Want a glimpse into your future, my yanqui friends? . . . The future so many of you seem to be craving? . . . The future where every decision is made for you by politicians? . . . Coddling you from the cradle to the grave?

Please welcome Big Brother, English-style:

A mother is taking her fight to the European Court of Human Rights after she was forbidden from seeing her three-year-old daughter because she is not “clever enough” to look after her.

The woman, who for legal reasons can be identified only by her first name, Rachel, has been told by a family court that her daughter will be placed with adoptive parents within the next three months, and she will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite the declaration by a psychiatrist that Rachel, 24, has no learning difficulties and “good literacy and numeracy and [that] her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range”.

Her daughter, K, was born prematurely and officials felt Rachel lacked the intelligence to cope with her complex medical needs Baby K was released from hospital into care and is currently with a foster family. Her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day medical care. . . .

Her attempts to fight Nottingham city council’s adoption of her daughter have been hampered because her case was taken over by the official solicitor, the government-funded lawyer who acts for those unable to represent themselves. He was brought in to represent Rachel’s interests because she was judged to be intellectually incapable of instructing her own solicitor. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite her wish to do so.

The nightmare is real. The nightmare is headed to the US shores. Hell, out here in California, the nightmare infiltrates the waking hours: politicians treat citizens—those who pay their scabships’ exorbitant salaries—like helpless, brainless children.

Ah! But look around! someone once argued to me. People are children!

Yeah, and continuing to treat them like children’s the wise response. Sorry, dude, but at some point your parents stopped treating you like a child in hopes you would become a man. How do we expect people to grow up and take on personal responsibility if they’re treated like children from the womb to the coffin? Sink or swim.

The most basic tenet of human life is the right to be left alone . . . and that’s being stripped from us daily.

Future shock? No one should be shocked, least of all you who vote for and then support through blind worship these vile scabships who second by second suck away our freedom and our money like leeches.

Guus Hiddink.

Great manager. Unbelievable CV: De Graafschap; PSV; Fenerbahçe; Valencia; Netherlands; Real Madrid; Real Betis; South Korea; PSV; Australia; Russia; Chelsea.

For Liverpool’s sake, I’m incredibly relieved his time in the Premier League has come and gone.

Chelsea will be hard pressed to find someone who’ll fill his boots as a manager.

I suppose if the general population doesn’t react accordingly with tales of the 21^st century bogeyman—anthropomorphic climate change—the stakes must be raised:

Climate change is already killing 300,000 people a year in a “silent crisis” that is seriously affecting hundreds of millions more, an influential humanitarian group warned today. . . .

The report claims that 90 per cent of the deaths are related to gradual environmental degradation caused by a warming climate, which exacerbates existing threats—mainly malnutrition, diarrhoea and malaria. The rest are said to be the result of weather disasters.

. . . The research was carried out by Dalberg Global Advisers, a consultancy firm, who collated all existing statistics on the human impacts of climate change. The report acknowledges a “significant margin of error” in its estimates.

[The former UN Secretary-General] Mr Annan said the report could never be as rigorous as a scientific study, but said: “We feel it is the most plausible account of the current impact of climate change today.”

I honestly wonder how much of the malnutrition is attributable to the weather?

Renowned female African economist Dambisa Moyo, whose prescription for economic stability in Africa includes cutting off all aid within five years, had this to say in an April interview with Guernica:

Take Kenya as an example. If aid were given to the Kenyan government by the people, [instead of the West], then the government lives and dies by that money coming in. If that link doesn’t exist—money from the people—then the Kenyan government will not stand. Or take Zimbabwe. Its economy is in ruins. When people believe their government is run by a despot, the people shut down. In Zimbabwe, we’ve seen it in the transition from commercial farming to subsistence farming. The people have stopped producing—the shelves [in the markets] are completely empty. The economy has collapsed, they have no tax base, and the government is still standing only because of aid. If you take away that aid, then the government would have to rely on taxes—yes, it might take some time to rebuild [the tax base]. But if Mugabe continued to use government revenue, now tax revenue, for corrupt purposes, the people would stop paying taxes and eventually—without money to keep the army in place, to keep a civil service—the government would collapse, perhaps by a coup or other means. . . .

Remember that in the nineteen seventies, Africa had 10 percent of its population living in poverty; today that number is over 70 percent. To continue down a path of depending on aid—which doesn’t create jobs, or innovation, or alternative and more transparent ways of development finance—the number of impoverished Africans could get to 80 or 90 percent in our lifetime.

Truly, the world needs saving.

From goodists. Especially of the guilty Western type.

From Benjamin Franklin:

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

Therefore, “lifestyle related revenue raisers” (like additional taxes on wine and other spirits [i.e., government-mandated “bad behaviour”] to pay for government-sponsored health care) must be proof that politicians hate us and hate to see us happy.

Government was, is, and will always be The Enemy; and their scabships won’t stop until they have complete control.

Live free or die? Ha! You’re already dead, my yanqui friends. Just like your European cousins.

Nine years ago today I married my best friend.

Happy anniversary, darling. Where but for you would I?

Continuing the theme of recent posts, a few words from Oliver Kamm:

Yet the notion that freedom of expression is a specifically Western obsession that needs to be balanced against the demands of social cohesion has become commonplace in today’s debates. It is part of the political mainstream; part of supposedly progressive thinking, assuming that the sensibilities of minority groups should be protected. . . .

No one has a right to the protection of feelings. If politics concerns itself with mental states, there is no limit to how far legislation can intrude on people’s lives. The task of progressive politics is to protect liberty, not least by attacking the accumulation of bad ideas. Yet to many on the Left, the individual, inquiring mind is of far less importance than the representation of designated groups. . . .

Many civilian lives were lost in Iraq owing to a grotesquely underprepared military intervention. But the notion that this was aggression against a sovereign state with rights gets exactly wrong the balance of moral responsibility. It is hard to find many on the Left who will say this, or will argue the intrinsic connection between peace and human rights. It is not the trahison des clercs, only because there is nothing any longer that the Left still has to betray.

I’ve nothing to add.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón defends the novel:

. . . [I]n an age of iPods, games consoles and YouTube, I still believe that nothing can tell a story with the depth and beauty of a book. I believe that language is the software of our minds, the blueprint of our identity. Our brains function along narrative structures and crave stimulation. Among many other things, good literature should tickle the brain.

What a pity that we must constantly defend the written word . . . all those imaginary worlds in which we can truly lose ourselves, and, in doing so, find ourselves.

If you give your child an iPod or game console or computer or, God forbid, a TV before you give him a book, you have failed your child.

If your child doesn’t have rudimentary reading skills before he starts school, you have failed your child.

Think of reading like mother’s milk: essential for a child’s wellbeing. 

Like most slogans, it sounds trite; unlike most slogans, it’s The Truth: Reading is fundamental.