If it got under J. Edgar Hoover’s skin it’s no wonder I loved it when I was a kid.
Happy 50th Alfred!
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Taking a bus to Brixton from Streatham this afternoon, I saw the Big Brother posters which assured me I was safe. Considering I was in one of London’s three murder hotspots, the posters seemed appropriate. In Coldharbour Lane the new multimedia telephone kiosks were empty yet there were queues outside them. These were the drugs hustlers who called out “Grass”, “Charlie” and “Horse” as I walked past. Directly beneath a bus lane camera a car blocked the bus lane. I was reminded that when the security cameras were installed in Coldharbour Lane one of them didn’t work. Any guesses where a murder was committed? Yup, directly beneath the faulty camera. In Kingston-upon-Thames a few years ago a jeweller’s shop was discovered to be the only shop in the street which couldn’t be seen from the array of cameras. A nice dark alleyway running alongside was also unaccountably off-screen. Any guesses how this was discovered? Yup, when a gang burgled the shop. At least there is no suggestion that inside information could possibly have contributed to these crimes. October 25th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 Justice Barker has a curious notion of the law. Last time I thought about wandering the streets of London with a crowbar, I remembered that if I were found to be in possession of such an object, that I would be charged with possesion of a dangerous weapon. A Londoner was recently shot several times by armed police for carrying a table leg: that murder however was entirely justified, according to one of Mr Justice Barker’s colleagues. So presumably the intruder teleported the crowbar into his victim’s home using equipment from the 25th century. Also, presumably I would be allowed to carry a machete, crowbar or table leg around Mr Justice Barker’s home at 3am, but not in my front garden at 3pm. Perhaps a group of squatters might like to find out where Mr Barker lives and turn up at about 3am with plumbing tools and invite themselves in for a cup of tea. I assume that Mr Barker thinks there is no difference between this and the “right to roam”. And to think there are people who want the UK to have more common law? With barking Barkers on the judges’ benches, who could tell the difference? Anyone believe that a future Conservative government would amnesty self-defence prisoners of conscience? Ha! October 25th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Alas poor Brendan, we knew him well… No, Brendan O’Neill is not a dead blogger… he has not kicked the bucket, nor shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile! He is not an ex-blogger!!! The reason he has not posted on his blog for a while is that his blog publishing software has gone tits up in a big way. We will report when he is back on line and pooping all over the blogosphere again.
October 25th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Excuse me but….I’m…I’m just a little groggy right now. I’ve stopped seeing double but my hands are still shaking. I just managed to avoid hitting my head on the desk as I went down but I hit the floor with a thud. I only hope I haven’t broken anything. I think I have recovered just about enough of my constitution to link to this editorial in the Daily Mirror:
Wait a minute, did I say that was in the Daily Mirror? Let me just check [Pause]. Yes, it was the Daily frigging Mirror!! John Pilger’s dead-tree mouthpiece; Britain’s most popular left-wing tabloid. These are the people who have been running a TV ad campaign inviting the public to regard George Bush as a more dangerous tyrant than Saddam Hussein. Have the proprietors been locked in a cellar somewhere? And what about the author, Tony Parsons? Not in the Pilger league for sure but still a long-standing, card-carrying member of the sneering leftie ‘intellectual’ classes. Well, at least he was until now. Has someone implanted a chip in his brain? Would some functional adult please go and read the whole editorial and tell me that I wasn’t just hallucinating, because the world isn’t supposed to be like this. In truth, I am sort of hoping that I am just seeing things because if I am not then we at the Samizdata have to face the thorny problem of there being no more idiots left to denounce. What are we going to do then, for chrissakes??!! October 25th, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world knows it as Silicon Valley, a name coined in 1971 by the editor of a microelectronics newsletter; but on the Rand McNally Atlas it is the Santa Clara Valley, a 40-mile by 10-mile strip running from Palo Alto to the southern suburbs of San Jose, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. It constitutes just over one-third of the 1312-square-mile Santa Clara County. In 1950 it was the prune capital of America.
October 25th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thanks to Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas for the link to this, which says that peace may have broken out between India and Pakistan. They aren’t yet talking to each other about it, but touch wood, for the time being, they’re doing it.
I seem to recall not a disagreement exactly, more like a friendly exchange of his fears and of my hopes which both of us shared – “I hope I’m wrong”, “I hope I’m right”, that kind of stuff – between me and David Carr about India and Pakistan. The trouble with predicting peace and of then getting (a little slice of) it is that peace isn’t very newsworthy. War, on the other hand, gets absolutely everyone who ever told us so saying I told you so. So anyway, I told you so. Cue a nuclear attack by India. The Indians were withdrawing their forces because they didn’t want to bomb them. No, please, no. October 25th, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Brian has commented on a left/right difference in art punditry. I differ with what he said only because I’m uncertain it matches what he does and why he does it. His High Arts (and low!) commentary has been been a breath of fresh air. Artists, artist wannabees and art students like to write about art because that is what they do. It’s their passion. What they think about when life isn’t messily intruding on those More Important Things. A few years ago a large part of my writing would have been in the music biz vein. I was playing as near to professionally as I could afford to. At the moment I’m spending all my time with technology and still trying – badly I might add – to make a living. At times I wonder if tech should be the hobby… but then I talk to a friend whose record label is failing and whose tour gigs are falling off and I realize it doesn’t work well either way. Although I write a lot on technology and policy, catch me at the bar while a Rock gig is on (well, during the break when you can talk anyway – I always stand near the speakers) and I’ll talk your ear off about “the biz”. I drive my business partner up the pub wall at times. I point out the features of the electronic kit the lead guitarist is using, what keyboards they have, the qualities of various amps and speakers and of course the pros and cons of why CF Martin makes the best acoustic guitar, whether a Strat or an SG is a better electric and for what, direct feed versus amp miking etc. etc… I would posit libertarians are more like the Left when it comes to the arts. It’s the socially liberal side of the equation which we don’t share with the Right. Some who once thought they were Conservative may disagree. I ask them: “Why do you think you were politically homeless before you found us?” It’s because you weren’t Left and you didn’t fit on the Right. The vice-versa thing heppened to me on the Left. Libertarians are neither Right nor Left: go find a Nolan chart. We’re, well… sort of, you know… UP1. We’re the new kid on the ideological block and most of the writers in our corner have been philosophers, policy wonks and political pundits. Samizdata is out to change all that. Libertarians have a life style as open as the philosophy itself. We’re here to show that.  1 = Extra credit for those who recognize my literary misreference. October 25th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
My initial hopes, that the storming of a theatre just outside Moscow (the name of which doesn’t appear to be published anywhere, incidentally) by a gang of heavily-armed Chechenhawks was merely the execution of a piece of bizarre and shocking performance art, have now ebbed away.
As substitute for hope, I now have the tangibly queasy feeling that this is all going to end very badly. October 25th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I seem to recall some mention here of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Yes, here, in the comments. All who seek a painless way of learning a little more about this truly great man, and also about a rather interesting British broadcaster whom not all Samizdata readers will know much about, should read this Patrick Crozier piece for Biased BBC, which proves that Biased BBC is not itself nearly so biased as you might expect it to be. (Once again the blogger archive system is a deranged mess which blanks out the very piece you are trying to get to. All must move from Blogger to Movable Type. All, I say, all. So go to the top and scroll down to Wed Oct 23.) Patrick begins thus:
And I love this, towards the end of Patrick’s piece, about the end of Clarkson’s performance:
As I recall it Puck said he’d put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, and I don’t remember Brunel ever launching a satellite into earth orbit. But had he been around now he undoubtedly would have. Jeremy Clarkson, for the benefit of all you Americans, is a somewhat facetious but otherwise very capable, confident and good-humoured writer and TV broadcaster, mostly on the subject of cars. Politically Clarkson is a P. J. O’Rourke party-on libbo-rightie – O’Rourke also got a lot of his first writing assignments doing cars did he not? – and is definitely one of us. He gets right up the noses of all those whose noses we here want got up, so it’s very good news that Patrick reckons he did so well. All of this is in connection with a BBC search to find “the greatest Briton”, and you never know, Brunel might do quite well. Princess bloody Diana indeed. October 25th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The buzz started by the Two Blowhards about whether righties like art or not, etc., rumbles on most entertainingly. I particularly liked this posting. Here’s a few more pennies-worth from me. If you are a lefty, you believe in actively shaping the details of the big wide world out there. You and your friends are going to plan it, shape it, sculpt it, collectively and democratically if you are being nice about it. Therefore your opinions about everything, including art, are a public issue. If you prefer abstract impressionism to neo-realism, then you have a positive duty to say so, because when you have finally become the Benevolent Despot of Everything of Behalf of Everyone, your opinion is going to make a big difference to all those favoured or thwarted artists and art fans out there. Ditto your opinions about history, geography, biology, nuclear physics, literary criticism, sport, car design or car abolition, Linux-v-Windows-v-Mac, gay marriage, tupperware, who should or should not get the Nobel Peace Prize and who should or should not be allowed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. And when you finally realise that you aren’t going to be the Benevolent Despot of Everything on Behalf of Everyone, there remains the matter of badgering the person who is into giving political support to the art you approve of, and to everything else that you approve of, and dissing everything you want dissed. There are no boundaries to politics. Everything is political. Even the personal – in fact especially the personal, because that makes this quintessentially leftist point so strongly – is political. And then there’s the right, by which I mean me. Actually I don’t care for the word “right” to describe my noble and infinitely nuanced self, for all the usual libertarian reasons. Legalise drugs, hurrah for the international free migration of labour, blah blah blah. But the word refuses to detach itself from me. So yes, the Other Position I contrast with leftism is my own. → Continue reading: Art to the left – art to the right October 25th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I find it rather interesting the sniper and his boy sidekick were living in Tacoma Washington and doing target practice in their backyard as recently as January. I could not be the only one who remembers there was an al Q’aeda cell training in the wilderness there. One really has to assume the authorities are looking for connections between an Islamic sniper with US military quals and a training camp in his vicinity1. An FBI fellow interviewed by UK ITV News was certain the dastardly duo were working alone and doing this only for the money. I’m sure his statements must be as accurate and as correct as Official statements on the LAX shootings were. There certainly is a potential venue for Muhammad to have been recruited. He was a bodyguard for Nation of Islam and that would have flagged his name but good for those who might be looking for native trouble makers. There is no need to assume Nation of Islam has any association whatever with terrorism for this to be true. If I were al Q’aeda I’d be nosing around and infiltrating this ready made army with a classic old style Communist co-opt, take-over and purge in mind. If I were Louis Farakhan, I’d be watching my back very carefully. I am relieved these people are in the lockup, although no where near as relieved as people in the region are. I have many friends in both areas where they were killing people. One friend’s youngest daughter goes to school 3 blocks from the Ashland Ponderosa. This is the South and I would not be surprised if he was picking her up at school the last few days… with a bit of security hardware close to hand. Now we wait for the trial and see what connections come out in court. The State of Maryland will be seeking the death penalty and I doubt there will be any hue and cry over it. Marshmallows anyone? 1 =“in his vicinity” out in the West should be interpreted to mean “within a few hundred miles. As they say, there is nothing out there but miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles. Well, nothing other than a lot of trees, mountains, not-so-extinct volcanoes and the odd bear, wolf and mountain lion at least. October 24th, 2002 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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Update: Brendan has fixed his technical problems and is once again ‘with blog’.