The mighty N.Z. Bear has a splendid article about what he would do if he was UN Secretary General for a day, fisking UN Resolution 1441 and Iraqi non-compliance. Good stuff!
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I have liked many of Mark Steyn’s articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq’s Ba’athist regime.
This is Steyn at his best… read the whole article! January 25th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 After playing some excellent games like tongue-in-cheek No One lives Forever 2 and the the awesome & ultra slick Splinter Cell, I was starting to get the impression computer games were starting to really enter another era: an era in which equal attention is paid to scripts, story flow, voice acting and the ability to interact other than by shooting someone. 
Splinter Cell: ultra cool Boy was I wrong! Having just played Soldier of Fortune 2, I realise that even quality companies like Raven can produce clunkers. SoF2 is as linear and predictable as the original Doom, the cut scenes are filled with flat and indifferent declaiming and the characters are cliches (in itself sometimes amusing but in this case, not). Even the graphics are nothing to write home about. Level design ranged from uninspiring (“Ah, yet another blind corner… I might as well chuck a grenade as there is bound to be a bad guy lying in wait like the one before. And the one before that. And the one before that…”) to the idiotic (as in ‘my allies will try and kill me if I get too far ahead or behind the patrol I am helping to defend’…. riiiiiight) to the baffling (‘so I shot the guard dead with a silenced weapon, he was nowhere near the bloody alarm button and the alarm goes off anyway instantly? And the logic behind that is…??’). 
Soldier of Fortune 2: suspect moustache I guess that the SoF & Raven brand names are responsible for the game’s excellent sales and I gather that multiplayer in reasonable in SoF2, but I would certainly urge anyone who likes a good plot line, thoughtfully designed scenarios or snappy dialogue in a single player game to look elsewhere and give this by-the-numbers First Person Shooter a miss… Deus Ex or Half Life this game ain’t. January 22nd, 2003 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
After watching the news tonight, I am coming around ever more to David Carr’s way of thinking. Perhaps sheer irritation by the Bush Administration about the obscurantist stance of the French and German governments regarding the use of force to depose Saddam Hussain may achieve something I have long wanted to see… the end of the fiction in American minds that either France or Germany are in fact US allies in any meaningful sense. This is the first step needed to de-couple the Anglosphere Atlantic Alliance from the legacy of World War Two and the Cold War. The first clear step that this process is under way will be the permanent withdrawal of most US forces currently stationed in Germany, a situation which is a costly anachronism in the post Cold War world. Maybe the opportunity will be immediatly post-Gulf War II, with the US troops currently based in Germany which are going to be involved in Iraq going back to bases in the USA instead. I just hope the pompous Chirac and the buffoonish Schroeder keep plucking on the eagle’s feathers… sooner of later Blair, or his successor, is going to have to decide if they want to be on the side of history’s winners or history’s losers. Hell, changing the name of N.A.F.T.A. to North Atlantic Free Trade Area would not even require reprinting all that stationary with the acronym on it! January 22nd, 2003 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting post by David Kenner over on An Age Like This complete with pictures he took, of the pro-Saddam Hussain protests in Washington DC. It is good to see a bit of blog primary reportage. Also David has a picture of Protest Awards!: Most Offensive Banner. January 21st, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Although attention is focused on the nightmarish regime in Iraq, please spare an angry thought for the vile rulers of Zimbabwe, who are still starving and murdering sections of the population felt to be ‘disloyal’ to Robert Mugabe. George Bush, supported by Tony Blair, will clear up Daddy’s (and Donald’s) mess in Iraq by spending several billion dollars and sending a few hundred thousand troops to see the end of Saddam Hussain… Blair could do something about tyranny in Zimbabwe for a fraction of that price if he had the moral fortitude. For all his many and varied sins, Saddam is not (currently) killing and dispossessing British subjects, which cannot be said for Robert Mugabe. Will the British state please stop spending my appropriated tax money on funding the comforts of former Taliban asylum seekers and, given that I suppose it is too much to expect my money back, start sending crates of rifles and ammunition to opposition groups in Zimbabwe. January 20th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have long known that the world is essentially a madhouse with no locks on the doors, but when I read that a former Taliban soldier who fought against British and US forces in Afghanistan will be given asylum in Britain because the pro-western government in Kabul is ‘persecuting’ him, I start to really wonder at what the word ‘asylum’ really means. Did rational people object to former members of the National German Socialist Workers Party being ‘persecuted’ in the aftermath of World War Two? A few days ago, American bloggers Andrew and Sasha arrived in Britain, neither of whom have ever fought against British soldiers, or called for the death of Christians and Jews, or joined any organisations like Al-Muhajirun which aims to make Britain a muslim caliphate… …and yet they were nevertheless detained at the airport upon arrival in the UK on Thursday and grilled for nine hours before being provisionally allowed into the country. In fact Sasha’s blog was examined by the Immigration agents and its content used as the excuse to initially deny her entry. It is strange that the content of Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad’s website does not seem to get him kicked out of the country. The state is not your friend. January 19th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Or more accurately, the day after the night before. Two separate parties yesterday involving a large contingent of Samizdatistas has resulted in rather meagre output today. 
Proper decorum was observed at all times
Brian Linse, our pet pinko from California crashed
Sober discourse was the byword at this gathering as usual Normal output will resume tomorrow… January 18th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The excellent folks at Stand.org.uk, who describe themselves as “a group of volunteers who originally came together in 1998 in a vain attempt to fix the worst aspects of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act”, are mobilising efforts to oppose the imposition of ID cards in the UK. They enable you to contribute your comments to the ‘consultation’ process, which Downing Street is claiming shows Growing support for entitlement cards… We think you should go to Stand.org.uk website and let them show you how to tell the British government exactly how you feel about this. I did and left comments saying:
Be polite but tell them what you think. Kudos to Stand.org.uk for their efforts to defend what is left of civil liberties in the United Kingdom. 
The state is not your friend January 13th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
At the heart of almost all ‘redistributive’ statism lies the idea that it is perfectly okay to take money from one person, backed by the threat of state violence, in order to give it to other people deemed more worthy of that money. The ‘worthy’ people are those who have managed to make the political process work in their favour in some manner, such as students in Britain. People like Will Straw, son of British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, call education a ‘public good’ and thus sees that as ample justification for the National Union of Students demanding that students like himself have their education paid for by money taken from others… and yet is not the opening of a corner shop or supermarket a ‘public good’ as well? It offers not just needed products but also employment. Is not almost any lawful economic activity between two willing parties a ‘public good’ for much the same reason, as it generates wealth and satisfies needs? Yet unlike education funded by theft, these other activities involve only consensual relationships and private capital allocated with private insights and information… If I buy a product or open a shop, it is because I think it is in my interests. However I am not going to use force to extort people into buying products at my shop or acquire things by violent robbery. Although Will Straw may think it is in my interests for him to be educated, I happen to disagree. However he is quite prepared to have the state use force to compel me to provide for his education. Like most who feed at the public trough, he casually accepts the morality of the proxy violence of the state provided it benefits him. There are some actual ‘public goods’ in the sense Will Straw uses the word, such as defence, the prevention of crime and perhaps discouraging communicable diseases, but those are really the only legitimate role of state… for the likes of Will Straw to think something like his personal education is something that compares to those true ‘public goods’ is strange thinking indeed, for it violates the true public good of the prevention of crime: he would have the state rob me for his benefit. January 12th, 2003 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
No, I don’t mean some figurative ‘holy grail’, nor do I mean Monty Python & The Holy Grail, I really do mean the real purported The Holy Grail. A group of modern day Knights Templar will be using modern thermal imaging and ultrasound technologies to search Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland, long thought to be final resting place of what is said to be the real Holy Grail. January 10th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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)
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