If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
– attributed to James Madison, as quoted here by Rand Paul
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Fears over NSA surveillance revelations endanger US cloud computing industry:
Of course it is highly unlikely that GCHQ or its French and German counterparts are actually any less intrusive, but that said, I suspect the budget for these organisation would not keep the NSA’s staff in Cheetos and RAM upgrades, so on that basis alone I suppose your data is probably safer anywhere but the USA. But the perception that the USA is the very worst option in the First World from a security perspective is now going to be very hard to change, whatever the truth of the matter. I did see this coming. August 9th, 2013 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Marmite… a dark pungent paste in a jar that has been separating men (of all ages) from mere boys (of all ages) since 1902… has once again shown they are The Food of the Gods.
Poor taste? Bah! Off with their heads! Often one can measure a person’s worth by who they piss off, be they Edward Snowdon (PBUHH) or… Mr. Marmite… it has to be Mr. as this is truly food-with-serious-bollocks. So here you go, Marmite my mate, some free advertising by Samizdata.net. Indeed some of us take our Marmite so seriously we have sterling silver lids to replace the ugly plastic ones that they have now rather than the earlier rather marvellous metal ones.
I recommend the Marmite XO for that extra Marmite wallop of gastrogasmic goodness, ideally with some really robust Cheddar. August 7th, 2013 | 60 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Snowden had gotten things his own way, he’d be writing earnest op-ed editorials in Hong Kong now, in English, while dining on Kung Pao Chicken. It’s some darkly modern act of crooked fate that has directed Edward Snowden to Moscow, arriving there as the NSA’s Solzhenitsyn, the up-tempo, digital version of a conscience-driven dissident defector. But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents. These thumb-fingered acts of totalitarian comedy are entirely familiar to anybody who has read Russian literature. The pigs in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” have more suavity than the US government is demonstrating now. Their credibility is below zero. The Russians, by contrast, know all about dissidents like Snowden. The Russians have always had lots of Snowdens, heaps. They know that Snowden is one of these high-minded, conscience-stricken, act-on-principle characters who is a total pain in the ass. – Bruce Sterling, who I think has his own head up his arse half the time (my god he is still clinging to the Climate Change shtick and is thus as credulous as many of the people he is inclined to mock)… but Sterling is nevertheless always a fun read because in addition to being half wrong, it is also (generally) half right. August 4th, 2013 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The first problem I have when I read of ‘austerity’, meaning less state spending… is that the amount the state is spending is not really going down at all, it is just getting moved around a bit. But there is a second definitional problem I have with this term ‘austerity’ as it is being used. When I see members of the kleptocratic classes, the receivers of appropriated state largess, describe less public spending as ‘austerity’, I often wonder if such people regard the steadily lessening rates of burglary in the UK as also being a long term trend towards ‘austerity’. Look at it this way: people are (allegedly) having less of their property appropriated by burglars, which means the burglars have less of your money to spend. So clearly this means society is experiencing ‘austerity’, as you, in your un-burgled household, get to keep more of your own property and spend more of your own money, rather than having it spent by someone else. So… less people having their stuff taken away from them by the state, and by burglars (but I repeat myself)…. that is ‘austerity’, right? August 4th, 2013 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
… this is not really about porn, other than very tangentially. And it is not even about pederasty or terrorism or any of those nasties that we tend to agree are Rather Bad Things and which get trotted out at the first sign of opposition to the rapidly coalescing Panopticon. No, it is about exactly the same things that induced the Chinese state to put the so called Great Internet Wall of China in place. It is about political control, pure and simple, which a very substantial number of people support. Indeed most people who works in a government job think what they do is sufficiently important to justify having any information that they want about you. So Jimmy, this is not really about porn at all. August 3rd, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Top Conservative Lord Howell sparks fury over ‘desolate and uninhabited’ North claim… …trumpets the headline in that paragon of Little England statism, the Daily Express. This is because Lord Howell thinks fracking for gas in the north of England would actually be a good idea given that most of its inhabitants are goats and seagulls. As a quick glance at this map indicates, he called the North of England ‘desolate and uninhabited’ because it is, er, desolate and pretty damn uninhabited.
Well I have no idea if Lord Howell has ever been up north but I have and yeah, it is desolate and uninhabited for the most part and many of the inhabited bits are ugly as hell. So I am very much in favour of fracking the fracking hell out of it. July 30th, 2013 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
So sayth Gethin Chamberlain in The Observer. Well… seeing as he puts it that way… I suppose it would be better if these Third World folks were unemployed (and thereby provide a lower carbon footprint of course, not to mention gainful employ for First World NGOs involved in the Pity & Guilt Industry) and depending for their survival on First World aid money, disbursed via their government. The important thing is that The Islington Set can feel good about increasing the price of clothes for the British lumpenproletariat… and just remember that a lot of those bastards with their false consciousness and lack of class awareness voted for Thatcher back-in-the-day! Of course much the same was said about The Dark Satanic Mills of the industrial revolution. But just as in India, people moved into the ghastly factories of the Midlands and elsewhere because it was better than the subsistence of grinding rural poverty… and this ultimately led to the technological mass affluence of today that has taken the vast majority of humankind beyond one-failed-harvest-from-starvation. July 28th, 2013 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I read this…
… I was moved to say that this Perry is very much in favour of Guido using the courts to kick the living hell out of that Perry, the thuggish ‘Honourable’ member for Devizes. Put the boot in, Guido! July 25th, 2013 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
There you have left-wing hypocrisy in a nutshell. When a government official like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg tries to reduce the public consumption of sugary beverages with a tax that makes the drinks more expensive, he’s a public health hero. But when it’s a profit-generating company that stands accused of increasing beverage costs, it’s a greedy manipulative Wall Street blood-sucker. July 23rd, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The dependably nauseating David Cameron is demanding a massive infrastructure for internet censorship… oh to protect the children, of course. And also of course, this is not really about porn… that is a bare faced lie. It is about political control. The state wants to easily be able to log what you look at and to easily block access to whatever it deems ‘unacceptable. The notion any government can be trusted with the infrastructure to control what people can see is madness. July 22nd, 2013 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the USA there as been a high profile case involving a neighbourhood watch person by the name of George Zimmerman, a half-Hispanic, half-White man who killed a young black man called Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder and indeed the jury also declined to find him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter as well. This seems to have sparked gasps of disbelief and protests from left-of-centre commentators and the racial identity industry. I only know what I read in the mainstream media, and previously felt no need to comment on a foreign murder trial as I had no opinion on the subject of the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman. I was not privy to anything beyond the usual reportage and concluded that case would all come down the the minutia of corroborating evidence that you really needed to be the courtroom to see and hear. So my question is… so what do these people know that the jury did not know? Why exactly are they protesting the verdict? I have not read any coherent arguments as to why the jury in this case got it wrong. July 15th, 2013 | 102 comments - (Comments are closed)
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