the worlds most violent religion

As the worlds most violent religion exits its month of holy rioting we seem to heard much less of it than the carbecues of last year. That is not to say there weren't any. This year mindless arson, mutilation and murder are not the only objectives, they are actively going out to attack the police. Yet the media has barely made a sound.

Perhaps the fact that Islam fosters violence is simply not news, despite the protests of the multicultists, Islam's violent and repressive nature is now well understood. Oh, the Muslims are angry? When aren't they? The most important Islamic cleric in Australia considers women little more than slabs of meat that deserve to be raped. Hardly surprising he's just following what is in the Koran. A british imam says gay people should be murdered. Nothing new there either. Islam is violent. Yawn, tell us something we didn't know.

Or more likely they are frightened of the murderous ways of the followers of the Religion of Peace the pointed response that accompanies any criticism of Islam.

gay nature

I've blogged about this before but here is a longer and more detailed article on the exhibition on gay animals in Oslo.

porn is good for you

Some more evidence of the good effects of porn.

Using state-level panel data on the rise of the internet, I [the author of the paper] find that internet access appears to be a substitute for rape. Specifically, the results suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in internet access is associated with a decline in reported rape victimization of around 7.3%.

I have blogged before about how porn decreases sexual violence because of our authoritarian government's unnatural desire to see everything banned. You can get the PDF of the research here.

So close and yet so far

A guardian writer almost gets it, so close then lets things slip through his fingers into the standard anti-capitalist rant that you would expect. He is talking about the fear of teenagers that is developing across society.

We Brits are significantly more likely than western European counterparts to think the young are mostly to blame for anti-social behaviour. Whether justified or not, it's clear that they terrify us grown-ups. We let them get on with it. We give them a wide berth. What can you do?

How about not giving them a wide berth, standing up to them and not letting them get on with it. Change the balance of risk and reward so that it is nolonger such an easy choice to be a chav. But if you do that then you will always end up worse off, ignored, ridiculed as powerless, or knifed by the teenagers. And they are right, adults are powerless. They cannot do what is needed to maintain a civil society because if they do then they will be arrested by the police for daring to show up it's ineptitude. And he almost gets it writing:

Adult society as a whole has a duty to behave in an adult manner, to regard the conduct and wellbeing of children at large as part of its collective responsibility.

For in the world of the Guardian taking collective responsibility decays quickly to keeping your head down, letting them get on with it, giving them a wide berth. And then blaming everything on Grand Theft Auto. Since obviously teenagers are all simple automota programmed through the consumer goods that they are required to buy. Not actual living, thinking people like Guardian readers.

The niqab

Here is a story from a woman that decided to wear the niqab. She does not get on with it. IT is not just the simply things like how do you drink a cup of coffee with your friends wearing one of those things.

I miss seeing my own face, my own shape. Yet at the same time I feel completely naked. The women I have met who have taken to wearing the niqab tell me that it gives them confidence, but I find that it saps mine.

Nobody has forced me to wear it, but I feel as though I have oppressed myself and isolated myself.

The niqab is the product of a culture that considers women little more than meat, and any expression of themselves is an invitation to rape. So feeling oppressed should not only be expected it was probably the point. She also experiences a lot of people resentful of such a blatant political symbol of self-segregation such, as the children that point and laugh. What exactly does she expect? She is wearing a full length poster saying "I think your culture is shit, and you're all rapists" and somehow expects everybody else to be happy about it. Muslims aren't the only people that can feel insulted.

I don't understand the need of women to wear something as severe as the niqab. But for that tiny number that do, I will shake their gloved hands for bearing this endurance task — the staring, the swearing and the discomfort. On the streets of London, the black veil does nothing to distract attention — and everything to attract it.

But when you are making a political statement that is kind of the point.

Philosophical Health Check

Another self test thingy, the Philosophical Health Check one about how self contradictory your beliefs are.

The PHC is designed to identify tensions or contradictions (a Tension Quotient) between various beliefs that you have. The PHC does not aim to identify which of your beliefs are true or false, but where the set of beliefs you hold may not be compatible with each other.

And the score?

Tension Quotient = 7%

with the average score being 28%.

the politics of envy

Have a look at this article wreaking of jealosy in the Guardian for an archtypical example of the politics of envy. Apparently everybody is so stupid that they can only imagine something enjoyable if they are shown it on TV, and if they then cannot afford this then mass depression will ensue. Hence why nothing fun must be shown, ever.

Why be jealous of them jetting off to exotic places? There is plenty of fun to be had at home. I personally opt to orgy with the charming and beautiful people, and enough drugs to wire the entire chinese olympic team. Don't be envious of second home owners, be happy for their sucess. While you engage in sex acts that they (and most doctors) would not imagine physically possible. But this is the Guardian so what they could not imagine is that it is physically possible to be happy for somebody else's sucess. Probably because they can't get laid.

Religion is stupid

The Islamic religious nutters think that if a man sees anything other than a womans eyes it will drive them into an uncontrollable lust fueled frenzy of debauchery (following the example of their prophet obviously). The Christian religious nutters think that if a man sees a womans eyes ("optical intercourse" — staring too intently into the eyes of a member of the opposite sex. This is also referred to as "making eye babies.") it will drive then into an uncontrollable lust fueled frenzy of debauchery. So how about we take both sets of religious nutters and seal them into barrels, in a deep, dark, dank vault benieth a mountain where no part of them can be seen. Ever.

Islamophobia

Given the terrible terrible problem of Islamophobia that we constantly hear about and how Muslims feel so terribly terribly victimised and persicuted you might think that there would be far more hate crimes against Muslims than anybody else. Hardly. 11% of hate crimes in America where anti-Islamic, 68.5 percent were anti-Jewish. Both groups account for the same amount of the US population (roughly 1% each). But I guess that that is just a great big zionist conspiracy.

taxes

I was reading a post about the reason for the rise in house prices (which is land values since the material of the house itself has been getting cheaper and cheaper to replace apparently) but it was one of the diagrams that really caught my eye, This one:

Not for the land and rent prices, but for the data charted below that wages, GDP per capita and all taxes per capita. Look at how the rate of increase in taxes outstrips both that of GDP per Capita and wages by a considerable amount.

Labour facism

One of the very few liberal things that Labour have done is allow pubs to open a little longer. But only if you have government approval to drink, without it you cannot go into a bar at all, and everybody gets treated like a criminal no matter what they do. Of course the facists of Labour claim that this is voluntary, it's just that if the pubs don't 'volunteer' then they could get shut down. Fingerprinting being also used in Labour's compulsory ID Card system. Then there is Labour's national DNA database, now set to include the DNA of every single person in the country. Or the automated number plate recognition system that will track every single car journey in the country, and the highest concentration of CCTV anywhere in the world. Labour have legislated to ban encryption, and make anybody with anything that looks like an encrypted document on their computer guilty until they can prove themselves innocent or they decrypt it for the police. This is not the only crime for which you are guilty until proven innocent thanks to Labour, or can be convicted and sent to prison based on gossip. That is if you get a trial at all and are not simply executed in the streets under Labour's shoot to kill policy. Or you could be interned, unable to see the evidence (if there is any) against you or even speak to anybody that has! Labour have legislate to give themselves emergency powers greater than Hilter's Enabling Act. They have created all the legislation needed by a dictator, all it needs is somebody to activate it.

EU accounts don't add up

For the 12th year running the EU has not had it's accounts signed off by it's auditors. Perhaps this isn't really news since the EU has been unable to get it's accounts signed off ever since it was required to first get them audited in 1994. Dispite the spin the BBC is putting on it, "Only 3/4 of the accounts are riddled with errors, yay!" this show that much of the money that is thrown at the EU has yet again disappeared.

gun buyback did not cut gun crime

Reduce the number of licenced guns and you will reduce the number of deaths because of them? Actually no according to a study in Australia:

Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA[National Firearms Agreement], the conclusion being that the gun buyback and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia,

We need the police to police

That strange emergent phenomena called society has certain needs, such as the protection of it's members. If the state chooses not to do this then this protection will still emerge just in different forms. This could be neighborhoods buying their own police, setting up their own borders, vigilantes setting suspected criminals on fire, or a fat man unloading the contents of his fridge on a neighborhood nuisance. The state may not be happy about it's abandoned turf being taken over, and certainly does it's best to discourage any self reliance that shows up it's meager efforts. But since the State has abandoned one of it's primary roles society will take up the slack eventually, even if the results will not be just and certainly won't be pretty.

At times it seems like the State wants social breakdown. On the one hand there are worries about Britain is in danger of becoming a nation fearful of its young people, with Britons far less likely than anybody else to intervene to protect the social commons should they see anti-social behaviour, something the State has become unwilling or unable to do itself. Yet at the same time the state comes down with all its might on any that do, and legislates to destroy structured activities for young people that could stop anti-social behaviour. It attempts to force all social interactions through itself trying to nationalise the people and have them run by a committee of bureaucrats. But with the nationalisation of industry having been an unmitigated failure what other option is there for the socialists that rule us? This is both illiberal and doomed to failure, even if it could get all interactions to require government approval it would be impossible for any government department to judge them even a fraction as well as the massed interactions of the functioning society that it seeks to destroy. It doesn't help that the multicult has elevated some people are above the law so attacking the basic premise that we are all equal under it.

NHS denied to smokers

We are frequently told that the NHS is the envy of the world because it gives service free at the point of need to everybody. Even health tourists from distant lands that never paid a penny into it. But not smokers. If you smoke and need an operation then it is going to be tough luck. Smokers will of course still have to pay for the NHS, and more than most people thanks to the huge tax on Tabacco, but they can expect nothing from it. Such is the fairness of the last bastion of Socialism.

Measuring EU stupidity

The EU has a metric obsession, everything must be sold in metric and soon only metric.

Why ban supplimental measurements? Perhaps I want to buy cord by the Cubit, and I do since 2 cubits is the perfect length for making a prussik loop (if you don't know what a prussik loop is and why it is important read Touching the Void by Joe Simpson). If I get my 2 cubits and they get 2 cubits worth of money who exactly has lost out from this transaction? Nobody. But if I do not get my 2 cubits and they do not get their 2 cubits worth of money then we have both lost out.

Supplimental measurements increase information and so make trade easier. I want Cubits but you understand Picas (and as every typographer knows there are 210437.71 Picas to the Furlong) then have labels for both and we can conduct our transaction with ease. Having only one or the other exclusively and trade suddenly becomes alot harder. All this directive is is yet another of the EU's non-tarrif barriers, those slippery things that the EU uses to further it's counter productive protectionism making everybody poorer.

This may be an obscure example, but there are plenty of others, and I'm deliberately using some obscure measurements to avoid the whole 'but metric is so much better' arguement which will always come up in talking about metric vs. imperial measurements. Metric is based around base 10, and so is our current numbering system. But that does nothing to change the fact that unless a measuring system is understood it is useless. Having supplimental measurements increases the chance of at least one of them being understood and so is better than any single measuring system.

Biased Broadcasting Corporation

Michelle Malkin has a post on the secret meeting where the BBC finally owns up to the fact that it has biases.

it was imagined that Baron Cohen chose some kosher food, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a Bible and the Koran.

Nearly everyone at the summit, including the show's actual producer and the BBC's head of drama, Alan Yentob, agreed they could all be thrown into the bin, except the Koran for fear of offending Muslims.

That is the problem, not that the BBC allows things that insult some people, but that it does not apply things equally. Or

Former BBC business editor Jeff Randall said he complained to a 'very senior news executive', about the BBC's pro-multicultural stance but was given the reply: 'The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it.'

Yet it claims to be unbiased. It isn't. No media organisation is. But why should people that object to it's political view point be forced to pay for it? That is what makes the BBC's biases so unpalatable. Not that they exist, all the media have biases (some more obvious than others), but that anybody that owns a TV has to pay for this political indoctrination station whether they want to or not.

The results of the Welfare State

The Devils Kitchen points me to a story in the Daily Mail by the Police blogger that goes by the pseudonym PC David Copperfield, writing about his work he says:

Take a call I had recently. 'A 12-year-old girl has been missing for a few days,' said my radio. 'Please attend the address.' I tried to get the details from her mum and mum's partner but this was a bit difficult over the noise of daytime television.

I wasn't getting anywhere so I set off. My first call was to the girl's school — and there she was. I returned to the house — some 800 yards from the school. 'She's at school, she's fine,' I said. 'That's no good,' said her mum, one eye on the TV. 'I want her back here.'

I have to agree with this commenter on DK's blog:

Women like this are the product of 60 years of the welfare state. She does not lack education as Neil Harding suggests, she has learned every lesson that her socialist mentors have taught her. Not only has she learned the theory, but her practical application of the theory is flawless.

And what she has learned is that the state is there it pander to her whims. She can ignore her responsibilities, as so long as she does the state will take care of them for her.

It doesn't matter that she is pulling her child out of school to satisfy a casual interest. That she is therefore reducing her child's best means of getting a better life. No she wants it, so she must have it. But she does not want to be distracted from her life of daytime TV and nightclubs either, so she gets the police to do it for her. It doesn't matter that they might have better things to do than run around after somebody so lazy that she cannot be bothered to walk down the street to check herself. The state has always been there to pander to all her other needs so it will pander to this one.

Just another person trained into savagery by the Welfare State.

self test thingy

via Martine Martin If find yet another of those little self test thingies, The Nerd Test



Bow down and worship, I am your god.

It's status Jim, but not as we know it

There is evidence to show that jealousy of other's social status has a negative impact on well being. This is not just true of Humans but also other social animals like our primate relatives. The big problem is what to do about it.

There are those that think that this is all to do with inequalities of wealth, and through crippling tax rates a more equal society can be created. This has been tried and failed, when not expressed in purely financial terms differences of status became manifest in other ways as Chris Dillow points out:

Remember the 1970s? It's no coincidence that high taxes were accompanied by absurd distinctions in status, like "executive toilets". Much the same was true of the old Soviet Union, as Trotsky pointed out.
Taxes, than, aren't the solution.

Others think that we should retreat to some pastoral idil where everybody is the same. Working from dawn till dusk scraping a living off the land only to die at what is currently middle age, and if your very very lucky marrying somebody that isn't your cousin.

Some may even cling to the belief that it is possible for Humans to reach Marx's Communist Utopia, despite the 110 million dead telling them that we can't. However in other primates, where the social structure is capable of getting much closer (in human terms) to the Communist ideal (but still with purges during leadership changes) than Humans can, there is still very definite social hierarchies, and the members at the bottom are still effected negatively.

Then there is the idea that if some people getting prizes when others don't causes problems then everybody must have prizes. Except when everybody gets the same prize that prize is devalued so much that there is no point getting it at all. People are all obviously different and have differing strengths. To try and abolish difference by bureaucratic fiat simply pushes everything down to the lowest common denominator without doing anything about the fact that some people really are better at some things than others.

The opposite of all must have prizes is to use the fact that everybody is different and let them all choose how they define their own status, without a system being imposed on them from the outside. Let everybody definite there own personal tree that they can be at the top of with everybody else below. As described by David Friedman. Which would be great if we all lived in the world of Star Trek (but hopefully without the lycra jumpsuits) and could ask the replicators to provide unlimited resources to pursue these varied goals. However we cannot, and so must rely on the markets distribute the limited resources we have to where they will be of best use. This means that people with the most idiosyncratic paths will naturally not have the same resources to follow them as people that wish to do things that many others find useful to have done. So until we get that message from Vulcan on how to build a replicator there is always going to be some kind of external social hierarchy that will distort any attempt to let everybody create their own personal hierarchies.

Or you could just tell the jealous bastards to go and fuck themselves if they cannot deal with the success of others, the misanthropic cunts. (Well this is a swearblog after all).

More angry muslims

An what is the Islamic anger about this time? It turns out that the 2012 Olympics is going to be held in Ramadan is what has pissed them off (but no death threats ... yet). Expect a grovelling apology and change of times. Not that the same reaction would be applied to any other group, and especially not by Muslims to any other group since Islamic courtesy does not extend much to non-Muslms.

Minting it

Minting it has long been a way of saying making lots of money, because it takes a special kind of incompetence to loose money on making money. But that is exactly what is currently happening in the US at the moment. Certain coins are worth more melted down than their face value.

EU is crap says EU commission

Tim Worstall has a piece in the Times today on the costs and benefits of the EU according to the EU's own figures.

The cost €600 billion
The benefit €164.5 billion

This is just the single market, which is by far the best bit of the EU. Nothing to do with CAP or CFP (which is soon to make cod extinct in the North Sea). So unless the EU single market produces €435.5 billion of hidden benefits for the member states that the commission could not find, which I doubt, even for the best bit of the EU the costs massively outweight the benefits. And given the EU's history and the proposals that we know of (such as becoming a Europe wide censor for the internet) there is no better time to leave than now, since it will only get worse.

BBC mounts court fight to keep 'critical' report secret

An interesting story from the Telegraph, the BBC is spending thousands pounds of license fee payers money to try and stop a report on the BBC's biases in middle eastern reporting from becoming available to the public.

A little on immigration

The free movement of people, like the free movement of goods, is generally good, and for the same reason. Individuals are able to balance the good and bad points and so find the place for them to live in order to be happy, just as individuals are best able to decide what assets will make them most happy and what they are willing to trade for them. In a perfect world we could simply open our borders to trade and people and everybody would end up with the most happiness possible. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world.

Sometimes there are problems created that do not directly affect the people involved, in trade these are called externalities, and so are not part their decision making process.

So what are the externalities of the free movement of people?

Well high Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization is known to cause lower GDP growth, and if large numbers of immigrants enter a country without learning the language then obviously this is going to go up.

Diversity in communities tends to lower trust between people:

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.

The market for places to live in is not free, some places are very hard to move to, and some places subsidise people moving to them (via a welfare state). This means that some places will see immigration far above the natural level.

Colonisation, where immigrants make no effort to integrate into the society of the country they have chosen to live in. Be this the British colonies in southern Spain or the Islamic colonies in the midlands.

There are ways of mitigating some of these problems.

The linguistic part of Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization can be reduced simply by encouraging immigrants to speak the same language as everybody else. The simplest way to do this would be to use the stick of make not speaking the native language hard through not having translations, and the carrot of easy access to education.

We can remove the market distortions simply by getting rid of the welfare state (a good thing in itself) and lobbying for free movement of people everywhere.

We can reduce the problem of colonisation, a bit anyway by. In case of the Islamic colonies we can use the stick of not paying them the jizya that supports them, Muslims had the highest overall levels of economic inactivity in 2004, (more than double the national average), while reducing our regulatory burden that stops the colonies economy from integrating with that of the outside world. However there are also factors within Islamic culture that have made Muslims especially prone to acting as Colonists rather than integrating like all other groups.

And diversity? Everybody speaking the same language will help then 3000 years of free movement of people and it will simply stop being an issue.

Why we need a good police force

If you want to know why we need a police force that people can rely on to actually police, rather than avoid criminals, have a look at what happens when there isn't one.

If you are wondering the suspected thief being burned survived as other villagers to the ones that set him alight cut him down and extinguished the flames. He was later treated for the burns.

the boys from Brazil

Here is something that will be of interest to the Bushitler crowd, Bush plans to settle in Paraguay after he leaves the Whitehouse. Obviously to raise a clone army of Bushes to take over the world. Though it may be more likely that he was actually more interested in a different kind of bush, and his knowledge of geography has let him down. Again.

weedkiller

Guess what has happened because of the softening of the policing of Cannabis, an explosion of use? Well not exactly

The apparent trend is reinforced by British figures which show that the popularity of cannabis in the UK has plummeted, with 600,000 fewer people smoking or eating marijuana than three years ago.

Legalise the lot of them.

Salman Rushdie on Islamism

A very interesting interview with Salman Rushdie by Johann Hari about the changes in Islam over the last century and the emergence of Islamism.

"If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of Al Qaeda by one jot. It's not what they're after"

...

"Go away and die – that’s all Bin Laden wants you to do. It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you’re not married to.” He pauses. “It’s about life.”

...

“so much of the left always seems to fall for fascist bastards pretending to be speaking on behalf of the masses. They’ve done it before with communism in its various forms, and here’s another bunch of fascist bastards claiming to be speaking for the downtrodden masses, and they’re falling for it again.”

Just a few tasters. It is really really good. If only there where a few more people around like Mr Rushdie

Happy Friday the 13th

Before I forget happy, Friday the 13th everybody! This day gets it's imfamy through the Church choosing this day 700 years ago to wipe out the Knights Templar, Europes first international banking organisation, in an effort to steal their money.

EU worse than it seems

I linked to a peice in the FT yesterday about the costs of the EU. It looks like the FT made a mistake, and it's even worse than they claim. Here is the correct values from EUReferendum:

The information is based on an EU report which is still available on the EU website (see page 36) and, by the way, the figure is not 600 billion euros – but pounds. The cost to Britain is in the order of £120 billion or nearly £4,000 a second – the true cost of EU membership.

Some people obviously think that the EU is worth this, I obviously don't. Perhaps this is a good thing, knowing the costs we can use a demand revealing referendum to decide whether membership of the EU is really worth it. So any pro-EU people out there want to give me the £2000 that the EU costs me every year and I don't think it is worth? Mat? Nosemonkey? Anybody?

Islamists Take Offence

There are numerous examples of Islamists being able to take offence from just about anything. Here is another good one, aparently a bunch of them have taken offence from Apple's shop on Fifth Avenue. They don't like that it has a cube shaped thing outside, apparently Islam has a monopoly over all cube shaped things since the Ka'ba happens to be cube shaped. Anything cube shaped can therefore only be meant as an insult to Islam. What a bunch of squares.

All hail Thor

Monboit himself has calculated that energy efficiency and all the possible renewable energy we could get simply cannot supply the reduction in C02 producing energy sources that is needed to deal with climate change. This means that to deal with climate change that way would either require considerably less people, or considerably less technology. And if you are worried about climate change because of the way that it will damage general human happiness choosing either of these could lead to a cure that is worse than the problem.

The only technology that can plug that gap is nuclear. But most enviromental groups are so irrationally afraid of it, if it is being controlled by peaceful democracies that is, that they won't even consider let alone think about developing better sources such as Thorium reactors such as the one that is being proposed to be developed in Norway. Norway also happens to have substancial Thorium reserves, which could provide a nice little earner when the North Sea oil fields run out.

Making nuclear weapons out of reactor fuel is hard enough requiring considerable purification to get from fuel grade to weapons grade uranium. With Thorium it is impossible because you cannot make a Thorium based bomb since Thorium can not produce the same kind of chain reaction as Uranium, it requires an external neutron source to get it going and keep it going. This can either be supplied by something like a Fusor or a particle accelerator, meaning that you can turn your reaction off at the flick of a switch. Or you can use Plutonium which gets destroyed in the process, meaning that you can use a Thorium based reactor to burn away the waste products of Uranium reactors.

Big Gay Al's ... museum

Those homophobes that critise being gay because it is unnatural should probably take a trip to Oslo where a museum his holding an exhibition of gay behaviour in animals

Geir Soeli, the project leader of the exhibition entitled "Against Nature", said: "Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1500 animal species, and is well documented for 500 of them."

as you would expect this exhibition has not gone down well in all quarters

One radical Christian said organisers of the exhibition – partly funded by the Norwegian Government – should "burn in hell", Mr Soeli said. Laws describing homosexuality as a "crime against nature" are still on the statutes in some countries.

It should also be noted that religion has only ever been recorded in one species.

Toasted politcians

Jackart does not seem to like the latest pronouncements from the health gimps, in fact he thinks if you want to tax junk food, you're an arsehole, and should be stabbed with a big knife. He makes the very simple point that people get fat by not exercising enough, you can get fat on lentels and rice if you take in more callories than you expend. This is a point so simple that even a Labour minister should be able to follow it, however solving the problem of obesity is not the only factor at work here. Playing fields and sports equipment costs money, taxes raise money, and the government needs more money to waste in order to buy votes. Don't bother applying for government money in an area that isn't producing Labour MP's. Which is why the government deserves to be roasted alive. Delicious, nutrionally balanced, and a service to the country.

The cost of the EU

A while ago I posted about the costs of being in the EU. This included a news letter from 2004 in which it was calculated that the opportunity costs of being in the EU (such as having to turn down a free trade agreement that the US offered in 2003). The result was £100 billion per year. However thanks to the Serf I have found that the EU costs Europe £405 billion per year due to complying with the EU's regulations. This is according to the EU's own competition commissioner, who had wanted to reduce the costs of EU regulation when he was appointed. Unfortuantly for him that was not part of the culture of the EU:

European Commission officials had not adapted to "a new political culture" and still believed their job was to unite Europe through more regulations, Mr Verheugen told the Financial Times.

"There is a view that the more regulations you have, the more rules you have, the more Europe you have," he said. "I don't share that view."

Which is at least good to see them admitting that the purpose of the EU is to form a new state, something that you will not see any British politician admitting. So what do we get for the £4 billion net direct contribution, £100 billion in opportunity costs, and £405 billion in the costs of regulation? Well more expensive goods, more expensive food, a tax that is so complex with so much fraud that it distorts trade figures, the distruction of the British fishing fleet (for no enviromental benefit), the distruction of the fisheries of two continents, and the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from contributing to the impoverishment of some of the already poorest people on the planet.

UPDATE

Tim Worstall gives a little perspective on just how big the cost of the EU bureaucracy is:

Very roughly, that's 30% of the entire production of the 60 million people in the UK spread out across the population of the EU. It's thus something like the whole output of an entire 20 million of the world's most productive citizens* pissed away so that bureacrats can play with their paper clips.

The Campaigne for [western] nuclear disarmament

As everybody knows by now North Korea has tested it's atomic bomb, the result of which might be a nasty letter from the un and that's about it. I expect that Kim Jong-Il is quaking in is boots about that one. This is obviously big news and the Englishman points us to the home page of the Campaigne for [Western] Nuclear Disarmament, obviously they will be up in arms about this new nuclear threat, especially as it is controlled by probably the most insane of all the tin pot dictators (not that anyone in North Korea can afford a tin pot thanks to his and his father's misrule).

Well actually no. They have a campaigne against a repalcement for Trident, as you would expect, and against nuclear power (obviously prefering CO2 belching coal power stations). But they also have a campaigne against NATO, and one to avoid any attacks on the Iranian nuclear installations that are rapidly progressing towards their own bomb. Nothing about North Korea at all.

No to Islam say the muslims

[Warning purple]

For immigrants to come to a country they are showing that they want to live in that country. They think they will be happier their than where ever they left. This can be for any number of reasons jobs, education, environment, freedom, safety, any aspect of what makes up our culture. But lets be frank, nobody moves to Britain for the weather. In coming to enjoy our culture the flow of ideas is not a one way street. Immigrants throw their ideas into the mix and new better ways emerge, the best bits of the native culture which attracted them in the first place plus any useful traits that they bring. Cultures mix and merge and after a short time a hybrid comes forth invigorated from a dash of new blood.

Most immigrants want to make their way and do, they enjoy their new lives and take advantage of their new home. After all why would anybody travel thousands of miles because of how much better life is under and different culture, and then refuse to live under that culture? Why travel thousands of miles to reconstruct an outpost of a culture that is so inferior that you would travel thousands of miles to escape it? The only group to arrive in Britain that has been unable to come to terms so far with the logic of assimilation is the Muslims, but then logic and religion were never the most complimentary pair.

The attraction of British culture has not disappeared for them, we still have many of the points that made them or their parents pack up and move to this rainy island on the edge of the atlantic ocean. It is all theirs for the taking, yet there is also still Islam forbidding them from taking it. Eventually one of these drives must win out. Either the attraction of the west most go, or the force pulling them back to Islam. So which? Which is better? Can you really judge competing cultures like that? The thing is that they themselves have already decided. They came here, they want to live in Britain not Pakistan. So no to kowtowing to the extremists, no to creeping dhimmitude, and no to submission. The Muslims have spoken and who are we to reject their decision?

Police protection

One of the big stories today has to be the police officer in the diplomatic protection squad that requested not guard the Israeli embassy during Hezbollah's conflict with Israel. The Guardian claim that this was because of moral concerns. Police officers deciding that they should not have to protect people the protection that the law demands because of their personal moral judgements would be a truely terrible situation and mark the end of the rule of law.

Luckily the Guardian is wrong. This officer requested not to guard the Israeli embassy because he felt that the lives of himself and his family, which includes family members in Lebonon where they could easily end up victims of Hezbollah. However the fact that the police cannot even protect their own officers from Islamist violence is hardly a ringing endorsement of their ability to protect us the public from the Islamists.

UPDATE

The Telegraph carries exactly who this Officers family in Lebonon are

Pc Alexander Omar-Basha's father-in-law is related to Bakri [Omar Bakri Mohammed]

Welfare for government

A nice little bit of knowledge from Stumbling and Mumbling on the soon to happen increase to minimum wage, guess who the person to benifit most is? Well not anybody getting it, obviously. It's Gordon Brown who gets the most money from an increase in the minimum wage:

She sees only 30p of every £1 rise in wages. The other 70p goes in higher tax or lower benefit - it's table 1.2b of this massive pdf. So, she gains £187.50 - if that is, she keeps her hours and job.
The minimum wage, then, is a way of transferring income from bosses to the Treasury, more so than a way of helping the low-paid.

There is a better way of helping people than a stealth tax with a nasty side effect of pricing the lowest paid out of work. Such as the Flat tax, Citizens basic income, and a fuck off huge personal allowance. Kind of like is being proposed by UKIP. But that might not be the best way to help government, and just think of the poor civil servants. How could they survive without their above average salaries and inflation proof taxpayer backed pension schemes? Little Tarquin's school fees won't pay for themselves you know.

religous addiction

An interesting idea from Andrew Sullivan, fanatism is adiction to to sky fairy. So Bush didn't so much give up his addiction to the bottle as swap it for an addition to god, and Islam requiring abstinace from everything fun means that the only thing left to get addicted to is the religion itself.

Christianist death threats

Looks like the Christian nutters are lifting more ideas from the Islamist playbook. Not just rather abortive suicide bombings, but the rather more sucsessful tactic of death threats to people that disagree with them, in this case that the religious mumbo rumbo such as Inteligent Design has a place in a science class.

Monbiot right shock

George Monbiot writes today about Stephen "I'm not gay" Green, and weirdly I agree with him.

we should be pleased that the charges he faced last week have been dropped. Stephen Green is offensive, intolerant and illiberal. But so is the law under which he was arrested.

It is better that Stephen "I'm not gay" Green is able to make a complete idiot of himself in public than everybody be censored by these terrible laws. Freedom means the freedom to be wrong, or as that Eric Blair put it "Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don't want to hear." However Anthony Blair and New Labour has always been terrified about offending anyone, and have projected this phobia outwards in a raft of censorship laws crushing public discourse under the dead hand of the state. Get rid of them. If there are limits to free speach then they can only be the direct incitement of violence or panic, though at the moment this only this category of speach seems immune from Labour's censorship.

Gone Pink

I've decided to turn my template pink for Beast Cancer Awareness Month.

Motoons redux

One year on from the riots that killed over one hundred people when a lieing Imam decided to stir up trouble by taking offence from some extremely inoffensive cartoons and the cartoonists are still in hiding from the death threats that followers of the Religion of Peace love so much.

What has happened since? Well hundreds of deaths from Islamically inspired terrorists. The volence from Muslims who felt that the Pope (pot meet kettle) had implied that Islam is violent. This time a French Philosophy teacher for publishing an editorial about the violent nature of Islam. Muslims don't like Islam being portrayed as violent, hence more death threats. What's the classical arabic for irony?

Hurrah, for once, for the European Union

The EU has used the fact that it overrules the laws of the nations that make it for good, for once. It has stopped the US from demanding vast amounts of information about everybody taking plane flights. Samizdata has details.