Some thoughts

If, as Voltaire once wrote, the Kingdom of Prussia was not a state with an army, but an army with a state, then modern Britain is surely not a state with a healthcare system, but a healthcare system with a state.   The NHS need not depend on immigration  - Sam Bidwell, The Critic 

From RedState:  Chelsea Handler Makes 'Comedy' Skit About the Life of a Childless Woman but It Reeks of Sadness S he has no permanence in her life, including her love life which seems to involve emotionless physical contact and a vibrating machine. By the time she becomes too old for any of that, her weightless existence will become the heaviest thing she has to bear as her loveless life of selfish decisions results in no one being there for her that truly has any attachment.She’ll sit in a room alone wishing someone would come through the door and no one will except attendants and assistants who are only there because they’re paid to be. Meanwhile, the mom she mocked for not having her life will be surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Indeed, the older I get the more lonely I feel and regret never having found a wife or having children. The final line also rings very true:  This life that feminism has told women for decades is full of fulfillment and wonder is an abs...

One of the cleverest moves of the British left was convincing people to embody their patriotism in the BBC and the NHS- Glenn Reynolds Indeed. Update: From Powerline,  Annuals of Government Medicine

On unconservative tories who want to be liked by Guardianistas: 'these people aren’t going to vote for you. Never, ever. They despise you simply because you are a Tory; you can literally hand them billions of pounds to stay home and do nothing and they will say you are the sisters of Pol Pot. Waving a trans flag isn’t going to cut much mustard.'   Gareth Roberts in the Spectator,  The great Tory delusion  RTWT Updated: similar topic here:  Why do the Tories love to promote their enemies?

Given the ability to do so, the socialist would tell us what time to get up in the morning, what to eat for breakfast, what time to travel into work, what work we should do, what time we should have our lunch hour, what lunch we should eat, when we should go home, how many children we should have as they do in China. You know, this is what socialists believe in, they believe in collective control. The conservative doesn’t, the conservative believes you can work out for yourself whether you should travel on a bicycle or in a car. You should decide for yourself whether to have Weetabix or in my case just a cup of black coffee or whether you prefer to have a fry up, a deep fried Mars bar for your breakfast, whatever it is, we believe in individual liberty, individual responsibility and we recognise that people make better decisions for themselves than the government can make for them. And that’s the key: the collective is in fact best served by thousands, millions of individual decisions ...

Britain threw away the wealth of generations in two world wars with a great depression in between. Post World War Two America – seizing the chance to finish off the British Empire – turned off the financial tap to us even as it poured money into western Europe to rebuild it and prevent an outbreak of communism. The terms on which we joined the EU withered many of our industries for over 40 years. Meanwhile the Third World gained our technological know-how and exploited it with desperate urgency as only the poor can – one company I used to advise specialised in exporting large machine tools from our closing factories. Is it a surprise that money-making seems to centre around housebuilding these days, rather than industry? It is as though Stone Age men could eschew hunting in favour of selling each other caves. Where the hell will our money come from?

 In the comments of this post at  Transterrestrial Musings : Progressive Leftist cause for “[x]”– First we overlook [x]. Then we tolerate [x]. Then we legalize [x]. Then we promote [x]. Then we celebrate [x]. Then we require [x]. Then we persecute those who still object to [x]. Very accurate.

Dom pulls no punches (again:)  The PM on Hancock: 'totally fucking hopeless' . Foe me though this was the ket paragraph: 'The Cabinet Office built by Heywood was totally unable to cope with this crisis because it did not have the right sort of people with the right skills in key jobs and could not rapidly fire/promote/move people and act with determined authority — it could undermine departments and No10 and slow things down, and sometimes improve things, but it could not itself act as a proper executive authority but neither could No10' Sounds like thing were unchanged from his previous experience working at the Department of Education from 2010-14. Despite the reforms Gove has planned, I doubt things will improve without a concerted effort from the top. 

'We will not eradicate COVID-19 from the UK. There will not be a time when we can say that there will never be another case of COVID-19 in this country.  Secondly, variants will keep on coming. There will be new variants every year. If the Government’s position is that we cannot open up until there are no new variants elsewhere in the world, we will never be able to travel abroad ever again. The third: sadly people will die from COVID here in the UK in the future, as 10,000 to 20,000 people do every year from flu.' ( source ) I'm shocked, shocked, to find myself agreeing with Mrs. May, makes me wonder how she'd have dealt with the pandemic

From the Evening Standard's  Andrew Neil interview: GB News chairman on launch and taking on woke culture “It is no longer enough that I should disagree with you or get to say the opposite, that’s been the traditional way since the enlightenment. Now it is the norm that if I disagree with you, you should be stigmatised, brought before the court of woke opinion, you should lose your job, you should certainly wear sackcloth and ashes and your name should be dragged through the social media sphere. You should be forced to apologise but we may not accept your apology.”   True. This is the biggest problem with all this- the lack of any possibility of redemption or forgiveness (see also the furore over that Cricketer's teenage tweets) Ironically this is coming from the same people who argue against imprisonment as punishment for crimes and that rehabilitation should be the focus. I'm looking forward to the launch of GB News and checking out its programming.

As we approach the 5th anniversary of the referendum, it becomes more and more apparent the vote was justified. Case in point: this comment by former negotiator Lord Frost: 'For at least some Europeans, they have a very strong view that Brexit simply cannot succeed. It’s a sort of historical error that goes against everything they know about the progress of history and the way things work… that is at the root of some of the problems.’ He stresses that ‘we don’t have any [problem] at all about the EU and the member states succeeding. We think that’s a good thing. And we think they should think it’s a good thing if we succeed’. RTWH:  Bloc buster: David Frost on Brexit, Barnier and the backstop

RonLiddle in this column : 'various noisome nests of weirdos and perverts, such as Brighton.' As a former resident of Brighton (3 years of uni at Sussex), this rings very true!

 From  this  article at The Critic, on cancel culture: It’s what the American journalist Rod Dreher calls the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”

Double edition! Number 1:   'wokeism isn’t about protecting minorities. It’s not about making the world better for marginalized people. No, it’s about raw, naked power and nothing else'  True. From  On Chickens Coming Home To Roost   Number 2: 'the wars of religion that seemed to define pre-Enlightenment history never really went away; the religions just got new labels. Secular ideologies that supplanted the old confessions seized the mind with the same sense of spiritual mission. The loyalties they demanded were more divisive and even more destructive than anything organized religion ever managed. In the 19th century it was nationalism. In the 20th, communism and fascism. In the 21st woke cultural nihilism is the dominant confession, and a fanatical one.' Also true. From  The C-Suite Converts to the New Political Religion

'Ultimately this is a choice we need to make. We could choose to create a kind of woke utopia, where children and families are rare, upward mobility is constrained, and society ruled by a kind of collective welfare system that rewards inactivity and stagnation. But to those who value the permanence of our society, and the remarkable importance of children, this is something close to a dystopia.' -  How Declining Fertility Rates May Deliver Us Into Oblivion Read the whole thing. I've long suspected woke/SJW politics, extreme environmentalism, trans/alternative sexualities, etc are linked to the belief that there are too many people. At some point (probably in the 60's or 70's) the cultural and political 'elite' became convinced of a Malthusian view that overpopulation needed to be countered, and so began pushing this stuff to crash the birthrates. Notice how the celebs and pols are still breeding. The desired result is a neo-feudal order where a few million v...

'But what is indisputable is that a weird, unsettling and censorious atmosphere of religiosity now surrounds the Duchess of Sussex. The cultural elites have beatified her. They’ve made her the patron saint of critical race theory, the goddess of wokeness. To venture a criticism of this high priestess of correct thought is to risk cancellation. Questioning her ‘truth’ is to 2021 what questioning the truth of the Bible was to 1521. Okay, you won’t lose your head, but you might lose your job.' Thou shalt not criticise St Meghan , Brendan O'Neill at Spiked. While I don't particularly have much sympathy for Morgan, a stopped clock is right twice a day and I agree with him on this.  More good commentary on this by the Lotus Eaters:

Regarding squishy Conservatives: 'They never really meant what they said in the first place. It started as frat-boy cosplay, then turned into a career, and for some public office. But they never believed it, never understood it, never gave a damn about it. They like their lives, fortunes and such honor as the Left is willing to allow just fine, thank you very much' By an anonymous commentation on this (long) article- The Mote in Thine Own Eye (in the Eye of the Conservative): Why Are Conservatives So Naïve That They Refuse to See the Beam in the Eye of Those Who Hate Their Very Existence?  

 ' "We realised that we had to pay attention to market forces," says Calvin. "Sometimes, traditional practices are there for a reason.' I'm shocked, shocked I tell you! It's almost as if there is a reason that  fence is there... 

' in the aftermath of WWI and the turmoil of the fall of royal families all over Europe (which had been going on for about a century, to be fair) the youth of Europe latched onto Marxism as a new doctrine to give their world meaning. It’s not even hard to see that. Even solidly prosy middle-class women like Agatha Christie (who was also a storytelling genius, but that often descends on people with no regard for who they are) made their communist characters very smart and socially conscious and you know, even when in the wrong kind of right.' Sarah Hoyt nails one of my key  points in explaining what has gone wrong with the West. 

 ' We will change you, Dr. Jones, all of you, from the inside. We will turn you into us. And the best part? You won't even know it's happening.' Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I noticed this line while watching this film on C4 this evening, and can't help wonder how much of the current madness is the legacy of Soviet psyops undermining Western institutions....