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The Dnepr launch including the TransOrbital engineering test article for their coming Lunar Trailblazer vehicles has been orbited successfully. According to the Russian company’s news section:
We can now look forward to a late 2003 attempt on the moon.  Courtesy TransOrbital December 22nd, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.” December 22nd, 2002 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
In so far as this slogan declares a beautiful and simple truth, it does not prompt me to go and read James Lileks. But that’s because I already do read James Lileks. Avidly and regularly (doesn’t everyone?). All the more reason, then, for a particular phrase or position in his column to stand out for me and ignite a bonfire of ideas in my head. This time, the great man says:
It is taken from the screed that inspired the above-mentioned slogan and it is a view from which I beg to differ. I am opposed to ‘Women’s Studies’. I am opposed to all ‘studies’ be they women’s, social, peace, gay, ethnic, media, vegan, enviro-mental or any other ‘studies’ one may care to mention. ‘Studies’ are not about studying. They are nothing whatsoever to do with pushing forth the frontiers of knowledge. It is not about learning, it is about anti-learning. ‘Studies’ are the colonies of the marxist academic imperium established to train future operatives in the principles and means of deconstruction and social engineering. They are the proving grounds of the middle-class kleptocrats that spend their lives absorbing wealth while serving in NGOs, committees and state bureaucracies, manipulating and publishing statistics and information in order to advance their naked political agendas. ‘Studies’ are a cancer, a rot. Cut open any ‘studies’ department of any university and a million saprophytic creepy-crawlies will pour out, scurrying frantically away from the light. ‘Studies’ are a leukemia attacking the healthy cells of a civil society. Cauterise them, remove them, incinerate them and let the body grow strong and healthy again. December 22nd, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Poor, beleagured France! All they’re trying to do in West Africa is to keep the peace and impose some semblance of order.
Meanwhile, the EU Commission in Brussels has denounced French unilateralism. The country’s ‘intellectuals’ are doing nothing except sneer at their leaders ‘simplisme’ foreign policy. The UN has passed a resolution condemning French aggression. Church leaders are urging the French to be more tolerant and understanding. Thousands of left-wing academics and celebrities have launched a ‘Not In My Name’ Petition. African leaders are calling upon the rest of the world to resist French militarism and both the Guardian and the Independent are running editorial columns focussing on France’s right-wing, red-necked President, their dangerous and uncivilised obsession with gun-culture and the danger that their blind, one-sided foreign policy represents to the rest of the world community. Okay, none of those things have actually happened yet. But I’m quite sure they will. Any day now. You mark my words. Just wait and see. December 22nd, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Such is the quality of the balkanisation nostrum that it can, simultaneously, be a cornerstone of establishment thinking and also packaged up as new, different and ‘radical’. As evidence, please see the case of ‘Ms.Dynamite’, a 21 year-old British recording artist who has proclaimed that her future lies in the political realm:
Welcome to the club, Ms.Dynamite.
It’s the Rocky Hip-Hop Picture Show. Ms.Dynamite is doing the ‘Time-Warp’ and we’re back in the 1960’s.
Sounds like she’s been tuning in to that middle-class, rich white man Jack Straw. That’s precisely what he’s been telling us for years.
Ah yes, that must explain what the British National Party are trying to do. Still, all things being equal I expect that Ms.Dynamite will embark upon a successful career in politics sooner or later. She will slide effortlessly into the NuLabour machine. December 21st, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Banned Wagon is rolling into town again and, this time, a herb called ‘Kava-Kava’ has been tossed unceremoniously onto the back of the wagon and driven into the wilderness:
Well, four deaths is four too many, that’s for sure. But how is Kava-Kava ‘linked’ exactly? What does ‘linked’ mean? Does it mean that the herb caused symptoms which led to an illnesss, or what? Questions enough, but the report gets even more obtuse and vague:
But that doesn’t matter because:
This may have something to do with the way the journalist has written the article or it may that there’s something we’re not being told but, in the absence of those two possibilities, then the case for prohibition is anything but ‘clear’. In fact, it is quite opaque. It is the diametric opposite of ‘clear’. This is ‘Newspeak’; producing no evidence of guilt results in a ‘clear’ case having been made. Well, that’s about as much ranting as I’m entitled to, I reckon. I have never bought kava-kava and now, I daresay, I never will. Not unless I’m prepared to go to a shady, kava-kava pusher. But, I do detect that we’ve just witnessed another example of the ‘Precautionary Principle’; this is the public policy mandate that all risk must be avoided and which usually manifests itself as an avoidance of all critical inquiry as well. I have no medical or scientific training but I presume that the people who staff the Medicines Control Agency have oodles of both. Is it too much to expect them to approach matters a bit more…well, scientifically? December 21st, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Gender is too important an issue to be left to people who think it’s more important than anything else. December 21st, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today I visited my mother, and maybe I got my enthusiasm for Isn’t Capitalism Great? stories from her, because like me she thinks that good news is important. And she told me of some very good news that was in last weekend’s Independent On Sunday. I made a copy of the cutting.
The professor is a man called Joshua Silver, and the glasses he has devised are as remarkable an invention as I have ever heard about. With normal glasses the lenses are made of solid glass. But Professor Silver’s lenses are filled with liquid (silicon oil), and you can alter the focus of these lenses by pumping liquid into or out of them so that they expand or contract. You fiddle about with them until they are just right for you. And if your eyesight changes, which for most people means your eyesight getting worse, you can alter them, just by twiddling a couple of knobs on the side of the glasses. You only ever need one pair of glasses in your entire life, and you never need visit an optician in your entire life. None of this is now a particularly big deal in somewhere like London SW1 or New York City (although it quite soon may become important there as well), but in Africa, for millions upon millions who are now blurry-eyed losers, this is the chance to make visual sense of your world for the first time in your blighted life. Africa just doesn’t have opticians on every street corner the way rich countries do. Many Africans with bad eyesight never even learn to read, for this one reason. Educated people who used to have good eyesight but don’t any more now have to retire early. All that could now be about to end. → Continue reading: Adjustable spectacles from an Oxford physics professor – £6 a pair and they last a lifetime December 21st, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
A friend of mine insists that the Cato Institute is nothing more than a sell-out, obsessed with media coverage at the expense of intellectual integrity. This view seems to have been shaped by the jealousy of a less media-effective think-tank. In Britain, the Libertarian Alliance has the ambition of being/becoming the world’s second best libertarian website after Cato. Having been sent a copy of a recent publication: “Cato Supreme Court Review 2001-2002” I admit that I’m impressed with the quality of the content, the actual book itself, and the fact that it is possible to produce a commentary on the performance of the Supreme Court. I have not read the Supreme Court Review from cover to cover yet. But leafing through I learnt about the practice of “fast-track plea bargaining” and the conundrum posed by obscenity laws on the one hand and the provisions of the Bill of Rights on the other. I discovered that 90 per cent of criminal cases don’t go to trial by jury in the federal courts because of the “fast-track” system and that British law on defining “child pornography” would be thrown out, probably with a 7-2 majority, if attempted in the USA. The contrast with the United Kingdom is stunning. No British think-tank has the intellectual quality to produce such an academic work. None produces this level of production quality. And our absence of a constitution makes such a project redundant. The so-called “unwritten constitution” is precisely worth the paper it’s not written on. My only suggestion for future editions would be that it would be handy to have a listing of all Supreme Court cases over the period, with an indication as to which cases were covered in the various chapters. Otherwise, I welcome the appearance of this tome which deserves to become both a tool for the academic study of the US Constitution in practice, and an essential campaign guide to the wins and losses of individual freedom in America. December 20th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
China is a country that appears to be attracting increasing interest from the blogosphere and elsewhere and not without good reason. We all sense the potential lurking in this Asian giant. Depending upon one’s point of view this is either worrying or exciting or, possibly, both. Only yesterday I took delivery of a new dining table and set of chairs and couldn’t help the raised eyebrow upon noticing the legend ‘Made in China’ stamped on the box. Jolly smart it is too. I admit to being lured into the ranks of the China-watchers, so I tend to regard throwaway news items like this to be noteworthy:
How ironic that, despite the unarguable ghastliness of their ruling regime, the Chinese are constantly embracing new ideas of enterprise and weath-creation whilst the ruling elites of the West are searching for ever-more elaborate ways of suffocating both. For us fans of capitalism, watching China is a bit like watching a child develop, from the first utterance of ‘Mamma’ to taking the stabilisers off of their bikes. Just wait until those hormones begin to kick in! December 20th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of being wined and dined at the Chez de Havilland in the company of the man himself, Brian Micklethwait and a delegation of student bloggers responsible for the St.Andrews Liberty Log. Spending an evening with these fine, upstanding examples of student life rather put my own persistant grumbles into perspective. Judging from what they have to say about their fellow students at that fine old institution, it has become a Seat of Unlearning. Our dinner companions, it would appear, constitute an oasis of sanity amid a vast, barren desert of addled brains. One example that sticks in my mind, is a story related by one of the students, Alex Singleton. I believe I recall the details with reasonable accuracy but I’m sure I will hear smartly from Alex if this proves not to be the case. It seems that St.Andrews University Student Union has its very own ‘Equal Opportunities’ Commission. Or, at least, it used to have one because our Alex managed to get himself elected to head it and then promptly proceeded to trash the entire operation and render it unusable. Chalk one up for the good guys. However, in the midst of performing this great service for mankind, Alex was approached by a diminutive fellow student who wanted Alex to take up her claim that she was a victim of discrimination because of her lack of height. December 20th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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