at and in and around Clapham Junction had had the same cultural nous as their colleagues on the Tube at Clapham South some eleven months ago when “gangs” of modern “youths” were busy putting paid to modern civilisation along St John’s Road, Battersea.

It was of course part and parcel of the liberal idealism of the Nineteenth Century that the uncivilised could and should be civilised. It was William Morris’s life’s work to try to use nice things – from flock wallpaper to his own version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle – to try to turn his more disadvantaged fellow subjects into nicer people. Alas that it doesn’t always work! There aren’t many nicer countries in the world than Austria. And yet only a few days after the London “riots” a gang of masked vandals did their bit for “progress” by attacking a pro-life office in the city of Mozart himself. The Human Life International office in beautiful Salzburg suffered seven broken windows and thousands of dollars in damage.

Not that the German-language media were for one moment fooled about the London disturbances! Whereas the English ‘papers all been wallowed in introspection and political point-scoring (because the riots were caused by the welfare cuts, or the riots were caused by family breakdown, or the causes of the riots were multifactorial) and inevitably went haring after the Oxford graduate and the grammar-school girl and the kid who played the bully in the Harry Potter films, the Krauts were still perfectly able to see the trees for the wood. (And the German for clichés, it turns out, is… Klischees.)

The English media though remained mercifully hesistant about making connexions between the civil disturbances - the worst the British capital had seen since the 1980s - and race and racial politics. Or at least most of them were. The buffoonish David Starkey lowered his horn-rimmed spectacles and made his own forlorn little charge on Newsnight, claiming somewhat bizarrely that the riots had been caused by white youths talking like black people. The equally disgusting Darcus Howe unwittingly backed him up on the rolling news feeds. Others out there in the blogosphere chimed their support. According to this fellow the “riots” had indeed really been the blacks' idea all along, 'with blacks in the cultural vanguard and idiots of other races following their example of what's cool.' Other people though couldn’t quite make up their minds. The Torygraph’s resident Mrs Niggerbaiter Katherine Birbalsingh started off by writing that the riots were about race. Then, after Dr Snarkey had had his say, she changed her mind.

Subtler and more historically educated minds went to work on the problem as well. A good friend of mine from the United States commented

Nor is this really a question of race. The reality is that Britain had a vicious underclass in the 18nth Century and some of the most draconian laws and punishments to be found in Europe. With the expansion of the Empire and various wars these people were exported and by force of circumstances 'civilized'. Since 1945 they have had nowhere to go, and my own guess is that the Afro-Caribbean immigrants have in many respects simply learned from the locals. As has been pointed out, the rioters are not first generation immigrants; they are a home grown product. I suspect that the ultimate cause for much of this lies in the industrial revolution and the sudden growth of a mass proletariat living in slum conditions and already divorced from both religion and the possibility of education, and the only solutions which would work are not possible in a democracy, at least not in peacetime. Anyone broadly familiar with both Western Europe and America will also note that the British "chattering classes", of whatever political stripe, are exceptionally divorced from the mass of the population. Now, fortunately, the majority of the population is honest and law-abiding, but I suspect that they also feel alienated from the chatterers, who, in any crisis seem more interested in scoring points off of each other than in seriously considering ideas to resolve the problem. To a less severe degree one sees this in America too, though in America the political class and the chattering one tend to be more greatly separated, possibly because Washington has never been an intellectual or cultural centre.

A slightly more subtle take on the “race” angle was, it turned out, the “gangs” angle. Apparently they’re not called n****rs anymore. They’re called “gangstas”. At the time the scum were smashing up St John's Road my impression was that there were several different local children's gangs involved - probably the same young villains who normally haunt the Common and compete with each other for mobile 'phones. I just assumed that they had joined forces for the evening to loot Debenhams and Orange and so on. Oddly enough, KFC survived, as did Waterstones – partly because (in the case of the former) even gangsters need somewhere to eat and (in the case of the latter) almost as if the aura of classical culture that still just about lingers around bookshops made it too scary to attack. (It turns out you don't necessarily need Mozart. Delia Smith will do.)

Brendan O’Neill scoffed at the very idea of gangs. I thought he was wrong, but only in the sense that I do think gangs exist. They just tend to be very small, with seldom more than a handful of members, most of whom will tend to be family or from school-based cliques. The majority of them will be young enough to avoid the law.

But although I do believe gangs and gangsters did have a role in the riots, rather more important was the way the leftist politics du jour had filtered down through the Capital’s middle-class, working-class and underclass youth. Eventually almost nothing remained of any political cause and all there was was the example of the underclass's more educated fellow travellers. Affray, robbery and smashing things up, justified not so much by ideology so much as by seeing other people doing them on television with seeming impunity.

So, first there had been the student riots, which had featured a middle-class white man trying to murder policemen by throwing a fire-extinguisher off the roof of a building, and the drugged-up rich white brat of a white former pop-star desecrating the Cenotaph on Whitehall. Then there had been the UK Uncut riots, which involved middle-class white men smashing up shops and cash-machines whilst being egged on by the rich, white (OK, Jewish, but who's arguing?) Leader of HM Loyal Opposition. And finally the chavs themselves (many of whom happen to be black) got in on the act with a bit of looting in Tottenham, Battersea and elsewhere.

The excuses I've heard for the "riots" in London have included "the police", "the Government", "the Conservatives" and "tax". These are all modish left-wing concerns that the "rioters" themselves certainly didn't understand. But the "rioters" were sufficiently aware of these issues to feel justified in breaking shop windows and stealing gym-shoes.

As for the somewhat bizarre comparisons coming from the Far Left between the “protesters” and the Tea Party movement in America, presumably that was what the slag on St John's Road meant when she said "We're getting our taxes back"?

In the end then, for all the wrangling and hand-wringing of London’s political classes, the politics of the "riots" were almost entirely specious. In actuality the riots were not only non-racial but also almost entirely non-political. (Battersea is one of those places where we don't really DO politics.) Pace Auntie, in fact, these weren’t "protesters", or even “rioters” except in the strict legal definition of the term.

If any persons to the number of 12 or more unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assemble together to the disturbance of the public peace and being required by any Justice by proclamation in the King's name in the exact form of the Riot Act, I George I, Sess.2. c.5. s2., to disperse themselves and peaceably depart, shall to the number of 12 or more unlawfully, riotously and tumultuously remain or continue together for an hour after such proclamation shall be guilty of a felony.

In truth, the looters on St John’s Road weren’t even particularly angry. Nor indeed was there any real 'intent on causing indiscriminate mayhem on their own doorstep'. They were simply the youth-wing of the new underclass, who knowing the Fuzz would be too busy elsewhere to do anything in Battersea, saw an opportunity, took it, and had themselves a bit of summer fun into the bargain.

So, what had gone wrong with our society to bring us to such a pass? After a great deal of chattering, some of the media did eventually start to come to some conclusions. Dan Hodges, who is a soppy lefty who writes books about Nazis and who at the time was soon to be ex- of The New Statesman, was actually the nearest of any hack to genuinely "getting it". The blogger TeaAnd2Sugars was also good. Dalrymple was better. The Speccie (unusually) was great, even putting the wind up the Great One himself.

The whackiest diagnosis of course came (predictably enough) from Boris

London's riots were the product of Labour's open-door immigration policy. Social cohesion may not be a fashionable term, but without some semblance of it, there will be more violence and death. This is a time for plain speaking, and I shall not shirk my responsibilities on that score.

He didn’t like the idea that of police being tough though, because that would be like going back to a banana republic in the 1970s. (On the other hand, it was nice to think of the FCO a few days after the disturbances finally getting a taste of its own medicine.)

And yet the tragedy was that the police didn't (and don't) need to be tough. Personally I was deeply sceptical about what difference the police actually made in the end. In most places the "rioters" would have blown themselves out and/or quit whilst they were ahead anyway. All that it would have needed was for the police to be there. The worst thing about the whole nonsense at Clapham Junction on the evening of the 8th August was that everyone knew that they would be coming at about 6.45 pm that evening. The police knew about it in advance, and I can say that because at about 6.30 I saw them telling the shopkeepers on St John's Road to close early, Waitrose and M&S included. Somehow, as I walked home that evening, with traders all around battening down their hatches and stupid bloody PCSOs standing around looking stupid, there was a real AD 61 atmosphere. And to think all I'd wanted was to buy a loaf of bread!

By five to eleven at night I could hear a police helicopter circling overhead, a burglar alarm that's been going on for hours, and the sirens of police cars whizzing up and down the South Circular. And the Prime Minister is on holiday in Tuscany. The 'copter wasn't for crowd control. It was just to make sure none of the "rioters" moved into any residential areas, which were obviously higher priority than the shops.

To those who claimed later on that the cops had manipulated the whole situation to ensure overtime, no lay-offs and higher rates of pay, all I can say is bully for them if they did. But the truth is that in a "free" society we shouldn't need the police to protect our property. And in fact we don't. In the end, the reason the "rioters" at Clapham Junction only did over St John's Road and not Northcote Road as well was that Northcote Road is full of pubs and trendy wine-bars that at the time were still full of people who would not have stood for it. It really doesn't take much to discourage cheeky teenagers. (Indeed, it did seem that we'd moved into a whole new "conflict paradigm" when Milwall supporters were making more effort to maintain law and order than the bloody Fuzz were.)

My own attitude at the time of course was very simply “Sod the cops! Invoke the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, send in the Parachute Regiment and retake Tottenham, street by street. Then stick a bag over Chris Williamson's head and fly him out to Gibraltar for a bit. (Creep!)”

Apart from that, all I could really think of was

Loud howls Garm before Gnipahellir,
Bursting his fetters, Fenris runs:
Further in the future afar I behold
The twilight of the gods who gave victory.

Brother shall strike brother and both fall,
Sisters' sons defiled with incest;
Evil be on earth, an age of whoredom,
Of sharp sword-play and shields clashing,
A wind-age, a wolf-age till the world ruins:
No man to another shall mercy show.

Is it the end of the world? It's a warm day today, so we can probably expect all sorts of fun over the next few nights. But my hope now is that last year marked a turning point. The political Left not only disgraced itself. It to a certain extent discredited itself, as did the Government's law enforcement agencies. It is to hoped then that some people at least will have seen through the facade of the Blairite police state and will from now on look at the supposedly disadvantaged in our society in a new and more sceptical light.

The Tories are really, really, really doomed

Why is Janet Daley so stupid? Why does she think that the “centre ground” is shifting to the right? What evidence does she have that the electorate is “tough minded”? In actual fact, Labour is well ahead in the polls, and both the Establishment and the electorate – each acting as an echo-chamber for the other – are refusing to face up to economic realities. The lies about spending cuts continue.

The last tax u-turn – the 3p fuel-duty rise – won’t be paid for by spending cuts. It will be paid for by borrowing, as British and German bonds get cheaper on the back of economic chaos in the Eurozone. As the PIIGS continue to prat about, the UK Establishment is minded to continue to pig out – the principle being that no matter how bad things are here we’re still not as badly off as all them.

Not that any of this is set to last! Germany’s other defeat at the hands of Italy came about with help from France and Spain. Thank God for the Bundesverfassungsgericht! The chaps in the red hats may even call for a referendum in Germany.

According to the left-wing Spanish political activist and “judge” Baltasar Garzón, who has himself faced more than his fair share of criminal allegations and who apparently is now assisting the equally callous and unscrupulous Julian Assange, the arrest of Gen Pinochet in London – in flagrant breach of international law – back in 1998, was all down to this man.

I don’t really see why we should be surprised.

Are we now relying on these people to save us from the Euro?

Oh, how the old anti-German Euro-sceptic conspiracy theorists must be quietly ignoring this!

Unfortunately this man was NOT a paedophile. The man who killed him justified his murder, apparently successfully, by claiming that his victim was a paedophile. He then went on to kill again, using the same justification.

Because there are no "paedophile priests"! Paedophiles are simply the new gays, the new blacks, the new Jews, the new witches, the new papists. (It's no accident at all that so many of these "paedophile" priests are Catholics.)

How many more innocent men are going to have to die horrific deaths before the mainstream media drops its lurid fantasies and accepts that conjuring demons out of thin air has consequences?

Table: Democracy and EU/EEC Membership

Country	Year of most recent introduction of democracy	Year of Accession to EEC	Years democratic outside EU/EEC
PIIGS
Greece	1974	1981	7
Ireland	1832[?]/1922	1973	141[?]/51
Italy	1948	1952	4
Portugal	1975	1986	11
Spain	1978	1986	8
Others
Austria	1945/1955	1995	40/50
Belgium	1944	1952	8
Bulgaria	1991[?]	2007	16[?]
Cyprus	1974	2004	30
Czech Republic	1989/1993	2004	15
Denmark	1945	1973	38
Estonia	1991	2004	13
Finland	1906	1995	89
France	1944	1952	8
Germany	1949	1952	3
Hungary	1990	2004	14
Latvia	1990	2004	14
Lithuania	1992	2004	12
Luxembourg	1945	1952	7
Malta	1964	2004	40
Netherlands	1945	1952	7
Poland	1989	2004	15
Romania	1990	2007	17
Slovakia	1998	2004	6
Slovenia	1990	2004	14
Sweden	1907 [?]	1995	88 [?]
United Kingdom	1832 [?]	1973	141[?]

[H/T: Andrew Lilico]