Responding to his cancellation, Gilliam said it was “very sad that a great cultural institution like the Old Vic allowed itself to be intimidated into cancelling our production”. Likening the younger members of staff who lobbied Old Vic bosses to scrap his show to “Neo-Calvinists … | Continue reading
“Setting aside the stunning sexist double standard being applied to the current prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin, forgive me if I don’t think it’s news, or relevant, or important, or even noteworthy that she’s got moves. Look, I don’t believe politicians are any more noble o … | Continue reading
“It was bound to happen. After skating through the summer without rolling blackouts, Californians on Wednesday were told to raise their thermostats to 78 degrees and avoid charging electric vehicles during peak hours as a heat wave grips the state. Good thing new gas-powered cars … | Continue reading
It would appear that the Ukrainians have begun a major offensive in the Kherson region. So, using my knowledge of the First World War, how do I think it’s going to go? “Using your knowledge of a war that ended a century ago! What is this nonsense, Crozier?” Let me explain. I like … | Continue reading
This form of cognitive dissonance faces almost the entire population of the country with respect to lockdown. For the actual decision-makers, such as Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, admitting that lockdown was a mistake would be intolerable because … | Continue reading
I can think of no easier way to get a cheap cheer than by appealing to the bigotries and credulities of any remaining remainers. How readily they swallowed the conspiracies of dark Russian money; how wide-eyed and trustful they looked to those who fed it to them. Maitlis’ talk of … | Continue reading
A retired and now ennobled supreme court judge writes in the Times that the decisions of the government during a crisis were wise and good and that if, perchance, any slight errors were made, fear not, lessons will be learned. Bzzt. Click. System error. Commence program reset. A … | Continue reading
Putin may be the proximate cause of this crisis, but the reason we were vulnerable was an intentional policy to crush fossil fuel investment – Juliet Samuel [£] | Continue reading
CEOs at prominent firms such as Apple, Tesla and Goldman Sachs have required employees to return to the office, curbing the working from home trend that got going at the start of the pandemic. One point that jumps out at me is how this shows that skilled employees have a lot of m … | Continue reading
Mr Sunak…..explained how the minutes from Sage meetngs were edited so that dissenting voices were not included in the final draft. (Report from the Daily Telegraph.) In other words, the committee – Sage – that was created by the government to oversee COVID-19 policy deliberately … | Continue reading
“The U.S. could have set an example for the world through innovation. Instead the government chose to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve no noticeable climate benefit.” – Bjorn Lomborg, Wall Street Journal ($). | Continue reading
Last week, James Sweet, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and President of the American Historical Association, published a very few, very cautious criticisms of the 1619 project (carefully bookended by impeccably woke remarks about the supreme court and … | Continue reading
Just 20 years ago when this site got rolling, many of the best ideas flowing into UK came from USA, whilst at the moment, I would say they tend to be the very worst. Yet outside the distorting funhouse mirror of social media, we have ‘progressed’ somewhat less towards shrill into … | Continue reading
The way Sam talks about institutions and expert opinion confirms my sense that the true split of the heterodox world was between those defending the institutions and those who defend the truth. When the institutions separated from the truth, we saw who was who. – Alexandros Marin … | Continue reading
Dr. Douglas Young, political science professor emeritus at University of North Georgia-Gainesville, has some interesting views about political fanatics: secular edition. There are loads of obsessives today: folks fixated on their phone, TV, sports, race, sex, etc. But the only on … | Continue reading
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it gives you shot down Russian aircraft, strip the bits & sell ’em as souvenirs to help fund the war effort. | Continue reading
Reporter #1: “Is the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?” President Biden: “No. It is not. Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 – well-equipped- as well equipped as any army in the world – and an air force – against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not … | Continue reading
Another excellent chat by Perun for folk interested in this kind of thing. | Continue reading
The suggestion that foreign-born terrorists should, perhaps, be asked to leave and build their murderous theocracy elsewhere would make the people who write and enforce our laws choke on their quinoa salad. – Konstantin Kisin | Continue reading
“What’s on your mind?” asks the WordPress dashboard at the top of the little box where you put your content. This. This is on my mind. Salman Rushdie getting stabbed. Back in the 1990s I bought a copy of The Satanic Verses as a contribution to his security costs. I’ve read it, an … | Continue reading
(I focus on the UK here in this brief commentary; needless to say, readers in the US and other countries such as Singapore or parts of Europe will have plenty to add. I remember reading about how water rights and arguments over it has been a huge issue in the US Southwest, for ex … | Continue reading
I have no sympathy for these idiots. we are demanding a reduction of energy bills to an affordable level. Our leverage is that we will gather a million people to pledge not to pay if the government goes ahead with another massive hike on October 1st Imagine finding yourself livin … | Continue reading
There’s a great deal of vanity involved in all of this. Our political elites, encouraged by a priestly caste of experts, love to pose as miracle-workers. To them, and to us who elect them to office, I would every day recite Ormerod’s final dictum: “We may intend to achieve a part … | Continue reading
One big problem of Brexit is that it’s created a big category error in everyone’s thinking. Problems are categorised as being caused by Brexit instead of by trade regulation. Nobody notices the EU could just choose not to restrict food imports from the UK. Or vice versa. French p … | Continue reading
“Schumer-Manchin won’t reduce inflation, won’t reduce the budget deficit, and it won’t reduce the world’s temperature. What it will do is transfer some $369 billion from taxpayers and drug companies to the pockets of green energy businesses and investors. It will tighten the hold … | Continue reading
For those interested in such things… From the always interesting Perun. | Continue reading
“When did you hear any public figure extol cheap energy as an agent of poverty alleviation? When did you hear any historian describe how coal, and later oil, liberated the mass of humanity from back-breaking drudgery and led to the elimination of slavery? For 10,000 years, the pr … | Continue reading
Amnesty’s leaders are unable to morally distinguish between democracies that have blots on the system and totalitarian regimes where the blot is the system; nor between democracies that may err in defending themselves & terrorist attackers that deliberately target civilians – Hil … | Continue reading
Everything the Tories did to crash the economy, Labour criticised them for doing too little of. – Guy Herbert | Continue reading
Assume all public bodies have the same goal – and it isn’t what it says on the tin. You might think the Committee for the Promotion of Postage Stamp Collections is obsessed with postage stamps, or the Sewage Treatment Works Agency is fascinated by sewage. Actually they both do th … | Continue reading
Readers of this blog know that I sometimes use the writing style called ‘English understatement’ – and though I’m Scottish, I’m also British and have a claim to it. So when I read “a homeless shelter worker and people close to Ms. Leyden questioned whether, despite her gender ide … | Continue reading
When I first saw this story, “Daughter who buried father in illegal woodland pagan funeral avoids jail”, my outrage-meter went off the scale at the apparent violation of religious freedom. Unnecessarily, it turned out. Eirys Brett was not in court for conducting a pagan funeral. … | Continue reading
Remember this? “Glastonbury 2017: ‘Ohh Jeremy Corbyn’ chant sweeps festival as revellers get political” Last year, it was the universal disdain for the Brexit vote, myself waking up to megaphones announcing David Cameron had resigned and Boris Johnson may take the PM position. Th … | Continue reading
Sean Gabb writes: Sending money and weapons into the black hole of corruption that is the Ukraine is not a worthwhile cause. It is not worth defending in itself, and it is in the Russian sphere of influence. We have no business there. There’s quite a lot in that paragraph but it’ … | Continue reading
Someone posted this on Twitter… And Twitter suspended their account. Thou shalt not blaspheme against the True Faith. | Continue reading
The ex-soldier’s supposed crime? He had posted a trans-BLM-swastika on social media. This emblem was originally designed and posted by Laurence Fox and re-posted by many others – including the Daily Mail. Its purpose was to highlight the authoritarianism of “trans-activist” group … | Continue reading
The video embedded in this tweet from Laurence Fox apparently shows someone being arrested for tweeting. I cannot see the video, but the top comment says, “Chap shares a post by @LozzaFox and the police arrest the chap, even though Laurence is actually stood there This is disgra … | Continue reading
[The WEF crew and associated elites] are not Marxists. Marxism is rightly discredited (it really is) to all but a lunatic fringe. Even ‘Communist’ China is not really Marxist, not in any way that Karl Marx would have recognised. These people owe far more ideologically to Henri de … | Continue reading
We need to talk about how demented the elites’ crusade against modern farming has become. As a result of the global lockdowns and the war in Ukraine, the world is experiencing some pretty serious food shortages. A report published by the UN last month said that around 180million … | Continue reading
The Tories are skilled marketers of the “freedom” side in that equation. Thus, we find Truss promising to “liberalise” planning laws and Sunak urging the need for more post-Brexit “deregulation”. But the main populist element in the Conservative government’s mandate cannot be ign … | Continue reading
This is savage and just from the Spectator: There’s a rich irony in HSBC now refusing to collect data on its customers, given its involvement in abetting the Chinese government’s crackdown on Hong Kong. HSBC not only publicly backed the draconian National Security Law but also fr … | Continue reading
“AI, machine learning, robotics and the power of computational science hold the potential to drive explosive economic growth and profoundly transform a diverse array of sectors, while providing humanity with countless technological improvements in medicine and healthcare, financi … | Continue reading
I first became aware of David Trimble some time in the early 1990s. I was impressed. He was way more impressive in his media appearances than any other unionist of the time. I was so impressed that – wearing my National Association of Conservative Graduates hat – I interviewed hi … | Continue reading
Interesting discussion about how Russia does propaganda | Continue reading
Tegnell was aided by another worthy candidate to share the Nobel, Johan Giesecke, who had formerly held Tegnell’s job and served during the pandemic as an advisor to the Swedish public health agency. Decades earlier, he had recruited Tegnell to the agency because he admired the y … | Continue reading
“If consumers and businesses cared about the CO2 they emit, the last cars they might buy are hot-selling EVs like Ford’s Mustang Mach-E or GM’s Hummer EV.” Holman W Jenkins, Wall Street Journal ($) | Continue reading
The WHO has proclaimed Monkeypox a global health emergency. A major study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that Monkeypox is being driven overwhelmingly by sex between men. Yesterday the CDC reported ‘US records first two child monkeypox cases: California toddler and … | Continue reading
But which is least bad? We love to say that politicians “are all as bad as each other”, but that is very rarely true. There is nearly always some difference between them. Go on, make me care. I am in a sulk because Kemi Badenoch is out of the running. She is my local MP. I have s … | Continue reading