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.

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

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...

Sorry, I just had to share that

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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'.

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

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.

It could always be worse!

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.

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.

Little does he know where a new supply can be found, bwa-ha-ha-ha....

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Japanese beer. It is mostly mass produced lager, but it is extremely good mass produced lager. Australia is also a land of mass produced lager, but Australian lagers are sweet, whereas Japanese lagers are much drier, which is more to my taste. Asahi Super Dry and Sapporo are fairly widely available in England, but the Japanese breweries make a variety of specialty and premium beers which are not as easy to find. In Colindale, however, there is a full range for me to stock up on. And of course I did.

And of course there is the dazzling array of multicoloured cans of non-alcoholic drinks that one finds everywhere one goes in Japan, often available from Japan's astonishing number of vending machines, that one even seems to find in remote places with no visible source of electric power.

This is actually only a tiny fraction of such drinks available. There is actually shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf. To me these drinks all taste almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea in exactly the same way. But what would I know? I'm not Japanese.

Getting good quality seafood in London can at times be extraordinarily difficult. On special occasions I am quite a serious cook, and if I am cooking for a dinner party I like to do a seafood course. Getting the ingredients in London can be a trial, whereas in Australia I can just go to my local supermarket. However, as this is a little Japan the choice of seafood is just amazing, even in London. It is a shame this place is so far from where I live.

And of course

But much as I enjoyed the supermarket, it was time for lunch.

The style of the Noto sushi bar appears to have changed a little since the article was written in the Observer. The set lunch deals described in the article seem to no longer be available, and the article makes no reference to it being a kaiten-zushi restaurant, that is a restaurant on which the sushi goes past on a conveyor belt and you help yourself to the plates you want. I suspect the arrangements have been changed a little to make things easier for the chef. What has not changed in any way is the superb quality of the food and the very reasonable prices (by London standards, anyway).

I tend to associate kaiten-zushi with small restaurants selling moderately good reasonably priced sushi where one grabs a bite to eat in between from the subway to the private line at Shibuya railway station, or with overpriced, slightly too westernised sushi in London or New York. This is perhaps not fair, as kaiten-zushi comes in various kinds, from mass produced to very good. And although this restaurant is superficially kaiten-zushi, and the kaiten-zushi aspect probably dominates at peak times and/or for inexperienced diners, it is only superficial and you can completely ignore it if you wish. (This is true of good kaiten-zushi restaurants in Japan and elsewhere, too).

Upon sitting down, one is handed a menu, and there are signs saying "If you do not see what you want, please order it from the chef". And if you do, the sushi chef behind the counter will make whatever you ask for to order. And he is exactly the same sort of chef you will find in an upmarket sushi restaurant: he wears the same white outfit, jokes in the same way, and says things to indicate that he is obviously concerned that you are enjoying the food, once more in the same way. (Japanese sushi-chefs have a certain clichéd style somehow. (My mind is thinking of the hilarious parody of this that Quentin Tarantino had Sonny Chiba play in Kill Bill vol. 1 for some reason).

In any event, I had the eel, the clam, the fatty tuna. Mmmm. It really is the best sushi I have eaten outside Japan, and better than much that I have eaten in Japan. And (by London standards at least) it really is very reasonably priced. I am way out in the suburbs of London, but the Japanese-ness of this place is somehow extreme, and concerned with detail, and with everything being exactly right. It is my favourite place to go for lunch in all of London, and having eaten very well there I paid the bill, thanked the chef and staff very warmly, praised the food excessively to them, and headed off.

I then had a little bit of a further wander, mainly back to the kitchenware shop, where I bought some nice Japanese tea cups.

Kitchenware and crockery here is once again very nice, and also substantially cheaper than I would buy non-Japanese equivalent stuff in a London department store. This is not a tourist destination but is concerned with value, no doubt for businesses as well as individuals.

Whereas a Japanese tourist destination would undoubtedly take JCB, this is not a tourist destination. It is for resident Japanese who are concerned with value, and presumably the fees on JCB are too high, as with Amex. And probably most resident Japanese have British bank accounts anyway.

(The JCB ("Japan Credit Board") card is probably the fifth largest credit card in the world in terms of the number of people who carry it. Almost all of thse are Japanese, however. One can track destinations frequented by Japanese tourists around the world by looking for shops that accept the JCB Card. (My most memorable personal example of doing this occurred once when I was at the Groot Constantia winery in Cape Town in South Africa. This winery made one of the most famous wines in the world around 200 years ago, before being wiped out by phyloxera and becoming obscure. However, as the wine from this winery is (amongst other things) mentioned in Jane Austen's Emma, this is a perfect Japanese tourist destination. I was there with a friend. I pointed to the "We accept JCB" sign, told him almost exactly what I have just said in this paragraph, and within approximately 30 seconds of my finishing a bus of Japanese tourists arrived in the car park)

And finally, before managing to drag myself out of the place completely, I stopped off at Sega World for a few lanes of coin operated fully automated ten pin bowling. (Ten pin bowling is big in Japan for some reason. I blame the American occupation, personally. It's terrible what those evil American GI's will do to a country).

Once I had left the shopping centre, I saw something quite interesting, in some freestanding shops nearby.

So the Japanese bookshop had not closed, but had merely moved, perhaps because the rent inside the shopping centre itself was too high. Or something. In any event, it still looked extremely Japanese on the inside, if not the outside.

And that was it. The place I had visited is extremely Japanese, and yet somehow also very London. The Japanese population of London (which isn't enormous) is somehow the sort of Japanese population that really needs these things to be right, and so this place is there to serve them. (The Japanese population in somewhere like Sydney is less obsessive, somehow).

None the less, I still wonder how well other cities do the same kinds of thing. As it happens, last time I was in Paris, I saw this advertisement on the side of a van.

Besides asking the really important question - Why do the French love the prefix "Hyper" so much? - one also wonders how well do they do Oriental Shopping Centres. As it happens, I shall be in Paris next weekend, and one of my principal tasks is going to be to boldly seek out this Hyper-Asiatique and find out for myself.

Baseball player Andres ("Big Cat") Gallarraga is fighting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and making a new name for himself by writing a book about how non-Hodgkin's lymphoma can be fought. As the Baby Boom gets ever older, expect more relatively young celebs to make their diseases public in order to appeal to this disintegrating demographic.

India's Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT has been busy ensuring that ladies trying to become constables do not get unfair treatment in Chandigarh.

UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:

Washington, DC, Jan. 13 (UPI) – The singer Cat Stevens was denied entry to the United States because of money he had given to terrorist linked groups, a U.S. official said.

"If you contribute to terrorist organizations, I'm sorry, but you're not welcome in the United States ... And that's what happened to Cat Stevens," Robert Bonner, customs and border protection commissioner told United Press International Thursday.

Mystery has surrounded the case of the singer since federal officials diverted a Washington-bound flight he was on to Bangor, Maine, last September. He was deported after being questioned.

Jaguar's Big Cat is best in show.

WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:

With today’s medical technology, it’s possible to see pain, to stand outside the body and examine the tiniest muscles and thinnest tissues inside us.

Thank the magic of magnetism or MRI, magnetic resonance imaging, a technology developed about 20 years ago as a new way to see inside ourselves.

…

As the CAT scan exposes bone, the MRI looks at softer targets. The MRI shows two kidneys; the left one has one artery feeding it, its twin has two.

Hacienda Luisita's CAT is Luzon’s biggest sugar refinery, but, says Tarlac News, there is trouble brewing there. At the mill, I should say. That would be in the Philippines, right?

A high speed cat, the WestPac Express, is helping out with the Tsunami relief effort in Thailand:

US military officials also said the shallow draft and speed of the vessel allowed it to ferrying relief supplies quickly and efficiently to many different types of ports.

WestPac’s captain, Ken Kujala, said it took only minutes to begin to unload cargo, using the vessel’s roll on, roll off ramp.

"Most of our missions support training … but we're doing something different this time," said Captain Kujala. "Everyone …will jump through hoops to get the job done."

Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop.

BMS-CAT is a Texas based recovery firm, and it has been busy in Hawaii, after the flooding there.

This story evidently started out with a misprint in its headline. Google has the original link as "USA Today Highlights iPod's Importance to Cat Stereo Makers". But they meant car. Jaguars especially?

CAT news from Kolkata:

KOLKATA, JAN 7: The Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, has decided to accept Common Admission Test (CAT) and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores from candidates seeking admission to its one-year post graduate programme in management.

I know what you are thinking. Cats are not machines or acronyms, they are, first, last and always, four legged mammals. So I will end with news about Tropical Storm, son of Storm Cat:

Maiden winner Tropical Storm, a four-year-old son of Storm Cat, has been acquired by Roger and Jane Braugh’s NewLife Stud and will stand stud the 2005 season at a Central Kentucky farm yet to be determined.

Catisfied?

Must say I am particularly impressed by the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar this year. In these dark days of January, what better than some quality cheesecake to lift the gloom!.

My very best wishes to all our readers for a very happy New Year.

By way of clarification, the reference 'New Year' is based upon the standard, current, accepted Western Calendar which is not to say that the Western Calendar is in any way preferable or superior to any other form of Calendar be it religious, cultural, historical, scientific or regional and which may or may not be recognised by any other person, group of persons, organisation or self-defining community based either in a particular jurisdiction or transnational.

Please note that this greeting in no way implies any judgement against any other days which may or may not be recognised by any other party as marking the beginning of a new year or any implication that any such recognition, and any celebratory rituals that may or may accompany such recognition is, in any way, less valid or worthy of respect.

Furthermore, the extension of best wishes does not imply any obligation of acceptance or reciprocity in any form from any person or persons or other parties who do not recognise the standard new year or who do not recognise or celebrate the turning of any year (howsoever defined) or who may recognise (whether officially or informally) either the standard new year or any substantially similar event without the need for good wishes or by means of the customary extension of other greetings or forms of accepted social coda.

Finally, the use of the term 'happy' refers merely to a state of emotional being that may or may not be transient and acceptance of the best wishes does not imply any requirement on the part of the acceptee to be either in a state of happiness or arrange their affairs in such a way as to induce a state of happiness either in whole or in part. Nor does use of the term 'happy' imply that any alternative or different state of emotional being or emotional response is any less valid and the use of the term 'happy' (whether accepted with best wishes or not) should not be construed as any declaration that happiness is either a superior or desirable state of mind.

Thank you.

Happy New Year from the Editors and Contributing Samizdatistas in the British Isles, America, Australia and Europe!

Here is my mother's new kitten.

Happy new year everyone.

Ok, so I have been told some fruitcake stated the tsunamis were 'Gaia's revenge'1 (which would explain why it was only SUV driving capitalists who were drowned)... but how long before some nut job decides that the tsunami was actually caused by the Americans setting off nukes on the seabed? You just know it is going to happen!

1 = anyone have a link to this or other similar moonbatness?

1- To quit smoking
2- To lose weight
3- To post more and better stuff on Samizdata.net

Happy New Year to all my fellow contributors and to the readers.

I mean, what else does one need?

Update: Cool. God bless Texas.

To all our readers, Christmas greetings from the Samizdatistas on three continents!

A Merry Christmas to all of our loyal readership and most especially to those serving the cause of liberty in far and dangerous corners of the world.

You get used to your favourite sort of coffee, and I have now become completely used to my favourite brand: Nescafé Gold Blend. Nescafé is, so they claim, the biggest selling instant coffee in the world.

Originally I started buying Nescafé Gold Blend because I had been told by my television that it would cause a very attractive young actress called Fiona Fullerton to become friendly with me, but now I buy it because I like it.

However, I have a serious complaint to make about the size of Nescafé jars. There is a lot of talk out there in Internetland and Blogland about how market researchers are trawling the blogs to find out, on behalf of the business enterprises who hire them, what the masses think of the latest products of these business enterprises. Well, let the Nescafé market researchers trawl this.

I have no problem with the coffee itself. It is the jars that concern me.

There is much about Nescafé Gold Blend jars that I like a lot, quite aside from liking their contents. They are very fine in their own right, both aesthetically and structurally. When people first emerged from the Communist Yoke into the Light of Capitalism, they found themselves confronted with packages and pots and containers containing branded Capitalist products that were so beautiful (the packages and pots and containers I mean) that they could hardly bear to throw them away. These Nescafé jars were an excellent embodiment of this dilemma. When archaeologists dig up something like these jars made by ancient Romans or Greeks or Etruscans they celebrate for a century and build entire new museums to accommodate these items and all their worshippers. Yet we Westerners just chuck them out with the rest of the rubbish.

And I do too, for reasons I will get to, but first let me explain what I like – or would like – to do with these jars. I like (and would like) to use them for shelving. Thus:

When I die, I expect all my various Internet scribblings to be forgotten utterly, very quickly, and that the last thing about me that anyone will really remember will be my kitchen, with all its CDs, and the fact that many of the shelves (for CDs and for general crap) involved Nescafé jars.

But sadly, as that picture shows only too clearly, the lids are disintegrating. So first, Kudos to Nescafé for having solved this problem by changing the design of the lid. Not long after I constructed these CD shelves and began to learn the bad lid news, Nescafé changed their lids to make them more structurally robust, as robust as the jars themselves, and better suited to supporting horizontal shelves. So, some positive feedback there for the Nescafé market researchers.

The basic problem with shelving is when it gets too wide, and the shelves sag in the middle, under the weight of all those wonderful Capitalist products. To solve that problem you need a vertical lump of some sort to stick in between the shelves, and to save you the bother of doing any complicated carpentry, like this:

Those particular vertical lumps are there because the last thing you want to do to a shelf that you have just attached to a wall is smack more nails through it, thereby loosening it from the wall. So, the shelves on the right there are simply resting on a separately attached shelf below, not fixed to the upright at all. Hence the blocks holding them up.

And the ideal lumps for these purposes are things like Nescafé jars. True, these jars occupy valuable horizontal space, but they are pleasingly decorative, finely printed in interesting and tasteful colours, and they generally celebrate all that is best about our shared civilisation.

Or rather, Nescafé jars would be ideal for shelving purposes if only they were the right size.

Since I built the shelves illustrated in my first picture here, Nescafé jars have undergone two redesigns.

The first took them from the straight up-and-down design pictured above, to a pleasingly slim-wasted design, and now they have done a redesign of the original slim-wasted jar to make it slightly less like a Real Woman (surely this was partly what they had in mind – I shall call it that anyway) and more like a supermodel, i.e. taller and thinner.

Nescafé jars come in three sizes, and the smallest size is of no interest to me, being far too small for my most pressing shelving purposes.

However the medium sized Nescafé jar and the large Nescafé jar, pictured above, are very much of interest, being just the right sort of size.

So, here is a picture of the medium sized Nescafé jar, in its three recent manifestations. On the left is the original straight-up design, but with the new and improved lid. Then comes the Real Woman look, and then the Supermodel look.

You will notice that in between them are a couple of CDs, and there is the problem.

The first design was okay, which was why I used it for my CD shelves, but (aside from the lid thing) it had another quite serious drawback, being somewhat too big for CDs. Too big is better than too small of course, but it is not ideal. You either have wasted vertical space, or you stack CDs horizontally on top of the vertically shelved ones, neither arrangement being entirely nice looking or entirely convenient. How much better it would be to have it the ideal height (like my lumps of vertical timber in picture number two above), thus wasting no space, and thus accommodating the maximum number of shelves on your wall.

The Real Woman version of the medium sized jar was a real step in the right direction, as you can see. It was smaller, but crucially, not too small. Anther fraction of an inch and it would have been perfect.

But in the latest redesign, what did Nescafé do? Blinded by exclusively aesthetic imperatives, but with no thought for function, they made the medium sized jar bigger, in fact very nearly as big as the original straight-up-and-down look. Talk about a wasted opportunity!

Had I known that they were going to turn the Real Woman of the medium sized Nescafé jar into a Supermodel version I would have stock piled more of the Real Woman ones than I did. As it was, they sprang the redesign on my out of the blue, and I now do not have enough Real Woman jars to serve my ever growing CD shelving needs. I will have to use timber. Hard work, and aesthetically dreary, but form must follow function.

So far so unsatisfactory. But the situation with the large Nescafé jars is far more distressing.

Take a look at this picture:

The same three jars, with the two redesigns, and this time, a couple of videos, and a DVD.

Now it is far worse. Now, the jars are all too small, and too small is worse than unsatisfactory; it is just plain useless. The straight-up design was too small even for the smaller video cases like the one shown, and even a tiny bit too small for DVDs, a tiny bit too small being simply: too small. And the latest version, the Supermodel, is still too small not only for videos, but for the now ubiquitous DVD. For DVDs it is a very, very close thing. But close is no cigar. A serious blunder.

I am not happy. Stick that up your market research, Nescafé.

With Nescafé jars letting me down so badly from the CD and DVD shelving point of view I have been on the look-out for other commonly available products whose jars or cans might do these two jobs.

Here's a possible DVD candidate:

The trouble with this spray can is that too much would be asked of that lid. Solidity needs to go right to the top. It would be those old Nescafé lids all over again, only far worse.

This is a bit more promising, for CDs. At least it is the right size.

But structurally, again I have my worries about it, and I would need to do some serious testing before using it.

Plus, I suspect that cans are definitely stronger if you don't open them, and I do not care to buy can after can of Red Bull if, on structural grounds, I cannot even drink it. There must be cheaper crappy drinks available in cans this size, but most are those poncy energy type drinks, and cost the best part of a quid.

I used old fashioned, uncrashable by hand, like your granny had during the blitz, Tesco and Sainsbury's own brand baked beans and mushy peas tins, for my most recent shelving efforts:

By the way, that is a glass Crème Brulée tub at the bottom there, in which I have complete confidence. Glass is tough stuff, although I guess the price of being wrong about something like could be uncomfortably high.

These own brand, old fashioned tins seem a whole lot stronger than those little fizzy drink cans, which seem to be deliberately designed to be crushable, which is not at all the quality you look for to support your CD collection.

So, all in all, Nescafé really missed a couple of tricks here, especially on the DVD front. And if my reseach is anything to go by, this market is still wide open and begging for someone to burst into it with a product that is structurally perfect for CDs (in the medium size) and DVDs (in the giant size). "Also tastes good" would make a fine slogan for such a product - "Also good for car cleaning" - "Also a great sink unblocker" – "The kids also like it in sandwiches". Whatever. And make sure that, like Nescafé jars, the containers are as strong when empty as they are when full.

Plus, an issue I have not really dealt with but which could use a bit of thought is how wide from side to side and how deep from front to back these containers ought to be, for structural purposes. Personally I would want to see just one container for each bit of vertical structure, with a boxlike shape perhaps being ideal. The same shape, in other words, for CDs, as my timber verticals in picture two, and something similar for DVD shelving.

If you are the one to crack this market wide open, and your product becomes the market leader for the domestic shelving needs of people with my kind of shelving habits throughout the world, think of the permanent advertising that this would mean. A marketing man's dream, I think you will agree.

Maybe, all uncaring, your company already makes containers exactly like those I want, and puts something in it I could happily consume. You need then only alert the world to this circumstance. In which case, go to it.

And before anyone else says it, I do not believe that CDs and DVDs are about to vanish from the earth, and that everyone will store everything on their hard discs. CDs and DVDs are "hard discs".

And it only needs a few to feel as I do about how to shelve them all for this to be a nice pair of little market niches, and a nice little source of word-of-mouth chatter.

Perhaps someone will concentrate on just making the containers, and leave others to worry about what to put in them, and do lots of licensing deals. THat must already be what happens with tin cans.

Come on Capitalism, you can do it. You can do anything that you put your mind to.

Internet marketing endnote: Although I do not see why bookshelves made like this are intrinsically any more dangerous than any other kind, it seems possible that if this idea were flaunted in something like old-fashioned TV or newspaper adverts, it would then be pissed all over by Health and Safety fascists. So, make the things anyway, and then, you know, let it be known, Internet style, how excellent they are for shelving purposes. No need to alert the authorities to what is happening by incurring a big Mainstream Media bill.

Send me some samples. If they do the job I have described, I would be delighted to help you to spread the word.

Certain words, over time, have devolved from specific context to generic insult. 'Fascist' used to refer to a certain socioeconomic system involving nationalism and state control of industry; 'racist' used to denote a person who believed that his ethnic group deserved some privileges that other groups did not. In modern parlance, however, almost anything can be 'racist' or 'fascist'; go to any protest or peace rally and you will hear that the war in Iraq is 'racist', that opponents of a Palestinian state are 'fascist', and so on. These words now mean "something I disagree with or wish to belittle" instead of their original connotations.

I am sad to report that we are in danger of losing another word into this sinkhole: pornography.

Full disclosure: I am as guilty of this as anyone; I wrote a piece back in January talking about financial pornography. But abuse of this word has become widespread. WordSpy.com, a site that tracks the use of buzzwords in pop culture, has listings for "debt porn" (lurid tales of people bankrupted by credit card abuse), "eco-porn" (corporate shareholder reports that rave about the company's environmental record), "domestic porn" (Martha Stewart-eque magazines) and "investment porn" (fawning profiles of fund managers who 'beat the market' without regard to the fact that someone had to be above average.)

But now we may have witnessed the ultimate: sparing no rhetorical excess, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has denounced Hardee's new Monster ThickBurger, a concoction that contains 2/3 lb of beef, four slices of bacon, three slices of a cheese-like substance and mayonnaise, as 'food porn'.

Of course, CSPI and its founder, Michael Jacobson, are not interested merely in educating the public that gargantuan fast-food hamburgers are unhealthful. CSPI has advocated the taxation of meats, dairy products, and sodas, among other things. The website CSPIscam.com has extensive documentary of CSPI's various forms of activism: junk science, junk litigation and intimidation.

CSPI founder Michael Jacobson, according to the ActivistCash.com website,

... will not tolerate any of his employees eating "bad" foods. CSPI's in-house eating policy is so puritanical that Jacobson once planned to permanently remove the office coffee machine -- until one-third of his 60 staffers threatened to quit.

I guess in that sense, though, fast food is a lot like porn: it is the same group of neo-puritan busybodies who oppose both.

In which a Samizdatista wanders approximately along the northern road to Santiago and beyond, views some industry and some magnificent rugged coastal country, tries some regional cuisine, watches some football, and encounters an interesting individual while drinking port in Vila Nova de Gaia

In August I took a summer holiday starting out at San Sebastian and Pamplona more or less on the Spanish/French border, working my way west across pretty much the entire Atlantic coast of Spain, and then spending several days in Porto in northern Portugal. For some reason an urge to visit that part of the country had been developing in my head for quite a few months, and I wanted to get it out of my system by going there. Sometimes I will visit a place because there is one thing there that I feel I must see, but more often the reasons resemble the reasons why I choose to read a particular book. If I find that I find two or more unrelated recommendations of a book in places and unconnected as possible, even slight or in passing recommendations, then this will encourage me to read it more than a single, stronger, recommendation, or two recommendations from the same place. And going to northern Spain and Portugal was like this.

One thing was that I went to Cornwall in England last year and had a wonderful time. And Cantabrica and the Asturias and Galicia are in a way the Cornwalls of Spain - the last parts of Spain to become Spanish, places that are less well integrated than many other parts, places that are still at least a little bit Celtic, and places that retain a distinct regional character. Or so I was told. (And Spanish food is said to retain more regional culture than most places). And like Cornwall, there is lots of rugged and beautiful coast to see.

But while Cornwall has always been a remote and economically relatively poor part of England, the Atlantic coast of Spain is something else, because when Spain conquered and ruled America, this is where the ships sailed from. And the industrial heartland of Spain came into being in this area as well. And of course this is the base of the massive and much maligned Spanish fishing industry, at least by the people of Cornwall and parts of Canada. (And of course this is the fishing industry that may have reached North America well before Columbus sailed to the Carribean).

I was curious about another thing, possibly more trivial. One of Spain's greatest and most famous football teams is Deportivo La Coruña, which comes from the city of La Coruña in Galicia, a city with a population of only 230 000. This makes La Coruña into almost the Green Bay, Wisconsin of Europe - a major sporting team in a seemingly minor city. I was curious about this, too, so I thought I would go and have a look. Football, culture, and nationalism are incredibly mixed up wherever you go in Europe, but in Spain this is as extreme as anywhere. For decades the great club Real Madrid were basically an arm of General Franco's fascist government (and some would perhaps crudely argue that they are basically an arm of the Madrid government today) and cheering an opposing football team was often one of the few public ways of protesting the government that was available, and passions for football clubs in ethnic minority regions can often be extreme.

And there was the city of Santiago de Compostela, the destination of the great pilgrimage to the supposed burial place of the apostle St James, that was once a point through which Christians amongst other things demonstrated resistance to muslim rule of Spain.

And there was another question that vexed me. Spain officially has three minority languages: Catalan, Basque, and Galician. The nationalist issues that go with Catalan and Basque are well known (and I had been to both places before), but the Galicians have a lower profile. Alas, I am not a linguist, but at least some people had told me that Galician is mutually intelligible with Portuguese, so that Galicia is essentially the Portuguese speaking part of Spain. And I was curious about this, and whether Galicia felt Spanish or Portuguese. So I thought I would visit Galicia and northern Portugal and compare the two places.

And I had heard that Porto is a stunningly beautiful city, and I thought I would go and look for myself. And I am a big fan of the great fortified wine that both comes from and is named after the city of Porto.

So all these things came together, and had been making me want to visit. Finding myself with a couple of weeks before starting a new job, I bought a ticket to Bilbao and flew off.

Now despite the cultural richness of the destination, this journey was quite substantially off the regular tourist circuit - at least that traversed by English speakers and northern Europeans. I am at heart a low budget, independent traveler, and I usually carry a backpack, but in taste I am more what Neal Stephenson describes as the "hacker tourist" than a backpacker. (And if you have never read his 1996 essay "Mother Earth Motherboard", go read it now). But I am not quite one of these either. He describes a transitory existence of expatriates in airport bars and business hotels, and while I am an expatriate, and I have at times certainly found myself in transit lounge bars in Asian airports talking to such people, that one is not quite me either. When I travel I do it on a relatively low budget. I stay in cheap hotels or hostels or I go camping. I probably started doing it because I was compelled by financial pressures, but these days I do simply because I like it. One meets more interesting people, in my opinion.

This is a style of travel particularly suited to single men travelling alone I think. And I suspect I shall not always be one of these. I understand that if I ever cease being single and have someone else with me, I shall probably have to give up camping and hostels and stay in nice hotels, and I will probably only be indulged with a small amount of time to go and look at the container ports and aluminium smelters of the world. (Unless I can find one of those few wonderful women out there who like going on camping holidays and seeing interesting and eclectic things. I can dream)

But while I enjoy low budget travel, one tiresome thing is that within that, one finds what might be described as the "politically correct backpacker". These are people who claim to disdain mass tourism, and often reject the very word "tourist" (usually preferring to refer to themselves as "travellers"), would not dread of eating at a McDonald's or going to a Starbucks, and usually travel for long periods at a time. They are often Australian or English or German or Scandinavian. Despite disdaining "tourists", they have this curious tendency to all travel to exactly the same places, eat the exact same things in the exact same places, and see exactly the same things as one another, which is the same precise type of behaviour they disdain in "tourists".

Sadly, one thing about them is that they have infiltrated the guidebook business. Fifteen years ago, most independent tourists in Europe were carrying "Let's Go" guidebooks, which were written mostly by Harvard students taking summers in Europe. These days, they are dominated mostly by the "Lonely Planet" guidebooks, which were founded and are run by some independent travellers from Melbourne, Australia. These do have the advantage of being pretty comprehensive and quite good for finding things like train times, cheap accommodation, and restaurants, so I usually carry one, but their editorial tone is deeply tiresome. The "Lonely Planet Spain" guidebook I was carrying managed to contain such gems as the following.

"Fortunately, Spain is not yet 'blessed' with too many motorways......"

(Very good. You managed to sneer at the prospect of Spain having decent roads on which to get around twice in the one sentence. Presumably you are also arguing that the fact that my bus journey from Gijón to La Coruna took six hours and then left me with severe motion sickness that then turned into a full blown migraine that left me completely debilitated for the next 12 hours was a good thing, whereas if I had arrived in three hours perfectly well that would have been a bad thing).

"The ten worst things about Spain: 9. Heavy industry around Bilbao"

(Yes, okay, I realise I am in a minority in that I go to look at industrial sights when I travel, but the most interesting architectural trend in the world is what is being done with decaying industrial structures, and how they are being rebuilt with modern materials and modern design to become commercial and residential centres. The result has a tendency to look like monsters with spider webs growing on them. Bilbao as a whole is maybe the best and most fascinating example of this kind of thing in the world. The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao works architecturally because it understands this and complements the rather brutal architecture around it - not because it is some gem surrounded by a sea of effluent (as most guidebooks seem to suggest). Don't tell me you have missed this trend entirely? Yes. You have missed it entirely).

And don't try using any such guidebook if you are interested in finding anything of historical interest in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or economics. It is entirely pointless.

In any event, I preferred the day when the standard guidebooks were written by rather more open minded American college students. They weren't always as comprehensive, but the editorial line was a little more welcoming to people who did not share their biases.

But anyway, as I said, the tiresome breed of backpacker tend to all go to the same places, and the Atlantic coast of Spain (with the exception of San Sebastian, which is backpacker central) is not that place. And for that matter, English and German package holiday tourists don't go there either. Spanish package holiday resorts are on the Mediterranean coast and the Balearic Islands. The north coast is a destination for Spanish tourists, but not for foreigners.

So I made my way along the coast. I saw a variety of container, bulk materials and fishing ports. I did a number of really magnificent coastal walks through rugged and magnificent country (particularly near Santander and Gijón ), and found some monuments to great mariners of history. I visited a couple of beautiful beaches. I visited the cathedral in Santiago (I couldn't go to mass without having my bag placed through an X-Ray machine and having to walk through a metal detector. The fact that I was at least in some sense at a point of historical conflict between Christianity and Islam was presumably not unnoticed). I found out something about the conventions that apply with respect to Galician ham sandwiches when Real Madrid games are on the television. I enjoyed quite a lot of regional Spanish cuisine. Spanish restaurants are a bargain, often providing three large courses, wine, and bread for less than €10) But the downside of all this was that I didn't meet many English speaking people, and I had to do without interesting conversations for most of the trip. And as one of these monolingual Anglophones, there was not so much I could do about that. I managed to catch a Deportivo game in La Coruna, and as the opposition was Irish, I managed to find some people with who to speak English for a day or so. And I enjoyed the hilarious spectacle of watching twentysomething male Irish football fans be taunted by sixtysomething Spanish grandmothers in football colours. Now there is something I wouldn't see in England. (And the full name of the football club is Real Club Deportivo de la Coruna. Spanish clubs have the best names, and one wouldn’t see that in England either. Royal Arsenal anyone? Perhaps we will see Imperial Czar’s Chelsea at some point though)

But eventually I got to Portugal, and Porto. Given the cultural and linguistic links between Galicia and Portugal, I was curious to see to what extent the two places felt like they were in different countries.

The answer was, enormously. For a start, there are only two trains a day between Vigo in Spain and Porto. Whereas there are lots of trains between Porto and places just the other side of the border. "You want a ticket from Vigo to Portugal? Here is the ticket to the border, and here is the ticket from the border to Porto. An integrated ticketing system? You must be joking. Yes, I know there are no border controls and a single currency". And even on those two trains a day, there were very few passengers on the section actually crossing the border, although there were lots of passengers travelling internally within Portugal.

And then you get to Porto. The city is beautiful and magnificent. It is quite a large city - over a million people - and is I think for many people just about the last undiscovered great city of Europe. Some cities on rivers are dominated by the river. (The Danube through Budapest is a fine example). Some are not. (The Danube through Vienna is an example of that). Porto is a city with a chasm through the middle of it, through which flows the magnificent Douro river crossed by wonderful bridges built during the 20th century. (Never was there a better location for twin deck steel arch bridges. But I digress).

The architecture is different to that in Spain. Customs in restaurants are entirely different. (While in Spain everything is included in the price including the wine, in Portugal you pay separately for everything, even the things they place on the table that you did not order). There is often a shift in customs and conventions when you cross a border, and the one between Spain and Portugal, even from Galicia to Portugal, is more jarring than most. It may be that both countries were dictatorships and fairly closed until just two or three decades ago. Or it may be more than that. Even though the least integrated parts of Spain, the parts near the Atlantic have received their largest cultural influences from Spain, and when not that from France. But many of Portugal's came from somewhere else.

And the most famous product of Porto, port wine, may be a clue to this. Port is of course an "English" wine, in that its modern form came into being out of trade with England. As England spent much of the 17th century at war with France, supplies of red wine from Bordeaux were unavailable, and the wine drinking classes of England had to obtain their wine from somewhere else. As relations with Portugal were good, they started importing wine from the Douro valley in Portugal. (Even in those days, England had long been the traditional trading partner of Portugal, the two countries having signed a treaty of "perpetual friendship" in 1373). Initially, the English were initially unhappy with the quality of of the wine imported, and therefore they set about improving the quality themselves, and a number of English port houses were founded in Porto (or, more correctly in Vila Nova de Gaia on the south side of the river, which is to this day still officially a separate city). Nobody is quite sure when port became a sweet wine. The practice of adding brandy to the wine to stabilise the quite astringent wine apparently started quite early, but adding it prior to the fermentation of much of the sugar apparently did not come until the 18th century. One probably apocryphal story is that a shipment was prepared this way by accident, and that people in London liked it that way and asked for more.

But the English influence on Porto is profound. It influences the architecture, the bridges across the river were built by English engineers, the trams have an English style about them (although there are no trams like that left in England), and the place just has a far less Latin feel about it somehow than Spain. There is even a "Crystal Palace" in the middle of a "Crystal Palace Park" on a hill overlooking the river. While it is nowhere near as large or ornate as the structure that once existed in south London, it is a nice touch.

And in a country that was and to some extent still is very poor by European standards (although much less so than even a few years ago - when I visited Lisbon in 1993 the city had slums of a kind that were absent in Porto this year) the city is clearly extremely proud of the world famous product that is produced there.

Which is why the names of the port houses light up the night on the south of the river. Each major port lodge has a large illuminated sign on the roof or wall of its building. There are no other illuminated signs south of the river. I don't know if there is a law restricting them to the port lodges, but the effect is quite interesting, for the names are all very proper English or Scottish names. "Graham's". "Tayor's". "Warre". "Cockburn". "Smith-Woodhouse". "Croft". Most of the port houses are now Portuguese owned, but the English names remain. (Port wine is produced in the upper Douro valley and shipped downstream (these days by truck) to Porto, where is is "lodged" in the premises of the port house in question, hence the expression "port lodge").

And more importantly for me given that I was visiting the city, like wine producers everywhere the port houses provide tasting rooms for visitors to sample the wares. So, I set about visiting a few of the port lodges to try some of the port. These are professional operations of large wine companies. If you are visiting winemakers, this is often a good thing, as the cellar door tasting room is in that case usually essentially a public relations operation. They hope that you will enjoy your visit and as a consequence buy their wine in a local shop due to the good feeling you got from the visit. (Small wineries often make their livings through cellar door sales, so there is more pressure to buy as well as taste, which can be a problem if you are carrying only a backpack and flying home on an aircraft). The port lodges in Porto have tours in multiple languages, audio-visual presentations, display cases with historic port memorabilia - all that kind of thing. Much of this is English memorabilia - such as an empty Port Bottle that was specially prepared and dispatched to Jesus College Cambridge in the early 18th century and similar memorabilia

Which gives me a little bit of a personal relationship with this place. Port was invented for a particular type of Englishman in the 17th and 18th centuries, and these certainly include the people who attended and became fellows of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. A lot of the best port ended up in the cellars of these colleges. And the colleges have a serious culture of port drinking to this day. And as it happens, I attended such a college - St John's Cambridge - when I was doing my Ph.D. a few years back. Being served 25 year old vintage ports at formal dinners is an experience I have had once or twice. And I joined the college wine society, learned all about the different kinds of port (as well as other drinks) and generally had a fine time. I even started running tastings and giving lectures on wine myself - although only to the members of the graduate common room. I was a little too intimidated to give one to the college wine society itself. (In retrospect I look back and realise this was silly - they would have been very pleased if I had done so). So as it happens, I know quite a bit about port myself, which is quite unlike most of the other visitors to the port lodges, who seemed to be mostly Spanish, German or French, and who knew nothing about port at all.

In any event, after visiting a few tasting rooms, I ended up at Taylor's at around midday on a Saturday. I tried a few more wines, and received another presentation on the history of the port industry and the Douro valley. Ahead of me were a couple who looked in their sixties. They were talking American accented English, which is always a good sign, as Americans are usually the friendliest and most welcoming of fellow travellers. So I walked up and introduced myself.

After a little conversation I said something that suggested I knew more about port than I was letting on. This was queried, and I admitted to having done a Ph.D. at a Cambridge college that took its port seriously. Further enquiries discovered that I had a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics, and I was promptly informed that the person I was talking to was a retired American physicist who had grown up in Michigan, done some defence work at some point, worked at a University in Texas, and had retired to Provence in France. After a further chat, I find myself joining the Americans in the adjacent restaurant, having an enormously pleasant conversation over a long, large, and quite alcoholic lunch. A bottle of table wine was ordered which wasn't very good, and as a consequence we kept drinking futher glasses of the white port that was intended as an aperitif instead. Always a bad decision (or good, depending on how you look at it). The conversation ranged from a discussion of the relative merits of differential and integral forms of the Navier Stokes equations to the merits of living in Provence (beautiful place, but the French state at this point is a disaster) to the merits of our various modes of travel. My description of my solo low budget approach and my €15 a night accommodation was the source of a certain amount of mirth, and the observation was made that if I had a partner I would be paying ten times that but "it has its compensations". I explained that both sides of this bargain were things I was aware of, and that perhaps my time of solo travel would not last forever. (They were one of these obviously long and successfully married couples who could completely rely on one another and who could therefore be a little carefree over a long and alcoholic lunch in a foreign country, so I did see their point). I told them about my slightly itinerant life of recent years, and how I was about to return to the busy but well remunerated life of the financial markets a few days later. They told me about their children and tried to impart a little of the wisdom of long lives to a relatively young and inexperienced but hopefully interesting chap like me. We exchanged URLs and e-mail addresses. I gave them the address of my personal blog, and made the observation that "If you follow the links, there is a libertarian website I also write for". Although Adriana and Gabriel might not like the description "libertarian", it will do for me for now.

And it did in this context. For a funny thing happened. The gentleman gave me a look - the sort of look that might be described as a "He has the accent. 'Tis a Gascon" look. The fact that I had declared myself to be a libertarian somehow went down very well. This gentleman was as pleased to find a young libertarian ex-physicist financier in a Porto port-lodge as I was to meet him.

But fine as it was, the lunch was eventually over. We shook hands warmly and went on our separate ways.

While I usually do have long interesting conversations with people I don't otherwise meet when I travel, the off the beaten track of this particular trip had meant I hadn't had one for a couple of weeks. But the quality of this one made up for it.

I love travelling. I can't help it.

Avant-Garde French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, has finally been deconstructed:

Jacques Derrida, one of France's most famous philosophers, has died at the age of 74.

Though to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.

Er...or something.

The mighty Dissident Frogman is in typically excellent form and has produced a marvellous gonzo masterpiece to help John Kerry get a better grasp of geography... so go to The Frogman's Propaganda Bureau, scroll down to the bottom of the article, click the red button and find out just where the hell is Cambodia?

There are many annoying things about computing but one of those things that is most likely to reduce me to screaming at the monitor and firing up Google to hunt down the home addresses of certain programmers is rude software.

Yahoo is a particular offender. Download and install their Yahoo Instant Messenger (or better yet, do not) and you get, unasked for, an icon in the taskbar and two more in Internet Explorer, all without so much as a 'by your leave'. Install the whole suite of Yahoo products and you get even more. This is 'interruption marketing' and contravenes the cardinal rule of 'do not piss off the customer'. If I wanted the frigging icons taking up my screen real estate, I would have damn well asked for them. So if you find that as intolerable as I do, download Trillian and use Yahoo Instant Messenger's services without actually having to sully your machine with Yahoo Instant Messenger. Hey Yahoo, my response to you trying to shove your products in front of me? Let's try "Screw you, I am going to use your more congenial competitor". I am willing to pay to be treated more to my liking.

The same 'interruption' ethos can be found all over the internet. The most extreme form is practiced (mostly by porn sites) via complete browser hijacking, persistent pop-up windows and the criminal practice of trying to covertly download diallers and other adware/malware onto your computer. Less extreme but more common are simple intermediate link hijacks. For example if you are a gamer, you might want to check out the well known site Gamespy for up to date news on the subject. But every now and again, you will find yourself confronted not with the Gamespy page whose link you just clicked but rather a bright green page with an advertisement that will eventually release you and send you to where you actually want to go on the site. No doubt Gamespy thinks hijacking some of your valuable eyeball time is a small price to pay for their well informed site.

No, I beg to differ. In fact not just "no" but "get stuffed" is my real reply. If you want to subject me to advertisements, bloody well ask me if I mind first. And my answer will be "No thanks, I mind very much". Not an option? Fine, then I will take my eyeballs to Worthplaying.com, whose coverage of games is just as good and whose advertisements are far less intrusive.

If popup advertisements and link hijacks do not bother you, all well and good, you see things the way 'they' wish we all did. Speaking for myself, my time is far too valuable to waste on information I was not looking for. The internet is filled with many choices and that means there is no need to tolerate that sort of 'push advertising' approach. Internet advertising is cheap so the cost of indifference is far lower per pair of eyeballs than, say, a magazine advert. But that is not true if the advertisement has the opposite effect you want. If your company tried that on me, the consequences will be negative value for your money. Not only does interruptive advertising not work on me, it actively makes me your enemy and induces me to spend some of my valuable time to seek out alternative ways to achieve my objectives that will definitely not include you. And I am far from the only one who feels that way... your competitors are only a few clicks away.

I use both a PC and a Mac (OS X 10.3.4) and I was wondering... is there any way to make the Mac not use that ghastly bugfest called Safari as the default browser?

Future is waiting for us. With hollow skeletons
or downsized ugly creatures with bulgy eyes - it's not important.
Important thing is that there will be a footprint left.
Footprint of civilization. Cement, metal and dust not claimed by anyone.
They are eternity.

I found this interesting site called Abandoned.ru (via the irrepressible Good Shit) and as 'Tears for Fears' once said (said he, showing his age), there is a beauty of decay.

For an old cyberpunk like me, stained concrete, jagged bare metal and pools of water under ruined roofs are a rhapsody of shadows for the darker parts of the soul. Go check out Uryevich's excellent series of photo essays.

And yes, I am so ready to play Stalker...

And now the important news of the summer: a record crop is expected of grapes in the Champagne region [French link]. The absence of frost last Winter and mild weather in Spring is a hopeful sign for a good vintage, although quantity and quality do not necessarily follow. Over the coming weeks vines will be pruned of some of the grape bunches to ensure a greater concentration of sugar and acidity.

So the next time some tree-hugging Greens moan about penguin habitats, they can console themselves with a nice bottle of Veuve Cliquot.

Over on the Social Affairs Unit blog, Michael Mosbacher takes Seamas Milne to task for the idiotic statement in the Guardian that the people fighting the US and UK are the 'real' liberation movement in Iraq, not the people who toppled Saddam Hussain.

On the broader topic of anti-Americanism however Mosbacher points out that Seamas Milne has a quite a way to go before he reaches the 'stature' of that florid friend of tyranny the world over, Harold Pinter, who has long been a pet hate of mine and others on this blog.

There is good news for the differently-conscienced and the caringly-caffeinated. They no longer have to exorcise their middle-class guilt by travelling overland to India or teaching English to ragamuffins in the shanty towns of Kinshasa.

Absolution is soon to be found right here in Central London:

The UK's first fair trade coffee shops are set to open later this year, courtesy of Oxfam. And to give customers a flavour of what to expect, it opened one for a day in central London.

As if anybody does not know what to expect!

The food is fair trade wherever possible, so fruit, cereal bars and chocolate are "ethical" but pastries are not.

These diabolical right-wing, warmongering neo-pastries with their blundering, inept foreign policies are inflaming the 'Arab street' and bringing the world to the brink of war. It's all about creeeeeeeeaaaamm!

"The cafes are about people enjoying classy coffee in a classy place. If they want to find out about the coffee and the issues they can make that discovery. It's not about saying 'Come and feel worthy' but 'come and have a super time'. The values are extra."

Only if munching your way through an inedible cereal bar in the company of a bunch of po-faced do-gooders is your idea of a super time.

There are photographs on the walls showing the people who matter most in the venture - the farmers from Honduras, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

Collectively, they share 25% of the profits, community projects in those areas get another 25% and Oxfam has a 50% share.

In other words, some 75% ends up back in the pockets of the professional welfare classes. This is not 'fair trade', its a money-laundering scheme.

Two cups of hot, steaming piety, please!

Well trade here seems to be rather light, so here, given that writing adequately is beyond me just now, are some photos I took earlier. Earlier this evening to be exact. The light was fading fast, but a few of my snaps came out okay.

I like the effect you get when the background is a London bus. Lots of colour, but blurred, and if the figures in the foreground come out well, it can look great.

As you can see, I like to take pictures of people who are taking pictures. Sometimes, as here, I include the people they are photographing. And look, over on the right is a lady posing for another photographer away to the right. I only noticed her after I got home. The horses are a big fountain statue just to the edge of Piccadilly Circus, and are, I think, much more impressive than Eros.

This next bunch of people are doing a characteristic digital camera thing which Real Photographers never do. They are looking together at the picture they have just taken on that little TV type screen that digital cameras mostly now have.

But now here is a shot of London life of a quite different sort. The London Underground is a creeking, groaning, deafeningly loud, hideously crowded … Underground. But they are amazingly quick to put up the posters about any problems they are having.

When I see posters like these, I am part angry, and part impressed. Such a fuck up, and so courteously explained!

I cannot end on this grim note, so here is a happier Underground related picture, this time of a Coca Cola advert done in the lights of Piccadilly Circus, which are supposedly famous, but usually rather feeble, I think. But this was nice. This picture is probably too small, but trust me, it looked very fine.

London. As Doctor Johnson said, if you are tired of London, go to bed and get yourself a good night's sleep and you will probably feel much better in the morning.

I have just started a weekly environment column for the Brussels-based Centre for the New Europe.

My first article called Reports of My Extinction are Greatly Exaggerated is about the 'reappearance' of previously 'extinct' species, in this case the New Zealand storm petrel, believed extinct for 150 years. No animal conservation programme can claim credit for this, although with a ban on trafficking, expect a market to develop in contraband. So governmental action may actually provoke the extinction of the bird.

[I am aware that at the moment individual articles do not link, I shall be speaking to the CNE webmaster about this.]

There will be much muttering in their beards in the caves of Tora Bora. There will be much gnashing of teeth and gnawing of livers in the ghettos of the Democratic National Committee.

A new front has opened in the struggle for freedom.

Age 25, single, 5 foot 11 inches: the new Miss America describes herself as "a Republican" and says that she will use her influence to explain America's involvement in Iraq. Miss Shandi Finnessey is a statuesque blonde from St Louis, Missouri and replaces last year's winner from Massachusetts. [Thanks to Pejmanesque.com for the link.]

Note: Missouri voted Republican last presidential election. Any bets this time?

By every standard that can be measured, participation and interest in electoral politics in this country is in precipitous decline. With every year that passes the figures for voter turnout, party membership and financial donations drop a few more points down the graph.

The process is slow but apparently inexorable and (for obvious reasons) it is sending an adenalin-rush of panic coursing through the veins of the political classes:

Democracy needs strong political parties. And for them to be representative and effective, they need to be properly funded. In the past 50 years, parties have seen their income and membership decline dramatically while expectations of what they should do have increased.

Says Leader of the Commons and Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Hain, who appears to be far less concerned with political bankruptcy than with the very real threat of financial bankruptcy:

In return for public funding, parties should be obliged to direct a certain amount of their work to community organisation and to educational material for voters. We might, for example, borrow the idea from Germany of creating party-linked, publicly funded foundations which could take on this education and policy formation work.

This relates to the third principle: extending public funding will create a more bottom-up style of politics, with political parties better embedded in local communities, for example by financing youth organisers in major towns or population centres, so reaching young people disturbingly turned off politics.

Public funds could be earmarked for salaries to employ general party organisers at national, regional and local level, as happens in Sweden, Germany and other European countries. Public funds could also pay for training and political education schemes and international contacts between parties.

So Mr. Hain is proposing that the funding that he and his colleagues have signally failed to amass through voluntary donation should now be taken by force. In return for this 'generosity', civil society will be merged with 'the party' to become a single living, breathing, sweating, symbiotic creature of state.

More public funding could help all parties extend their work beyond the world of political activists, creating a politics that serves the people and not just politicians.

Some people will believe that. But then some people will believe anything.

The raison d'etre for being a politician, or to use that wonderfully explicit Americanism, a 'lawmaker', is to pass laws. This is a topic I have often pondered before. Without that ability, a politician's power of patronage completely disappears and with it, the funds given by people who want laws enacted that tilts the table in favour their personal or factional interests. To be a politician is to see the world as something to be legislated.

Thus when I hear that there is another push in the US to pass laws that will 'control the availability of pornography to minors', I feel the urge to nod sagely and marvel at yet another example of the triumph of image over substance. Now I know you expect the usual rant from me regarding how such legislation is a violation of both freedom of expression and freedom of association, but as any regular reader of Samizdata.net already knows my views on that, let me just point out that what really interests me is that 'lawmakers' are so happy to pass laws that have no chance whatsoever of making the slightest difference to the perceived problem at hand. This is nothing new of course, but it is sometimes worth reminding oneself why this happens so often.

The public appearance of a politico 'doing something' is far more valuable to that politico than actually addressing the problems they are called on to fix. Thus the actual efficacy of a measure, or even the prospect of the law passing, is often largely incidental to the decision to try and enact a law. Thus if the ACLU, EFF, FOREST or whoever get a bill strangled at birth, the politico can shake his head sadly at his enraged backers and say "Hey, I tried, but those slimy [civil rights/capitalist/pinko/faggot] S.O.Bs got in the way".

And thus a sublimely fungible business like Internet pornography, much of which already runs off servers in Romania, Bangladesh and Brazil (places not known for giving a flying whatever what laws get enacted in the USA), is going to be effectively regulated by some American law how exactly?

Do the majority of legislators actually care? Probably not, other that a small semi-demented cadre of folks from the less well travelled American hinterlands who probably cannot conceive that the world is filled with people who regard the antics of American Lawmakers with mild bemusement or utter indifference.

George Monbiot is as mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore. Narcolepsy-inducing speeches, plaintive whining and bogus statistics are no longer enough to bring about revolution. And George should know because he has tried all three.

The time for mere words has passed and the time for action has begun:

The formula for making things happen is simple and has never changed. If you wish to alter a policy or depose a prime minister between elections, you must take to the streets.

I think George is making yet another big mistake if he thinks that sleeping in shop doorways and begging strangers for money is going to change the world. But who am I to argue?

"It's not the age, it's the mileage."

Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)...

PS:

Ah yes, St. Valentine's Day. The shop windows are filled with endless tacky heart-shaped corporate eye-catchers and the air is filled with cupid's arrows... and other rather faster moving objects.

Have fun.

No... not some tedious article about race...

Perhaps the reason I find snow in London so fascinating is that it is both uncommon, little more than a dusting and very picturesque. I do not recall finding it so interesting when I lived in the United States, but that might have been because when it snowed, verily the skies opened and it tended to be a significant inconvenience! That said, New Jersey copes better with 3 feet of snow that London does with 3 inches

Last Saturday I decided to treat a friend of mine to a dinner at a restaurant, the Painted Heron, that received one of the most glowing reviews I have ever come across. It appeared in the last week's Sunday paper magazine (no link, alas) and it certainly inspired me despite the fact I am not too keen on Indian food.

The dinner was an extraordinary experience. Despite our high expectations induced by Matthew Norman's raving review, we were not disappointed. Everything - the decor, food and service - was excellent and the price commensurate with the quality we enjoyed. For our London-based readers I recommend to make a trip to 112 Cheyne Walk, SW10 and sample the gastrogasm-inducing fare we enjoyed.

I also applaud Matthew Norman whose restaurant review in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine is one of the sections of the paper I read regularly. His razor sharp witt is refreshing as he uses it to punture many a pompous restaurant's pretentions. However, his vitriolic sarcasm had a day off when he wrote a review for the Painted Heron - one of the reasons I wanted to see this culinary marvel. And as it was substantiated, I am ready to trust his opinions in the future. He is by no means the only one to give high marks to the place. Although I cannot link to his review, I found another reviewer making pretty much the same points:

The food is bloody marvellous. Every single dish made me stamp my feet and howl at the moon.

The tandoori baby chicken came. And I came over all funny. This was a good strong bird not much bigger than a greedy quail, served whole, orange from the oven and trickling juices and runnels of bright yoghurt, served on onion kulcha bread.

I picked it up and tore in. Sweet Jesus. And then I was sorry again because the chicken in your local curry house is not fit to cluck orisons over the carcass of this princely bird-child.

Quite.

Still reeling from the culinary delights of the night before, I opened this week's Sunday Telegraph and right in the news section I find out how Matthew Norman's review of another restaurant has earned him a letter from the owner threatening to sue.

It was, both parties will submit, not quite a glowing review. Indeed, phrases such as "the eighth circle of hell", "among the very worst restaurants in Christendom" and "meals of crescendoing monstrosity" may have conveyed the impression that Matthew Norman, the prize-winning restaurant critic of The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, was not entirely enamoured with the food on offer at Shepherds in Westminster, central London.

Last week, alas, things moved from the kitchen towards the courtroom. Richard Shepherd, the owner of Shepherds, whose restaurant has long been a favourite of politicians, is threatening to sue The Sunday Telegraph for libel because he was so hurt by the review.

Unless Mr Shepherd received damages paid to the charity of his choice, and the opportunity to write a letter defending his restaurant, he would have no choice but to sue.

It is not just a matter of free speech and the right to express one's opinions, especially when one is getting paid for doing so, but the manner in which Mr Shepherd's reacted to Mr Norman's sharp and let's face it, witty criticism.

Where do you start with somewhere like Shepherds? You don't. If you have any sense you finish with it.

There is so much about Shepherds that is wrong that it would, in a more elegant age, merit a pamphlet rather than a review.

This is a man who likes his food and dislikes the kind of pretentious 'concept' restaurants that has sprouted all over London in the last decade or so. Apparently, many customers have written letters to the Telegraph expressing support to the restaurant with colourful insults directed at Mr Norman. One has to remember though that Shepherd's is frequented by politicians whose palates are not necessarily amongst the most discriminating, what with having to kiss arses all day long...

Mr Shepherd's response, or more accurately his lawyers' response, is a seriously po-faced letter that completely misses the point of Mr Norman's job and talent. It is almost distressing to see the kind of corporate bullying normally reserved for customers directed at a restaurant reviewer. There was at least one dissenter, John Blundell of the Institute of Economic Affairs, who wrote:

Thank you a million times for your brilliant review of Shepherds. I stopped eating there four years ago when we had to send back three of our four main courses.

Mr Norman himself appeared unrepentant, although he did admit that he had one regret.

The lawyers' letter was far more amusing than my review. That's the sad thing.

Somehow I doubt it...

George Monbiot aka Moonbat has joined the great and the good in the 2004 edition of Who's Who, described as environmentalist and writer.

Oh dear.

(in today's Telegraph's print edition)

An American scientist, William von Hippel has an explanation for racism. Well, a theory of why elderly people are more likely to be prejudiced than young people. And if his research is right, it's not just because they grew up in a different era, because Blair's Britain is a sink pit of immigrant crime, or because old people are brave enough to fly in the face of political correctness. Mary Wakefield explains in today's Telegraph that a bit of their brain is missing:

According to von Hippel and other psychologists working in the same field, whatever age we are, our immediate thoughts are formed by cultural stereotypes. This means we instinctively think inappropriate and unfriendly things about each other.

...

For a highly social species, the ability to keep these thoughts to oneself is crucial, so we have developed a special part of our brains – a mesh of connections between the prefrontal lobes and the limbic system – to inhibit and temper them.

...

Where von Hippel's research is new is in suggesting that older people's brains often suffer the same sort of damage. They become prejudiced because they lack the power to inhibit the stereotypes that form our instinctive thoughts.

The gap in their brain releases stereotypes and they naturally infer that they are doing it on purpose.

I have no idea whether the theory will hold up to further scientific scrutiny. I also do not like the implication that older people's opinions and behaviour are somehow not results of their rational discourse but determined by a neurological phenomenon. Nevetheless it is an interesting article that caught my attention and so it appears here without any firm conclusions from me as to its goodness or badness. If true, it has highlighted the importance of stereotyping and unexamined prejudices. Get your opinions in order before you are disconnected from them and begin to embarass your offspring.

Of course, this means that there could be a psychological metacontext.

Clearly an off day here at Samizdata. So maybe today is the day for a question which I found via b3ta.com. This is a question that has always troubled me, ever since I first encountered the problem.

Warning. If you do not like questions about toilets, and in particular about how disgusting they can be when they are being really, really disgusting, then stop reading now. I mean it. This is not a nice posting. This is a crappy posting. But the way I see it, after the previous posting, I have nothing left to lose, dignity-wise.

Okay, here it is:

German toilets are quite extraordinary. Other European toilets - well, the ones that aren't merely holes in the floor - work much like their North American cousins. They are shaped a little differently, but the basic principle is the same: the excrement either lands directly in the water or it slides down a steep slope into the water, before being flushed away. Simple, effective and clean. See?

There then follows a picture of a North American cousin type toilet. But now, and this is your last chance to stop reading this if your disgustingness threshold is low, comes this basic and most troubling fact:

Not so the German toilet.

Last chance. Okay, you asked for it.

The excrement lands on a bone-dry horizontal shelf, mere inches beneath one's posterior. Repeated flushings are required to slide the ordure off the shelf into a small water-filled hole, from which it hopefully disappears. See?

And then there's a picture of that, in section, as we ex-architecture students say.

And the rest of the piece can be boiled down to a one word summary: Why? What on earth, on the sun, and on all the other planets in circulation around the sun, is the point of this arrangement? Why do they do this???

The Samizdata commentariat has a growing reputation in the blogosphere for its combination of intellectual scrupulousness, technical savvy, and for its general ability to see the larger picture, to sense what are the important things in life and what are not. So people, let's get this thing understood, and if necessary dealt with. Either we establish once and for all that there is a good reason for this apparently senseless, not to say plague inviting arrangement, and that it really does have a good reason, and then tell the world about it, or we establish that there is no good reason for this arrangement and we set in motion the (if the latter is the case) long over-due process of putting a stop to it.

The internet is a powerful thing, with a global reach. Time to use the its powers for good once again.

Sorry, Natalie, but I am in a profound depression triggered by the US Supreme Court's decision to jettison the First Amendment (which protects, or used to, freedom of speech and of the press). After I am suitably medicated (less than half a bottle of Laphroiag to go), I will have some thoughts on one of the fundamental flaws in the whole campaign finance debacle.

Right then. Desperate times, desperate measures. It'll just have to be the kittens.

Surely, this time, that clique of tranzi panhandlers and chisellers have overstretched themselves just a bit?

The United Nations has published new predictions on the size and age of the world's population 300 years from now.

You know what they say, there's lies, damnable lies and then there's UN predictions.

It says that if fertility stays at the current level, the global population could rise to 134 trillion.

134 Trillion!!??. Why not add a few more zeros? Go on, really crank it up. Why be so conservative?

The UN publishes long-range projections to help environmental scientists and policy-makers assess implications of dramatic change in world population.

And whine for more funding, of course.

The report says the increase is a clear indication that fertility levels are unsustainable.

Then make war, not love.

Has there ever been any organisation more scurrilous, more fraudulent or more transparently self-serving than that stinking, Augean mess known as the United Nations?

It has been tantalising everyone for so long now. Were they? Weren't they?

The little signs were all there. The furtive glances, the blushes, the games of footsie under the table, the electric crackle whenever they were in the room together and those oh-so-subtle gestures of intimacy when in public that were so charged with romantic frisson.

Were they even aware that polite society was awash with all manner of fanciful and delicious gossip about their dalliances? Nobody was fooled by their calm exteriors. Everyone knew. Did they think they could hide their irresistably mutual animal magnetism behind their coquettish games for ever?

Of course not. So now they have done the decent thing and formally announced their engagement. Socialism and Islamism are now, officially, an item:

The Muslim Commissariat in Moscow oversaw Russia's policy towards Islam. Muslims with few communist credentials were granted leading positions in the commissariat. The effect was to split the Islamic movement. Historians agree that a majority of Muslim leaders supported the soviets, convinced that Soviet power meant religious liberty. There was serious discussion among Muslims of the similarity of Islamic values to socialist principles. Popular slogans of the time included: 'Long live Soviet power, long live the sharia!'; 'Religion, freedom and national independence!' Supporters of 'Islamic socialism' appealed to Muslims to set up soviets.

The Bolsheviks made alliances with the Kazakh pan-Islamic group the Ush-Zhuz (which joined the CP in 1920), the Persian pan-Islamist guerrillas in the Jengelis, and the Vaisites, a Sufi brotherhood. In Dagestan, Soviet power was established largely thanks to the partisans of the Muslim leader Ali-Hadji Akushinskii.

The assault on Islam marked the beginning of a sharp break with the socialist policies of October 1917. As the Soviet Union launched a programme of forced industrialisation, Muslim national and religious leaders were physically eliminated and Islam was driven underground. The dream of religious freedom was buried in the Great Terror of the 1930s.

Socialist Review stands in a tradition that totally rejects the Stalinist approach to Islam. But in the early years of the revolution the Bolsheviks were successful at winning Muslims to fight for socialism. We can learn from and be inspired by their achievements.

They are going to make such an adorable couple.

[Link courtesy of Harry Hatchett who also has some pointed observations.]

Last night I attended the Adam Smith Institute Christmas Party, and I was once again struck by what seems to me to be a major fact of modern social life, and a major difference between the times we now live in and the times in which people lived in earlier times, say two or three hundred years ago.

Present at the party were some hundred or more people, ranging from posh and clever schoolgirls enticed only a few hours earlier with the promise of free food and a rest from schoolwork, to opposition front benchers, and assorted policy wonks, friends of the ASI of extremely variable wealth, and of course a decent sprinkling of bloggers, ditto. And what I noticed, again, was that when you are in a gathering like this, it is impossible to tell at a glance how grand the person you are talking to is, unless you happen already to know.

Take the nice chap I found myself talking to. Fifty-ish, matching jacket and trousers (that's pants if you're American), educated somewhere, you know, good. Pleasant, a job being Something in the City which I didn't quite hear properly because the din was a bit loud and nuances got lost. And as I said to the man himself in my bonharmonious liven-up-the-party way, I simply had no idea how important a chap he might be. Dressed like that, I said, you could by anything from a wage slave to a billionaire, from a failing journalist to a major media player, from a pathetic wannabe politician to a Bilderberg Commissioner. I wasn't that eloquent, but that was my point, and he got it well enough and with no offence meant or taken. Indeed, he amplified the point, by saying that me being dressed as I was (vomit coloured corduroy jacket, red cardigan, no tie, black corduroy trousers with safety pins to keep the improvised turn-ups turned up), I too could be anyone or anything. He reminisced about the various ultra-grand personages he had met in his time who dressed in a similarly down-market way.

The big immediately visible social gulf, now, it seems to me, is the one at the lower end of society, between those who are just about clinging on, and those who have fallen off the social edge into the untermenchen class. Dressing as I do, in a socially concerned manner (i.e. badly), I get a lot of attention from the street begging variant of these people, and I can tell at once what sort of person I'm dealing with. I don't know this person. Certainly not. But I do know exactly which side of the great divide he or she is on, and he or she is on the wrong side of it. Sorry. No.

Two or three centuries ago, I'm guessing, when even averagely nice clothes were about as cheap as an averagely nice house might be today, things were very different. Social nuances all up and down the tree were more visible, and the people at the top who could simply have the best, all day and every day, damn the cost, stuck out way above everyone else. Being one of the elite who could have the absolute best clothing there was were the ones whom you could in those days spot most easily. And the gap between the top people and the rest was the one that was most obvious.

Maybe it's just that I am personally very bad at spotting the nuances of people's clothing and appearance, and maybe that's all part of why I choose to operate in a social milieu (the intellectual end of politics) which is relatively indifferent to how you dress (so long as there is no actual vomit on your clothes). Maybe in other settings the matter of what brand your shirt is, how well your suit fits, how well your last bout of plastic surgery went, etc. etc., are all very visible-at-a-glance. And, people whom I've floated this theory at have argued that in my part of London, if you aren't fairly high off the bottom of the social ladder, your only business in town would be begging, hence what I think of as a huge social cleavage. London SW1 creates the illusion of a social gulf between the nearly bottom and very bottom of society.

But I sincerely don't think this is true. I don't think my belief in this particular piece of sociology is a mere trick of my neighbourhood, or a defect in my own personal social antennae. After all, I do know the difference, at once, between the people at the very bottom, and everyone above them. That I can see. So, if I can't tell the difference between a super-market manager and Rupert Murdoch, that's because this difference is genuinely much harder to spot.

Would you know who Steven Spielberg 'is', if you didn't recognise him, just by looking at the guy at one of his parties? Aren't those jeans pretty much like the ones you and I wear?

And actually, my part of London, which either is or is right next to Pimlico depending on how you define Pimlico (Pimlico by any definition being where I do most of my regular shopping), is a 'real' enough area, by which I mean that it contains many rather poor, but very hard-working and respectable people, working away in their shops and their offices (many of whom, I surmise, are not nearly as poor as they choose to seem). There are lots of council estates around here, with their quota of struggling single mums. And almost all of these people are on the good side of the social barrier I'm talking about. For many, I'm sure it's one hell of a battle, but they manage it. They wash every day. They have an address. They have TVs and phones. Most of them work. They pay their bills, and whenever they want to look smart they can manage that, for the price of a few new CDs.

And in among them, crouching in the boarded-up doorways and in the otherwise meaningless little triangles and nooks of space created by modern architecture, are to be seen the Miserables, who do not wash, who do not pay bills, who do not have fixed abodes, and who absolutely do not look smart, no matter how hard they may be trying on any particular day.

These Miserables are made even more miserable by the fact that, unlike in former times, they don't even have weight of numbers on their side. In the nineteenth century, entire social philosophies were erected on top of the worry about what might happen if the Miserables ever got really, really angry. Now, if our modern Miserables get angry, which individually they do quite frequently (a lot more than in the past I should guess), they merely get a talking-to from sympathetic but firm police persons. In the past the luckier people were scared of Miserable anger, so if the Miserables did get angry they'd be clubbed back into subservience by riot police. But now, the combined anger of the Miserables counts for nothing and the Miserables know it, which is why we feel no need to see the police hurting them any more than they are hurt in the normal course of their lives.

One conceptual clarification here: noting the existence of this crucial social line between this way of life and that one is absolutely not the same as saying that no one ever crosses it. I'm not saying that. People fall below the line, and they climb above it, and they climb back above it. The point is: it's a line. It takes a hell of an effort to cross upwards and then to stay above, but it can be done and it is done, a lot. Social stratification and social mobility are two different things. I recall from my sociology studies that Britain has always had and still has a lot of both, and the social mobility probably makes us more aware of social gradationss, on account of us moving up and down through them and past them, than we'd be in a society with less social mobility.

Another clarification: I'm not saying that all the social gradations within the Great Washed are now of no consequence, that the differences between me and Rupert Murdoch doesn't matter. Far from it. They matter a hell of a lot, once you find out about them. I am merely saying that they are not things we can now tell from each other at a glance.

Faced with this circumstance, the Marxists have had a dilemma. Marxism used to depend on the Miserables outnumbering the Toffs at the top, but this doesn't happen any more. The most visible upper class is the majority. The most visible lower class is a minority. So, having dumped their reliance on the old Working Class, many ex- or post- or neo-Marxists have tried instead to stitch together a new coalition of the Miserable, mostly involving the more put-upon of the ethnic minorities. But alas for the Marxists, the ethnic minorities are just as anxious to avoid Miserable status as white people are, and are just as capable of doing so. One of the reasons why multi-culturalism bothers me rather less than it seems to bother many others in my part of the political landscape is that to me, the enormous anti-centrifugal gravitational pressures on everyone – regardless of race, colour or creed – to join the Respectable Mono-Culture are so massively strong that they can over-ride any amount of Marxist and post-Marxist mischief-making.

Other left-inclined strategists, including not a few former hardline Marxists by the way, have simply made the jump. A lot of the story of New Labour is the realisation that they had to let the Miserables go hang, and concentrate all of their electoral and propaganda efforts on the Great Washed.

(This is one of the many strands that has been woven into that complex thing know as Political Correctness. PC means lefty memes being divided up and spread separately among a class traditionally unimpressed by leftism in any form.)

Before backing off and letting commenters pick up whatever threads of argument they are inclined to pick up from all of this, let me mention one other little social tit-bit straw in the wind which I found out about in connection with my Transport Blog activities. On TV a week or two ago, they did a bit about some new British bus companies which are getting into their stride, which do two things. First: they charge very, very little for their tickets. But second, and in apparent defiance of this first policy: they insist that all tickets much be purchased over the internet.

The obvious explanation, and I'm sure the public one, for this policy is that this is more efficient. The driver doesn't have to bother with messing about with change, etc. etc. But I wonder if there might also be something else even more important than mere efficiency going on here. If you can only buy on the internet, that keeps out the Miserables. At present, travelling by bus in Britain isn't that weird and scary, probably because it's not that cheap, all things considered, the way it is the USA. But if in Britain it now does get seriously cheap, how do you then keep out the Miserables? Answer, by making it an internet only deal. None of this is spelt out in any of the bus sales chat, which is partly why this social exclusion point never occurred to me while I was writing my original posting about these companies. I only got to thinking about it in a subsequent comment. But I think it's a thought deserving of somewhat more prominence than that.

In the USA, as I say, cheap bus services, especially cheap inter-city bus services, are famously the haunt of weird people, at any rate if the movies and TV are anything to go by. Inter-city bus stations are famously the places where TV detectives trawl the lower depths of society, and learn of the most gruesome yet socially insignificant crimes. Buses and Miserables go together, in other words. As a result, the Great Washed are inclined to shun buses, and to pay extra to go by train or even air. How do you make Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny look like a seriously miserable sympathy case whose life is going nowhere, while still having her look like Michelle Pfeiffer? – not easy, God knows. Answer: stick her in a long-distance bus for the opening credits. Any American woman who has to endure this ordeal is in trouble. In fact it occurs to me that this movie is all about living just above the Big Drop, so to speak. And in Johnny's (Al Pacino's) case it's all about climbing back up again after you have suffered the Big Drop – see above re social mobility.

Final final thought. I love the Heinecken TV adverts we have in Britain just now which imply that asking for lager which is not Heinecken will, in Holland, get you tossed out of respectable majority of Dutch society and into the Dutch Underclass. ("Weirdo!") You can see that lager sellers would have a, er, demographic problem not unlike the problems faced by the sellers of extremely cheap inter-city bus services. This advert tackles this problem head on. Clever.

It is such a comfort to know that our public authorities are prepared to crack down hard on this sort of thing:

A prison officer was sacked for making an allegedly insulting remark about Osama bin Laden two months after the September 11 attacks, an employment tribunal heard yesterday.

Colin Rose, 53, was told he had to go because, although he did not know it, three Muslim visitors could have heard his "insensitive" comment about the world's most reviled terrorist.

The assistant governor at Blundeston Prison, near Lowestoft, Suffolk, gave him a ticking off at the time. But he was sacked after a six-month investigation.

Mr Rose, a former Coldstream Guardsman with a 21-year unblemished record in the Prison Service, is claiming unfair dismissal.

The Norwich hearing was told that on Nov 15, 2001, he threw some keys into a metal chute at the prison gatehouse. When someone said it sounded as if he had thrown them so hard that they were going through the tray at the bottom of the chute, Mr Rose said: "There's a photo of Osama bin Laden there."

Just in case Mr Rose happens to be reading this, he should memorise and repeat the following statement:

"Osama bin Laden is merely the poor, desperate victim of oppression and social injustice".

With sufficient sensitivity training, I am quite confident that unpleasantness of this nature can be avoided in the future.

Arnold Kling of the Bottom Line (one of the Corante blogs) has blogged about an email exchange with one of the 'intellectuals' over at Crooked Timber. He suggested that they actually read one of his essays before denouncing them as illegitimate. The reply he received was incredible. I suppose that is how liberals argue...

Arthur Kling (AK): Thanks for the comment. I am in favor of providing health care subsidies for the poor. What I object to is the notion that a middle class that supposedly cannot afford to pay for health insurance on its own can somehow magically tax itself to pay for health insurance.

Crooked Timber 'intellectual' (CTI): Tax the upper class. Why don't they figure into your calculations? Are your usual readers stupid enough to be swayed by such foolishness? Do you really think "big government liberals" believe what you claim they do? (I suspect that you do: your imagined opponents are all idiots who can't appreciate your impeccable logic.)

How about establishing a government health insurance system to eliminate the 30% overhead that "entrepreneurs" typically extract? Despite libertarian cant about government inefficiency, government insurance programs get by with less than 3% administrative costs. Seems that might make health care a bit more affordable. (I know that fact will be hard to accept, since it contradicts the dogma you adhere to, but it's a hard world.)

AK: Sorry that the point was unclear.

CTI: It was indeed. Are you sure the obfuscation was unintended?

AK: Thanks for taking the time to read the essay.

CTI: You're welcome. Wish I felt it had been better spent.

There is more rudeness, arrogance and supercilious invectives. Judge for yourselves.

Some people have far too much time on their hands:

The County of Los Angeles actively promotes and is committed to ensure a work environment that is free from any discriminatory influence be it actual or perceived. As such, it is the County's expectation that our manufacturers, suppliers and contractors make a concentrated effort to ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature.

One such recent example included the manufacturer's labeling of equipment where the words "Master/Slave" appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.

Okay, how about we use the term 'Boss-man/Bitch'?

Guardian's crime correspondent reports that scam-baiting - replying to the emails and stringing the con artists along with a view to humiliating them as much as possible - is becoming increasingly popular with more than 150 websites chronicling the often hilarious results.

Mike, a 41-year-old computer engineer from Manchester, runs the scam-baiting site 419eater.com, which started two months ago.

Almost always the scammer will think you are a real victim and try their best to extract money. It started because I used to get a few emails, and although I knew it was a scam I never knew how it worked. I did some research, found out about scam baiting and decided to have a go. It's now almost a full-time hobby for me.

His site specialises in collecting pictures of the scammers in order to make it more difficult to find new victims. Using the pretext that in order to believe they are real people they need to take a photograph holding up signs with the name of Mike's character, he has succeeded in getting one fraudster to pose with a piece of paper stating: MI Semen Stains. Other sites feature similar pictures with signs reading 'Iama Dildo', 'Mr Bukakke' and 'Ben Dover'.

According to Guardian the oldest anti-scammer site is Scamorama, which aims to educate the public about the latest trends as well as waste as much of the fraudsters' time as possible. The original emails often claim the author has suffered a personal tragedy, usually the loss of a parent. A typical Scamorama reply claimed the recipient has also lost a parent in shocking circumstances, having witnessed their own father being shot. The email was signed 'Alfredo Corleone'.

I had a go at some of the stories on the 419 Eater website and I recommend you have a look too. Marvellous stuff. What a way to brighten up a dull morning.

Brave, crusading, iconoclastic Guardian correspondent Matthew Tempest is striking out against the evil, right-wing, corporate-media conspiracy that is actively suppressing the truth:

It's an unthinking, immutable truth for the mainstream media that young people are not interested in politics.

So, if they were permitted to read about it, many of that media's consumers/readers would be surprised to learn that today something like 60,000 mostly twentysomething people from all over Europe will gather in Paris, unpaid, in their own time...

No-one is permitted to read about this. It is unclean. It is seditious. It is dangerous propoganda and, I swear, if you even cast your eyes over so much as a single sentence of it, your door will be knocked down and you will be dragged away by the jackbooted goons of the Bushista-Berlusconi-Murdoch Mind-Control Reich and subjected to continuous loops of Fox News until your eyeballs explode.

...to sit through four days, 10 hours a day, of..

Nose-picking, navel-gazing and self-abuse.

...lectures, seminars and talks on politics.

Same thing.

And it's not just any old politics. The topics are largely esoteric, complex and abstract...

Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.

Until today, the ESF had almost no coverage in the mainstream British media.

Well, what do you expect? Nobody dare speak of such things, lest they be 'eliminated' by the all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent Zionist-Corporate-Illuminati World Control Machine.

The event is the European Social Forum...

No kidding?!!

The ESF (slogan: A Europe of Rights and a World Without War) is, admittedly, a tricky topic to cover. Fascinating as the planned speeches and seminars may be, it doesn't translate easily into "hold the front page" breaking news.

Oh I don't know. Surely all it takes is a little imagination. Let's see, here is the itinerary which includes "Sustainable methods of production and consumption, ecology and preservation of the ecosystem". Need to translate that into a tabloid headline? Easy. "Save the Bamboo Forests, Start Eating Pandas."

No (immediate) changes to the world will be visible by Sunday, when it closes.

And no changes to underwear will be visible any time this decade.

With that in mind, this reporter will be filing a daily weblog, chronicling the events as they happen, who I talk to, bump in to, and, not least, how well I sleep at the "crash accommodation" - a so far undisclosed gymnasium floor somewhere in Paris.

Er, Matthew, I get this distinct feeling that you're going to be bedding down in a 'so far undisclosed' shop doorway.

First of all, though, is the Eurostar, and a train journey I'm looking forward to.

At least he will be able to get some sleep.

Instead, there will be 300 of us commandeering a carriage or two, with political theorist and global justice guru George "Moonbat" Monbiot (that's the nickname his rightwing critics give him) giving a lecture on the train...

CONDUCTOR: "Tickets, please?"

MONBIOT: "Do you realise that, by demanding a ticket from me, you are, in fact, acting as the unwitting pawn of the global capitalist conspiracy to exploit the underprivileged and suppress the democratic rights of the world's native peoples?"

CONDUCTOR: "Oh they're right. You are a Moonbat."

...before a hip-hop act takes over for an impromptu gig under the Channel.

So 'impromptu' that it has been meticulously planned in advance.

Revealing that I'm reporting on the event for the Guardian is on a "don't ask, don't tell" basis, for fear of being lynched for the sins of my colleagues. That's a slight exaggeration, but for the reasons just stated, many of the activists regard the mainstream media, even (or especially) the Guardian and Independent, according to the Noam Chomsky doctrine - as a safety valve by which the state-corporate nexus maintains its stranglehold on information through the existence of a fringe "liberal" media.

Oh my gosh, the Guardian and the Independent are both in on it, too. They are mere tools of the Right-wing-Bush-Hitler-Corporate-Nazi Programme of Social Control and Dissent Crushing.

STOP. DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE. DO NOT FOLLOW ANY OF THE LINKS. IT IS ILLEGAL. YOU WILL BE CAUGHT AND YOU WILL BE PUNISHED.

Although I still maintain that I do not take iCan all too seriously, I have bunged a new 'campaign journal' up and also written the same piece up as an iCan 'article' called Neither chaos nor regulatory dystopia. iCan is wildly convoluted and a real nightmare to navigate and I could not figure out how to 'attach' the article to Anti-Activist Activism.

I did however find out how to attach the article to iCan 'issues', such as 'direct democracy', where I am sure it will be about as welcome as a turd on a billiard table

I can't wait to see their election manifesto:

Anti-war activists including the Guardian columnist George Monbiot are planning to form a coalition to challenge the Labour party in the European and local elections in June.

The attempt to unite socialist parties, anti-globalisation campaigners, peace activists, and faith groups, including Muslims, has already aroused the hostility of the Green party, which is branding the electoral project as "unhelpful".

The Green hostility is understandable. They can't very well be expected to just sit back and do nothing in the face of this open challenge to their monopoly on crackpot drivel.

The Conservative Party has been blessed with a ringing endorsement from none other than Polly Toynbee:

A remarkable document has emerged from the Conservative frontbench. Search it from cover to cover and few would guess its provenance. Its deceptively dull title hides a radical departure: Old Europe? Demographic change and pension reform, by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for work and pensions, transforms Conservative family policy.

Not even his economics smells of Conservatism. The pensions problem does not, Willetts declares, need more saving by today's workers. "Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare."

So, is this just a devlishly cunning bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu to throw their opponents? I don't believe they are anywhere near clever enough for that.

I think the end is nigh.

As I type, the American magician David Blaine is suspended in a perspex box above the River Thames in London in which state he intends to remain for a period of forty-four days with water but no food. For the life of me I cannot see what 'magic' is involved in this process but I will concede some moderate appreciation of his will to endure.

Rather less appreciate is the seemingly endless procession of London low-life who have taken it into their heads to try to sabotage him:

Protesters today tried to attack the cage holding illusionist David Blaine next to the Thames.

In a dramatic raid just before 5am a man scaled a scaffold support tower which is connected to Blaine's perspex cage. Two accomplices had diverted security guards. The protester then tried to cut through the cable supplying water to the illusionist who is in the 10th day of his 44-day endurance challenge.

Excuse me, but protestors? What, precisely, are they supposed to be protesting about? Has David Blaine been oppressing the Palestinians? Did he invade Iraq? Has he contributed to starvation in Africa? Is he lining his pockets from 'unfair trade'?

I submit that the term 'anti-social thugs' is far more accurate and appropriate.

There is an awful lot of this kind of thing appearing in the mainstream British press right now and I cannot help but wonder if it isn't a faint echo of the 'root causes' mentality: the tendency to ameliorate malevolence by ascribing to its perpetrators the implication they are driven by some sort of legitimate grievance. Hence, their actions can be both explained and excused.

Whilst there stands no comparison whatsoever with Mr.Blaine's bone-headed tormentors, I am quite convinced that if Adolf Hitler and his cronies were on the march today the press in this country would insist on referring to them as 'German militants'. Likewise, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge would be described as 'peace activists'.

The Volokh Conspiracy highlights the jailing of an antiques dealer "for conspiring to receive antiquities claimed by a foreign government, in this case Egypt."

This has been an earthquake of sorts for the American trade in antiquities, it is an open secret that most of the material is assembled against various foreign laws. Previously the American law was applied only to thefts from museums, churches, private homes, and the like, now for the first time it is being applied to thefts from archaeological sites. Dealers suddenly wonder whether they can stay in business. Observers wonder what is the difference between licit and illicit antiquities dealers, given how much of the material comes from sites.

Although the Volokh Conspirator agonizes over this issue in seeking a proper libertarian solution to the problems posed by the antiquities trade, it seems to me that the solution is quite simple in principle, and that the problem is entirely a creation of overweening governments.

As with any other item, an antiquity is properly on the market if the seller has proper title to it. For an old vase recovered from an archaeological site, the answer to who has title is (or should be) quite simple. The vase belongs to the archaeologist (or other person) who found it, unless it was found on private land, in which case it belongs to the landowner. The vase is, essentially, lost/abandoned/mislaid property in the sense that no one knows who the original (or last) owner was and/or no one can trace their living descendants. Under the common law, such property discovered anywhere other than private land belonged to the finder as against anyone but the true owner, meaning in an archeological context that the antiquities belong to the archaeologist, unless the dig was on private land, in which case it belongs to the owner.

The "problem" posed by the antiquities trade is entirely a creation of overweening governments, which have asserted a wholly unjustified ownership interest in all antiquities discovered within their borders. If one disregards this claim (as the American courts apparently did until this most recent case), then in principle it becomes possible to construct a valid chain of title for antiquities, and thus possible for the trade in these items to go forward on the same basis as every other line of business.

One wonders how other countries, especially the French (as I understand Paris is the center of gravity of the arts and antiquities trade), deal with this issue.

Given its provenance (and prominence) as a marxist tool, class analysis is something which both conservatives and classical liberals tend to ignore. To the extent that people whose politics fall within those groupings understand it at all, they respond to the mere mention of the term with an understandable degree of horror.

But that's a shame because the examination of class interests can be a very useful means for analysing problems and even discovering possible solutions. I believe it can every bit as useful for individualists as it has been for collectivists.

In his latest Telegraph editorial, George Trefgarne, wields a bit of class analysis in formidable fashion:

I can't help thinking we need an English Poujade, to speak up for the little person and take on our own Left-Bankers. You know the type. Self-satisfied and pleased with themselves, they are the new Establishment who have deposed the old, traditional elite.

It is they, rather than your stereotypical Tory squires, who thrive in such institutions as universities, the Church, Whitehall and the BBC. Only the Armed Forces seem to be holding out against them. They are hung-up about class, contemptuous of tradition and love petty gestures such as refusing to curtsy to the Queen or abolishing the Lord Chancellor because he wears tights.

If you question their beliefs, they will express disdain, mock you for being old-fashioned, suggest you are immoral or dim, and - their trump card - racist. But the truth is they are, for the most part, members of the government salariat, who live off taxpayers' money.

It sounds as if Mr.Trefgarne may have read about the Enemy Class. If he hasn't, he should. In any event he has made a worthy stab at identifying a potential counter-class:

But the real economic pain is being shouldered by the generation I like to call the Baby Busters - those in their twenties and thirties who are the children of the Baby Boomers born after the war.

Unlike some previous generations, Baby Busters find it easy to get a job. But they are an assetless group, groaning with debts. Baby Busters graduate from university with thousands of pounds of loans to pay off; they cannot afford to get on to the housing ladder as prices have soared to their highest ever level (when measured as a multiple of incomes); they are not saving for a pension because the stakeholder wheezes that the Government invented for them are a flop; and they are not earning enough to progress in life.

The 'busters' are groaning under the weight of supporting a monstrously overgrown state; the result of their parents endless demands for interventions and government largesse.

Everywhere, their opportunities are restricted by the growth of government, bureaucracy and rising taxation. Yet no political party seems to care about the Baby Busters. They are a rabble, waiting for a rouser.

We're trying, Mr.Trefgarne, we're trying.

The Financial Times has long dined out on its reputation as an institution steeped in sound economic principles combined with dispassionate and admirably non-partisan reportage.

The truth is that, for the last few years, that reliable old standard of fiscal soundness has been an amplifier of third-way, interventionist euro-mummery and the kind of kumbaya hand-wringing that most of us more normally associate with the Guardian. Sad yes, but predictably concordant with the miasmic and corrosive spirit of our age.

However, I detect a change afoot and not for the good. If this preposterously fawnographic article on Noam Chomsky is anything to by, then maybe the FT is about to pack up its wagon and head on out into the wild, barren scrubland of drooling lefty-lunacy:

Noam Chomsky pokes fun at President George W. Bush's "original vision" of a Palestinian state, and the audience chuckles. He talks of Ronald Reagan as "our cowboy leader" and they guffaw. He reminds them that the Reagan administration once described Nicaragua as a grave military threat and they practically roll in the aisles."

The he tells them the one about two gay guys who go into a bar and they double-up in spasms of choking hysteria. Noam Chomsky: the comic's comic.

The collective sniggering makes everyone feel at one, and the US's dissident-in-chief is not above being clubbish.

Nor is he above being childish. In fact, he makes a handsome living out of it.

On this warm evening in a suburban Boston church, they are looking to their unofficial leader for a renewed sense of purpose.

They'll be looking for a very long time.

A 74-year-old linguistics professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Chomsky may look an unlikely hero.

Very unlikely. In fact, so unlikely as to be statistically impossible.

But it isn't so straightforward for this MIT intellectual, who has created a cult following by opposing all US administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. A self-described libertarian socialist, he would not be caught dead at a Democratic Party rally.

If he was, would anyone notice? Oh and another 'libertarian socialist' (chortle). Do these snake-oil salesmen never give up?

Chomsky sometimes loses his thread.

Wrong. His thread is trying frantically to get away from him.

He talks about the centuries-old abuse of the native Americans. He lambasts Democrats, criticising John Kennedy over the Cuban missile crisis, and Franklin Roosevelt over the second world war.

Yeah, fucking Roosevelt went and joined the wrong side. Bastard!

But if the Democrats are such a bad bunch, a woman in the audience asks, why bother pulling Bush out of office for their sake?

Said woman was immediately set upon, dragged out into the street, beaten, stripped and set on fire. This part was edited for reasons of taste and decency.

Chomsky doesn't miss a beat.

Yeah man, that's Chomsky all over. Old 'chain blue lightning'. Sharp as a tack. Quick as a bullet. He's the turbo-charged nail-gun of political dissent. He never misses a beat. Er, except when he's losing his thread.

Widely known for his incendiary political writings...

And even more widely known for his utter gibberish.

His eloquence and large following - especially in Europe - have made him a painful thorn in the side of most administrations, including those of Kennedy and Johnson.

Some of us are rather wary of people who have a 'large following' in Europe. And with good reason.

And 'painful thorn'? Is George Bush sitting at his desk facing a coterie of security chiefs saying "Damn it, guys, can't any of you come up with effective strategy for dealing with Noam Chomsky"?

It was effectively disarmed by the UN... Nobody regarded [Saddam] as a threat except the US."

Oh and except all those Iraqis whose clawed their relatives remains out of burial pits.

Even Chomsky's more controversial statements pass unchallenged. He says the Republicans "don't really want terrorism, but don't really mind that much," and dismisses fears of the radical Islamic Hizbollah group as largely unfounded.

Poor old Hizbullah. So misrepresented. So misunderstood. (sob)

Most Americans won't notice this speech. And many who hear it later, when it is broadcast on radio, are likely to write off Chomsky and his followers as off-the-wall leftists.

Now what on earth would make them do a wicked thing like that?

The Financial Times ran a very successful marketing campaign with the slogan 'No FT. No comment' but maybe that has played out now. Better they replace it with 'The Financial Times: we take Noam Chomsky seriously'.

Britain is hot today. Scorching. It's hot, it's sticky, it's steamy and, for the Guardian that means....it's Kyoto time:

Evidence increasingly points to a weather system shaped more and more not by nature but by humanity. The pattern of industrial development of modern day society appears to be producing too much pollution for the world to cope with. The effects will irrevocably remake the climate for the worse.

And we all know who to blame for this, don't we? Yes we jolly well do.

On gaining office, the Bush administration, with its roots in oil and big business, withdrew unilaterally from the biggest international commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions - the Kyoto protocol. To gain some scale of how reckless this act of political vandalism was consider this: if US states were independent nations they would comprise 25 of the top 60 nations that emit greenhouse gases - Texas's emissions alone exceed France's.

The Guardian runs this same editorial rant about once a fortnight regardless of whether it's hot, cold, tipping down or a white-out. In the summer, though, they just turn the volume up. They probably call it a social conscience. I reckon it's a bad case of sunstroke.

Adriana sez: "Statism is enough to drive a girl to drink".





Granny sez: "Don't you have some flavour other that 'samizdata.net flavour'?"

But what do you think the captions be?

Far be from me to try to tell HMG how to run their nationalised industries, but if I was ever to be charged with such a thankless task, I would not go about it like this:

Fitness tests for police recruits are being made easier in an attempt to increase the number of women officers, the Home Office has announced.

Recruits' speed and agility will no longer be put to the test as this is where most of the women have been failing.

Tests of strength and endurance will be made easier and the speed and distances recruits have to run will be halved.

This may actually be a blessing. As we watch the apparatus of a police state growing around us we can take some comfort that the police may get set on us for all the wrong reasons but at least we will be able to run away from them.

Yesterday I came across an interesting op-ed piece by Adam Nicolson of The Daily Telegraph in which he bemoans the decline of the art of conversation.

It has started happening to me all the time. I say something, probably going on too long, never happy to use one word where a hundred would do, but trying to persuade someone to see it all in a different way, to see it, let's be honest, my way, and at the end of this long spiely speech that I give them, they say, "Yeah, whatever," and turn off on to the thing that, as far as they're concerned, really counts.

And then he really lays in to "whatever":

"Whatever" wafts a contemptuous and disdainful hand in the direction of everything he has had to say. As a saying, and an attitude, it goes beyond the confrontational. A few years ago, more aggressively but at least more engagedly, someone who felt equally sceptical might have replied "So what?" in the same circumstances.

He tracks down the culprit - the origin of this degenerate phenomenon lies with modern marketing:

What is the source of this new, casual, bypassing contempt and impatience? At least one of its origins, I think, is the appallingly degenerate language of modern marketing. We are swimming in a soup of the near-meaningless. On a plane the other day, I was given a box full of unguents called "Origins In Flight Comfort Kit". "For those who don't know about Origins," the leaflet began, "it's all about caring for yourself in different ways. Choices. Alternatives. New Experiences. Finding unusual answers to every-day problems." Among which were lip-grease, skin-cream, a water spray for your face and then "brush your teeth with Rembrandt Whitening Toothpaste for a healthy, brighter smile".

The sentimentality and cynicism, inflated into a puffball of what hopes to pass for charm, that make up the modern language of salesmanship has made us all impatient with blather. It has created "whatever" as a reaction to the over-elaborated or overstated, because ingrained in us now is a recognition that the marketing surface is not to be trusted.

[...]

If the "whatever" phenomenon signals the approaching death of the marketing culture, it is likely to bring other things down in its train. "Whatever" loves only the minimal. It will have no time for the enriched or the inherently complex. "Whatever" thinks that everything should be reduced to essentials, which is a recipe for crudity and philistinism...Poetry, for one, can't really survive in a whateverised world. To be or not to be, that is the question. Whatever. Is this a dagger I see before me? Whatever. The rest is silence. Whatever.

Bravo! I agree wholeheartedly. I agree so much that I have quoted the piece almost in its entirety. The language of marketing is ludicrous and preposterous at best, crude and insulting to its audience at worst. My impression is that many companies are now stuck with costly marketing techniques, simply of out fear that if they do not spend a fortune on glossy brochures, flash animated websites, extortionately priced logo designs and re-designs, expensive advertising etc, they will not be taken seriously. Marketing as we know it may still be around not because people actually believe that such marketing works but because everyone does it as a token sign of a Serious Business.

One thing I always hated about Big Companies was their increasingly disconnected and uniform marketing. When The Cluetrain Manifesto come along a few years ago, I breathed a sigh of relief. A breeze of fresh air, a tornado of common sense, it unveiled the Emperor's naked and bloated body underneath the threadbare designer clothes.

I am not holding my breath waiting for the end of marketing but I do hope that more and more businesses will see it for what it is and stop throwing money at the advertising industry and insulting their customers and employees with its meaningless marketingspeak.

Not even for a fleeting moment do I believe that President Bush and his cabinet need me to jump their defence. Indeed, jumping to the defence of any politician is not an activity that generally sits well with me.

However, I am prepared to set aside my customary reluctance in the case of George Bush but only because he seems to have become an Aunt Sally for every loud-mouthed class-war agitator who is looking to make a name for themselves with the woolly-hatted, mushy-brained, stapled-face brigade.

A case in point is the current (and I am so ashamed to have to type these words) Mayor of London, Mr.Ken Livingstone. Livingstone is veteran political shape-shifter who has spent the last thirty or so years hitching himself to every po-mo leftist bandwagon that rolled into town and maybe even invented a few of his own. Having been shoved back under his rock by the Thatcher government of the eighties, wily old Ken has since re-invented himself as a cuddly 'man of the people'; an image that he has assiduously cultivated as a base from which to launch a political resurrection.

Thanks to his favourable media coverage and a severe outbreak of Memory Deficit Disorder (a condition endemic to this country) 'Ken Il Sung' managed to get himself elected to this high-profile office that enables him to regale the world with what I suppose he regards as his words of wisdom:

Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, was widely condemned yesterday after comparing George Bush to Saddam Hussein.

Oh well, I suppose it makes a change from comparing George Bush to Hitler.

The Left-winger described the American President as a "coward" who was at the head of a "venal and corrupt administration".

Anyone who accepted large sums of cash from Colonel Qaddafi in order to set up a trotskyite newspaper has got some nerve calling other people 'venal and corrupt'.

Addressing an audience of schoolchildren...

I don't suppose adults would want to listen to all his tiresome bollocks.

"This really is a completely unsupportable government and I look forward to it being overthrown as much as I looked forward to Saddam Hussein being overthrown."

Yes, which is why 'cuddly' Ken was at the head of every 'Stop the War' march.

Mr Livingstone is used to courting controversy. Shortly before being elected mayor he appeared to endorse anti-capitalists rioters when he said: "Every year the international financial system kills more people than World War Two. But at least Hitler was mad."

But, Ken, Hitler's views on the 'international financial system' were remarkably close to your own. What are you trying to tell us?

Yesterday he played down his latest remarks, saying that he had made the same point at an anti-war rally in February and that no one took much notice.

No doubt because they were all stunned to hear that you wanted Saddam Hussein 'overthrown'. You did tell them that back in February, Ken?

Asked about the row, Ari Fleischer, Mr Bush's spokesman, said: "I've never heard of the guy."

The perfect response. Ken Livingstone: the nobody's nobody.

I have only just noticed a really quite interesting and lengthy essay by Bill Whittle on Eject! Eject! Eject! called Victory:

This nation has been for many decades under direct and coordinated attack by fanatics whose failure to gain respect and attention through the force of their arguments have turned their level of rhetoric to such a shrill and hysterical pitch that years of it have seemingly driven some of them quite insane -- insane to the degree that they cannot see that acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons and daily torture and execution are not mere rhetorical flourishes -- roughly equivalent to hanging chads and bulldozed Dixie Chicks CD’s -- but a desperate and ever-present reality.

They did everything in their power to deny this reality, these Champions of Compassion, and Not In Their Name did these daily horrors come to an end. That is what six decades of freedom, security, tolerance and prosperity will do to some people: isolate them from the brutal reality of horror and torture to the degree that "evil" must be accompanied by sneer quotes and the motives of 300 million free and decent people are suspect while those of a small cabal of psychopathic mass murderers are not.

Whilst I think it is not a 'coordinated' attack and should be more realistically described as widespread but unsynchronized petulance, the toxic nature of these attitudes are no the less real for their lack of coherent direction. Bill's essay is a lengthy but thought provoking read. Check it out.

If you want something cultural to read, I recommend postings numbers one and two of Nikos Salingaros week, over at 2Blowhards.

The postings are interesting. But even better, in my opinion, are some of the comments. I've posted tangential comments of my own about the "New Urbanism", briefly on Transport Blog, and at somewhat greater length at my Education Blog. Meanwhile here are bits from two of my favourite of the Blowhard/Salingaros comments, so far.

First, here is "Tom", replying to something Michael Blowhard had said about suburbs:

You are so right about the zoning, transportation department, fire department rules ossified since the 50's creating inevitable horrible suburbia. I have done work in suburban areas and the results are completely predetermined by setbacks, maximum lot coverage areas, single use zoning, minimum parking space numbers and transportation department road standards. This is where the problems with modern architecture really are - a socialist/utopian attitude towards city planning. Even in many areas where they object strongly to this kind of thing, the solutions are always increased regulation - appearance reviews, stricter zoning, etc which just makes the problem worse. The reason all suburbs in america look the same is because there are two (i believe) companies that publish model codes for towns that they just buy off the shelf. The role of new urbanism should be fighting these standards.

But I am nervous about blanket condemnations of any kind of architecture. Modern architecture is not quite the force for evil in the world that I keep reading on this blog. That said, modernist urban planning is as bad or worse than has been expressed. What we need to be worried about is any totalitarian vision for architecture or urbanism. A strong town or city has the capability to absorb any style of architecture or building type, but any utopian or totalizing scheme will always destroy the city. Hitler and Speer's megalomanical plan for Berlin (dispite it's neo-classical style) was not a good thing regardless of how much Leon Krier liked it. We need architecture and urban planning that is anti-utopian and anti-totalitarian, not necessarilly anti-modern.

And second, here's Michael Blowhard himself, commenting on posting number two, having a go at A. C. Douglas:

… I don't know about you, but I have a hard time reconciling ACD's language with his implicit claim that he's the reasonable one here. Um, to say the least: his words seem to me to be dripping with irrational fury. Castigations, imprecations -- hey, son of a gun, that's the language of the offended religious nut! I'll resignedly point out, feeling slightly wounded, another anomoly -- that ACD, despite his habit of presenting himself as the ultimate arbiter of all things civilized, never shows the grace to express even the smallest appreciation for the way 2Blowhards occasionally stimulates a little conversation on architecture topics. No, he just seems to want to stamp it out. Tres civilized. …

You need a bit of heat in among the enlightenment of a good debate. Michael then goes on to offer an example of what he has in mind. In general, the needle between the Blowhards and ACD is something to savour. My opinion of ACD's views on the Modern Movement in Architecture is that I agree with most of what he says about the operas of Wagner.

My take on all this is that Salingaros is onto quite a lot of good stuff, and stirs in quite a lot of opinion-wrapped-up-as-science sense and ditto nonsense. I don't plan to read his magnum opus until it is (a) a huge best-seller and then (b) remaindered. I'm not holding my breath.

The way I prefer to write about modern architecture – well, maybe I mean the way I prefer to see it written about – is one bad idea at a time. And there are plenty of those, believe me. I'm strongly with "Tom" in wanting to see fact and opinion separated, as Salingaros and Douglas are both very bad at doing. In my opinion.

In my other postings on this subject I've been recommending in particular this article, entitled The New, Neighborly Architecture.

Meanwhile, my congratulations to the Blowhards on some fine blogging and some truly outstanding blog-debate hosting, terrific even by their standards.

Okay, enough about Iraq. Something even more unpleasant - the sheer din experienced these days while shopping. I am not talking about the noise caused by the clack of shoes on a floor, or the natural bustle of a busy marketplace. This is all part of the deal and can often create a buzz which is almost pleasant. No - and I sense this is my old age creeping in - what gets on my nerves is the loud pop music din which seems to be a standard feature of shops these days.

Example. At lunchtime today your humble scribe went to a shop in central London to get a new mobile phone. Okay, the staff were no more surly, badly dressed or inarticulate than most, but that was not the problem. The problem was that it was if I had strayed into a particularly bad nightclub by mistake. I could hardly hear myself think as I went through the options of a mobile phone deal. Craziness.

My grouches besides, what motivates the owners of shops to blast out music like this? Is there some philosophy which has worked through the shopping world in the UK - I cannot vouch for other nations - which says that the more loud music we have, the more we will buy? I don't honestly know about that, but for me, the sheer loudness of some of the music played these days often encourages me to leave a building as soon as possible. I guess I am not the only person to feel this way. Maybe some shrewd shopping entrepreneur could steal a march on his rivals by setting up calm, music-free shops.

If anyone reading this actually works in the retail business and can explain the current fashion for piping loud music in shops, your comments would be most welcome.

I was supposed to be in Milan on Friday. But instead, I ended up spending a night in a tiny Austrian village and having to cancel my meetings in Italy.

I was heading through the Austrian Tyrol on Thursday when after rounding a corner on a descending road, my car started skidding on ice and began spinning uncontrollably, somewhere vaguely near Bischofshofen. After several terrifying seconds I came to rest with a gentle bump against a flimsy metal barrier between me and about a 100 metre drop. And then a few minutes later, while I was still sitting there trying to calm down, a woman in an ancient Skoda with German plates did the same thing and I thought she was going to shunt me over the edge. I jumped out of my car as her slowly spinning vehicle came closer and closer... and I immediately slipped on the icy road and went sprawling. Just to add to the fun, I didn't even have my shoes or big coat on, just a tee shirt and a little skirt. But like me she just bumped into the barrier, which was obviously stronger than it looked, missing my car by about 2 metres. I have to say I felt my lapsed Catholicism flickering back to life at that moment.

My German is rudimentary and she did not speak any of my languages, but I think we were both trying to calm each other down for a few minutes and I am pleased to say that she burst into tears and not me. Her name was Hanna and while my car had only a teeny little dent on the rear bumper (I hit the barrier backwards), her car was more damaged, with both front lights broken, as she hit the barrier straight on and a bit faster. Additionally, neither her wipers nor one of her rear lights was working and her engine was making alarming spluttering sounds.

It was getting dark already, so poor Hanna could not drive her car without headlights and with a questionable motor on a twisting icy mountain road. As a result I did not feel I could just leave her there. Also after what had just happened I was not too keen to keep driving myself but obviously we could not just stay there. It was bitterly cold and windy as well, I am sure it was at least -10 Celsius. Fortunately I was travelling with all my luggage so I loaned Hanna a puffy coat and we waited to see if someone would stop and help us. I tried to call my friend in Vienna to ask what to do and how could I contact the Austrian Police but my phone could not get a signal.

Soon a car drove up, with French plates I think. And kept driving. He also skidded as he went up the road we had both skidded down but the car did not crash... and after a moment he was gone. Then nothing for over half an hour as the last daylight started to fade. Finally I heard the sound of a truck coming from the same direction we had both come from and then headlights... Hanna and I jumped out of our cars. I looked over and from her expression she was probably thinking the same thing I was, wondering if the truck was going to do what we had both done. The thought also crossed my mind that we could at least have moved both cars away from where the next person to come sliding down that road was also going to land. Obviously it was a bit late for that now. There was probably a good reason that the barrier we had bumped into looked suspiciously new.

Fortunately the approaching truck was quite unimpressed by the slippery surface, moving with the authority that only really big industrial things have. As the truck approached, I realised that we had both been so concerned that our cars were about to be shunted over the edge should the approaching monster have skidded, we were not jumping up and down to attract the driver's attention. We need not have worried however, and he pulled up along side us in a juddering swirl of lights, diesel and vibration. After a moment, out climbed a middle aged Austrian man who asked us if we needed help (I deduced he was probably not asking us for a cigarette). Seeing my Croatian licence plate, he asked me the same in French, Italian and English, the last of which I (obviously) speak.

Quickly assessing our problem, he suggested that we follow him into the nearest small town some 10 kilometres away: Hanna would follow him closely as she had no headlights and only one dim taillight. I would follow Hanna to ensure she was not back-ended. And so off we went. I have always disliked driving near large trucks as they make me nervous, but I have to say that having that big metal beast in front of us slowly growling down the icy road in low gear was very reassuring.

Eventually we arrived at a town and Hanna pulled into a garage that our friendly trucker led us to. He also stopped and got out and we both thanked him for his assistance. I decided I did not want to make the long haul to Milan, still several hours away, given the road conditions and my frayed nerves. I asked the truck driver if he knew of a hotel or inn nearby. He said yes and that I should follow him, whereupon he climbed back into his truck and started off. I followed him for maybe 20 minutes and he pulled up in front of a row of houses in some tiny Tyrolean flea-speck of a village.

Within moments of the truck and my car pulling up, a woman immerged from one of the houses. She and the driver quickly conversed and then they came over to my car, extending their greetings and offering me a bed for the night. Their friendly nature was so clear that I could not really say no. There is something very reassuring about a smiling woman in a dirndl and within moments I was inside and being investigated all over by a large and excessively friendly borzoi dog with a wet nose. Only now did I discover the names of my hosts, Rudi and his wife Anna-Maria... and Strudel the dog.

Although Anna-Maria spoke only a little English and I only speak a little German, we were able to converse in a weird mixture of several languages (English, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian and German), prompting Rudi, who turned out to be an encyclopedic film buff in five fluent languages, to make jokes about a character who conversed with a chaotic multilingual jabber in the film 'In the Name of the Rose'.

Soon I was gorged on robust Tyrolean food and light headed from far too much of something called Mozart Salzburger, a yummy chocolate flavoured liqueur I have never had before. It seems I was not the first lost soul Rudi had brought home unexpectedly and Anna-Marie showed me post cards and letters from Moscow, Hamburg, Athens and Plovdiv from people who she had met under similar circumstances to my unannounced arrival. Although I do not really speak Bulgarian, I could make out enough of the meaning of the letter from Plovdiv to translate it into English for Rudi, who for over ten years had never actually been able to read it. It was a letter of thanks for assistance rendered to a Bulgarian student he had given a lift to many years ago. I ended up spending the night in the bed of Rudi and Anna-Maria's son, who was away with his German girlfriend in Poland for a few weeks. I eventually gave up repeatedly ejecting Strudel from the bed and drifted off regardless of canine curiosity.

Next day, I got on the phone and for business related reasons too convoluted to mention, I abandoned all hope of going to Milan and instead managed to bring forward an appointment in Switzerland. So Rudi and Anna-Maria saw me to my car and waved me off, and after another none too easy drive, here I am in Zürich, in a lovely oh so Swiss hotel just a few minutes walk from Paradeplatz, with a pleasant but cold weekend to kill.

So if you ever find yourself in distress on a remote Austrian mountain road and out of the gloom comes Rudi Steiner, rest assured that you are in the hands of a true Austrian gentleman.

And if you ever run into a German woman called Hanna from Leipzig, driving a battered old Skoda, tell her I want my puffy coat back!

Must say I admired David Carr's ability to get hold of a transcript of the BBC broadcast of the first day of the euro note and coin (January 1). For a moment I thought it was a spoof, but it just looked too real for me!

"This is the news from the BBC. Today witnesses the launch of the Euro as the official currency of the twelve Eurozone countries. There are reports coming in from all over the Eurozone of joyous celebration and free, happy citizens spontaneously embracing each other in a new spirit of unity and brotherhood. Our leader, Citizen Prodi, has formally announced that the Euro will herald in an everlasting era of unprecendented peace, prosperity and complete fairness for every person. Already, the grain harvesting figures are confidently predicted to reach their highest ever level and tractor production has officially doubled! It is the Great Leap Forward our leaders have promised us. Meanwhile, however, in Britain counter-revolutionaries and extreme right-wingers continue to conspire with American capitalists to keep the Euro from liberating the oppressed British people. That is the end of the news"

The regular Samizdata contributors are reading and listening to:

Dale Amon
Last book read: Winning Colours (Elizabeth Moon)
In the CD player: Song X (Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman)
Last magazine: Fly Past

Perry de Havilland
Last book read: The Fabric of Reality (David Deutsch)
In the CD player: Soul Reflections (Xorcist)
Last magazine: Scientific American

Walter Uhlman
Last book read: Art of War (Sun Tsu)
In the CD player: Stunt (Bare Naked Ladies)
Last magazine: First Freedom

David Carr
Last book read: To hell in a handcart (Richard Littlejohn)
In the CD player: Itaipu (Philip Glass)
Last magazine: Free Life

Natalie Solent
Last book read: ? (?)
In the CD player: Spitfire Prelude and Fugue (Sir William Walton)
Last magazine: House and Garden

Natalija Radic:
Last book read: Fear and loathing in Las Vegas (Hunter S. Thompson)
In the CD player: Dämmerung im Traum (Stromkern)
Last magazine: Vogue (Italian Edition)

Samizdata Illuminatus
Last book read: The Necronomicon (Abdul Alhazred)
In the CD player: Malediction & Prayer (Diamanda Galas)
Last magazine: Simplicissimus

Actually I do not mean Sauron at all, I mean Noam Chomsky (I know, I know, same thing).

What do they have in common? Flit, an interesting new blog run by Bruce R., that is what. I found this polished looking little jewel via Dawson, whom I was checking out to see if he had any new Ann Coulter pictures <snigger>.

There is an excellent article critiquing the Horowitz attacks on Chomsky and I must say I largely agree with him on all but a few minor points. I think Christopher Hitchens' attacks were far more damaging to Chomsky than those of Horowitz, though he does indeed land a few blows on the Vile One too.

In an earlier Flit article, had I started blogging sooner than November, I would have made much the same points regarding the historical analogies in Afghanistan. Much of the ill informed punditry fretting US involvement in view of the disastrous Soviet and before them, British Afghan wars missed something rather importent... Britain learned the lessons of the horrendous First Afghan War and kicked the crap out of the Pashtun in the Second Afghan War. Likewise the military 'template' of successful colonial style warfare, namely using the synergy of friendly local forces and a smaller but highly professional British force with higher technology (the famous mountain warfare 'screw gun' light artillery) is exactly what we have seen in Afghanistan once again with the Americans (and some Brits too) operating with the various anti-Taliban forces. It is gratifying to see someone else make those points. However it also backs up what I have also pointed out myself in earlier Samizdata articles, the trick after victory in the Second Afghan War was to install 'friendly' local leaders and then get the hell out before an insurgency developed...so why oh why does that cretin Tony Blair want to stick around 'peacekeeping'? The Americans clearly understand the relevance of British military history better than the half-wits in the Foreign Office... no surprise there I suppose.

But Bruce, as for Kylie and that song... resistance is futile, you have been assimilated.

Over on The Fly Bottle blogista Will Wilkinson writes about Totalitarian Chic.

Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.

It reminds me of someone catching sight of my collection of pretty enameled Soviet Political Activists Pins, Red Army Hats and 'Heroic Soviet Worker' posters. As he was well aware of my anti-communist background, I saw his eyebrows raise. Heading off his question I interjected.

Headhunters keep the severed heads of their enemies as trophies.

He understood immediately.

The demented Hollywood Investigator reports on the fact that due to the marvels of modern technology, Britany Spears has been 'upgraded'. As you can see in the pictures, they are talking about her, ahem, microphones.

I wonder if David Deutsch is aware of Miss Spears' less well known talents in the field of Quantum Theory?

I am sending in a vital article from Bosnia-Herzegovina tonight. But the problem with being with my friends in here in Sarajevo is that I now have little sticky crumbs of baklava in between the keys of my portable computer (no, sorry, not the infamous biMac I was fantasizing about before but a real Titanium PowerBook) and there is cigarette ash everywhere. But if there was no baklava crumbs and cigarette ash, I would not believe I was here. Yes, I know I am rambling but I am slightly drunk on Stara Sljivovica and hopped up on endless tiny cups of nuclear strength Bosnian coffee.

Ok, the important information now: over on the wonderful blog Mind over what matters, there is a picture of Jay Zilber in bed. It is soooooo cute!

But what I want to know is who is that funny looking guy that he is lying on?

With thanks to Transterrestrial Musings for pointing out this top notch P. J. O'Rourke article in The Atlantic in which he 'puts the boot in' to all the usual suspects with his trademark clarity and viciousness. Excellent.