The correct name of this user is יהוה. The name is spelt thusly due to technical restrictions.

Welcome to the userpage of Bastin's ego. As egos go, he's the best. I'm sure that he'd say the same about me, were he not tied and gagged to prevent him ruining everyone's day. However, just to be kind to the little fella (who's not that little; he's actually larger than Kentucky), I have written this page. Wikipedia, although ostensibly an encyclopaedia, is, therefore, primarily a soapbox for me and my ego. Wasn't that thoughtful of Jimbo?

Please do not touch anything on this page. If there's a mistake, bite your lip and move on; eventually, I will spot it without your help. If you want to tell me something (about how great I am, etc), please do so on my talk page. Thank you.

Bastin is busy in real life and may not respond swiftly to queries.

[edit] Who Am I?

How can we pad that out to 27 books? We need to know more, Bastin! This user believes that no quantity of spelling errors can make American English a language or dialect. This user trusts the European Union about as far as he can throw it. This user is pro-choice. This user is a monarchist, and a British imperialist. Rule, Britannia! This user is going to attend every event at the 2012 Olympic Games in London. $ This user asks, Who is John Galt? This user supports Israel within its 1967 borders. That's stretching from the Suez Canal to the River Jordan, bitch. This user thinks that the Roman Empire was nothing more than an amplification of Hellenic Culture. This user supports the independence of a democratic, capitalist, prosperous, and free Taiwan. This user has read the Complete Works of Shakespeare. This user believes that an inter-city Maglev train network would be feasible and really cool. This user believes that the only Republican fit to sit in the Oval Office is Ronald Reagan (and that's only because Reagan liked Maggie). This user believes that unbridled democracy is fundamentally flawed. This user knows his history, and counts the real Kings of France This user would not hesitate to use any means necessary to defend the Falkland Islands. This user is a capitalist and exploits the proletariat as much as the law will allow. This user is widely considered a spelling and grammar Nazi. He is sometimes erroneously considered a regular Nazi. SI This user always uses metric units. This user is a Monty Python fan, and often walks sillily in public. This user is a carnivore. Hitler was a vegetarian. Think about it. This user believes that London is the capital city of humanity. This user plays chess. According to the Political Compass this user is: Economic Right (10.00) and Social Libertarian (-4.67) This user supports Arsenal Football Club, amongst many others. FF This user uses Mozilla Firefox. He does not like Internet Explorer one little bit. This user knows that, if there is a Supreme Being, it must be Himself. However, He does not accept complaints concerning the shodiness of His creations. MI This user knows all the Monkey Island insults by heart. How appropriate; you fight like a cow. This user believes that the only Democrat fit to sit in the Oval Office is Jed Bartlet (and that's only because Bartlet is an economist). This user objects to a band of two Britons and two Irishmen being called 'Irish'. This user is a member of the Clan Campbell (and Clan MacDonald, too, but he pretends that he's not). This user knows better than to take sides in petty Oxbridge rivalry. He prefers the company of Jeremy Bentham. This user believes that the Home Nations should be scrapped. This user understands evolution, so he knows that it's true. This user supports the westward expansion of New Zealand. This user is known to occasionally edit Wikipedia when hammered. Please excuse his poor referencing on such occasions.

I am a citizen of the United Kingdom, and live in Holborn, London. I'm a Caucasian male, aged 18 to 64. I'm heterosexual, but am a member of two gay rights groups (I believe the term is 'not narrow', but I find that offensive to straight people). I am not Jewish, despite myriad daydreams to the contrary. I am able-bodied and neurologically capable. I am a narcissist, and fear sock puppets and bumblebees, but am otherwise sound of mind. That's enough for you to know.

[edit] Whom do I admire?

I hold firmly that admiration is a long neglected sentiment. Character is unvalued, as too is personal virtue. Most people have one hero, or, at most, a handful. I count hundreds of figures, contemporary or historical, as my heroes. I will list but a handful of disparate figures (in alphabetical order) to give an idea.

• Lance Armstrong - Quite simply, the greatest sportsman in history. An inspiration to those fighting in the face of overwhelming odds, and an inspiration to those that refuse to compromise.
• Neil Armstrong - The embodiment of the Second Age of Discovery. He went where no man had gone. His first step on the moon was the pinnacle of man's achievements. Why is it that only eleven people have ever followed in his famous footsteps?
• Winston Churchill, Duke of London - Who doesn't admire him? His defeat by Clement Attlee in 1945 remains the most disgraceful event in the recent history of our country.
• King Edward I of England - The greatest monarch in British history (closely followed by James I/VI). He created the independent judiciary, reformed the Royal Household, oversaw an economic revival, annexed Wales, built dozens of castles, and tried to unite the crowns of England and Scotland peacefully (although failing). Pity about his anti-Semitism.
• The Few - The 2,927 pilots of the RAF and of allied air forces, that jousted with the Luftwaffe over the skies of the British Isles. Had the Battle of Britain been lost, there can be no doubt that civilisation would have been lost, too.
• Sir Edmund Hillary - I know what you're thinking. I've already named Neil Armstrong, so Hillary's just overkill, right? Seemingly so, but Sir Edmund has two significant advantages. First, he is an incredible philanthropist, having devoted the past forty years of his life to the Sherpas. Second, he is a New Zealander.
• Daniel M. Lewin - Proved that even the average billionaire ex-commando is capable of acts of extreme heroism.
• Sir Isaac Newton - Greatest person in history. By himself, he advanced nearly every single field of science.
• Adam Smith - Creator of the modern world. Smith developed many of the ideas of capitalism, free trade, and modern economics.
• Jan Smuts - The original opponent of Apartheid. A man of too many achievements to list. One of the most remarkable figures in history.
• Baroness Thatcher - Greatest woman ever, and greatest peace-time Prime Minister ever. Thatcher turned the Sick man of Europe into its most dynamic economy, ended class struggle in the UK, opposed political integration in Europe, defeated Argentina, and supported the unity of the UK.
• Duke of Wellington - Find a better commander of men, and I'll eat my hat.
• Simon Wiesenthal KBE - Most dedicated servant of humanity in the 20th Century? For decades, he slaved away to bring a smidgeon of justice to the greatest injustice in history. He didn't care that nobody paid attention to his work. His principled devotion and refusal to bow under tremendous odds mark him out as one of history's greatest 'nobodies'.

And, finally:

• Cliff Bastin - Without whom, I wouldn't have this username.

[edit] What do I believe?

I am a libertarian. I believe in the inherent superiority of the individual over the collective, the power of private ownership, and free market capitalism. I am influenced by Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and John Stuart Mill, but, ultimately, I am an Austrian economist.

Just because it's the area I'm qualified in, I'll run through a few of the economic positions I hold. I hold fiercely to the principle that there is no action outside the individual, and give a lot of credence to public choice theory; I can't see any argument against the subjective theory of value, and hence support free banking; I don't believe in the neutrality of money in actuality, but I think that non-neutrality is the least of macroeconomics' problems; and I believe that common law is the most economically-efficient legal system, but think that public choice issues preclude constructive constitutional evolution.

Wikipedia is not paper. That means that I'm Wikipedistically Inclusionist. It's also worth pointing out that, since life is not paper either, I am also a proper inclusionist. I am a atheist (a weak, explicit one, to be precise) and a dedicated secularist, and hold office within the British humanist movement.

I am a member of the Conservative Party. In the 2005 leadership contest, I spoiled my ballot in protest at our inability to choose our preferred candidate. Whilst I still wish we had been given a choice of any candidate, I have since come around to Cameron's way of thinking, and am fully supportive of his leading our party into government in 2010! I am also a member of ACT New Zealand, even though, as a non-resident, I can't vote there. In the United States, I usually support the Libertarian Party, but would support abstentionism in quite a lot of cases in which they have been elected (why do counties have drains commissioners? Seriously).

Oh, and, since it's the only political issue that most plebs care about, I supported the War in Iraq, although I'm reconsidering that. In retrospect, I'd have preferred regime change in Havana, but the idea was never floated. C'est la vie.

[edit] What have I contributed?

As of 9 November 2009, I have made 19,361 edits of 9,653 unique pages on the English Wikipedia. My major contributions are listed here. I have written one Featured Article (#1), two Featured Lists (#1, #2), and one Good Article (#1).

I have launched seven mini-projects, of varying sizes, at Wikipedia:

1. I decided to try to boost the article on Jan Smuts to featured article status. Very generously, at least one person thinks that the article is good enough as it is. He is wrong. It may get there some day, but not quite yet.
2. More recently, noticing that the number of articles on diplomacy were heavily outnumbered by all sorts of articles on obscure crap about which nobody really gives a rat's arse, I dedicated some time to creating lists of British ambassadors and High Commissioners to other countries. That got tedious, and I figured that I didn't have enough time to do it for the hundreds of countries with which the UK has had diplomatic relations. I may periodically pick this up again, but I'll never finish it, so don't bother asking.
3. Being both a sports nut and Commonwealth of Nations nut, I was shocked to see that the articles on the Commonwealth Games were woefully short. So, I set about doing what little I could. That mostly involves making lots of navigation templates that nobody will ever use. However, I am happier with this project than the previous two, as I actually finished something. How about that?
4. After getting giddy at having completed something, however limited it was in value, I turned my attention to other matters. I tried to find a country about which I had a passing interest, on which there's lots of information lying about, and that had few Wikipedia articles of note (but had already been furnished with maps, because I'm awful at making them). The perfect country turned out to be Luxembourg, so I've now launched WikiProject Luxembourg to help to improve the coverage of that tiny part of Europe.
5. As a diversion from my Luxembourg mini-project (which is still ongoing; rest assured of that), I decided to continue to improve the coverage of diplomacy at Wikipedia. Furthermore, I decided that the best way to improve it would be to improve to an excellent level a very small slice of the diplomatic history of the world. In the above case, it was the diplomatic history of the United Kingdom. In this case, it's the diplomatic history of New Zealand. The result can be seen here and here. Thus, in under two days and with minimal effort, I completed my second thing at Wikipedia.
6. I returned to covering Luxembourg, and achieved much (every railway station, every motorway, a few dozen biographies, etc), but got rather tired of what is essentially entirely non-academic and rather banal. Hence, always having been interested in the Commonwealth (see above) and both constitutional and historical matters, I decided to start writing articles on the history of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Nations. We'll see how far that goes; Constitution of the Commonwealth of Nations, maybe?
7. Whilst browsing Wikipedia (which takes up most of my supposed 'work' day), I was aghast to find the rank bias in the article on Jesse Helms (a man with whom I didn't agree, but one that still doesn't deserve to be defamed). After encountering opposition to introducing a neutral point of view, I went for the nuclear option: digging up every single article I could find on Helms (New York Times, Times, Economist, Financial Times - and will do Washington Post and Wall Street Journal when I have time), and citing ALL of them. The result is one of the longest articles on Wikipedia: and it's only half-done. I intend to split the article as a template for future expansion of similar politicians' articles.

For an index of my user pages, see Special:Prefixindex/User:Bastin.