cdanny365

This is awful. Truly; and should not have happened. A picture of decline. Unarmed teletubbies in ill-fitting playground uniforms. Pseudo soldiers used as decorations. The very opposite of martial excellence, and so far from the hard steel and war-won standards of the past. No wonder IRGC finds it easy to roam free around the UK….

Critics said it was fantasy that we could leave the ECHR and secure our border. The real fantasy is thinking there’s an alternative thetimes.com/comment/columni…

Messing with the guy who just got out of the gym, not a good idea

I'm acutely aware that my much-loved but antiquated Vauxhall will give up the ghost some time in the not too distant future so I'm still idly browsing Autotrader for inspiration. I'm now fascinated how the auto industry has been absolutely gutted. It used to be that you could buy virtually anything you like on the used car market, just so long as you didn't care that much how many miles it had on the clock. £10k would buy you a very respectable motor. Now though, you can have anything you like just so long as it's a grey, underpowered faux-SUV that's going to be too complicated to repair. It's interesting because this is the inevitable destination of multiple regulatory interventions resulting in cars that all have basically the same engine, and built to roughly the same dimensions and specifications, so there is now nothing on the market that's genuinely exciting. It's basically state-directed communism without taking ownership of the car plants. The market is still notionally capitalist, and the market still sets the price, but you can only choose between a narrow set of parameters defined by the state, basically demolishing any notion of desirability. This is what they're doing to everything. Without actually imposing full communism, they are gradually removing anything resembling consumer choice. The state decides what you ought to have according to their central plan, but still allows you some choice in the minor variables to maintain the illusion of freedom of choice. The depressing thing about it is that it's done imperceptibly slowly, so that nobody really notices or complains. We'll just go along with it until one day you can only rent a transport pod, and food is just a Soylent Green pizza base with a choice of rationed toppings. This is when they tells us that capitalism has failed and move in to acquire all the businesses they've regulated into oblivion. But then it occurs to me, they been doing this for a long time now. It started with our political parties. They've basically regulated what is an acceptable political position. They reward conformity and punish dissident, to the point where you have notionally different parties with different colours and logos, but are essentially the same thing. You notionally have freedom of choice, but only from the options you're given. As with any consumer market, the system is regulated to prevent innovation that might offer anything different. Every time they do this, they decide not only what you should have, and what you should like, they move to ensure they are the only supplier - and it's always somehow a moral failing to not want what they supply. The other day, I remarked that if Russian tanks rolled into Brussels and London, I'd view it as a liberation. It is deeply ironic that a revanchist Soviet aggressor state would be less hostile to energy generation and industrialisation than supposedly free market Europe. We're basically Communist China but without the industrial base.