Venezuela's useful idiots have gone quiet. I wonder why - CAPX

"...When the situation in Venezuela got even worse, the Western Left fell silent on Venezuela. It is as if the country had just dropped off the map. It is clear what the next step will be: we will soon hear post-hoc rationalisations explaining why Venezuela was never “really” socialist, and why it is a silly straw man to hold the failure of that experiment against the socialist Left. This process has already begun.

Noam Chomsky now says he never described “Chavez’s state capitalist government as ‘socialist’ … It was quite remote from socialism. Private capitalism remained … Capitalists were free to undermine the economy in all sorts of ways, like massive export of capital.”

This has happened many times before. In the 1930s, hundreds of Western intellectuals flocked to Stalin’s Soviet Union, and came back praising it to the skies. A few years later, they decided that Soviet socialism was not “real” socialism, and crucially, that it had never been socialist in the first place. Then the same thing happened all over again in Cuba, in Mao’s China, in Enver Hoxha’s Albania, and many other places...

Brexit - letting go of Nanny's hand - The Salisbury Review

There are varieties of fatuity – and then we come to Archbishop Justin Welby...

Crying for nanny is of course a characteristic of the infantile mind. Like weak men everywhere, Welby has a craving for authority, for someone to tell him what to think and what to do. Plato would have provided him with such figures. Plato called them Guardians, which the Latin philosophers translated as Custodes. And they immediately asked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes: Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Round of applause, please everyone. Let’s hear it for the Archbishop of Cant.

Review of WeVideo from Primal Video

Justin Brown at Primal Video loves WeVideo

Until quite recently, Online Video Editors had a long way to go to compete with even the most basic desktop video editing software. But with faster internet speeds (and enough development cycles) they’re starting to catch up! These days there are some solid options for editing video online, and the benefits of these cloud video editing options can be huge – for the right people…

WeVideo is one of the leading online video editing software options, and after putting it through its paces, Justin covers his thoughts and experiences in this WeVideo Review.

Check out Justin Brown's excellent review at PrimalVideo

Being mentally ill: the new normal?

One of the consequences of the widespread promotion of mental-health catastrophism is that being mentally ill is fast becoming the new normal. This is especially true among mental-health proponents’ main target: the young. Indeed, over the past couple of decades there has been a constant stream of reports and publications claiming that children and young people have never been as anxious, depressed and insecure as they are today. Hence among the media and policymakers, the narrative of a ‘generation in crisis’ has firmly taken hold.  Of course, a sense of alienation and existential insecurity has long characterised being young, from the Romantics to the Beats. What has changed, however, is that youthful angst and insecurity has both been medicalised and, increasingly, inflated. 

Read On Spiked

100-Year-Old Colour Portraits Of New York Immigrants

Here are just a handful of the 12 million men, women, and children who arrived at Ellis Island, New York, between 1892 and 1954 to start a new life in the USA, often dressed in their finest clothes...
The photographs were taken between 1906 and 1914 by amateur photographer Augustus Francis Sherman, the chief registry clerk at Ellis Island, then the country’s busiest immigration station...
Photo colourisation specialists at Dynamichrome have put painstaking work into bringing these photos to vivid life by adding colour, using historical references to help pinpoint the exact colours, including postcards from the era, and colour photographers from a later date.

Via Buzzfeed

The Islamophobic attacks you don't hear about

Incidents of ‘Islamophobia’ are really getting out of hand in Britain. In fact there has been such a wave of attacks that it’s amazing that politicians and commentators across the political spectrum, (not to mention all those supposed ‘anti-fascist’ groups) aren’t grand-standing like crazy. Perhaps their problem is that this wave of attacks does not consist of people writing nasty and mean things on Twitter, but of Muslims killing other Muslims and still other Muslims extolling such killings.

Read the rest at The Spectator

Female MPs, please stop playing the sexism card

Thornberry provided us with the car-crash interview of the weekend when she was questioned by Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News about the Labour Party’s position on Brexit. In response to Murnaghan asking her if she knew the name of the French foreign minister, Thornberry said, ‘Don’t start pub quizzing me, Dermot’. When the question was repeated, Thornberry said: ‘No, and I’m not going to start answering your questions on this.’

The interview reached its cringe-worthy peak when Thornberry failed to provide the name or gender of the president of South Korea. She then launched into several angry rants, before accusing Murnaghan of sexism. ‘I certainly think sometimes, when it comes to sexism, some Sky presenters need to look at themselves, too’, she said.

Picture shows how Christmas favourite Quality Street have shrunk since 1998

The image, which shows four of the iconic purple tubs side by side, has sparked outrage on social media after it was posted on the Quality Street Facebook page by customer Charlotte Stacey Hook.

In her post, Ms Hook claims that the oldest tin, pictured on the far left, was bought in 1998. However, some chocolate fans have argued that it was the design used in the 1980s.

A Nestle spokesman said it was difficult to tell when exactly each tin was made, but that the newest tub appeared to be from 2014/2015; the ones in the middle from the 2000s; and the one on the far left from the late 1990s or early 2000s. 

Danger! Men On Trains

Jeremy Corbyn has said he might consider creating women only carriages on trains. Apart from the fact that the man has no chance of ever being in a position to implement such a policy and that fact that it's a regressive step back to the time when "ladies" needed to be shielded fro the real world it addresses a problem that, despite the hysterical, overwrought ramblings of some commentators, is insignificant in any case. 

Here are the FACTS, you know, those awkward things that get in the way of people's silly prejudices and misrepresentations:
There were 1,399 reported cases of sexual assaults (that includes inappropriate speech etc) on the UK public transport system last year. There were well over a billion journeys last year on the London underground system alone. If all the reports were limited to the underground that would represent just 0.0001399% of journeys. But, of course, we have to add the 1.16 billion train journeys and 4.7 billion bus journeys (of which 2.28 billion were in London).

The total number of journeys in excess of 7,300,000,000. 

The total number of journeys on public transport per annum is in excess of 7,300,000,000. Even if you add all the crimes reported on public transport, including robbery, racial harassment etc it still comes to under 0.00015%. Hardly an epidemic. Hardly evidence of hoardes of violent, sexist, racist men rampaging on buses and trains, is it?

PS: Rod Liddle is very concerned about it. 

Painting a bus stop sign

This is pretty cool. I'd always thought they used some kind of template or stencil but it's done freehand. 

Via Kottke

Good old Blog, we knew him well...

Eulogy for a Blog.  A must read over at Copyblogger

Blog’s life was tragically cut short at a very young age. I’m saddened to say, he never really hit his stride or had the chance to grow up to enjoy what might have been his prime.  When Blog was born he was full of hope and vigour. He dreamed of being an educator. He loved having an audience, though our friend Blog had to settle for a very small one...

Up the wooden hill, not quite...

Great idea. Bedrooms seem to me to be such a waste of space. This is one way of getting that space back. But you need HIGH ceilings!