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At long last I have managed to scrape out a half hour of free time to bring you some samples of a marvellous event. Although it was the LA County Airshow, it was no where near LA the city. LA County is probably the size of some small countries and certainly contains more environments.  The Bitcoin L-39 shows they are doing well and are my kind of people!  The BitCoin L-39 pilot seemed to have a penchant for flying upside down and spent a lot of his time in that attitude. April 6th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have been watching the ‘Sad Puppies’ campaign in the world of science fiction and fantasy writers for a while now, with mounting amusement. If you are unaware what it is, think of it as a backlash against the overt cultural Marxist ‘Social Justice Warrior’ clique who have been dominating the Hugo Awards for many years now. Well this year it looks like some folks are aiming to blow up the SJW Death Star. Several on the left have remarked the sudden slew of anti-authoritarian nominees has been due to an influx of GamerGate supporters. Yet as the number of votes has only increased slightly, it would appear the GamerGate people were already there, they just finally decided to stand up, form two ranks and figuratively shoulder their Martini-Henry rifles, whilst facing the podium occupied by the establishment. Anyone who thinks the Culture War is unwinnable or not even being fought by our side is not paying attention. April 5th, 2015 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
“America is the world’s most successful economy because it is a democracy”, sayeth Iain Martin. I am not convinced.
But it is liberty, not democracy, that brings these things. It is constitutionally separated powers and limited government, which is to say limiting the scope for democratically impelled politics, that enables people to challenge established business models. And those limits on what government can do are in precipitous decline in the USA (and elsewhere) regardless of ‘democracy’… and often because of it. A great many people are quite happy to vote for excessive government power and more ‘free stuff’ that other people will have to pay for. April 5th, 2015 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stop calling what happened in Kenya a ‘tragedy‘. A bridge collapsing is a tragedy. A house burning down is a tragedy. Dying from Ebola is a tragedy. What happened at Garissa University in north-eastern Kenya was an atrocity. People did this on purpose. April 4th, 2015 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you are an adult and want to work as a model in France, the French government will decide if the way you look is appropriate in their view. And if not, the people who hired you will be fined or jailed. April 4th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The dismal forces are indeed massing as I predicted. That well documented fountain of fraudulent claims the NSPCC and all the usual dismal censors, from assorted statists of the nominal right like Sajid Javid, to the usual leftists are indeed starting to metastasise into another effort to control the internet. For the children of course. We need products than make proxy servers and geolocation spoofing default-easy for the 95 IQ user, something people just use because it is cheap and largely invisible… with end to end encryption and all those other things that states hate integrated in at the lowest level possible. April 4th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The downside of zero inflation is that it does nothing to erode the value of debt, much of which is denominated in money terms. If your mortgage is £100,000 and the price level doubles, its real value has fallen to only £50,000. The world is still burdened with excessive debt, which is a worry for policy-makers. But a low inflation world forces them to confront this issue honestly, and not try to evade it by using the subterfuge of inflation. Of course it is only a ‘downside’ if you are in debt, it is an upside if you are a saver and lender. April 3rd, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
… and in order to fit in better with the people around you, feel the need to blast off about ten IQ points, you are in luck! Just watch this from our good chums over at the BBC. It is an experience a bit like holding a live piranha to the side of your head. April 2nd, 2015 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Libertarians on Reddit are calling out an executive order from Obama that appears to allow the federal government to seize property from anyone who donates money to anyone that the federal government does not like. The New York Times makes it sound far more reasonable and mundane. How bad is it? April 2nd, 2015 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The horror in Kenya is almost beyond belief. Almost. One hundred and forty seven dead, mostly Kenyan university students. I wonder how ‘the west’ will get blamed for this one? April 2nd, 2015 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Back in the 1986, we actually had that bastion of idiotarianism, Channel Four, run a program called “The New Enlightenment: the rebirth of liberalism”, about Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman et al. But I would have never guessed that in 2015 we would be experiencing a New Endarkenment. Fuck you. No seriously, fuck every last one of you who turned off those lights and made parts of glorious London look like North Korea. Well my house was a gleaming beacon I can assure you, with every single light turned on. Maybe I will purchased some searchlights for next year’s endarkenment. Yeah, this is my ‘hang over’ from ‘Earth Hour’ rather than this incident per se. April 2nd, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was ill recently. In the end it was “just a virus” but I had symptoms enough one Saturday that I braved the local NHS walk-in centre. This is where you end up if you have the bad manners to get ill on a weekend. It was functional, in its way. I was told there would be an hour-and-a-half wait and that is what it was. There are no doctors, only nurses, but they are skilled enough to determine whether you are likely to survive until Monday, or so I imagine. But the economics of this kind of place are such that every body through the door is nothing but a drain on resources, and no-one is making any effort to conceal this fact. Truly it is a miserable place to be. I do not expect a medical waiting room to be jolly, but I saw not the merest hint of a smile from any staff, and the receptionist was very grumpy about my address being out of date on her computer. There is no welcome; no sympathy; no bedside manner. If you want to find a deep root cause of problems with the NHS, I submit the inevitable hatred of the staff for the burdensome customers. Here is another piece of evidence: when I said “thank-you” to the nurse, she replied, “you’re welcome.” April 1st, 2015 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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