This listing for Get Carter is awfully confused:

Cast: Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, Ian Hendry, Miranda Richardson, Britt Ekland, John Osborne, Mickey Rourke, Tony Beckley, George Sewell and Johnny Strong. 
Director: Mike Hodges, Stephen Kay and Stephen T Kay. 
Production: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Distribution: Turner Program Services, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, United Artists

It could be the 1971 version they are talking about but the stuff in bold looks suspiciously as if it came from the more recent Hollywood remake.

Reason has an update on the Free State Project along with a history of other, similar attempts.

The 30-minute Rule was suggested to me by Brian.  It is that up to 30 minutes after posting something you are allowed to alter it.  Which I think is reasonable.  Certainly, in my case, it is only after I have published something that I start to notice the spelling mistakes, typos, missing words etc.  Often it is only then that you find how it truly looks.  Usually you find that new line breaks have magically appeared and old ones have (equally magically) disappeared.

What I don't think is reasonable is either changing the wording or the meaning - especially the meaning.  If you didn't mean it you have to retract it either through a new posting or an update (which I think is OK).

Squander Two doesn’t like his brother or public transport.  In fact, it is difficult to tell which he likes least.

Blogging mentioned in the Telegraph.  Is this a first?

Update.  Perhaps he means articles like this one.

What is one to make of this TV listing from our friends at Yahoo:

The Charge of the Light Brigade
BBC 2 Mon Dec 27 2:40 PM
(110 min., 1936, USA, Adventure/Western/War Movies)

Biting satire of the folly of war based on the spectacular defeat of the British army at Balaclava during the Crimean War. As the English upper classes prepare to do battle, the youthful Captain Nolan has a fight on his hands with the brutal Lord Cardigan, commander of the celebrated Light Brigade. Less action and more political comment than the 1936 Hollywood version of the same story.

Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Patric Knowles, Henry Stephenson, Nigel Bruce and David Niven. 
Director: Michael Curtiz. 
Production: Warner Bros. 
Distribution: The Vitaphone Corporation, Warner Bros.

So, Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz weren’t Hollywood then?  Or perhaps they mean this film?  Who can say?

Search is now up and running (see bottom of sidebar).  The results page could be better but making the necessary adjustments could be quite a lot of work.  So, some other day then.

Eamonn Butler condemns the removal of tolls on the Skye Bridge.

Instapundit links to a piece on the Iraq War.  It includes this from Tony Blair:

There surely is only one side to be on in what is now very clearly a battle between democracy and terror

Which, I am sure, is precisely how he and many others see it.  But I don't.  My problem is that I am deeply ambivalent about democracy.

Here are some gripes:

• It produces a class of people who seek to benefit from the democratic process.  That's not quite right.  We all seek to benefit.  But for most of us there’s a swap involved.  In return for paying our taxes we expect to receive something in return.  In democracies there is a whole bunch of people who don't have to pay anything net.  A whole bunch of people who have little short-term disincentive to voting for higher taxes.

• It depends on the "collective wisdom of the individually stupid" as Thomas Carlyle put it.

• As the franchise has expanded so liberty has retreated.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has some more.

However, there is one big, inescapable plus: it wins its wars.  Democracy took on all-comers in the 20th Century and won every single time.

But can we really put that down to democracy?  Brian Micklethwait reckons that one of the West’s great strengths is its ability to debate.  This is never more true than when it comes to warfare.  Commanders argue like crazy about the plan but at least, as Brian says, "everybody knows what the plan is." I think there is another element to it.  Because the debates are so furious there is a tendency to allow people to do their own thing.  Some ideas succeed eg radar; others fail eg the bombing campaign.  But the point is that that process of experimentation is allowed to take place.  A quasi-market in warfare, perhaps?

It is just possible that the two world wars were fought at a time when the major democracies were still largely free and that democracy had not had long enough to really mess things up.

Of course, it also just possible that the rise of statism is an aberration brought about by the industrialisation (and therefore, centralisation) of the means of communication.  In other words the medium really is the message.  In much the same way the new decentralised communication technologies will bring forth a more decentralised and, therefore, freer world. 

We have to hope.

Yes.  There will be plenty of occasions when I want to find something I have written before; categories aren’t always that useful; Google would be too clumsy.

Update.  Only it’s proving harder to implement than I thought.

Red used to be Blue - only changing in 1992.  Well, well.

I find writing difficult.

It's fine when I know what I think.  That has been one of the delights of doing this blog: I have some very definite ideas about how blogs should be - so, for once, it's reasonably easy for me to sit down and say what I think.

But when it comes to politics I often don't know what I think.  Or more to the point I know what I think but I find it difficult to explain why I think it.  This matters.  I spend a lot of time writing to my 16 or 17-year old self.  He's not going to accept assertions.  He needs reasons.  Supplying them is hard work.  But blogging isn't supposed to be hard work.  The great thing about blogging is that you can just spout away.

I also find that when I set finger to keyboard I often come up with lots of ideas all at once.  That part's not too bad.  It's when you order them.  That gets tricky.  And then you have to polish the English (I have to do a lot of that).  That's hard.  Often you find that one idea rests uncomfortably with another.  It's not so much that they contradict one another, more often that they are too similar or that if Idea A is true it is difficult to get it to fall into a logical sequence with Ideas B, C and D.

But the explaining yourself - that's the hardest part.

The strategy I came up with at Transport Blog was to fire off a “shoot first, ask questions later” post as quickly as I could in which I stated what I thought but explained absolutely nothing.  Explanations, reasons and definitions would come later.  Maybe in footnotes, maybe in follow-up posts and (it has to be said) maybe not at all.  Some of the time it worked and some of the time it didn’t.  Some of the time it was great because in the follow-ups you would create posts that could be used time and again.  ”Safety is not the only thing”, ”Safety is dangerous” were two of my standards.  But on other occasions the follow-ups were much more esoteric.  One offs.  The effort didn’t seem so worthwhile.

So, I don’t know.

The Copper on the uselessness of specialist squads.

Norman Dennis lays into the Home Office’s latest mantra.

Jackie D has a go at answering the question: why are mothers so knackered these days?  She thinks it because we (generally, not just mothers) are such a bunch of whiners.  We are a bunch of whiners because we have had it so much easier than previous generations.  Maybe. But, if ease of life leads to whining then, surely, the most whining would be heard in the US where life is easiest.  In which case people would be even less keen on having children.  But that's not the case as Mark Steyn never tires of pointing out.  On the contrary, the demographic disaster areas are Western Europe and Japan.

Is it, perhaps, related to holiday time?  Certainly, Europeans take an inordinate amount of time off by American standards.  But the Japanese don't.

Are the US figures buoyed up by immigrants? If so, it does tend to suggest that, at a certain point, wealth is the enemy of procreation - something I really don't want to believe.

Sean Gabb on why drinking and driving should not be a crime.  It’s something of a hardy annual for him.  His basic points are that accidents caused by D&D can easily be dealt with by the existing laws on manslaughter and murder and that "prior restraint" laws have subtle, unintended consequences.

"My colleague appears to be “indisposed"" says Helen of EU Referendum of Richard who has been banged up.  This should be interesting.  Perhaps it'll encourage him to cut down on the inter-necine attacks.

A US B17.  Oh, the perils of taking photos of the telly

The programme is divided into two sections. Half of it is devoted to the training and half to the history.  The training is the weaker part.  The hope is that the grandchildren will gain some appreciation of what their grandfathers went through. But it doesn’t really work.  There is an essential ingredient missing.  Their grandfathers knew that every day could be their last.  Today’s generation don’t.

The history part is better.  And it doesn’t pull its punches. The losses were appalling.  50,000 died.  Four out of five who took to the air never came back.  By way of comparison in the Great War four out of five who fought did come back.  I have this awful suspicion that you had a better chance of survival as a Kamikaze pilot.

The tale was told of a bunch of freshly-trained crewmen arriving at their new base.  They eagerly asked how long it took to complete their 30-mission quota.  They were given rather vague answers.  No one knew how long it took: no one had ever done it.  At that stage of the war (1941) being in Bomber Command was a death sentence.  That was precisely the same situation my grandfather was in.  He never saw 1942.  Or Germany for that matter: flying bombers was dangerous enough even without people trying to kill you.

A couple of years ago I had a chat with a man who took his basic training alongside my grandfather.  He was posted to the fighters and in the entire course of the war never took part in a single operation. Another aquaintance was even luckier.  Eighteen in 1939 and German it should have been curtains.  But he was living in England.  He was interned straight away and spent most of the war working in a Canadian abbatoir.  Such is life.

Bomber Crew, Channel 4, Mondays, 2100

We now have an e-mail link on the sidebar (labelled "Contact").  Many thanks to Jackie for the encoding.

Isn’t it great when Instapundit finally catches up with you?

Parenthood is not a bundle of laughs:

Everyone I know who has children and is aged between 30 and 45 is knackered . . . all the time&8230;Not just a bit tired, not merely wanting a little lie down, but comprehensively, totally exhausted.

Says India Knight.

I’m sure our parents’ generation weren’t this exhausted. Certainly, they managed to do things my generation simply hasn’t the strength to do, such as go to the theatre or hold intelligent conversations after 11pm (the only people I know who can talk after 11pm are single, on drugs, or both).

But why?

Gosh, why don’t we go back to the old system that we know provided it, rather than inventing expensive new ways that may or may not work?

Tim Worstall’s actually talking about education here but he could be talking about any number of other things.

Should I have pics?  I know I’ve jumped the gun here a bit what with the pic from Andy Wood’s blog only a few postings down but if we imagine that never happened then do I still have them?  The answer is, of course, "yes".  A picture can speak a thousand words.  And they look nice.  What more is to be said?

How to do them?  The null option is to simply bung them up.  The danger is that they may be too wide for the column in which they appear.  So that means either cropping or re-sizing to make them fit.

The next danger is that they will be so big that (for some readers) the page will take an age to load.  Now, for some bloggers like Brian this isn’t a problem (he effectively says: "I don’t care if it takes an age to load, this blog is going to have lots of images.  If you don’t like it don’t read it."), but I don’t think I can. In other words I have to reduce images in size even further.

This is precisely the same situation I found myself in with Transport Blog.  The solution was to thumbnail images (setting the smallest dimension to 120 pixels) while hyperlinking them to the original image.  Most packages will allow you to do this.  To my mind it worked pretty well with Transport Blog and I see no particular reason to change it.

Next question. Where to put the image?  I love it when text flows round images.  It looks wonderfully professional.  Again, I have a pretty good way of doing this.  It’s a refinement of what I (though not Brian) was doing with Transport Blog.  It also allows me to add in captions which I like a lot.  The only drawback is when there isn’t much text. I use tables (I’m not aware of another way of doing this) which leads to the image from one post encroaching upon the text of another.  Not good.  The only solution I can think of is to strip out the tables which is a bit fiddly.  That will give me an image but (as you can see below) a slightly odd one - it’s too near the left-hand side and too close to the text above. If I want to solve these problems I am going to have to rootle around in my style sheet and create a new style.  A bit of a pain but I can’t think of an alternative.

Incidentally, yet another plus point for Expression Engine is that it allows you to set it up so that it automatically surrounds the image with all the tags and parameters it needs to display correctly.

Update.  New style for pics with little text now done (see below)

Update II.  We’ve got the flowing working.  Only problem is that it seems to indent the first line of the accompanying paragraph.  But we can live with that.

Russia is going backwards, says Helen Szamuely (pronounced Sam-you-elly, I understand)

Magic mushrooms to be banned. Well, thank flip for that.  I’m just going to feel soooo much safer.

Thought provoking piece by Charles Hanson for the ASI:

Democracy assumes that ordinary people are wise enough to elect a government. If so, surely they are more than capable of deciding how best to spend their own money. And yet in the western European democracies people regularly vote for governments that take between 40 and 50 per cent of their incomes in taxation. In so doing they are saying that fallible politicians know better than they do themselves how to provide the health, education and other services that they need.

Are they?  I’m not so sure.

Don’t change your name, says Digby Anderson

The Copper on violence:

If the local library ring up to report a problem customer returning a library book late, you just know that you’ll be rolling around on the floor somewhere between Late Medieval History and the Large Print section.

Talking of nice bridges…here’s one of Andy Wood’s favourites

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know Blunkett’s gone but the real question is did Andrew win his bet?

Brian writes about the newly-opened Millau Viaduct.

Announcing the 1952 Committee - for all those who would have voted Tory but for their decision to back ID cards.

For what it's worth I gave up with the Tories shortly after the 1997 General Election.  I realised then that we (libertarians) had so thoroughly lost the battle of ideas that there was no hope for a freedom-loving political party in the medium term.  I’m very glad I did.  Suddenly, I was able to just what I liked. Blogging has only helped this.

Nifty logo.

Update.  It just occurs to me that way back in 1997 one of the attractions of voting Labour was that they were (sort of) against ID cards and the Tories (sort of) in favour.  And who was the Home Secretary at the time?

Update II.  Guido is none too pleased either:

Howard gave a speech in the City in February about his “British Dream”, it was trailed as his libertarian vision. When he said “the people should be big and the state should be small.... “ and to follow the British “...dream wherever it takes you.” He apparently meant you had to take your ID card with you.

I saw some chart recently (don’t know where but I think Instapundit linked to it) showing the growth of the Blogosphere.  When I started (March 2002) there were some 200,000 blogs up and running.  Now that figure stands at nearer 5m.

It certainly feels like it.  Every day it Mark Holland (he is particularly good at this) seems to be flagging up yet another excellent blog.  Which is great.  It shows the vitality of the Blogosphere and means that there will always be plenty to read.

The question is: how do I find out about the good stuff?  I do what I can to keep abreast of the blogs I know about via Bloglines.  But the list is starting to get big.  It’s not too bad yet but one feels that at some point things are going to become unmanageable.

I have another fear.  Mark can’t be flagging up every new blog.  There’s bound to be stuff I am missing.  And if I’m missing it so are lots of other people.  Which is a shame.

I suppose what I am hinting at is the idea of a Blog Central - somewhere where all the best postings get flagged up.  I could do that here but there’s only one of me and I can’t read everything and I can’t do it every day (unlike Glenn Reynolds).  No, I’d need other people.  So, it would have to be a group blog.  And that implies all sorts of personnel issues that I would rather not get involved with right now.

Anyway, there’s an idea for someone seeking fame if not fortune.

We now have the category or categories at the end of each post

I don’t have to.  Brian, for instance, doesn’t.  He reckons that it would just get him all obsessed by the hit rate rather than the more important business of writing stuff.

As it happens I do have a server-side counter as part of my package with Hosting Matters.  So, debate over?  Not quite.  I find that server-side counters (as opposed to their on-the-page equivalents) tend to measure funny things, like, for instance, control panel log-ins.  It also seems remarkably difficult to get them to tell you things like where people surfed in from.

The other advantage of on-the-page counters is that they are comparable.  If, as I did, you make your stats public then you can see that while you get 200 hits a day, Instapundit gets nearer 200,000.  Of course, the key thing here is that you have the same counter - counters have a sneaky habit of counting different things which can lead to different counters coming up with wildly differing results.

I suppose, in summary, it is just about worth having one.  And if you are going to have one it had better be the same one as everyone else.  And that means Sitemeter.

"The NHS is evil"

In defence of the Austin Allegro. Hmm.  He defends the technology, the ride but not the looks.  Odd, because that is about the only thing about it I would defend.

Via Blognor.

One of the great pros of blogging is interactivity and in the form of already-enabled comments and trackbacks this blog already has plenty of that, or, at least, the potential for it.

But this is only present for specific posts.  What if someone wants to contact me for some other purpose, like, for instance, inviting me to a party (well, you never know)?  Now, they could hijack an existing post and say: "Very sorry, but had to contact you." which is a bit Heath-Robinson if you ask me.  And there is the element of confidentiality.  What if, for instance, it was to tell me that the test results had come through?  Nope, e-mail is best.

But, in my experience, if you publish your e-mail address anywhere online all you ever get is a torrent of spam.  The way I got round it on Transport Blog (rather late in the day as it happened) was to compose a special page which alluded to my e-mail address and to hope that people were able to read through the lines.  It seemed to work though it was rather clumsy.  Having said that, now that I have moved to Hosting Matters (another decision I haven’t regretted) I seem to have the option to activate a spam filter.  I think I may give this a go and see what happens.

Iain Murray writes about rail infrastructure for the National Review.  Iain has the advantage of having actually been there when the bodies were being buried and, so, is in a good position to claim that BR’s infrastructure was clapped out and that London Underground used infrastructure as a bargaining chip in subsidy negotiations.

Via Cold Spring Shops.

Milton Friedman in the WSJ:

To summarize: After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas (though no such battle is ever won permanently); we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course.

Via Peter Gordon

Update.  It occurs to me that socialism is doing so well precisely because we have not won the battle of ideas.  While we may have persuaded people that state ownership of (how shall we put it) commercial industries is a bad thing they are yet to be so convinced about regulation and state ownership of (largely) non-commercial industries such as health and education.

You know when you’ve made it as a Blogger when the national press choose to plagiarise you.  Well done, the Copper!

By the way, I can’t find a link to the original plagiarism.  Maybe it’s not available on line.

Mark Holland explains Britain’s historical success:

One of the reasons to be proud of Britain is because we’ve generally reacted to events as they’ve come along rather than laid out plans to obliterate the old order and create a new one.

Permalinks are essential but where should they link to?  I always dread a MovableType link because it takes you to a page with just that entry and nothing else.  When you follow a link it’s often the only opportunity you’ll ever get to check out that particular blog.  If it’s not blogrolled right there and then it probably never will be.  What you really want is to see some other posts along with the one you originally wanted to see.  That way you can get a feel for the blog.  But the thing you don’t want to do is to have to do any further clicking plus waiting.  Strangely enough, I think old Blogger got this right first time round.  Their permalinks link you to the monthly or weekly archive and then scroll you down to where the entry is to be found.  That way you can read the post and do some browsing.

Anyway, from now on, that’s going to be the approach I (for the most part) adopt here.

KILLER FACT!
Luxembourg has both the world’s highest alcohol consumption, and the world’s highest GDP per capita.

Harry Hutton

Who is Tubby Riefenstahl?

"No cause is worth its salt unless it has its own custom 404 message".

How true

True to my word here is a list of blogs which I like:

From Bloglines

The roll of shame (blogs without feeds):
Natalie Solent
Michael Jennings
Photon Courier
TOLLROADSnews
Conservative Commentary

Note This is a