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We are having some problems with the White Rose comments system (as in “it is completely buggered up” sort of problem). This has been caused by the installation of some comment anti-spam defenses over on Samizdata.net, which shares server space and some system resources with White Rose. We hope to have the comments up and running again soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. Update: Fixed! The comments are now working fine once again October 26th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird’s flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips. Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight… this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe1…
I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991… as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh! It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like “the more people I meet, the more I like my cat”. 1 = NY Times link requires free registration. October 25th, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Adriana & I recently returned from a two week business/fun trip to the USA which took us to initially to New Jersey for a couple days… 
Samizdatista Walter Uhlman demonstrates conclusively
Adriana thought she should practice a little before venturing out And thence to Los Angeles, where we lurked in the stygian cigar fog that is Brian Linse‘s rather nice home in the Hollywood Hills. We also ventured from there into the equally pungent Cigar Club The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, as this proved to be the perpetual hang-out of our illustrious host. Therein amongst its Armani’ed and Prada’ed denizens, we encountered the splendid actor Robert Davi, who had some, interesting, things to say to us which I cannot repeat 
Welcome to Los Angeles! → Continue reading: Odyssey across America October 24th, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
A hastily convened Blogger Booze Up has been called by Gavin Sheridan and Dan Gillmor When: Friday at 6:30 pm. Where: Red Lion, Westminster, 48 Parliament St. Who: Whoever wants to show up. Why: You have to ask? October 23rd, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
noun. The community of people who leave comments on a blog. Usage: “We got some useful suggestion from the commentariat today on how to deal the spammer problem.” October 23rd, 2003 | Comments are closed
Over on the Adam Smith Institute blog, Madsen Pirie makes an excellent point about the joys of borders and the competition they bring:
Which is of course why so much of the USA’s political class have supported the steady march towards ever more federal power and why the EU’s political classes love ‘harmonization’ to prevent ‘unfair’ tax competition. The Adam Smith Institute is often seen as just being about the life of homo-economicus but as Madsen’s remarks show, they are in fact concerned about the impact of liberty on culture and society and not just the Dow Jones Index. One of the reasons so many French families can be found living in Kensington (‘Frog Valley’) is that there is a two way exchange going on between Britain and France: a ‘brain drain’ in which French entrepreneurs, executives and high tax bracket individuals are moving to relatively less regulated more dynamic Britain to escape the deadening (and grasping) hand of the French state, whilst at the same time retired British people who do not actually have to work for a living, and are thus unlikely to have to deal with the nightmarish French state, are buying up property in the Dordogne to experience the cheese, fois gras and claret idylls of bucolic France. Yes, there is something to be said for borders. October 23rd, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night until late, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a veritable multiplicity of LA Bloggers swarmed into Casa Bad Dude… 
Bill Whittle & Rand Simberg… Jets and Rockets
Rand Simberg & Mickey Kaus
Kate Sullivan & Emmanuelle Richard
Martin Devon, Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum & the pseudonymous Armed Liberal
I finally got to meet Rand Simberg face to face
Sara & Moxie, who contrary to some scurrilous rumours, is most certainly not deformed!
This being Casa Bad Dude, the air was thick with cigar smoke Update: The morning after the night before… 
Brian Linse recovers slowly from last night’s festivities October 13th, 2003 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
During my ongoing travels in the USA, I encountered two splendid examples of the idiocy of regulation…  What you see in the above picture, taken a few days ago in Newark, New Jersey, is a steep concrete stairway leading to a carpark next to a roller-skate rink. Now I was rather puzzled to see a bunch of mandated disabled carpark bays next to a roller-skate rink, but the really funny bit was the small curb at the bottom of the stairs with… a wheelchair ramp. Ignoring for a moment the sheer idiocy of the notion someone in a wheelchair would use those stairs at all, somehow I suspect if they had somehow negotiated that imposing set of stairs, they are not going to need a ramp to get over the damn curb at the bottom. Next for your edification, we have what is in effect a mandated warning posted on a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, taken yesterday…  Yet for some reason the state wants the same people who drink in bars to vote on who gets to put their finger on The Button. Why do people tolerate being treated like cretins? America is a very strange place sometimes. October 13th, 2003 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an article about a movie that I rather like, but it is also about how not to write a film review. I am werewolf, hear me roar… No, I am sure I remember that name of that daft Helen Reddy song all wrong, but that does seem to be the message of a review of Underworld in the Sierra Times by the colourfully named RadioFree Rocky D… this movie is just a pinko feminist tract. To which I say… nonsense.  Underworld, the film in question, is in essence a version of Romeo and Juliette, but set against the backdrop of a war between not Montagues and Capulettes, but a clan of werewolves and a clan of vampires! This has everything for the trash movie aficionado: monsters, perpetual gloomy atmospherics, high tech weapons, chick-in-latex-with-guns (the breathtaking Kate Beckinsale)… need I say more? As an extra added bonus, it even has a decent and fairly complex storyline! The review on the worthy Sierra Times dislikes this movie because it was being ‘politically correct’:
Well for a start Selene, Beckinsale’s character, does not go mano-a-mano with the werewolves when she can avoid it… in fact she runs like hell to put some distance between them so she can shoot the hell out of them with silver bullets. And for another, she is not a 115 pound woman, she is a 115 pound immortal vampire, so why the hell should she be constrained by the limitations of a normal woman? I am sure that mighty jock RadioFree Rocky D could kick Kate Beckinsale’s delectable behind, but I doubt he is bulletproof regardless of how much weight he warms up with, so who cares? 
The fact she casually steps off a ledge 20 floors up is a But then the review gets really weird:
Huh? Now I quite like the Sierra Times and no doubt RadioFree Rocky D and I would probably agree on a great many issues (I was an outspoken supporter of the armed overthrow of Ba’athism in Iraq for example), but this review is what happens when one’s ideology starts to distort everything one sees. That paragraph seems to suggest that to question the legitimacy and sanity of any war makes you some pabulum puking whining pinko. I guess RadioFree Rocky D must have thought any Russian who questioned the wisdom of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was some sort of weak kneed girly-boy. And from this position he takes the view that questioning the wisdom of a war between vampires and werewolves is somehow criticism of the US/UK invasion of Iraq. Funny but I must have missed the ‘No Blood For Oil’ speech coming from one of the vampires (vampires… blood… get it? Oh never mind). 
Use GUNS when fighting werewolves! Anyway, this review tells us a lot about the author who rejoices in the name of ‘RadioFree Rocky D’ but tells us jack shit about the movie called Underworld… which happens to rock big time. 
The October 4th, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alex Singleton over on the Adam Smith Institute blog does not think much of the cinematic renditions of Lord of the Rings and asks:
Well it takes all tastes but I for one enjoyed both Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers thoroughly and disagree with almost every word of Alex’s critique. The dialogue was true to the story, the battles gripping and best of all for me, the characters were almost exactly what I had in my head for over 30 years since I first read the books. In fact I think the films cut out a lot of the ‘flabby bits’ in Tolkein’s epic (such as editing out the completely superfluous Tom Bomberdil interlude) without doing a great violence to the substance of it. Although as you may have gathered, I have long been a great fan of Tolkein’s works, the Lord of the Rings has always held deeper meanings for me and the big screen versions have just reinforced my views as to what it all really means. I eagerly await the third part later this year.  October 1st, 2003 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Free State Project is a group in the USA looking to get at least 20,000 liberty oriented activists to move to a single state in the USA so that they can have more political impact somewhere rather than be lost in the sea of Republican and Democrat statists by being scattered across the country. And the result of the vote to see which part of the USA they would all move to is… New Hampshire. Godspeed to you all. I shall be watching this project with great interest.  October 1st, 2003 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Islamic culture gets bashed quite enough in the blogosphere without me sticking my oar in, but I wonder what the kumbayah singing disciples of multiculturalism think of this?
Or more correctly, a tragic story arising out of an Islamic Kurdish culture with no real notion of objective moral truth beyond what they have been told is written in some book and a Western one which at least imperfectly aspires to find such a thing. All cultures have problems, flaws and idiocies but that does not therefore mean all cultures are equal. When Islamic culture is not tempered by secular influences, it is particularly prone to produce monstrous crimes like this one. Not that irrational secular creeds cannot produce evils aplenty (such as fascism and other forms of socialism), but at least most strains of Western Christianity and Judaism have had their more demented fundamentalist edges worn off by centuries of secularism. Brave individuals can use reason to transcend the confines of their culture, but all cultures are not the same and I do so wish some people would stop pretending otherwise. September 29th, 2003 | 57 comments - (Comments are closed)
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