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The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. – James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 47 October 30th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The Stern report on climate change is being published and has been seized upon by the government to continue its alarmist campaign for government expansion. Stern lists the usual disasters and argues that humanity must take action now to avoid impoverishment, although it was commissioned for an international audience. In Britain, the main impact is taxation, with the media concentrating on new charges and levies. As the electorate are already sceptical about further tax increases, the self-appointed prophets are latching onto the paradigm of climate change to justify their onerous theft. Taxes on cars, aviation and other carbon generating activities will weigh more heavily upon the poor and lead to lower living standards now rather than the hypothetical poverty projected for the future. The Letter from David Miliband, the appointment of the political failure Al Gore and the report by Stern are all designed to provide the intellectual ballast for continued government expansion. These taxes are politically unpalatable and would be rejected by the electorate, if levied without green cover. Therefore, climate change and catastrophism are the reasons for a ‘greener than thou’ ratchet effect, where politicians use Britain and our money to puff themselves up as a moral example for others. Since the science and the scenarios are still so uncertain, climate change has been adopted as the vanguard for further taxation and a curb on British consumerism. Using the expansion of the state and taxes, rather than market mechanisms, our politicians will dampen our economic growth, steal our wealth, and wrap us in their parasitical hairshirt. The only light in this gloom is that the British electorate may reject such alarmism and the example of our political stupidity will lead India and other natiosn to seek technological and free-market solutions that do not curb their march away from poverty. October 30th, 2006 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been experimenting with Firefox because of its superior ability to block annoying advertisements, something I was advised to do by a host of readers last month… but ever since upgrading to Firefox 2.0, I have been very grateful for its ability to ‘restore browsing sessions’ after a crash because I get five or six crashes per day, something I certainly did not get with Firefox 1.5 (or the Devil’s Browser IE 6, for that matter). Are many folks out there experiencing anything similar? October 29th, 2006 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andrew Sullivan has been gently poking fun at 80s music recently. Steady on Sully, I am a proud 80s-era teenager (although I never sported a mullet haircut, honest). In my ‘umble opinion, you can keep your droning Coldplays, Travises and thuggish Oasises, for me, nothing comes close to the brio of Madness, the wonderful, cleverness of the Stranglers or for that matter, these dudes from Norway. And of course, one should always remember to buy Danish! (I originally said that Aha is from Denmark. Several latitudes of error. Thanks for the eagle-eyed reader for pointing this out). October 29th, 2006 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to the Sunday Telegraph, a new way of calculating how council tax (local government taxes) are set will take account of aspects of a locality such as crime in setting the tax band. The nicer and less crime-ridden the area, the higher the tax you pay. Areas such as Chelsea and Westminster (I live in the latter area) will see their tax bills soar, while presumably if you live in a place such as Hackney, one of the most deprived and crime-ridden areas, your bill goes down. Marvellous. This is hardly an incentive for people to help curb crime and contribute to making their neighbourhoods more pleasant places in which to live. One of the tropes of the MSM in recent years has been how the present New Labour government has turned away, in part, from the politics of punitive taxation as practised by Labour governments in the past. This is more about image than reality, however. Inheritance tax is biting into a broad swathe of the affluent middle class, the sort of folk that switched to Labour in 1997 or simply refused to vote for the Tories. Now Labour, in order to finance the swelling ranks of public workers, is proposing to hammer those same classes again. Even the Tories, who have been supine on the tax issue under the leadership of David Cameron, have started to kick up a stink on this issue. The increasingly intrusive powers of officials in judging the values of our homes, coupled with this latest threatened increase, promises to be a gift to the Tories, if only they have the cojones to play the issue properly. The threatened increases are likely to hit precisely those marginal constituencies that the Tories must take from Labour to stand a chance of winning the next election. This does not look very intelligent from Labour’s point of view. October 29th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. – H. P. Lovecraft For me this quote can really be applied to almost any set of beliefs. October 29th, 2006 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
For those of you in London, there’s a free showing of a new film on Wednesday looking at "the dark side of environmentalism". I saw Tom Clougherty on the internet TV station 18 Doughty Street (view recording) discuss the film against some statist from the Green Party. Clougherty’s view was that while there is something of the Michael Moore about this film, it makes an important point. It’s about an underdeveloped town in Romania full of unemployment and poverty. Capitalists want to create jobs by building an environmentally-friendly mine, but Western environmentalists swoop in from overseas and try to force the locals to stay poor, saying that the locals are happy being poor. The showing is at One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA. Doors open at 6:30pm, the film starts at 6:45pm, there is a Q&A session at 7:50pm, and there is a drinks reception at 8:15pm. RSVP to iea@iea.org.uk. View the trailer here: The film is also available on DVD from here. October 29th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
October 28th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I read this item with interest as it shows a major difficulty with the flying laser battlewagon has been solved. The big laser gunships use powerful chemical lasers in which fairly toxic chemicals are used in massive quantities to fire missile-killing rays thousands of miles through the atmosphere and space. Even a very large aircraft can carry only enough ‘ammunition’ for a handful of shots. For this and other lesser reasons I have not been enthusiastic on the viabiliity of the current developmental generation of laser weapon systems for defense against anything beyond a single missile. I do admit I have always appreciated the major cool of a 747 with a battle laser on board! Not surprisingly the USAF has seen the same problems I have. The referenced article shows they have worked on and perhaps solved it. If the chemicals are recycled onboard the aircraft, the number of shots becomes very large, limited only by the recycling efficiency and the onboard power available to carry it out. The chemicals become a sort of ‘capacitor’ or rapid discharge ‘battery’ rather than a consumable ‘bullet’. In operation an airborne laser would fire one or more shots and then over a period of time use lower density power systems to recharge for the next salvo. October 28th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Who would you not allow to participate in a parliamentary delegation to Israel? An MEP linked to far right anti-Semitism and holocaust denial. That seems a fairly straightforward rule of thumb. Do not take such figures along as your hosts might get a trifle jumpy. Welcome to the pomposity of the European Parliament, the post-democrats who represent us. They decided to include Marine Le Pen in their ranks, and the Israelis thereupon refused to meet any of the delegation. The visit was promptly cancelled for “technical reasons“, or, as one official noted, rather pointless. The cancellation was not met with universal acclaim. Some think that a foreign power should not dictate the membership of a parliamentary delegation:
Others were miffed that they did not go, as they thought had a contribution to make, and the Israelis should have been willing to put the Holocaust behind them:
October 27th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire – which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) – I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that. A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer’s everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book. What people like Paul Marks or Sean Gabb would make of it, people who know this story inside out already, I do not know. I suspect that they would be impressed if slightly bored, and that they would nitpick details of interpretation but have no big complaints. But I am, I surmise, a more typical sort of educated person than those two luminaries, the sort who knows lots of bits and pieces about stories like this but nothing like as much as I’d like to. And I absolutely loved it. → Continue reading: Ancient Persia versus the Ancient Greeks – Tom Holland ties it all together again October 27th, 2006 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Count this against the serendipitous beauty of found objects, but I just got suckered into opening an email I had not intended to, and found this bit of salient, nonsensical prose heading up a doubtless spurious offer to buy stocks in some ethanol company that I suspect is not incorporated anywhere near the State of Delaware:
This is as good a bit of expiatory nonsense as any I have ever read. And I have read a lot. October 27th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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