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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. – George Orwell Yet strangely I do not think Orwell actually knew David Cameron. November 10th, 2009 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
 This comes as no surprise whatsoever…
It is just a bit ironic that is comes on the day celebrating the Berlin Wall coming down. It is not enough to just defeat this legislation, the likes of John Yates and all his ilk need to be driven from positions of power because these are the Orwellian people who are the true clear and present danger to our very civilisation. The threat from terrorism is real, but the threat from our own insatiable security state is even greater. November 10th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Thompson – a blogger who seems to find some superb photos for his site, by the way – has a nice roundup connected to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, about which Perry de Havilland has already had some thoughts. As a reminder, here is a film I mentioned some time ago, based in former East Germany, that is a telling story about the dangers of the surveillance state. It remains something of a mystery as to why Communism was able to appeal to some very smart people for so long. Oh sure, many supporters of totalitarian socialism were transparently evil or very, very thick but obviously that does not quite explain it all. The idea of Marxism-Leninism as a substitute for religion comes closest, in my mind, to explaining its hold on many well-meaning minds as well as less benign ones. Some of that religious-substitute drive has now been shifted to the Green movement. But even so, I continue to this day to be surprised by how supposedly sharp people got swayed by communism. Take one random example: the 20th century spy novelist and film screenwriter, Eric Ambler. I have long been a fan of his fiction: the modern spy novel owes a lot to his style and method. He died in the late 90s at a ripe old age; reading an introduction to one of his books, I was a bit taken aback – although maybe I should not have been – to read that he was an enthusiast for the Soviet Union right up until the Hitler-Stalin pact at the start of WW2, which “depressed him deeply”. One wonders why this acute observer of human nature in its more sleazy respects had not cottoned on to the massive killings, the Man-made famines, that were already an established feature of 1930s Russia? By the mid-30s, this stuff was not a secret any more. British journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge had already exposed a lot of what was going on; even old Bertrand Russell, a man capable of considerable foolishness as well as brilliance in other ways, fingered the Soviet Union as a gangster state. November 9th, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The latest power grab by what the news simply calls ‘the experts’ is photoshopped images.
I think this does not go nearly far enough. Clearly the company behind Red Bull should be closely regulated as it is only a matter of time before someone drinks one and jumps off a building and falls to their death because contrary to their claims, Red Bull does not in fact ‘give you wings‘. In short, as people who are not ‘experts’ are moronic halfwits incapable of telling reality from advertising hype, we must simply turn over all aspects of our life to government approved We must ‘do it for the children’ of course. November 9th, 2009 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a very revealing article in the Guardian (natch) called ‘East Germans lost much in 1989‘. The ‘money quote’ (in GDR Marks of course) is:
Yes it is hard to not shed a tear for all those unemployed Stasi and blacklisted apparatchik that made the whole system possible. I have long suspected the real reason the wall was built was to keep out the waves of oppressed Western workers who were flooding into the socialist worker’s paradise and threatening to overwhelm the system. More seriously, the blacklisting process did not go nearly far enough in my view. A large number of people who were the enablers of the communist state should have spent a great many years in gaol. In 1955 the USSR created East Germany… and it ended in 1990… so it would seem to me that putting the most egregious enablers of that system in gaol for thirty five years would be a measure of poetic justice for the people who lost a generation of personal liberty by living in that open air prison called East Germany. Blacklisted? Apologists for tyranny deserve far worse than just being ‘blacklisted’. November 9th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The following is an account of a visit to Chernobyl I made over the summer. However, first an only slightly related personal plea, if anyone in our wonderful techie readership has expertise in the electrical systems of Hitachi hard drives, or knows a business with specific expertise in data recovery from such drives, could you please read this and get back to me. I would stress that expertise is more important than location: if you are or know someone really good in Taipei or Fresno, that is still greatly helpful. In 1986 I was in my final year of high school in Australia. The Cold War was still in force, and although some liberalisation had occurred in the Soviet Union, it felt like part of the natural order of things. The USSR was dark, strange, mysterious, and seemingly eternal. There was a wall down the middle of Europe, and nothing was more stark than the two sides of that wall. In April that year, workers at a nuclear power plant in Sweden detected excessively high levels of radiation. After briefly panicking about their own reactor, they realised that the radiation levels were higher outside than inside the building, and that the radiation was coming from somewhere else. Within a few days we knew that there had been an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kiev in the Ukraine. Over the years, we have learned more about what happened, and the word “Chernobyl” has entered the world vocabulary, at times as a general word denoting a terrible catastrophe or destruction. We learned of firemen sacrificing their lives to contain the disaster, of evacuations of cities, and eventually of a strange forbidden zone that reflected the times and earned a place in certain kinds of popular culture. Even culture that preceded it sometimes now seems to have a strange sense of being about it.  I am not usually one for organised tours, but there are places where one has no other alternative. Sometimes one needs the expertise of a local, and sometimes there are places in which one is simply not permitted to go other than on an organised tour. The so called Zone of Alienation around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor is such a place. In any event, in June I visited Kiev (*) in the Ukraine. I have been pushing further east into the former communist countries on my travels in recent times, and going to the Ukraine was an obvious next step. I have still not been to Russia – the amount of nonsense that one must go through to simply get a Russian visa rather puts me off – but the Ukraine is now in an interestingly semi-westernised state where one can get there on discount airlines and most westerners no longer require a visa, but which is outside the EU and NATO. Democracy and what middle class that exists is relatiely fragile, and one still can encounter Soviet style bureaucracy. Businesses from further west tread cautiously. However, my main reason for going was that I wanted to see that mysterious forbidden zone. → Continue reading: A trip to Chernobyl and the USSR November 9th, 2009 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid chap, but I cannot understand how he can fail to see the absurdity of his latest remarks. His threat to block his online content from search engines is an indication he does not grasp the fact his content is almost entirely fungible in a world where the plentiful alternatives are simply a click away.
Let me correct that…
Not only will people not be motivated to pay Rupert Murdoch for content if they cannot find it via google, they will not even be aware of the content Murdoch is hiding from them. In short, Murdoch will become completely November 9th, 2009 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I can easily see how there’s a connection between individualism and depression. Once you manage to throw off the social-collectivist hive-mind and think for yourself, you cannot fail to see how deeply into-the-shit ‘society’ has got itself.” Tanuki, a Samizdata commenter, writing about this. November 9th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sorry to obsess on the subject but I just keep seeing these howlers by the professional journalists who we are told are so essential for democracy/social justice/world rotation/whatever. The latest giggler comes from Ed Pilkington writing in the Guardian:
Well… a 5.7mm pistol round is kind of low-powered really, at least in terms of ‘stopping power’ and I suspect the main reason that traitorous Muslim creep at Fort Hood killed so many people was they were defenceless and thus died from multiple point blank shots… therefore I can well believe he purchased several high-capacity magazines… you know, the sticky-down bits that hold the “ammunition rounds” (presumably as opposed to “newspaper rounds” or “doctor’s rounds”)… hehehe…. and I assume he got several so that he could reload quickly during his shooting spree. It seems a crime reporter writing for a ‘quality newspaper’ does not need to know even the most rudimentary technical terms when describing a firearm used in a crime. The fact the editor of the Guardian lets a journalist make a ass of himself writing about something they obviously both know nothing about tells you a great deal about the state of the ‘indispensable’ news media. November 9th, 2009 | 72 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Snapped by me a fortnight ago, at the LA/LI Annual Conference at which Anthony Evans was the final speaker. I’ve straightened and sharpened it as best I could. A copyable, pastable and more readable version of the text from which this is taken may be read here. More photos of the speaker taken that same day can be viewed here. November 8th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, writes, at Devil’s Kitchen, thus:
I think this is spot on, not necessarily in the sense that Britain would be better off out of the EU, but in the sense that this is the bit of the argument that has been neglected. After all, the same lying politicians, stubborn bureaucrats, town hall little Hitlers and idiot voters that got us into this mess would still be around to screw up the alternative. So how would being out of the EU necessarily make their position weaker? Might the alternative actually be worse? I believe – partly because I want to believe (see paragraph one of the quote above) – that it would an improvement, but I would like to hear this argument made. Also, would we, Norway style, still have to endure EUrocrats making our rules for us, for the privilege of trading with the EU? Seems unlikely, but again, I’d like to hear the argument. So, as Instapundit would say, it’s in the post. The ordering seemed to work very smoothly. Nothing like free of charge to simplify things. November 8th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Inexplicably many seem to have been surprised by Dave Cameron’s predictable backtrack on confronting the EU’s constant slow motion power grab… however even those credulous enough to have not sussed Cameron’s weathervane nature ages ago are now getting the message loud and clear.
The solutions are actually quite obvious and straightforward: 1. simply do not vote for a Cameron-lead Tory party as a vote for them is a vote for more of the same. Vote UKIP instead. This could mean Cameron will win anyway (which means we get more of the ways things are now but at least does not reward the Tories for being BlueLabour) or Labour wins again (which means we get more of the way things are now). Either way it makes sense to vote UKIP. 2. get rid of the disastrous Cameron, who is in effect the UK version of the disastrous George Bush (i.e. a nominal ‘conservative’ who will continue to expand the state) and get a Tory leader who has some balls and at least a modicum of principle. This is not rocket science, it is just stating th bloody obvious. Hague’s Cameron mouthpiece statement is already setting up the Tory party for a lengthy period of doing nothing meaningful on the issue of the EU. Anyone who thinks “constitutional reform would not be on the EU agenda for some years” does not mean “constitutional reform will not be on the EU agenda ever” is a jackass and I have no interest in even debating with them. Either… clean house within the Tory Party and get rid of Cameron… or vote UKIP. Voting for a party under a jackanapes like Cameron makes no sense at all, unless the current state of affairs is actually what you want. November 8th, 2009 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
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