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If you meet Liberal Democrats trying to claim that after the local government elections that Britain now has three-party politics, tell them that after the European elections it actually has four-party politics; and their party is fourth.

I have long thought that Liberal-Democrats deserved to be rounded up and kept in high security prisons. However, a friend suggests a more useful alternative. Why don't we use genetic engineering to breed a four-headed hydra with the likenesses of Hayek, von Mises, Friedman and Reagan? It could seek out Liberal Democrats, wrap itself around them, and suck the collectivism out of them. The discarded husks could then be shredded and recycled as packaging for the fast food industry.

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The story of the next general election is one of three party politics
Charles Kennedy, Liberal Democrat leader

Sure, Tories, Labour and... UKIP?

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Skiing in Australia might seem rather like sunbathing in Britain, but just as there are actually beaches in the UK, so there are indeed ski slopes to be enjoyed in Australia. And the Australian skiing industry has been around for quite a while in its own quiet little way. In some sections of the Australian community, it is an annual feature to have a trip to the ski slopes in August or September.

The industry lives in terror of global warming, which is forecast to reduce the amount of snow available. However, since even the most rabid statist accepts that there is no way for the government to change the climate, the Australian ski industry has conceded that there's no point pestering the government about it, and have decided instead to do something about it.

But the crucial factor in sustaining the industry is an increase in, and better application of, snow-making.

"Each of the resorts told us what type of depth they would like throughout the year, and we were able to use a model to show that that profile throughout the year would tend to become lower, and to compensate for that they would need to invest in between 11 and 200 per cent more snow guns," says Hennessy.

Colin Hackworth, managing director of Australian Alpine Enterprises, which runs the Victorian snowfields at Mount Hotham and Falls Creek, says snow-making is now vital to attracting crowds.

"As the industry has embraced snow-making, we have been able to provide a more consistent product, which has given people more comfort when booking a ski holiday," he says.

Hackworth says snow-making technology continues to improve and artificial snow can now be produced at up to 10C.

It's not the only challenge that the Australian ski-industry faces, but once again they are trying to solve their own problems, rather then whine about it.

It's funny how that happens, isn't it?

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It has been reported that the 700 strong 1st battalion of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment has been in contact with the enemy every day for the past six weeks, racking up 250 seperate combat incidents.

Capt Justin Barry, a military spokesman, is quoted in the Daily Telegraph:

The fighters engaged were basically terrorists and gangsters - people who are out to destabilise the area, drive out the Coalition and suck as much out of Iraq as they can. But at the end of the day, we got the better of them. The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment were engaged in very heavy hand-to-hand fighting and bayonets were fixed. There's a great sense of satisfaction among the men with the way this turned out.

Indeed, but no thanks to Tony Blair. The fact the government has not greatly reinforced UK forces is nothing short of a national scandal.

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… and leading directly on from how the state uses cameras to mess people around, here is another story (from the same source – top right column again - June 3rd) about a capitalist-supplied camera that helps motorists, and also anyone they might otherwise fail to notice and drive into.

Simply, on the very front of the car, some capitalists have attached a camera that can see sideways in both directions. Inside the car, there is a screen showing the (two) results to the grateful driver.

At the home where I grew up, and where my mum still lives, driving out past those high hedges and that high wall and across that very narrow pavement into the road was and is still a perpetual worry, with much craning of the neck forwards and asking of any front seat passenger to help by doing likewise. I do not use a car now, but when I did, I used constantly to think how handy such a camera would have been. Well, if I ever get another car, I may be able to have just such a camera on it.

Apparently these gadgets are already very big (metaphorically speaking - they are of course literally tiny) in Japan, where they were first devised and have first been made available. Japan is a land, I would guess, with many awkward little corners and hard-to-negotiate exits. As is ours.

The state is not your friend. Business has to be, or it goes out of business.

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Patrick Crozier's Transport Blog has a valuable service at the top right of the blog, in the form of links to transport related articles. (Most of the media do not seem to have a special category for "transport" stories, the way they do for "education" or "arts".) Patrick adds very little in the way of accompanying commentary to these links, but others can comment, and on this story, several people did. I missed this when it first came out, but it seems to me worth making a fuss of, even if belatedly:

A pensioner who warned motorists of a police speed trap was convicted of wilfully obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty, banned from driving and ordered to pay £364 costs yesterday.

Stuart Harding, 71, was attempting to slow motorists down as they approached a Sunday morning car boot sale where many people were crossing the road.

Noticing that police were parked nearby with an officer using a hand-held laser speed camera, he decided that a warning stating "Speed Trap – 300 yards ahead" would be the most effective way of getting drivers to reduce their speed. But as soon as the officers noticed his placard he was cautioned for committing an offence.

And there seems little doubt that it was this sign that was the "offence".

Robert Manley, prosecuting, said: "In displaying this sign the defendant was giving motorists advanced warning of a road safety camera being operated by the police 300 yards further along the road."

The supposed idea of speed cameras is to dissuade people from breaking the speed limit. Mr Harding was also dissuading people from breaking the speed limit. Yet this is something that a prosecutor considers it proper to denounce Mr Harding for doing. And what is more, the court agreed.

I suppose you could just about argue that if we were all allowed to put up signs about speed cameras, we would all be at it, and we would all accordingly only have to obey the speed limit where there was a warning sign, instead of all the time as we should.

But I prefer Andy Wood's explanation, which he links back to in his comment on this story. The income from speed cameras goes to local police forces, and they use cameras, and place their cameras in the first place, to raise revenue rather than to dissuade dangerous driving, the problem with dissuasion being that if it succeeds they get no money out of it.

So, watch out. If someone is committing an offence for which he is liable to be fined, do not, whatever you do, try to dissuade him. You will be "wilfully obstructing" the police in their attempts to fleece us of our money whenever they can.

I suppose the next question is: would it be wrong to encourage people to commit such offences? Would the police have any objections to that? Presumably not.

More seriously, this illustrates the general principle nowadays, that the state would rather tax and torment and generally mess with law-abiding, and even, as in this case, actively law-upholding citizens, rather than go after real criminals. Criminals are just too much bother to deal with. Moral: be a criminal. Seriously. The government is always jabbering away about how this or that measure might "send the wrong message" – usually what they say is that if they do not forbit some harmless and utterly unaggressive thing they might be interpreted as encouraging it. Well, what kind of message does prosecuting Mr Harding send?

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Trade here seems to be rather thin (although since I first put that it has got a bit thicker), just as it seemed to be this time yesterday. And this time yesterday I started concocting a posting (for my Culture Blog and to link to from here) about the strange things to be seen on or from Chelsea Embankment, just to the south of Samizdata HQ (which I was visiting the other day for reasons that need not concern you). This morning I finished it. Thinking about this posting some more, I now consider the ducks to be rather mundane. But the red sailed sailing boats and the bus are quite fun, I think.

Here is one of the red sailed sailing boats.

The point is that you do not see little sailing boats on the river in London very often. I seldom do, anyway. Follow the link above to get to a bigger version of this picture, and for the bus and the ducks, and for further commentary.

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The UKIP has just become a significant force in British politics. Will it last? I have no idea. But the fact is that the UKIP is now a major player in the European Parliament and allegedly gained almost 16% of the vote where they stood.

And yet this appearance of a new political force in Britain seems to be almost a footnote in most of the articles in the press. Oh, it is being covered, but the fact this upstart party is being examined in such muted matter is itself quite worth pondering. Although I am hardly an uncritical admirer of the UKIP in many ways, I do share their antipathy to the EU and I think that their success does show that a deep vein of disaffection is beginning to come to the surface even amongst Britain's typically ovine electorate.

And the fact the sensationalist British press is not treating this into a sensation is itself rather interesting.

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Nick Denton of Gawker, Gizmodo (etc. etc.) fame is perhaps the best known face on the commercial blog scene and certainly the most quoted these days. I also think he is quite incorrect in his understanding of why people read blogs, which means I think his business model is not one I would care to follow myself. Do I think all of what the redoubtable Denton does is wrong? No, not at all, but I do not really think the foremost advocate of blogging-for-business really understand blogs that well and I do not think he understand the blogosphere at all.

Most people do not look at something because they want to have advertisements shoved in front of them. Old style 'interruption marketing' might work when people have few options, say just a few TV channels, and are willing therefore to accept advertising as the 'price' for something else they value, but what Nick Denton seems to be saying is that there are lots of people who actually like reading ad-copy and will read blogs that are just well packaged advertisements (or 'advertainment' if you prefer) when the Internet is awash with places giving content away and doing no such thing. I simply do not believe that is true. Yet I do believe that there is a role for commercial blogging.

People read blogs to get a different perspective, even if they do not always agree with it. If people want to read a blog which is largely advertisement dressed up in well written urban hip and blog-speak rather begs the question, why would such a person not just stick to established media channels which are filled with endless marketing? Are blog readers really so dim as to not pick out the fact they are just being handed the same old interruption marketing message dressed up in a slightly different way?

I think for a commercial blog to succeed, it must do the same thing as a successful non-commercial blog, and that means it must be interesting and credible to its audience. In fact I would say a blog is a 'credibility machine'. To use the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto, a blog must speak with the author's authentic voice if it is to be believed... and it is a rare company indeed who can be authentic if all people hear from them is what their marketing and PR department say.

For a companies and other institutions to blog successfully, and people like Macromedia, The Adam Smith Institute, Microsoft and others do indeed blog successfully, then they actually have to speak in ways that are a long way from a press release that has been carefully worded by the PR department, and a million miles away from copy produced by an advertising agency. No one actually believes that crap any more and sticking it on a blog just makes it stand out like poop on a pool table.

No, if a company wants to blog, it needs to decide that it wants to be forthright and talk to people like human beings... if you have desirable or difficult or complex products and have interesting things to say about them, people might actually be interested in hearing what you have to say if you can convince them you are not just parroting the same old sales pitches served up for the Google Generation.

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It will be very interesting to see what happens in the election in Britain today... As I have written before I would like to see the UKIP cut into the Tory vote in the hope of that moving them in a more Eurosceptic direction.

But part of me would be just as happy to see a nice low turn out as people find a better use of their time than voting for which group of control obsessed kleptos get to exercise their looting rights. Sadly the use of postal ballots looks like it might actually increase 'turn out'. Too bad.

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My recent posting on Slovakia contained a scoop and I missed it. The leader of the Slovak governing party's campaign for the European elections tomorrow is former ice hockey player Peter Stastny.

I knew the name (one of the few names in ice hockey I ever knew of), but failed to connect it to the poster boy of the Slovak Democratic Coalition.

From the comments to my last posting, my description of SKDU as conservative-libertarian is controversial. Considering that the new Libertarian Party candidate in the USA was selected because he campaigns on sticking to the Founding Fathers' intentions (nationalized Post Office and all), I stand by my description for now.

What is amusing is the contrast between the Slovak and the Austrian election: the posters in Austria oppose reform, the Slovaks put a celebrity on the poster and bring in massive tax reforms in the right direction. American show-biz versus Austrian corporatism. I know which I prefer.

[Thanks to Tim Evans at CNE for providing the tip-off about Peter Stasny.]

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This article in the Independent by Pamela Schlatterer, described as "UK correspondent for German TV" (what - all of it?), is an amazing combination of illogical muddle and patronising sneering at all those British people who do not want to put up with illogical muddle such as hers. Above all there is her sheer refusal to concede that there might be any rational basis for British loathing, not of Europe itself, but of being ruled by EUrope.

For example, she says this:

Having said that, the last time I met my German and Dutch colleagues for an election meeting – we regularly team up to exchange ideas about the UK and its weird and wonderful ways – there was bafflement at the amount of anti-Europeanism in all parties' election pamphlets. The attitude seems to be that it will not hurt to include a few sentences against Brussels in propaganda, no matter which party you are from.

Yes, and ask yourself why that might be.

We shook our heads at a country that seems intent on denying it is already governed by Brussels in lots of areas. The deep-seated sentiment against being "not independent" has crystallised into Euro-hatred, and even though the Prime Minister prides himself on being pro-Europe, under his leadership, things have got worse.

These mysterious British with their absurd desire to be independent! You silly woman, we British are not denying that we are "already governed by Brussels in lots of areas". We are now well aware of this fact. It is merely that a lot of us do not like it and would like the process reversed. We have had it up to here with that it-will-never-happen-it's-not-happening-it's-happened EUro-rigmarole.

One of the things I personally most hate about the EUropean Union is that, by dumping itself down on top of Britain (with the enthusiastic support of lots of British people) it has caused other British people, understandably disinclined to make subtle distinctions between Europe and EUrope, to hate Europe. But such hatred is caused by EUrope. It is an article of faith among EUro-enthusiasts that EUrope makes for peace and fellow feeling. But a central government – any central government – is just as likely to stir up hostilities between different provinces (each blaming the others for the combined mess) as it is to make everyone like one another.

This paragraph I find especially annoying, because you hear this kind of tosh so often, and because it has been exposed as tosh a thousand times, yet still it comes back. It almost makes me hate Europe myself, if it contains International TV correspondents as stupid as this woman. Have a read of this:

I was raving the other day about a new central London café, which I see as a triumph of European food culture over sad English cafés. I got a bit carried away and exclaimed: "This island could be paradise: with better public services and more European influence on the food."

Here we go again, the relentless confusion between doing something the way some other people do it, and having to be ruled by the same political apparatus as those other people. We do not have to be ruled by EUrope in order to have European style cafés in London, any more than we have to be ruled by China to have Chinese Restaurants. If we want European-style public services, we can install them whenever we want, insofar as we are capable of running them. And if we are not capable of running them, us being a province of EUrope will not change that. Raving is right.

With luck people like Pamela Schlatterer may eventually decide that we British are all so disgustingly anti-European and irrationally hostile to foreigners that we are all of us without exception complete scum who must be completely ejected from EUrope. At which point those of us who want to can get back to liking Europe without having to make those subtle distinctions can do so.

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"Well, maybe he was a lot smarter than most people thought."

George P. Shultz, in his introduction to Reagan In His Own Hand

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Britain goes to the polls tomorrow to elect a round of representatives for the European Parliament, for UK Local Authorities and the office of Mayor of London.

Or, more accurately, about one-third of Britain goes to the polls. The other two-thirds cannot be bothered and, while I entirely sympathise with their attitude of non-engagement, it is my intention to buck the trend and cast my vote. I will explain.

I have never even attempted to conceal my contempt for the 'democratic process' as presently configured. In modern parlance, 'democracy' has become a euphamism for the perpetuance of a permanent political class, devoted to conducting their mischief without hindrance, objection or opposition. When all political candidates are required to sign up to a rigidly conformist and hegemonic agenda, the process of voting becomes a waste of time. At best, it is endorsement of the status quo, a rubber-stamped approval for 'business as usual'.

Read more.

However, I am not averse to using existing mechanisms to achieve ends of which I approve and I would be churlish to deny that there are times when a convergence of circumstances gives rise to interesting opportunities to give that boring, monochromatic old status quo a damned good kicking.

Tomorrow is just such a time for there appears to be something of a headwind building up behind the UK Independence Party. If various well-publicised opinion polls are to be believed, then it is entirely possible that UKIP could shove the execrable Liberal Democrats into third place and possibly even nip the buttocks of the milquetoast Conservative opposition. That makes them a cause worth voting for.

A number of people have been quick to point out that some of UKIP's policies may be regarded as highly illiberal (e.g. they favour immigration controls) and quite inconsistent with a free society. That may well all be true but, that fact is that I simply do not care because their flagship, numero uno policy, nay their raisons d'etre is British withdrawal from the shoddy, cankerous mess of the European Union. The rest does not matter (and, besides, UKIP are probably no more hostile to immigration than is our current Labour Home Secretary).

With all the other political candidates offering a choice between spending squinty-million-billion on the public sector or spending squinty-million-billion-zillion on the public sector, the heretical bad-boys of UKIP shine with the enticing lustre of a semi-buried precious gem. Having endured the slings, arrows, barbs and whale-harpoons of sustained media hostility, they are the ones who are truly up for a scrap. Phooey to all this dull 'consensus', UKIP are riding into town looking for trouble. Even their list of '5 Essential Freedoms' includes 'Freedom from Political Correctness'. I have no idea what they mean by this and, possibly, neither do they but it's fighting-talk and refreshing as a shower of lemon zest.

I doubt very much whether they will ever form a government but this bunch of quarellsome bruisers is squaring up to the effete political establishment and I love them for it. A good result for them tomorrow will have the scions of the media/political nomenklatura running around sqauwking like a load of indignant hens ("abolish UKIP", "abolish voting", "abolish Britain"..."waaaahhhhhh") and for that spectacle alone it would be worth voting for them.

But it is worth voting for them for other reasons too. A solid UKIP vote tomorrow will not herald any revolutions. Nor will it prove the catalyst for any material change either in the short term or possibly at all. It will not even reverse or slow down the disastrous process of political integration in Europe. But what it will do is to puncture the smug confidence of the ruling guard and remind them that they may not always have things quite so under control. It will send a ripple of fear through the corridors of comfortably assumed power and make their cherished orthodoxies look just a little vulnerable. In the words of Jack Nicholson in 'Batman': "This town needs an enema".

Tomorrow we have an opportunity to light a candle instead of just cursing the darkness. I have impotently cursed the darkness for far too long. Now is the time to light candles. Many, many candles.

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Here, a story on how refusing to medicate your child can be deemed child abuse.

So Taylor took Daniel off Ritalin, against his doctor's wishes. And though Taylor noticed Daniel was sleeping better and his appetite had returned, his teachers complained about the return of his disruptive behavior. Daniel seemed unable to sit still and was inattentive. His teachers ultimately learned that he was no longer taking Ritalin.

School officials reported Daniel's parents to New Mexico's Department of Children, Youth and Families.Then a detective and social worker made a home visit.

"The detective told me if I did not medicate my son, I would be arrested for child abuse and neglect," Taylor said.

One hardly knows where to begin. The bogus "medicalization" of behavior? The all-too-common abdication of parental and teacher responsibility in favor of the easy fix of medication? The heavy hand of the state telling a man he has to drug his child for the convenience of public employees, even though the drugs are causing sleep and appetite problems.

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Today I did something I do not normally do, but ought to do more often. I bought the latest issue of Viz, which looks like this:

What a fine British institution this is! Dirty jokes. Merciless send-ups of political and any other sort of correctness, attacks on the high and mighty (especially God), and lurking under its lewd surface is a fiercely freedom-loving political agenda, not unlike that pushed in a similarly subversive manner by the creators of South Park.

I have been feasting in particular on the wonderful Viz letters pages, where, in this issue, there is to be found a thoughtful exchange of views on the nature of the terrorist menace, and the concomitant threat to civil liberties posed by the various state measures that are allegedly being taken to curb it.

T. Harris of Leeds starts the ball rolling:

So the Home Secretary plans to force us to carry identity cards with our iris patterns encoded onto them. That's rich. How dare David Blunkett judge people on their eyes when his don't even work. It would be like the head of the DVLC not having a number plate on his car.

Les Barnsley of Barnsley pursues the theme of iris patterns:

Could the Home Secretary explain to me how biometric checks on iris patterns and fingerprints are going to help keep tabs on muslim cleric Abu Hamsa.

Good points both, I think we would all here agree.

Read more.

Londoner Charles Nylon has this reflection to offer concerning the nature of terrorism:

These suicide bombers really get my goat. What an evil way to kill innocent people, running screaming into a crowded place like madmen, blowing themselves and everyone else to bits. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned gentlemen terrorists like the IRA, who'd quietly pop a nail bomb under a pub table and leave without making a song and dance about it.

But Bamber Ross of Ross ripostes:

Mr Nylon (above letter) does not know what he is talking about. Gentlemen terrorists, indeed. When you get stang off a wasp, it just flies off to sting again and again in the style of the IRA bombers that Mr Nylon so admires. However, when a bee stings, it pulls its arse inside out and, like a suicide bomber, dies. And I think we' all agree that bees are much nicer than wasps.

But Prof. J. Shiels of the Dept of Entomology, Maudling College, Oxford, rejects this bee/wasp metaphor in no uncertain terms:

I'm afraid Mr Ross's insect/terrorist analogy (above letter) doesn't hold water. The reason that we agree that bees are nicer than wasps is nothing at all to do with their stringing ability. It is because bees are furry, like little black and orange flying teddy bears that make jam. Wasps on the other hand are all hard and have them Darth Vader faces. And they chase you when you run off.

Good to see the academic classes contributing to the debate there.

And the profundities just keep coming. Says Tracey Cusick of Cumbria:

The NSPCC keeps going on TV and saying that unless I send them three quid a month, a baby called William won't be so lucky next time. I suggest that we don't give in to these extortionists and blackmailers, or they'll be back with a threat to top him if we don't send them a fiver.

Wise words indeed.

Viz. Gentlemen intellectual terrorists. At all good newsagents now. And I have not even mentioned the Fat Slags.

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Tory leader Michael Howard is now loudly stressing his Eurosceptic credentials' as the Euro elections come closer and it looks like the UKIP will be seriously cutting into the Tory vote.

Of course talk is cheap and the only way the Tory Party is ever going to actually become a genuine (rather than a tactical) Eurosceptic party is if the party's very survival and the jobs and pay checks of its professional politicos is actually put in real, rather than potential, jeopardy... and there is only one way to do that.

Do not reward a decade of duplicity with a mindlessly tribal vote for the Conservatives. If you are going to vote at all, vote UKIP tomorrow.

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It is strangely comforting to see that the 'class war' instincts of old Labour are not entirely dead yet:

John Reid, the Health Secretary, yesterday dismissed the demand for a blanket ban on smoking as "an obsession of the learned middle class".

Speaking at a Labour Party event, he said he was reluctant to use compulsion to outlaw something that was a source of pleasure, particularly to working class people.

That Mr. Reid has to fight the corner of working-class people at a Labour Party event speaks volumes about the evolutionary path of the modern left.

Earlier, Mr Reid expressed his views even more bluntly when he took part in a round-table discussion with some of those invited to contribute to the consultation.

Told that they were discussing a smoking ban, Mr Reid said: "Let me play devil's advocate. What enjoyment does a 21-year-old mother of three living on a sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they get is having a cigarette."

One participant objected quite strongly, telling Mr Reid her mother died of lung cancer.

But Mr Reid, a former chain smoker who has now given up, said it was best to provide people with information and let them decide what to do for themselves.

Now, perhaps, Mr. Reid can take the next logical step and denounce the levels of tax that working people have to pony up in order to enjoy their smoking habit. Then the bien-pensant can safely re-classify him as a 'right-winger'.

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Ronald Reagan was, as we know, dubbed among other things as "The Great Communicator". Through his speeches, radio broadcasts and writings, Reagan had a wonderful knack of communicating important truths in clear-cut ways.

What intrigues me is wondering what he would have made of this new field of blogging. I reckon he would have loved it and could easily imagine the old fella writing one. As a talk-radio host, he had a lot to say that would have fitted in perfectly with the weblog format. I have recently been reading a collection of his radio show broadcast transcripts and it blasts the idea of him being a dope. Anything but, in fact.

Reagan was eager to make full use of the modern technologies of his time in spreading his views about the role of government, capitalism, the evils of communism and the like. I don't think it impertinent to imagine that this great man would have loved our medium and enjoyed the fact of its challenge to Big Media. I wonder what he'd have called his weblog. How about "Shining City on a Hill"?