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When our esteemed (or steamed?) editor Perry de Havilland put out the photo opportunity call to the Samizdata team, I found my scanner wanting. The scans came out dark beyond Imagemagick’s Redemption. In lieu of something newer, I found this old black and white from a gig of my old Belfast rock band Transit. It’s a decade old, but it will have to serve for the moment.  January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 In a recent posting on Transterrestrial Musings Rand asked:
It means the Libertarian Party (and others) are starting to raise enough money to be an annoyance. Vote tallies for Libertarian candidates in a number of election races in November 2000 were actually greater than the margins of victory. Many think we would have done even better if not for the onerous regulatory requirements. Harry Browne was prepared to make a constitutional challenge against the very existance of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) but was unable to do so, partly due to internal party bickering. The existing regulations prevent small parties from getting a leg up, but they are of little or no consequence to the Demopublicans. So my take? It’s just another excuse to shore up their monopoly of power. If they can generate good vote-acquring “moral” and “ethical” soundbites while they are at it, it’s an even bigger win for the two faces of the monopoly party. January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Do you have a science qualification? Are you tired of struggling to pay your bills and make ends meet? Are you sick of seeing the other guy making a good living while you constantly scrimp and save? Do you ever wonder what the secret is to making loads of money? Well, wonder no longer. Just follow our easy 8-step guide below and you too can be a Successful Scientist 1. Fix your attentions to some aspect of modern life or a consumer product; preferably something technological, new-fangled and, therefore, little understood January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
16 Years ago today, 7 honoured members of the space community gave their lives for the dream we all share. I and others in that community pledge to carry their names to the stars.
I raise my glass. We will never forget you. January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Three men have been admitted to hospital, one of them in critical condition, after a shooting on a Glasgow Housing Estate January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
I was perusing Bill St. Clair’s most worthy End the War on Freedom blog and was so inspired that for no reason in particular I felt like posting this pictures of myself doing what comes naturally.  Note the AK-74 style muzzle brake… makes the weapon very controllable even on rock and roll but everyone sure as hell gets to see where you are firing from! Photograph was taken by excessively tall good buddy and would-be evil world ruler Willi Zahn. January 28th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The Milosevic trial in the Hague is having trouble due to the fact most of the Kosovo war crimes evidence was gathered by western intelligence operatives, rather than independent investigators. However even if that part of the charges against him collapses, he will not be able to stonewall his way out of the charges relating to Croatia and Bosnia. Nevertheless, I must say that I have never thought the Hague trials were either legitimate or, more importantly, sensible. To paraphrase Talleyrand, they are worse than a crime, they are a mistake. For Serbia to recover from the monstrous era that the entire former Yugoslavia is emerging from, it needs to go through a process similar to the de-nazification Germany went through after World War Two. It must face its own history and that is not achieved by putting The Demon on trial in the Netherlands. He did not act alone and whole sections of Serbian society must face up to that fact. The place Slobodan Milosevic should have gone on trial for mass murder and other war crimes was in Serbia because then, and only then, can Serbian society itself drive a stake through the heart of its own darkness. There are a lot of good people in Serbia who are quite capable of doing just that. Of course this could have been achieved another way too: like Mussolini, Slobodan Milosevic, his vile hellish wife, most of his adult family and about fifty senior ministers, police chiefs and generals could have been strung up on meat hooks as a lesson to future generations. That would have worked too. It might not be pretty but it would have been justice. January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Over on Vodkapundit Stephen Green waxes lyrical about us Brits and speaks of us as ‘Congruent Forces’, a phrase which lends itself to so much more than the reactions to 9/11 and contains within it a recognition of ties that go beyond a common langauge Thanks to the Bush Telegraph of Blogdom the Americans have learned that, despite the best efforts of our Sneering Classes, every voxpop opinion poll in the country puts support for the USA at over 90%! Is there any country in the world where pro-USA feeling runs so high? Come to think of it, does it run that high in certain parts of California? This is more than a Fifth Column (although it is that as well); it is the big ghost in Blair’s machine, the great, immovable mass of Britain that he must, by some means or other, tear away from its Common Law roots and into the arms of Napoleon’s Code where rule of the people by the people is replaced by rule of the people by the their betters. Theirs is the other 10% and they are the New Aristocracy, taking their holidays in Tuscany while the vulgar, embarrassing , white-bread English serfs chug Budweisers in Florida and insist on defending their homes. The former, almost without exception, rely on various forms of government activity for their wealth and power. While the latter consist of the plumbers, electricians, small businessmen, shopkeepers, hairdressers and builders; the real ‘warp and weft’ of any country This is the congruent force that goes deeper than World Wars or 9/11. It is a shared epistimology of liberty assumed not requested; of Magna Carta, Habeus Corpus and each to his own. A worldview that binds at a cellular level and is bedded in the sense of objective rightness that power over the individual should vest, ultimately, in that individual and not in the capricious favour of potentates These are the values breathed into America by the great English and Scottish enlightenment and it is why Americans like Stephen Green rightly call us The Mother Country for the ‘American Revolution’ was not so much a revolution as a Civil War between the rebels trying to champion those ideas and their imperial rulers whose persistant continental wars had so wounded them Yet, despite all the wars the British fought, because they too often tried to rape instead of seduce, in every bit of the globe in which the Sons of Albion planted the Union Jack they left behind those Common Law values and good administration and, hence, shaped so much of it. Britain gave birth not just to America but to Gibraltar and Hong Kong and New Zealand. It is not mere coincidence that, today, of the world’s top ten most liberal economies, no less than eight of them are former British colonies Those Yeomen of England are now the Bloggers of Cyberspace and we lie beneath; we are chained in the attic, buried under the floorboards. That blury shape in America’s bathroom mirror is us; that shocking reflection in their bathwater is us. We are trying to communicate with you Americans. We’re trying to tell you something. We’re trying to warn you that Tony Blair may be sleeping with your President; he may be whispering sussurating, cooing declarations of eternal love in your ear, but really he is a murderer and he is trying to kill us. Can you hear us, America? Can you see us? January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Where is Amnesty International when someone really needs help? If an individual is truly in jeopardy but not held by the “big, bad, Satan America”, forget about it. Those NGOs who bleat and wail about The United States of America, with far too much support from biased and political media groups, should be held accountable for any detrimental or deadly results in this particular case. For openers, they should be stripped of their tax-free status; when they start lobbying from a political position, they violate the laws by which they are permitted to function. They need to be exposed, over and over, for what they really are: poseurs with political bias. Here is a legal case that cries out for worldwide condemnation. If Amnesty International and other like groups fail to perform, castigate, or at least condemn this judicial situation, then they expose the truth about themselves, which belies their current posturing completely. They should be ashamed. MommaBear January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
…very different things to different people. Let us consult the Oxford English Dictionary:
Of course this also rather depends on what you mean by ‘country’
And therein lies one of the problems with Patriotism. When some one says ‘I am a patriot’, what the hell does that actually mean? Let’s take me, for example. My mother was American and I have lived about one quarter of my life in the USA. My father was British and I have lived a little under half my life here. For purely accidental reasons, I was actually born in the Netherlands. I feel both/neither British and/or American. So much for the complicated heredity and biology. Now for some ideology: I personally reject as illegitimate any function of the state which is not related to the defence of the individual liberty of people within their area of control, within a broad reasonable definition of those terms. I see the State as, at best, a provider of a service (security) in much the same way as I see the Pepsi-Cola Beverage Company as a provider of cans of fizzy brown liquid. I do not accept the very notion of ‘citizenship’ as I regard that as tantamount to denying me free association with non-citizens and implies the State somehow owns me in some way. So can I be ‘patriotic’? To the State? Absolutely not. Try to make me pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the Union Jack or the Tricolour with the intention of extracting an admission of loyalty to the state and I will set it on fire instead. And if it is on a tee shirt saying “Try to burn these colors asshole”, the wearer might just get their wish. Try to conscript me and the state will discover that I am not a pacifist and have no problem with using force against someone who tries to impose servitude upon me: starting with the guy who tries to serve call up papers on me. And yet… I live in London at the moment but I have ‘Old Glory’ displayed in my front window for all to see. Try walking down Upper Cheyne Row in Chelsea and you will see which is my house. It has been there since September 12th 2001. I do indeed feel an affinity for what James Bennett aptly calls The Anglosphere. I regard myself as a member of a cosmopolitan, English speaking global community, a civil society far greater than any mere nation state. For all its flaws, that extended society is the best hope for freedom and liberty the world has ever known and that is something worth defending. Unlike British society, which has a myriad cultural and regional symbols redolent with meaning, only Old Glory, the Stars and Stripes, the Star Spangled Banner, truly represents not just the American state but also American society, warts and all. Truth is I much prefer the Gadsden flag (see side bar of this blog) but most people would not know what it means. And so that is why the Stars and Stripes is stuck in my window for all to see. It was not just the people of New York who were wounded, it was all of us and that is a point I think well worth making publicly. So is that ‘patriotism’? Opinions vary. January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
There is a funny post on the NRO Blog ‘Corner’ by Rod Dreher relating to Lord of the Rings. The final remark is hilarious… but they do kind of have a point! January 27th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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