A message to commuters.

If you want to have a loud chat, please find someone else who's already having a chat and sit near them. Please do not walk the length of the train looking for someone who's trying to read a book and sit next to them.

Every. Bloody. Time.

So boycott Israel, already.

This article by Charles Moore is absolutely superb and I recommend you read it, but what I really want to draw attention to here is yet another brilliant but anonymous comment — The Telegraph don't provide links to comments, so you'll need to scroll down manually (how Twencen!): it was posted by "me" on June 5 at 7:56PM:

There are many ways you can make a personal sacrifice with your anti-Israel boycott.

Most of Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel. So set a personal example. Throw away your computer!

The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel. Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrium processor were entirely designed, developed and produced in Israel.

Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.

The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 in Israel by four young Israeli whiz kids.

Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R & D facilities outside the U.S. in Israel.

So due to your complete boycott of anything Israeli, you now have poor health and no computer. But your bad news does not end there. Get rid of your cellular phone! Cell phone technology was also developed in Israel by Motorola, which has its biggest development center in Israel. Most of the latest technology in your mobile phone was developed by Israeli scientists.

Feeling unsettled? You should be. Part of your personal security rests with Israeli inventiveness, borne out of our urgent necessity to protect and defend our lives from the terrorists you support.

A phone can remotely activate a bomb, or be used for tactical communications by terrorists, bank robbers or hostage-takers. It is vital that official security and law enforcement authorities have access to cellular jamming and detection solutions. Enter Israelís Netline Communications Technologies with their security expertise to help the fight against terror.

A joint, non-profit, venture between Israel and Maryland will result in a five-day Business Development and Planning Conference next March. Selected Israeli companies will partner with Maryland firms to provide innovation to the U.S. need for homeland security.

Quite.

I'd love the UK's academics and trades union members to demand a ban on mobile phones and personal computers and to insist that our police refuse to use Israeli technology when defusing bombs — it's always nice to know where people stand — but, like so many of these things, it's just a puerile stance for the self-righteous to adopt. They wouldn't dream of making any genuine sacrifice for their cause.

I am reminded of sitting in a student council meeting at university. I wasn't a member, but was there now and then in order to get things done. Like most students' unions, ours banned all Nestle products, which I'm sure was a great worry to Nestle. Nestle, you see, sell baby milk formula in the Third World, and a lot of Third-World countries have a lot of different languages. All Nestle's baby formula packaging has the usual blurb that breast-feeding is better for your baby than bottled formula, but that blurb isn't always in every single language spoken in a given country. And some of the formula is given away free to new mothers, some of whom can't or don't read the packaging and so don't breast-feed, and then cannot afford to buy the stuff once the free supply runs out. Apparently, this is so unutterably evil that no British left-winger has bought a Fruit Pastille for about twenty years now.

Meanwhile, emphysema and other diseases caused by smoking are now killing two-thousand people a day in China and are predicted to wipe out a third of China's population. Tobacco firms invest heavily in China. When you buy a packet of cigarettes, you are contributing directly to the massive marketing budget that has succeeded in creating what is likely to become the greatest cause of death in China's history.

So, as I was saying, this anti-Israel boycott reminds me of sitting in a student council meeting, surrounded by chain-smokers earnestly discussing the terrible controversy of the Union's shop having accidentally sold a couple of Walnut Whips.

Very nicely put.

An excellent piece by Daniel Hannan in The Telegraph:

An oil strike could well be the worst thing that can happen to a country. By giving the regime an independent income stream, it breaks the link between taxation and representation. States that do not depend on a single natural resource can develop free economies, in which property rights are adjudicated by independent courts. But states where there is one overwhelming source of wealth tend to become oligarchies, whose leaders squabble to get their hands on fabulous riches.

....

So, a piece of advice to the Scottish Nationalist Party leader, Alex Salmond, who is about to publish his plans for an independence referendum. Stop droning on about the £200 billion of oil revenue that you think a separate Scottish state should have received. Scotland has suffered enough from subventions.

Scots, like other Britons, are a restless, mercantile, inventive people. They rose by relying on themselves, not by trusting their leaders to sign back-room deals with multinationals.

 

It never goes out of fashion.

In response to my post about Bruce Schneier's article about terrorism, one Wolfie has this to say:

I might be wrong but I'm guessing that Bruce Schneier is Jewish so it seems not entirely surprising that his understanding of terrorism is stunted or simplistic. He's been spoon-fed simplistic prejudice on terrorist motivation from the cradle.

It's true what people say: Jew-hatred really is more interesting than other types of racism. I mean, as we all know, Arabs and Muslims are demonised as evil killers by the Jew-controlled media and the Jew-controlled governments of the West, and all the Jews are in on it. But when a man with a suspicious-looking E-I in his surname says that he thinks that that demonisation is wrong, that just goes to show that he's just like all the other bloody Jews.