The Lede Vanishes
I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and...
View ArticleBroken how, exactly?
Sweden has made its choice and must live with the consequences. Two years ago almost to the day, after a vote that attracted unprecedented public interest, Sweden introduced a new national flower. It...
View ArticleBig Brother and Denmark
Regular readers of this blog know that politically, the cause for liberty cuts through conventional categories. Over at Wired magazine, which in my view has tilted more Left in recent years and seems...
View ArticleA convergence we will see more often
“Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change”, Euronews.com reports: A Belgian man reportedly ended his life following a six-week-long...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day – Vittu Putin edition
Can Putin take any comfort from the advance of the populist Finns Party, which achieved its best-ever result to take second place? After all, Moscow has often looked to Europe’s hard-Right parties for...
View ArticleA Lamborghini tractor at the gates of Downing Street
“If we don’t learn from the Dutch eco quagmire we might end up with Farmer Clarkson as PM”, warns the Times. Jeremy Clarkson is a bit too much of a Remainer for my political tastes, but we could do a...
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What I did on my holidays
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But… It says, Mandatory shooting...
View ArticleDifferent city, same old story. This time it’s Rotterdam.
In the Telegraph, Ruby Hinchliffe writes, The city that declared all-out war on landlords – and what happened next The Dutch have launched wide-ranging crackdowns on the buy-to-let sector, but renters...
View ArticleThe BBC frequently does tell people “who to support and who to condemn”
Four days ago John Simpson of the BBC wrote this article, “Why BBC doesn’t call Hamas militants ‘terrorists’ – John Simpson”, in which he said, “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day – some institutions cannot be reformed
I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is...
View ArticleThe lever wasn’t long enough
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”, the great mathematician Archimedes is supposed to have said. Maybe it was their company name that led...
View ArticleClimate fatigue
This article about “climate fatigue” by Francesco Grillo is one of the better arguments I have seen in the Guardian on the topic: “Climate fatigue isn’t a sign that Europeans are in denial – it’s a...
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