If I were his lawyer, I would point out that using a government office for having sex with his secretary was far less ruinous for Britain than how he might otherwise have been using it. While Prescott was harmlessly fucking his secretary, the rest of the cabinet were probably hatching schemes to make us all line up and be fingerprinted. Put it this way: would you rather he was shafting his secretary, or the nation? We got off lightly.
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Once again the ‘we know whats best’ brigade is out in force, targeting pharmacutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. They are upset about some obscure point of medical research. However the tactics that they are employing are rather sinister, even for the creepy ‘animal rights’ fraternity.
GlaxoSmithKline has set up an information page for shareholders, which is welcome. However the company is deserving of censure, or, indeed, of a right-royal kick in the bollocks over this matter. Shareholders have a right to privacy and how the animal rights fanatics managed to obtain shareholder details is a question that the company should make great efforts to find out the answer to. Given the highly emotive and irrational nature of the animal-rights lobby, this is not a matter that GlaxoSmithKline should be taking lightly. May 9th, 2006 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Flicking through the Reason blog, Hit & Run, I came across the link to the recent appearance by Reason’s editor, Nick Gillespie, on the O’Reilly Factor. Gillespie argues that it is silly to pass a law stating that folk should sing the national anthem of the United States in English. I agree (it is not exactly a Top Government Priority), although I would have thought that immigrants, if their intentions are to make a long-term home in their adopted country, should value it enough to try and speak the local language. Language is a part of assimilation. If I went to live in France, I would expect to learn the language, even if I spoke in an atrocious accent. But passing laws to force language is silly. That said, I do not think Gillespie helped his case by what I thought was a singularly boorish performance on the show. Not a great advert for libertarianism. Virginia Postrel would have never acted like that, and she is much better looking. May 8th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Techdirt points to a story in the Toronto Star about three Canadian hackers who have created a software work-around for China’s ‘great firewall’. The subtle irony is that the hackers’ solution, called Psiphon, is inherently cooperative:
One has to love the idea of the failure of the enforced, monolithic collective inspiring genuine, entrepreneurial cooperation. The fact, as Techdirt points out, that three hackers are able to out-perform a cast of 30,000 censors also suggests another truth: that freedom is always cheaper and more efficient than oppression. May 8th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am presently on a Singapore airlines Boeing 747 over Afghanistan, on my way back to London from Australia. The aircraft has in flight WiFi. It is for-pay WiFi, but I could not resist. Looking at the physical geography of the place, I really do wonder what the Soviets were thinking when they thought that they could invade and subdue the country. (And what exactly was the point, anyway? What did they have to gain?) More importantly than that perhaps was that the WiFi is not really that expensive. I am paying $9.99 for an hour, two hours is $14.95, and it gets cheaper from there. (Up to $26.95 for a 24 hour pass, which would just about manage the entire trip from Australia to England). Given that they are managing WiFi in an aircraft, and some sort of link to the ground (presumably via satellite) I can not really complain about the cost. Intriguingly, this is actually less than my local Starbucks charges for WiFi access. Given that the total cost to them of offereing the service is one £50 router and a £ 25 a month ADSL connection that they probably have already, I think that somebody has their pricing wrong. May 8th, 2006 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The price of undue restraint in war is always paid in the blood of your own soldiers. The Moqtada al-Sadr’s ‘Mahdi Army’ has previously given the US/UK forces all the justification it ever needed to crush them militarily and put Sadr’s head on a pike for all to see. He took up arm against the British and Americans, his people killed allied troops and yet rather than wipe out his supporters when they were cornered in Najaf, crushing his organisation once and for all and removing him from the political equation by putting a bullet in his head, he was allowed to make a deal , rejoin the political process and rebuild his armed strength. And now the price for that idiotic restraint is being paid. It was demonstrated when Sadr’s militia were allowed to just walk away free at Najaf after making a few empty promises to lay down their arms in order to end the fighting, that the consequences of taking on the allies in Iraq are not military annihilation with no possibility of being accepted as a legitimate political figure. On the contrary in fact, so not surprisingly Iraq’s warlords see little downside to strengthening their credentials with nationalist and Islamist elements by taking intermittent swipes at allied troops in the knowledge they can always mend fences later of the US or UK looks like they are putting them under serious military pressure or if they corner more of your people than you can afford to just write off. May 7th, 2006 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 7th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
City Journal, the New York-based magazine, is rapidly turning into one of my favourite reads (many of its articles are now on-line). It carries writers of wit and grace on all manner of issues, many on education, urban life and business. It is now, in my view, streets ahead (‘scuse the pun) of the Spectator, which lost the plot under the editorship of Boris Johnson, whom I now regard frankly as a twerp. City Journal ranks alongside the rejuvinated Atlantic Monthly and Prospect magazine as a place to go for having one’s views challenged and stretched. I strongly recommend the latest issue, which has an appreciation of the late writer, Jane Jacobs, who helped take apart the case for centralised planning of towns, and a review of the life of Robspierre, and a must-read piece on Iran by Mark Steyn, who happily is still churning out great material despite parting ways with the Telegraph Group. May 6th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the oldest refrains of those who bash capitalism is that speculators are bad people, inflating the ‘true’ price of X or Y from its supposed ‘correct’ level. It is no surprise that at the moment, those who speculate in the market for oil and other sought-after commodities like copper and gold are getting a lot of abuse. I guess they can take it. As I mentioned in this post on the same issue of the oil price, the level that crude oil is fetching in the market has been pushed to high levels for a whole host of reasons, with speculation playing a part, but not necessarily the major part. In any field of endeavour where there are different appetites for taking on risk, you will get speculators. Speculators take the risk of a price going up or down that others are unwilling, for whatever reason, to shoulder. If it were not for speculators trading in those mysterious things like interest rate swaps or futures, I would not be able to have a fixed-rate mortgage on my house, for example. At the moment, hedge funds and other operators are willing to bet that the price of oil will go higher, and presumably could get cleaned out if the price turns, on say, a sudden discovery of a major oil reserve, an outbreak of peace in the Middle East, return to political sanity in Venezuela, or whatever. So just as one should not weep over the losses speculators make, it would be equally foolish to carp about the gains they are making now. As for the Greens, they ought to be praising those strange-sounding investment vehicles called hedge funds. By pushing up oil to near $75 per barrel, they are doing their bit to show the folly of taking one’s children to school in those small trucks called SUVs, leaving the lights on all day and shunning alternative forms of energy. No wonder the share prices of alternative energy firms and even the nuclear sector are looking promising. UPDATE: And this guy does not think much of the economic grasp of New York legal blowhard Elliot Spitzer, on a related topic. May 6th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most folks on holiday like to unwind, relax, and take it easy. This means that tourists are not always the global community’s best behaved citizens. Now, as China increasingly enters the mainstream community of nations, Beijing is worried about the behavior of Chinese abroad.
I much prefer social pressures then state ones to stamp out anti-social behaviour. The more Chinese people see of the world, the less they are likely to indulge in anti-social behaviour. I must confess the sooner people anywhere give up spitting (and chewing gum), the happier I will be, however. May 6th, 2006 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
I finally managed to herd my Conference Coordinating Committee together to review a 2008 conference proposal and am somewhat less pushed for time the rest of the day. I am of course deep into sleep deprivation but that is a normal part of life at an ISDC, something I have learned to deal with over the 20 or so of the 25 I have attended. Our collaboration with Planetary Society has been wildly successful and a pleasure to both parties. Buzz Aldrin had a lively luncheon, including an hysterical fighter jock type joke which I will not quote in order to save his historical reputation. Buzz has been down to the Titanic and up to the North Pole and is now trying to get a hydrogen fueled Hummer drive at the South Pole. When Hugh Downs got up to leave he called to Buzz at the podium to count him in. There is simply so much going on here I wish I had time to tell you more, process raw images, give more anecdotes. I feel like I am cheating you of the wondrousness of the week and the people and exhibits and talks. A full time live blogger could not cover it enough, let alone someone who is tied up in Society managment, committee and board meetings, organizational shmoozing and such. Also, please forgive errors in spelling, punctuation and whatever else I manage to screw up while racing to get information on line during stolen moments May 6th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Shana Dale, the NASA Deputy Administrator (and also a rather nice looking southern gal), announced a set of Challenge prizes for lunar lander technology. Not dry as lunar dust stuff, but real flying hardware to compete at the Las Cruces Race for Space this coming October. There are two levels of prize with different rewards. The competition will be held again next year if any awards are not made this year. The first level has a first prize of $350,000 and a second prize of $150,000 for a vehicle to make a vertical take off, climb to 50 meters; stay in hover for at least 90 seconds; translate 300 meters and land on a designated landing point. They may then optionally refuel before taking off again and doing the same in reverse. If more than one contestant manages the flights, placement is based on how close they landed to the designated point. If there is a tie, there will be a shoot out… the vehicle to do the most trips in an alloted time will be the winner. Level Two is a bit harder and the prizes are $1,250,000 first; $500,000 second and $250,000 third place. For this money the must take off vertically take off, go up 50 feet; hover for 180 seconds; translate 300 meters and land in a wild bit of terrain in which remote pilotage is allowed. This is the first NASA competition with a prize over a million dollars. They appear to be doing this right. They are working with people who handled the successful Anseri X-Prize with Burt Rutan won; it will be a great spectacle for the watching crowds at the rocket races; and it will as a side effect also boost earth based private launch technology. With some luck I will be there to watch and record the competition this fall. Personally, I would put my bet down on Jon Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace. May 5th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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