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There is a new law in France that every car must carry a breathalyser so that drivers can test themselves and see if they are fit to drive. Call me a cynic if you like but I strongly suspect that certain law makers may well have significant pecuniary interests in… … the country’s two companies that make these breathalyser sets July 1st, 2012 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It may be a minor thing but why oh why do people who cover the world’s conflicts seem to have so little technical knowledge of the subject they cover? I saw an article in the Telegraph with an image captioned “This image made from amateur video released by the Shaam News Network, purports to show a Syrian military tank in Homs, Syria”… except it is clearly not a “tank”, it is a BMP… an infantry fighting vehicle. This is not new. I spent much of the 1990’s in various parts of the former Yugoslavia and was often exasperated to grab a western newspaper in Zagreb and see pictures of “Croatian tanks”… which more often than not captured former Yugoslav OT M-60 APCs pressed into service by the Croatian, HVO or BiH armies… or even rather exotic Croatian improvised armoured personnel carriers (in effect armoured trucks with a machine gun). More recently I also recall a clip on CNN describing “British tanks” in Iraq that were in fact AS-90 artillery vehicles. It seems odd to me that so few modern war correspondents are ex-military and thus, with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan, far too many of them cannot tell the difference between a Mauser and a javelin (and neither can their editors it seems). This is certainly why I find Michael Yon so refreshing… he actually understands what he is looking at up the sharp end. June 29th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of our commenters has made what I think is a very important point about the rapidly snowballing ‘Fast & Furious’ scandal that may well consume the Obama presidency:
– Samizdata commenter ‘Disillusionist’ making a very germane point about the ‘Fast & Furious’ scandal. June 23rd, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
… may cause some system response latency in the Samizdata primary data meat buffer. I am attending The State of the Net conference in Trieste so in between listening to fellow Samizdatista Adriana Lukas explain why all why “all yer hierarchies are belong to us” and doing my bit to drain Europe’s wine lakes, there may be some delays in clearing comments caught in SmiteBot’s merciless jaws. June 22nd, 2012 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometimes useful insights about the state of the world comes from sources very far removed from the dismal mainstream media. This was taken from Knight Frank estate agency promotional bumf stuck through my door yesterday under the title “What nationalities are buying in your area?”
Yup. We may be fucked but we are less fucked than you. June 20th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 20th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
[Greek government policy is] known as ‘drinking your way back to sobriety’. The deficit spending the Greek government wants to do is almost-entirely suppressive or neutral to GDP – it is spending by government, for government, on government. The population is shrinking, their internal revenue picture is already dreadful and only getting worse (because they have the worst ratio of producers to consumers of tax funding in the civilized world, and getting worser) and the only way any government of Greece can survive and keep the mayhem in the streets down to acceptable levels is to restore the drunken-sailor approach to public spending that got them into trouble in the first place. This means 14 monthly pension checks a year, retirement at 50 for workers in hazardous trades like hairdressing, and all the other 1,001 ways they managed to bankrupt themselves already. – Serial commenter llamas June 18th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Greek electorate is in denial. It rejects austerity, but insists on keeping the euro. All the main parties duly parroted what voters wanted to hear, making for a fantasy election, a make-believe election, a fingers-in-my-ears-I-can’t-hear-you election. The only list which was honest about the necessary cuts – a coalition of three liberal parties – failed to gain a single seat. June 18th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
If anyone ever had any hopes that Boris was any different to the dreary authoritarians who populate the system, this should lay such notions to rest. He is very much ‘one of them‘. He purports to have ‘libertarian instincts’ and yet thinks the role of the state should extend to telling people at gun point what they can eat. To hell with taking a moral position and respecting self ownership, says Boris, what are the utilitarian arguments? A vote for this man was sadly a vote for more of the same regulatory statism that spews out of the political class. June 11th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the United States, as elsewhere, groups plotted to better themselves without consideration for others or the nation as a whole. They were encouraged by an aggregation of incongruous theories called the New Deal, which put the nation $40,000,000into debt and in some departments degenerated into a money-oiled machine for keeping politicians in power. Chiselling public funds, once the prerogative of politicians, became the aim of millions. The formula that citizens must not starve in a land of plenty became for many a means of living off the government rather than by the sweat of the brow. – Upton Close (Josef Washington Hall): “1930-40: Decade of Deceit” June 4th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 25th, 2012 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
…the state is not your friend. Ira Stoll over on Reason.com has an excellent article drawing the obvious parallel between the Nazi era Reichsfluchsteuer tax imposed on fleeing Jews and the ‘exit taxes’ being imposed on US subjects seeking to leave the USA. Read the whole thing. May 22nd, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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