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The attempt assassination in London of a critic of Vladimir Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, almost certainly carried out by the Russian intelligence services, highlights that it is long past time to stop treating Russia as ‘just another European government’. But there is another rather interesting twist to this story that I did not spot in the media yesterday, courtesy of the UKIP. Update: sadly it is not longer an ‘attempted’ assassination. November 20th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 As regular readers here all know, the state is not your friend… but sometimes its petty tyrannies and inanities are bloody funny:
A quick check and sure enough, these people fail to mention their sausages are not in fact made from dragon meat (which I had assumed was ‘self-smoking’). Hell, I only bought them because I thought they contained the ultimate in ‘endangered species’. November 19th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Classic Version The Modern Version Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. BBC, ITV and Sky show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. Britain is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on ‘Newsnight’ and charges the ant with ‘green bias’, and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings “It’s Not Easy Being Green”. Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the BBC Evening News to tell a concerned interviewer that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Thatcher summers. Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his ‘fair share’. Finally, the EU drafts the ‘Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act’ retrospective to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, has his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of judges that Tony appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday’s between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him since he does not know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of New Labourites announcing that a new era of ‘fairness’ has dawned in Britain (original provenance unknown) November 14th, 2006 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thirty one stalwart samizdatistas plus assorted friends and allies descended on Samizdata HQ last night/early this morning for our celebration of five years on the front line of the blogosphere. 
Two of Samizdata’s editors presided over the festivities
The damn paparazzi were everywhere
People tended to congregate around the alcohol
As the hordes started to pack into Samizdata HQ, others took up defensive positions on the stairs
Our fearless editor seemed strangely surprised that her spray-on
…or spank…
… or smack
Yet people seemed quite uninterested in Brian’s rear-end
Kamal demonstrated how to do anatomically improbable things with corks,
The food from Penni Black was excellent and greatly improved the ability of
Guido Fawkes reminded us all why we blog (however there
But Jax was in no doubt that the answer was indeed ‘beer’
Guido demonstrated his patented “grab ’em by the googlies an’ squeeze” tactic to
As the evening wore on, Paul Coulam shared his technique for remaining upright
The ‘sitting down’ method of avoiding unexpected non-verticalness was also widely adopted towards the end November 11th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 10th, 2006 | Comments are closed
On November 2nd, 2001, I rounded up a posse of disgruntled hyphenated libertarian types on three continents and an island, telling them they were henceforth ‘samizdatistas’ and offered them a way to get their ‘gruntles’ back that was far more effective than cursing at the television every time the news came on. We started off initially on blogger.com along with many other so-called warblogs, before eventually migrating to Moveable Type. We drew our initial inspiration from Glenn of Instapundit fame (and duly got Instapundited quite a few times) as we raged anti-idiotarian fury against the mainstream media’s editorial absurdities. We coined a few terms which seem to have gained wider currency, such as Moonbat and Tranzi. We learned the fine art of fisking, slew some trolls, stomped on a lot of blogroaches, fact-checked a few asses and we wrote more than a few blogapotamus postings. Putting one in the eye of The Man yields many benefits and millions of page views, a couple crashed servers, 8,651 articles and 129,117 comments later, Samizdata.net once again proves that not only is blogging far more fun than gainful employment, it is a great excuse for throwing parties… and thus tonight at 7:00pm London time we hold our Five Year Blogger Bash, therefore expect light blogging from the UK contingent and possible heavy casualties by tomorrow morning. November 10th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
If there is one thing that statists of all parties hate, it is being ignored. They cannot abide the idea that there could be a solution to any problem anywhere that does not involve the state and its force backed regulations. And so the Charities Commission is to have its powers vastly increased so that the state, and only the state, gets to say what is a Charity and what constitutes a ‘public benefit’. Not only can the state decide who gets preferential tax treatment, soon it’s bureaucrats will be able to test for ‘public interest’ according to their own judgement and if they are not satisfied…
The fascist approach has clearly won out over the old socialist approach of simple ‘nationalisation’. In the fascist way of doing thing, individuals and companies and indeed ‘private’ charities could remain in ‘ownership’ of the means of production, but only if they actually used them in accordance with the government’s national objectives. Clearly this is Britain’s future. You can set up a charity and get endowments from willing people, but if the state decides it disapproves, it will simple take the money are give it to someone more politically correct. Can you imagine a charity in the future saying anything that might displease or embarrass a future British government? November 6th, 2006 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
So Saddam Hussain will be hanged… what is there left to say except ‘sic semper tyrannis’? November 6th, 2006 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
South Korea finally surrenders to one of the finer features of modernity and legalises the miniskirt! 
Legal! November 4th, 2006 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the Dutch town of Drachten, they have removed nearly all the traffic lights in a bold experiment that seems to be paying off. There was typically one road death every three years in Drachten but there have been none whatsoever since the traffic light removal began seven years ago.:
It is also nice to see the correct message from such examples starting to sink into a few brains in the mainstream media. Meanwhile back in Britain… November 4th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been experimenting with Firefox because of its superior ability to block annoying advertisements, something I was advised to do by a host of readers last month… but ever since upgrading to Firefox 2.0, I have been very grateful for its ability to ‘restore browsing sessions’ after a crash because I get five or six crashes per day, something I certainly did not get with Firefox 1.5 (or the Devil’s Browser IE 6, for that matter). Are many folks out there experiencing anything similar? October 29th, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is not just in the UK that the steady drum beat of the state encroaching on ancient liberties can be heard. There is some good discussion on 10 Zen Monkeys regarding the horrendous Military Commissions Act in the USA. However I do find the lack of concern about the effects on non-US subjects a bit disconcerting given the propensity of American courts to try and apply their laws extra-territorially. Naturally these laws have been sold as only applying to The Bad Guys… just as RICO was sold as just being a tool to go after organised crime and yet it ended up being used again anti-abortion activists. Regardless of what the politicians say when they are selling a prospective law, once enacted, legislation gets used against anyone it can be used against, not just the targets intended at the time the laws is passed. I must say that anyone without a US passport who is politically active and less than flattering about US government’s policies should serious reconsider taking that holiday in Florida or going to visit American friends. October 25th, 2006 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
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