Best comment on the hysterical reaction to over-sexed politicians - yesterday's Telegraph letters page

No, I'm not belittling the women who have come forward recently to talk about their...

The New York attack, Tory gropers, the sleazy Clintons... and the wisdom of Diane Abbott

Oh dear. Meanwhile, in case you imagined that yesterday's attack in New York was carried out by a radical Islamic terrorist acting in the name of ISIS, let the BBC's North America Editor put the right:

A neighbouring council has allegedly spent £55,000 a head on getting 21 smokers to quit!

The above figures come from a fascinating article, Council anti-smoking campaigns are an expensive failure,  by Harry Phibbs, published on Conservative Home yesterday. The council in question is Hammersmith & Fulham, and their grotesque squandering of the Public Health Budget - which comes from general taxation rather than the rates - should be enough to make anyone, whatever their political leanings, weep with frustration. Ultimately, that represents £1.2m taken from the private sector (where all the tax ultimately comes from - the tax paid by public sector workers was taken from the private sector in the first place) to help a handful of nicotine addicts who could have visited either Totally Wicked or Shop E-Cigarette on King Street and...

Roy Peck talks balls about immigration - and makes perfect sense

American journalist Roy Peck's famous 2010 gumball rally immigration video...

In the wake of horror, one fact shines out: the British are really very, very nice...

Having spent the last few hours slumped in front of the TV, banjanxed by the unwonted heat, watching Sky News and the BBC News Channel, I came away even more convinced that the British really are a top-hole people. I'm sure this sounds glib, trite, sentimental, etc. - and it's not exactly difficult to feel sympathy for the victims of terrorist attacks, their families, and the people of the towns and cities where they tend to happen - but it's true. One of the very few heartening aspects of yet another mass slaughter by Muslim fanatics is that the aftermath affords us a glimpse of what people are really like...

Ah! Poor little Syrian orphans of war - what was advertised, and what actually arrived in the post

Heart-rending, right? What sort of monster could possibly object to Britain taking in poor, vulnerable little mites like these? Not even me!

But when the courier knocked at the door this morning, this is what the package contained:

The government tells us that eating and drinking too much, smoking, and not exercising is bad for us! Who knew?

The government agency Public Health England has launched a campaign called "One You" (which sounds distinctly Chinese to me) whose aim is to inform middle-aged people that they're less likely to be ill later in life if they adopt a healthier lifestyle now. No kidding! Because, when I was middle-aged, I simply had no idea that smoking, eating and drinking too much, and not exercising might be bad for me. The problem, of course, was a lack of information. Whenever I read a newspaper or watched television, these things were simply never mentioned - in fact, I remember endless articles and TV programmes strongly advising me to avoid exercise, consume masses of sugar and fast food, drink myself insensible every night, and to try my best to get through at least 40 Benson & Hedges a day.

James Delingpole suffers a life-threatening embolism - and thinks he may have discovered why the NHS is at breaking point

The pulmonary embolism was the result of falling off a horse. The journalist spent four days in hospital on morphine as a result. The staff were all wonderful, but his recovery wasn't helped by a senile old man in the bed opposite (literally) flinging shit around in the middle of the night, keeping everyone awake for hours, and soaking up a huge amount of staff time. Delingpole has written about the experience in this week's Spectator in an article entitled "What I learned while nearly dying", subtitled: "My NHS experience, with a life-threatening problem, was an encouraging one – apart from the other patients":

The transgender obsession: Has anyone got a spare time machine handy? I'm just not sure I belong here.

This is an actual story from an actual newspaper - specifically, today's Independent. You can read it here. It's worth it just to enjoy the terrible tangle the journalist gets herself into by insisting on using the pronouns "her" and "she" while writing about someone I suspect the majority of us would regard as a mentally ill man. This example of political correctness renders much of the piece incomprehensible - but not nearly as incomprehensible as why anyone would indulge "Stephoknee" (FFS) in his ridiculous fantasies. As one tweeter put it: GIVE.ME.STRENGTH.

Great news! Parliament is looking at introducing special bogs for transgender folk!

No, I'm not making this up. The story is in today's Telegraph, here. According to the paper:

MPs could get transgender loos as part of a series of recommendations being made in a “gender insensitivities” review into the House of Commons. Sarah Childs, a professor of gender and politics is currently being seconded by the University of Bristol to carry out an independent assessment of inequalities facing men and women in Parliament. One of the areas professor Childs is looking into is whether Parliament should provide more lavatory facilities for transgender people and women.

Having successfully militated for gay marriage, the BBC now wants the country to go transgender!

I noticed a headline on the BBC website the other day about a mother writing to her transgender son (supportively, I think). As there is literally no subject on the face of this planet that interests me less than trans-anything, I scrolled on. But it lodged in the back of my mind. Just how remorselessly, I wondered, has the BBC been drip-feeding transgenderism into the national consciousness since the start of the year?

So hate speech and physical abuse are excusable as long as you’re not white - but a white scientist poking mild fun at women isn't?

In April, Goldsmiths student union welfare and diversity officer Bahar Mustafa, who recently graduated from the institution with an MA in gender and media studies (so a fat lot of use she's going to be to society) wrote the following on Facebook about an event she was organising:

‘Invite loads of BME Women and non-binary people!! Also, if you’ve been invited and you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME just cos i invited a bunch of people and hope you will be responsible enough to respect this is a BME Women and non-binary event only.’

Scarlett Johansson is a heroine for standing up to Oxfam’s disgraceful anti-Israeli bullying

Scarlett Johansson doesn’t mean that much to me, probably because she tends to appear in the sort of film I don’t watch (the last one I can remember seeing her in was Lost in Translation ten years ago, which nearly bored me insensible). I’ve seen her in tons of TV and magazine adverts for "luxury" brands over the years, but I wasn’t aware of her role as an ambassador for Oxfam until I read today that she had given up her role with the charity after eight years because of her connection with the Israeli company SodaStream.

What about an online register of leftard actors and “comics” like Rufus Hound so conservatives can boycott them?

Hound by name, swine by nature

We saw Rufus Hound in the play One Man, Two Guv’nors in the West End last year and he was pretty good. But I'm now annoyed because, before booking the tickets, I checked up on the chap online just to make sure he wasn’t one of those ghastly standard-issue BBC “comedians” who imagine that the ability to deliver a script written by someone else in a vaguely competent fashion somehow gives them the right to bore our tits off with their drearily predictable left-wing opinions. Not having discovered any definitive proof that the chap was a blister, I purchased two seats in the dress circle.

More proof that arguing with liberals is pointless: Peter Hitchens v. Matthew Perry on the issue of drugs

I meant to post this Newsnight item last week, when it was broadcast, but Christmas intervened. It involves the conservative newspaper columnist Peter Hitchens (brother of deceased alcoholic, Christopher) making some reasonable points about how drug addicts are treated by the criminal justice system, and substance-abusing former Friends star Matthew Perry, doing what many liberals (especially the less intelligent ones) seemingly can't help doing when anyone dares to disagree with them, i.e. resorting to sarcasm, personal insult, appeal to fallible pseudo-authorities and questionable research, and a deliberate, faux-naive misunderstanding of what their opponent is saying (the moronic "so you think all children should me murdered at birth" ploy whereby lefties seek to close down all argument by depicting their opponents as evil madmen). 

Stories that make one wonder whether holding left-liberal beliefs shouldn’t be an imprisonable offence

The following stories are all from this morning's newspaper:

130 education “experts” have written a letter calling for schooling to delayed until children are six or seven – because “untold damage” is being wrought by a “too much, too soon” culture. Inevitably, they want Britain to adopt the Swedish system. (Children have been let down by 50 years of left-wing child-centric education policies. So don’t let Michael Gove implement nasty right-wing education policies – let’s not teach the little beggars anything at all!)

Note to BBC: stop acting as a platform for Luddite left-wing unions to whine about government reforms

At 12:03 on Saturday, the main headline in the news section on the BBC homepage was ‘”Fanatical” Gove attacked by union’, which linked to an item about some dreary female teaching union head droning on about the "damage" being done to “the system” by the Education Secretary. An hour later the lead story remained the same, but the headline has changed to ‘Heads’ no confidence in Gove’s reforms’ – so more of the same.

Obamacare: what 20,000 pages of disastrous, expensive, socialist nonsense looks like

Simple rule: if a statistic supports a left-wing argument, it’s a damned lie

You know the sort of thing I mean: 9 out of 10 adults are severely disabled, 40% of British children are dying of malnutrition, immigrants represent a net financial gain to the UK economy, Britain has lower educational standards than Cuba… i.e the sort of ridiculous crud regularly featured by the Guardian and the BBC and endlessly repeated by liberals at dinner parties (or whatever these people do for amusement these days).

The NHS has been getting worse for 30 years – liberal compassion-mongers have just accelerated the decline

Now that I’ve reached sixty, I’m doing my best ignore all the stories about how British nurses seem to have gone from being angels to demons in the blink of an eye (or, rather, during the course of thirteen years of enlightened Labour rule). After all, there’s a chance I’ll be spending time in hospital between now and popping my clogs. Like most people, I’d prefer not to wind up lying in a pool of my own faeces and drinking foul water from a flower-vase because my nurses gained their pseudo-degrees at the Josef Mengele Institute for Patient Care.