Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of the arrival on Mars of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit. Despite a few problems to do with their age, both this rover and its identical twin Opportunity are in good working order and are still wandering around the surface of Mars and sending back interesting findings. The obvious first thing to do is to congratulate everyone who had anything to do with these missions for a truly magnificent...

Being charitable to my fellow motorists, I guess a lot of them were in a hurry to get home last night and start off the first full working week nice and early, judging by the amount of tailgaters I encountered while driving down from East Anglia to London. At least half a dozen motorists drove very close behind me, full headlight beams on, doing probably about 90mph, forcing me to get out of the way...

A half-remembered phrase from a short story by C S Forester is lodged in my mind. The story is set in World War II. Some sort of British warship has to approach very near an enemy-occupied coast, do something or other heroic, and then get away before the German artillery can do its work. The ship, under the guidance of its iron-nerved captain, does so, and then - futzed if I can remember the details...

How can we bring down the European Union?...

The UK Libertarian party is celebrating its first year of operations. May 2009 see them grow and prosper and may they do much to undermine the foundations of the limited right-Statist and left-Statist UK political scene....

As of today, the Czech President Václav Klaus takes control of the largely symbolic but quite high profile office of President of the EU. Given his stridently pro-free market and highly Euro-sceptic utterances in the past, the sense of dread in Brussels is palpable. He is a brusquely outspoken man and I cannot wait to see how he uses the bully pulpit that the EU Presidency provides....

2009 is going to be an interesting year, particularly in the USA. Big State Democrat Barack "The One" Obama crushed Big State Republican John "I Support the Bail Outs" McCain and this means the country is going to have a new president whose politics make him the most committed statist since LBJ. The country was given a choice between statism and statism and it voted for... statism. Well to quote Mencken, the American electorate are...

Getting my sleep patterns into sync with UK daylight is for me, now, a constant struggle, especially now, when there is very little in the way of daylight in my part of the globe, and especially when there are such good international cricket matches going on elsewhere in the world, together with, now, the means to follow them, ball by ball. The latest such disruption to my daily clock took the form of a terrific...

"Politics is all very well in its place, that place being very much on the periphery of life." - Tim Worstall, who has had an impressive year on his own blog, and seems to have quite marvellously upset one of the main figures of the Guardian's columnists. Excellent....

Gold Coast, Australia. January 2008. Valencia, Spain. January 2008. Gdansk, Poland. February 2008. Les Baux-de-Provence, France. March 2008. Munich, Germany. April 2008. Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 2008. Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay. May 2008. Santiago de Chile. May 2008. Cataratas do Iguaçu, Brazil, May 2008. Stockholm, Sweden. May 2008. Prora, Germany. June 2008. Warsaw, Poland. June 2008. Sofia, Bulgaria. August 2008. Ben Lawers, Scotland. September 2008. Taipa, Macau. October 2008. Yantian, China. October 2008. Hong...

Another milestone is reached as channels of distribution change: 2008 will be seen as a landmark year in global communications in the textbooks of 2100 â?? it was the year that the internet finally surpassed what was once considered an unassailable bastion of main media, newspapers, as the leading source of national and international news in America. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies...

There are many reasons for my decline in Samizdata productivity during the last year or two. The feeling that I had said a lot of what I had to say, and the feeling that, me having said it, the world seemed disinclined to listen very carefully to it are but two that spring to mind. And then there is the fact â?? no mere feeling â?? that professional journalists have become rather less snooty about...

Dominic Lawson writes a good deal of sense about proposals to to use public funds in the UK and US to rescue various stricken car manufacturers, such as Jaguar and GM. Like Mr Lawson, I cannot quite see how the average UK voter, who can barely afford a Jaguar car, feels about handing over money to ensure that these cars stay in business, and certainly not if a prize political creep such as Peter Mandelson...

Scientists are planning to ignite a tiny Man-made star, according to this Daily Telegraph article. I wonder if the scientists or the journalists writing on their activities have seen the film, Sunshine, about which reviews have been mixed?...

Darwin gave us hope, not God. We have an inbuilt Pandora's box that enables us to deceive not only others but ourselves. Deception is clearly linked to neural complexity and a positive perception of our environs is a deep-rooted drive. Without this, we cannot accomplish what we set out to do. Moreover, we have a tendency to deceive ourselves and deny the truth, since the alternative is depression and despair. Evolutionary Psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of...