My faith in America is restored. My furtive bid to try to acquire a Green Card may be renewed again in anger, and the people of New Hampshire or Texas may yet hail me as one of their Britain-escaping sons. Yes, folks, the voters of Washington State’s Seattle have rejected the idiotarian espresso and latte tax, recently proposed, by a margin of seven voters to three. Good on you, Seattle. May the three out of ten of you who voted for it, be shipped out on a boat to Guardian-loving Britain, immediately, to see what it’s like to live under the corrupt welfare monolith you would so dearly love to create.
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Polly Toynbee poses the agonising question of the day:
Because citizens are dangerous, Polly, they’re so dangerous. Stop giving them all these chances. September 17th, 2003 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
 You’ve had a long, hard day. You want to go home to relax and unwind. You can hardly wait for that sweet moment when you place your key in the lock of your own front door. You make your way back to your car as it begins to rain. Your feet hurt. You’re getting wet. You want your comfy sofa and a hot meal and the TV and your warm bed. You finally reach the place where you parked your car only to find….disaster! It’s been clamped! You stand there helplessly while the rain pitter-patters on your brow. Your blood begins to boil into toxic fumes of rage and frustration. You are stranded and alone, feeling victimised and vulnerable. But, just at that moment, from out of the scudding, grey skies there swoops down a heroic figure of salvation to end your torment and set you free. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Angle-Grinder Man! → Continue reading: Desperately seeking heroes September 17th, 2003 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This is going to be a long, long post. Where it says ‘MORE’ it ought perhaps to say ‘A LOT MORE’. But my basic message is very simple. Go and look at – and have a read of – this new blog. Want to read the longer version? Very well, gather round. Once upon a time, long long ago, before many of you reading this were even born, in an unhappy land ruled by unhappy people some of whom were perhaps doing their best and others of whom were just plain bad, and none of whom seemed to be able to do anything right … It’s hard now to remember the political atmosphere in Britain in the late nineteen seventies. Frankly, the place seemed headed for the Third World. The public sector was growing and growing, in every way except in the contribution its workers made to the lives of others, and the public sector trade unions seemed untouchable. But then the International Monetary Fund came calling, demanding economic rectitude and cuts, and the public sector had to be challenged, even though nobody knew how. It wasn’t pretty. I remember this as the time when a cup of coffee in Covent Garden went from costing about 15p to costing about 30p in what seemed like the space of a few months. Inflation is a thinly disguised tax, and this tax was going up, fast. National ruin beckoned. → Continue reading: The new Adam Smith Institute blog is launched today September 17th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve not been writing about XCOR lately as there has not been much I feel at liberty to write about. There has not been a press release from them since July. So… I rang the CEO, an old friend from sci.space days. I caught him in DC where he is no doubt carrying out obeisance and sacrificing a fatted calf or his first born to the God of Paperwork. Mojave has submitted its application to be a launch site. XCOR has submitted its launch license paperwork. I would say both are fairly good news. It certainly makes for convenience if the Mojave Civilian Flight Test Center adds spaceship testing to its’ approvals. Both Scaled Composites and XCOR are based there. September 16th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
After two years of investigation, Superintendent Ali Dizaei of Britain’s Metropolitan police has been acquitted at the Old Bailey of two minor charges of falsely claiming £200 pounds worth of travel expenses, and lying about where his car was when it was vandalized. Yes, maybe it is the right thing to investigate alleged bent coppers, up to a reasonably sensible cut-off point, but so far this case has cost the British taxpayer up to £7 million pounds, has involved MI5 style surveillance involving legions of personnel, and has subjected Henley-on-Thames’s very own Mr Dizaei to levels of public humiliation which will almost certainly see him win massive compensation against the Met, should he file a claim against them. It seems reason has long since flown out of the police cell window. And despite being found innocent, Mr Dizaei faces further disciplinary charges from his bosses, while still remaining suspended on a £52,000-a-year salary. If I was a betting man I would say he’ll win a full £1 million settlement fee, if he does sue the Metropolitan police for harassment. So I don’t think we taxpayers will see much change out of the thick end of £10 million quid before this outrageous shambles is fully played out. But hell, what price the integrity of Britain’s premier police force? Who needs the state’s policemen, anyway, to be out on the street apprehending criminals, when they could be up each others’ trouser legs hounding out offensive tattoos, hounding out speeding motorists from behind their desks, or hounding out innocent superintendents falsely accused of expense account fiddling. Money is no object, apparently, except of course when it comes to actually protecting the public against the appalling rising squalor of modern British life. September 16th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
As I type, the American magician David Blaine is suspended in a perspex box above the River Thames in London in which state he intends to remain for a period of forty-four days with water but no food. For the life of me I cannot see what ‘magic’ is involved in this process but I will concede some moderate appreciation of his will to endure. Rather less appreciate is the seemingly endless procession of London low-life who have taken it into their heads to try to sabotage him:
Excuse me, but protestors? What, precisely, are they supposed to be protesting about? Has David Blaine been oppressing the Palestinians? Did he invade Iraq? Has he contributed to starvation in Africa? Is he lining his pockets from ‘unfair trade’? I submit that the term ‘anti-social thugs’ is far more accurate and appropriate. There is an awful lot of this kind of thing appearing in the mainstream British press right now and I cannot help but wonder if it isn’t a faint echo of the ‘root causes’ mentality: the tendency to ameliorate malevolence by ascribing to its perpetrators the implication they are driven by some sort of legitimate grievance. Hence, their actions can be both explained and excused. Whilst there stands no comparison whatsoever with Mr.Blaine’s bone-headed tormentors, I am quite convinced that if Adolf Hitler and his cronies were on the march today the press in this country would insist on referring to them as ‘German militants’. Likewise, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge would be described as ‘peace activists’. September 16th, 2003 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Telegraph reports that the French government has told an airline that it is not to ferry British troops to Basra. The ban is seen as reflecting Paris’s opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Corsair, which has been chartered numerous times to transport UK forces around the world, pulled out of a contract to fly reinforcements to Basra at the weekend. Transport ministry officials said yesterday that the move had nothing to do with safety but was a result of the intervention of the foreign ministry. The foreign ministry denied the report, saying there was “no political motive”. But British defence officials appeared to confirm that the ban was political and not technical. A Corsair spokesman said most of the flights undertaken for the MoD took troops to training exercises. For security and insurance reasons they rarely flew to war zones.
Basra is already open to civilian aircraft. For once I have nothing to add to Instapundit’s commentary:
September 16th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
About a year ago I posted this wondering how much data there was in a truck. Dai Davies, director of Dante, has answered my question (via the BBC)
I am still waiting for an answer to how many trucks there are though. September 16th, 2003 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Friday, Alice Bachini blogged this:
It worked. She is now back in blogging business full time, newly energised and revitalised by having a new blog address without_any_underlinings_in_it_as_per_this, which apparently some people couldn’t get. (Although I notice that the archive links in the rest of this posting still have underlinings in them. If the links below still don’t work for you, go to the one in this paragraph to the top of the blog and scroll down.) There’s also a picture of Alice wearing a bikini and a fur coat, and there is practically no bikini visible at all. → Continue reading: alicebachini.com September 16th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Geez, governments can’t do anything right. I mean, your average paint-huffing teenager can grow decent pot, but not the Canadian government. With a multi-million dollar budget!
Words fail. September 16th, 2003 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
What does the government know about you? – that’s the title of a piece that starts with this:
Here‘s the rest of it. September 15th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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