UK not in EU: Edmund Burke would have agreed

In 1790, while English radicals lost their heads in admiration for the French Revolution, Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" fought the flames that threatened to reach and engulf Britain: "Whenever our neighbor's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident a security."

Presciently - three years before the killings of the French King and Queen and the Reign of Terror - he warned that the abstract principles and powerful enthusiasms so dear to Richard Price and other progressive thinkers had to be contained and co-ordinated by institutions, lest they become highly destructive:

"When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men. But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers."

To us, that last sentence may serve equally as a warning against the (supposedly ex-) Communists and other cabalists influential in the modern European Union, as about the Robespierres and Napoleons who were then still bubbling their way to the top of the French Revolutionary froth.

Richard Price's "A Discourse on the Love of our Country" (4 November 1789), to which Burke's book was a riposte, claimed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had established the principle that we could arbitrarily choose or depose our rulers. Burke countered that although it was true that William had not been first in the royal succession and so it appeared that we had then instituted a new Constitution, yet the link with our ancient Common Law had not been broken, and had been amended by statute only so far as was necessary ("to the peccant part only") to correct the malfunction in the British body politic caused by James II's Catholicism and its concomitant threat of ceding power to persons and entities outside the kingdom.

"Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities: otherwise, competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force. On this principle, the succession of the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by the Common Law; in the new by the statute law, operating on the principles of the Common Law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same force, and are derived from an equal authority, emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state, communi sponsione reipublicæ, and as such are equally binding on king, and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they continue the same body politic."

The people, it should be unnecessary to remark, are an essential "constituent part of the state" and their part is an inalienable element in "the engagement and pact of society". Burke's stress on the continuity of the Common Law means that he could not possibly have approved of the surrender of national sovereignty implied in our unconstitutional (and therefore unlawful) entry into the Common Market in 1972, much less of the considered deceit and treasonable collusion by high officials whereby they usurped the immemorial social pact of the nation.

Though a Whig (progressive) himself, Burke is viewed as the founder of modern political Conservatism. (The Tories, believers in absolute authoritarian rule, supported the 1715 rising that tried to reinstate James on the throne; so to be a Conservative is to be opposed to Tories.) Today's Conservative voters and MPs, if they do indeed stand in the line of Edmund Burke, should be against EU membership to a man and woman.

"You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our Constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity,—as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors."

"Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy." Nor may a Parliament, or treacherous Ministers, Prime Ministers and civil servants abdicate our sovereignty for us. Our "entailed inheritance" of national freedom and self-determination is to be "transmitted to our posterity" and cannot be sold, mortgaged or gambled away.

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Blogging is not dead, but evolving

AK Haart regrets what seems to be the decline of the blog - but what are we regretting?

Are we after numbers of readers (millions would be nice) or quality? Popularity, or influence? Number of visits, or average length of visit? Number of comments, or content of comments?

In the battle between the MSM and the Internet, Goliath is still pulverising David: Martin Langeveld estimates that, even though readership has declined in recent years, 96 per cent of newspaper reading is done in relation to print editions, with only some 3 per cent online.

Similarly, Paul Grabowicz says, "A visitor spends an average of a little over 1 minute per day on a newspaper website. Compare that with the 27 minutes per day that newspaper readers say they spent perusing the print product on a weekday, and 57 minutes on Sundays, according to a 2008 survey by Northwestern University's Research Institute."

But, as Grabowicz observes,  you can offer more online: "More in-depth stories and richer content can be published on a website than in the relatively short snippets of information distributed to people via mobile devices, on YouTube and Flickr, or through blogs and micro-blog postings. Providing deeper content fulfills the public service function of journalism and can help form online communities at news websites where people can gather to discuss issues of importance to their communities, both geographic and topical."

This reminds us that people read in different ways, and for different purposes. In 2006, Holsanova, Rahm and Holmqvist studied eye-movements of a group of readers to test assumptions about types of readership and concluded, "there are three main categories of readers: editorial readers, overview readers and focused readers."

Which leads us to ask, how much of what we write is actually read? In 2008, Jacob Nielsen found that "on the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely." Grabowicz's article (linked above) also observed an increasing tendency to skim and hop about: "while the total number of unique visitors and pageviews at the newspaper websites has been increasing from 2004 - 2009, the average time spent by each person on a site declined." This jackrabbit reading was turned into a very funny Radio 4 series in 1999, called "The Sunday Format."

Writing can take into account readership tendencies, so WikiHow shows us the art of composing adverts (for example, don't use punctuation in headlines, as this encourages the reader to stop).

But unless you're doing it for money, is the reader you whore after the one you should be concerned to attract? Perhaps we need to worry more about why and what we write, and less about who and how many are reading. Posterity and the estimation of one's peers outweigh meretricious éclat.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Why the UK is not in the European Union

U.S. Supreme Court

Norton v. Shelby County, 118 U.S. 425 (1886)

Norton v. Shelby County
Argued March 24-25, 1886
Decided May 10, 1886
118 U.S. 425

Following the decision of the highest court of the Tennessee in Pope v. Phifer, 3 Heiskell 691, and other cases, this Court holds that the Board of Commissioners of Shelby County, organized under the Act of March 9, 1867, had no lawful existence; that it was an unauthorized and illegal body; that its members were usurpers of the functions and powers of the justices of peace of the county; that their action in holding a county court was void, and that their acts in subscribing to the stock of the Mississippi River Railroad Company and issuing bonds in payment therefor were void.
 
While acts of a de facto incumbent of an office lawfully created by law and existing are often held to be binding from reasons of public policy, the acts of a person assuming to fill and perform the duties of an office which does not exist de jure can have no validity whatever in law.

An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.

The same principle, that the Constitution overrules local and national law, means that until the people have spoken, the United Kingdom remains wholly outside the EU.

Hat-tip to Karl Denninger for the legal reference.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Australia goes easy on tyrannical Fiji government, plans to dump asylum seekers there

- that's David Robie's anaylsis of the current rapprochement between Australia and Commodore Bainimarama.

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Love, Chinese-style

Like the Elizabethans, the Chinese are conscious that the fires of romantic love are dangerous. Roseann Lake's cultural and scientifc report suggests that the lessons are: love carefully, and refrain from criticism.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Plus ça change

"The potentates of this world are [...] apt to consider themselves as possessed of an inherent superiority, which gives them a right to govern, and makes mankind their own; and this infatuation is almost every where fostered in them by the creeping sycophants about them, and the language of flattery which they are continually hearing."

Richard Price, "A Discourse on the Love of Our Country" (4 November 1789)

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Storms and man-made disaster

"We are apt to believe that today we experience more violent upheavals of Nature than in past generations, but this is not so. Heavy storms and exceptional weather phenomena occurred much the same in past years as now."

Reginald M. Lester, "The Observer's Book Of Weather", Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd (1955)

But we can make things worse, whether it be the EU-directed failure to dredge rivers that has exacerbated the flooding this year or the late-19th-century dredging of the pebble beach at Hallsands that led to the sea's destruction of the whole village in 1917.

We've been planning to revisit possibly the best fish and chip restaurant in England (the Start Bay Inn at Torcross in Devon's South Hams), but fear the worst after the recent weather:





Some think efforts to stop coastal erosion at Slapton Ley are ultimately doomed, anyway.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.