Today the Telegraph leaked some delicious details of MP’s expense scams, beginning with the PM himself and his senior cabinet members.  They include Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary,  David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, Geoff Hoon, the Transport Secretary, Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, Caroline Flint, the Minister for Europe, and Paul Murphy, the Welsh Secretary.

In high dudgeon the Telegraph leader proclaimed a scandal at the heart of our democracy:-

The systematic misappropriation by MPs of the allowance paid to defray the expense of keeping a second home is one of the great scandals of modern public life. It is a story that our readers, indeed the whole country, need to be told. Now, for the first time, it can be.

As The Daily Telegraph discloses today, it goes far beyond the now familiar tales of barbecue equipment, bath plugs or adult movies bought at the taxpayer’s expense. Many honourable members (of all parties, because this is, explicitly, not a party political matter) have been complicit in what amounts to an officially sanctioned and sustained abuse of public funds perpetrated against their own constituents over many years.

The extent of their rapacity is astonishing; and its scale can only be fully appreciated with the disclosure of the information being published by this newspaper. It will make uncomfortable reading for the MPs, for their families and for their voters. But it is right that the public should know what has been going on.

Not everyone is at this game.  Some honour still obtains.  But not much.  Setting the tone, our beloved leader blames the system for dealing with MPs’ expenses.  It made him do it, apparently.

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Today is Europe Day!

Celebrate European Identity!

by John Gordon

John Gordon is an Australian New Right activist and can be contacted through the New Right Australia/New Zealand website.
GW

Political principles which are founded only on a posture of character or a feeling – like “conservative” (i.e., being resistant to political change, especially if that change is of a fundamental nature) and “progressive” (an older term for being inclined towards a liberal or revolutionary political stance) are prone to lose their meaning over time if they are not linked to substantive principles (viz. fundamental principles of politics which do not change over time as objectives of policy). This loss of original meaning has also occurred with the terms “left” and “right” – which are no longer pure concepts, but now hopelessly conceptually skewed and mixed into their opposites, and therefore almost useless for purposes of clarification or analysis.

The clear meaning that they once possessed – as they did, at their origin – has long since passed and this has had a negative impact on the understanding of contemporary politics and on what the way forward is for those who want a good society or who want to work towards such a society. However, the course of this progressive confusion of terms can be readily traced.

The origin of the terms (“left” and “right”) was in a specific political and historical context, and an examination of what they meant at their birth can provide us with both the type of character which tends to favour either one and – more importantly – the substantive content which they were meant to embody.

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The Washington Post reports that:

Hackers last week broke into a Virginia state Web site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. They deleted records on more than 8 million patients and replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.

Tech Crunch has previously reported that:

President Obama will be naming Aneesh Paul Chopra as his choice for CTO during tomorrow’s weekly address, as first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed in this press release posted to the White House’s official web site. Chopra currently serves as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology, and has previous acted as the Managing Director for the Advisory Board Company, where he advised executives on health care operations.

by Happy Cracker

Ontology is the study of being, and the reason why such a simple concept is gifted such lofty Greek-derived nomenclature is to underscore the need for sufficient circumspection in this endeavor.

We are just now recovering from a period where a flowering of scientific methodology, and the resulting accumulation of knowledge, have lead to a breakdown in our ontological models of the world. The adoption, implementation and breakdown of ontological models due to accumulation of contradictory scientific knowledge, can be visualized as a series of parabolic figures on a coordinate plane. The x-axis represents historical time and the y-axis represents certainty of ontological knowledge. The parabola thus represents the adoption, implementation and breakdown of the ontological model - consistent with a rise, peak and fall in the certainty or belief in this knowledge. Some parabolas are in series, such as Rousseau’s “Natural Man” and Robespierre’s terror-as-virtue Republicanism:

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Decades later, the nature of man had changed; Robespierre needed to use the state to enforce terror in order to create a virtuous order:

“We wish that order of things where all the low and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions awakened by the laws; where ambition subsists in a desire to deserve glory and serve the country: where distinctions grow out of the system of equality, where the citizen submits to the authority of the magistrate, the magistrate obeys that of the people, and the people are governed by a love of justice.”

Arrest of Robespierre on 19 March 1794. He went to the guillotine five days later.

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As an addendum to the episode of JR’s “Scroob” post, which is now gone from the page, I am publishing the last two emails between JR and myself on the subject, plus JR’s response to criticisms he received in the thread.

First, a reply to me from JR.

Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 1:07 AM

Leaving it is better than taking it down.

Reader’s support is not the main issue.  MR attracts over 2000 readers a day.  Few of these leave comments.  Who’s telling you to take it down?  Crypto members of the tribe, those fearing that it may lead to nordic nationalist philosophy and some who haven’t understood what the hypothetical thought experiment is about.

And it’s not just about one person.  The situation is fairly generic; there are many scroob’s commenting at MR.  If there weren’t implications for the big picture, I wouldn’t bother posting on a single commentator.

The most dangerous part of it, for members of the tribe, is the list of their serious crimes that need to be exposed.  You bet members of the tribe will try to do something to not be seeing such an expose.

And the post isn’t about tribal exclusion.  It’s a thought experiment.  Let me clarify the thought experiment in a comment and see if they still have things to object to and offer rational objections.

I will shortly be preparing a response for the entry.  Trust me, it’s for the long-term good, and the path won’t be smooth.  There will be plenty of bumps along the way.

And here is my response to that.

Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 9:21 AM

JR,

Since we started this conversation yesterday I’ve had mails from other MR writers, reacting exactly as I did when I saw the post, and asking whether we are coming apart at the seams.  Some “thought experiment”!

It should be very obvious that the blog isn’t a place where hypothetical thought experiments like this can be conducted on the readership, as if it was a lab rat bred for vivisection.  I can’t stand around and watch this rat cut up and thrown away, JR.

MR exists to examine all the issues pertaining to the fate of our people - not just one.  Those issues flow as four great dynamics, like four wheels on the tumbril taking us to the Place de la Révolution.  On each wheelhub is painted a word: “Globality”, “Profit”, “Equality”, “Final Solution”.  The motives of every individual labouring in the machine of our destruction is contained in those four words.

In its very small way, MR has contributed to the understanding of that from every angle: the political, the philosophical, the scientific, and the angle of the JQ.  There is far more here than the narrow and absolutist reading of the last of those, about which you have become so passionate.  Such committment always contains a seed of destruction because it does not respect limit.  You, for example, have reached the stage of “intellectual hygeine” now, throwing to the winds people who you charge with secret attachments and agendas - not only Fred, who is my friend as you are, but others we know and countless more we don’t.

Our people will not ... can not unite behind such a view.  The inevitable effect (on intellectuals, particularly) is that they will be splintered into groups competing for attention and going nowhere.  In other words you act, honourably enough, out of a fear that our progress will be frustrated by Jewish agents.  But your zeal does the agents’ work for them!

MR is an organ of synthesis, the requisite condition for which is equilibrium.  That is the only basis for our intellectual momentum, and for attracting the able to contribute their very valuable and welcome thoughts here.  That’s what we have to maintain, even above our committment to free speech.

Since you won’t act on my requests, which was my preference rather than taking the post down myself, I will have to do it this morning.  In its place I will publish these two mails plus your comment from the thread.  It will be interesting to see what productive thoughts the thread engenders.

Kind regards,

GW

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By David Hamilton

A change of consciousness is spreading through Britain as we realise that we are being discriminated against by our elected representatives.  People can find no work, and one reason they have now understood is that foreigners are brought in as cheap labour to undercut wages.

People are realising that the main parties, the media, academics and corporations are promoting an agenda which is destroying them.  Politicians are effectively at war with them, and slowly the realisation is dawning.  People hear them degrading white children as “chavs” and “yobs” while praising ethnics.  They see their communities turned from safe areas into places of fear and uncertainty. They see politician’s children sent to the best schools while theirs have to risk knife gangs from imported ethnic communities.

The seeds of revolt have always been there:-

The Cambridge village of Cottenham is an unlikely place for an old-fashioned revolt against authority. But earlier this year, some 1,000 residents declared they would withhold their council tax until something was done about the travellers on the outskirts.

For decades there have been Gypsy communities living legally on two sites for 30 or so families near the village. Then, at Easter 2003, the site grew as a number of Irish Traveller families arrived in the area.

Local tensions rose, as villagers believed their way of life under threat. Angry residents demanded answers and established a campaigning website, Middle England in Revolt.

… but now politicians are beginning to lose confidence:-

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These are getting harder to find now.  But ... late last night a man named Michael Keith, who is a director of the execrable Centre for Migration Policy and Society (COMPAS for short), posted his first journalistic offering online at the Guardian.  It is temptingly titled Don’t leave migration policy to the BNP.

The usual mud-wrestling proceeded.  But in the course of it a southern European gentleman going under the soubriquet of JorgeG offered an argument which I paraphrase thus:-

The English can emigrate wherever they please, and have done so in their millions over the centuries, ‘race-replacing’ not just cities but whole continents, eg. North America, Oceania.  But Jonny Foreigner is not welcome here.

So, does one defend the right of the intelligent to prosper wherever they please, including their own homeland of course?  Does one argue that native-Amercians, Aboriginal Australians, Maoris, etc had a natural right to resist, very often did so but lost, and we have a natural right to resist also?  Does one take the judo option that race-replacement is not morally sustainable under any circumstances?