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I am interested in this story as I am one of many people for whom the hopefully sunnier weather of summer is accompanied by the irritation of hayfever. I do not suffer from it as badly as when I was a child but it is still unpleasant sometimes. I once played in a cricket match and my symptoms – streaming eyes and sneezing – got so bad that I could hardly continue to play the game. Anyway, it may be soon be possible to significantly nail the problem with a vaccine. June 5th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The other day I referred to a PJ O’Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:
If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie. Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.  June 4th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones – heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry – they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He’s great. I particularly like the tune, “Roadrunner” – ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast. Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed. Here’s an album of some of his greatest hits. June 4th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Along with these fine people, I will be one of the speakers at the Libertarian International conference in Warsaw on June 28-29. I will be speaking about how government regulation of radio spectrum flows through into such things as excessive roaming charges on your mobile phone, and leads to absurd states of affairs such as having a continent wide 3G mobile broadband network that is too expensive for anyone travelling outside their own country to actually use. This is course creates a vicious circle in which regulators feel they have to correct “market failures”. I will be addressing the question of how much regulation (if any) is necessary in the first place. It would be splendid to see any readers who feel like joining us at the conference and in Warsaw and an associated trip to Krakow on the following days. I know from experience that Warsaw is a fun and stimulating city, and I promise to mount an expedition to seek out vodka in bars with far too much chrome on Saturday night with anyone who cares to join me. June 3rd, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter’s Big Government views and the former’s alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama’s recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:
Maybe the “glee” has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let’s just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a “Christianist” (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer. Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself. In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period. June 3rd, 2008 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown’s fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:
What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means “submission”: to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology. The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to “cure” Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for “extreme” Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah’s Witnesses? When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead. June 3rd, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am out of tune with the spirit of the age. My first reaction was to laugh out loud: The grandson of prominent anti-gun campaigner Pat Regan has been arrested on suspicion of stabbing her to death. It is not just the paradox. It is the way such an incident – horrific in reality though it no doubt is – puts the lie to all such sentimental campaigns. Children are not angels corrupted by contact with mundane implements; they are social animals, small brutes that will grow into large brutes unless civilized. A civilized man ought to be able to carry a gun without offering to shoot anyone under any provocation short of violence offered. A brute will assault you with whatever comes to hand if he feels slighted, and the last thing society needs is for him to have is greater self-esteem. [(1) – (2)] Fetishising mere tools just further exculpates violent people in their own minds. Am I too cynical, or too idealistic? June 2nd, 2008 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London’s underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people – they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students – were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault. I guess this proves Boris’s point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer. Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks. June 2nd, 2008 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy. Excerpt:
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic. The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading. June 2nd, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via the Boing Boing website – is this superb picture. Enjoy. June 1st, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘The Caballeros’ of the National Space Security Office were awarded the National Space Society’s prestigious ‘Space Pioneer Award’ this evening for their work in bringing the possibilities of Space Based Solar power to the attention of the powers that be and pretty much every one else. Although these ideas have been known ‘forever’ amongst my circles, they have been out of the limelight for decades due to a Carter-era hatchet job. So, congrats to our friends in DOD, and new found drinking buddy Coyote Smith!  The Caballeros receive their just rewards for saving the planet. Coyote is second from right. I’ll add other names later. Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved Speaking of drinking… there is a party in the suite down the hall, so that is me away! June 1st, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is poetry, there is bad poetry and there is an order of magnitude revealed by the “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Fifth Annual Horrible College-Student Poetry Competition. Some snippets from a piece that has a fluidity we can only dream of:
Or this:
Do read the whole post. June 1st, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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