Kitchen Nano Garden

A properly tamed hydroponic garden for the digital age, designed by someone who's never seen a growing vegetable in his life.

Freedom is Slavery

The British government decides to implement that tyrant's charter called the Equality Act.

I think it's time to change the Conservative party to the "Not Quite New Labour" party.

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day
from
Ephemeral Isle

The Green Hornet: Chapter 11 - Disaster Rides the Rails

Gammera the Invincible

Bolshevism according to Punch (1918)

FIRST BOLSHEVIK: "Let me see; we've made an end of Law, Credit, Treaties, the Army and the Navy. Is there anything else to abolish?"
SECOND BOLSHEVIK: "What about War?"
FIRST BOLSHEVIK: "Good! And Peace too. Away with both of 'em!"

Vanquishing climate villains at Popular Science

Agents of Goldstein! Evil! Evil! Hate! Hate! Hate!

I used to love Popular Science as a boy and I still spend a lot of time burrowing through the archives on Google Books. Indeed, if you're a DIY enthusiast, the workshop articles alone can give years of informative pleasure. In recent years, however, it's become a thin shadow of its former self with gee wiz covers that are betrayed by thin articles that are often little more than adverts for new gadgets and cars. I could even live with that if it weren't for the fact that a magazine once aimed at men with both wood and metal lathes in their garages has now been taken over by left-wing journalism grads who think that they were put on Earth to lecture Outer Party members to toe the line.

Case in point is this article telling the unwashed how they can "vanquish" "climate villains" who dare to question Lord Summerisle and the priests of blessed Gaia. I'd offer a refutation of this prolonged exercise in ad hominem attacks and poisoning the well, but the comments section does a far better job.

Conquest of the Air

HERB

Short for Home Exploring Robot Butler. When it isn't hunting Sarah Connor, it hands out bottles of Fuze.

Interesting technology, but I see some consumer resistance if they plan to market it as a butler. The idea of a mechanical Jeeves to fetch the tea is tempting, but as far as I recall the flesh and blood Jeeves never stood behind Bertie Wooster's chair with metal claws poised to clutch and rend.

Call me old fashioned, but it's hardly feudal, is it?

The Great Fire through the funhouse mirror

Channel Four is airing a new documentary on the Great Fire of 1666 and bigger load of codswallop I've never seen electrons wasted on.

In an article on the BBC website, the producer airs her view that the significant thing about the fire wasn't how it transformed the architecture of the City, the tragedy of a great natural disaster, nor how it arguably burned out the plague from the capital, but rather that is it a parable of how nasty modern Britain is. According to the producer, the result of the Great Fire was just like that after the 7/7 bombings: A vicious, murderous, utterly gratuitous backlash (for something the English knew was just reprisal) against innocent immigrants who never had an impure thought in their stainless lives.

The fact that the 7/7 bombings didn't "just happen", it really was a conspiracy to carry out an act of war, and that the inevitable-yet-never-occurring-anti-Muslim-backlash never occurred is strangely passed over. Still, aside from having absolutely nothing to do with one another, the producer is happy to use the Great Fire-7/7 as a handy stick with which to bash Britain. Not surpsingly, the entire article is an insult and reads like it was written for ten-year olds from a more than usually backward comprehensive.

The producer claims that the violence meted out to suspected arsonists after the fire was entirely due to an earlier English raid against West Terschelling by the Royal (the producer calls it "British") Navy that year. The Second Anglo-Dutch War is, of course, never referred to by name. With a proper historical perspective, the article refers to this raid on Dutch commerce as "diplomatic piracy" and an "atrocity" and claims that a gulit-ridden London populace awaited just reprisal because:

It was expecting something bad to happen, not because it was superstitious or frightened, but because the government had done something bad.

Translation: Londoners in the hot summer of 1666 went about with wringing hands and shouting ala Dr Hans Kiosk, "WE ARE ALL GUILTY!"

Despite apparently knowing full well that, to paraphrase the Reverend Wright, "England's chickens have come home to roost", the English reacted as all right-thinking historians expected them to with a pointless, utterly unwarranted, and vicious spree of bloodshed and murder against the utterly innocent. The fact that England was at war and that London had been the site of Catholic terrorist attacks within living memory is, of course, ignored as inconvenient to the thesis.

Charles II comes off a bit better in this national character assassination–sorry, documentary:

The king took a very enlightened view and always believed it was an accident.

"Enlightened" apparently now means in accordance with the latest version of events from Minitru. Never mind that it raises the question of whether if the King had been wrong, would he have been "enlightened"? Best not to dwell on it.

As is usual for the farce that passes for modern scholarship and the current prejudice against giving the English a fair hearing, the producer commits the standard 21st century fallacy of condemning the people of a more brutal age for living in a more brutal age; for not being "us". That isn't to excuse the mobs and the injustices dealt by the courts of the day, but none of it was inconsistent with the times and, if anything, the English response was incredibly muted. Had the Great Fire occurred on the Continent and the Dutch had been thought to blame, Amsterdam would have been put to the torch and its inhabitants to the sword before Cheapside had stopped smoldering.

So, what is the conclusion? That the Great Fire was an accident, but if had been arson it would have been justified? That, by implication, we should believe the same thing about 7/7? The writers can't even be consistent. Who was being blamed for fire? Immigrants? The Dutch? Huguenots? Roman Catholics? All of the above? Why? The facts are true, but the conclusion is a stinking muddle as the producer jumps from incident to incident with less of a desire to explain than to imply that the English were inherent brutes then and remain so to this day.

The article ties it all up with the neat bow of a perfect relativist conclusion that we think it was an accident, but other views are equally valid and who are we to judge? Well, except that the English are horrid, of course. That's objective fact and anything else is "airbrushing" to provide a "happily-ever-after sort of story".

I'm going to open a few windows and let the stench of rotting academia out now.

Eigg on their faces

The Isle of Eigg has won all sorts of praise and awards amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds for its go-ahead "green" approach to its electricity supply. According to the BBC, the island's 95 inhabitants "champion" renewable energy production with all manner of wind turbines micro-hydroelectrics, and solar panels (in Scotland?!?).

The thing is, all this sustainable energy isn't sustaining itself. Despite servicing less than a hundred people, the island is still utterly dependent on backup diesel generators and a light rainfall this year means that the Eiggians can't even run their toasters.

This is a shame, because electricity for the Hebrides is a serious problem and not a "green" rathole to pour down money that the country doesn't have and never should waste on such follies. Still, there is one silver lining. At least the Isle of Eigg can stand as a warning example of what the Greens intend to inflict on the rest of us, though not themselves.

Now, if you will excuse me, my toast is getting cold.

Civilising Toronto

Barbarian: Meet civilisation.

Bringrr

First, cell phone technology means that you'll never have privacy again unless you "forget" to take the little snitch along and now the Bringrr makes sure you'll never forget.

Still, you can always use my old wheeze of sticking a paper clip across the battery contacts.

Squadie... of the FUTURE!

They might want to think the helmet through a bit more.

Toronto 2010

A pox on these crazed, right-wing tea partiers. If we don't...

What? Left-wing communist/anarchist demonstrators struggling to free the oppressed through freedom of expression? Oops, sorry. Aside from all the latter's rioting, vandalism, assault, destruction of private and public property, rejection of legitimate authority, and violent crime in general in the service of a totalitarian philosophy, it's so hard to tell the difference.

Cracked

With the Eurozone in meltdown and the entire ghastly union facing everything up to and including civil war, the EU leaps into action and proposes a ban on selling eggs by the dozen. Instead, all products must be sold by weight and weight alone instead of number of items. Why? Because it's officious, confusing, pointless, expensive, and generally a way of rubbing the common man's face in the petty tyranny that Brussels dispenses as a matter of course.

If it wasn't so scary, it would be entertaining.

Update: The British government says that it will fight this ban. If it keeps to it's word, it will be a small indication that Whitehall still has a something resembling a spine, but great changes often start with the small.

My hope is that the government's opposition will take the form of a full-throated denunciation of not just the legislation, but the assumptions and ambitions behind it. My expectation is that it will be a mere quibbling about wordings and exemption.

Roll on the collapse of the EU.

Update: The EU claims that there's no truth to the story, though I wouldn't trust their saying that the Earth has gravity without jumping up and down a few times.

Project Trojan

Click on title link to listen.

The Green Hornet: Chapter 10 - Bullets And Ballots

Tales of Frankenstein

Baracus Obamus Caesar

The rule of law is for little people.