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September 13th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One of the blogosphere’s brightest lights, Michael Totten, once again finds himself up the sharp end and brings some interesting reportage from Georgia. If you are interested in the real chronology of events and understanding why Russia, not Georgia, is the prime mover of this regional tragedy, check out his article. August 27th, 2008 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The sheer number of articles suggesting that we are seeing a return to the day of the ‘Cold War’ are such that frankly I cannot even be bothered to link to one. Certainly the Russian Bear has been more overtly unfriendly as of late, and I do think Russia needs to be taken seriously in the way any collection of armed thugs need to be taken seriously. However it is absurd to contend that Russia as a long term threat in the way the Soviet Union threatened the world for more than fifty years. Hapless Russia has a near mono-culture economy (GDP the size of Italy, for gawd’s sake) and catastrophic demographics that make Europe seem like a stud-farm (Germany, Poland and Austria more or less total the same population as Russia’s ‘hordes’). The appropriate personification for Russia circa 2008 is not an oil fuelled Genghis Khan, threatening to surge once more across Eurasia… no, it is more like a drunk with a knife unable to admit they have terminal liver disease… a vodka fuelled Genghis Khan’t if you will. Surely a policy of political containment is really all that is needed while nature, rust and liver sclerosis on a Biblical scale do the rest. Probably the most damaging thing we could do to hasten the deflation of the absurd delusions of the thuggish Russian political class would be to make it easier for young Russians, and Russian money, to get the hell out of Russia and move west. August 18th, 2008 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday in the British Press, much was made of the THREAT TO NUKE POLAND… well, really? What the Ruskies are saying is not “if you allow these systems on your soil, we will nuke you”, but rather “in the event of a war between NATO and Russia, we will attack military targets in Poland, which is a NATO member”. Well no shit? This is hardly a revelation. Yet to read many of the article headlines you would think it was a clear and present danger, which it clearly ain’t. Move along, not much to see here. That said, clearly what the Russian general said is a crude attempt to intimidate Poland, albeit politically and not actually by making a threat of imminent action. Also predictably it has stiffened already deep hostility to Russia across Central Europe. Good, it is probably exactly what Europe needed. August 17th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was going to write about the unconscionable Russian attacks on Georgia and how it is more important than ever to confront and isolate Russia and impose a cost on Russian imperialism… but then I read this article by Marko Hoare, who has written some great things in the past on the Balkan conflict, and he says much of what I would have…
Amen. August 10th, 2008 | 110 comments - (Comments are closed)
Lasers for shooting down mortars bombs and missiles… sounds great and has potential to change battlefield quite fundamentally… if it actually works in practice out in the messy real world. Remember Patriot? Much cheered at the time but it turned out to be a wildly expensive but only occasionally effective weapon system designed to shoot down rather cheap and only occasionally effective Scuds. I suppose it all comes down to it is this another a vastly costly to operate system designed to shoot down various cheap-as-chips weapon systems? I suppose time will tell because potentially this is revolutionary as battlefield lasers could eventually mean the end of a great many forms of indirect weapons. Potentially. July 14th, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daniel Hannan has a short but pointed article about how the European Parliament does not hesitate to ignore its own rules if it means they can crush euro-sceptic dissent.
Disgraceful but hardly surprising. July 9th, 2008 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Neil Glass, who writes under the pen name David Craig, is to run against David Davies with these immortal words:
So other people’s liberty, meh, who cares about such trifles? All that matters to Neil Glass is having money wasted. Truly here we have an unabashedly amoral man …who will feel right at home in politics. The fact he would give half him MP pay if he won (which he won’t) to charity is a political device, nothing more. This is not a person I would care to shake hands with, to put it mildly, as by doing this he is overtly running against civil liberties. June 17th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
…there is a party celebrating a half century (not out), at Samizdata HQ tonight. 
The company was delightful…
…the booze plentiful…
…the gifts were exceedingly creative June 14th, 2008 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Or perhaps a ‘stupidity’ of congressmen? A ‘fantasy’ of lawmakers? An ‘arrogance’ of representatives? They all seem to fit.
The US House of Representatives have just in effect declared that all foreign governments and businesses must be subject to the wishes of US politicians and their regulations and sell oil at prices that US legislators like. Or else. The sheer absurdity of this is breathtaking. Exactly what sanction were they planning against OPEC? Perhaps not buying their fungible oil? Yeah, that will do the trick. May 21st, 2008 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is hard not to be struck by how often the British state threatens its subjects. You can hardly turn on the television without being confronted by direct unambiguous threats that say ‘obey-or-else’, as mention here on Samizdata before recently. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute wrote about this in an article titled Watch out, the Gestapo are about. The latest one I have noticed is a threat to car owners. If they do not pay their car tax, they will have their cars seized and crushed (cheers to Andy H for the link to the advert). Imagine hearing this on your television, set to ominous music:
Of course MasterCard only lend money to people who are willing to take that money in the first place, yet can you imagine the howls of outrage if a company publicly threatened people if they do not comply with the terms and conditions of a loan? Of course no company in their right mind would actually do that. Yet do you hear any outrage from the Conservative Party or the LibDems when the state uses tax money to run advertisements threatening to use the Boys in Blue against people who do not cough up the money the state wants? Not that I have heard. Well I am not outraged either, in fact I am delighted. Every time I see the TV Licensing adverts or the Car Tax adverts, I am struck by their educational value. States are self-perpetuating institutions through which the means of collective coercion are applied, nothing more or less, and having the state be completely upfront about its true nature is very useful indeed. One of Samizdata’s tag lines is ‘The State is not your friend’, so I can hardly complain when the state starts running advertisements saying much the same thing. May 17th, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Finding myself uncharacteristically unable to give a flying fuck about what is in the news today and therefore unable to murder helpless pixels merely to write about politics or world events, I took advantage of my inamorata being away on business to escape the Ivory Tower and go bathe in the blood and beer of popular culture… yes, I just saw Doomsday, a post-Apocalypse Mad Max-meets-28 Days Later action splatter flick. It is a movie that sets its sights low and consistently hits the target. Okay it does get a bit wobbly when any character has to speak for more than fifteen seconds, which thankfully occurs rarely. That said, much as I enjoyed this exceedingly low-brow gore-fest, Rhona Mitra is simply better than the movie. She is superb as the quipping but mostly taciturn harder-than-nails action chick with the one thing so many action heroines lack: physical presence. Also this movie has the best and most brutally ended action-girl-on-action-girl fight scene, well, quite possibly ever. And the ‘eye thing’… very cool. But I am not writing this to praise Rhona… well, actually I am…  …no…no… the purpose was to repeat what an old Scottish chum of mine said to me on the phone this evening when he unexpectedly called me up and I told him I had seen Doomsday. “Oh yes, that film is a hoot!” he replied, “but it just made me wonder, maybe the Apocalypse is just Glasgow at chucking out time on a Friday evening, only it never ends. And people who can eat deep fried Mars Bars will eat anything.” May 14th, 2008 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
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