I’m going to be setting up a mailing list, but would rather it not be on my own servers . It seems to me there’s two major options - Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups. They seem pretty similar in function. Are there any advantages of one over the other? Or should I just go with Yahoo! as...

—Click to enlarge— via. Oliver...

Apart from the LPUK notices outlined below, there are a few other things of a libertarian nature to plug.First, members of LPUK (your humble Devil included) will be talking to a combined meeting of the Cambridge University Conservative Association and the Cambridge Libertarian Society on Tuesday 28th October. The format is, I believe, similar to the Oxford meeting, i.e. a swift talk and then a Q and A session.I believe that I shall be returning to Cambridge in November, as Devil's Kitchen this time, to give a talk at a port and cheese evening. I had better start writing my speeches for the events (oh, and I might try not to offend the potential audience this time!).More details to come on both dates, as I get them.Next up, and I am very late on both of these, are the Libertarian Alliance...

I often post pieces here that I label as Fragments. I used to divide these fragments up into fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose and label them here as such. However, such is the… well… fragmentary nature of these pieces that it is often hard to decide if they are fiction or non-fiction, or even occasionally poetry or prose, they are both and neither, all and none. Fiction and non-fiction and poetry and prose. So, now they are labelled just as Fragments. Consequently, if there is an ‘I’, a ‘me’ or somesuch in the piece, it should never be assumed that that person is me, or that the people, etc are real and the events depicted ever happened. On the other hand, it may all be true. Or, as is often the case, it may reside somewhere in that...

I’ve long predicted a financial meltdown. The level of borrowing was never sustainable. Even before I started this blog, I used to argue for hours on forums with rightwingers who said that I was just a doom-monger, and that my like had been proven wrong time and again. I asked them to explain how America and the UK could possibly borrow so much, run such huge deficits, and yet expect the money would never run out? Then again, I never expected the coming recession to be quite this devastating. Alan Greenspan, the man at the Fed when times were good and when the credit flowed, has called this a ‘once-in-a-century‘ financial crisis (h/t Sunny). U.S. banks are collapsing at a terrifying rate. House prices are tumbling and unemployment is on the rise again. With David Cameron...

I know I haven’t blogged all week. Sorry. Just been busy with some work and working on some photos (which I’ll post at some point). Just catching up with some of the more interesting posts, one of which is this reader post over at TPM. “DF” is concerned that few Dems are talking about the possibility of cheating in November - after all, the GOP have done it before. The writer has a point, voter disenfranchisement is a serious problem in many states (usually targeting key Dem-leaning demographics), and with concerns regarding the integrity of the electoral mechanisms continuing, hopes for an accurate count are low. Obama is still ahead (see Electoral College), but the national polls are...

A number of my libertarian colleagues, including Tomrat, appear to be attempting to quntify their monthly outgoings and so, in a spirit of solidarity and to get my head around what I spend, I thought that I'd do the same. The numbers are fairly rough, but are accurate certainly to the nearest tenner and, more likely, the nearest fiver.Take home pay: £1520.00Tax and NI: £480 (plus my employer pays... what?... another £100 NI?)And expenditure is...Rent: £750 (I have a single-bedroom flat to myself. This may well have to change soon, solely for reasons of economy)Internet (including BT phone line): £30TV License: £11Car insurance: £90Petrol: £200 (roughly)Medical insurance: £48Server and domains: £75Council Tax: £80Gas and Electricity: £40 (roughly)Miscellaneous travel:...

For those who care about such things (and, deep down, I do, I'm afraid), I have posted some buttons reflecting The Kitchen's placings in the Guide To Political Blogging top lists in the Vanity section of the sidebar. You can get a whole range of them, which were designed by Mike Rouse, over at Iain Dale's place.You can also download a black and white version of the Total Politics Guide To Political Blogging 2008/09 [PDF], which has the usual lists, tips, commentaries and "state of the blogosphere" summaries. Thanks to Shane Greer who wrote the Right of Centre focus-piece, for including a large section on your humble Devil.Like it or not large swathes of bloggers on the centre-right have the Labour government (and Gordon Brown in particular) to thank for their success. After all, it’s...

I’m away for a couple of days. Going to Stirlingshire, Scotland. I’m not taking my laptop, and I’ll not be looking for the internets. Sometimes you’ve just gotta disconnect. Back Monday. Bye....

Your humble Devil is busy, busy, busy—and playing host to Timmy as he beds down into his UKIP press officer job. This has led to a slight contraction in my already small amount of spare time, and a reasonable rise in my alcohol consumption.However, we now have the final details of the Freedom Zone Tory Conference Fringe Event debate that I am taking part in—as Dizzy reports.The Freedom Zone is the brainchild of the Freedom Assoication, inconjunction with Forest and The Free Society and is being hosted in Auston Court, a state-of-the-art 150 seater theatre. They're going to have free wifi and blogging facilities which is handy.There are all sorts of interesting things going on during the two days incluing discussions with David Davis, a discussion on the TV license etc....

I know this sort of thing bores most people to tears, but I wanted to point out a change I’ve made to this blog. For a long time I’ve wanted to bring more attention to the stuff I do elsewhere — my other blogs, Twitter and the like. This blog still gets more visitors than my other blogs even though I can go quiet here for weeks. At first I put up two different solutions on the one page (lifestream). But that was still out of the way, and it wasn’t very good either. So instead I have decided to sweep up the sidebar and put in what I’m calling a ’sideblog’. Note that if you’ve come here from an RSS reader, it only appears on the homepage. The sidebar aggregates my content from all sorts of different places — my other blogs, Twitter,...

Sorry, this is all navel-gazing stuff. But since I mentioned it already, I should probably point out that the results are up. If this happened on the train I would probably be complaining quite vociferously. As it is, I lie between the Brian Taylor and Calum Cashley in Iain Dale’s top 40 Scottish political blogs, as voted for by readers. More to the point, this list is definitive proof that this blog is the second best non-aligned non-MSM Scottish political blog (behind Ideas of Civilisation). I always knew it. (Any way to make the result sound more impressive, huh?) Overall this blog is 16th, which is a dramatic fall of fourteen places from my previous position in this list. Still, I got off lightly. The person who was number 1 in that previous poll is nowhere to be seen in the top...

My server has been going up and down like a fricking yo-yo at present. Apologies to those whose sites are there hosted: I suspect that the current problems are related to the migration to the new data centre, but I am going to be tracking down the suppliers and giving them gyp.In the meantime, if any of you find that the images on this site are not displaying, then you know that the damn thing's down and again and I am struggling manfully with the controls......

I’m just playing around with the theme at the mo. Hence the new look. Can’t seem to get rid of the “Site Admin” from the header tabs. Grrrr. I know where the code is on previous versions of K2, but not RC7. T’is cool (see comments), you don’t see it if you’re not an...

By the way, your humble Devil will be turning 31 on the fifteenth of this month. He doesn't like doing parties, but he will be down at the Cellar Door, 0 Aldwych, on Thursday 14th August from about 8pm, drinking cocktails and acting like an arse.If anyone would like to wander down, please do; owing to the vastness of the London arena, the number of people that I actually know is rather limited and drinks are always good.So, if anyone feels like strolling down—especially if you are good-looking, sexually available and undiscerning—then feel free......

I don't know if this will affect my servers, but my supplier has announced some scheduled maintenance.Start Date: 07/08/2008 23:30:00 End Date: 08/08/2008 01:30:00Some servers will be inaccessible until the maintenance is complete.Just to let you know......

WARNING!!! BORING META-BLOGGING I have just installed James McKay’s Comment Time-Out plugin. As SPAM tends to attach itself to older posts, I have instructed the software to close all comments after 30-days. If comments on a post are ongoing, the 30-days will roll-on until the debate cools and then begin to count-down from the date of the last comment. Excellent stuff, and I hope it will drastically cut down the amount of spring cleaning I have to do. As previous commenters are probably aware, I pre-approve all comments to keep SPAM to a minimum. Although, if you have a pre-approved comment, further comments are automatically...

A few days ago, Gary Andrews tagged me with a book meme.Basically the rules are thus. Below is a list of classic books.You are supposed to:Look at the list and:Bold those you have read.Italicise those you intend to read.[Bracket] the books you LOVE.Reprint this list on your own blog.Although I should be doing some work, I shall, nevertheless, indulge in this quickly.1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen2 [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee6 The Bible [well, most of it—know your enemy and all that...]7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]9 [His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman]10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott12...

Just to let you all know, Anonymous comments have been switched on again. So, fire away (until the next time)......

So BJ The Major Bear has come out in favour of Barack Obama. I’m not sure Cameron is brave enough to back Obama just yet. So maybe Boris is standing in as Cameron’s proxy - vicariously backing the cool candidate, without explicitly playing his hand. Cameron will be loathe to endorse a Democrat in haste. The Tories have traditionally been allies with the Republicans. Then again, Labour has historically been aligned with the Dems, yet Blair and Bush had the strongest Atlantic relationship since Thatcher and Reagan. So maybe Cameron, if McCain continues to run a woeful and nasty campaign, will openly endorse Obama - maybe with maximum fanfare at the Democratic convention (this won’t happen, IMO, it would be a bad move for both sides). Leaving political manoeuvring aside, I...

The Standon Festival was most entertaining: I bumped into a lot of people who I've not seen since I left the Old Coll in '95, and the Souls played a great gig. In fact, the atmosphere was really rather nice. I then got back to London, took a large amount of various drugs—including one I've never tried before: not all it's cracked up to be, if you ask me—and then stayed up, 'round my brother's place, so that I could ensure that he left in time to catch his 10.30am flight to the US.I got back to the Foremost Tower of Hell at about 8 in the morning and spent most of Saturday sleeping. On awakening early this morning, I had received a couple of congratulatory emails. What? Why? Oh...That's right, the results of the 2008 Witanagemot Awards has been published, and The Kitchen has...

Bribed by a free pass, your humble Devil is chauffering Gronk and some bandmates up to the Standon Calling Festival today, so that they can play their gig...Posting will be light to non-existent until the evening......

Your humble Devil would like to thank the Toyota engineers today. I was bowling along the A3 to work, as usual, when some cunt in a white van pulled right into me; with no opportunity to stop, I clipped his bumber and smashed into the central reservation.Since I was doing a good 70 mph, it took a little while to bring myself to a stop, but at least I did so without pulling across all the other lanes. As the guy who stopped and offered himself as a witness said, "good recovery!"My little Toyota Corolla is really quite buckled on the driver's side, and the side-lights are smashed, but it still drives OK. And, fortunately, your humble Devil is unharmed, although thoroughly irritated.I phoned my insurance company and one of the questions was "do you admit liability?" Admit liability? Do I...

Well it seems as though everyone else has been doing it, especially on the Scottish blogs. It’s all in aid of the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK by Iain Dale. He’s asking everyone to vote you see. Last year, quite incredibly, this blog was named as the number 2 Scottish political blog thanks to Grant Thoms of Tartan Hero fame. Some will say that this blog is indeed a load of number 2, so the position is pretty apt. But I would be amazed if I repeated the feat this year. So vote for me now! As a few other bloggers have done, I will reveal my top ten political blogs. If nothing else, it fills a bit of space here. You might also be interested in my recent post on ten excellent blogs. It’s not easy choosing just ten great blogs — and choosing the order...

Each day, it seems, the stoats of loquacious marmalade disparagement draw ever closer to the secrets of our underwear drawers. Soon all will be lost, except for that one single pair of underpants you keep for emergencies. You fear for a day far off when you hope nothing untoward will befall you whilst you are forced to wear them due to the vicissitudes of the laundry cycle. Dreading that day when you set out from the security of your home, hoping hope against hope that your mother was wrong (for once) and that accident or emergency care is not solely dependant upon the state of the victim’s underwear....

Sorry guys, it's spam city around here: I'm going to have to close down Anonymous comments again for a while....

An indication of things to come...?Blogger are once more planning a major upgrade to their service, details of which are on the Blogger in Draft blog. Some of these—such as the inbuilt Webmaster Tools and the post ratings—look to be really quite useful and I am going to start playing around with them.However—and here's the rub—many of these tools require you to be using the (relatively) new Blogger Layouts system that appeared in Blogger Version 2.0. Your humble Devil is still using a "Classic" template—that is to say, it is still pure CSS and XML driven and doesn't use Blogger's widgets and their nasty, incomprehensible (to me) code. That is why, for instance, you never see polls on The Kitchen.This humble little template has served me well over the last......

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, but the UK Libertarian Party now has an office in Second Life. It has been sponsored by one of our members and has been backed by another member, Tom Paine, who is something of a force majeure in SL.Yesterday Bag and I had the idea of opening a UK Libertarian Party office in Second Life. "No sooner said than done, so acts your man of worth;" within a couple of hours we had clearance from the party's Director of Communications, I had identified premises, Bag had rented them and we had furnished and equipped the space in time for the Director's first visit...For those of you who are already SL'ers, this link will take you right there.As I have said before, LPUK is a little bit weird. We came together through the blogosphere and are thus...

Yep, it's that time of year again when Iain Dale collates the Top Political Blogs.In early September TOTAL POLITICS, in association with APCO WORLDWIDE will publish the 2008-9 Guide to Political Blogging in the UK. It will contain articles on blogging by some of Britain's leading bloggers, together with a directory of UK political blogs, and a series of Top 20s and Top 10s. The book will be available at the Green Party, TUC, Labour, LibDem and Tory Conferences, where TOTAL POLITICS will have exhibition stands.We're asking for your votes to decide the Top 100 UK Political Blogs. Simply email your Top Ten (ranked from 1 to 10) to toptenblogs@totalpolitics.com....The rules are simple:Please only vote onceOnly blogs based in the UK or run by UK residents are eligibleVotes must be cast before...

Yesterday WordPress 2.6 came out which is pretty unbelievable because it feels like WP 2.5 just came out last month. Anyway, a new version of WordPress comes with the necessity to upgrade and the hair-pulling that comes with it. My upgrades went fairly smoothly, but I did notice an issue with .swf files not being installed. I saw that a couple of other people had the same problem. It got me thinking about what might be causing the problem. The obvious candidate was that the Flashblock Firefox extension wasn’t playing nice with the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. Flashblock, incidentally, is a must-have Firefox extension for me as it allows you to have complete control over Flash files. No more stupid adverts or autoplay or any of that other nonsense that comes with Flash....