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From Jamie Whyte's A Load of Blair, a book on the fallacies endemic in political rhetoric that I thoroughly recommend:

In November 2002, an ICM poll asked voters if they were willing to pay more tax to fund increased spending on public services. 62 percent said yes. It also asked respondents if they believed this extra spending would improve standards in health and education. Only 51 percent said yes. At least eleven percent of voters favour pointless increases in taxation.

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Nothing says "I love you" quite like saturated fat and slutty lingerie.

And as St. Valentine's day is typically associated with dreamy soft focus pictures...

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I get the impression that somewhere in France, a middle finger is being raised.

Update: It has been suggested that this be printed on a tee-shirt with the following caption...

My Imam went to Mecca and all he got me was this lousy Tee-shirt

Sorry, I just had to share that

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I spotted this online quiz on a Tim Blair thread. Normally, such quizzes tend to be inordinately tedious, but this one raised a chuckle. It features a series of quotes taken from both Al Gore's book Earth In The Balance and The Unabomber's Manifesto. Get marks by correctly attributing each quote to either Unabomber or Gore. I scored precisely 50%. Heh.

As an antidote to environmental luddites, used copies of Bjorn Lomborg's fantastic book The Skeptical Environmentalist are going for a song over at Amazon. When I bought this book a few years ago, it cost me more than fifty (Australian) dollars. If you have not yet read this fascinating expose of the Green movement, what are you waiting for? Whip that credit card out now!

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What psychotherapists call a moment of insight. Probably nonsense, therefore, but let us follow the thought.

New Labourites are uniformly middle-class kids brought up in the arid pinched north of England and Scotland in the 60s and 70s. They have been on family holidays to France a whole lot and idealise the place. Naturally. There is a lot to like, and as well-off tourists, the likeable bits are the things they have seen.

Thus, and because they attribute all social good to government, it is a conclusive argument in the New Labour mind that French dirigiste, technocratic ways of government are to be emulated. Technocracy, because they do not understand it , (having studied arts and social sciences not Bac-C) is modern. French is modern. But the actual content or history - history is not interesting if you are modern - of French institutions need not be studied. We know all about them: we have been there on holiday 1.

Thus 'identity cards' are modern and harmless, though ours will not work as simply as the French and there is plenty of evidence they are a nuisance to them.

Arbitrary powers of detention are fine, because France has them, and French judges (conveniently ignoring the fact that they are closer to the state than our chief constables, and the ones exercising such powers) can be found in favour.

And now the reductio ad absurdam: French local government is modern. That is, the commune system introduced at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries is. Maybe local government reorganisations in England (1540s, 1880s, 1965, 1974, 1986, 1995-98) will stop for 200 years when we are truly modern.

1= Not me, you understand. I do not come from the sort of family that had foreign holidays. Though to pre-empt accusations of negative stereotyping of North Britain, I should point out I was brought up in Yorkshire between 1966 and 1974, and what holidays there were were further north.

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There is an e-mail program called Goowy which is one of a species of software I call 'landmine-ware', which is to say during the sign up process, on one of those bits no one actually reads, there is a yes-by-default opt-in box that allows the software to do something very few people would agree to if they actually noticed what they were being asked to agree to.

A friend of mine just signed up for Goowy and as a result Goowy just imported her entire contacts list from Gmail and spammed them all (including me) with invitations to sign up for Goowy. Now as this was technically permitted by the default-yes selected check box, there is nothing clearly actionable about this. However as no one would usually agree to their entire email address book being spammed by a third party, it would be fair to say Goowy counts on people just not realising what they are 'consenting' to and thus relying on people's natural tendency to not carefully watch every step they take (hence my description of Goowy as 'landmineware')

Now just to spare all the obsessive libertarians reading this from getting their knickers in a contractarian twist, just because something may not be immoral theft (i.e. Goowy did not 'steal' permission to spam in your name) it does not mean it should be socially respectable to trick people into doing something either. Yes, ideally we should all read every line of the disclaimer on every single thing we sign up for on the internet. Yet other than a few obsessives, no one actually does that in the real world as there is a general expectation that nowadays companies understand how much spammers are hated and what bad PR can be generated by acting like a spammer. Sadly Goovy suggests that this expectation is not quite as dependable as it should be.

At the very least, tricking people into in effect becoming spammers gets people like me writing nasty things about any company who would do that. In short, any company who resorts to abusing what is typical customer behaviour should not be trusted. Even if tomorrow Goowy announced it was going to make that option default-no rather than default-yes (i.e. permission to spam your entire address book of contacts), I would not allow them to be anywhere near my personal email and I suggest you do not either.

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It has always puzzled me why the state pays 'compensation' to victims of certain crimes. Why are fellow taxpayers robbed to compensate an individual for a misfortune? Surely that is a job for an insurance policy.

There are now calls for victims of international terrorism to be financially compensated and again, I cannot quite figure why the general public should be required to stump up for this. Whilst 'acts of war' and terrorism are often specifically excluded from insurance policies, it is possible to find policies which include even that if you are willing to pay premiums. It just seems odd to me that folks should have any expectation of a non-charitable, non-insured payment from fellow national subjects.

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A few more pictures from grimy, chaotic, interesting Istanbul...

Turkey... NATO member and on the frontline of the struggle for secularism

Hagia Sophia, now a museum, is a fitting place to ponder the fact civilisations and not just nations sometimes disappear





Perhaps the coolest place in Istanbul is a cistern, built by Justinian! It is unknown why the two statues of medusa are sideways and upside-down

The bazaars and streets are insanely busy and...

... you see the strangest things!

I must say I find the place fascinating, though my travelling companion might use rather different words.

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I am out of London for a few days, taking in the sights, sounds and tastes of Istanbul.

They know a thing or two about footie in these parts

Almost every turn brings an interesting skyline

It would appear the gun laws are far less benighted than in poor defenceless Britain

The skylines are really amazing (click for larger image)

Rather cool Turkish police station... no doubt best seen from the outside

I had not realised how dramatic the Bosphorus is... a tremendously busy sea-lane running right through the centre of a large city is quite something to behold

The sense that the city revolves around the sea is everywhere. There are so many rod fishermen that my fanciful head started having images of ancient phalanxes (click for larger image)

And just to ensure no one thinks this report from Istanbul is being posted by an impostor... yes, the city is well stocked with rather fine ladies

My first impressions of Istanbul are that it is dirty, chaotic, its traffic verges on homicidal, the food is great, people seem helpful and friendly. In short, simply splendid!

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I saw this by Alan Moore on the SMLXL blog, referring to the Communities Dominate Brands blog (Alan Moore is one of the co-authors of the book the blog refers to). We often hear about the economic impact of the internet, mobile communications and new media, but the real story is that it will change just about everything, including culture, politics and government.

There is a school of thought, that, within 10 years communities will have replaced the orthodoxies of government, management, business and marketing as the primary medium by which these organisations will successfully engage with their audiences.

Further, enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows will transform these organisations and how they engage with their stakeholders, simply for the better.

And, that those organisations that ignore the newly empowered and connected customer/voter/stakeholder will simply struggle to survive.

This is the unsung, un-remarked media and cultural revolution. That the great explosion is in peer-to-peer communication - something many organisations up until now have overlooked.

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A few days ago, Findlay Dunachie died.

His widow Lyn asked us to send her a few words of appeciation concerning his contributions to Samizdata, and we sent her the following, some of which will be read out at Findlay's funeral, which is to be held this coming Tuesday. These few hastily composed reflections were not written with a view to publication on Samizdata, but when we asked Lyn if she would object to them being used for this purpose also, she very kindly agreed.

Last night we at Samizdata received the sad news of the death of Findlay Dunachie. He had recently told us that he was, he believed, dying, so this was not a complete surprise. But we were still greatly saddened. Only one of our number ever actually met Findlay, and we know him best through many phone conversations, but above all through his writings for Samizdata. Selfishly, we regret that there will be no more such writings.

Samizdata is a weblog - "blog" for short – devoted to spreading news and comment, profundity and triviality, concerning human freedom, human progress, and about the many and various enemies of these things. We seek to celebrate and to spread the ideas of, approximately speaking, classical liberalism and libertarianism which Findlay Dunachie held dear.

For a number of years, Findlay had been writing review articles about some of the many books he had been reading, and in October 2003, having received a great trove of these writings, we at Samizdata began to publish them.

Almost all of Findlay's writings for Samizdata were book reviews of one kind or another. In total we published just under fifty such articles, the most recent one being a timely tour de force about Nelson, the Battle of Trafalgar, about the man Nelson's death left in command of his fleet, Admiral Collingwood, and about the aftermath and consequences of the battle.

Looking down the long list of topics covered, a few things stand out. Findlay wrote about the whole world and about the world's long varied history. He did not confine himself to his own country or culture, or to his own time. However, a deep love of Britain, its language, its institutions, and of Britain's on-the-whole beneficial and liberal effects upon the world is also strongly evident in Findlay's writings, as is an interest in the various forces arrayed against such influences – continental European despotism, such as that against which Nelson fought, such as communism in it various forms, and such as the more repellent aspects of Islam throughout its long history.

Findlay's professional background as a scientist was also reflected in his interest in the claims of, and the most scrupulous and eloquent critics of, the environmental movement, so much of which involves making misleading or false claims about science and about technology, and about the largely beneficial effects of technological progress.

From the start Findlay's writings were hugely appreciated, by a readership concentrated in but by no means confined to Britain and the USA. We know this, because at Samizdata our readers are able to comment. And concerning Findlay's many writings, comment they did, gratefully, effusively, and continuously. It was regularly said and never contested that Findlay's reviews were among the best things if not the best things to be found on Samizdata. Since, on the whole, Findlay tried to read books that he himself would end up liking and mostly succeeded, he surely made a not insignificant contribution to their sales figures.

His widow Lyn tells us that it gave Findlay enormous pleasure to find readers for his writings at this late and presumably rather painful time in his life. The feeling, but not the pain, is entirely mutual. It gave us huge pleasure to have published Findlay's writings.

Those of us who had direct dealings with Findlay, by phone or in person, formed the impression that he was, quite aside from being an attractive and formidable intellect, also a thoroughly nice man whom it would have been a great pleasure to have known a lot better than we did, and to learn a lot more of what else he did in his life besides write things for Samizdata. Geography made that difficult. But modern electronic communication, in the form of the internet, made it possible for Findlay to find readers who would otherwise never have encountered his mind and writings.

To all his closer and closest friends and loved ones we at Samizdata say: we hope and believe that we helped to make the last two years, for Findlay, that little bit better than they would otherwise have been. If so, this is only fair, because he did exactly the same, and more, for us and for many readers the world over.

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After being to a wedding this weekend, I must confess that I have had enough of dealing with people for a little while. I am not the world's greatest social butterfly.

Ann Althouse points to a classic article that helps for dealing with people like me, one that I deeply wish I could print out and send to most of my family members. I would highlight this passage in particular:

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

Quite so. All things in moderation is my motto.

We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts' Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say "I'm an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush."

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In Jonathan Pierce's recent article about the British Crime Survey, many were questioning the validity of the data but the BCS has always struck me as one of the more reasonable surveys of this kind. I think one has to be very careful about drawing too many 'obvious' conclusions from the data (such as one commenter's bizarre remark that declines are down to CCTV), but the data itself seems as good as one can reasonably expect.

For what it is worth, some years ago a fairly senior policeman with whom I was acquainted put it to me that the significant decline in burglary had nothing to do with CCTV or detection rates (which were actually declining) or convictions per crime (ditto) but rather that as items like computers, DVD players, CD players, CDs, microwaves, wristwatches and the like had now become so inexpensive compared to steadily rising national incomes that even in quite 'deprived' areas, the 'economics of crime' simply made that sort of offence hardly worth the effort and risk. Why buy a stolen DVD player from some thief when you can get a new one that is more likely to actually work for the relatively trivial sum of £100?

Make of that what you will.

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Back in April, whilst delivering political leaflets is the pouring rain, I asked myself (not for the first time) "why do I do this?"

After all I do not hold some Conservative party policies in high regard - state pensions increases linked to the rise of average earnings, free higher education, bankrupt private pension funds bailed out with money found from "money forgotten about in banks" and so on.

Also I do not like some of the things that the leader of the Conservative party has been doing recently - getting rid of Conservative candidates because he does not like the (very mild) things they have said, or because they happen to have had their photograph taken where there were firearms (which did not belong to the candidate) also in the photograph.

Indeed Mr Howard recently got rid of a serving Conservative MP (Howard Flight) for saying he that he thought there was greater scope for savings in the government budget than the Conservative party was committed to (Mr Flight said nothing about "secret plans" and, as his remarks were recorded and published, Mr Howard knows he said nothing about "secret plans").

So why was I getting soaked in the rain putting out leaflets? Well I quite like the people who are standing locally for the Conservative party (I would not like to see them upset - and they would be upset if they lost). But there is another factor - a bad conscience.

In 1989 (just as this year) there were County Council elections in Northamptonshire, and a person I knew and liked was in line to become the leader of Northamptonshire County Council.

Everybody told me that the lady was in a safe seat and that I need not concern myself with the campaign. And, besides I was off at university (anyway I was going to become a academic and was bored of my years of helping out with practical politics - if I had known what the future really held in store for me I would, if I had found the courage, taken my own life, but that is another story). So I contented myself with coming home for the day of the election and left it at that.

The lady lost by three votes and the Conservatives lost Northamptonshire Country Council by one seat.

The Labour party made much of the Conservatives losing Northamptonshire and it was one of the factors by which some Conservative MPs justified their attack on Mrs Thatcher in 1990 - an attack the Conservative party (and Britain in general) has never recovered from. I will never know whether Mrs Thatcher would have fallen anyway (wicked people can always find an excuse for their wickedness), but I did leave a local friend to lose.

So yes ordinary people "can make a difference", I proved that by making a difference for the worse.

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On a train from Manchester to Nottingham I was sitting at a table when I was joined (in Sheffield) by two academics from the University of Nottingham.

The two gentlemen talked (rather loudly) about the internal affairs of their department (which seemed to be a 'social policy' department, at least the term 'social policy' was used) and their nice trips to various European nations and to Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

What struck me was the total lack of interest in ideas that the academics showed - they both boasted of using the same talk again and again, and neither cared whether their talks represented the truth or made any contribution to knowledge.

I only spoke once. One of the academics was boasting of his trip to the "biggest city in New Zealand", but could not remember the name of the place - so I told him it was called Auckland. But later he seemed to be under the impression that he was talking about the capital of New Zealand - so he may have meant Wellington.

For the rest of the time I just sat there in the hope that some sign of interest in ideas would be shown by either man, but it was not.

I remembered Professor R. of the Politics Department of the University of Nottingham. Professor R. had always been interested in ideas - although I can not say that I had always agreed with him.

Once at a conference in London I had expressed the fear that local councils would use the introduction of the Community Charge (the "Poll Tax") as an opportunity to increase spending - and blame the bill on the new system (my own position was that a local sales tax would be the least bad option - as people could at least vote with their feet and shop in the cheapest areas thus, perhaps, forcing down the level of the tax).

Professor R. had replied that I was too cynical and that most politicians met well, they were just guided by mistake ideas. As my own view was that most politicians (and many other groups of people) were scum, our difference of opinion became quite sharp. Perhaps my anger was due to Professor R. reminding me of my father - a man who was betrayed so many times and yet maintained a strange (at least strange to me) faith in human beings.

Some years later (after some "modernization" of academic life) Professor R. killed himself.

As I have said he was man who was interested in ideas and valued them, but perhaps he had too much faith in human beings (just as, perhaps, I have too little faith in people).

I miss people like Professor R., they thought that other people were like themselves (and they are not), but the world would be a better place if they were correct and people (especially academics) were really honest and dedicated seekers after truth.

Still what would have I had heard had the two academics had been interested in ideas? The latest plan to reform the Welfare State - yet another pattern for the deckchairs on the Titanic?

Or (if the academics had been economists) the claim that the best way to promote prosperity was to "reduce interest rates and stimulate demand".

I have even heard libertarians talking as if investment did not have to based on real savings ( fiat money and credit bubbles performing this function instead), and as if prosperity was based on consumption (rather than on work to produce goods and services of value to human beings). The madness of the boom bust cycle being presented as what "all serious economists" believe (as a columnist in the "Times" newspaper put it - referring to his idea that Germany's economic situation could be improved by issuing more money "stimulating demand").

What is worse? People who are not interested in ideas, or works of political philosophy, economics (and other subjects) that are filled with absurd nonsense and seeing this nonsense repeated in so many places, from leading universities to television and the newspapers?

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One cannot say, in general, that there should be more or less legislation: that is for governments to decide. If the present volume of legislation is causing problems at the various stages of the legislative process - and all our evidence confirms that this is so - the first requirement is not a reduction in that volume, but improvements in the process at those stages where it is under strain. The kitchen should be big enough and properly equipped to satisfy the legislative appetite.

- Making the Law, Hansard Society, 1993.

So much for separation of powers in the view of serious British parliamentarians.

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I think it is a mistake to assume that the motivations of all people in government, or most of the people who vote for governments, is knowingly malevolent. Most people want to believe the policies they support are 'helping people' because voting or passing a law makes them feel good about themselves as they are 'doing something'. Consequently such people really dislike having it pointed out that their 'something' actually makes things worse more often than not, regardless of what their motives are.

That said, I think there are indeed quite a few people who understand full well the real harmful consequences of what they do, and they do it anyway because all they care about is maintaining the political apparatus from which they benefit at the expense of others. Those people will also react angrily to this being pointed out, because what they do requires their motives to be thought of as benevolent by the wider public whereas in reality it is just a force backed appropriation that benefits a favoured constituency at the expense of those less favoured.

My view is that 'doing something' via the state is sometimes the correct thing in an emergency (most obviously during a war, plague or natural disaster). Alas people often then apply the same logic to normal civil society outside the context of the emergency, acting as if the social logic of the lifeboat and normal civil society were one and the same (libertarians of some ilk often make the same mistake but from the opposite direction). A leitmotif of the post war British election in 1945 was "Look what we achieved together in wartime, think what we can do in peacetime!"... as if life in a total war and life in the social context of peacetime were much the same thing. The same logic used when being threatened by a totalitarian state is then applied to the ebb and flow of normal social life generally with monstrous results.

But cynical politicians who know full well the real consequences of their actions have powerful reasons to misrepresent the truth bacause all they care about is maintaining their personal power and influence and they do this by playing to people's need to feel good by 'doing something'... and they are the people who will do it. For this reason I think it is very important to keep pointing out the true effects of actions that governments take, and the consequences of participating in a process designed to lead to those sorts of interventions in civil society. Sometimes it is important to make people feel bad about themselves for 'doing something'.

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There is an interesting article on American Thinker about the institutional mindset of political correctness.

A team of Indiana firefighters, volunteering to help rescue victims of Katrina, went to Atlanta, where Federal Emergency Management Agency staffers told them that their job was to hand out fliers and that their first task was to attend a multi-hour course on sexual harassment and equal employment opportunity

And a useful comment on that story that quotes Theodore Dalrymple can be found on No Pasaran

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Today's Guardian is as ever full of fascinations, but this, from a TV review by Mark Lawson struck me as gloriously, perplexingly weird:

The notable balance of the film is shown by the fact that both liberals and conservatives are offered a harrumph-moment: the former when we note that the Guildford Four were locked up for these bombings rather than the people who actually did it, the latter when we learn that those who actually did it were freed from jail as part of the Good Friday Agreement.

It beats me why conservatives should not care about false convictions, nor liberals about murderers being released as part of a dodgy political deal. But then, I do not see liberalism and conservatism as irreconcilable opposites, which is probably why I still have trouble predicting what the PC attitude among media folk will be, even after 20 years of working on the fringe of the media.

Elsewhere in the same issue, the reliably barking John Sutherland takes a story about a US alternative medicine quack, and manages to find it is proof, not of human wickedness and human credulousness, but of the evils of capitalism:

But the runaway success of Natural Cures also bears witness to genuinely troubling aspects of the American healthcare system. It has been estimated that some 50 million citizens have no health insurance. For these desperate people, who fall sick like everybody else, "natural cures" are all they can afford. "Socialised medicine", as the Clintons learned the hardway, has no place in America. Capitalistic medicine does. What John le Carré calls "Big Pharma" has made America the most drugged nation in history.

Which "explanation", unfortunately fails to account for some important facts: (1) the purportedly natural non-cures offered by quacks are not generally cheaper than the products of Big Pharma, even at US prices; (2) the most drugged nation in history, is on average (i.e., including all those without health insurance) rather healthier than Britain if you look at survival/recovery patterns for pretty much any disease; (3) The European quack industry is also fabulously successful, and expensive, despite the subsidised competition from socialised medicine.

What is particularly enjoyable about this lunacy is it appears in the same issue of the paper as a nice clear feature by the impeccably rational Dr Ben Goldacre explaining why alternative medicine offers comforts not available from a scientific physician.

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It could always be worse!

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When I was studying for my Ph.D. at Cambridge University in the 1990s, I made friends of many nationalities, which was an all round splendid thing. Inevitably, many of the best of these friends were (and indeed are) American. An organisation named The American Friends of Cambridge University would hold social events on July 4 and at Thanksgiving for Americans in Cambridge, and my American friends would often smuggle me in to these events. (Actually there were was very little smuggling involved. Although I was not American, I found myself as welcome at these events as I think I would have been if I was). And today I at one point found myself thinking that there would be such an event going on in Cambridge today and that it would be fun to be there.

As it happens, one of these American friends of mine is getting married in Sonoma county, California this coming Sunday, and I shall be attending the wedding. Shamefully, I find that it is five years since I have been to the United States, but I hope I shall make up for this a little bit next week. After the wedding my movements are a little uncertain - I am not sure which of my other friends will also be at the wedding and whether I shall be doing anything with them afterwards - but I have a tentative plan to drive up to Crater Lake National Park in southern Oregon, do some hiking and perhaps a little fishing, and then head back to the Bay Area. My expectation is that I shall be in San Francisco or thereabouts on the weekend of the 16th of July. If any of our Californian readers feel to the need to hold an impromtu blogger bash, or perhaps even just wish to buy me a drink, well I shall be around.

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In today's Times Daniel Finkelstein reminisces.

There used to be a free-market libertarian bookshop in Covent Garden. It sold pamphlets on things such as how to cut crime by giving criminals tradeable vouchers. Or you could buy a T-shirt with a Warhol-style print of Friedrich von Hayek. You should have gone while you still could. It has closed down now — supply exceeded demand.

What's wrong with tradeable vouchers for criminals anyway? Works for Ankh-Morpork.

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Orange seems to be a pretty good colour at the moment. After all, the soundest thing to ever come out of the Liberal Democrats was called The Orange Book. Now there is a website by some classical liberals (rather than Liberal Democrats) called The Orange Path. The authors claim that liberalism is "bright, zesty and Orange". They point out that:

Whether knowingly or accidental, some of the landmark texts of classical liberal scholarship have orange front covers - a curiosity easy to overlook. The University of Chicago Press published FA Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty in 1960, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom in 1962/1982 and James Buchanan's The Limits of Liberty in 1975 - all liberal, all free, and all undeniably orange

Well, whatever. The point is that The Orange Path is a useful resource, aimed at helping the left to understand classical liberal ideas. Take a look.

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There can be little doubt that Albert Einstein was one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century, as his enduring appeal to so many indicates. How many other people in such arcane fields as theoretical physics and mathematics can generate such interest? Not many.

Yet sometimes I think Albert Einstein is also the poster boy for the axiom 'stick to what you know'. Of course in Einstein's case, what he knew was rather a lot: E=MC2 is a legacy that will speak to the centuries.

But then all you have to do is read much of what he wrote about economics and politics to realise how clueless Einstein when it came to many things, with an attachment to nightmarish notions of supranational government. I share Einstein's distain for nationalism but the cure for the excesses of governments is not super-nationalism but rather a culture of individualism that demands less government rather than yet another tier of it to regulate our lives and take our money.

Likewise in his apologia for socialism, he got it spectacularly wrong in 1947 when he wrote that...

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of the smaller ones.

...when in fact technology and capitalism means that small business and diffusion of capital have expanded vastly more that 'one size fits all' big business since 1947. Technology has created diseconomies of scale in ways that Einstein never imagined in spite of the evidence already being there (pity he did not spend some time with Frederic Hayek). Globalisation (rather than 'supernationalisation') of capital markets has likewise put hitherto unheard of quantities of capital into the hands of small businesses beyond counting. He even bought into the daftest and most pernicious economic absurdity of them all, the 'fixed quantity of wealth' fallacy.

Albert Einstein. A fascinating genius for sure, but like everyone, he had his limitations.

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This post is will ultimately turn into a photo-essay about visiting a Japanese supermarket and having a very fine Japanese lunch in London, but before that it will be long and rambling in my preferred way. People who are just here for the sushi should go directly below the fold and scroll down

One peculiar thing about the novels of Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson is that he has often felt the urge to set large portions of his novels in two cities: London and Tokyo. I have one or two ideas as to why this is so, because, as it happens, these are my favourite two cities as well. Why is hard to describe, though. One aspect of it is that these are cities with tremendous amounts of fine detail or structure. Looking carefully at a street and the buildings on it, and what is sold in shops, in both cities one can see legacies of hundreds or thousands of years of history. (In Tokyo's case, the fact that much of the city has been covered with concrete has somehow failed to destroy this. In London, the builders of 1950s public housing did do a good job of eradicating it in certain parts of the city, but a great deal none the less still remains) Both cities are collections of villages that have gradually merged into greater agglomerations, a process which was completed by a period of rapid urban railway building. But in both cases all these villages retain very distinct characters of their own and it is very hard to describe precisely where the centre of the city is. Visiting Camden in London or Harajuku in Tokyo on a Sunday afternoon somehow feels similar (although Camden is much grimier). There is a feeling that global youth fashion is somehow emanating from here, and in both places there is an interesting mix of the spontaneous and the commercial, as street markets sit right next door to international brand names, and the relationship is somehow a beneficial one to both parties. Both cities have a media hipness about them - for some reason London and Tokyo are the two cities in the world that produce the most interesting television commercials, although the programming itself on television in both places has rather less to recommend it.

And there is just a buzz that I get when I am in London or Tokyo that I don't get elsewhere. (I get it to some extent in New York and Hong Kong, but not quite to the same extent. And not quite in the same way). And this buzz goes deep. When I am in a foreign city I like to visit suburbs as well as the centre of the city, and in both London and Tokyo I still find the buzz almost everywhere I go.

I am not going to speculate any more why these two cities are like this. (Well, not much. Both are great ports which are the capitals of Island countries separated from their continents. That must have something to do with it?). In any event, though , I am not the only person to feel this. And I don't think Gibson is even the only cyberpunk novelist. (Neal Stephenson has just written The Baroque cycle, an immense three volume novel, much of it set in London in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in which he is trying to figure out the same thing, I think. Stephenson has written less about Tokyo and Japan, although come to think of it there is a fair bit of Japan in both Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, and even a little in the Baroque Cycle.

But, anyway, in early 2001 I was living in Sydney, Australia. Although Sydney has great weather, wonderful food, beautiful scenery, and many other attractions, I was a little bored. Life was a bit lacking in buzz. I found a link (probably from slashdot) to this article, in which the London Sunday newspaper The Observer had asked Gibson to describe his fascination with Japan. In it he writes as much about London as about Tokyo, both cities being in his eyes being the world capitals for the otaku - the passionate obsessive.

I think he is right. I think the reason I love it is that I can be a passionate obsessive myself.

And (back in 2001) looking carefully at the Observer article, I noticed that the newspaper's magazine had put out an entire "Japan Issue", an entire magazine full of articles looking at Japan (and mostly Tokyo) from the perspective of London. (The entire magazine is all still on the web, although there doesn't seem to be an index. The URLs are fairly easy to guess though).. And reading this magazine in 2001, it was a big thing in making me realise how much I was missing my favourite cities - and as it happened I couldn't hold out very long and before a year was out I had got on a plane for London. (Tokyo was more culturally daunting without knowing the language, and anyway I have visa issues there. There was nothing whatsoever stopping me from just hopping on a plane for London and looking for a job when I got there). In London I did find the obsessive compulsive Japanese-ness I was looking for, in the places Gibson described such as Portobello markets, and elsewhere. (I have a particular memory of sitting in a London cinema in 2002, watching an animated Japanese homage to a great German expressionist surrounded by an audience of very earnest young Japanese people).

And in particular, I followed the advice of this article from the Observer magazine Japan Issue, and made a visit to the Oriental City shopping centre, a place of amazing Japanese-ness in the unexpected location of Colindale in north London. Where I go from time to time, and where I went again last Sunday.

(Click on for the story and photographs of last Sunday).

Basically, the article states that there in an astonishingly good, authentic, and quite inexpensive sushi restaurant in north London, a place so Japanese that you almost forget you are in London. And when I got there I found it was true, and that there is much more to it than that.

And in fact I went there last Sunday. I had tried to persuade a couple of my friends to join me (Hi Brian!) but in the end I went by myself.

One steps off the tube, way up in North London.

The best sushi outside Japan is supposed to be somewhere around here?

Eventually though, one does find what one is looking for.

And although it is "Oriental City", and products and food from other east Asian
cultures beside Japan are also present, the dominant culture in the shopping centre is overwhelmingly Japanese. There are stores selling Japanese cultural detritus, of various kinds.

Of course, in Tokyo there is a Hello Kitty theme park, but I suppose I can't have everything.

There is a terrific shop selling Japanese kitchenware, tea sets, chopsticks, cutlery, bowls, dishes and the like at very reasonable prices.

However, the Japanese bookshop, which looked exactly like the kind of bookshop you would see in Akasaka railway station, was closed since the last time I was there. Kind of sad, really.

There are a couple of Chinese themed shops also, and a food court selling all manner of East Asian foods: Thai, Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, you name it. The sushi bar is off the corner of the foot court. But my thoughts were to wander around a bit and look at everything else before sitting down for some food, and the article will follow that structure.

The most important shop in the centre by far (apart from the sushi bar) is the Asian supermarket, which, once again, is overwhelmingly Japanese with other things added to the Japanese-ness. Which is great, allowing me to stock up on a few things I like to have in my cupboard. For one thing, there is Japanese beer. One thing foreigners don't always appreciate is just what an enormous beer drinking country Japan is. And also, just how excellent is Japane