I see that Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s husband tendered for the first phase of California’s high speed rail-to-nowhere.

Do you think he won?

Ultimately, the state claims ownership of everything-

A DAD’S new car has been confiscated by the Crown after his son crashed while drunk at the wheel. Kevin Stirrat was driving the £12,000 Kia Cee’d when he crashed it into a road sign and a hedge.

Sheriff Robert McCreadie granted a Crown motion to confiscate the car, even though it belonged to ­Stirrat’s father John. It is one of the first cases of its kind under recently toughened laws to tackle drink-driving.

The state will sell the motor, keeping a parasite busy for a week and will pocket the proceeds of its theft. And that’s what it is, plain theft of a man’s property, but the beast is always hungry.

h/t Jock Bastard

Put me down as unpersuaded in this Syrian chemical attack story. It seems to have started this week with Israeli General Itai Brun claiming that victims foaming at the mouth is proof of sarin gas use. It might be proof of shaving cream as far as I can tell, or is it toothpaste?

The US, which had denied having any evidence of chemical weapons use in Syria, suddenly ran with it. Predictably, Cameron has a red line for intervention which has been crossed too. Fancy that. Haven’t we been here before?

Remember when Cameron opposed government snooping into our lives? Not any more, clearly. His Communications Data Bill, dubbed the “snooper’s charter” (in reality, a Home Office Bill) would pay ISPs to log our complete online acts, allowing the police and intelligence agencies to easily discover what we’re each doing. What could possibly go wrong with that?

When you’re on the authoritarian side of Nick Clegg, you might have gone a bit far. Clegg has vowed to sink the Bill, vowing that it will not happen (audio here). Good luck to him, but he’s passing through while the bureaucracy is permanent. He might win now, but they only have to win once.

Speaking of authoritarian bastards, CISPA has passed the House of Representatives and is in the Senate. I’m sure that two such similar Bills appearing concurrently, thousands of miles apart in two friendly capitals, is no coincidence.

Samantha Cameron

The plantation owner says that women should ditch the baby after giving birth and start digging for victory. It’s “good for the economy”, apparently. Despite punishingly high levels of looting taxes, the owner’s lifestyle is so extravagent that he always needs more hands on his tax farm. We must always toil harder and longer to make his taxes because the beast is always hungry.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a monster. The idea of giving him their money, to fund his life and actions, would fill the people of Massachusetts with horror.

Yet that’s what happened. Except they didn’t voluntarily fund him. They were forced to do so, because the state government put him on welfare.

What a joke this is.

The Court of Appeal yesterday ruled against the government. Despite Jordan giving assurances over the manner in which Qatada would be prosecuted, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission last year ruled that he should not be deported. The Court of Appeal upheld this decision, stating that there’s “a real risk of a flagrant denial of justice”. It also refused permission for the government to take the case further to the Supreme Court.

The Telegraph reports that Theresa May (the Home Secretary), Chris Grayling (Justice Secretary), Dominic Grieve (the Attorney General) and David Cameron held talks at which temporary withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights was considered. It’s a nuclear option and would cause big ructions in government. The problem is accepting the ECHR in the first place. Either stay with it or (preferably) withdraw permanently, but to overturn supposedly timeless principles just to get one man out of the way isn’t really playing the game.

AS I thought, it was all for show.

I live half a mile from where the suspect was caught, and I disregarded martial law and walked outside. What I noticed was fascinating: There were no police around. They weren’t checking in bushes, or looking through alleys or dumpsters. They were all assembled in a mall parking lot on the other side of town marching in formation for the media. This was a show of force, not a manhunt.

One young man had gone to ground in an urban area. The idea that he could be found by paramilitaries walking slowly up a road, or by driving around in armoured military vehicles, is absurd. A search involves maps, brains, shoe leather and dirty hands. What we saw was a show, a piece of security theatre set up for the media lens.

It worked of course. Note the applause from residents for the paramilitaries after White Hat had been bagged. Most of them had staked out Dunkin’Donuts all day and it was a fellow resident who actually found the suspect – after the police said he now go outside. He saw the tarp had been disturbed on his boat and used his hands to investigate. So we note also, like the authorities failed at the marathon, and like they initially focussed completely in the wrong direction for suspects, this theatre of the absurd completely failed to discover the whereabouts of the wounded man they were looking for all along.

So let’s get this straight:

Eurozone authorities pressured Cypriot banks into buying Greek bonds. Then eurozone authorities imposed losses of 75% on Greek sovereign debt held by Cypriot banks, setting off the Cypriot banking crises. They then grab Cypriot savings and bank deposits, to solve the banking crises, and now they’ve seized three quarters of the country’s gold reserves, a move which the Cypriot Central Bank knew nothing about.

“The Eurogroup don’t give a damn about moral hazard. They are thieves”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph.

Damn right they are. Someone in these here parts has warned that nothing you think you own is safe, and that ever more ingenious and desperate ways will be found to “tax” it from you. They’re becoming more desperate by the week.

HBOS went bust in 2008. We now know that it didn’t happen because of financial acrobatics with derivatives. HBOS went bust because it loaned too much money to people who couldn’t pay it back. It failed, doing traditional bank business, because it was run badly.

So Gordon Brown coaxed LloydsTSB into a rescue deal, tax-victims were forced to cough up a £20billion sweetener, and seven HBOS directors trousered almost a million quid each. Droit du seigneur, the modern way.

It’s important for genuine capitalists and free marketeers to call out the biggest welfare parasites and fraudsters of the lot – the inhabitants of the cozy world of crony capitalists and special interests whose access to power centres allows them to gorge on more of our wealth than whole armies of council estate unemployed can dream of. It’s important because it’s right, it’s important because something is not necessarily moral simply because it’s not illegal, and it’s important to make the point that it’s plain bad economics and business practices like this which damage everyone.

It’s a subject touched upon by Allister Heath today in CityAM, in which he makes the essential point that free markets have given way to crony, government-rigged markets, as evidenced in the HBOS deal:

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