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I love snow, but in London we often get none at all and only very rarely does it snow heavily, which is to say, actually leaving a nice white carpet (yes, I know… that hardly counts as snow at all by some standards). Yesterday however, I got my wish, with the heaviest snowfall in London in 12 years… 
The view down my street It will be mostly gone by tomorrow in all likelihood but it at least I get a day to enjoy the ephemeral splendours of winter. January 9th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
 To all those who believe that first-world farming cannot survive without the theft of subsidies, please then explain how New Zealand seems to manage with hardly any help from the state. I second the suggestion by Ross Clark in The Spectator… let’s have a buy-cott of New Zealand’s theft-free farm produce: the Kiwis puts British, European and North American agriculture to shame. January 9th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Our favourite pinko blogger, Brian Linse is in London…  Little does he know the effect of drinking out of a Samizdata.net Coffee Mug will have on his fragile political sensibilities…muuuahhhhhh! January 2nd, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott plans to restrict the right of council tenants to buy their homes. This is very encouraging to me as it is a policy calculated to remind the large ‘new bourgeoise’ of former ‘working class’ people with aspirations to become property owners just how out of sync a socialist meta-context is with their real lives.
Yes, shocking. When ‘working class’ people (a largely empty term when in reality the majority of British society is utterly bourgeois) make too much money, they start getting strange notions that they should be allowed to keep it and that is clearly something the Labour Party needs to stamp on! The notion of poor people turning a big fat profit by engaging in capitalist activities like selling their own property is anathema to a party which exists to dole out other people’s stolen money to a supplicant class. In a manner which is actually technically more in tune with the fascist variant of socialism, they are happy for people to ‘own’ private property’ (e.g. such as allowing a person to purchase their council house), but if they then dispose of that ‘private’ property for their personal benefit in a manner not in accordance with ‘national objectives’, that is seen as an ‘abuse’. Which is to say, Labour shares the fascist view that private property is just fine, particularly the bit in which the former council tenant pays the council for the property… provided it does not actually then mean the new ‘owner’ in reality controls the thing he has just paid for. Economically at least, modern regulatory statism has a large streak of fascist thinking at its core and this is an good example of that sensibility at work. January 2nd, 2003 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gun crime continues to rise in Britain, with two young girls shot dead Perhaps Britain should ban all handguns. Oh, that’s right… they already are banned. So let’s ban… I dunno… let’s ban something else… toy guns, just like they are in Sweden! That will do the trick! January 2nd, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am trying to figure out who ‘Holland & Barrett’ are worried might sue them if they discovered NUTS in their packet of… Whole Cashew Nuts! December 31st, 2002 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states. So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the ‘African Disease’ but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism. December 30th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Garry North at LewRockwell.com tells us:
The USA wants to invade Iraq to ‘control’ the flow of oil. Bush wants to do this in order to increase the supply of oil and therefore lower the price… and clearly saying “Y’all” is prima facie evidence of conspiratorial evilness. Gotcha. However…
Right, so Bush has been doing beastly things to Iraq to keep oil prices up then?
Ah, its not about oil, its about Israel. Right. And if ‘balance-of-power’ is such a terrible idea, when why are LewRockwell.com always so bent out of shape by the current pre-eminence of the USA? And what is this about bailing out England? I guess Scotland, Ulster and Wales were not ‘bailed out’ then? It is usually a good indication of someone engaging in a cranio-rectal insertion when they refer to the UK as ‘England’, which is rather like describing the USA as ‘New York State’. And this is someone who has such knowledge of International Affairs that he can see through the machinations of the sinister Oil Illuminati.
Ah. Its all about Russia! Or more accuratly, depriving Russia, the world’s second largest oil exporter, of oil. Gotcha. And that is what Afghanistan was ‘about’ too… in case an oil pipeline might, some time in the future, go through there. Or through Pakistan. Or through Turkey. Or maybe Gloucestershire?
Oh, so it is all about oil then! If someone can explain what this gibberish actually means, I would be very grateful. And to think there was a time when I actually admired the Lew Rockwell group. December 30th, 2002 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Computer games are evolving at an astonishing rate, acting as the primary driver of desktop computer development (after all, how many people actually need a 2.5 GHz CPU, a 128 Mb graphics card and 512 Mb of RAM to do word processing and spreadsheet work?) Back in the Paleolithic age of computers (the 1980’s), computer games looked like this…  Wolfenstein: Shoot! Mild fun… but not for long Mildly amusing but crude in the extreme. By the early 1990’s however, came the advent of the ‘FPS’: the First Person Shooter!  Wolfenstein 3D: Shoot! Great fun… but not for long They seemed astonishing at the time, actually putting you inside the gun wielding hero. The graphics were rather basic, to put it mildly and after a while the lack of multifaceted interaction tended to make the games rather tedious after the initial ‘gee whiz’ factor wore off… other than opening doors, the only way to interact with things was to shoot at them. My goodness how things have changed! Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom, which begat Quake, Hexen, Marathon, Unreal, Duke Nukem, Tomb Raider etc, etc… all worthy ‘shooters’ of steadily increasing graphic quality. Sudden surges came with games like Half Life, released at the end of the computer games neolithic era (1998) and yet still playable now…and featuring not just excellent graphics but Artificial Intelligence which actually shows a bit of intelligence, rather than just a desire to commit virtual suicide… Half Life & the spin-offs Blue Shift and Opposing Forces brought also the ability to ‘talk’ with the computer generated denizens of the game as opposed to just shoot at them.  Half Life: Don’t shoot, he is on your side. Great fun… for hours on end! Then games like No One Lives Forever (NOLF), a spy thriller set in the 1960’s with frequent plot specific cut scenes came along, and suddenly the story line of the computer game actually started to matter.  NOLF: Cate Archer, at the grave of her ‘dead’ mentor The next generation of releases saw the success of story intensive NOLF and soon games of almost cinema grade plot and characterization started appearing, such as the conspiracy ladened Deus Ex and then the gritty darker than dark Max Payne. And so yesterday the new Gamespy PC Game of the Year was announced, and it is the excellent No One Lives Forever 2. As well as being superb graphically (caveat: you do need a high spec computer to get the best out of this game), it is just down right funny! Set in the 1960’s, this ‘spy shooter’ owes more to the wonderfully camp ‘Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ than James Bond or Smiley’s People. Although slightly more ‘serious’ than Austin Powers (but only slightly), it provides endless entertainment by allowing you to eavesdrop on the all-too-believable conversations of other people.  NOLF2: This Indian H.A.R.M. agent has a sword… but Cate has a Kalashnikov I look forward to continuous progress in computer games… pure distilled essence of capitalism married to explosive creativity. Within a few years, interactively with the virtual environment will be almost total, opening up steadily more ambitious story telling possibilities whilst at the same time the holy grail of photorealism comes closer to realization. The future is so bright, we are going to need shades to see it. I can hardly wait! December 29th, 2002 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The dependably clueless Prince Charles wants the state to require tax funded institutions like Britain’s nationalised public health service and state schools to add insult to injury by not even attempting to get ‘best value for your stolen money’… which is to say he wants such arms of the state to be required to buy British farm products even if foreign products are cheaper/better… not only does he say they ‘should’ buy British, but that the government should force them to. Like most people with socialist & fascist understandings of economics, producers are all and consumers are nothing to Charles. Why will people like him not be more honest and just admit directly that they want productive taxpayers to be compelled by force to prop-up less efficient areas of the economy and they should not be given any choice in the matter. The Royal Family usefully occupy the same seriocomical niche as the Flag and ‘Hand-on-heart’ pledge of allegiance do in the USA… and like that inanimate object and rote chant, are largely empty of real meaning beyond their warm-fuzzy-glow value. If only we could devise some means of permanently depriving Charles of speech, leaving him only with earnest looks and poses, then the British monarchy could have another couple centuries of seriocomical semi-usefulness ahead of them. December 28th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Raelians are a truly weird cult, that is for sure, and the fact they are claiming to have produced the world’s first cloned human is hardly going to calm feelings about the technology. However even if their contention to have done so is true (not surprisingly I am disinclined to just take the word of a group which claims humans are the descendents of bio-engineered clones created by space aliens), I must say that I find it hard to get all that excited about the whole matter. Although I do have worries that the technology and underpinning science is sufficiently immature that there is cause for concern for the health of a cloned child, the principle itself does not bother me at all… a child is a child is a child, and the manner of its creation does not give it any less worth or intrinsic rights. However the issue of how to assign paternal and maternal responsibility for the child is, of course, going to keep a small army of lawyers busy for quite a while! I would be quite interested to see what people’s views are as to “who is left holding the baby”, if you will forgive the expression December 28th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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