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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)
Art criticism is something about which I only rarely touch on when something particularly interests me. But in today’s Sunday Telegraph (print version only), Ian Hislop has written an interesting piece called Now I’ll be labelled a pervert on how playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber has been scorned and derided by the British ArtCrit set because he has the temerity to not just collect Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but to actually exhibit them to the public.
1= free registration required And for me, therein lies the rub. Most art critics hate literal art because literal art can be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn a bit about the context within which the art was created. Now I am not someone who thinks ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron but it is true than much of what passes for art these days is so obscure that it requires an ArtCrit, such as Sewell or Saatchi, to give it some meaning. I guess what I am really saying is that much of what the likes of Tracy Emin does is so devoid of intrinsic meaning that only a professional arbiter of artistic values and taste can tell us poor muggles what the hell it means. No wonder art critics love ‘cutting edge’ modern art! And now for some art you might be able to figure out for yourself… 
September 28th, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two members of the illustrious Samizdata Editorial Pantheon are going to be in the USA… myself and Adriana, on a mixture of indolent tourism and ardent capitalist business. We will be in Los Angeles from 10th -16th October and then in the New York/New Jersey area between 17th – 21st October before returning to London. We would love to meet up with US bloggers and so we are organising blogger bashes, one which is already arranged in LA on Saturday 11th October… and one in NYC on Friday 17th October. Please let us know if you would like to join us so we can get an idea regarding numbers. That inimitable gentleman Brian Linse, Samizdata.net’s favourite pet pinko, will be hosting the West Coast blogger bash so numbers may be limited. The splendiferous Jane Galt is heading up the where-and-when of the one in The Big Apple. September 26th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
After reading Natalie Solent’s article, posted both here and on White Rose called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with a cautionary tale of his own as a case in point. Check out his close encounter with the reality of CCTV over on White Rose. CCTV is not your friend. September 23rd, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Which is to say, a politician I respect. Now I do not always see eye to eye with Ron Paul, the
Damn, that is almost enough to turn me into a Republican! Now if that party could just do something about its mercantilist anti-market trade policies, repressive sexual policies in some states and nasty tendency to vastly increase the size and scope of state whilst claiming to be the party of small government… September 21st, 2003 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night was a speaker at a blogging seminar in London at the IBM building, organised by Sp!ked called Gone to the blogs: The blogging phenomenon in perspective. The other speakers were Brendan O’Neill, James Crabtree and Bill Thompson. The introduction to the seminar asked:
The interesting thing to me was that there was really very little agreement as to what blogging was ‘all about’, either amongst the speakers or from the floor. One recurrent theme was endless blather about blogs being ‘good for democracy’ without really saying why that might be the case. Paleo-socialist Bill Thompson of the BBC, about whom we have written on Samizdata.net before claimed to now like blogging and regarded the fact virulently anti-socialist folks like Samizdata.net also blog as ‘an acceptable cost’. He also egregiously mis-characterised Brendan O’Neill’s rather temperate remarks on the topic of Salam Pax, the Baghdad Blogger. Whilst a reporter mis-representing a person’s remarks is hardly news, for him to do so when the person in question is sitting a few yards away and is able to point out that is not in fact what they said is… interesting. Below is the text of my opening remarks:
September 18th, 2003 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 14th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The day started off with ominous signs as I left the house, a raven seemed to be calling a warning from atop the church…  Even when I arrived at the appointed place, I found nervous animals, disquieted by a change in the ether…  And then, suddenly, he was there! The rumours were true! He had returned and the room exploded into chaos!  In no time at all, he was back to his old tricks as though he had never left…  Andrew Dodge is back in London after his long exile in the colonies. God save us all! September 14th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
As mentioned by R. C. Dean in an earlier article, the fact that EU policy is a major contributor to poverty in the Third World is finally starting to attract the attention it deserves. Many of Samizdata.net’s contributors have written in the past about the true price of protectionism and just who pays it. Well now the The Centre for the New Europe has released a devastating paper that shows the claims of the Euro-statist elite to care for the world’s ‘have-nots’ for what they are: complete lies
The complete paper can be downloaded from the main CNE site  September 5th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whilst sitting in a café surrounded by all of Bratislava’s Central European splendours and pondering how to get my treasures back to London… 
…I could not but notice how all that history has interesting effects on the local arts… 
Of course there are many local inspirations, not just the historical ones… 
We decided to just try and take my new prized possession, my dragon, on the aeroplane with us. The artist obligingly packed it up in a most expert manner and we just took it with us as luggage, praying that it did not get crushed on the bus to Vienna or smashed into matchsticks by the baggage handlers…  …Arriving back in London  Finally back home, we unpacked the new love of my life and is was… perfect!  Nice to be back but I shall certainly visit Bratislava again September 1st, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Continuing my tales of Bratislava… One of the things I very much enjoyed was the food. Although a short visit of only a few days does not give my views much authority, I have to say that both the home cooked meals and restaurant victuals were really rather good. One restaurant in particular was so good that I would have to say it would make my top ten must-eat-at places anywhere I have been… and all modesty aside I am extremely well travelled. This splendid place is called Café Zichy (formerly known by the name ‘Harmonia’). The venison in plum sauce with puréed chestnut was sublime. I was also introduced to the splendours of Demänovka, the excellent local firewater. The service at the Zichy was informative and agreeable without being intrusive: the place is a mandatory visit when in Bratislava! Another thing that caught my eye…  …is that if you pay attention, you can find interesting and idiosyncratic art all over the place. Some of it very modern and some of it very old indeed…  But as I have mentioned before, Bratislava is filled with the sort of distractions that can make a person miss such details…  During my meandering around the cobbled streets, I encountered the first dragon I saw in Bratislava: a rather fine golden dragon which happens to be the mark of a pharmacy…  …and although I did not know it yet, it was the first indication I was about to fall madly in love, but more about that later Whenever I visit a new city, I always pay attention to the graffiti and political posters as I always believe it is worth seeing what ‘the others’ are saying. When I was passing though Vienna airport a few days earlier the only graffiti I saw was ‘EU NEIN’ engraved on the flusher in the men’s room…  Compared to Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (the other part of the Slavic world in which I have considerable experience), Bratislava has much less of a problem with graffiti or flyposting. It was mildy interesting therefore that in Slovakia the only political posters I saw were for a rather incoherent group of ‘anarchists’ and a nameless call (in English) to ‘smash the reds’… 
Warning sign number one… these ‘anarchists’ are waving their flags on May Day. There may have been other political posters but the distractions on the streets of Bratislava are many and varied…  I saw an interesting sign of the transformations going on in Slovakia when I visited a carpet warehouse with my hostess, the mother of my travelling companion. The warehouse was until quite recently the Factory of MDZ (Medzinarodny Den Zien, or International Women’s Day)… an old style communist industrial collective. I was much amused to see that under its new capitalist management, it was advertising Astroturf, a quintessentially American product.  During our meanderings, we wandered past a rather typical gated Austro-Hungarian era courtyard and noticed a small sign directing us to something called ‘Gallery F7’. Being curious by nature, we went in and found at the far end, an exhibition of the work of an artist called Jozef Borovka… and that is where I well and truly fell in love. Borovka’s work was just fantastic. He is an extremely talented Slovak artist working in wood, stone, oil and pen and I would have happily walked off with almost every item that was on exhibit. As it happened, that day was the last day of the show and so we contacted the artist and arranged to purchase several of his works. The first we acquired was a superb and whimsical bison made of 5 kg (11 lbs) of stone with antlers made from a coat hook, the second was a pen and ink drawing of a rural house in the Slovak countryside, the third was a female torso in mahogany on a large brass base…  …and the last piece was a table… but, oh, what a table! This was the true object of my undying affections: the finest Dragon in Bratislava. However seeing as we were flying on Air Berlin, which is El Cheapo No Frills Cattle Class Airlines personified, actually getting a honking great cherry wood, mahogany, glass and brass table that was very fragile back to London was rather a major problem. We explored shipping it back via DHL but that proved to be prohibitive on the grounds of price, so we retired to the many and wonderful cafés of Bratislava to ponder what to do and admire the passing parade…  More to follow… September 1st, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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, we took a cab home and were welcomed by a very liberty-friendly message en-route…
… for the artworks of course 
