If you want to see how different the world now is from how it was before the internet, look no further than this story (now bouncing energetically around the world):

It is claimed that the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has been hacked and there is a massive file of emails and code up on a server in Russia. If what has been posted is real then the balloon is about to go up.

Excerpts of the emails have been posted here. They include a CRU scientist welcoming the death of a prominent sceptic, discussion of how to fiddle results and so on.

Amazing. If true.

As someone says, if it looks to good to be true, it probably is.

Those were my first sentiments exactly (although I don't think that being glad when an opponent has dropped dead is all that surprising - I'm sure we all know that feeling), and the sentiments of practically everyone else in the anti-AGW blogosphere when they first heard about this. Now, it is looking ever more likely that it is true, all of it.

Not least because the first big response from the hackees has been to cry, not: load of made-up bollocks, but rather: stop thief! Yes, we have been hacked, and that's outrageous. The story is that we have been hacked. (Lots of people are suddenly discovering the case for intellectual property rights.) The BBC's first version of this story goes with this angle, and with pretty much nothing else. AGW scientists (good) robbed by anti-AGW fanatics (bad). But this response has not killed the story. It has only given it legs. If there's nothing to it, why be so fussed about the hacking?

Even if the mainstream media try to bury this, they can't stop us anti-AGWers from talking about it amongst ourselves, and my bet is that they will quickly abandon the attempt to ignore the content of this material, and instead make copious use - perhaps even acknowledged use, with links - of the work even now being done by all those damned bloggers. If they don't do this, they will merely look foolish. It's a different world, from the one where all the journalism was done by "journalists", and only those journalists could decide what journalism would be done.

Sure enough, the New York Times already has a report about this, and James Delingpole already has a piece up at the Telegraph blog. (Thank you Instapundit.) This won't now be buried, even if the story ends up being that a lot of trivia was hacked, and then a lot of incriminating stuff was forged and added, which is looking less and less like the story with each hour that passes.

Two particularly good bloggers on this story so far have been Bishop Hill (already quoted above) and Devil's Kitchen, the Bishop for the trawling through that he is already starting to do, and DK for the way he (among many others) is already teasing out what it all might mean:

What these emails do show is that there is not consensus amongst scientists and that, privately, they think that certain papers are crap. No word of this gets to the media, or to the people being soaked for ever more cash to pay for these delusions.

What these emails really show is why such information never gets to the public: it is because climate scientists - like doctors - close ranks when attacked.

Not only this, but these emails also clearly show that climate scientists have been doing their absolute best to ensure that those who would question their findings cannot find the data.

The Bishop even has a new book out about AGW trickery, entitled The Hockey Stick Illusion. Coincidence? Well, yes, and one that is liable to mean lots of further work for him, riding whatever wave these new revelations may cause. But a nice coincidence nevertheless. This could now become a global best seller.

I already know what some of our cup-mostly-empty commenters here will say about all this, or want to say. Yes, the anti-AGW camp may now be starting to win the argument, but "they" still command the institutions they need in order to impose AGW-based tyranny. True. But those institutions can never be neutered, closed, etc., if they do not first lose their argument. (Think: USSR.) This is already rather good news, and potentially very important in its longer term impact.

For other early AGWer reactions, read this, together with all the comments.

As Samizdata regulars might recall, I am not exactly a great fan of Naomi Klein, author of the Shock Doctrine, a book that tries to argue, rather absurdly, that various dastardly free market governments (which ones? Ed) exploited, in a sort of underhand way, the inexplicable failures of socialism (the horror!) to impose those terrible ideas of people such as Milton Friedman. Yet there was nothing underhand or deceitful about what say, Sir Keith Joseph - one of Mrs Thatcher's close political allies - argued when he said that the stagflation of the 1970s had undermined the Keynesian settlement and proved that big government was harmful. Far from being some sort of sly attempt to exploit a shock, the governments of Reagan/Thatcher or even some of the social democratic governments in the 80s such as Spain, implemented some forms of free market reform because it made sense, given the situation. Anyway, you can read some of my views on this here, and there is a demolition of the book here.

Robert Higgs, a libertarian writer, has pointed out that in fact, it is frequently the case that disasters of various kinds frequently are used by political leaders to expand, not roll back, the state. It may be that the partial halt, if not reverse, to the growth of the state that occured under the Reagan/Thatcher episode was an aberration, although I obviously hope it was not.

Of course, in the ultra-long run, the numerous failures of endlessly repeated regulation, tax and yet more regulation and taxes, may yet produce such a disaster that this "shock" may once again encourage the "doctrine" of free markets, limited government, honest money and free trade. So I guess we must hope that in a perverse kind of way, Ms Klein is vindicated, if not quite in the way she imagines or wants.

Why give a damn what this person says? Well, she sells a lot of books. A lot. JK Galbraith, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and others do the same. And there are articles by the Richard Murphys, George Monbiots and countless other characters that feed the collectivist narrative that what the world needs even more of is more government, more rules and more powers for the likes of them. Therefore, I share the view of the US libertarian and author, Tom G. Palmer, that we need to be better at knocking their theories down and responding vigorously. And that is why I salute the indefatigible Tim Worstall, who seems to have dedicated part of his blogging energies to making the existence of Richard Murphy, hater of economic and social liberty and a general buffoon, a waking nightmare. It may seem cruel to mock the afflicted, but bear in mind that at the moment, the Murphys of this world seem to be succeeding in their desire to shut down an element of global markets, otherwise known as tax havens, since these places create one of the few incentives left to keep taxes down. He's not just a harmless buffoon, comforting though it might be to assume so. He's certainly not harmless, and neither is Ms Klein.

There is swear-blogging, and then there is this:

Emily Thornberry MP: a very stupid and thoroughly unpleasant person who should be severely punched in the cunt, and then thrown into the sea.

That's way too far over the top of the top for me. Maybe I'm getting old. It's in a posting in response to a posting here by Johnathan Pearce on Saturday, about how giving women rights at work will make them more expensive to employ and consequently cause women to be employed less.

I'm genuinely in two minds about this swear-blogging thing. (See also this blog.) On the one hand, as with the passage quoted above, I think it can be horribly offensive by almost any standard and liable to make a lot of people think badly of something I value, namely the libertarian movement. (If you look under affiliations, you see that DK is affiliated to the Libertarian Party.) I can foresee a time when such passages as the above will be quoted in evidence against us all. If anyone points out that "they" (i.e. us libbos) were writing things like that, and none of "them" complained, well, I did. And if this posting alerts enemies of the libertarian movement otherwise unalerted and it all blows up in our faces, then the sooner the better, I say. Get the argument about swear-blogging over with.

On the other hand, this kind of language does at least communicate just how angry people get about the plundering and bossiness of politicians. If you are similarly angry, read on, Devil's Kitchen is for you. You are not alone. It libertarianism was only written calmly and dispassionately, something important would be lost.

One thing I do know is that if Devil's Kitchen was nothing but the above offensiveness, I wouldn't give a ... flip ... about him. It is because he writes good stuff about important topics, in among the effing and blinding and sometimes worse, that I now ruminate upon the wisdom or lack of it of how he writes. Whatever I end up thinking about this, I am not now recommending and never will recommend that what I might consider to be excessively sweary swear-blogging should be illegal, to read or to write.

The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It's the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn't have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.

Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.

If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.

Hard to say if the snappily titled "When Your Neighbor Loses His Job It's A Recession. When You Screw A Whore Behind Your Wife's Back, Get Caught, And Lose Your Job, It's A Catastrophic Economic Meltdown" is my favourite blog post title of the year or not but it is both howlingly funny and 100% on the money.

Disgraced criminal Eliot Spitzer has for reasons unknown been occupying a columnist spot at Slate.com for some period of time. His column is always dull, hysterical, and powered by a level of self-satisfaction that is undiminished by any apparent shame over the pain the columnist has caused not only for his own family but for a good Jersey girl trying to make a living by providing an honest service.

Hehe... read the whole thing.

CNN is talking about something called 'Blog Action Day', which describes itself as follows:

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be one of the largest-ever social change events on the web.

Yet would anyone care to bet that when they say 'social' change (such as deciding to do something yourself, such as recycling your plastic bottles) a great many of the contributors are actually talking about 'political' change (using the collective means of coercion to force people under threat of violence to be more 'green').

Of course such folks are just following the well establish and rather Orwellian conflation of opposites used exemplified by socialism, which I have often argued is the most ironic use of human language ever - a system by which all social interactions are forcibly replaced by intermediating politically derived formulae.

Well I would like to dedicate a previous samizdata blog post to "change.org" and the Blog Action Day jamboree, called My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon footprint by the indispensable Michael Jennings, that one man global warming machine that we are privileged to have as a writer for our splendid blog.

The notion that the US blogosphere is going to allow the US state to require it to register certain content is something that has me wondering if some cunning conspiracy was not at work by a shadowy cabal of Good Guys (who inexplicably did not let me in on the plan) luring the enemy into a sort of virtual Teutoburger Wald by playing to hubris and Imperial overreach. These people do not really even understand what the internet is I suspect.

I can not tell you how delighted I am. When a body like the Federal Trade Commission commits itself to an unwinnable fight against an almost literally endless enemy with the ability to vanish and reappear at will, it is a clear sign that terminal stupidity has set in, which is really rather good news.

Oh and by the way, all you US based corporate drones looking for a few blog harlots to review your magic widgets in return for some free samples, there are large numbers of blogs based outside the USA with extensive US readerships who will be happy to openly invite the FTC to stick their regulations up their collectives arses... that said, US blogs who like to review products are almost certain to completely ignore the FTC, with the more nervous ones just reorganising how they do things (trivially easy: change names/host overseas) to make these absurd regulations worthless.

The Times, assisted by Mr Justice Eady, who seems to preside over the whole mess that stands in the place of proper privacy law in England, has unmasked the police blogger NightJack. NightJack had just won the Orwell Prize for his blog. I am guessing that drew it to the attention of higher authority, and such articulate dissent must be punished.

It took just six weeks, including a court-case, to reveal his identity. The blog has now been deleted, and the DC formerly known as NightJack has been disciplined in some unspecified way. Apparently it is in the public interest to maintain a disciplinary code under which police officers are not permitted to express their opinions. That is what Sir David Eady implied, obiter, in giving his judgement.

But deleting from public knowledge what has once been on the web is difficult. Here is a celebrated sample, NightJack's advice to the arrested, which Samizdata readers may find both useful and enlightening (there is a situational irony in the sideswipe at those who have learned how to use the forces of law and order to score points and extract revenge):

A Survival Guide for Decent Folk

Paul has posted a number of lengthy replies on the “Modest Proposal" thread. In these days of us increasingly having to deal with law abiding folk who have fallen foul of the “entitled poor” and those who have learned how to use us to score points and exact revenge, I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general guidance for those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. It works for the bad guys so make it work for you.

Complain First Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops right away and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.

Make a counter allegation
Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis. This is particularly good where there are no independent witnesses. When it boils down to one word against another and nobody is ‘fessing up, CPS run a mile and you, my friend, are definitely on a walk out.

Never explain to the Police
If the Police arrive to lock you up, say nothing. You are a decent person and you may think that reasoning with the Police will help. “If I can only explain, they will realise it is all a horrible mistake and go away”. Wrong. We do want to talk to you on tape in an interview room but that comes later. All you are doing by trying to explain is digging yourself further in. We call that stuff a significant statement and we love it. Decent folk can’t help themselves, they think that they can talk their way out. Wrong.

Admit Nothing
To do anything more than lock you up for a few hours we need to prove a case. The easiest route to that is your admission. Without it, our case may be a lot weaker, maybe not enough to charge you with. In any case, it is always worth finding out exactly how damning the evidence is before you fall on your sword. So don’t do the decent and honourable thing and admit what you have done. Don’t even deny it or try to give your side of the story. Just say nothing. No confession and CPS are on the back foot already. They forsee a trial. They fear a trial. They are looking for any excuse to send you home free.

Keep your mouth shut
Say as little as possible to us. At the custody office desk a Sergeant will ask you some questions. It is safe to answer these. For the rest of the time, say nothing.

Claim Suicidal Thoughts
A debatable one this. Claiming to be thinking about topping yourself has several benefits. If you can keep it up, it might just bump up any compensation payable later. On the other hand you may find yourself in a paper suit with someone watching your every move.

Always always always have a solicitor
Duh. No brainer this one. Unless you know 100% for sure that your mate the solicitor does criminal law and is good at it, ask for the Duty Solicitor. They certainly do criminal law and they are good at it. Then listen to what the solicitor says and do it. Their job is to get you off without the Cops or CPS laying a glove on you if at all possible. It is what they get paid for. They are free to you. There is no down side. Now decent folks think it makes them look like they have something to hide if they ask for a solicitor. Irrelevant. Going into an interview without a solicitor is like taking a walk in Tottenham with a big gold Rolex. Bad things are very likely to happen to you. I wouldn’t do it and I interview people for a living.

Actively complain about every officer and everything they do
Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers. Nothing like a complaint to muddy the waters and suggest that you are only in court because the vindictive Cops have a grudge against you. Far fetched? Wait until your solicitor spins it in court and you come over as Ghandi.

Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it
You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.

So there you go, basically anything you try and do because you are decent and straightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed. Copy the bad guys, its what they do for a living.

One of the lovely things about the interweb is the complete freedom to post obscure, intractable, thoroughly off-putting essays, revelling in the fact that even if 99.9999 per cent of humanity really doesn’t want to read e.g. a rambling 12,000 word reflection on some little-known artist by a totally unknown commentator - a perfectly legitimate point of view, obviously - well, there’s still the outside chance that someone out there, somewhere, actually will want to read it. And sometimes just the prospect of connecting, probably anonymously and certainly at a great distance, with that one other person is what makes the whole project worthwhile.

- Bunny Smedley comments on a short posting at my place

As I have already confessed, I have incurred the sympathetic derision of commenters here with my various and variously expressed hopes-stroke-predictions that Gordon Brown will, within a matter of days, or weeks, or just soon, no longer be our Prime Minister. But just when I had resigned myself to Mr Brown's non-resignation, that is to say to him not being ejected from Downing Street with whatever would be the necessary degree of force by a delegation of Labour Party heavies appalled by the damage that Mr Brown is doing to the Labour Party (even as they remain stubbornly indifferent to the damage he might also be doing to the mere country), and thus resigned also to the consequent hell of Mr Brown remaining our Prime Minister for another fourteen months, this happens. This being a petition to the Prime Minister, begging him to resign.

Even if it fails in its ultimate purpose, this petition may surely do some good. It may, for instance, show the Labour Party rank-and-file something of the odd mixture of fear and contempt now felt towards Mr Brown and his hangers-on (hanging on being all that they now seem able to think about) by almost all British non-tax-guzzlers, and many others besides. This in its turn may cause Labour supporters to join in by adding their own names to the electronic heep, if only to earn a few shreds of national gratitude for their now apparently supine and utterly corrupted Party.

Better yet, this petition, if it takes off as I think it might, may put a rocket up David Cameron's rear end, to tell him to stop merely waiting for the country to fall into his lap like a rotten apple (while carefully refraining from telling us what he would then do with it other than allow the rot to continue), and get him instead to start saying that the rot should stop, and saying how. (Basically: which government activities should be closed down, now.) In due course, and I realise that it goes against the grain around here to be saying such a thing, Mr Cameron might even become the kind of Prime Minister who might actually stop some of that rot.

Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale have already linked to and given their support to this petition. Both have insisted that they don't usually 'do' government petitions, but both of them sense that this one could be something else again. No doubt other bloggers have already added their voices to what I trust is now a chorus, saying similar things, and if they have, I think that all of them - Guido, Dale and all - are right. This could get very big, very fast.

Guido's scalp may place further problems for the blogosphere. Labour's line has been to blame the medium and the messenger, spreading the slurry of 'dark arts' to Guido and even Cameron, though they are the primetime guilty party.

Now that the monopoly of the mainstream media has been blown right open, Labour MPs are demanding regulation and trying to put the lid back on Pandora's box. Hear their complaints: the blogosphere is an arena of tittle-tattle and gossip, compared to the comforting blanket of reporters and the NUJ who will take you out to lunch and treat you with respect. They will want to turn the clock back.

Well, it is the goodness of blogging sunshine that reveals the dark arts. Time to start flaming the political vampires who suck the lifeblood out of Britain with their lies, expenses, and hypocrisy. Time to follow up with garlic and the stake.

I wasn't lying on purpose.

- Derek Draper on Channel 4 News (already nailed down as the defining soundbite of today by Iain Dale)

This posting will tell any Brits who care about it absolutely nothing, but perhaps our many American readers should be told about this. This being the downfall of one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's closest advisers. A certain Damian McBride has "resigned" because of some emails about smearing various Conservatives that he sent to another Labourite, the widely despised Derek Draper, who tries to blog for Labour.

Blogger Guido Fawkes is being credited with this outcome, not least by the guilty men themselves. They have spent much airtime today jabbering away on Sky News, the BBC, etc, about how "disgusted" they are that their emails have been read. Disgusted that they were caught was how it sounded. Guido's numerous commenters are exulting. "Good on you Guido", "we must mark the date in our diaries", but "mission definitely not accomplished" until such time as this government beast or that government beast (a certain Tom Watson MP is apparently next in line for the chop), or the King Beast himself, are nailed to the Guido wall.

King Beast Brown, I mean. For there is indeed something very Nixonian about this, or at any rate it feels that way today. The thing to get is that Damien McBride is not like some College Republican ratfucking prankster. He is much higher up the greasy pole than that, far nearer to the H. R. Haldeman end of things, talking every day with the Big Beast himself.

By the way, the sneer quotes each side of "resigned" two paragraphs up are because when heavyweights in this government "resign", all that happens is they change titles and move office. They keep their actual jobs and they get even huger pay-offs than otherwise, if only to stop them telling the truth to the media instead of the dribbling evasions they are pushing now.

The resigned one and his various defenders, including Draper, are asking us all to believe that their Downing Street computers were hacked into, and for all I know that may be true. But if that is so, what does it say about the wisdom of creating a Database State, given that these are the plonkers who will be in charge of it? As Guido has just pointed out, this was the week the government awarded itself the right to read all our emails.

Anyway, my basic point is: remember that big cheese TV guy in America who got caught making use of a forged letter that said something bad about someone, and remember how it was bloggers who blew the story to bits. And remember how people said during all that that this was blogging really making itself felt for the first time in real world politics. Well, that moment just happened here in little old Britain. Tomorrow, this will be all over the Sunday papers. Guido's face and Guido's blog - the actual blog, how it looks - is being flashed all over the TV news as I write this.

The most telling moment for me was when I dialed up Guido Fawkes, and instead merely got a big message saying: "Error establishing a database connection". A lot of people, a lot more than usual, are tuning in to Guido just now, or trying to.

What a shame that the end result of this and other such dramas will merely be a Conservative government presided over by David Cameron. I still live in hope that such a government might be rather better than the present one, but I am not counting on it. Which makes me rejoice particularly at this, from Guido:

McPoison accuses Guido of having Tory backers - it just shows that they just don't get it - this blog was started for free, with no committee behind it, no plan, on a whim. It is Guido's plaything. The Tories are rightly wary of Guido and incidentally they have a PR problem tomorrow - the last thing they want are half truths mixed with smears getting out into the open uncontrollably.

The really important stuff will come when Guido gets stuck into the Conservatives for being too statist.

Regular commenter here Nick M takes a wack at Vernon Bogdanor:

Progress occurs when free people do things. It just happens Boggy. It is retarded when retards like you try and gerrymander it. In 1900 the fastest growing economy on the planet was Russia's. Look at the plight of the place now? There is nothing "progressive" about being progressive.

I was going to put that up as a Samizdata quote of the day, but I reckon the feline enumerator has his sneer quotes around the wrong "progressive" there. Still, good stuff, albeit sweary.

Talking of which, I do wonder about this swear-blogging thing. The bad news is that respectable bloggers who might give particular (swear-)blog postings of merit lots of new readers are put off by the swearing from linking to such postings. (Telegraph Blogger Alex Singleton recently told me exactly this.) On the other hand, a lot of people are very angry just now, not just, you know, in a state of respectful disagreement with the powers that, for the time being, be. Such angry persons deserve voices around which to rally, voices which communicate their feelings rather than just their thoughts.

Swear-blogging may also mean that, by assembling all the angry ones in a cursing, seething internet mob, in a way that completely alienates our present version of Polite Society, the angry ones will achieve a far greater degree of tactical surprise come the storming of the Winter Palace, or whatever will be the equivalent event or events during the next few years. Polite Society just won't see it coming, because it simply cannot now bear to look. It will consequently swing in far greater numbers from lamp-posts (or again, whatever will turn out to be the modern equivalent) than would otherwise have happened. Which just might be a rather fucking good thing.

How to stop this bail-out madness? I think I have an idea that might help.

One of the most valuable things that the internet can do is state ideas of the sort that you definitely do want said, but which it would probably not be wise for heads of state or front bench politicians to be saying for definite, for fear of it all getting out of hand.

One of the most important memes that the internet has circulated during the last decade has been the extermination option, when it comes to Islam. Extermination of all muslims. Not now, you understand. Just if there continue to be serious muslim-perpetrated terrorist incidents (and especially if there are some much more serious muslim-perpetrated terrorist incidents), and if muslims continue to equivocate about whether they support them, and seriously try to conquer the world with a kind of good-muslim-bad-muslim routine. Which in a lesser way is what they are doing anyway, just not on a scale and with a degree of nastiness that elbows all other problems to one side. But, if you guys crank up the nastiness the way you say you want to and that we deserve, said certain voices on the internet, including certain voices commenting here on postings soon after 9/11 (including my voice), and you'll get the exact war of Us against You that you are spoiling for, and guess what, we'll fucking wipe you off the face of the earth. See: Dresden. Don't make us angry. You really wouldn't like that.

This is not the kind of thing you want Presidents and Prime Ministers to be saying, until such time as things like that actually have to be done. But I sincerely believe that having some people saying things like this, as and when the need arises (therefore including me), is a force for peace and harmony in the world. Seriously. I think the fact that the internet said this stuff to muslims – did a good-infidel-bad-infidel act right back at them – meant that since 9/11 most of the terrorist crap has been strictly amateur. The heavy hitting muslims have confined themselves to propaganda. Good. We can win that one. Certainly we can argue and low-level-fight them to a stand-still. Not everyone on our side believes that, I know, but I do.

One of the biggest reasons why major conflicts (and major catastrophes generally) happen is because the participants don't realise, until it is too late, what they are letting themselves in for.

This was one of the major causes of World War 1. They just didn't realise what horrors they would soon find themselves doing to one another, or (in that case) for how long the horrors would last. Maybe if they'd had the internet in those days, the few people who did realise might have been heard, and that might have caused the contestants to hold back.

These apocalyptic recollections have been prompted by the realisation that there is now another extreme meme which the internet now needs to circulate. I refer to the government default option.

It needs to be said that under certain circumstances easily now imaginable, many Western citizens would argue, strongly and vocally, that those idiot foreigners who are now lending money to Western governments should in due course be told: sorry sunshine, you ain't ever going to get it back. Our governments are bankrupt. Why the hell should we and our descendants in perpetuity be paying tribute to you? You knew that the money to pay you back would have to be stolen from us. You assumed we'd just cough up indefinitely. Well, we damn well won't. You are now a definite part of our problem, and telling you to take a hike is going to be part of our solution. Our thieving class is now "borrowing" money from your thieving class like there is no tomorrow, and we are not responsible for the actions of either gang. A plague on both your houses.

We want you foreign thieves to stop lending to our thieves, now. And the best way for us to convince you that you should indeed stop lending, is to tell you that you are extremely liable never to see most of your money back.

Which has the added virtue of probably, approximately, being true, already.

The usual way such threats are phrased is to talk only, and very vaguely, about how "nobody wants" and "nobody is recommending" the extreme scenario in question. It's all just too too frightful to think about with any clarity or seriousness. Well, I think that the internet should now aggregate all the voices of those who, like me, think that under certain thoroughly imaginable circumstances the default option would not only be highly likely to go into effect, but also highly desirable. We would support default, argue for default, now.

Just circulating this meme in an angry whisper (i.e. in postings in and comments on blogs) will raise the interest rate, a bit, for our thieves, as they frantically mortgage the future tax revenues that they still think they are going to get from us. And that's good, because it will bring the current craziness to an end that little bit sooner.

Ever since Ezra Levant came to the attention of Samizdata readers, thanks to a posting by Perry just over a year ago, I have had his blog on my personal blogroll and have occasionally visited there. But I do not read all of it. Sometimes the sheer detail of Canadian politics becomes too much to endure. But this recent posting I did read, right through, with great pleasure. Some political hack called Warren Kinsella, who sounds like a cross between Alastair Campbell and Derek Draper, has sued Levant for defamation, demanding five million dollars. The idea was presumably to make people scared of Kinsella, and maybe it has. But not Levant.

Filing a $5-million lawsuit to try to silence questions about his Adscam involvement probably isn’t Kinsella’s smartest move. I’m not sure why someone who wants to stop people talking about Adscam would create a conversation-starter like a massive lawsuit. And then there’s the prickly matter of Kinsella subjecting himself (and his private documents) to unlimited cross-examination by me - I mean days or weeks, not the brief appearance he made before Justice John Gomery’s Inquiry.

What is Adscam, I wonder? Something that makes Kinsella look bad, presumably. I ask this to show how right Levant is about how this bizarre and way-over-the-top lawsuit causes faraway people like me with no direct interest in any of this to get drawn into the story. Levant is asking for donations. Defending against lawsuits like this, thanks to the internet, can now be paid for by sympathisers.

The bigger picture here, or part of it, is that the political left is losing its grip on the means of political communication, and it does not like it. Time was when people like Kinsella could get up to all kinds of mischief and nobody would say a word. If anyone did complain, the story would be told from Kinsella's point of view and then forgotten. Thanks to people like Ezra Levant, those days are passing. But Kinsella seems to be having a problem adjusting to this new media reality. It looks to me like Kinsella is really suing Levant for the more elemental crime, if that's the right phrase, of not grovelling. Levant doesn't know his place. But Levant does know his place. It is Kinsella who no longer seems to understand his.

The bigger party political picture is that Kinsella risks damaging his political master. This is a certain Michael Ignatieff, known to Brits only as a talking head on late night culture shows on the telly, but now a Big Cheese politician in Canada.

A good friend of mine and fellow blogger, Andrew Ian Dodge, who is also an occasional commenter here, writes about his father, who died this week after an illness. Rest in peace.

Blogger and soldier Andrew Olmsted was mentioned on a Fox News report I listened to on the net tonight. His posthumous last post from January of this year seems worthy of Christmas Eve.

If I (and apparently he) are wrong and there is an after... I sincerely hope it is populated by souls such as his.

Andy Burnham MP to the Royal Television Society (in questions after the speech):

The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet. I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new.

[Reported by The Register]

Twice is coincidence...

In response to a letter from the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Nominet is announcing an independent review of its current corporate governance structure, to be benchmarked against established best practice corporate governance standards.

Three times is enemy action...

Hazel Blears MP:

There will always be a role for political commentary, providing perspective, illumination and explanation. But editors need to do more to disentangle it from news reporting, and to allow elected politicians the same kind of prominent space for comment as people who have never stood for office. [...]

Unless and until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new and disparate voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair.

I take it that "adds value" means 'supports us'; "legitimate protest" means 'sneering at our enemies'; and a "more responsible manner" means 'without questioning our control of the discourse'.

So I pop in to Guido's, and at the top right, item (as of now) one in the Seen Elsewhere section, is a link to this short posting at the UK Libertarian Party blog:

The Taxpayers Alliance have reported that the Lib Dem Northampton Borough Council have awarded themselves a 7.7 per cent wage increase despite a black hole in their budget.

A Lib Dem Councillor on being told that the story was on the Taxpayers Alliance Website, said its ok we have had an expert in who said unless it was reported in Guido Fawkes we should not worry about stories on Blogs.

Alas, the writer of that posting, Guthrum, is unable to reveal his source.

Meanwhile, the comment war sputters along at the original TPA posting, tax cutters trading abuse with selfless public servants who argue that if councillors are paid only peanuts the results will be ever more simian. But I reckon the problem goes deeper than that. What with all the statutory obligations now piled upon local councillors, these people no longer actually make local decisions; they merely oversee the local versions of decisions made by others, in London and in Brussels. They are the local arm of a nationalised or EUropeanised industry. Few who are even sane would want a job like that. Hence the following, from a TPA commenter:

As one who lives in the very town itself, I have to say that one of the most upsetting of this mob is one Roger Conroy, a skeletal gnome with appalling teeth who sends out these sort of low-rent Pravda newsletters featuring endless blurry photos of himself hanging around public places looking like a mendicant, pointing at things which particularly offend him - holes in the road, paving slabs, squirrels, that kind of thing. The last one included him pointing at a tree stump, and proudly declaring that he'd forced the council to remove said tree as "a security risk".

And nobody sane would want to spend all his spare time quarrelling with someone like that. Whenever anyone tells me that the Lib Dems are becoming semi-sane, I picture someone like Conroy and say to myself: no they aren't. To Samizdata's American readers, i.e. to most of them by the sound of the comments these days, let me add that not everyone in the UK behaves like Conroy, or thinks like him. Besides which, you too also have the occasional Community Organiser wandering around trying to get noticed, do you not? But I'm guessing yours have better teeth.

The IEA now has a blog, which is good. Good that it has one, and good in that it looks to be good.

Here are two characteristic quotes, from the two most recent posting at this blog. First, here is a recycled little something that John Meadowcroft contrived to get published by the Times yesterday, about Marx:

Sir - Marx's theory of the crises of capitalism is little more than a melodramatic description of the business cycle - standard fare in economic analysis. Every original contribution that Marx made to our understanding of capitalism is demonstrably false: the working class does not become increasingly immiserated; the class structure does not become increasingly polarised; no society has evolved from feudalism through capitalism to communism; the iron law of wages is fallacious; the State does not wither away when capitalism is abolished. Marx will continue to be neglected by serious scholars because he was wrong in every important respect.

And here is a the final paragraph of a summary of this publication:

Given the complex causes of the gender pay gap, it is clear that complete equality of pay is unlikely to be achieved without draconian measures that would restrict freedom of choice and damage the economic prospects of both men and women. Calls for new legislation on equal pay should therefore be resisted.

The IEA has always seemed to me to be the kind of organisation which should have a blog, but also as the kind of organisation which has been mindlessly prejudiced against having a blog on account of having nothing to say about kittens and sunsets and the personal dietary habits of its inmates, and on account of not liking the bark-at-the-moon style of current affairs commentary, as if that were all you were allowed to do, blogwise. This is like denouncing the whole idea of telephones merely because other people often chatter pointlessly to each other with them. Why should that bother you? Happily, the IEA has now overcome any such prejudices.

I like Fridays these days, because on Friday, David Thompsom does another clutch of Friday ephemera, and this Friday's ephemera included three links to a black guy named Zo, explaining why he will be voting McCain/Palin. When I started listening, I kept thinking, there's a snag. When is the ambush coming? I don't know quite why I thought this, but I did. Cognitive dissonance, I imagine. Guys who talk like that just do not think like that. Many of them hardly think at all, except about show business concerning which they are highly knowledgeable.

Another favourite blog-ephemerist is Lynn Sislo (sp?), who will not be voting McCain/Palin, in fact in this posting, she includes a link to a report about the equal and opposite phenomenon to Zo. But best of all, in a more recent Lynn S posting, there is a link to an amazing time-map showing the growth of Walmart. Capitalism at its formidable best (talking of which, have you heard that Buffet is now buying shares?). It is an object lesson in starting slow, getting it right and then – and only then - conquering the universe. Well, not the universe, yet, just America. But give it time. Highly recommended.

Any regular reader of newspapers will be familiar with the phenomenon of the newspaper article which says one thing, but with a headline above it, written by someone completely different, saying something completely different. Yesterday's Telegraph piece written by Bruno Waterfield, entitled Brussels admits defeat in EU blog wars is, I think, a good example. I read the headline and rejoiced, but then I read the article.

What Waterfield's piece actually says is not that the EU has admitted defeat in the face of blogs, but that the EU commission does not like blogs. Blogs have enabled those who think 'No' to say 'No'. Blogs are too cheap to be bought off or controlled, too easy to set up to be silenced. Blogs are bad news. Blogs have been especially bad news in Ireland, where Irish bloggers saying No lead directly to Irish voters voting No. But nowhere in Bruno Waterfield's report did I read any suggestion that the EU commission is ready to give up in its struggle with this new media menace to its power, and just to lie back and allow people to put whatever they think up on the internet. On the contrary, this 'secret' report that Waterfield quotes from sounds to me not like a surrender at all, more like a declaration of war.

Says the man from the Devil's Kitchen:

Bishop Hill has pieced together the full story of the hockey-stick graph and it is, in the opinion of your humble Devil, fucking dynamite.

Pardon his French. Unlike DK, I have not read this posting of BH's yet, although I most certainly will be reading it very soon. But the Bishop has for at least the last year or so been one of my favourite bloggers, and Devil's Kitchen is a regular favourite of mine too. This posting looks like it will confirm – no, strengthen - my high opinion of both of these bloggers, one for writing it, and the other for flagging it up. I came across the Bishop's posting under my own steam, but soon after noting it, I noted Devil's Kitchen noting it also.

Assuming that DK is approximately right about the excellence of this piece of writing by Bishop Hill, here is a fine example of one of the many things that the best bloggers are now doing very well, namely pulling together lots of postings on the same general topic (in this case all by the same person) and summarising them for the benefit of anyone who is interested, but who lacks the time or the inclination to read all those original postings.

Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner and I love London town, but from where I sit by far the most newsworthy winner in the recent round of British local elections was the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. However, unless I am very much mistaken (which is entirely possible), the Boris Johnson blog, far from being at the centre of the Boris campaign, was put on ice for the duration, and looks like staying there.

Or am I missing something? Is there another Boris Johnson blog? Is there one for his currently very neglected constituency (the one linked to above), and another blog (not linked to because I can not find any such thing) about him trying to be and now being the Mayor of London?

If my failure to spot it means that there is indeed no Boris For (Boris Is) Mayor blog, then I think that's rather a telling fact about the limits of internet political campaigning in Britain. The way Boris himself told it when interviewed on the telly at the very end of his campaign, he did his campaigning not via any internet efforts, but by trekking around London making personal appearances and being on local radio stations. You might have thought, what with so much of success in local politics being the art of attracting any attention at all, and what with Boris having done this so very, very well and having got his own vote out so very, very successfully, a blog might have been part of it.

Or is the thing that I am missing that other bloggers, like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, made crucial contributions to Boris becoming Mayor by campaigning on his behalf, under the opposing radar so to speak, making points in his favour and claims on his behalf that he himself did not have to worry about and which he was not personally obliged then to, as they say, clarify? Boris would no more have his own campaigning blog than he would set up and run his own radio station. In politics, it seems, either you do it, or you blog, but, you don't do both. This makes sense, I suppose. Blogging works best when you blog your mind, and tell it how you see it. Blogging means having an authentic voice. Politics, on the other hand ... Some bloggers - this one, for instance, in something he said at a gathering I was at - have complained that Boris's authentic voice was also muted, for the duration. Something to do with him not drinking, perhaps? (Bring back the booze I say.)

On the other hand, why didn't any of Boris's mere supporters gang up and run a Boris-is-here-today-and-there-tomorrow Boris-thinks-this-Boris-says-that blog, at least while the campaign itself lasted? Not worth the bother, presumably.

In other local election news, my brother Toby Micklethwait (UKIP) came a decent (but to him I daresay deeply disappointing) second to the Conservatives in Englefield Green west, very near to where we were raised and where our Mum still lives. He too accomplished what he accomplished not with any fancy blogging or internetting, but with lots of posters stuck up in people's gardens, with a ton of leaflets and other printed material, and with all the associated personal chit-chat. Maybe the truth is that the more local the politics (and Toby's latest burst of politics was about as local as it is possible for British politics to get), the less relevant blogging is to the campaigning politician. The blogging USP, its ability to send your message whizzing around the entire planet in seconds, does everything but solve your actual problem, and tells everyone in the world all about you except the exact people you are trying to reach, so blogging is of little use to you. Maybe it is time for me to revive that notion I once had about becoming the Supreme Ruler of the World.

"You guys have given me a bit more confidence to hold my [libertarian] views and have been a real tonic. It is good to be reminded that there are likeminded souls out there."

A remark about this blog that was addressed to me by one of the attendees at an Adam Smith Institute event last night. Comments like that help to make this gig worthwhile.

Shane Greer - a sound centre-right blogging celeb - keeps popping up on Sky News. The news channel's blog posting about his appearance yesterday bills him simply as "top blogger Shane Greer". He was on the channel to discuss the stories moving across the web, although the last time I saw him, he was reviewing the papers.

Shane has got an important political media job too (he is executive editor of the forthcoming magazine Total Politics). The presenter did mention that (it is just before the clip below starts), but while Shane was speaking the caption was www.shanegreer.com, his personal blog. I noticed, similarly, Jeff Jarvis being introduced on the channel either today or yesterday as being the author of the BuzzMachine blog.

This is yet more evidence that blogging really is fully mainstream. Additionally, Shane's blogging-print media combination highlights for me that the traditional media and the best of the blogosphere are now increasingly one in the same.

Over on The Line is Here, they are hosting the Carnival of the Libertarians, where various folks sound off about, surprise surprise, issues to do with liberty.

Check it out.

I like this:

For, the truth is that a dogmatic respect for certain fundamental rights is what enables us to be easygoing about most other things.

"Us" being us libertarians. This is in connection with some row at Harvard about reserving the gym for women, for a bit, or something. Being, like Ravikiran Rao, a libertarian, I can be easygoing about the details, although a link from Rao would have been good.

To me, it seems like a good idea to make reasonable accommodations for people's religious or other beliefs, where possible. Whether we should in any particular case depends on so many factors, so many costs, so many benefits and the conflicting interests of so many constituencies that it would be highly presumptuous of me to make blanket statements one way or the other. But what I can state is that letting property owners make the decision devolves the decision making to those who are closest to the decision and who have the most stake in the costs and benefits of that decision.

Or, you could turn this into a legal question involving esoteric principles. Well, good luck. When you are trying to make a law for this, you are moving the decision-making up to the top. Your quest for foolish consistency will inevitably lead to foolish decisions, because no law will provide for every nuance that would be involved in individual cases. There is still time. Come to Libertarianism my children!

Heh. Read the whole thing (which is not a lot longer) here. And while you're there, wander around the rest of the blog, which is one of my favourites, aside from its regrettable habit of not supplying links, to such things as stories about Harvard gyms being reserved for women.

I particularly enjoyed an earlier posting that Ravikiran Rao wrote, some time last year I think, which I cannot now find (so no link to that from me – sorry), in which he blamed nuclear weapons for the miseries of the world. The argument went approximately like this. People are happy when progressing, and one of the easiest ways of making progress is to make the kind of progress involved in clearing up after a major war, by rebuilding buildings, baby booming, and so on and so forth. But, nuclear weapons have done away with major wars, progress has therefore become a lot more awkward, and people are consequently more miserable. I suspect that there may be quite a bit of truth to this surmise, but true or not, I enjoy the way that Rao's argument arrives at a deeply respectable modern orthodoxy (nuclear weapons: bad!) via heresy (nuclear weapons have unleashed a serious modicum of world peace).

That last heresy is one that I agree with. I accept the orthodoxy about the niceness of world peace, and say: well done nuclear weapons. Seriously, I think that nuclear weapons have changed the world from a place in which major powers prepared for world war at all costs, to a place in which major powers avoid world wars at all cost.

There is an amusing article in The Observer magazine today called The world's 50 most powerful blogs which deigns to list our crazed (but correct) rantings here, I am pleased to say.

Samizdata is one of Britain's oldest blogs. Written by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians, tax rebels, Eurosceptics and Wildean individualists, it has a special niche in the political blogosphere: like a dive bar, on the rational side of the border between fringe opinion and foam-flecked paranoid ranting. Samizdata serves its opinions up strong and neat, but still recognisable as politics. On the other side of the border, in the wilderness, the real nutters start.

Least likely to post 'I'd say it's six of one, half a dozen of the other'

Such lists are of course highly subjective and whilst I am happy to see Samizdata numbered amongst new media's Golden Horde, there is a howling error, indeed it is a glaring radioactive glow-in-the-dark omission... where the hell is INSTAPUNDIT?

If you do not regularly read Michael Totten's Middle East Journal, you really are missing out on something you just do not see in the MSM. He delivers straightforward reportage not just of The Big Issues when they happen but of the mundane realities of what it is to be in the Slums of Fallujah with the USMC.

Lieutenant Lappe overheard our conversation. I think he was worried that I was getting nervous. "No one can lay down an IED anymore without somebody calling it in," he said.

Very revealing.

If you like his stuff as much as I do, consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal button and support truly independent journalism.

...All the wonderful tools of liberty. But... but... I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog's masthead!

Seeing as we have been talking about Tom Cruise and Scientology earlier today, there is an interesting ruckus brewing on Gawker, who have posted a rather interesting (in a 'huh?' kind of way) video of Tom Cruise talking about Scientology. The Church of Scientology's lawyers have demanded they take the video down and in response fearless Gawker VP Gaby Darbyshire politely invited them to go rotate, citing 'fair use' (Gaby is delightful and rather hot, by the way. I met her at Les Blogs in Paris a few years ago).

I take no conclusive view of the legal merits of the case (certainly if extracts of a proprietary video are used, it is a 'fair use' slam dunk... not so sure about using the whole thing), but I am much taken by Gawker's sheer bravery going up against the deep pocketed Scientologists, who are prone on the slightest pretext to sue people who cast aspersions on, or even reveal the details of, their religion. Does that remind you of someone else?

The Scientologists deserve every brickbat they get for their strong arm tactics against detractors. However I do not really understand the intellectual animus directed at the Scientologists for their religious beliefs. Their key myths do not strike me as any more preposterous than those of other more mainstream religions. It seems to me that their only big mistake was going into too much detail, thus in their case it is harder to fog the issue with the 'allegorical interpretations' that help us avoid tears of mirth when reading the literal word of other holy texts, ones which were not written by L. Ron Hubbard but rather by his more time hallowed equivalents in antiquity.

...or should I say Ron Paul. The previous post makes the case against Ron Paul as a champion of the libertarian faction of the US Republican party.

However, I shall be speaking about the US primary system and what Congressman Paul's campaign means at the Putney Debates tonight. I shall try to get a summary up over the weekend, either on Samizdata or here. The title of my talk is ‘Change at the Top: How the US Election Process Works and What are the Opportunities for Ron Paul?’ Details from here.

I shall also be continuing to cover the US primaries on my election blog.

I just heard that blogger and soldier Andrew Olmsted was killed in Iraq last Thursday. Very sad news indeed. I used to read him quite often back when he posted on his own blog, before DOD policy put a stop to that. I only knew him slightly (we exchanged a few e-mails) but he seemed like a great guy and he shared my long standing dislike of a certain left wing US blogger.

Heartfelt condolences to his family and friends.

Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect - although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion - that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:

I am currently out of the Country and on my return home to England I am going to be arrested by British detectives on suspicion of Stirring up Racial Hatred by displaying written material" contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

This charge if found guilty carries a lengthy prison sentence, more than what most paedophiles and rapists receive, ...

At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase "This charge if found guilty" It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar.

I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more.

Lionheart's central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not "Islamic extremism". The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart's ideas about that.

But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit's attitude:

I don't know much about the blogger, but I don't need to - people shouldn't be arrested merely for blogging things that the powers-that-be don't like.

If Lionheart's claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance.

For I think there's a fault line that runs through "political blogging" which isn't in fact properly appreciated. There are those who blog for a specific group, for a party, for their tribe. And there are those who blog in support of certain ideas, or ideals. The former group will indeed be liable to capture by the centre ("don't rock the boat old boy, not now we've got back into power again") and the latter will continue to scream for their cherished goals whichever party is in power.

- Tim Worstall

Triticale (real name Tom Arnold), a blogger and commenter on more than 250 Samizdata articles, has passed away.

God speed, Good Sir, you were a welcome guest.

Glenn Reynolds points to an excellent way to help out blogger Mark Steyn in his battle against being muzzled by the Saudi's: buy his book!

Besides sending copies to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, I can think of some other people who should read more of Mark's work.

Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing.

The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links - climate cuttings number 14, no less - with the following:

And that's it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.

Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot.

Blogger Patrick Lasswell had a real world encounter of the 'dial 911' kind that shows whilst civic virtue is a good thing, it is even better when the upstanding citizen has a firearm to hand when investigating a disturbance.

Hiding in my front yard from a shotgun armed maniac last night made me reflect on my libertarian leanings. The Second Amendment never seemed so clear to me as an individual right as I waited for the police to arrive, and waited. I was carrying only a telephone and a flashlight, and updating the 911 operator as the lunatic passed twenty yards from my position it occurred to me how very much I appreciate owning rifles, and how very, very far away they were at the moment.

Read the whole thing. Fortunately the encounter in question was 'merely' alarming, yet clearly there was potentially for a shooting and thus Patrick was in violation of Jeff Cooper's First Rule of Gunfights: have a gun.

Patrick, you live in the USA so you have no excuse to emulate the disarmed civilian population of Britain.

From late June of this year until earlier this month my personal blog stopped working. All previous such outages had been either very brief, lasting only a few days at worst, or they were longer but purely voluntary breaks, while I went off on holiday or just recharged the blogging batteries. But this summer's break was different. For boring bloggage reasons involving comment spam attacks (who by?) and Supergeeks who wouldn't answer the phone, the details of which I will spare you mostly because I don't understand them (although I hope and believe that my Geeks and Supergeeks do), my personal blog stoppage went on, and on, and on, and on, for the best part of three months. The stoppage only stopped about three weeks ago, and when it did I had become so used to not blogging that it actually took me about another week to jump back into it again.

When I started personal blogging, I supposed that if my personal blog was ever seriously interrupted, I would welcome the outlet offered by the other blogs that I have posting rights to, such as the Transport Blog, and of course Samizdata, to write whatever else I felt like blogging that fitted their remits. But instead, I found that I did not want to blog at all. Unable to avail myself of it, I found that blogging, anywhere, had lost its charm. I still wrote some bits for money, although the frequency of that also slowed during the summer. But that was work. It was not, you know, blogging. Why did this happen? Why did losing my own blog mean that my desire to contribute to anyone else's blog evaporated?

The best answer I can offer is that for me, wandering about on the internet looking for stuff to mention on Samizdata or Transport Blog constantly results also in stuff I want to comment on and link to chez moi. So if chez moi is no longer functioning, it's like having a gag stuffed in my face. I do not actually blog about everything I find that is of interest to me. But it hurts if I can't. Starting a personal blog meant that, for me, the internet had finally become fully interactive. I can say whatever I like about it, to it, on it. Being unable to say whatever I liked, I switched back to reading books.

For those unfamiliar with Alisher Usmanov, he is a Soviet era criminal (and I do not mean a dissident) and multi-gazillionare oligarch who is trying to 'do an Abramovich' and buy English football club Arsenal. More to the point he is also the man responsible for taking Tim Ireland's UK based Bloggerheads off-line for pointing out his criminal background (and thereby also taking down Boris Johnson's blog as 'collateral damage' as he was managed by Bloggerheads).

I must confess that I am a couple days late to this fight for the inexcusable reason that I simply cannot abide Tim Ireland, but in truth that has nothing to do with the outrageousness of some jumped up plutocrat throwing his weight around like this. However much I might dislike the notion I am forced to support Tim Ireland unequivocally.

As Mr. Eugenides aptly puts it:

And let's be clear on this point; these blogs are down not because Usmanov has been libelled, but because he says he's been libelled, and has a room full of paid monkeys sitting at typewriters firing off threatening letters to that effect.

I don't give a shit about this character, or Arsenal FC (no offence to any Gooners out there); nor do I share all or even most of Tim Ireland or Craig Murray's politics. But that's far from the point. If you can be silenced for calling a businessman a crook, then you can be silenced for calling a politician a crook, too. Then it's everyone's problem.

It is for reasons like this that Samizdata is hosted in the USA, where I have no doubt whatsoever that should the likes of Schillings, Alisher Usmanov's solicitors, approach my hosting company with a demand they pull the plug because I said something mean about some porcine thug-in-a-suit, they would be calmly invited to go get a US court order requiring them to take the site down (good luck with that) and until they do, they should please feel free to go fuck themselves.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution is not the source of any right, it is just a legal tool used by Americans in America to secure the natural right all people have to express themselves. But in this networked world we have, it actually has the unlooked for effect of extending a significant degree of that protection to other people across the world who write from foreign keyboards about foreign things for foreign audiences, hosted on a server in the USA. I find that quite interesting.

Michael Skube is having a fit about the demise of what sounds like beautiful, beeeaaauuudiful journalism in Blogs: All the noise that fits.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Who'd have guessed that he's describing journalism in the above?! Skube reads like an old journalist pro (and I use that word in the loosest possible sense) who bemoans the fact that his hard-earned 'right' to be published is being trampled upon by the barbaric hoards of bloggers. Well, the Big Editor in the Sky is no longer, there is just the internet with the online equivalent of printing press. With distribution bundled in. The bargain of the millennium. But the likes of Skube want to convince the world (or what's left of those who haven't taken to blogging) that this is bad for the luxury brands of MSM. We already know that, Michael. The real luxury is not having someone like you misrepresent what people are, do and mean by your selective 'fact-sifting', out of context quoting, and sloppy reporting. I am not accusing Michael Skube of such practices here, I'll leave that to Ed Cone, I am targeting the entire profession here. I am an equal opportunity ranter.

It always amuses me - right after it annoys me - how his type (Andrew Keen et al) only trawl through the bad stuff online and construct their argument around the worst they can find. Granted, nowadays they find a parenthesis or two to reluctantly admit that bloggers have some influence.. but no matter, if things continue this way, we are all dooomed. DOOOOMED! Well, yeah, dude.

Instead of supporting their arguments about the plebeian nature of the blogosphere and the rubbish we are all inundated with, they merely demonstrate their lack of skill in navigating blogs and finding the daily gems. So Jay Rosen of PressThink put together a blowback that's worth bookmarking - a collective effort of many to list examples of a blogger doing a journalist's job. It has also been published in LA Times. For the record.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

I did not want to write about this at the time when the article came out, since I thought why should I give any more publicity to the fascist - that is surely an accurate description - Neil Clark than he already got. But having thought things through and seen some commentary, such as by Stephen Pollard, I decided to give my two pence on the matter.

Clark is clearly fascinated by and attracted to, tyrants. He has defend Milosovic, for example, with a gusto that goes beyond whatever reasonable doubts one might have about who were the bad guys in the Balkan conflict. He has now argued that Iraqi interpreters trying to seek asylum should be left to their often violent fates. I wonder how he would have felt about the German interpreters who worked with the Allied armed forces in the latter stages of WW2, for instance? Clark is a truly strange beast. It is hard to think of him as "left-wing", still less "progressive" in any coherent sense whatever. He is a socialist in his attachment to state central planning and hatred of capitalism, but then that was a trait of the far right (but then again, do the words left and right in this political sense make any sense whatever?). The unifying trait of this character is a love of violent leaders, so long as they are against Britain and the evil US. Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals, demonstrates how often men who like to paint themselves as being on the side of the little guy are attracted to violence. I sometimes wonder whether Clark falls into the same trap. If I were a Christian, I'd pray for his soul.

A few months ago a student called Oli Cooper wrote to me to say that he was setting up a Libertarian Society at University College London. I took him for lunch and he explained his plans and I explained how such groups had worked elsewhere. The society does not officially launch until September but there is already a website and a feisty blog called The Torch.

I learn from the blog that since 1997, there’s been the equivalent of one new criminal offence a day. He beats up the UK government’s plans for extending punishment without trial. In one post he agrees with the hard-right Tory clique the Cornerstone Group but explains, lest readers get the wrong impression, that normally the Group “represents just about everything that’s wrong with the Conservative Party. They’re Kinder, Küche, Kirche sort of authoritarians, keen on protecting the privileges of the elite.” Ouch.

I suspect we will be hearing a lot more from the UCL over the next couple of years.

The first leg of my journey began on May 17th with a Belfast to Manhattan direct flight. I had a one day layover before another early morning start for a train to Boston. This gig, the JPMorgan Technology '07 Conference, was one of my big ones of the year. I worked as a backstage Tech on this investor conference from May 19th to the 23rd.

For those not in the heart of the tech game, these conferences are important events. Hundreds of millions exchange hands based on the information released by CEO's and CFO's and in back room wheeling and dealing. That's why I get paid well to travel a long distance just to be a webcast editor. They cannot afford failure, and if things do go wrong they want people who are overskilled enough to not panic and to solve the problem.

Our glorious leader tried to foresee the unforseeable or at the very least make sure everyone knew what they had to do.

Despite all the prep and redundancy and effort... gremlins will have their day. Just as the lights came up during an early Monday morning session... the entire hotel blacked out. Lighting boards. Sound boards. Television cameras. The video mixing desk. Registration servers. Video projectors. Streaming servers... and of course the Editing stations of my demesne. All hell broke loose... but in less than 15 minutes the hotel power problem was found, circuits repatched and every team had their gear synced up and back on the air. That's how the pro's do it.

I did not get to see much of the show unless you count occasionally looking over my shoulder and watching it in reverse.

The hours are long but there are perks working a job like this. For one, I get a very nice free room, and these things are not held in one star squats. As you can see, I had a lovely view of the harbour. I also had a panorama of the Charles River and the Boston skyline.

To top it off, the team is one of the best I have ever worked with. 'The craic is mighty' as one might hear in Belfast.

On the last day I rushed to finish my Editing tasks in time to strike my gear and flag a taxi to the railway station. I had a flight out of JFK to catch at 0500 and I left Boston only twelve hours earlier. The train takes a very scenic coastal route. I highly recommend the Boston to New York train for that and as a way to not go through the indignities of airport security.

At the moment I am sitting at the house of a Physicist and Venture capitalist friend in Connecticut in between jobs north of DC and a trip out to Laramie to push ahead on my latest venture. That is why I have had some time for posting again. These last few weeks on the road have been mad but have had some fun times as well, so I will perhaps do a few travel posts while I have the chance.

If you get the impression that Samidatistas are world travellers... I wonder whatever gave you that idea? ;-)

A quick plug for this excellent weblog of Daniel Ben-Ami, a freelance journalist who knows his economics. Daniel holds the heretical belief that material prosperity is a good thing and has debunked some of the recent nonsense about how people are made "unhappy" by material wealth. His site is definitely worth a regular visit.

I mean really geeky! But cool nevertheless.

This is not me. Save as a result of incompetent shaving, or depressed non-shaving, I have never had a beard. And not more than a couple of millimetres long, in any case. My verse output is formal exercises and satyrical squibs. One directory thinks there are eight Guy Herberts in Britain. More than one of those are, or were, me. I do not know whether any are him.

Dave Walker sees more online samizdat, which he deftly names samizdata. Sounds familiar?

The original Samizdat consisted of textual material intended to criticise and subvert repressive political regimes - it was surreptitiously copied and circulated in a "pass it on to your trustworthy friends" manner.

Today's samizdata - such as a certain hex string which, in the last month, has spread from one blog across Digg and thence to thousands of blogs and sites - is material which can now also be intended to subvert repressive data management regimes.

In the days of the Cold War, samizdat was spread between people who typically knew each other, whereas today's typical samizdata - even though it could conceivably propagate via USB memory sticks in a similar manner - employs more of a "scattergun" approach. This may well be down to the fact that secret police organisations in Cold War times were not omniscient; by contrast, today's data management Politburos have access to Google, so the top priority for samizdata proponents is, as well as concealing their identities, ensuring that their data is propagated so widely that the probability of all the sites carrying the data being gagged becomes as close to infinitesimal as possible.

Before the AACS product key, the last major piece of data management-subverting samizdata was DeCSS. DeCSS spread by website, newsgroup and T-shirt, the AACS key has spread much more quickly by blog, wiki and tag indexer. It is a sign of the times, although I am not about to predict that AACS product key T-shirts won't happen soon.

While the contribution of samizdat and its influence on populations to the eventual fall of various regimes is discussed in detail elsewhere, the effects of samizdata (online samizdata for the purposes of this discussion) are also not entirely straightforward; DeCSS and the falling cost of embeddable processing power clearly influenced AACS, particularly in the case of the upgradable key. However, as AACS could be broken once, on the grounds that key and encrypted material are stored together in a device under the physical control of the user, it can be broken again. The most accurate prediction I can make is that we'll be seeing a lot more samizdata in future.

In the autumn, I created a website called LibertarianHome. I did it as a prototype to see if there was interest and to see if anyone wanted to become Editor. I had some discussions with people about running it, but the problem with running such a site is that it just involves to much work. Yet LibertarianHome, in the short period it existed, seemed to generate a great deal of buzz. People seemed to enjoy commenting on it; when I stopped adding content, people emailed to complain.

The main design problem with LibertarianHome was that it was top-down. Although it had an open comments facility, it needed an individual to slog away feeding the beast with original content. People liked the fact that the home page was full of links to newspaper articles of interest, but this really did take a lot of time to update.

Anyway, I have worked out how to properly do a portal for free-marketeers, classical liberals and libertarians. The result is SpontaneousOrder.org, a "social" news portal. Based on the mainly-technology focussed Digg.com, it solves the top-down nature of LibertarianHome by letting readers submitting links to news or blog articles they would like to share. The person submitting writes a two to four line summary and then readers get to vote on whether it's an interesting link. If it's popular, it appears on the home page and the idea is that traffic pours on the site that's been linked to. The news headlines on the home page thus evolve by spontaneous order.

Why do I think SpontaneousOrder.org will work? Firstly, it does not involve much effort for people to submit links to it. Secondly, I'm relying on self-interest: people will submit links that are important to them - that they want to share with others and see more widely read.

The site is currently in beta test stage. Feel free to add content, comment on existing headlines, and try the voting system - and, of course, have fun.

This is just too damn funny not to draw people's attention to:

[Y]ou have raised so many straw men in that comment you are probably eligible for some sort of agricultural subsidy.

- Commenter 'Squawkbox'

The other night I had a look at the 18 Doughty Street internet-based public affairs TV programme. I quite like what Iain Dale and the others in that outfit are trying to do with internet TV: breaking into the arena now dominated by BBC, ITN and Channel 4, channels that are by and large infused with the meta-context of the liberal-left. 18 Doughty Street is unashamedly pro-liberty, pro-capitalism, pro-America and anti-Big Government in its thinking. My main doubt is whether it can keep going without being able to make hard cash. Anyway, it is also attracting guests from across the spectrum, and it is an appearance by a leftist blogger on the show the other night that got my attention.

Dale was interviewing three bloggers about events of the week, and one of the guests was Alex Hilton, the author of the blog Recess Monkey, a leftist site with a sense of humour that may or may not to be to one's taste. He recently got into a bit of a pickle by posting the 'news' that Margaret Thatcher, whom Alex loathes, had died. She is, of course, very much alive. Iain Dale phoned up the BBC after seeing the 'story' and promptly Hilton had to retract and publish a rather grubby apology, albeit one with a fairly nasty sting in the tail. What a nob, I thought. Then I saw his appearance on 18 Doughty Street. Fairly boilerplate lefty, I thought, a bit cocky, not a bit ashamed of spreading an untrue story, in fact, denying that that the death of Mrs T. would be a 'story' at all (any newspaper editor would turn him down on the spot if he thinks that the death of a famous politician, however old, is not a story. I certainly would).

Anyway, the interview went on. I was interested in how Hilton described how he came to hold the views he did, which is always interesting, in my view. His family background is working class - printing and coal mining, two industries that succumbed to the crackdown on subsidy and the trade union closed shop thanks to the Thatcher years (I strongly support both such changes, naturally). Hilton is a reminder, however, that a lot of people experienced the hard side of those changes, necessary though they were. I was a bit disappointed that Dale did not ask the question, "So Alex, are you in favour of massive coal subsidies and the old print union methods, then?", which was a pity. But at one stage we got a really interesting admission. Hilton was talking about leftist economics bloggers, and said it was a pleasure to come across such folk, because on the whole, "economics is an emotional issue for socialists", or some such. I certainly remember the use of the word "emotional". Bang. For a socialist to actually admit that their views on economics are driven, not by logic, factual evidence, by reason, but by "emotion" is a big admission. It is an admission of intellectual defeat if you do not say that you have reason as your main motivator. It is to run up a big, white flag in the battle of ideas. When Marx was writing about class and the rise of the proletariat, he did not present his arguments as "emotional" - though of course they were in many respects. He used the language of science a lot. The left used to talk about 'scientific socialism'. Their posters had big pictures of factories, machines and aircraft on them, all waxing lyrical about technology and the power of reason. The left is now a very different, post-modernist beast. Reason is out. Emotion is in.

Socialism just took another little step towards its coffin on that show. Nice one Alex. Keep up the great work. Just do not try to kill off Britain's greatest post-war Prime Minister ever again.

Or at least he tried to, but her friends and family made sure she was never made aware of the sick actions of her daughter's former schoolteacher.

As I say in the article, there is no law against being a jerk - nor should there be - but "It is a First Amendment right" is a coward's excuse for trying to hurt a dying woman and her grief-stricken daughter. There are lots of things in life against which there are no laws, but which are heartless, meanspirited, and downright disgusting things to do to another human being. If you consider the US Constitution your moral guidebook, you need more help than any lawyer can offer.

Eliot Stein refers to himself as an "internet pioneer" (in gutless actions?) and takes great pride in the lengths he went to in order to distract Cathy from her waning health and to try to get her to focus her attention on him ("I WILL NOT BE IGNORED!"), which says almost as much about his character as you need to know. Eliot Stein, while Maia's schoolteacher, also posted nasty comments on Maia and Cathy's blogs; when Maia's school got rid of him, he came to work in a tuxedo on his last day and made sure to tell every class that his departure was Maia's fault, which he must have known would lead to her being bullied and humiliated (which is exactly what happened).

Like I said, Eliot Stein is a real peach. And yet he still persists in the belief that Cathy could say or do anything which would make him seem more unfit to be around children than his own professed actions - of which he boasts with considerable pride. Would you want your kids to spend any amount of time around this man, let alone be stuck with him as a schoolteacher?

Bryan Appleyard has written a piece on the inimitable Guido Fawkes, but alas he has made a whole host of gross factual errors:

He started submitting entries to the transatlantic libertarian blog samizdata.net/blog, but they were never accepted, possibly because Samizdata was neocon and Staines isn’t. He’s a real libertarian, not a corporate shill like the average neocon. So he began his own blog, adopting the Guido persona.

Firstly, we did in fact publish quite a few of his various 'guest post' articles here on Samizdata... probably 70% of the ones he sent to us. And to find this out, all Bryan had to do was use the search box in the right hand sidebar of this blog to discover that.

Secondly, far from me (or Samizdata) being neo-con in contrast to Paul-the-libertarian, 95% of the time you could not fit a piece of paper between my views and those of Paul Staines. And of the 5%, I suspect the vast majority of our differences would be tactical, not philosophical. So as for me being a corporate shill, well Bryan is talking through the cushion on his seat, and that is putting it politely. If I am on the payroll of big business, my cheques must keep getting lost in the (state owned) postal service.

Thirdly, I did indeed turn down several of the-man-who-became-Guido's articles for Samizdata but not a single one of them were rejected for ideological reasons. I turned down some because they were defamatory and other because this blogs does not really concentrate on party politics to the extent Paul likes to (and that is also why Guido and Samizdata are not 'competitors'... we have quite different 'mission statements').

Not up to your usual standard, Bryan. Consider your arse fact-checked.

Chris Lightfoot, occasional commentator here, well-known blogger, and technical wizard, is dead. It has been a confidential matter for a couple of weeks, but can now become public.

I didn't know him very well, but will miss his awesome intelligence. NO2ID will miss his capacity just to fix things while lesser techies were squabbling among themselves about how to do it.

Other people, here, and here, for example, knew him better and have more valuable things to say.

If anyone wants to talk about 'root causes' here's one:

Kareem’s father decided “to attend the court verdict session with his four brothers, who completely memorized the Holy Quran, to announce disowning the accused Abdul Kareem inside the court room, in order to reduce the embarrassment and pressure that civil rights organizations are applying on the court panel (…) The father of the accused also described the organizations that are working on having his son acquitted as “monkey rights” organizations.”

The full story of Abdel Kareem Soliman, a 22-year old Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam on his blog, is here.

I found this together with a presentation about online censorship in Pakistan. Don't Block The Blog is an online campaign launched by Awab Alvi and Omer Alvie on March 3rd 2006, to support free speech of Pakistani bloggers and internet free speech in general.

We at DBTB support the right of free speech for everyone. This umbrella of free speech rights also covers those sites that we might consider offensive. In order to ensure free speech for most average citizens who voice their opinions for no other reason then just to tell the truth, one has to accept the right of free speech of even those who have an extremist or hateful political agenda.

This is a big deal as in any totalitarian environment, and let's face it countries with islamic population do not tolerate alternatives, governments can pay only lip service to the notion of free speech. The moment you disagree with the accepted religious, social and by extension political parameters, you are blasphemous, disruptive and imprisoned. Take your pick. Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian political refugee living in the Netherlands since 1998, interviewed Awab Alvi.

The only way the authorities (in any country) can successfully ban a specific topic or content on related sites, is by banning the whole of the internet in that country. Otherwise, it can NEVER be done. What usually ends up happening, as in the case of the cartoon issue, the most useless, hate-filled, and irrelevant site ends up being popular (and as result gets a much larger audience) due to the ban enforced on it.

This is going to be a long campaign... and I am not talking about bypassing the ban with technology. Proxy by-pass servers and mirror sites are technological solutions, albeit essential, to a human mind problem. Unless coupled with conviction and resistance, technology can work for the other side - just ask Cisco. But there is some good news:

...and while repressive regimes are particularly effective in building substantial Internet filtering systems and at creating an atmosphere of fear in which people censor themselves, there are amazing individuals who are making a difference. In the asymmetrical battle — individual vs. State — taking place between two parties with vastly different resources, a few freedom-loving people have been taking on the sophisticated state censorship machine, armed with nothing but their passion and creativity.

I must have missed this but according to the Heavens there has been a blogwar. Or perhaps some minor arguments amongst the British blogosphere. First alerted by Iain Dale's misapprehensions, I checked Google News to see how far the disagreements and conflicts had rocked the mainstream media. They had not.

Staying below the parapet of the media or using the wrong search word certainly demonstrated to me that if there was any retelling of these events, they were not listed as a blog war and I cannot stomach Media Guardian tonight. It was time to try Technorati, the rather slow and ponderous Technorati. You can tell I am writing this as I wait.

Well, I have gone back three days and, as yet, no blog war has appeared concerning British bloggers on Technorati. Call me an old fogey but I remember the days when blog wars were real blog wars. I think that a blog war only exists if it meets the nominalist requirements and is called a blog war as it happens across many blogs.

The Heavens have had a minor spat. It hardly counts as the fall of Lucifer. If you want a real British blog war, agree the terms of declaring the conflict by throwing down a stylised gauntlet and go to war. Ritualised textual combat, avoiding libel and error of fact, may be just the path to spice up our ideological differences.

Last week I was interviewed by David Grossman of the BBC, on the subject of Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes. When I did the pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance, we published three pieces by Paul (this, this, and this), hence the BBC's interest. The show I was contributing to, a Radio 4 programme called Profile, was first broadcast at 7pm on Saturday night, and you can listen to it by rootling around here.

The impressive thing about Paul Staines is that he has always understood the connection between political freedom - civil liberties etc. - economic freedom, and what for want of a better phrase is called lifestyle freedom, i.e. sex and drugs and rock and roll. All are but different faces of the same thing: freedom! Most self-styled enthusiasts for freedom tend to emphasise some freedoms but to downplay and even oppose others. Paul Staines always was (and now Guido is) in favour of freedom across the board. Those three LA publications - about human rights abuses around the world, about acid house parties and the efforts of bossy Conservative politicians and of newer varieties of lefty safety nazis to shut them down and to stop anyone having any fun, and about the benefits of unfettered financial markets - cover pretty much the whole spectrum of freedom. When it comes to freedom of any sort, Paul Staines is on the side of the angels.

He is particularly good at distinguishing between the idea of free market capitalism, which is about how we may all do what we want with and trade with what is rightly ours, and the mere interests of particular capitalists.

Not that the man himself is always an angel. He is very flawed, very human. As are all the politicians whom he now torments. Their problem being that they often try to present themselves to the world as something rather more elevated than that, and accordingly as people who know better than we do what is best for us.

This man writes very well and very entertainingly, but I wish he would stop using the word 'liberal' to describe people who want to restrict and often abolish liberty.

Liberal is a good word, and we who believe in liberty should keep hold of the word tight. Calling shameless collectivists, who believe neither in economic nor 'social' liberty nor any other kind of liberty, 'liberal' will destroy this good word.

When someone disagrees with you about how to protect and extend liberty, he is still entitled to be called a liberal. When he stops even bothering about liberty and starts saying that liberty is neither an important end, nor even an important means towards the achievement of other worthy ends, then what sense does it make to let him take the word liberal off with him into the tyrannical bog that he has blundered or marched into?

In the USA, it would appear that the battle for this word was won and lost long ago. But on this side of the Atlantic, the word 'liberal' still means something far more truly liberal. We must keep it that way.

This short posting is the sort of thing I am objecting to:

Further proof of the moral degeneracy of Liberals. Not only pushing even more legislation restricting free speech, but loading it down with caveats to protect people whitewashing their favourite murderers.

The point is a good one, as are so many points made by this writer. But... Liberals?

I also think that describing your very sharp views as coming from the 'House of Dumb' is, well, dumb. He is not a bit dumb, and I am sure he has his reasons for doing this, but whatever they may be, if I learn them I do not expect to be persuaded by them. Irony perhaps? Whatever. Argumentatively speaking, calling yourself dumb amounts to constructing a huge open goal for your opponents to tap in a succession of soft goals. One of the basic rules of propaganda is: do not put yourself down. Speak out with clarity, seriousness and sincerity. By all means make trivial jokes about yourself, but the seriously wounding jokes should always be on the other fellows. 'House of Dumb' ought to be a blog dedicated to the idiocies of the non-liberal, anti-liberal collectivist creeps, and it briefly crossed my mind while writing this sentence that maybe this is what the man had in mind, which would have made this sentence read very foolishly. But then I remembered that he calls himself 'DumbJon'. It is his own house that he is talking about, just as I had been assuming. And his very name, never mind his blog's name, is a pre-emptive cringe. Right wingers bloggers do this a lot, with their I-know-what-you-think-I-am-but-I-don't-care names. They think it is showing toughness and wit. It think it is admitting that you are wrong before you even open your mouth.

I repeat, I really like how 'DumbJon' writes, and I agree with point after point that he scores against his hated "liberal" anti-liberals. I particular, agree with him, as many ferocious opponents of Islamism or "Islamic extremism" often do not that Islam itself is a huge problem for the West, rather than the Islam problem merely being a few nutters who take it too far. What the nutters do is take Islam seriously, just as they claim to.

Anyway, having made my points about liberality and dumbness, I will leave it at that and continue to read House of Dumb with profit and pleasure. It is obviously far too late for 'DumbJon' himself to consider any name changes. But, to any other worthy people with ideas like his who are still wondering what to call their blogs, I say: do not be ironic about yourself if you want to be truly persuasive and truly wounding to those whom you seek to wound. Do not build the insults of your opponents into your descriptions of yourself and of your ideas.

And do not hand your opponents compliments that they do not deserve. Do not, for example, call people 'liberal' when they are nothing of the kind.

And how do I know? It has passed Julian's Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT).

Michael Totten has some more great stuff from Lebanon that you just will not read in the mainstream media.

And remember he does not have a news organisation behind him, so he trips and reportage are all funded from his own pocket and from donations from readers.

Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian has written about the blogosphere in a way that had me grinning by the end of the first paragraph...

I'd love to see his reaction to the Guardian arts blog, where the dynamic often suggests that the argument has spilled out of the crowded bar and escalated into a punchup in the car park.

Yes, the comment sections of blogs, and indeed blog articles themselves, can get a bit like that at times. Although he is writing about the 'Arts' blogosphere, some of what he observes also pertains to the political and punditry blogosphere... and some does not, which I also find quite interesting.

However where I think Lynskey is not quite correct is where he writes...

Many of the people who post [comments] on blogs appear to be annoyed not by what the writers say so much as the fact that they're in a position to say it. You can spot this type because they write things like : "You've only written this to provoke a reaction." Or: "Why did you even write this? What a waste of time." As if writing to complain about a waste of time were not, in fact, a bigger waste of time. Or, my favourite: "Typical Guardian." Perhaps they also post on the website of Practical Caravan magazine, complaining: "Typical Practical Caravan. So caravancentric."

No, not really, I do not think people care that Lynskey is in a position to say what he says. I think what he is observing here is not resentment that he has a gig writing for the 'Grauniad' but rather a change in the culture regarding the whole journalistic profession.

People have realised that whilst they may not be journalists, they no longer need to be one in order to editorialise the news. In short, journalism is no longer an 'institution', it is just 'something people with opinions do'. Some people get paid for it and other do it for free. In a sense, we are the journalists now in that we are the ones keeping journals of our opinions on the outrage-of-the-day. People who work for newspapers might be better described as 'newspaper men', many of whom are formatting commoditised information, or as 'reporters' if they are collecting information to be formatted. The editorialising role is something that the mainstream media has now largely lost their lock on.

If the Guardian tells me car bomb has gone off in Baghdad or a British minister has resigned, I believe them. However I do not need the Guardian to tell me what the significance of that is as the low-down regarding what was behind said ministerial skulduggery is probably better and fresher on Guido Fawkes.

However he is quite correct that criticising a Guardian article in the Guardian's own comment section for being a 'typical Guardian article' is rather bizarre. What were they expecting? It is all the stranger as people in the UK have the advantage that most clear eyed British journalists make little pretence that their newspaper is not partisan (unlike in the USA when the preposterous myth of journalistic impartiality persists), by which I mean each paper has an identifiable political editorial line that colours everything it does... people understand that the Guardian is a left wing statist newspaper, the Telegraph is a right wing statist newspaper with occasional classical liberal pretensions, the Independent is the Al Qaeda House Journal, etc. etc.. Just as people do not read Samizdata and expect to be confronted with a paean to the NHS (that is the Guardian's job), they should not expect to read an article in the Guardian calling for an end to state education (that is our job).

Nevertheless, love it or loath it (one guess), the Guardian has always been far and away the most internet savvy newspaper and Lynskey seems to have a much better grasp of what blogging is about than the irascible Keith Waterhouse.

For those of you who have been following the story of the Pakistan born ex-Muslim blogger 'Isaac Schrödinger' who has been seeking asylum in Canada, I am delighted to report a very happy ending.

Michael Totten has written a couple very interesting articles called Hezbollah's Putsch and Hezbollah's Christian Allies.

Well worth checking out as you just do not see stuff like this in the mainstream media all too often. Also consider dropping your mouse on his PayPal donations button to support his excellent international reportage.

From all of us at Samizdata, to all of you, our loyal readers and commenters, a very Merry Christmas!

A large contingent of Samizdatistas were seen making merry and getting blotto at the party of a certain Reuters journalist tonight. As Christmas party season is in full cry, blogging may be a bit... sporadic... over the next few days.

Apologies for not flagging up sooner that I recently had a recorded conversation about Samizdata with Perry de Havilland. It took me over a week to edit the thing, by which I mean over a week to get around to stitching the two chunks it happened in together (I find everything involving computers to be hard until I know how to do it). And after posting about it on my blog, it has taken me another two days to mention it here. I had a busy weekend. But the mills of Samizdata grind small, and slowly. A week and a half's delay will make no huge difference to the big picture, or to the meta-context as Perry likes to call it.

Anyway, click here to have a listen. It lasts about forty minutes.

Our conversation reminded me of something I first heard myself say to Madsen Pirie a long time ago, in the old Alternative Bookshop. What will this achieve? - said Madsen, waving some pamphlet I had just done in my face. I replied: "In the short run, nothing. In the long run, everything." Samizdata is like that.

Jackie D liked it too.

Today, assuming the plan goes according to plan, I will be doing another of these things, with Alex Singleton, about... Gilbert and Sullivan. There is more to life than what governments do.

Hosting company 'Watching America' are currently under a sustained (two days and counting) denial-of-service attack and as a result various blogs may be hard or impossible to access as a result. Consider this a public service announcement. Methinks some lynchings are in order.

I had the pleasure of meeting U.S. blogger Stephen Green, of the excellently entitled Vodkapundit, a few months ago at a party in London. Stephen has been ill, lost a lot of weight, and I must say I got quite concerned when he stopped posting. He now explains what has been going on. It looks as if the fella is going to be all right, which is terrific news for him and his wife and child. Feel free to nip over to his site and give him your best wishes.

I am looking forward to the Colorado Scribe posting up more of those cocktail recipes again. Mine's a gin and tonic.

Steve Edwards has administered a particularly welcome hatchet job on critical aspects of the ostensibly benevolent, world government-loving Bahá'í religion. Check the comments - the Bahá'í faithful have piled in.

I can not have been the only blog-reader who was struck last week by the difference between this from Iain Dale:

The Browns must be shattered, particularly after the death of their daughter. Things like this bring politics into perspective and make some of the silly political games we all indulge in look absolutely pathetic. I am sure every single reader of this blog would want to put political differences aside and express their good wishes to the Brown family.

And this from Guido:

Now call Guido cynical if you will, but on the day the Charity Commissioners announce their intentions, and the Telegraph articles show the press chase has begun, we learn from a deftly placed story in the government's favourite mouthpiece, The Sun, that tragically Gordon's son has cystic fibrosis. A good day to front-page the tragic news?

Because yes, it would seem that there is some funding scandal surrounding Mr Brown which is now coming to the boil.

I think Guido wins. He does not deny the tragicness of the story. But, he notes the timing of the telling of it. He adds something. It is the full page spread in the Sun, which Guido reproduces, that clinches it for me.

And in the unlikely event that it was coincidence, then I am afraid that this is not the kind of benefit of the doubt that most of us are any longer prepared to give to this government.

Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told. Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place "in which views bloom". But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

- BBC

It is extraordinary how people opine without understanding the subject. It seems like Mr. Toulmin understand nothing whatsoever about the internet. There is indeed a "form of redress for people angered at content" on blogs available and that is... blogs. It is extremely simple: go to blogger.com, spend about five minutes doing the 'three easy steps' and then start posting your rebuttals on your own damn blog.

As for a voluntary code of conduct... I invite Tim Toulmin to ask his lawyer to write one down on a piece of paper, roll the document up tightly and then stick it wherever his lawyer's imagination and Mr. Toulmin complacency will allow. I look forward to being told off for that remark when Tim Toulmin sets up his own blog.

For another similar view to mine, see here.

I particularly like it when blogging is being done, or is about to be done, by people whom I know quite well. And my friend Helen Evans has just this very day started a blog about nursing, called the Nurses For Reform blog.

That said, the prose style so far is rather corporate and armour-plated for my taste. However, despite the rather baffling word "contestability" - which is presumably some kind of Blairite code-word, for something or other - I think it is reasonably clear what is intended by the following:

NFR rejects bland egalitarianism in favour of contestability. Above all else we believe that greater partnership with the private sector is to be actively welcomed and that this sector’s contributions are good news for patients and healthcare professionals alike.

That suggests to me something quite like free market medicine, and of course I am totally for that. This next bit is definitely about free market medicine:

NFR believes in fundamental change. It believes that only by putting patients and consumers interests first will healthcare improve. It is only when healthcare is opened up to real consumers and trusted brands that nurses will find themselves working in a sustainable environment and with the incentives, resources and encouragement to deliver a responsive, popular and truly high quality service.

This says stuff I agree with, but in the manner of a corporate mission statement, and I loath and detest nearly every corporate mission statement that I have ever encountered.

Wouldn't it be fun one day to read one of these things starting with something like: "We believe only in superficial change. Fundamentally, things should stay pretty much as they are." And how about someone just occasionally admitting that he aims to supply an "unresponsive, unpopular" product or service? Many splendid tradespersons do just that and are richly rewarded.

However, since this is a corporate mission statement, I really ought not to carp. And since this is medicine and nursing care in Britain that is being talked about, well, I admit it, I do believe in "fundamental change". Nor can I reasonably object to the ambition that nurses should work, if at all possible, in a "sustainable environment", nor to them delivering a "responsive, popular and truly high quality service".

To be more serious, I have quite often heard Helen Evans say, in the plainest of English, that one of the many problems of Britain's National Health Service is that its nurses do not now have a proper career path in front of them. As soon as they get really good at their job, they tend to leave. The NHS has lost many of what would now be its NCOs, so to speak, good and experienced senior nurses being to hospitals what good and experienced sergeants are to armies. And where have they all gone? To get married, or to the private sector.

When the postings at this new blog get more specific and personal, as I am sure many of them will, I will surely read them with interest and pleasure. There will be more links from here to there in the future, I promise you.

Transport Blog is up and running again, and I have agreed once again to write bits for it, now and again.

Specialist blogs like Transport Blog often get quite high traffic, provided everyone involved keeps at it. There are a lot of people in the world who are interested in and excited about transport, especially by trains, which just happen to be a particular interest of Transport Blog supremo Patrick Crozier. Almost everyone travels, or has travelled. Bloggers everywhere have the occasional moan about transport, and often also have stories to tell about how transport was good in one way or another, or about how it may soon be very exciting. So, emails to me or to Transport Blog itself (i.e. Patrick) about transport related stuff, either telling the story direct, or linking to where you or someone has already told it, will be most welcome.

Transport Blog will, just as it did first time around, find a quite distinct readership to that which reads things like Samizdata. So it makes sense to have a little competition here, and for me now to promise to repost the best comment(s) on this posting here during the next twenty four hours, over to Transport Blog.

Any good recent transport stories to tell? Terrible delays? Transport policy cock-ups? (Or triumphs?) Weird and wonderful pictures (a particular favourite with me – see below) of bizarre transport contraptions? Very nice transport experiences? Odd moments in transport history? Transport in odd places? It's a delightfully vast subject.

Picture from here. Hat tip: ASI Blog.

Brian Micklethwait is going on 'internet TV', which should be interesting. I recall Brian once telling me that he thought he had a 'good face for radio'. Check it out and hear what he has to say.

Great respect is due to Cato's Radley Balko, who has tirelessly campaigned against the the 'no-knock' search and entry powers employed by law enforcement agencies in the United States. I was surfing around the blogs and came across this story a few days after it broke. This is a glimmer, a start in what hopefully may be a change in the law. Radley's work on the Cory Maye case is a bit of a result for blogs, too. This is a US issue, but as we know with stuff like eminent domain, it is always worth we Brits watching developments like this for signs of similar trends closer to home.

Jim Henley has related thoughts on the issue.

I wish these guys all the very best of luck in breaking the lock of the mainstream media on broadcast television in Britain and political coverage in particular. I am not sure if this outfit is going to feature a lot in my viewing habits, though. Given that I have to look at current affairs news quite a bit as part of my day job in London's financial centre, I actually deliberately avoid too much of the same when I get home, preferring to read a book, go to the gym, see a movie or just hang out with my lovely wife. But for the political trainspotters out there, this sort of venture should be a boon.

My only carp at this stage is why choose such a dull name? Maybe there is some sort of perverse appeal about it.

Yours truly got a mention in a whimsical New York Times article by William Safire in which he makes the point that "coiners can’t be choosers"... once an epithet, in this case Moonbat, escapes into the general meme-pool, the coiner has no control over how it actually gets used.

Steve Edwards relates an interesting story unfolding in the Chinese blogosphere:

Chinese Internet vigilantes have launched a hunt for a self-professed British bounder who has sparked outrage by blogging about his seduction of women in Shanghai. The campaign to uncover the identity of the blogger and have him kicked out of China is the latest in a series of online denunciations that have drawn comparisons with the humiliations inflicted by mobs during the Cultural Revolution.

Traffic on the Sex and Shanghai blog [currently restricted to members only - JW] had surged from 500 hits to more than 17,000, thanks to a swarm of castration threats, anti-British rants and attacks on women who sleep with foreigners.

That some Chinese men are haunted by a sense of sexual inadequacy should come as no surprise - it is a trait that can be uncovered universally. However, there seems a particularly 'Chinese' way of expressing this, combining a sense of wounded pride, chauvinism and sexual frustration. I recall similar goings on a few years ago when a young Chinese female author wrote a scandalous (by Chinese standards) book that was subsequently banned. The protagonist, a Chinese teenage girl, got up to all kinds of naughtiness. In the most infamous scene, she has sex with a German in a public bathroom, stating something like "riding his big cock was like sitting on a fire hose". Such explicit prose brought forth a torrent of outraged letters to the author and messages posted on bulletin boards. Most of them were deeply offended by the sexual encounter with the foreigner, and many threatened sexual violence involving the respondent's own (presumably fictitious) monster appendage.

The ugly controversy these isolated tales of sexual licence generate obscures - yet also confirms - the fact that generally, Chinese women are probably the most sexually conservative in East Asia. Despite its ostensible headlong rush to modernise and embrace the rest of the world (not an entirely apt metaphor, considering my forthcoming conclusion), such controversies show that much of Chinese society harbours a visceral discomfort with the consequences of throwing open the gates to Johnny Foreigner. This evidently includes large elements of the net-savvy middle class; a demographic that usually has progressive views ascribed to it. Socially, China is still quite an illiberal society, despite the adoption of many Western values. Foreign workers in a city like Shanghai can lose sight of this in the familiar surroundings of expensive consumer goods, rows of the steel and glass churches of capitalism and a general will to party like it's 1999 amongst the city's elite and emerging elite. Nevertheless, as this story confirms, conflating the two cultures can still be dangerous; even in the midst of China's latest Cultural Revolution.

Sometimes you read something that you have every reason to believe was written by a sane, intelligent and logical person, and you are shocked. Shocked at how incredibly twisted this sane, intelligent and logical person's perspective could be regarding one singular subject their pen encountered. Tim Blair points out such an example. To quote the estimable Mr Blair's post:

Graeme Blundell’s review of The Falling Man includes a curious claim:

In an extraordinary act of national media self-censorship, several days after the photograph appeared, it vanished. Papers across the US defended themselves against charges of invading a dying man’s privacy and turning tragedy into pornography. The photograph became impermissible. There was a deeply held belief the deaths of the jumpers weren’t proper, indeed that they were cowardly. [JW - Blair's emphasis, not mine] The images that came to symbolise the day were of helmeted heroic rescuers working in the rubble and the jumpers disappeared to the shameful websites that traffic in autopsy photos and videotapes of executions.

The commenters at Tim's site rightfully voiced their disgust at such a sentiment. I could not help but marvel at the sheer ignorance betrayed by the author's reading of events, too. I quite confidently assert, with no supporting evidence, that not one media outlet in the Western world even briefly pondered cowardice as a motive of those wretched jumpers. The fact that Blundell so egregiously detects this wildly inaccurate perception as a "deeply held belief" amongst many suggests to me that this is his own delusion, which is where the ignorance part introduces itself. When trapped out on a stricken building's precipice - with intolerable heat and the promise of excruciating pain at one's back and cool, open air at one's front - people do jump. I cannot possibly know or understand what would be running through a desperate victim's mind at a time like that, but I would guess that a very basic, elemental survival mechanism - buried deep in our ancient animal instincts and wholly unencumbered by conscious and cerebral rationality - might well be invoked. Step back into a hellish inferno and certain death. Step forward into benevolent - tragically fleetingly benevolent - open air and possible survival. Only one profoundly ignorant of the human condition would mistake the latter choice as an act of cowardice.

On a lighter note; since I have mentioned Tim Blair here, I may as well press an unrelated fact. The man is right up there with the very wittiest writers in the blogosphere. In the middle of a gadfly-esque post confronting the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's marketing of a book published by them (the book is also written by an ABC science broadcaster) - whereby Blair contrasts a strident and hyperbole-ridden stance towards the rather wacky and more-or-less harmless Intelligent Design movement with the ABC's generally sheepish reaction to the world's most dangerous religious phenomena - we stumble across Exhibit A:

I’m not religious, so I don’t have a God in this fight

Brilliant.

I do not read Andrew Sullivan's blog very often but when I saw the Michael Totten (who is someone I do rate rather highly) was guest-blogging there, I took a peek and saw an article Sullivan wrote a few days ago about the plot to blow up aircraft heading from the UK to the US, which quickly reminded me why I rarely visit.

I wonder if Lieberman's defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled. I wish I didn't find these questions popping into my head. But the alternative is to trust the Bush administration.

Riiiight. It is totally sound policy to distrust what the authorities tell us and instead just look for the evidence as we have been lied to again and again, and until I hit the paragraph I quoted above, I was mostly in agreement with what was being written. Lord knows there are more than ample reasons to give the Bush administration a sound and repeated kicking and I am the last person to urge people to trust governments, but concocting weird conspiracy theories is a clear sign that the point of rational criticism has been past and we are entering Bush Derangement Syndrome territory.

Both Bush and Blair will not hesitate to use any plot by Al-Qaeda, even those of the more common Keystone Cops Terrorists variety, to abridge yet more of our civil liberties without in fact improving our security one iota. But the notion that the timing of such tactical moves by the police are being micro-managed by Blair, let alone Bush, for maximum PR value is stretching things, particularly given that the PR effect of such a bust is extremely uncertain given the recent propensity of London's Metropolitan Police for arresting, not to mention shooting, the wrong people.

Moreover, the fiasco in Lebanon was an entirely domestic Israeli cock-up caused by the most idiotic leadership in the Jewish state's history, so other than the ravings of the perpetually BDS infected Kos/Democratic Underground crowd (who are frankly an irrelevant lunatic fringe in any PR calculations likely to be made in either the White House or Downing Street), it is difficult to see why a military and political screw-up by Israel would have Bush or Blair desperately looking to finesse a diversion of attention away from the violence in Israel and Lebanon. It was really not their problem in any major way and it had largly pushed Iraq off the front pages of the world, which was unlikely to be causing many sleepless night in Downing Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. And I really, really doubt Tony Blair is more than dimly aware of who the hell Joe Lieberman is given that he is hardly a household name outside the USA. Methinks the idea such issues were driving the Metropolitan Police's actions is frankly bonkers.

Still, I will probably be reading far more of Andrew Sullivan's blog in the days to come now that someone else is actually writing for it.

Can it be true that UK mobile phone company Orange has suspended an employee, Inigo Wilson, for a non-work related entry on a blog? What seems to have caused offence is him making jokes in his 'Lefty Lexicon' such as:

Islamophobic - anyone who objects to having their transport blown up on the way to work

Unless there are other factors at play here (I will be see what I can find out), I am about to become an ex-Orange customer and will start urging others to do likewise. If Orange is concerned about one of their employees 'upsetting customers', well I think they need to be told that pursuing this course of action against Inigo Wilson, they are doing precisely that. I do not dispute their right to hire and fire whomsoever they wish, but I intent to try and make them suffer some economic consequences as a result if this is as egregious as it appears.

Update: I received an e-mail from Stuart Jackson at Orange telling me:

To clarify, the suspension of an employee is not intended to imply that the employee in question has done wrong. It is a neutral act that allows us to conduct a full investigation and reach a conclusion based on facts. I will gladly update you regarding the outcome of the investigation.

But as the 'facts' are not in dispute, that does not really answer my question, which was:

I am enquiring about why Orange has suspended its employee Inigo Wilson. It is indeed the company's position that remarks made on an employee's own time and wholly unrelated to his work, is grounds for action by the company? I ask this as if there are other factors at play here, I may then refrain from cancelling my Orange account.

The 'facts' are not the issue. The issue is why Orange feels it has to do anything about them. Frankly even requiring Mr. Wilson to 'apologise and not do it again' would be wholly unacceptable given that his off-the-clock non work related remarks should be none of Orange's business and if they think otherwise, they can do without my business.

The latest bloggage from Michael Totten is something a bit different than his previous two offerings. It is about what it is like to be in a war zone for the first time and it brought back some strangely similar echos for me from when I first visited a war zone in 1991... war does indeed warp the mind a little. Check it out.

Michael Totten's latest on-the-spot bloggage from Northern Israel is up and ready to be devoured.

The indispensible Michael Totten is blogging from Northern Israel and has some great stuff to read. And while you are at it, consider dropping a dime in his tip-jar to support his first class reportage.

Blogging collectives only really work for the readers when the editorial line has some focus - Samizdata or Harry's Place for instance take a line and have a community of writers with broadly similar views (Samizdatistas think private gun ownership is good and want to liberate Iraq through firepower. Over at Harry's place they think gun ownership is bad and want to socialise Iraq through firepower.)
- the incomperable Guido Fawkes

Perry in particular will be delighted to know of the existence of Moonbat Media - it is new to me anyway. Though they do not seem to be taking the definition very literally.

Must go, got a government to destabilise.

- Guido Fawkes explains the brevity of his comment on this posting at my blog

Just a quick plug for a good friend of mine. Steve Edwards, author of the now-defunct Daily Slander, is back with his new blog, The Raving Wingnut. Steve's posts are still as lucid and pleasingly inflammatory as ever - true to form. Welcome back, Stevie.

Do drop by, and whilst there, take a closer look at Steve's "Charlie don't surf" photo. That shot was taken in Yun'nan province of south-western China - not Vietnam! - at a spartan guesthouse along the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek Steve and I embarked upon last year (my second time through that glorious part of the world). And note Steve's Cherie Blair-esque grin is clasping a particularly cheap and nasty Chinese cigar. He's all class, that fella.

I just discovered that O.G. blogger Acidman passed away last Monday, which is really too bad as he was a splendidly cantankerous and hugely entertaining SOB. I always thought of him as the Ted Nugent of the blogosphere.

If my blog does not meet your standards, then LOWER YOUR STANDARDS. Who the hell do you think you are, anyway?

Rock on, Rob.

There is a rather groovy bit of videoblogging on HopperVideo showing samizdata.net's Adriana discussing the issue of Net Neutrality in San Francisco. What I really like is how the vlogger uses floating text over the video to emphasise the points Adriana is making.

It has been a while since my last visit to the excellent India Uncut blog - too long.

First laugh - Amit's latest post links to a chef dispensing advice concerning prawns. As an Aussie, I was rather amused to discover some poor Seppo writing in, wondering what to do with that whole 'vein thing' running down the back of a prawn. Kiss it goodbye or let it lie? Basically, if you bought your prawns to impress - as a stand-out ingredient in some culinary masterpiece you've had up your sleeve for months - then you should clean them. Even if the prawns are merely a somewhat important ingredient amongst a few others, you should clean them. If you are using those bland tiddlers from Thailand - to add an interesting texture to your gruel or something along those lines - then don't bother cleaning them.

I swear, I was born with that innate knowledge. Bewdy, mate. Throw another... oh, never mind.

Now, if you bought your prawns to impress, and in doing so you selected those aforementioned bland Thai tiddlers - then you should clean them, because that's your punishment for being a tightarse. Apologies, the one minute I spent looking through idiotic online Strine dictionaries did not yield the definition of "tightarse". Note to the confused; if you are a tightarse, you are cheap. And you know who you are.

Second laugh - some politically incorrect Indian astrologer has decided that "Mumbai" is somewhat unlucky, and "Bombay" is rather more auspicious. Whatever. All the terribly clever weathermen on Australia's two publicly-funded television broadcasters take great pride in saying "Moom-Bye", like it is a signifier of one's magnificent cultural adjustment. A decisive strike in your valiant quest to bash down those imperialist Anglosized verbal imposts, comrade! When I was in Bombay, I did not meet a single Indian who termed their fair city 'Mumbai' - although a lot of Western tourists did. Having said that, perhaps the Indians did too, because I believe the correct pronounciation is "Mum (like your non-American, Pommy/Aussie mother) - Bay", and - if you say it quickly (which is invariably the case, because Indians are the greatest communicators in the world) - that sounds rather similar to "Bombay". Then again, I do not know, because I do not speak Hindi, and am basically a stupid Westerner.

Hrm. Sorry to plunge you all into the bizarre depths of DailyKos twice in the space of a week, but some of the goings on there are quite amusing. If I was a psychologist, I would say professionally intriguing. Take DailyKos commenter "CheChe" and the - erm - unusual relationship he appears to have with his daughter. Here's an excerpt from his post, which is so tragi-comic it is hard not to laugh out loud when reading it:

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the Senate Republicans want to drain the treasury in order to give every American a $100 check. I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult - the rage and feelings of helplessnes were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words - nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, "Honey, I just don't know - I don't know what's going on in this country anymore..."

When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

Er...right. How old is this child? Does she even know what $100 is worth? Of course, the policy itself is utterly ridiculous, but that's hardly the point.

Now, there is something really odd about this CheChe character's comments. He takes the exact same wordage from a previous comment he wrote relaying his daughter's earlier misery, and then superimposes another Kos talking point as the source of his little girl's current terror and sadness to create a new saga:

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be spying on everyone. "Even my Grandma?" she asked pitifully. [...] When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.

They have a lot of these kinds of chats; here's another. Same scenario, different bogeyman:

I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. "Doesn’t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?" she asked pitifully.

I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. "Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush’s trip ahead of time just in case...”

And so on. By now, most would have twigged to the fact that this CheChe fellow might be playing a little jape on the Kos kids. But no. Check out the number of people who "recommended" one of his posts (26), versus those who pointed him out as a troll (2). It is amazing that these plainly fictional tales of crocodile-tear woe hold currency with parts of the American left. To be fair, some people on the thread pointed out CheChe as a rather obvious fraud. His subsequent denial was true to form and hilarious:

I'm simply not going to apologize for loving and comforting my daughter. [...] There's just not enough time to always be writing a new story each and every time something happens, and since this is what happened, it seems fair. Since we lost her mother there hasn't been a lot of free time around here.

Classic.

(Hat tip: Zoe Brain)

One of my all-time favourite bloggers - who also happens to be the funniest man in the blogosphere - is under attack from DailyKos contributor 'dday', who does not think Harry Hutton is particularly funny at all. This post raised the ire of 'dday' and provoked this response from the little pet. 'dday' starts off by qualifying his monumental whinge with a "some of my best friends are black, but..." type defence of his sense of humour :

I'm not above making fun of people. Actually I do it for sport.

For one so allegedly adept at the art of piss-taking, he does not seem to understand that whole irreverence thing. Later, 'dday' flashes his humour credentials again - just so everyone is sure it is not him with the problem :

I make jokes continually, so I'm pretty up on my joke construction.

You can imagine the sort of emasculated, PC jokes this guy would crack. I bet he's about as funny as a gender feminist. Anyway, if the plight of those living in intellectual poverty concerns you, take a look at the "debate" via the links provided above. The related comments thread on DailyKos and that attached to the offending post at Hutton's are also worth a read if you enjoy the spectacle of uncomprehending, outraged mewling from humourless dolts.

Sometime Samizdatista and now Texan, Alice Bachini, has some thoughts on advertising on blogs.

I do not want big advertising on my blog, the front of my house, tattooed on my forehead, or anywhere about my territory, and I do cringe at the sight of otherwise nice-looking people and things decorated with ugly great banners selling big blue things that disturb the visual peace. And more importantly, if someone being given secret or otherwise free gifts by the coca-cola company offers me a drink, I may not fully trust their recommendation.

This does not mean I want to change any laws or tell other people what to do. It just means you know what my opinion happens to be on this, and also where it hails from.

If I want to advertise something I will do it anyway for free because that is what blogs are for: the spreading of recommended ideas, thoughts, pictures, experiences and other human beings as revealed in other blogs.

I will have to leap into the defense of advertisers here, on openness grounds. I think that if there's a big flashy banner involved on someone's blog, you can be sure that money traded hands. And like Dr. Johnson, I have faith in the innocence of those who are out to make money.

Mind you, I think you have to be a fairly large blog to make advertising worth your while. I had 'google ad-sense' on my old sport blog, and that did not make any money for me even though I was getting 400 or so readers a day. Not a lot, but it is no easy task to start a blog from scratch and get 400 readers a day.

But I will agree with Alice Bachini that the aesthetics are just awful on many blogs. Those huge 'pajamas media™' ads one sees around the place look dreadful. It is not for the likes of a humble mortal such as I to guess at the complex and elevated deliberations of the mighty. However, if the Editorial Pantheon ever do decide to go down the advertising road, I do hope they will not disfigure the stylish nature of this page in the process.

I am fairly used to intermittently getting peeved e-mails from people who get their comments deleted wailing about how they cannot understand how a 'libertarian' blog can 'censor' free speech (never mind that Samizdata is a blog that has many libertarian writers, rather than a libertarian blog per se).

But today I got two such e-mails within minutes of each other, one from a racist troll whom I have long banned and one from a Muslim troll who keeps posting passages from the Koran in random articles. As a result I thought I would revisit the issue yet again, even though Samizdata has several articles on this subject, such as this one.

It is really simple: this is private property and as a result anything published here is at the sufferance of Samizdata's editors. We invite comments but that does not mean we relinquish control over our property, just as when you invite people into your house, you do not relinquish the right to subsequently un-invite them if they act inappropriately or if you just want them out for whatever reason.

Apart from spam comments, the main reason we axe people's remarks are that they are gratuitously insulting, grossly and uninterestingly off-topic (interesting but off-topic is sometimes tolerated) or they are endlessly repetitive. Racists and Muslim extremists, who between them make up 85% of the non-spam deletions, almost always fall into the last category. It does not matter that their arguments are shredded and rebutted, neither group are psychologically capable of accepting their questions have been asked and answered unless they have been agreed with. Even more annoying, the racists are capable of hijacking a discussion about cricket or Beethoven into yet another absurd phrenological rant about racial IQs. The Muslim extremists tend to just reply to reasonable questions with great long quotes from the Koran as if that will magically end all arguments. Well life is just too short to tolerate such people flogging their dead horses on our turf and preventing rational discourse and reasonable progression of a discussion.

And when certain commenters wear out their welcome, sometimes they do not just get their comments deleted, they get banned completely. This is often a shame because a couple of the banned commenters had some interesting things to say when on the rare occasion they can bring themselves to stop obsessing about the issue that dements them. Yet there are only so many hours in the day we can spend moderating Samizdata (we do have off-line lives, believe it or not) and when the majority of a person's comments have proven to be obsessive rants, they get banned.

And who gets to make that call? We do. Our house, our rules. End of story.

Here is an interesting story. A friend of Jackie D (to whom thanks for the link) called Amy Alkon has discovered an artist. He is now homeless, but something tells me he is not going to be homeless for long.

His name is Gary Musselman, and here is one of his drawings:

Amy put that at the top of her posting, surely knowing that this would appeal to the blogosphere, although I rather prefer "Wichita" myself. Scroll down to see that.

These are the kind of drawings now sufficiently out of date in artistic style to appeal to large numbers of the general public, especially the sort who are internet-connected, but to be disapproved of by the regular art critics, who will not, I predict, approve. "Derivative", "emotionally empty", etc. Their real objection will be that their verdicts aren't going to count. Not this time.

Jackie D has already equipped Gary Musselman with his own blog, and the story is now gathering pace.

David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government, is happy for (undisclosed) government employees to post comments full of praise for him on the taxpayer-owned blog he uses to promote himself and his department. When a taxpayer - in this case, journalist David Tebbutt - asks if the fawning comment is indeed from a government employee, Miliband will not even publish the query, let alone answer it.

This, in a blog discussion about how MPs and ministers can prove to us through blogging that they do listen to taxpayers and are not as out of touch as we silly people imagine.

The state is not your friend and politicians certainly do not work for you, no matter whose propaganda (theirs or the taxpayers' rights' groups) you have bought into. Taking your money under threat of violence and actually working for you are not the same thing. David Miliband is one of many who take your money and work on their own agendas, on which self-promotion is paramount. This is an obvious fact, and David Miliband's abuse of his taxpayer-owned blog is just one more piece of evidence which proves it.

I submitted the following comment to the David Miliband promotional blog:

Dennis Howlett - who I know personally and like - misses the point about the difference between other blogs and this one: This blog is not the private property of David Miliband. It is being financed by the taxpayer and is using government (taxpayer-funded) resources.

Which makes it all the more disgraceful that David Miliband refuses to publish comments that might make readers realise his 'integrity' is not quite what it seems. (I do not expect this comment to be published, either, but only hope it imbues David Miliband with some degree of shame when he reads it, if he is capable of feeling such a thing.)

Quite apart from this abuse of a taxpayer-funded blog, this is a sterling example of abhorrent customer service. Then again, when the customers don’t actually choose your ’service,’ and are forced under threat of violence to pay for it, you have the freedom to be endlessly selective about which ones you pay any mind. Right, Minister Miliband?

The ASI hosted a gathering of bloggers and curious old media types in Westminster last night. Times journo Danny Finkelstein and well known blog commentator Tim Worstall. As with all the ASI events I have attended, I rather enjoyed myself and there was a large posse of OG bloggers to swap scandal with.

Read more about it from Jax here.

Harry Hutton, the funniest man in the blogosphere, has auteured a short film.

This morning I was on SkyNews on the Saturday live programme debating blogging. It was one of those discussions the media in the UK has started to have, as in... these bloggers are not going away, so let's make them sound a bit ridiculous and question whatever it is they do. Yawn.

I was in the studio with Bobbie Johnson, a blogger and technology correspondent of the Guardian, and Iain Dale, a former Conservative party candidate, political commentator and.. wait for it.. a blogger. We had fifteen minutes to argue with the presenter about what is a blog, are they any good, shouldn't blogs be like journalism, what is the bloggers' responsibility, is it good or bad that they are undermining and stretching the current rules and frameworks etc. So three years ago, dahling...

The questions were extremely basic and there was no time really to answer anything other than try to get a sound-bite in. Perhaps that is why I could not take the whole thing too seriously. Both Bobbie and Iain were good and made the experience rather enjoyable...

The best thing about this morning was an excellent tip from the studio make-up person - she recommended a smudge-proof eyeliner that will do what I want from it, i.e. stay put and make my eyes look smokey. For those interested it is MAC fluidline eye-liner gel. Perhaps the traditional media has something going for it...

And here is a gratuitous pictures of me, with the make-up on.
And yes, it was rather sunny today.

Cross-posted from Media Influencer

Update: Tim Worstall actually watched it! I wish he had been there too but flying all the way from Portugal for the sake of a few silly questions about blogging just does not seem worth it.

Zeyad, one of our favorite Iraqi bloggers needs to raise money to attend CUNY's School of Journalism.

If you have enjoyed his postings, consider giving him a hand.

Matt Welch has written a farewell lament in Reason on what he describes as the demise of warblogging. He harks back to the explosion of the grassroots media after 9/11 when many Americans found that their assumptions about the Middle East and terrorism were turned upside down. From this development, he defined the warblogger as a writer who transcended old partisan divides due to the defining event of a terrorist threat to the homeland.

“What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not?” I enthused. “I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”

Man, was I wrong.

Now, Welch has acquired a new job on the Los Angeles Times, and argues that the political blogging movement has reinforced partisan politics rather than bridging this supposed gap. Yet, the developments that Welch cites to bolster his thesis are disparate and amenable to alternative interpretation. He argues that the "current-events bloggers" have taken a strident approach to particular issues within the Culture War:

The Culture War, which seemed to take a back seat to the genuine article in those traumatized days of late 2001, has come back with a vengeance, with current-events webloggers taking a central role in the hysterical Red/Blue scrums over Terri Schiavo’s comatose body, Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple, and the pressing national security issue of whether people of the same sex should be able to obtain a marriage certificate.

His other examples are the inability of the blogosphere to create a permanent alternative to the mainstream media, like the Pyjamas website and the use of bloggers to galvanise activist support, especially within the Democratic Party. Welch does also emphasize that weblogs are now far more useful for the dissemination of knowledge and the procurement of differing viewpoints on particular issues. But he still views the development of warblogging as a lost opportunity:

But as I look back at December 2001, and prepare to hang up the blogging fun of Reason’s Hit & Run for the stodgier print pages of the L.A. Times, I can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves. You couldn’t predict what anyone would say, especially yourself.

To which the answer is: if you just look at blogs from the political perspective, it will appear more partisan, as activists have established and learned how to use these tools to their advantage. More importantly, many of those who blog on current events have strong and individual voices ranging over a wide spectrum of subjects. Warblogging did not run into the sands or fade away. After a while, bloggers preferred to jaw-jaw on more than just war.

Today I dropped in on Brian Micklethwait to take part in the inaugural Micklethwait podcast. I had a tie-clib microphone attached to my shirt which he had connected to a Sony digital recorder (an ICD-MX20). We chatted for nearly 20 minutes on the subject of podcasting, where it is going, and what we expect to be the things that make it work. The result, for your delectation and delight is this:

At some point, we will get a feed working. Meanwhile, I have started conducting podcast interviews over Skype - the results so far are here.

My personal condolences to Glenn Reynolds on the sudden death of his grandmother. Check out the old photos. She was stunning in 1938. Her husband looks so much like a young fighter pilot I wonder if he became one!

I am sure she was a fount of family stories and this must be an immense loss to Glenn.

For the last ten days or so, and for about another week, I have been and will continue to be semi-unplugged. Unplugged because my pay-by-the-month internet connection was disconnected a while ago, by some insonsiderate person pushing the wrong button at my internet service provider, but only semi-unplugged, because I have at least been able, thank goodness, to revert to the previous pay-by-the-minute arrengement which preceded my current although currently interrupted arrangement.

I am, therefore, able to link to particular places on the internet that I already know how to get to quickly, such as to this blog posting which I did for the Adam Smith Institute, in which I explain the effect of my present internet miseries, but I am not, as I explained at greater length in that posting, comfortable about just going a-wandering. I can switch on, go somewhere, download it, switch off, and read it. But, I deeply fear switching on, going somewhere, reading it, going somewhere else, reading that, looking something else up, deciding to write something, looking up other stuff, deciding to write something else and making a start with that, . . . you get the picture. It might not cost all that much, especially at the weekend, but in sad old Britain where local phone calls still cost, it could cost me a whole lot too much for comfort. If I did the sums, I might well decide that my state of only semi-linked-ness is a false economy, and that I should just plug myself in regardless and do whatever I feel like doing. But I do not want to have to be worrying.

So, this has been what Americans call a "learning experience", or what we know on this side of the pond as a considerable nuisance or words to that effect.

However, the particular combination of circumstances – not being permanently connected, but still being able to connect temporarily – has provided me with something you seldom experience in life, namely the contrast between two important stages in my life, with the full knowledge of what both states were like. It really has been a learning experience.

The difference between merely being temporarily connected to the internet and able to peck at its mere surface, guided by specific recommendations from others, and being permanently connected to the internet and able to roam at will with no further cost penalty was, for me, all the difference, when I first made the jump from the first state to the second. It was when I finally made this switch that the internet finally made sense to me. I was already blogging, a little, but this was when the blogging penny really dropped, because at this point I stopped having to worry about it. This was when I got myself, I gradually found out, a new job. I had spent the eighties getting established as a "desktop publisher", and the nineties getting ever more bored with being a desktop publisher. Finally, I had reached the next stage, and I am now enduring again what the previous stage was like. I imagine it as like having got happily married, but then being temporarily deserted by one's wife or husband, in other words an entirely different experience from never having been happily married in the first place, because you know exactly what you are missing..

Getting anything done at all is hard, like wading through treacle. You would be amazed at how many of my current activities – laborious, playful, or, as most often, a mixture of the two – turn out to be improved and informed by me being able to connect to the internet. Hardly any piece of internet writing is not the better for me being able to look something up, connect to something, throw in a tangent to something, even just look up the spelling of something. (Given that I used the internet constantly, I also used it as a spellchecker for complicated names. Yesterday morning, I spent several pence finding out how to spell Cecil B. DeMille.) Often some links at least are essential. I have spent most of the last week trying to puzzle out what it would make sense to write about, apart from writing about what the last week has been like. I have written more than usual about sport, because sport doesn't matter, and if you do not include all the links that you should in a piece of writing about sport, what the hell. It's only sport.

Sadly, however, my two favourite sports teams, the England cricket team and the England rugby team, had a very bad last few days, just when I really needed them both to excel. England lost badly to India this morning at cricket, and catastrophically to France in Paris yesterday at rugby. Do your own damn linking if you want the gory details. (On the other hand, how about - and here I will supply a link for this is worth a few pennies of any cricket fan's money - this?!?!? I found out about it via Ceefax!)

I thought that reading books would provide solace, but books provoke writing, or should, and writing requires links. Just reading no longer seems good enough, and neither is writing in a state of unpluggedness. Maybe these activities should suffice, but they don't.

You can imagine my feelings about junk mail. Receiving it is bad enough. Paying extra to get it is something else again.

In desperation I am now getting out more. I have invited myself to supper with various friends this week, and on Thursday I will be visiting my aged mother. And I will do various other things of an out and about nature. But it's not the same.

Whoever said "there is no such thing as bad publicity" obviously never had their career "Dan Rather'ed" into tiny pieces by the twenty thousand bloggers.

I do so agree with what Madsen Pirie, who is now guest blogging at the Singleton Diet, says about mustard:

Second breakfast consisted of a croissant with the rest of the honey-roasted ham, this time with Florida mustard and fresh orange juice. After it came black coffee. As you might gather, I like mustards, pretty well all of them, wholegrain, English, Dijon, French, Florida, and so on. I even regard sausages as just an excuse for mustard.

I have a jar of Tesco wholegrain mustard on the go right now, and very tasty it is too. I also often eat meat just to eat mustard, but I never really spelled this out for myself before, so I am grateful to Madsen Pirie for doing this for me.

The Singleton Diet, as already reported here, started out as occasional Samizdatista Alex Singleton blogging about what he was eating. The idea was for him to get slimmer. But after a while, Alex got fed up with blogging every day or even every few days about his dietary intake, and the Singleton Diet faded. (Whether Alex is now any slimmer, I am not sure, but I rather think he is.)

But now, the Singleton Diet has sprung to life again, with Madsen Pirie as a guest writer. I think this is a really good idea. Who wants to blog about everything they eat for ever? Almost nobody, and if anyone did, who would want to read that for ever? But a succession of different eaters is another matter entirely.

As regular Samizdata readers will know, if you have a pro-freedom attitude towards the world you will always have lots to complain about. But the economic rules and institutions that we favour have also poured forth a Niagara of good news, and in no area of life is this more true than in the matter of food. Thanks to the farmers and especially to the food retailers, we - especially we who live in London, as Alex Singleton, Madsen Pirie, and I all do - now have a world of exciting and exotic food products to choose between and to enjoy. What better way could there be for a man like Madsen Pirie, one of the most notable of London's freedom mongers of recent decades, to demonstrate that he is capable of enjoying life and not just of proposing improvements for and regretting the derangements of it caused by others, than for him to do a spot of food blogging? It should be a lot of fun.

Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and blogger, recently argued that the roots of the Web 2.0 movement creepily echoed the concept of self-realisation underlying Marxist philosophy. Keen describes Web 2.0 as a utopian project to construct new technologies which allow individuals to publish and promote their creative endeavours in music, art, or other forms of print media. The reduction of barriers to entry that this entails has had a radical effect on the traditional media. Keen portrays the movement as ideologically driven by a broad grouping of Silicon Valley veterans, fusing the dynamics of the 60s counter-culture with the techno-utopianism of the 1990s. It is an awkward fit as the New Left is shoehorned with libertarianism and the diversity of the figures cited lends doubt to the utility of the argument beyond a straw man network effect:

Just as Marx seduced a generation of European idealists with his fantasy of self-realization in a communist utopia, so the Web 2.0 cult of creative self-realization has seduced everyone in Silicon Valley. The movement bridges counter-cultural radicals of the '60s such as Steve Jobs with the contemporary geek culture of Google's Larry Page. Between the book-ends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris "Long Tail" Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle.

Keen is aware of his own leanings. Web 2.0 is drawn as an ideology and a political endeavour in order to level the playing field and allow his cultural conservatism to come into play. With arguments that echo those hurled at the development of mass media at the beginning of the twentieth century, Keen laments the passing of a common culture, the rise of mediocrity and the destruction of the existing elite. The future is drowned by dross. With the rise of more enthusiasts and more voices, Keen laments that the role of the media is lost and that personalised media will reflect individual preferences, losing sense of a wider world.

Is this a bad thing? The purpose of our media and culture industries � beyond the obvious need to make money and entertain people � is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.....Elite artists and an elite media industry are symbiotic. If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural "flattening." No more Hitchcocks, Bonos, or Sebalds. Just the flat noise of opinion � Socrates's nightmare.....

......One of the unintended consequences of the Web 2.0 movement may well be that we fall, collectively, into the amnesia that Kafka describes. Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard. The cultural consequences of this are dire, requiring the authoritative voice of at least an Allan Bloom, if not an Oswald Spengler. But here in Silicon Valley, on the brink of the Web 2.0 epoch, there no longer are any Blooms or Spenglers. All we have is the great seduction of citizen media, democratized content and authentic online communities. And weblogs, course. Millions and millions of blogs.

It must be such a chore to be one voice amongst many.

I must say that I always enjoy reading what Michael Totten has to say even if I do not always agree (though in truth I find myself agreeing more and more often). His reports from Lebanon were always compelling.

He is now writing from Iraq (Kurdistan to be exact) and I strong recommend people take a peek at his blog.

I have always had a particularly soft intellectual spot for David Friedman, the economist, for it was he who wrote the first book I ever read which seemed really to describe for me how I wanted to think about the world. It is called The Machinery of Freedom. (David Friedman has a father, called Milton, who also dabbles in economics.) And I now like David Friedman's blog, which he calls simply Ideas.

However, I do not always agree with David Friedman. Here are some recent thoughts of his:

Finding presents for friends and relatives is often a problem, made harder by the economist's puzzle of why one should give presents instead of giving cash and letting the recipient, better informed about his own preferences, decide how to spend it. A possible answer is that although I know less about the recipient, I know more about the gift. Acting on that principle, I occasionally pick a book that I and my wife particularly liked, buy a bunch of copies, and give them out as Christmas presents.

What giving money and giving the same book to several different friends have in common as present giving strategies is that they both exhibit an unwillingness to think about the individual desires of the person receiving the gift. "It's the thought that counts" is no empty slogan. And the particular thought that matters is: "What particular kind of person is he, and what might he really like?"

In one of my very favourite movies, The Apartment, the Shirley MacLaine character's rich and uncaring married man lover, chillingly played by Fred MacMurray, gives Shirley MacLaine a twenty dollar bill as a Christmas present. He does not even put in a pretty envelope. He just gets it out of his wallet and hands it over. Soon after that, she dumps him, and quite right too. Why? Because this moment proved that he did not care enough about her to give any thought, before meeting with her, to getting her a real present, of the sort that she would like, and which would show that he had thought about what she would like. He simply hadn't been thinking about her.

Were I one of David Friedman's friends and I got the same book last Christmas from him that several of his other friends had also got, I would feel ever so slightly slighted, and for the same reason. "He has thought about his own opinions, but he has not thought about mine." (A copy of The Machinery of Freedom with a carefully composed and hand-written message inside the front cover would be another matter entirely.)

Blog postings, however, are different. Those, like Christmas presents, also come free of charge to the receiver. Yet I do not feel in any way slighted because a blogger has failed to craft an individual thought entirely for me, but has instead given the same thought away to all his readers. On the contrary, incoming emails full of individual thoughts, just for me, can be rather scary, because, like Christmas presents, they can imply an obligation to reciprocate, also individually, which may be unwelcome.

However, notice that a similar principle applies, and in a good way, to blog postings with which one happens to disagree, by thoughtful people like David Friedman, as applies to Christmas presents. A present that shows that the giver has done some thinking is welcome, even if one already has that CD or that book, or happens not to like that kind of chocolate. The "wrong" thing is still right, because it's the thought that counts. I feel the same way about David Friedman's occasional wrong (as I think) thoughts in his blog. These mistakes, if mistakes they be, show that he is at least always thinking. Far better lots of thinking, and the occasional consequent disagreement between me and him, than no thinking, and a mere string of truisms.

The (Free) French Resistance has cause for joy because The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Blogosphere is back!

Let's hear it for The Dissident Frogman!

Soon he will be back blogging regularly. I feel like I am in the final scene of Casablanca when I say "Welcome back to the fight".

Signs of life have been seen from the famed Dissident Frogman, who has been been absent without leave from the blogosphere for far too long.

Wonderful news. Stephen Green, creator of the splendid Vodkapundit blog, and his wife Melissa, have had a baby son. I had the great pleasure of meeting Stephen at one of Perry de Havilland's summer parties last year and can testify to what a nice fellow he is. Congratulations to the Green household. It would be only right to hoist a fine vodka martini to little Preston Davis Green.

I will concede the point on the weapons, however. Unlike some of the other Samizdatistas, I am not particularly into guns. I am partial to a good set of knives, however.

(This came up when I attempted to access this site on an internet terminal in a McDonald's in Cardiff. The empire is clearly getting a bit lame. Also lame was that I had to use this in the first place. My attempts to find a coffee shop with a free hotspot where I could simply use my laptop had not gone well).

There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran's bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.

Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.

There is an interesting post on Bjørn Stærk's blog on his changing views of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

In the Sydney Morning Herald entertainment blog, Edmund Tadros made this rather extraordinary claim on Wednesday:

Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.

Now, I wonder, why would anyone think that? How do you define 'hard-hitting', anyway?

Is a hard-hitting blog one that causes events, especially public events?

Is a hard-hitting blog one that changes public opinions, or stimulates thought?

In the United States, political groups have used the internet to telling effect, and blogs have also exerted a powerful if difficult to define effect on public debate. The rise of Howard Dean, the Trent Lott affair, Rathergate and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were all things that could have happened in the context of the Australian legal environment.

Australia also had an election in 2004, but there was only one major effort to use the Internet to influence the Australian public, that being the 'Webdiary' of Margo Kingston, (which was then hosted by the Sydney Morning Herald). The reasons why 'Webdiary' was so ineffective in the public debate were numerous, but the principle reason must surely be the total intellectual incoherence of the site and the vulnerabilitiy of the main contributors to the most paranoid interpretation of public events. The most famous example of this was probably the famous 'anti-gravity' article in 2003, but it was never easy to take seriously a campaign lead by a senior journalist who could not spell. Margo's spelling errors and flights of fancy deprived her campaign of credibility and provided a rich lode of material for the likes of Tim Blair and "Professor Bunyip" to mock and ridicule her.

The more prosaic truth is that many Australian blogs are not very good, and those that are good tend to either be more interested in talking about policy of interest to a small few, or are devoted to dissecting and satirising Australian culture. The plain fact is that 'the great Australian political blog' is yet to be born. There's plenty of room for an Australian blog with journalistic skills and political savvy to wake up the slumber in Australian politics, and it has nothing to do with the Australian legal climate.

But it certainly will not be a blog that chewed through $44,000 in its first 10 months as an independent entity.

Just did some live blogging over on PajamasMedia on the subject of who should control the internet.

I must confess that I was not wearing my pajamas however.

The press plagarist of the year competition is in its final round. Go and vote for the worst blog content pirate...

Well it all seems a bit quiet around here. I guess all the other Samizdatistas have lives, at the weekend anyway. Today, even I have had enough of a life to have nothing much that I want to say here. (I was watching rugby internationals on my television.)

However, regular Samizdata commenter Julian Taylor does have a question:

Does anyone know of a good reliable (not Garmin preferably!) GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine and is also waterproof with a long battery life? None on the market seem to have this capability.

This question up at Julian's blog, Camera Anguish, for the last ten days. And do you know how many answers the so-called blogosphere � this mighty engine of knowledge, this magnificent organ of enlightenment, this aggregator extraordinaire of wisdom � has managed to supply? 0. This is not how things should be and I want to change it.

So, does anyone? Know of a good reliable GPS unit that can handle personal use, auto use, marine, and is also waterproof, and with a long battery life? Samizdata commenters are often rather good at discussing technology matters, so go to work, people.

I personally do not. I would need to be surer than I am now about things like what "GPS" stands for to be able to comment knowledgeably. Something to do with satellite navigation? My life seems to work okay without such knowledge. But surely others among us can do better. So get thinking, please, about those personal, reliable, waterproof, etc., GPSs.

But remember, not Garmin.

I don't know how long this fascinating New York Times article about blogging in China will survive as something you can read without any payment or other complication, so I quote from it now at some length.

Chinese Web logs have existed since early in this decade, but the form has exploded in recent months, challenging China's ever vigilant online censors and giving flesh to the kind of free-spoken civil society whose emergence the government has long been determined to prevent or at least tightly control.

Web experts say the surge in blogging is a result of strong growth in broadband Internet use, coupled with a huge commercial push by the country's Internet providers aimed at wooing users. Common estimates of the numbers of blogs in China range from one million to two million and growing fast.

In my opinion, that is the key to this development. What matters most is its sheer scale. Sure, censorship works, in the sense that you are not allowed to say that the entire government � listed by name � are a pack of corrupt scoundrels who should be replaced by this other group of virtuous persons, again listed by name. You cannot praise democracy, or freedom, or Falung Gong, or whatnot. But how do you stop this kind of thing?

"The content is often political, but not directly political, in the sense that you are not advocating anything, but at the same time you are undermining the ideological basis of power."

A fresh example was served up last week with the announcement by China of five cartoonlike mascot figures for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. They were lavishly praised in the press - and widely ridiculed in blogs that seemed to accurately express public sentiment toward them.

"It's not difficult to create a mascot that's silly and ugly," wrote one blogger. "The difficulty is in creating five mascots, each sillier and uglier than the one before it."

Answer: you stop it. But only after countless thousands of bloggers have had their chuckle, and after many dozens of them have copied it and pasted it.

By far the biggest category of blogs remains the domain of the personal diary, and in this crowded realm, getting attention places a premium on uniqueness.

For the past few months, Mu Mu, the Shanghai dancer, has held pride of place, revealing glimpses of her body while maintaining an intimate and clever banter with her many followers, who are carefully kept in the dark about her real identity.

"In China, the concepts of private life and public life have emerged only in the past 10 to 20 years," she said in an online interview. "Before that, if a person had any private life, it only included their physical privacy - the sex life, between man and woman, for couples.

"I'm fortunate to live in a transitional society, from a highly political one to a commercial one," she wrote, "and this allows me to enjoy private pleasures, like blogging."

What those concluding paragraphs hint at is the real punch of something like blogging. It is not that defiantly political things are being shouted from the rooftops. That is still far too dangerous. What blogs are doing is enabling an alternative attitude to assemble itself, as it were, and an alternative tone of voice to develop and to be communally celebrated. What is at stake here is not only what is said, but how it is said. Friendly chat around the table replaces the booming official megaphone. (Thought while proofing this: banning overt politics may actually amplify this particular contrast.)

Once assembled, these blog communities develop their various code phrases and metaphors, so that they always know what they are saying but so that the censors are running around in a state of permanent confusion, mostly because they now, suddenly, are faced with just too damn much stuff to censor. (One of the things that the cryptic metaphors will refer to will be links by means of which the censors can be got around.)

Beneath and behind all this is the brute fact of economic development. The CHinese government has bet the farm on this. So, although I am perfectly sure that groups of censors get together in their corridors and shout in chorus: "Shut the whole f***ing thing down, you idiots!", the government is in no position to do that. I further bet you that among the ranks of the censors are to be found some of the Chinese government's most thoughtful and well-informed critics, because nobody understands the weaknesses and foolishnesses of a weakening system better than the people who are paid to try to keep it going. (I well remember in the old Alternative Bookshop, that some of our best and best informed and most rabidly anti-statist customers were the ones working in the middle to upper reaches of the British Civil Service. They knew it was crazy.) The Chinese government wants its cake, economic development, but to eat it too, to keep the commercial classes and their children politically docile. Hm. How can it do this? Difficult, very difficult.

So, blogs form an alternative attitude, and they simultaneously sap the will to power of the ruling elite. All that is then needed is some genuine � although not especially outrageous � outrage to be committed by the government, and the whole Chinese blogosphere (now many millions in number) may then erupt with more explicit rebellion, on a scale which again overwhelms the censors. If and when that happens, the blogs will then do something else unprecedented. They will report what is happening, to each other, and to the outside world, such as to the New York Times person, Howard W. French, who wrote this article. Some will report what is happening while simultaneously saying that they oppose what is happening. Makes no difference.

And yes, if you are thinking this, this story does indeed illustrate that the much maligned Mainstream Media can indeed make a big difference in circumstances like these. Although, saying that the MSM are essential is something else again. I am sure that there are plenty of English language blogs out here - "web experts" is all that French calls them, no doubt in many cases being vague about it for very good reasons � where all these possibilities are understood and explained in great detail, and by using which French did a lot of his background research. Besides which, I only read French's article because Instapundit linked to it.

Meanwhile, French notes, the Chinese censors have resorted to leaving critical comments, supportive of the government, on Chinese blog entries. They might as well just put: "We surrender!" Now, suddenly, they must persuade the bloggers and their readers. Talk about reversing the burden of proof. So all the bloggers have to do is keep their peckers up. Many will not last. Having come, they will fade. But others will persist.

No doubt I am being, as is my taate, too optimistic about how well things in China might turn out. But I really do not see how the Chinese government can now expect anything better (for them) than merely to manage the demise of even the pretence of communism, and the emergence of a more participatory and democratic political culture. The idea that they can indefinitely sustain the communist power monopoly in the face of a new communicational world strikes me as far too pessimistic.

There is a snarky article in the Guardian about UK bloggers (including us). I was rather puzzled by Oliver Burkeman's description of Samizdata.net being "operated from a large and dimly lit flat in a pristine mansion block in south-west London".

Flat? Pristine mansion block? I do not recall if we gave Oliver a drink or three at our famous Cold War era bar when he came to visit but Samizdata HQ is a semi-detatched four floor house. Oh well, this is the Grauniad we are talking about.

Here is another in my intermittent series pointing out unusual blogs.

Hard Diamond is the blog of a British master jeweller by the name of Paul Hatton (and as any Londoner knows, Hatton Gardens is the centre of the UK jewellery trade). He takes commissions and explains here the reasons for bespoke jewellery. These are uniqueness, range and price & access to maker.

Jewellery is very personal: it is often used as a very unique way of showing love and affection, or human bonds. It often remains in families as heirlooms passed from generation to generation. It is only natural that when expressing a bond of love for another, people wish to seek something wholly unique to express the uniqueness of their feelings. Rather than something bought from even a high-end chain store, a design from a designer/maker, or a piece of bespoke jewellery, commissioned with an input in design, perhaps personalized with a birthstone or other symbolic stone or precious metal, speaks volumes about our feelings in a solid, eloquent and lasting way. I enjoy and am uplifted by working with people to make in fine jewellery or tableware an expression of their love or affection for another. Similarly, with symbols of status such as watches. A Cartier watch is a beautiful thing; but you will also see the same watch worn by other people. If I make a watch for you, often for the same price or less, you will have a unique and lasting timepiece no-one else can own.

What makes his blog fascinating is that it does not just display his rather groovy artefacts that he has created so far...

...but it also tells a story of his trade, such as this description of setting a gem in an emerald ring:

Emeralds are very fragile stones, as you may have seen from my first blog entry on the Moh�s hardness scale. It�s not recommended that this method of setting an emerald be used, as you have a 50% chance or more of damaging the stone. It takes extreme skill and experience to accomplish successfully this type of setting. When one has successfully achieved such a setting, great relief is felt, as emeralds of this quality don�t come cheaply, as I wipe the sweat from my brow�

Blogs like this make his profession come alive and he turns it into his own medium as well as a 'inside' story-telling space. Take a peek for yourself.

The Research Defence Society, a body supporting animal research in medicine, has started a blog. They intend to use it to keep people up to date with their activities, to counter disinformation and highlight how animal rights extremists use terrorism against scientists, and to support staff involved in animal research.

Barter economics at its purest.

Start with one (1) paper clip, and see where it takes you.

2nd November 2001 to 2nd November 2005 and it is 7,220 articles and 92,741 comments later (we added comments in August 2002).

Blimey, time flies.

And happy blogiversery as well to Natalie and all hail to our blogfather. Cheers, Glenn.

Heather "Momma Bear", who has been an important figure in the early stages of the blog world, has died after a long battle against cancer. She has been a friend to a number of bloggers I know well, including fellow Pimlicoan Andrew Ian Dodge. She was quite a character. RIP.

And now, for something completely different... In the last four years since I started blogging, the world of blogs has evolved beyond recognition. So I decided to offer a peek into the other corners of the blogosphere far from Samizdata's illuminating glow. This, however, does not suggest that these blogs are unenlightened.

As the first in an intermittent series of interesting blogs, let me present something which will strike many as an odd choice on my part.

Baukjen & Vanessa's Diary is a blog that blurs the dividing line between what is a commercial blog and a what is a private blog. The company Isabella Oliver designs stylish maternity clothes and the two principals behind that venture set up a blog that both chronicles events germane to their company and as well as elements of their private lives. This makes quite a lot of sense as spending time engaging potential customers in a conversational manner can be a much better way of getting people's interest than interruptive advertising, which I often think is a waste of money, particularly on-line... and blogs are nothing if not about engaging people if you have a story to tell or opinions to share.

I also find this approach interesting as it helps to break down the notion that private and professional lives are perforce completely separate things. I have always suspected that if people saw trade and commerce as the social activities they are, they might be less willing to see them as something to be regulated politically. Blogs... they are not just for geeks anymore.

I realise that Samizdata is not really for this, but what follows is what is on my mind. The woes of politics, economics, life (i.e. other people's lives), etc., can wait. My question is: does anyone know of an online source � preferably a blog � of advice about how to make a blog running on/under/with "Expression Engine" work better than it does now?

I offer no links in this posting, other than to the ailing blog in question, because links is what I want, rather than what I have.

My personal blog is now facing serious problems. First, I do not know how to make my monthly archives contain everything written during that month. You merely get the top few postings. And second, the process of uploading pictures has stopped working, without anything resembling an explanation:

A problem was encountered while attempting to upload your file.

Not helpful.

Third, in general, first really, the list of things you can tweak and twiddle when you look in the "Admin" section of the control/input system, or anywhere else in among all that stuff for that matter, consists entirely of things that could mean absolutely anything, and consequently, to me, mean absolutely nothing. Where do I find how to increase the number of postings shown in each monthly archive? It is impossible even to guess, and so far I have found nothing on the subject, despite several hours of looking.

Because the blog still is not working properly, I have not been able to get out of the "here is something silly just so as there is something up today" mode, and to start doing serious thinking and serious posting. I like trivia, from time to time. But not all the time.

My problems are caused by my opinions about how my blog should look. I think my blog should look good. I often write about the look of things, which is why I often want to put up photos, right next to what I have written. A blog that is one of those blog standard template thingies would not suffice for these purposes. I want something that looks a bit special, like the things I often like to write about.

What I really need to learn of is a blog where Expression Engine users ask each other questions and where clever Expression Engine show-offs or would-be Expression Engine paid consultants provide show-off and expert answers. Any Expression Engine experts in the London area would be especially useful to learn about. I do have someone helping me quite a lot, but that someone works funny and numerous hours at something else, and is not omniscient. A group blog just might be omniscient round the clock, as near as makes no difference. But is there one?

By the way, please (I cannot compel this but I can beg) do not turn any comments on this into an argument/celebration about how to upload photos to something else, like Flickr. My picture problem is uploading pictures into an Expression Engine blog posting. I want pictures on my blog. Pictures somewhere else as well is not now my problem.

If I cannot solve my problems with Expression Engine, which basically means finding a person or people who can help me solve my problems with Expression Engine, then I will stop using it. I only used Expression Engine in the first place because I was told that Samizdata was going to switch to it, which it has yet to do.

Bloggingwise, it has not been my year.

UPDATE Wednesday October 5th: Expression Engine is not to blame! Repeat: Expression Engine is not to blame! I am still confused by it, but I am confused by everything computational. I am now busy concocting a slightly longer version of this to put up at Samizdata, but meanwhile I attach this to the original posting. If you publicly denounce a product, and it turns out to be blameless, you must say so, and in a blog it is possible to say it right next to where you did the original trashing. So: sorry Expression Engine! Hope you are still in business. When I have done the longer posting, I will add the link forward to it from here.

Rumour has it that Brian Micklethwait is aging nicely...

Many happy returns.

Reporters without Borders has produced a useful handbook for blogging in an unfree environment. We will be adding a sidebar link to this useful resource which has some technical tips that may be of interest to people in places where Big Brother tries to controls everything you read.

It can be purchased or downloaded for free from here.

I have decided to go on a diet, fit in size 32 trousers and get a six-pack. People often have ideas about dieting, and give up very quickly. So what, as a blogger, should I do to ensure the diet works out?

The answer is obvious: I have started a will-power blog. Come and heckle.

The shocking story I wrote about earlier today is now being taken apart and examined to see if it holds water (perhaps an unfortunate expression under the circumstances) and as a result, it will either be reinforced as a truly damning indictment of the powers-that-be in and around New Orleans... or it will be a rather different damning indictment of a couple of politically motivated para-medic writers who, far from recording their eyewitness experiences, cobbled together a polemical message hung on a tissue of lies, misrepresentations and other people's stories. I really do want to know which it is but I am certainly not prepared to just discount this because I happen to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum to the socialists who wrote it.

Some commenters have said they suspect the article is 'true in essence' rather than a literally true account of events but that is far too 'Oliver Stone' for me (and trust me, that is not a nice thing to say given how I feel about Oliver Stone). I do not buy the idea of 'true in essence': it is either based on facts that happened and were witnessed by the authors... or it was not! It matters less if the authors were wrong about certain technical details or terminology or even the motivations of the actors in question, just so long as the actually basic facts are correct. It is their witness I am interested in, not their analysis. Once the facts are established beyond a reasonable doubt, we can argue over the whys and wherefores and justifications, but the accusations in this purported eyewitness account are just too damning to be left in doubt either way.

I find this whole thing really fascinating and I cannot thank enough all the people turning their analytical talents and local knowledge on this story for commenting! The truth will out and let the chips fall where they may.

Or more accurately, hear one of its editors. Adriana has participated in a BBC Radio 4 discussion about the use of blogs for businesses and how it is part of the way New Media is challenging entire business models.

If you are curious what blogs mean to the commercial world... or just want to hear what a great sounding voice Adriana has, you can listen to her here (requires Real Audio Player).

Laissez Faire Books, the bookshop that stocks all manner of fine tomes from the complete works of Murray Rothbard to obscure 19th century liberal historians, now has a blog. Definitely worth checking it out on a regular basis and some of their stuff is frequently cheaper than the other big online book retailers. I once spent a very pleasant two hours browsing through their store in downtown San Francisco last year.

Thanks to the ever-readable Marginal Revolution for the pointer.