So Saddam Hussain will be hanged… what is there left to say except ‘sic semper tyrannis’?
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Ordinary Britons struggling to get on with their lives are being menaced by a small number of bullies who do not care about the rights of their victims. These ‘Tsars’, as they are sometimes known, impose themselves and their lifestyle choices on others with an almost psychopathic disregard for other people’s viewpoints, and regardless of all attempts by police and others to maintain traditional values.
– according to The Independent on Sunday
As the same interview is (puzzlingly) slightly differently reported by the BBC. Anyone would think that the Indy report did not sound tough enough, and was re-spun for presentation to the Beeb. November 6th, 2006 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
This graphic novel V for Vendetta was first published as a comic book series which began in 1982. Many readers will laugh at author Alan Moore’s second-guessing of future history. In the story, the Thatcher government’s loss in the 1993 elections sets up a Labour government whose unilateral disarmament measures somehow keep Britain on the sidelines during a US-USSR nuclear confrontation. The war is triggered by an un-detailed situation analogous to the Cuban Missile Crisis – and there’s even a Kennedy in the White House (which Kennedy we are not told). Why a non-nuclear Africa gets wasted and a non-nuclear Britain survives is not explained. The likelihood of the next major event – the rise of the Norsefire party into power – is debatable. Post-holocaust Britain would still have a strong domestic military presence. It would have to be weakened significantly for an insurrection to succeed. The story mentions that there were several insurgent factions; perhaps Norsefire sat back while these multiple rebellions sapped the military of its strength. It is also possible that some of these insurgents drew their membership in part from the military. The story does accurately portray the function of a Fascist state. The church is nationalized but powerless, serving a mere ceremonial function. Surveillance cameras are everywhere (hey wait a minute, some social democracies are like that…) The government also conducts audio in addition to video espionage against its citizens. Separation of powers between executive, legislators, and judiciary is vastly diminished or non-existent. The economy is planned. Propaganda is pervasive. Citizens are forcibly resettled, and some like Evey are forcibly sent to work in certain industries. Undesirables are deported or incarcerated (and sometimes experimented upon). Policemen are granted latitude to allow certain criminals to ‘disappear’, as in Evey’s case. To formally prosecute her for prostitution makes it a matter of public record that the State is not meeting her economic needs as government propaganda promises. Enter V… His identity unknown, he is one of the last four survivors of the Larkhill Resettlement Camp, where he was subjected to medical experiments involving hormone injections. having escaped, he now dons a Guy Fawkes costume and is orchestrating a vendetta against the Fascist government. While Alan Moore himself allows the reader to determine whether or not V’s actions are warranted, many have described V as a morally ambiguous character. Such people are wrong; the direction of his moral compass is crystal clear. → Continue reading: Vendetta vs. Just War November 5th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Following on the pubs being leant on to fingerprint their customers and take names and addresses, another egregious example of police and licensing authorities clubbing together to force a business to stop its paying customers behaving in ways officialdom does not approve of.
– from VitalFootball.co.uk “Persistent standing”? I am no soccer fan as I abhor the tribalism of team sports, and it is really, really, dull to watch – almost as dull as horse- or motor-racing. I would not know about this at all but for Duleep Allilrajah’s column on Sp!ked. But is not leaping up and down, along with shouting and singing as part of a crowd, a significant part of football supporting? And unlike cheering and community singing, standing or sitting has no effect on the world outside the stadium. What has it got to do with anyone but the club and its supporters? Perhaps if I had taken more notice of soccer before now, I would have known of the existence ot the Football Licensing Authority, too. It is a public body created under Thatcher, for those tempted to idealise Britain before Blair. But we should all take notice of it now, because its imperial ambition is charted out on its website, a clear mission to tell everyone involved in doing or watching sport what to do:
One small mystery. Why should the Borough of Newham connive at undermining one of the poor borough’s richest sources of trade and employment? Could it be that the bureaucrats who seek such petty restrictions will get paid and pensioned from taxes raised in other places regardless of how blasted into feebleness the people in their care remain? Or are they just getting into practice to discipline the Olympics? November 5th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 5th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
South Korea finally surrenders to one of the finer features of modernity and legalises the miniskirt! 
Legal! November 4th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The advances in robotic vehicles due to the DARPA challenge prizes over the last few years has been nothing short of astounding. I am therefor slack-jawed at the congressional stupidity which has brought about this addition to the DARPA Urban Challenge press release:
I presume the problem with prizes is anyone from anywhere can enter and win it. This limits the usual opportunities for congressional corruption, or as I like to think of it, “Stevensing” (as in Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Ubercrook). I do hope some sanity breaks out in the Washington asylum. There are other Grand Challenges going on which have been generating simply amazing results. November 4th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Dutch town of Drachten, they have removed nearly all the traffic lights in a bold experiment that seems to be paying off. There was typically one road death every three years in Drachten but there have been none whatsoever since the traffic light removal began seven years ago.:
It is also nice to see the correct message from such examples starting to sink into a few brains in the mainstream media. Meanwhile back in Britain… November 4th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am sure at least most of you have heard of free and open source software. If not, I am not quite sure which part of the headwaters of the Rio Negro you are living on and how you managed to get your satellite internet link past the croc’s and piranha’s. You can be excused however, if you are unaware of the open source hardware movement. There are people out there designing everything from CPU’s to rocket engines in a global network but only the very plugged in are aware of these efforts. One stands above them all in my mind, and not just because I know a ‘kiwi’ who is one of the key participants: the Darwin open source replicator project. A replicator is a machine which cannot only make things, but can make copies of itself. In the ‘classical’ literature the macro versions of this are known as Von Neuman machines; in more recent decades most who keep up with such things have come to associate them with Drexlerian nanoscale replicators. The nanoreplicator may be decades away, but the first generation of macroscale open source replicators is already available and spreading. Darwin is not quite a full Von Neuman machine but it is a good start:
If you have some room to spare and want to play too, I suggest you join. Once there are enough of these gadgets around the world, I am sure there will be plenty of folks passing around the designs of all sorts of nifty things for you to build with it. Within a handful or two of decades we will build spaceships this way. November 4th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
On BBC News 24 TV this morning there was a tech show that was dominated by a report from the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’). After explaining how nasty some Korean people are in writing their opinions about other people, the BBC person said that the government of Korea was going to bring in a new law that would demand that anyone writing an opinion on to the internet would have to give their name and ID number. The only criticism of this new law (which I believe is going to come into effect next year) offered was “some people do not think it goes far enough”. I wonder if the ‘Federalist’ would have been written if ‘Publius‘ and the rest had to sign their correct names. Or ‘Cato’s letters‘ – or so many of the other great publications in history. Or indeed most opinion comments on this (or many other) internet sites. “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear by giving your right name” – I hope I do not have to explain how absurd that position is. Some people (such as me) really do not have anything to lose and can sign their name to any opinion they believe in – but most people have families, jobs, positions (and so on) and may sometimes wish to give their true opinion about a person or issue without putting their life on the line. I could mention historical examples to the BBC (some of which I mention above), but as the BBC people think (to judge by one show I watched) that the “tribes of Angles and Saxons” brought Christianity to “pagan Roman Britain” and (in the ads for another show) claimed that the war that brought Constantine to power had broken “centuries of peace” I do not think they would understand what I was talking about. I do not know whether it is the statism of the BBC or their lack of knowledge that bothers me more. November 4th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
– from Share and share alike by Christine Evans-Pughe on IEE Networks. (Thanks to the great Chris Lightfoot for pointing out this piece.) Naive foreigners with a belief in privacy and liberty may not understand that if in Britain you oppose state surveillance of just about everything, then you’ll be accused of wanting to protect people who torture and/or murder children. The article in passing explains how, if not why. November 4th, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Compare:
– Report in The Guardian this morning. With this, from a review by Stephen Fidler in the FT Magazine of MIchael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes:
November 4th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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