Is this to be an empathy test?

Its one of my favourite lines from Blade Runner, which is one of my favourite films. Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who kills rogue androids, turns up at the corporate HQ of the company that makes them. The boss walks in and asks “Is this to be an empathy test” (to discriminate between androids and humans). There is a fair bit of the movie before this point but that is where it really starts. The whole film is an exploration of empathy, of what it means to be human, and all the violence humans are capable of when they dehumanise their victims. Seems we have entered into a time, perhaps similar to the early 1930’s, people’s empathy has been eroded or manipulated and all love of truth has been snuffed out.

Abortion is seemingly the number one ‘right’ that feminists defend, because what all women dream of as little girls is killing unborn babies in their womb… Why don’t feminists long for a world which values pregnant women, and values babies? The way abortion denigrates women and children is a key part of why women are left with the crappy end of the bargain in the sexual revolution. But to have a conscience so decayed it treats unborn babies as an inconvenience to be removed and disposed of as medical waste…

These feminists will say “lets not go back to illegal abortions” surely what’s worse is that this monstrous crime against human life is peddled as a ‘right’ and babies are quietly killed by the millions and nary a law is broken. They say, “what about women who have been raped?” to which I’d reply, ‘so you think children should be killed for the crimes of their parents? if this is really about rape then make abortion only legal in cases of rape’, but it isn’t about that, its about using rape victims as a political football to protect a barbaric practice that enables third wave feminists to destroy motherhood in their quest for equality.

Mass immigration is another subject that seems wildly nonsensical. It drives down wages and raises housing costs for the poorest and puts huge strain on public services. To cap it all Europe is taking huge numbers of immigrants from parts of the world that don’t believe in democracy, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and finds no problem with rampant antisemitism.

There are many good reasons why people would want to move here, but at what point do western values, some of which we have only just arrived at as a society, eg gay rights, start to deteriorate when we are taking in millions of people who don’t necessarily share them. When queers, Jews, ‘apostates’, ‘blasphemers’ are killed in the streets and women are subjugated will we as a society be so proud of our open door immigration policies?

I empathise with immigrants, they are looking for a better life and our society is often treating them like dirt, how do we balance that empathy with the empathy we should be having for the people in our own counties who are truly shafted by mass immigration. How do we integrate so many Muslims when, thanks to multiculturalism, we won’t even defend the ideas that made Western Europe a desirable place to live in the first place.

Then there’s moral red herrings of environmentalism, the anthropogenic global warming alarmist myth that still won’t die despite how clear it is the whole thing is a fraud. We waste billions of pounds on this nonsense whilst ignoring far more pressing human concerns. It reminds me of Russel Brand, someone I don’t usually have a lot of time for, but I wonder if when he said: “When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I’m rich and I complain about inequality they say I’m a hypocrite, I’m beginning to think they just don’t want to talk about inequality” Did he know to aim that at the left? at all the things it wastes money on. The way the left shills for the EU and the EU spends a full 40% of its budget on the common agricultural policy because French farmers shut down the entire road network if they don’t get what they want…

So often the truth doesn’t matter around the world, recently in Russia a blogger was put in prison for saying the unpalatable truth that Russia invaded Poland in 1939. In the middle east the truth doesn’t matter at all. Islam itself teaches provably false beliefs about Christianity for example. In the hundreds of years after Mohammed very few seem to have done basic fact checking in that regard, why? because they’d be killed if they did.

Ever more the world seems to be moving towards a time in which the truth doesn’t matter, we choose our news outlets based upon which lies we prefer. Our political discourse becomes tub thumping tribalism. In all this cacophony of noise we need to hang onto our own sense of right and wrong, if we are lucky we were given a moral core prior to this point because it seems the morality that this world pedals is increasingly warped. The world is complex, it is often morally ambiguous because the only problems that self perpetuate are ones we don’t understand, but never has understanding been held in such low esteem.

The party is over

Its appropriate to be writing this whilst vaguely hungover. But it seems the party that is modern western civilisation is rapidly drawing to a close. We’ve had a fun 50 years. A blink of an eye in world history. Now it feels like all we are left with is half a packet of asprin to share around too many sore heads.

So then, Brexit. The potential benefits are long term, and a positive outcome depends upon good implementation, a reasonable European response during negotiation and the business community to hold its nerve in an increasingly scary world. That isn’t impossible… but its not certain either. What is amazing is the less well off beat the establishment, people went to the polling booths in droves and found the courage to vote for an uncertain liberty rather than a certain subservience. They did so despite the leaders of all the main political parties (and the Libdems) opposing it. Nigel Farage deserves a knighthood for his service to the realm and thoroughly deserves a well earned rest as the most successful politician since Margaret Thatcher.

Meanwhile the short term negative effects of 48% of the population wailing and gnashing their teeth have yet to be felt, mainly because a lot of them are still living in hope Brexit will never happen. The business world isn’t as rational as people think, what it does to protect itself from a recession are the very things that actively causes recession.(reduce procurement, stymie recruitment, act more cautiously). Don’t be surprised if the next 5 years are on the rocky side.

We aren’t in a recession yet but most people are yet to imagine the momentous nature of the referendum result. Its like 52% of us channelled Winston Churchill and chose the deep blue sea over Europe. I’ve never been more proud to live in a less well off city that overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU. Having said that, 48% of the country were channelling Neville Chaiberlain which is bound to have short to – medium term negative effects.

The Labour party have totally missed the opportunity to embrace Brexit. It wasn’t the old Conservative party eurosceptics who won it, it was the less well off. The people who realised they were being shanked by globalism voted accordingly. In other words when Labour opposed leaving the EU they showed just how spectacularly out of touch they are with their natural political base. Anyone who can look at election results can see this. Why Labour is committing electoral suicide by clinging to the EU is a mystery to me. They don’t have to go back to third way Blairite policies to become relevant again, Corbyn is perhaps realising this, but its too late for him. Labour will be in the wilderness for decades. The Conservative party can and probably will continue to govern in as cack handed way as it did under Cameron, it doesn’t have any real opposition.

In other more depressing news the Islamification of Europe continues to accelerate and for some reason the amount of terrorism keeps increasing, curiously nobody in charge will say why. Two plus two still equals five apparently. The general message of the political elite is ‘learn to live with it’, unbelievably that is exactly what the French prime minister said after the latest terrorist atrocity hit France. If the establishment doesn’t nip their their incredible apathy in the bud then Front Nationale will surely win big at the next election. Perhaps its best that the British government delays invoking article 50 until the Hollande government is almost certainly swept away in 2017. The only question is who will replace him, a left wing nationalist Le Pen, or a right wing republican?

Likewise the Germans will go to the polls in 2017 (August-October), will Merkel’s iron grip on politics be shaken by her disastrous decision to flood Europe with immigrants? only time will tell. If those two are gone then Brexit negotiations will be a very different ball game. That’s why I think Theresa May is probably wise to delay invoking article 50.

Talking of which, Theresa May’s cabinet selection was pretty savvy. Her decision to visit Nicola Sturgeon makes her look reasonable and the SNP look increasingly ideologically blinded. No they can’t veto Brexit, and no they won’t be able to join the EU, the Spanish will kick that to touch for fear of emboldening Catalonia. The SNP know they can’t afford to be truly independent, they’d just prefer Brussels as a sugar daddy to London. Well, good luck to them in that regard, they might find an increasingly decrepit and economically stagnant EU less amenable to their dreams of a socialist utopia.

It really is one of the strange quirks of history that both the Conservative and Labour party continue to want Scotland to remain part of the UK. At this stage the SNP is like a teenager yelling ‘I hate you’ at its parents, England and Wales are hoping its just a phase… The SNP’s spectacular rise to prominence happened quickly, hopefully they will dwindle just as swiftly. Unfortunately the only way for that to happen is to give them more power so the Scottish can see for themselves just where a national socialist party will take them… but that’s a rather risky proposition. Perhaps its best we let them live in fantasy land.

Finally, I’m getting a bit bored of Breitbart.com, Breitbart London is ok, but sadly the American side of the website has betrayed the legacy of Andrew Breitbart and shamelessly shills for Donald Trump. Never has the Democratic and Republican party selected two candidates for president who are less suitable for the job. Hillary Clinton should reside in a jail cell and Trump should return to reality TV. Don’t be surprised if Trump wins either, there is a swathe of less well off voters who don’t usually vote who might just turn up on election day to ‘make America great again’. Here’s hoping that the people who write Trump’s speeches don’t let him run amok when he gets to the white house. He let the press conference after the RNC conference be side tracked by his personal feud with Ted Cruz. Its very personal too, attacking his wife and his father. Is this really what Americans want out of a president?

But where else can I go for news? The Daily Mail has a couple of interesting writers, but other than that is an absolute rag. The Telegraph reads like the longest suicide note in history. I can’t really put my finger on why I despise the Times, it used to be its anti-catholicism and snobbery along with its dismal writing, being on the wrong side of Brexit didn’t help it in my esteem. The Sun got rid of its best feature, page 3 girls. The Guardian is an interesting insight into the mind of a delusional psychotic. The Indy is a boring insight into the more insipid minds of the middle class, its stock in trade is whine factor 9. I guess that’s why I’m writing my own newspaper here.

In personal news, yes I’m still transsexual, yes I’m still waiting on the glacial NHS. My psychotherapy drew to a close and I’m struggling to cope without it even though towards the end we were just talking endlessly about the same things over and over. I’m still currently in the lapsed Catholic category and will be until the Church can find a Pope who isn’t an idiot and find someone wise enough to say that transsexuality is something that is ill understood and they shouldn’t rush to judgement. At the moment at best it feels like the Catholic Church treats queers like me like lepers, at worst damned to hell. Until I am more able to compartmentalise that stuff I’m taking a break from religion.

Everything that cannot go on forever ends.

Recently one of those near mythical moderate Muslims wished his Christian customers happy Easter. He was brutally murdered by one of his less moderate fellow Muslims. The Guardian et al hid the fact it was a sectarian killing. The second the truth doesn’t fit their world view its drop-kicked into the tallest of tall grass.

Turns out Asad Shah was an Ahmadiyyah Muslim, what I know about that sect I could fit in a thimble, but apparently they disagree that Mohammed was the last prophet and formally reject jihad. As a result they aren’t even considered Muslim in Pakistan, and probably plenty of other Islamic countries, they are viciously persecuted as a result. Apparently this extends to Glasgow.

My working theory at the moment is that there is no such thing as radical Islam, political Islam, extremist Islam or fundamentalist Islam, these are just labels we paste onto the more zealous members of that particular religion. The grim truth is when you peel those labels off there is just Islam. Likewise there seems to be no such thing as ‘Moderate’ Islam, the peace and love variety are either considered non Muslim or lapsed Muslims by the more ‘observant’. Meanwhile these nominal Muslims have to keep their heads down or get them stamped upon, literally.

The statistics on the size of the minority of ‘problematic’ Muslims makes for depressing reading, but what is even more depressing is that it doesn’t really make a difference that the most egregious Islamic beliefs are minority views (albeit a big minority of what is rapidly becoming the largest religion on Earth). The Nazi’s were a tiny minority in Germany before they took over. All it takes is for the majority of Muslims and our dear leaders to pretend there isn’t a problem, which is exactly what is happening.

Its all well and good for Donald Trump to say no more Muslim immigration into the USA, its too late for Europe, 25.5% of French teenagers are Muslim and by the most conservative estimates the Muslim population is growing twice as fast as the native French population. You do the maths on that. Islamic State? its coming to a European map near you, very soon. If you are in the business of procreating your children will witness it.

Freedom of speech is already gone, it died with Charlie Hebdo. Freedom of religion is ebbing away, and arguably never existed if you are unlucky enough to convert to Christianity from Islam in say Bradford. Segregated train carriages, because expecting men not to sexually assault women is somehow too much to ask. Queers and Jews being harassed in the streets in our country, all punctuated by the occasional bomb blast. This is how Europe has decided to die. Its a dark thought, but there are times that I thank God there are only a handful of Muslims in the British Army, and that I’ll most likely already be dead when the civil war comes.

In other, perhaps related, news I’ve discovered a fantastic game called Rimworld. In it you found a colony on another planet. Maybe there’s a reason I’ve been playing it so obsessively.

The Donald

I do love watching American politics, it puts the parlous state of our political process into perspective and provides a few chuckles along the way. So without further ado I’m gonna type about something I have absolutely zero ability to influence, not being an American voter… then again a huge number of Democratic party voters are illegal immigrants so ^.^

So Donald Trump is going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Hillary Clinton is almost certainly going to be the Democratic party presidential nominee (mainly because of the backward way the Democratic party run their nomination process with super delegates so they don’t have to bother with that whole pesky voting business).

So is the world about to end? no. The way the Democrats have cornered the immigrant vote whilst filling their country with immigrants means the Republicans have to win this election or America will effectively become a one party state. Is it possible that the GOP can win by mobilising their voter base better? its very debatable. But a Hillary Clinton presidency? Will she be as bad as Obama? probably not, but then she’d have to carpet bomb the entire world to achieve that.

She is corrupt, wooden, cack-handed, tin eared, in a marriage of convenience with a philanderer whom she has spent her whole life enabling. She kept top secret information on a private server (which was almost certainly immediately hacked) and she had people removing classified markings from documents, both of which are felonies. She was part and parcel of the Benghazi fiasco where a US ambassador and his security detail were left for dead because Obama had just declared that he’d won the war on terror and if he pretended the attack wasn’t happening it would magically go away. Then afterwards she peddled the Obama line pretending it wasn’t terrorism and locking up a guy who made a Youtube video insulting Islam, because freedom of speech obviously isn’t a thing in the USA…

Its a strange time when a reality tv personality is your best bet for leader of the free world, but wow the Democrats really know how to pick terrible candidates so strange days are here to stay.

The canaries in the coal mine.

So the relentless Islamification of Europe is entering the public consciousness. Hundreds of women had to be sexually assaulted and at least two raped in Cologne for it to happen. The elites did what they always do, cover it up. Turns out they’ve been covering it up for quite a while now. I always thought that the canaries in the mine were Jews, queers and cartoonists but it turns out to be women too. We are beginning to learn the consequences of western culture being overrun. The feminists harping on about rape culture have finally got something real to harp on about.

This is just a foretaste of the future, we will become foreigners in our own land. We get the slow horror of watching our rights fade away, first it was freedom of speech. After the truth came out the mayor of Cologne suggested German women change the way they dress. Classic victim blaming. It doesn’t matter what women wear, these men treat women as objects, you can wear a niqab and you are still just an object, only imprisoned in cloth.

This is going to end badly, already gun and pepper spray sales have gone through the roof in Germany and Austria, vigilantes are gathering because people know that the nation state will no longer defend their citizens so its time to defend yourself. In fact the nation state will not only fail to defend you it will pretend you were never attacked in the first place. I see serious civil strife coming to Europe in the relatively near future, good job Angela Merkel.

Now onto Donald Trump, the knee jerk hatred of him in the UK is incredible. People who’ve never listened to a word he says suddenly hate him. He isn’t a conservative, he’s a crony capitalist, he’s uncouth and inarticulate, there is a fairly popular conspiracy theory that he’s running for president to help Hillary Clinton win. But in his clumsy way he states the blindingly obvious. There is something the matter with Islam. We all know it and its time to stop pussyfooting around the issue.

Apocalypse or Epiphany

So then, 50 days has passed since my last post. Not much has changed but I think the world is ever so slightly further down the road to either complete insanity or epiphany.

As predicted the Paris climate change talks resulted in a big fat nothing. Its a big fat nothing that our vapid Elites are pretending is a meaningful agreement so they can carry on doing what they were going to do anyway, drive more poor people into fuel poverty whilst filling the wallets of rich land owners, lobbyists and energy corporations.

On the bright side we have reached the stage where the green lobby’s cavalcade of liars are forced to lie about its defeats and call them victories. People are forever susceptible to misdirection though so I guess most people in the decadent west aren’t much closer to an epiphany. China and India on the other hand are now vital to the global economy and they couldn’t give a drunk monkey about western doom saying.

Talking of doom saying the slow cultural apocalypse is ongoing. Mark Steyn as usual nails it and again here. I’m not sure what I can add to his analysis. The left wants to ignore the problem of Islamification entirely and the right wants to distract us from it at home by fighting it abroad.

The only thing that has changed is it seems more of us are feeling like people must have felt as the Roman Empire disintegrated. The world we were lucky enough to inherit from our less apathetic forebears is slowly falling apart, but very few of us question the assumptions that are leading to its demise.

Recently the chief idiot Angela Merkel said its impossible to close our borders. Really? you certainly haven’t tried. Are you telling me the west with all its wealth and technology can’t dig a ditch and build a wall? we’ve had that technology for quite a while now. Seems the wall between North and South Korea works pretty well, the wall in Israel works pretty well too.

We used to have these things called armies, traditionally they were used to defend our borders…  Serving the people she was elected to serve is beyond Frau Merkel’s imagination though, so get used to it.  If you are my age and in the business of procreating (increasingly rare these days I’ll admit) chances are your great-grandchildren will be living in a majority Muslim Europe. That isn’t much time in the context of human history. They will have to fight against the imposition of sharia law because our generation won’t lift a finger in defence of western values.

In other news Pope Francis has hit upon the idea of a ‘year of mercy’ to which I’d say its all very well being generally in favour of mercy, but we need to be specifically in favour of it. Maybe the church should think about that in regards to queers like me. If we want to be merciful to Syrians and Iraqis we have to defeat ISIS, give them a country to return to and bring aid to the real refugees in tented camps. As it is we are stripping their countries of young men and writing their land off the map with ‘ere be barbarians’.

Gender bending

It seems that society is very gradually deciding that gender benders like me might actually deserve to be treated as human beings. Some guy decided he would get a bit transphobic on a twitch stream I frequent and basically everyone told him to shove it, which was a nice surprise. He also directed his dislike at a female streamer saying she was transsexual. Lets just say, if she is transsexual I want to talk to her doctor. But it just reinforces the theory that transphobia is frequently just another outlet for misogyny.

Talking of which Germaine Greer decided to stick it to male to female transsexuals in a foul mouthed rant. Why is it that men who want to be female make her so angry? perhaps she’s worried that she is losing the monopoly on telling people what being female means.

Biology is important, if it wasn’t I wouldn’t want gender reassignment surgery. Nine out of ten transsexuals are male to female, and there are biological reasons why. Why is it my biology is ripe for ridicule? Why is it that women can wear trousers but woe betide a man in a dress? Evolutionary psychology means that any man on meeting a woman will instantly decide on some level, subconscious or otherwise, whether he’d want to have sex with her. Transphobic men are scared that this base biological drive could be directed at someone who used to be a man. But what is it that’s fuelling Greer’s anger? I don’t know, but she can fuck right off.

I’m currently in the lapsed Catholic camp because the Vatican decided that transsexuals can’t be Godparents. Thanks for that, that’s another empty space on a pew every Sunday. There is no way to pretend that it doesn’t hurt, there is no way to compartmentalise my brain and just ignore the Church.

The gender transition process is traumatic, violence against transsexuals and transsexual suicide rates are sky high but the Church is too busy being smug. Well all I’ll say is that there was a long time when I was in denial about my daily cross dressing and I was very smug about my Catholicism. Then the scales fell from my eyes and I realised I was as queer as fuck and its the Church that wants me to pretend to be something I’m not, or better still pretend I don’t exist.

You can be a gay Catholic so long as you never do or say anything gay, so long as you don’t find happiness in a romantic relationship, especially not a committed and loving one, so long as you earnestly consent to being swept under the carpet. No wonder the first thing most gay Catholics do is lapse. The Church can learn from the heathens who defended people like me just because they can and until it does I’d rather spend time with them. Someone once said ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’. I’d say lay off the queer bashing or one day God might decide to make you, or your son or daughter, one of us.

Rock the kasbah

So Vladimir Putin has decided to put Russia’s military where his mouth is and blow ISIS to caliphate come along with all the so called ‘moderate’ Islamists that America and Saudi Arabia have been not so secretly funding. Obama is all in a tizzy that the war he is so desperately trying to lose might be won by the Russian bear. That is the only discernible reason why even the Cubans are getting involved, gotta love humiliating the ‘leader of the free world’. (Though I’m not sure Obama could do more to humiliate his own country on the national stage at this point)

I’m sure Russia’s sledgehammer will be no less indiscriminate than the West’s, but I get the feeling that Putin wants to win whereas I’m very sure Obama wants to do as little as possible so he can pretend he’s trying. Putin is an old fashioned cold hearted bastard and he’s decided to put to the sword, or more precisely the massive air strike, the most evil grouping of bloodthirsty lunatics since Genghis Khan. There is a certain symmetry to that. There will be suffering, as ISIS’s fantasy fails before their eyes I expect they’ll become even more violent, civilians will be killed by both sides but ISIS will murder them on purpose. You can only win a war by breaking the enemy’s will to fight it and you don’t do that by ‘degrading’ them (Obama’s own word for his policy of half measures), especially not a group of religious fanatics, you do it by exterminating them.

Honestly though, the damage may already have been done. Christian Assyrians in Sweden have ‘convert or die’ graffiti daubed on their shops along with the Arabic letter N for Nazareen seen in Isis territory to denote Christians ripe for persecution. These people have fled that hell hole only to find it waiting for them in ‘fortress Europe’. The only fortress which has its gates jammed open. A recent study in Denmark has shown that Islamic immigrants are becoming less integrated and more radical over time. Angela Merkel’s solution to the migrant crisis? Back Turkish membership of the EU. Its time to ask the question, is she insane, an idiot, or does she actively crave the demise of western Europe?

It might surprise you to know that I’m not an apocalyptically minded person. The tinfoil hat doesn’t fit me well. Life will go on after sharia is implemented across Europe. It will just be grim that’s all. Women will wear their niqabs, be beaten by their husbands, girls married off at age 12, non Muslim girls will be raped, there will be honour killings, queers like me will be strung up, apostates executed, democracy will be abolished, free speech will obviously cease to exist, there will be sex slaves too if the local Imam is feeling naughty. Some of these things are already happening in the Islamic ghettos of Europe but it will spread to, shock horror, white middle class suburbia, as if the cosseted viewers of Downton Abbey somehow think it won’t happen to them because they buy organic preserves from Oxfam…

I feel I have been thoroughly proven right about ‘global warming’. The hucksters are so ginned up about the Paris climate summit because they know its their last role of the dice and almost every politician knows*, but won’t say publicly, that the jig is up. Don’t get me wrong, there will be plenty of hand-wringing and sad panda faces, but alas, nothing could be done. (* not Barack Obama of course but then he lost touch with reality long before his first inauguration, to the point that an EU government, at the diplomatic level, believes him to be mentally ill). By the by I said Obama was an awful man long before it was fashionable to say so too.

But it seems like the worst time to be gloating about predictions when the above prediction is as dark as it is and unless something changes it will come to pass. Over the last few months we’ve all seen the timetable of its ‘fruition’ accelerate. I’ve said before that Europe, as a cultural entity, only has a couple of decades to decide whether it wants to survive, now I’d say that time frame can be measured in five years or less, maybe even in months. I wish I knew what to do about it but in the mean time lets write about it, then maybe we’ll talk about it, then maybe it might be averted.

Owen Jones

Lets talk about a clever leftist. This guy really is a genius political hack. The kind of wormtongue (no not that again) who could sell someone the golden gate bridge, twice. Anyway some hapless well off upwardly mobile leftist from my past liked a quote of his on Facebook. Now as we all know by now, freedom of speech is dead. If I criticise the quote it will be deleted, I know because it has happened to me many a time. So this irksome quote will sit there broadcasting its ideology unchallenged. So luckily I can come here to prevent myself grinding my teeth to dust.

Here is the quote:

“I’m not going to waste your time or patronise you by preaching the benefits of immigration. Instead, I want to ask you this. Who has caused our country most problems: the bankers who plunged us into economic disaster, the expenses-milking politicians who have the cheek to lecture us on benefit fraud, the wealthy tax-dodgers keeping £25 billion a year from the Exchequer; the poverty wage-paying bosses and rip-off rent-charging landlords; or Indian nurses and Polish fruit pickers?”

Lets dissect that, firstly yes you are wasting my time and anyone who starts a sentence saying they aren’t going to patronise or preach are already doing both.

Secondly, the global financial crisis was caused by a panic in the market about subprime mortgages issued by, among others Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of which were the only fortune 500 companies hand in glove with the state (as statists and leftists like Owen Jones love). Why? Because subprime mortgages are basically mortgages given to lower income people. They were helping poorer people get onto the property ladder. Is that evil? No, in fact it was overly generous. This made business sense in a booming economy, but as soon as the economy slowed as it inevitably did a lot of these people couldn’t pay up. So it was an error of hubris, but also, in a funny sort of way, it was an error of generosity compounded by state intervention in the market.

This is why Gordon Brown did what he always wanted to do and went on a gargantuan spending spree of banking nationalisation this country had never before seen, starting with Northern Rock. Why should taxpayers should foot the bill for a private company’s cock up? so that the state could do what caused Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to explode in the first place of course; pressure the banking system to hand out mortgages again which is exactly what happened.

Oh and lets not forget that the banking sector is a huge part of our economy, the tax revenue of which funds frivolous things like the welfare state… yes those nasty bankers you hate are funding everything you love Owen.

As for the expenses system, its simple, pay our politicians more and scrap the system or accept that the system is there to make sure than anyone elected MP can afford to be an MP. Put up or shut up Owen. Also I can’t help but notice the majority of politicians who defrauded the system were Labour and Libdems.

That doesn’t mean benefit fraud is ok, which is people taking scarce resources away from the people who need it and as someone who had to jump through a hundred hoops to get the help I needed at a time of acute mental illness I begrudge it. One bad thing one group does doesn’t mean another bad thing another group does is ok. That is called moral equivalence and its the first slab on the highway to hell.

As for tax dodging, a lot of the loopholes that tax dodging corporations utilise are created by leftists and the EU (though I repeat myself). Why? Because leftism inevitably means higher taxes. So how do you keep the big businesses who can afford to move from fleeing to the countries with more amenable tax regimes? Sir Albert Jobsworth takes their accountants on an exorbitantly expensive lunch (on the tax payer’s pound of course) gives them a masonic handshake, and then dicks around creating tax loopholes so that the big fishes can swim through but still catches the little ones. This is probably the only net in the world that works like that. The EU is practically made for this purpose.

Now here we get to the heart string pulling. But rents are high and wages are depressed because of supply and demand, this is exacerbated by mass immigration. Also people who own assets (particularly property) were massively enriched relatively speaking by all the quantitative easing done to bail out the government for its leftist profligacy. People who bought supercars were watching them increase in value, while people who only had small change in their pockets watched its buying power shrink.

Finally nobody blames immigrants for wanting to come here, we are a free(ish) and relatively prosperous country despite the best efforts of leftists like yourself. Mass unregulated immigration is effectively importing globalisation, it is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. At best we are stripping second and third world countries of doctors and nurses, at worst we are creating a huge downtrodden fungible pool of labour with zero bargaining power, making the minimum wage the maximum wage in huge areas of our economy and you are proud of this?

Q: How did it come to this? A: Turkeys do vote for Christmas

There is a great moment, laden with pathos, in the Lord of the Rings movies. After King Théoden of Rohan leads his people into helm’s deep, against the advice of Gandalf, he realises his mistake. ‘Who am I Gamling?’ ‘you are our king sire’ ‘do you trust your king?’ ‘your men will follow you to whatever end’. (only further driving home his mistake; they are trapped) ‘To whatever end… Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountains like wind in the meadow, the days have gone down in the West behind the hills into Shadow. How did it come to this?’. The answer of course is, even after Saruman’s ensorcellment was broken, Théoden’s decisions were made out of fear. He has led his people to the brink of ruin by forgetting his nation’s strengths, he is a horse lord, not a castle lord.

This is my pompous way of saying I worry more and more for the direction the UK, Europe and even the world is heading in. We are forgetting our strengths and seem to have embraced a suicidal mindset, a perpetual retreat from hard choices that leaves us dealing with ever increasing problems. The migrant crisis has been coming for a very long time and shows exactly what happens when you let the middle east and Libya go up in flames. It was predictable and largely avoidable if it had been acted on early, but the toothpaste is out of the tube now. So are we going to elect principled, sensible, serious, heavyweight politicians to try to fix this mess? of course not.

Jeremy Corbyn is still looking like he is going to win the Labour leadership.
Donald Trump is the frontrunner in the GOP elections, the thoroughly corrupt Hillary Clinton is the Democrat frontrunner (presuming she doesn’t end up campaigning from her jail cell for storing classified emails on a private server) How has it come to this?

Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown all came out against Jeremy Corbyn which was a sure-fire way of cementing his lead. Why do people care that Corbyn is ‘honest’? he’s honest about being a Marxist… why does being honest about liking the most murderous ideology in history make you popular? or being honest about how chummy he is with Hamas. I hope people only hate Blair, Mandelson and Brown more because they know them better… but still what kind of fantasy land do you have to be living in to elect this humourless clown?

Donald Trump blatantly doesn’t give a flying fuck about who he pisses off and it seems like he’s pissing off a lot of the right people. He is the only candidate who dares talk about immigration then everyone is surprised why he’s polling in front. Never mind he’s inarticulate, not particularly conservative, crass, not particularly likeable and would almost certainly lose in a general election. But rather than take his issue, the other GOP candidates want to attack him as a person, which only gives him more chance to show how little of a shit he gives about it thus feeding the beast. They are acting out of fear.

The root of all this is that as a society we seem to have lost the will to survive. The ‘dignitas’ clinic is just the most obvious symptom. The GB athletics team has removed the union jack from their uniforms and the Guardian calls our flag ‘divisive’. Abortion accounts for 27% of all deaths in the UK. Muhammed is by far the most popular boys name in London occupying number 1 and number 10 due to variant spellings. Freedom of speech is gone, you can criticise or mock any religion… except Islam, which is the only religion that threatens Western values.

What are those values? Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democracy, rule of law, civil rights, property rights, women’s rights, gay rights. Sorry to sound like a broken record but these values are all thoroughly taken for granted in the west and totally absent in the ‘Islamic world’ for lack of a better term. Freedom of speech is already dead, it was murdered in Paris when terrorists killed the Charlie Hebdo team. Has anyone in Europe has put their head above the parapet since? Certainly nobody new. Geert Wilders is cutting an increasingly lonely figure.

Why should we scorn Islam? There are so many reasons but to pick the most egregious: Because the Koran sanctions Muslim men to enslave and rape non Muslim women. I think the majority of Muslims reject this because everyone is made in the image of God and some kind of knowledge of natural law inevitably sneaks in. Surely if you think the Koran is ‘infallible’ but you know raping women is wrong, that must make you question your entire religion? But Muslim’s don’t question it. Why? Because the penalty for apostasy is death. Leave the theology to the Imams instead, keep your head down or they’ll cut it off. This is the fastest growing religion in the world we are talking about here.

Anyway that’s out of our hands. What isn’t out of our hands is the Islamification of Europe. This immigration ‘crisis’ is a symptom of our withdrawal from the world, our ever shrinking defence budgets. Our lack of belief in our own society. Our selfish inward looking materialism. The spiritual vacuum of modern society. We can’t be bothered to put out the fires in the Islamic world, we can’t even be bothered to defend our own borders.

The longer we retreat towards Helm’s deep the worse the battle will be at the end. Now Théoden (when not bewitched) wasn’t a wholly bad king (maybe he’s David Cameron if we are charitable to our current PM) but its the Aragorns and Gandalfs of this world who will get us out of this mess. Would we even recognise them when we saw them? The only thing I’m sure about is they are not Jeremy Corbyn. Is Donald Trump the the man for the job? of course not, he’s a blustering (and mildly racist) buffoon, (Gimli maybe?) but until someone better turns up he might be the leader of the free world that the increasingly unfree world deserves. Better him than Hillary Clinton anyway. (Denathor, definitely Denathor). I should probably stop torturing this analogy and put it out of its misery. (who is Treebeard?)