“The sexual conservative’s true hypocrisy is that he doesn’t really believe in his own idealisation. Men will be inflamed by the sight of hair, women will bear other men’s children at the fall of a veil, boys will suddenly cast off the tedious ways of heterosexuality and put on the gaudy garb of gayness. In truth, sexual conservatives wants to make everyone else pay for their own dark thoughts.”
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I get the feeling that the next general election in Britain could be the first one to be seriously altered in its overall result by the internet. I definitely hope so. My ideal result would be for Gordon Brown and David Cameron and that LibDem guy all to emerge from the election feeling equally humiliated, and all sounding like they are on the same side, that of Big Politics, while all the conviction parties, the silly parties, including silly conviction parties whose silly convictions are the absolute opposite of my own convictions, do far better than they were supposed to and compared to the amount of and nature of the mainstream media coverage that they got. In particular, I hope that UKIP does really well. I’ve heard the complaints about this party, most of which boil down to the claim that they are all just too weird. But scratch any active participant in any political party and pretty soon the weirdness spills out. My feeling-stroke-wishful-thinking along these lines is based on seeing things like this: I came across that here, a few days ago. It’s basically a greatest hits compilation of UKIP snippets taken from the European Parliament, mostly about Climategate, with a few bits from some internet TV show in the USA spliced in. I particularly like the Liverpudlian guy. That EU Parliament is an odd place. People make these little speeches in it, which almost none of the people present pay any great attention to, but which, on YouTube, can sometimes escape into the wild, to the point where mainstream media non-coverage becomes impossible to sustain. More fundamentally, even if such non-coverage persists, as I expect it to persist at least until the forthcoming general election, so what? More and more people can now receive such messages as these anyway. Enough to embarrass Brown, Cameron and Whatsisname? Maybe. As I say, I do hope so. January 5th, 2010 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I thought this might interest and rile up some of our readers, many of whom I expect are as great fans of Michael Yon as I am:
He was not at all pleased by the treatment and has written:
When, I ask you, are we going to FIRE these un-american, untrained, brainless, worthless, useless apes? (I beg forgiveness if I offend any of our near relatives by use of this comparison. Great Apes are marvelous creatures.) Of course, they might have to go on welfare if we fired them because no one but a government bureaucracy would be stupid enough to hire people whose only contribution to America will be their retirement. Mad? You are damned right I am mad. The TSA and INS are out of control. Disband it. Fire them all. NOW, DAMN IT!!! New info from Yon in addition to the above on FB: “The Customs people (CBP) were the actors who handcuffed me.” January 5th, 2010 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
By the time the ‘evacuation’ bus delivered Rand Simberg and I to the parking lot of the Mariah Hotel, the wind was far worse. ‘They call the Hotel, Mariah’, Rand quipped on the bus. The wind, however, was more like raging beast. The car was just around back and we had to lean into the sandblast. Rand thought there might be a party over at the XCOR hanger, but it was rather dark when we arrived. I was unconvinced anyone was still there and stayed in the car. Rand got out to knock on the office door and somehow managed to do so without being carried aloft like some Wizard of Oz character. So. No joy on Plan A. Plan B perhaps? The spaceport bar at the Mariah? So, back we went. It turned out this was where the action was tonight. We did a quick turn of the downstairs and found Alan Boyle at work near the Christmas tree in the Mariah lobby. He worked so much today he must still have been sober.  Alan was transported from tent to hotel without missing a keystroke. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved While Rand went off to see who else was around, I took a few lobby photos and examined the rather interesting hotel trophy case.  Yep, this is the spaceport hotel… Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved When Rand did not turn up again after a few minutes I went looking and naturally found him with another journalist in the bar. Where else do you find journalists? (Except Alan of course.) They type, they drink and therefore they are. I must admit my photos went rapidly down hill in quality. By the end of the night the results were about as blurred as what I was actually seeing. Remember, we had free Absolut and wine all day… this was just the after the party party! It was around this time I heard the evacuation was not just precautionary: the tents had been demolished by the winds.  Len David and Rand Simberg at the Spaceport Bar. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Pretty much everyone was there, including Burt Rutan and Richard Branson.  Sir Richard hung out in the Spaceport Bar with a few hundred close friends. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Since Mojave is the first official commercial spaceport, I am guessing that makes the Mariah Hotel bar the very first official spaceport bar!  The first spaceport bar. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Mostly we stayed in our quiet corner: not too crowded there and the bar staff kept full bottles in our hands. Misuzu Onuki, designer of fashion for space travelers, joined us for awhile. It was impossible to get a candid shot of her as she is just too camera aware! This is not to mention that, by this time, it was surprising I could even find the shutter button…  Barb Sprungman, Len David and Misuzu Onuki. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Although the party showed little sign of slowing down, we had a long trip ahead of us. Rand pointed me down the hallway towards the front door, but I stopped in the front room to thank Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn for a marvelous time. I also noticed Sir Richard was still hanging out and seemed to be enjoying himself thoroughly. He was in a small knot of folk talking in the back of the room.  Yep, this is just as I remember seeing it…. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved When we arrived back in LA, I posted my Samizdata teaser story and got into an online chat with one of my friends from the Mojave community. She asked if I felt like helping with the hunt for designer jackets tomorrow morning at the spaceport East fence… This is the last of a series of 7 articles on the SpaceShipTwo roll out at the Mojave Spaceport. The previous article is here January 4th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
An Islamic group called islam4uk, who are a front organisation for the islamo-fascist group al-Muhajiroun, want to march through Wootton Bassett carrying “symbolic coffins” as a protest against the ongoing British participation in the Afghan civil war against the Taliban. My suggestion is that the good people of Wootton Bassett reply by throwing “symbolic bricks” at the Islamo-fascist protesters, should they actually ever march down that town’s streets. Just symbolic bricks of course, made of sponge cake… or maybe bricks of good English bacon or Danish butter as I am sure the cheerful chaps of al-Muhajiroun will get the joke… not real bricks, because we do not want any Islamo-fascists to get their brains bashed out by our jolly japes… well, not whilst they are in Britain at least. But what I would really like to see is for Islam4uk carry out a march carrying symbolic coffins through a street in beautiful downtown Bazarak in Panjshir Province in Afghanistan. Just about everyone there is a muslim, so what could possibly go wrong, eh? Go on, guys, give it a try. January 4th, 2010 | 69 comments - (Comments are closed)
I pretty much endorse this list, over at Big Hollywood, of the 10 worst films of the past 10 years, although I am sure Samizdata readers will come up with some more for their own lists. I did not see No Old Country For Old Men, which is one of the derided films on the list, but the way that certain reviewers wrote about it, meant I just knew it was the sort of pretentious, nihilistic waste of several hours that the writer in the article I have linked to said it was. Plus I happen to think the Coen brothers are a bit over-rated anyway, although I quite enjoyed Fargo. As for the best 10 films of the past decade, name your choices. For my part, I would say that two films I saw last year – The Wrestler and Gran Torino – deserve to be on such a list. Here are my other choices: The Aviator – the biopic of Howard Hughes. Serenity – Okay, it helps to have seen the Firefly TV series first, but even so, a fine film. Casino Royale – Despite some flaws, it marked a triumphant reboot of 007 on the screen. Ian Fleming would have approved. Sideways – A funny comedy set in California’s wine country. My tour of Napa and Sonoma was not quite as eventful. Spirited Away – Proof that Miyazaki remains one of the world’s greatest animators and film artists. The Incredibles – I loved this film and much of its sense of life. The “designer” character is a hilarious combo of fashionista and Ayn Rand. Gladiator – “Upon my signal, unleash hell”. The film that made Russell Crowe a megastar. The Lives of Others – Brilliant film set in former East Germany, demonstrating the utter evil that is done in the name of the “surveillance state”. January 3rd, 2010 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reason magazine’s Nick Gillespie – writing in the WSJ – has a nice article up about how the ‘Noughties (sorry, I cannot think of a better term) have been generally miserable ones for those concerned about liberty and constraining government. He also has a few predictions for the next 10 years. Even leaving aside the response to 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments have lost few chances to find reasons, or excuses, to tax, monitor and generally annoy us. I love this paragraph:
Nudity as a condition of air travel. There’s an idea to conjure with on this cold Sunday afternoon. January 3rd, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Our exercise program can dramatically improve a woman’s sexual performance,” says Olga Nikitina, 40, the founder of the School for VUM-Building in central Moscow. “She can transform herself from a slow Russian car like a Lada into a Ferrari.” To disguise the fact that the equipment really does look like it belongs in a car-mechanic’s workshop – it’s all pressure gauges and rubber hoses – the school’s two rooms are painted pink and blue; stuffed animals model phallic devices. “Once a woman reaches optimal fitness, she can shoot a fountain of water up out of her vagina in the bath,” boasts Nikitina, a ponytailed blonde in a leopard-print top. The core device is a small silicone balloon that is inserted in the vagina and inflated with a pneumatic pump. “You squeeze against the balloon and measure the pressure on the attached gauges,” says Nikitina. Fine-tuning can be achieved by learning to shoot out pebbles onto a metal target. – Russian women learning how to get – and to keep – rich and generous husbands (with thanks to Instapundit) January 2nd, 2010 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a recent discussion on climate change I mentioned what I call the coming carbon collapse, that point at which human generated carbon emissions go to zero or even negative. If you wondered what I was talking about, here is just one of the technologies roaring down the tracks at us in 2010, brought to you courtesy of the Hero of the Capitalist Revolution who beat the socialist Human Genome Project to completion. January 1st, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ho hum! The letter is barking mad but it still needs hours of constructing a careful response, the net effect of which will be the same as two Anglo Saxon words. – Richard North responds to a lawyers‘ letter in a comment on this posting. My thanks to Bishop Hill for an email that got me noticing this latest twist in the Climategate saga a little sooner than I otherwise would have. January 1st, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The TSA is such a useless organization, they have to ‘beat up on’ bloggers with kids! Is there not some adage about the sort of men who beat their wives? That they do so because they are trying to cover up their feelings of inadequacy by showing off their ‘power’? Why do we not just disband this worthless organization and admit it never has been nor will be of any use whatever? January 1st, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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