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No Sex, Some Drugs, No Rock and No Roll. Also Some Bicycling

I shall resist the temptation to march off back to Stalingrad. I said I wouldn’t argue about homosexuality any more, and I won’t.  I promise to do so as soon as I see any sign that the sexual revolutionaries are going to talk seriously about the subject, rather than using it as a way to provoke and misrepresent conservatives. I see no such sign. In fact my quarrel last year with Matthew Parris (the reason for my fabled, televised sneer at the Press Awards dinner) was an indicator of the precise opposite. Mr Parris is the Voice of Reason compared with most people in this debate. Yet  could not resist misrepresenting me, and has never apologised for doing so, or withdrawn, despite the clear evidence that he had twisted my words (see index). I’m amused by ‘Wesley Crosland’ , who points out that God for some reason didn’t intervene to save me from being knocked off my bike on the way to church. Whyever was that? Then again, perhaps he *did* intervene, and I was only on that minor road because the Almighty had directed me away from a busier highway where I would have been erased by one of those concrete-mixer trucks. But perhaps He couldn’t prevent my assailant from setting out half-asleep that morning, owing to the other plans he had for the universe that day. I don’t mean to seem irreverent, but I do think we have to be careful not to assume that Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence mean that we can’t do stupid things sometimes.  I suppose this is another test of the Leibnitz theory (lampooned rather crudely by Voltaire) that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. You may think being knocked off your bike is bad. But it happened this way to prevent something much worse from taking place. There’s no answer to that, of course, since we cannot ever know what we avoided.  The intervention by Mr ‘Crosland’, which I assume is meant to be a joke, compares quite well with some of the humourless stuff on the ill-named ‘BigThink’ site, where I have now gone three rounds with a nest of perpetually angry God-haters. I did so because the site’s host published a series of posts disagreeing with one of my attacks on the ‘New Atheism’ – the difficulty of establishing an absolute morality if there is no God. I thought I should defend myself, but as so often found that the only response was series of abusive and ad hominem attacks on the fact that I am religious believer. Another Stalingrad, alas, but when where any serious combatant risks death by boredom. I shan’t return. In answer to Mr Blance, I do not say that ‘crime is going up because I say so even though I have no objective evidence’. I say that all official figures ought to be mistrusted when they are politically sensitive. Thus I think we can (at present) rely entirely on government statistics on the production of oats. But I am not so sure about those which concern educational attainment, inflation, crime and disorder. The problem, therefore, is the absence of properly objective facts which anybody can use. But the increase in crime in this country recorded by official statistics in the past 100 years  (see my book ‘The Abolition of Liberty’) is so great that it cannot possibly be dismissed.  Likewise the increase in the prison population. I say that the authorities often dismiss as ‘petty crime’ (and do not record at all)  many incidents which are far from petty for those who are the victims of them. Such incidents have happened to me, including a violent assault on me at a railway station by a beggar high on drugs. There was no point at all in my reporting it, and several good reasons not to do so, not least the ever-present fear that the police will accidentally provide one’s name and address to one’s assailant during the course of whatever action they take or don’t take, or that the CPS take or don’t take. I say that many series of statistics are no longer continuous ( essential for comparison) , because the recording method has changed or the classification of crime has altered, and that I personally find this suspicious. I deplore the use of the British Crime Survey, a glorified opinion poll, as a substitute for actual records of incidents that have taken place.  I say that it can be shown that various counting methods are used  (such as the one I note in my 22nd January column) whereby multiple crimes are mis-recorded as one, or thefts are mis- recorded as lost property. I say that certain crimes have now become so common, and insurance claims so difficult (or so many people are uninsured) in high-crime areas, that it is reasonable to assume that they are seriously undercounted. The allegation that I blithely say ‘this is so because I say so’, is absurd and unresponsive. Does the writer of this comment really believe that official statistics are wholly to be relied upon?   I do hope not, for his own sake apart from any other reason. Someone says that if I admit I am not a very good driver then it is surely wrong for me to drive at all. I don’t follow this. I didn’t say I was an actively dangerous driver. I said, because it is true and because I don’t confuse my driving with my masculinity, that I am not a very good driver. My knowledge and recognition of this fact make me cautious (in a way that of course gets me tailgated and flashed on crowded motorways, or on those all too frequent two-lane roads where the speed limit is a madly high 60 mph, or indeed for abiding by urban speed limits –many others will be familiar with this sort of thing) and reluctant to drive at all. I do so only when I absolutely have to.  Most people, as I observe, are not very good drivers by the standards of the Institute of Advanced Motorists. They pull out without looking. They turn without signalling (or start signalling long after they have begun to turn, or just drive along with their hazard lights flashing, as if this means we can read their minds as to what it is they propose to do), they break speed limits, they use their horns aggressively , they drive too close to the car in front, they believe they can see round corners, they brake and accelerate violently (I feel for their passengers), they fail to dip their lights. These are all basic offences against good driving. They are almost universal. I will not list the many ways in which they treat cyclists without consideration, as that is special pleading.  The difference between them and me is that I know I’m not very good, whereas they think they’re terrific. Which of us is safer? How is the USA different from Britain, in terms of crime and policing? Let me count the ways: History, tradition, climate, shape and nature of cities, distances, existence of large remote rural areas and sprawling suburbs without public transport,  racial divisions, laws. Will that do? The USA is not a Big England, It is a wholly different country. It has very few lessons to offer Britain. If we want to know how to make a better job of law and justice, our own past is a better guide than the American present.  I may well have talked about US Prisons to George Galloway on Talk Sport Radio, or whatever it is now called (when I had a rather good programme on it , it was Talk Radio) . But I doubt if I said anything different from what I normally say. I don’t regard American prisons , largely run by the inmates, as any kind of model for ours. It is impossible to ignore the fact that a huge increase in the US prison population has been followed by a reduction in crime. But that does not really answer the fundamental moral question which we face. I am constantly pointing out that I think Michael Howard’s slogan of ‘Prison Works’ is only very partly true. If prison doesn’t deter crime, both among potential criminals and actual ones, it can only be said to ‘work’ in that it physically prevents its inmates form committing crimes while they are inside. Such a  policy is no more likely to reduce crime in the long run than is Kenneth Clarke’s view that ‘prison doesn’t work’. Don’t mistake me for a Tory, for goodness’ sake. We can’t argue now over what would have happened if the Tories had collapsed (as they should have done) at the last election. All I ever said, and what I believe was that this would have provided the *necessary* condition for a new political formation. Whether it would have provided *sufficient* conditions was always open to doubt. The trouble is that they didn’t.  And whereas there was then a chance that we might have got rid of this horrible, useless anti-British organisation and replaced it with something better, there is now no such chance. We are back to the pointless see-saw between two indistinguishable left-wing parties, in which there is no hope of major change. I should note here that the proposal to put us on Berlin Time bit the dust in the House of Commons last Friday, thanks partly to the doughty interventions and determination of Christopher Chope, Philip Davies and the splendid Jacob Rees-Mogg.  By sticking to their guns they helped to obstruct the various gullible patsies who had fallen victim to the empty prattle of the ‘Darker Later’ campaign, which claims on the basis of flimsy guesswork that Berlin Time will bring great dollops of business and tourism to this country, while also saving lives on the roads. It was good to see that English MPs were active in the battle to keep us on or close to GMT, our own meridian, , as well as Scots.  As I have many times pointed out here, the false impression is always given that only Scotland would be plunged into darkness in the winter mornings by this plan. England would be too. The debate is available on Hansard and contains some interesting points, especially on the Darker Later Berlin Time campaign’s road safety claims, which blow serious holes in those claims. As the proposal will certainly be back (the EU never sleeps in its struggle to standardise us all),  it would be well to recall these points. I think it was Mr Chope who also shot out of the sky one of Darker Later Berlin Time’s most ridiculous arguments, that a time change would bring more tourism. He noted that tourism drops off in the winter months not because it is darker in the evenings but because it is colder in general. No doubt this country would have more tourism if it were hotter and sunnier. But Parliament cannot do anything about that. I was partly pleased and partly sorry to see that none of the Darker Later Berlin Time supporters chose to insult me personally in the debate, as two of them did the last time. One last thing. The House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee is about to start hearings on the subject of drugs ( it did this quite recently, when one David Cameron put his name to a disgraceful defeatist report, the only political act he ever performed before being suddenly made Tory Leader by a PR media campaign). I have written to the committee to urge them to ensure that they call witnesses who are not in the defeatist lobby. By starting with the comic figure of ‘Sir’ Richard Branson,(guess what ‘Sir’ Richard, once a great champion of British Euro membership, thinks about the ‘War on Drugs’) they risk giving the impression that they have already accepted the standard (and wholly bogus) received opinion that ‘The “War on Drugs” has failed’.  One more time. There is not and has never been any such ‘War on Drugs’. So it cannot have failed, can it?

Automobile Condominium Information | apicsud's blog

Nearly all of people are occupied with car rentals when they are on vacation. But what many travels may not understand is that car condominium within the United States, or North The us on the whole, is different than automotive leases in other nations like Europe.

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