Author Archives: Tim Newman

Conservatives need to stop defending their enemies

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In my podcast with Chris Mounsey of The Devil’s Kitchen we spoke about how modern-day politicians (and business leaders) are all at sea because they don’t adhere to any principles, and their speech and actions are made up on the fly depending on which way the winds of maximum approval are blowing. In the ZMan’s latest podcast he says what might be construed as the opposite, that the reason the right has lost the culture war on every front is because they are more interested in espousing principles than defeating the enemy.

However, our two positions may not be contradictory. The ZMan believes principles are drawn up and adhered to by the victors after the fight has been won by any means necessary, and there’s probably a lot of truth in that. Half the time the principles are applied ahistorically to explain why their side won: look at the moral posturing from the victors of wars that were won chiefly thanks to greater industrial output and superior logistics. A good example of the ZMan’s example of the right’s problem unveiled itself yesterday. Here’s the story:

A children’s speech pathologist who has worked for the last nine years with developmentally disabled, autistic, and speech-impaired elementary school students in Austin, Texas, has been told that she can no longer work with the public school district, after she refused to sign an oath vowing that she “does not” and “will not” engage in a boycott of Israel or “otherwise tak[e] any action that is intended to inflict economic harm” on that foreign nation. A lawsuit on her behalf was filed early Monday morning in a federal court in the Western District of Texas, alleging a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.

The child language specialist, Bahia Amawi, is a U.S. citizen who received a master’s degree in speech pathology in 1999 and, since then, has specialized in evaluations for young children with language difficulties (see video below). Amawi was born in Austria and has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, fluently speaks three languages (English, German, and Arabic), and has four U.S.-born American children of her own.

Regardless of what you think about the American practice of making people take various oaths, especially those related to Israel, if we’re adhering to classical liberal principles the requirement is an abomination and probably in violation of her First Amendment rights. But here’s the thing. The left imposes political purity tests on swathes of the population up and down the country, including hounding people from their jobs and social media platforms for the slightest wrongthink. They also attempt to destroy the careers of those who don’t succumb to the bullying tactics of the blatantly antisemitic BDS movement; if the only country in the world you’re boycotting just so happens to be the Jewish one, and when the subject comes up you sound as though you’re reading from a Hamas pamphlet, people will draw their own conclusions. (Indeed, the pledge the teacher was asked to sign was created specifically to thwart anti-Israel boycotts and a version of it is included by law in any contract an American company does for work abroad, including the Middle East).

When a right-winger is having their life destroyed for holding the wrong opinions, left either justifies the infidel’s treatment or they simply stay quiet. But when the shoe is on the other foot and it’s one of their own side being violated, they suddenly discover principles have a use after all – namely, to beat conservatives over the head with:


You can be sure that before the day is out there’ll be half a dozen prominent “conservative” commentators denouncing the treatment of Bahia Amawi and sternly reminding us all of the importance of free speech. And they will be right in principle, but it is not principles on which the left are basing their outrage over this, but political opportunism. I’m not saying conservatives and right wingers should defend what the Texas government is doing in this instance, but they could at least just shut up and not dance to the tune of those who seek to destroy them. Here’s a leading conservative intellectual:


Right or left, eh? Strange how this only seems to run in one direction. This is why conservatives have lost, and continue to do so. They need to learn to fight on behalf of those whose values they share, not those who claim to share their principles when it suits them but otherwise seek their destruction. Conservatives should let someone else fight Bahia Amawi’s battles.

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The problem of activist proxies

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Via a reader, this is a very interesting document (.pdf) from the US Chamber of Commerce containing one of their member’s testimony to a Senate Committee. This excerpt near the beginning gives a flavour of what they’re protesting:

Public companies and their shareholders are increasingly targeted through the proxy system and other means over issues that are unrelated to – and sometimes, even at odds with – enhancing long-term performance. Topics that should be reserved for the legislative and executive branches of government – including a variety of social and political issues that may not be directly correlated to the success of the company – are increasingly finding their way into proxy statements and being debated in boardrooms. This has created significant costs for shareholders and in many instances has distracted boards and management from focusing on the best interests of the company.

In short, activist shareholders are demanding companies adopt SJW-driven policies which have a detrimental effect on financial performance. So who’s responsible?

As the Manhattan Institute has pointed out, labor-affiliated pension plans have historically been the most active at advancing such agendas that do not correlate with long term performance. From 2006-2015, labor-affiliated investors sponsored 32% of all shareholder proposals at the Fortune 250, many of which deal topics of a social or political nature. Both the Department of Labor (DOL) Inspector General and the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit have expressed skepticism as to whether the shareholder activism engaged in by labor-affiliated funds is actually connected to increasing share value.

No doubt those in charge of managing the pension funds have guaranteed incomes and rock-solid personal finances so are happy to risk their members’ retirement incomes to pursue their own political goals. There is some good news, though:

The DOL took action this year in order to ensure that Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) fiduciaries are making investments based on economic factors and not elevating environmental, social, or governance (ESG) impacts over returns.

I wonder how many pension funds divested from oil stock, which traditionally pays consistent dividends, at the behest of SJWs?

A 2015 Manhattan Institute Report found that the social activism engaged in by certain public pension plan systems – such as the California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) and the New York State Common Retirement System (NYSCR) – is actually correlated with lower returns for the plans. In other words, public pension plan beneficiaries and taxpayers in such jurisdictions are actually harmed when the overseers of public pension plans emphasize social or political goals over the economic return of the plan.

Outdated SEC proxy rules have allowed motivated special interests to take advantage of this system to the detriment of Main Street investors and pensioners. The problems we face today have in part stemmed from a lack of proper oversight over proxy advisory firms and a failure to modernize corporate disclosure requirements. Activists have been able to hijack shareholder meetings with proposals concerning pet issues – all to the detriment of the vast majority of America’s investors.

So the problem isn’t just that activists wreck the returns for their own members, they wreck those of anyone else investing in the company as well. I suppose the moral of the story is, when choosing a company to invest in, to look at whether their stockholders include public pension plans – particularly those from the New York or Californian public sectors.

This also chimes slightly with what I’ve been said before:

The deficiencies within the U.S. proxy system must also be viewed against the backdrop of the sharp decline of public companies over the past two decades. The United States is now home to roughly half the number of public companies than existed in the mid-1990s and the overall number of public listings is little changed from 1983. While the JOBS Act helped arrest that decline, too many companies are deciding that going or staying public is not in their long-term best interest.

So stay small, stay private, and avoid both regulations and the lunatics. It also won’t surprise many to learn that government regulations have created a cosy little duopoly, either:

Activist campaigns, as well as routine proxy matters that companies deal with today, are also magnified by the outsized influence of proxy advisory firms. Two firms – Institutional Shareholder Services (“ISS”) and Glass Lewis – constitute roughly 97% of the proxy advisory firm market, yet both are riddled with conflicts of interest, operate with little transparency, and are prone to making significant errors in vote recommendations that jeopardize the ability of investors to make informed decisions in their best interests.

What was I saying earlier about “guaranteed incomes and rock-solid personal finances”? The authors believe the answer is greater regulation for proxy advisory firms, but I don’t know if that won’t just deliver another set of unintended consequences further down the line. My preferred solution is more people stand up to idiotic lefties and SJWs wherever they are to found, using mockery, humiliation, and a refusal to play their game. Alas that will require courage, a trait largely absent in today’s business world.

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Should societies be pleasant or durable?

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Ilhan Omar was born in Mogadishu, Somalia before coming to the United States as a refugee aged 14. Last November she became the first Somali to be elected to the United States Congress, and one of the first Muslim women. She has yet to even take her seat in Congress, but she’s already decided American society needs a radical overhaul:


I have written before about how I don’t think new citizens to a country should be given the vote: if you want a say in how you are governed, feel free to stay at home. I might be persuaded those who have lived 20 years in a country should have the right to vote, but I also don’t see their being denied as a fundamental injustice. The views of those who were born in a country ought to prevail over those of newcomers who chose to relocate, but people are so wedded to the idea of universal suffrage this idea sits well outside the Overton window in the west. The trouble is, universal suffrage is about 100 years old at best, which in historical terms makes it very much still in the experimental stage.

One of the more hubristic characteristics of modern political commentators and activists is they believe their preferred policies mark the end of history, that the societal conditions they have largely imposed on others will be here forever. Few stop to think that the Ottoman empire lasted 600 years before disappearing altogether, so perhaps the jury is still out on 5 years of gay marriage and 40 years of wimmin’s rights. Now it may well be that a society in which religion plays no major role, gays get married, and legislation ensures gender parity in the upper management of big companies is very pleasant and all who live in it enjoy long, healthy, fulfilling lives. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the society will survive more than a generation or two. It rarely occurs to people that pleasant societies might not make durable societies, whereas history certainly suggests that societies built on harsh conditions can prove remarkably enduring.

My point is that any society which allows rank outsiders to enter and immediately set about agitating for radical change probably won’t last very long. Any society which allows foreigners to take part in their national political process such that they attempt to overturn parts of the constitution, suppress free speech, and denounce the population as racist is engaged in a suicide pact. The Founding Fathers stipulated that the US president must be an American; had it occurred to them that Somalis would be running for Congress and seeking to radically change America, they might well have imposed similar criteria for all holders of elected office. Serious countries do not allow their political systems to be infiltrated in this manner: Britain banned Catholics from holding public office for two hundred years, believing them to be a fifth column. Somehow, America has gone from a country which insisted newcomers adopt their values to celebrating those who don’t.

I’m sure there are lots of very good, principled arguments for allowing Ilhan Omar to run for Congress and then denounce Americans as white supremacists, just as I am sure there are sound reasons for allowing known jihadists to roam free in European capitals. But the question is, can a society which tolerates this survive? And if so, how long before it is unrecognisable? This won’t end well.

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A weekend of art

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I spent the weekend in Paris and got down into some kulcher, as the kidz call it. On Saturday night I went to a show called Kiss & Cry in a small theatre somewhere around the Strasbourg-St. Denis metro. When I sat down I saw eight or nine models of various scenes in miniature – a house, a beach, a railway – several people standing around all in black, some very high-end video cameras on booms and a giant screen hanging above everything. I guessed right away they’d act out scenes with the models, film them, and project it live on the big screen, and this is basically what they did for an hour and fifteen minutes. The two principle actors used their hands and fingers instead of their bodies in wonderfully choreographed movements against a miniature background of considerable complexity. The effect worked very well. A team of about 10 people ran from one “set” to another, filming, mixing, inserting sounds, and creating all sorts of special effects in real time, including floods, blizzards, sandstorms, reverse-gravity, and deaths. For the audience, the most interesting aspect of the show was to watch the technicians at work on the miniature sets and see how it appears simultaneously on the big screen. In terms of technical skill, coordination, and discipline it was highly impressive and showed what can be achieved by simple models, decent cameras, and a lof of imagination.

On Sunday I went to an exhibition of modern art by the Argentine Tomás Saraceno in the Palais de Tokyo. A sign near the entrance let visitors know what they were getting into up-front:

“A planet free of borders and fossil fuels”, eh? Why how original. Because if not from the creations of edgy artistes, where else would we hear debates on environmentalism and open borders? “New ways of thinking”, indeed.

The first exhibit was basically a bunch of cobwebs which, although impressive and expressing undeniable aesthetic beauty, left me wondering why it was the artist and not the spider whose name is on the exhibition:

I spent most of the time looking for an actual spider, and eventually I saw one: it was huge. Sadly, it didn’t leap from its web and sink deadly poisonous fangs into the neck of an annoying child. Now that would have been art. Note also the exhibition is in pitch darkness, as was most of it. This might be my inner Philistine speaking here, but I’m of  the opinion that if your visual masterpieces are best seen in the dark, they’re probably not very good. Much of the exhibition concerned spiders and lots of woolly guff about cosmic particles which I don’t think the artist really understood. One room showed a video of a diving bell spider shot in ill-focused black and white, which made me think I’d be better off simply watching Animal Planet. Or perhaps it was the appallingly crap footage which made it art.

A bit further along the artist’s exhibits started rambling on about thermodynamics, which he didn’t seem to understand much of either. Certainly, there was no mention of steam tables. The best he came up with in relation to the subject was an acknowledgement of the fact that certain particles move upwards through the atmosphere “independently of fossil fuels”. Who knew? To illustrate this he presented a picture of the earth with various particles moving about, a bit like those .gifs you see on Twitter which map plane flights or marine traffic in real time. Only the .gifs are generally more interesting. I got the impression this chap latches himself onto a scientific subject in order to lend his work gravitas, but doesn’t bother to learn the discipline in question. Like Laurie Penny calling herself a nerd, I think a lot of artists pretend they are involved in science and  engineering in order to give the impression they are not empty-headed lightweights who would last about three minutes in a lecture on fluid mechanics. For example, one piece introduced the subject of space elevator – an interesting enough subject for a visual artist to cover – but this was little more than a premise for another sermon from the pulpit of environmentalism. Apparently any such device must be made available to all species, not just humans. How the blue whales will manage is anyone’s guess. Anyway, his depiction of the concept was six helium balloons in the dark. Another exhibit was a room full of string which the artist called Algorithms, perhaps in the hope he’ll be offered a job in Google.

Next we wandered into a room where a bunch of helium-filled balloons with marker pens hanging off them drew random patterns on the floor as they moved in the air. The blurb beside the exhibit talked in lofty terms of natural motion and forces beyond human consciousness (although not the artist’s, obviously) but I noticed the air currents in this exhibition hall were driven solely by a big f*ck-off industrial-sized HVAC unit hanging off the ceiling while guzzling fossil fuels. If it weren’t for this, his stupid balloons wouldn’t have moved and it would have been too cold for anyone to visit them.

The balloons set the scene for more woolly guff about “aerocenes”. Now I don’t know what they are, but it appears they’re against capitalism and fossil fuels and are worried about climate change. So your typically dim lefty, then. Have a read for yourselves, or not.

Finally we saw the artist had enlisted some slave labour volunteers to help him build a  giant balloon made of plastic bags from various countries – including Palestine in case anyone doubted his intersectional wokeness. The idea was it would fill with warm air, ascend, and blow around a bit. The way the artist described what most schoolboys learn from Ladybird books would have you thinking he’d just cracked cold fusion, but I suppose the average lefty who turns up to modern art exhibitions is sufficiently awed. In a room laughably described as a workshop I saw this picture on the wall:

What this shows is distillation columns in a refinery or chemical plant. What it does not show is chimneys. However, in order to make a refinery look more polluting, the artist has photoshopped it to look as though smoke is coming out the top of them. Now unless the plant is undergoing a serious industrial accident, this is impossible. One of the reasons I’m not in a full-blown panic over environmental degradation is those who claim to care the most about it often resort to outright lying over its extent. On the other wall of the workshop was a chalkboard inviting people to leave messages. I drew a methane and an ethane molecule and left, secure in the knowledge that a thousand visitors would pass by before anyone would get the joke. I suppose the irony would be lost on the artist himself, who can while away the hours pontificating over loosely-grasped scientific concepts thanks only to the excess wealth produced by a society built on fossil fuels and capitalism.

So if you’re in Paris next weekend and fancy a spot of culture in between the teargassing of rioters in yellow vests, I can recommend Kiss & Cry at the La Scala theatre. I can’t recommend Tomás Saraceno’s rubbish at the Palais de Tokyo.

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Charitable propaganda

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In September I speculated that the plethora of news articles concerning ill-treatment of Rohingyas in Myanmar and Uighurs in China were the result of lobbying efforts by pro-Muslim groups awash with zakat money. I’d like to see a study done on how many “news” items are simply campaign propaganda, paid for by political organisations masquerading as charities with too much money. Take this CNN report, for example:

Beef isn’t good for the planet. But you probably knew that already.
You might know beef is responsible for 41% of livestock greenhouse gas emissions, and that livestock accounts for 14.5% of total global emissions. If you didn’t, you’ve probably heard about the methane — a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent that carbon dioxide — that cattle produce from both ends.

This is one of several reports I’ve seen over the past few weeks claiming eating meat is bad for the environment and everyone needs to drastically cut down their meat consumption if the planet is to be saved. These stories appear on major news sites littered with question-begging statements coupled with wholesale acceptance of the most extreme climate change predictions. So who’s putting this garbage on newsroom desks?

Firstly, it must be understood that environmental campaigning, vegetarianism, and veganism are western, rich people’s hobbies. I read somewhere that Greenpeace gets the bulk of its donations from Germans; apparently they’re sanctimonious bores who like to tell others what how to live. Who knew? The last decade has seen the number of environmental groups multiply, probably as a result of government money being hosed at anyone who sings from the climate change hymnsheet, but also because societies – particularly those in northern Europe, north America, and Canada – have got richer. People – particularly those in mid-career with disposable income and no children – are more inclined to donate money to environmental and green charities, allowing them to lecture others on sustainability before jetting off to the Bahamas on holiday. Hell, some of them might even believe they’re helping.

What is certain is these environmental groups are awash with money. One proof of this is how much they spend on salaries and marketing campaigns: it runs into the millions. Only they’ve come under a lot of pressure recently to spend more on charitable activities, which to you or I means going outside and getting your hands dirty to help those in need. But the wealthy social science graduates who run these organisations aren’t going to do that; so instead they spend the money on “awareness” campaigns which can just about pass muster as “frontline services”. They’ll call up their friends in media and ask them to run some nonsense about how everyone must go vegan to save the planet, and they’re only too happy to oblige. It’s cheap and it’s free for starters, and they don’t even have to leave the building.

As I said, I’d love to see a study done on how many supposed news reports are simply media campaigns put out by charities. But what I’d like to see even more is the government carry out a thorough investigation into these alleged charities, strip them of their charitable status, and start treating them as political organisations. It’s high time the public started treating them that way, too.

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Wishful thinking

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The other day, Soviet-born demented NeverTrumper Max Boot tweeted this:


Leave aside the silly notions that:

1. Running government is the same as flying an airplane: does a pilot need to juggle dozens of competing interests with one eye on his job between takeoff and landing?

2. Government is about qualifications: if it were, why bother with elections?

3. People who think they’re the sort of expert who should be in government ought to be anywhere near the levers of power.

Let’s instead look at the idea that we want the best qualified people to design buildings. Is it true? Well, I’ve been involved in some civil infrastructure projects and I recall the contracts were generally awarded to the local company with the strongest political connections. I’ve also been involved in several engineering tenders and although lip-service is paid to quality and track record, it generally goes to the bidder with the lowest price.

And then there’s this:

State, local and federal government agencies regularly make a certain number of contracts open to bidding from minority-owned business enterprises, or MBEs. This minority business certification is a designation given to companies with women or ethnic minorities in control or in ownership. Learning how to bid on minority government contracts involves securing appropriate forms of certification and identifying and applying for contracts posted by various state and federal government agencies.

So we want the best qualified to design buildings, do we? If only.

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Time to get serious

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I’m disappointed but not surprised to wake up this morning to find Theresa May is still leading the Conservative Party, having seen off a vote of no confidence by a 2:1 ratio. In my opinion Theresa May is an appalling prime minister even if you disregard Brexit: she’s a nannying, authoritarian, dimwit with no vision, no principles, and no charisma who sees the British population as little more than a nuisance. Add to that her handling of the Brexit negotiations – which appear to be a mixture of devious cunning where Britain’s interests were concerned, and incompetence and capitulation in front of Barnier et al. – resulting in a deal which nobody is happy with, and she is likely to go down as the worst PM anyone can recall. That nobody among the ruling classes can mount a challenge to her, either within the party or from the opposition benches, almost beggars belief.

But like I said, I’m not surprised. The yawning chasm that’s opened up between the ruling classes and the majority population has been evident for some time, and that 200 Tory MPs have given their blessing to Theresa May and her Brexit deal merely confirms the people’s parliamentary representatives have no intention of representing anyone’s interests but their own. In some ways, last night’s vote is a good thing in that it may ram  home this point to those who for some reason thought differently. How anyone still believed it having watched Blair and Cameron rule Britain for a combined 16 years is anyone’s guess, but here we are. In short, May winning the vote demonstrates how utterly bereft of talent and competence Britain’s ruling classes have become, and it’s interesting to look at why.

Those 16 years I mentioned earlier explains a lot about where we are now. Both Blair and Cameron epitomised prime ministers for whom the big decisions over governance were solved by a combination of a collapsed Soviet Union, unprecedented wealth due to globalisation, and a handing over of major policies to the EU. Neither man had to tackle a single, difficult domestic issue: even the NI peace process was mostly wrapped up by the time Blair took office, allowing him to claim credit for it. From 1997 onwards, Britain was rich, peaceful, and faced no serious threats – except, in hindsight, from its own government. This allowed people like Blair and Cameron, who lacked any principles save for a desire to be in power, to tinker and meddle and make changes on the fly, many of which had devastating consequences down the line. Where previous prime ministers had to deal with the Soviet-backed communism, independence of the colonies, general strikes, deindustrialisation, and the oil embargo Blair and Cameron busied themselves banning foxhunting, creating thousands of new petty crimes, foisting political correctness on critical institutions, and micromanaging people’s lives. And while they did this, the majority of the population didn’t weep with despair and head abroad like I did – they stood and cheered, and said “Ooh, what a nice man!” Until Blair joined in with the wrecking of Iraq, anyway.

The irony is many of those people who voted for Blair and Cameron are now bitterly disappointed at the current situation, both leavers and remainers who think May’s deal is abhorrent, albeit for opposite reasons. Well, what did they expect? The British population allowed the ruling classes to be captured by a bunch of wet, unprincipled, and not especially bright charlatans, and were happy to let them rule provided they were doing all right regardless of the long-term costs. Whenever somebody with even a whiff of intelligence, backbone, or principles showed up on the political scene, the middle classes would clutch their pearls and launch into a frenzy of virtue-signaling (nowadays they just start shrieking about Nazis). And now, finally, the British ruling classes have been given a genuinely difficult, statesman’s task and they are simply not up to it: May has proven hopeless, and her closest rivals can’t even inspire enough colleagues to get rid of her. What does that tell you about the substance of Johnson and Rees-Mogg?

It’s time the British public got serious. Over the next few months the ruling classes will be found wanting once more, unable to make difficult decisions: May’s deal probably won’t pass a parliamentary vote, and a general election will be called where people are given a choice of another loser Tory or Jeremy Corbyn. This will being about a disaster no matter who wins, and this might – might – bring to the fore a different sort of politician, one we haven’t seen for a long time in Britain. How the population reacts will be crucial, and there will be howls of anguish from the metropolitan elites and a subsection of the middle classes who would prefer politicians stick to banning sugary drinks and shutting down hate speech on Twitter than actually governing. These voices will need to be shouted down with full force if Britain is going to change. But I’m not even sure it wants to.

In short, the public are going to have to start making difficult decisions. The trouble is, like Blair and Cameron, they’ve never had to. Can they learn? Time will tell, but if they can’t they might as well stay in the EU and let someone else rule over them. It’s going to be a testing twelve months.

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Rule by technocrat

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This is a good article on France, Macron, and the yellow vest movement, in particular:

Whether on the Right, center or Left, French politicians and senior government officials are an astonishingly homogenous bunch. Almost all of them have studied at the grandes écoles like the École Nationale d’Administration. These institutions serve to furnish a group of highly educated individuals. Commonly referred to as “les énarques,” they rotate between elected office, the private sector, and the state bureaucracy, thereby ostensibly lending stability to France’s notoriously cantankerous politics.

These schools produce well-trained technocrats furnished with the mindset that their primary responsibility in life is to serve the state. This is a very different attitude to that which prevails among graduates of most top-level American universities. But the grandes écoles also facilitate a monolithic outlook, an absence of creative thought, and unhealthy patronage networks.

In more recent times, these dispositions have been accompanied by a habit of embracing pretty much every politically correct nostrum. These range from gender ideology (something which infuriates large swathes of French public opinion, and not just on the Right) to environmentalism as a pseudo-religion. This has exacerbated the already huge gap between the viewpoint, life experiences, and priorities of people like Macron—whose personal career path epitomizes the énarque—and most other French people, especially the France of the provinces.

Anyone’s who worked in a company whose upper management are dominated by the graduates of the grandes écoles will relate to that passage. See also here.

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‘Tis the season to be murdered

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This is a surprise, eh?

France has issued a maximum level of alert as police hunt a gunman who opened fire at a Christmas market in the eastern city of Strasbourg.

Three people were killed and 13 wounded, eight of them seriously.

People being attacked by a murderous lunatic at a Christmas market in Europe? This is becoming as much a tradition as mince pies, carol singing, and bad jumpers. And wait, we’re not done with the surprises just yet:

The gunman, 29, known to authorities as a suspected extremist, escaped after reportedly being injured.

Of course he was also known to authorities, they don’t like to be caught with their pants down chasing an unknown terrorist. That would be embarrassing. Can we assume the “suspected” modifier will now be removed from his file?

Some 350 officers are involved in the search for the gunman.

There was a time when murderers on the run had their name and photo distributed across the lands to aid their capture. Now their names are withheld from the public in case the earth’s rotation is disturbed by the simultaneous eye-rolling of a hundred million people.

A picture is beginning to emerge of the suspected attacker, although a motive is still not known.

And may never be known. Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it before.

BFM TV described him as a “repeat offender” and “delinquent”, adding he was part of known extremist networks in the city.

So there are “known extremist networks” in Strasbourg? That’s comforting news. Do the authorities intend to do anything about them any time soon? If this statement from the president of the European Parliament is any guide, I’ll not be holding my breath:


Yes, “let us move” on even though the gunman has yet to be caught and the victims’ bodies are still warm. Naturally the Parliament won’t be intimidated by terrorist attacks because the elites inside are protected by armed guards. But the rest of “us”? Well, best stay away from provocative Christmas markets, eh?

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The Desert Sun Podcast #005

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In the 5th episode of The Desert Sun Podcast I talk with Chris Mounsey of The Devil’s Kitchen blog about the state of British politics, business, religion, Brexit, the NHS, libertarianism, and a whole load of other stuff with surprisingly little swearing.

You can listen to it on iTunes here, Player FM here, download it here, or listen on the blog by clicking the link below:

If you liked this podcast, please consider supporting me on my Patreon page.

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