[Milligan & Antrobus: The Bed Sitting Room]

There is still active discussion in the comments to a much earlier piece about the curious position of the welfare-dependent libertarian.

Just for the record, we have at last taken a lodger (happily a most agreeable gentleman) and, with luck and the forebearance of the notoriously godawful local ‘authority’, should be able to stop claiming council tax benefit entirely.

The office were not at all keen on this idea; they said that they would recalculate but that we definitely should not stop claiming.

My guess is that we will, on the basis of the offer of a very modest subsidy, be expected to continue to accept the intrusive and offensive surveillance of the apparatchiks of the mafiocracy.

Rather a question of what it’s worth, in that case. What would one pay to be free of the repellent busybodying, rude letters and public odium associated with being (a) on a means-tested benefit and (b) so disgustingly white, male, middle-class, previously employed and politically unsympathetic that one would never in a month of Sundays be ‘entitled’ to any part of the sizeable team of lawyers, accountants and social workers which one will find clustered comfortingly around every genuine member of the deserving underclass?

I strongly suspect that we, and Mid-Redneckshire District Council, will shortly find out.

I cannot understand this, from the Libertarian Alliance.

It appears to be something to do with a plump young lady who was photographed at Aintree.

It says:

Matters like this are important up here in the Tundra

It might be important in the Tundra, matey, but out here on the featureless steppes of Redneckshire it is, frankly, meaningless.

The terseness and concision of the article suggests that there is much to be read between the lines but I’m damned if I can find it.

Who exactly (if anybody) is the flabby floozy; what relevance (if any) does she have to horse racing, and what relevance (if any) does horse racing have to libertarianism?

I’m afraid that today’s Comprehensibility Award has to go to the Daily Telegraph. Well played, that man.

Cuddly synthesisers.

These are presumably for the band whose drummer uses Claes Oldenburg’s ‘Soft drum set’ (1972).

(h/t: Boing Boing)

Jackart, at A Very British Dude, dismisses criticism of the British Olympics as

…a meme going round the Libertarian Blogosphere that the Olympic games should be scrapped.

While he appears to accept that the Olympic circus is irretrievably corrupt and a complete waste of money, the idea of scrapping it does not appeal:

£9,000,000,000 is the kind of money Governments lose down the back of the sofa. And the damage to Britain’s reputation and prestige will hurt Britain and British business to a far greater tune if the Games were cancelled. Britain gets a reputation for failure to deliver? – no thanks!

This does somewhat presuppose that those forming the opinion are as convinced of the virtue of the circus as are the trough-fed politicians and their commercial chums who will do so nicely out of it. I wonder whether this is justified. One might suppose that some other countries, at least, would instead form the opinion that we are admirably prudent as opposed to glamour-crazed tax-wasters.

So like it or not, the Olympics are coming to London and the best thing we can all do is tighten our belts and put on a good show.

I do not like it. Nor do I much like this form of words. It is far too easy to imagine it being uttered by someone in the government.

There is nothing at present that I can do about the money which is to be squandered on this absurd exercise in national self-congratulation (all done, as according to Everett, in the best possible taste), but I am still capable of boycotting businesses whose snouts I find in its trough, and telling them why. The nearest Olympic target is fortunately a long way from Redneckshire, so I don’t suppose I’ll bother going all the way there to be hustled away by anti-terrorist police for staging some kind of demonstration (assuming this hasn’t already happened for some other reason). But I certainly won’t be watching it on the telly.

Do we really have to undertake this absurd, repetitious and offensive hijacking of the once decent world of amateur sport by the political establishment and the marketing and entertainment industries merely to avoid being ill thought of by exactly the sort of people who caused the problem in the first place?

‘Pig-headedness is a vital component of Libertarianism.’ Discuss.

Trixy, at Is there more to life than shoes?, wonders why British amateur Christmas illuminations (which, as I remarked unkindly to Mrs. Underclass the other night, could perfectly well be replaced with standardised thirty-foot neon signs forming the words ‘We Are Chav Scum’) so often feature trains.

Can someone explain to me why trains are festive? We were wondering whether it’s because in the British version of the Christmas story, Mary and Joseph were going on Holiday to Egypt on South West Trains and because of engineering works they were diverted from Nazareth to Bethlehem and, because of this unexpected diversion, they didn’t have any reservations.

Or is there a better explanation?

Yes (observe my suave and diplomatic restraint in refraining from mentioning that Trixy, notwithstanding her shoes, does not appear to own an anorak).

The trains appear in the illuminations provided by grants of some kind from the local authority, on the basis of a secret central government initiative. The locomotives are quite ordinary, but if you look carefully at the rolling-stock, you will see that it consists solely of cattle-trucks.

From the Daily Mail (caveat lector), remarked upon by Ambush Predator:

More than 250 miles of road are to be reserved for VIPs during the London Olympics.

Ordinary motorists face fines if they stray on to the reserved routes, which include sections of the M25. Challenging the fines could lead to a penalty of up to £5,000.

Sitting beside me on the desk is an OS 25K map of Portland, in the harbour of which I gather the Olympic sailing events are to be held, and which is, I hear, already being bulldozed to make way for yet another lightly-built but desperately expensive ‘Olympic village’. We are thinking of saving up some petrol-money and visiting the place (where some of my family used to live, and of which my grandfather was particularly fond) before it is completely ruined.

There seems to be no doubt that vast sums of money borrowed from our distant descendants will be spent on trying to compete with the USA and China in the matter of gross and tasteless media-circuses irrelevant to the declared purpose of the event.

The reserved lanes, once established, unlike the genuine Hollywood cardboard and tinsel of which the rest of the event is made, will never be removed.

Amateur sport is a good thing (vide Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Unfortunately the only amateurs one will find at the Olympics are some of the athletes.

My earlier information was that said athletes will not be allowed to use the reserved lanes but will be transported to and fro in minubuses among the common people.

I am not accustomed to the preaching of violent revolution on this blog but the whole business of the Olympics makes me feel like conducting a séance in order to summon up the ghost of Nestor Makhno, who would certainly have known how to deal with it.

Thanks to Sean Gabb for facilitating the unleashment of the Clerkes of Oxenfordes’ finest.

I entirely agree with Dr. Gabb that the Anglican church has reached the end of its service life and ought to be dismantled for parts as soon as possible.

This is not for quite the same reasons as he gives. The idea of a state religion is repellent to me as an individualist; if one requires divine assistance, then ideally one should negotiate it oneself with the deity of one’s choice. This could be described as a free market.

Also, I am sick to death of hearing the extremist adherents of a minority religion asserting that since ‘this is a Christian country’, my freedoms of thought, speech and action ought to be compromised in line with their latest, er, retranslation of a book written a couple of thousand years ago by some enthusiasts in a desert a long way away.

The presence on the coinage of the term ‘Fid. Def.’ is wholly incompatible with the ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ so keenly embraced by modern Anglicans. On such a basis we should still be digging Catholics out of priest-holes. What Oliver Cromwell and his merry chums would have made of militant Islam can only be guessed at.

I think it demonstrates restraint to demand only the disestablishment of the Church of England. To do it without mentioning the Archbishop of Canterbury, his predecessors, turbulent priests and so forth, is a masterpiece of restraint and Dr. Gabb is to be congratulated.

Law enforcement in Ruralshire relies heavily upon supplies of chocolate, according to Inspector Gadget. But now, despite the importance of this popular, traditional, cost-effective food to Ruralshire’s finest (and doubtless those of other Forces) it seems that the Advertising Standards Authority will not allow the manufacturers of Maltesers to claim, apparently truthfully, that each of them contains less than 11 calories.

It seems that one is not allowed to declare the true calorific yield of one’s food product unless that product meets some unspecified, and possibly secret, guidelines about what is or isn’t good for people.

An ASA spokesman said: “We concluded that the words ‘less than’ gave the misleading impression that a Malteser was low in energy.”

So even if someone were to invent a form of chocolate that contains the same number of calories and fat as carrots, they would not be allowed to say so. All chocolate is bad, whatever the facts and figures (which we, poor little souls, can’t be expected to understand anyway).

I have always thought that the ASA was a partial, biased, covertly state-controlled quango that ignores the excesses of government and big business while justifying its bloated existence with a few spectacular press-cases against small and defenceless targets.

Now I’m sure. I am not compiling a list of quangoes to be abolished; it is much easier to compile one of those which might for whatever reason be preserved, albeit temporarily; these guys aren’t on it.

Not wishing to get any police officers into trouble for reading terrorist material I have left out the steganographically augmented holiday snap containing the recipe for Mrs. Underclass’ chocolate cake, an example of which mechanically collapsed on its extraction from the oven last night under the sheer weight of all those calories.

According to The Telegraph it is only slightly less dangerous to travel by road today than it was in the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth. 34% of those killed in Shakespearian road accidents seem to have died as …the result of falling from farm wagons…

If one looks up the government’s statistics about causes of death (a very boring process) one finds that the greatest killer of children is not Paedophiles, nor yet Terrorists, but road accidents.

Why don’t parents save the tens of thousands a year they spend on designer SUVs (“The Safety Of My Child Comes First!”), and spend it on private tutors instead? Could it be because the other Mums couldn’t see them ‘parking’ (one uses the term loosely) a private tutor?

As a risk-averse society I think we ought to come down hard on this sort of thing. The roads are deadly, and clearly always have been. Children are, for their own safety, not allowed out at all any more, except, paradoxically, to undertake this daily suicide-gamble with Belgian juggernauts, policemen late for teabreaks, and the competitive, status-obsessed mothers of their contemporaries.

Responsible parents, if there are any left, should take their children home at once and spend next year’s armoured-personnel-carrier money on some real education.

As a well-known television ‘personality’ would doubtless say (pause, cut to Cam4, BCU, flutter eyelashes): “If it saves one child’s life… isn’t it worth it?”

Via Old Holborn, The Independent on the luxuriant profligacy of the shameless BBC, caught with both front trotters in the trough by a series of embarrassing FoI requests. Standard MSM/BBC bluster about the new culture of economy, not spending any more than fifty grand a year on ‘poo, etc. etc.

The bit that caught my eye was the three hundred grand a year spent on privately educating the children of those posted overseas.

Three hundred grand doesn’t go very far in private education. The fees at Eton are said to be some £28,000pa. So about ten people could go to Eton for this money. Of course other schools are cheaper, but the principle is the same. No more than a few dozen BBC people can possibly be enjoying this peculiar indulgence.

I wonder who they are?