This is very cool. Here is a tube map (underground metro) that allows you to locate nearly 250 bloggers in London.
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Good news! Samizdata.net is still accessible in China, at least as of this morning! A few months back we did get a couple e-mails from Chinese readers, so it is good to know that the Great (Internet) Wall of China has some holes in it, no thanks to collaborators Cisco and Oracle (may the great EMP from the sky strike them down). 
November 18th, 2002 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Or even if their isn’t, either we have free will, or we do not and are just deterministic biochemical meat puppets dancing to some unfathomable script… God playing with himself. If the latter is true, then what the hell, nothing, and I do mean nothing actually matters. Morality? Truth? Life? Death? Meaningless. Even if you do not believe in God, the same questions are relevant. I would argue that we do indeed have free will (for an excellent discussion by an atheist on that, see sections of David Deutsch‘s remarkable Fabric of Reality). And if we have free will, the very notion of submitting to the slings and arrows of life when an arrow-proof shield can be fashioned with our own hands is surely unreasonable… and to forcibly require that a person do nothing when the means to build that shield exist is not just unreasonable but monstrous. In the print edition of New Scientist, Tom Shakespeare, the co-author of Genetic Politics: From eugenics to genome advocates outlawing parents from using ‘sperm selection technology’ which can allow the sex of a child to be chosen. He sees this as a precursor to parents eventually selecting desired traits for unborn children:
This thinking is actually quite close to that used by socialists who argue that ‘private’ education should not be allowed because it should not be up to mere parents to decide what is best for ‘their’ children. Not only can private individuals not be trusted to make such decisions (it should be left to ‘experts’), it is also unfair to others if those children are better educated. Similarly, if physically more capable disease resistant children can be ‘created’ by parents, this is somehow seen as ‘bad’ for everyone else. → Continue reading: If there is a God… November 18th, 2002 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Want to buy a robot mini-dragon to watch out for fires and intruders? Got lots of money? Then what you need is a Banryu.  It looks like something from Appleseed or Ghost in the Shell. Very cool indeed. November 17th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a new film called 28 Days Later, which to summarize extremely briefly, involves Britain in the very near future laid waste by a bio-engineered plague released by animal ‘rights’ activists. This plague, called The Rage, turns people into feral zombie-like killers. Although the film has gained some rather good reviews, why bother shelling out your hard earned and heavily taxed money to see zombies up on the big screen? Britain is already full of zombies tramping somnambulantly under the CCTV cameras, past the voting booths in which they can meaninglessly vote for ‘worst choice one’ or ‘worst choice two’ and only moving at all due to the sensory stimuli provided by the carcinogenic stench of greasy fast food dispensaries and the flickering light cast by sub-moronic Pavlovian response inducing game shows.  So why bother going to see a film about them when all you have to do to see zombies is look out your well barred and burglar alarmed window? I am not usually this bleak-of-view, but to see the protections of both habeas corpus and double jeopardy doomed by a currently unassailable government… and yet to then see this greeted not with rioting on the streets but for the most part with a collective ovine shrug, does rather lead anyone who values liberty to dark sentiments. November 17th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
…and tough on the causes of crime  This meme hack was brought to you by Alan K. Henderson. See here for the inspiration. November 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Tonight three North African Muslims were arrested by MI-5 and charged under Section 57 of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, with conspiring to release cyanide gas in the London Underground (the subway train system). The arrested men were said to belong to an organization that is part of Al Qaeda. If only the British State would spend a great deal more of its appropriated money on this sort of legitimate operation and building up our highly professional but vastly under-funded military… and spend vastly less time and stolen money distorting our economy, abridging our liberties and generally screwing things up, we would be a great deal safer than we currently are. November 16th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alas Dodgeblog is dead… yet despair not for Andrew and his eldritch minions have gone slithering and gibbering over to their new cobwebbed lair in some dark and dank corner of the otherwise fragrant realm of La Blogatrice, Sasha Castel. Also, former Dodgeblog alumnus Mommabear has found a new den at On The Third Hand. November 16th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Moors murderess Myra Hindley has just died and is hopefully now burning in hell. Good riddance. November 15th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
…does not mean it is not true! In Brian‘s earlier article about why railways are the width they are, there has been much commenting about the veracity of the theory that it can be traced back to Imperial Roman times. But in those comment, it was claimed the English V-sign is also of largely mythical origin. I disagree. The meaning of the V-sign is quite well known and I have not seen any better explanations. The US gesture of extending the middle finger is clearly just a phallic reference (i.e. “f**k you”), but the English V-sign, which has some similar connotations (i.e. it is not a sign of endearment), has historical roots dating back to the 1400’s. If the middle finger is a gesture of anger, the V-sign is a gesture of defiance and above all, a threat. “It is with these two fingers that I use my longbow!”… Up yours, with an arrow! Of course as with anything of this nature, it is more or less a matter of folk lore yet I have not seen any evidence to contradict the contention that the V-sign was indeed a gesture of defiance by common English soldiers towards the French, though my understanding is that it was not just associated with the Battle of Agincourt but was in general use during the Hundred Years War.  
Both versions of the gesture made perfect semiotic sense and Since World War Two the V-sign, knuckles inwards, has come to mean V-for-Victory far beyond the shores of Britain. Knuckles outwards, it retains its more ‘earthy’ meaning. Yet Churchill would have been well aware of both the gesture’s significance and history. He intended to coopt both to use against Nazi Germany: Defiance and, to put it bluntly, Up yours. 
The V-sign considerably pre-dates the European Union… November 15th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Medact, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, released a paper on Tuesday which predicts that an invasion of Iraq could lead to a ‘human catastrophe’. The document is called Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq. Environmental Costs? Environmental Costs? These people are talking about the environmental costs of removing the man who ordered the systematic torching of all of Kuwait’s oil fields from power. I have some news for you, guys… there is already a ‘human catastrophe’ in Iraq. Killing Saddam Hussain and exterminating Ba’athism and its supporters is the only way that will ever end. It is interesting that the ‘International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’ think the best way to do that is to leave Saddam Hussain alone long enough that he can develop or acquire nuclear weapons of his own. One must remember that these are the same people who wanted the Soviet Union and NATO to disarm… but of course the West should do it first. I will start taking these apologists for mass murdering tyranny seriously when they publish a paper called “Willful Murder: The Health and Environmental Costs of having a Socialist Dictator in Iraq”. November 14th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been decrying the rapid emergence of a British panoptic total surveillance state but do not think this is a purely British problem. A NYTimes article reports Pentagon plans a computer system that would peek at personal data of Americans
Naturally anyone who values civil liberties and is not blindly trusting of the state is far from enthusiastic about this.
Yet of course that is not what the official line. Predictably…
And how will they “detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists”? By spying on the communications of tens of millions of Americans daily without so much as a search warrent of course. This is far from just a British problem. November 12th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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