Here, via the Flickr blog, is this charming photo (click on that to see it as big as you want), which combines an ancient agricultural procedure with some much more modern civil engineering, somewhere near Treviso, in north east Italy:

Ideal circumstances, all here will surely agree, for a James Bond car chase. Goldeneye, which was shown on ITV2 last night and is on ITV2 again tonight, has a car chase early on, on just such a road. No sheep are involved, but there are cyclists. Bond didn't drive into them, like this, but he did drive past them and they all fell over.

Sadly, I think that the above road is probably too narrow for cars, and is actually a bespoke sheep track. I guess that sheep, in Italy, are objects of political worship, much as cyclists are here.

I came across this article, which reads like a plotline from a Robert Ludlum thriller. Gloriously bonkers.

(H/T, David Thompson).

The Controller's Monthly Note from Radio 3 informed me of a new role that may fail a test of utility. They have appointed the artistic director of Music and the Deaf to sign a prom.

This Prom will be the first ever 'signed Prom'. Dr Paul Whittaker, artistic director of Music and the Deaf will guide the audience in the hall through the music of Stephen Sondheim in the company of the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by David Charles Abell (above).

Music and the Deaf is a worthwhile charity that aids deaf pupils who wish to learn how to read music and play instruments. Supporting this minority endeavour through private philanthropy and voluntary contribution is admirable for those who are interested in this cause.

One must ask if private encouragement requires public support: and if it does, whether a 'signed prom' meets that requirement. Music is enjoyed by people who can hear, not by the deaf. This is a fact. Allowing the Orchestra of the Deaf to play gives public evidence that the deaf do not need tobe prevented from studying music.

A 'signed prom' is a sop to the irrational and a waste of public money.

Indeed. Bulletproof custard. Thank you Instapundit. The spirit of Q lives on.

This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill's last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: "It makes you proud to be British."

I try always to take my camera with me whenever I go out, because I never know what interesting thing I will encounter, and because I have a superstitious fear that on the one day when I don't take my camera with me when I go out, that will be the day when an Airbus A380 flies over the middle of London, much too low, with one of its engines on fire, just when I have a perfect view of it.

Which means that when, on a recent late night visit to a local food and drink store that I don't usually frequent, I spied the following mildly interesting collection of objects, I was able immediately to photograph them.

Okay, not an especially startling thing to see. A fizzy drink named after a murderous bolshevik who, because he died young just after being very well photographed, and because a lot of stupid and dishonest people worshipped him while concealing exactly why, is remembered as beautiful, and cool, and wise, and virtuous.

This peculiar cult of Che the Beautiful has been much discussed here, over the years, and not in a polite way. However, this fizzy drink does not by any means completely disgust me, by which I mean that the idea of it does not completely disgust me. I haven't actually tasted Che and am in any case quite happy with the Tesco own brand version of such "energy" slop. Yes, these Che cans perpetuate a silly cult, but they also make it look, I think, rather ridiculous. For what we have here is not so much an anti-capitalist message as capitalism co-opting the iconography of anti-capitalism. Many of those seriously stupid people who not only love Che but who actually having a real inkling of what he stood for and of what he tried so ineptly to foist upon the world, well, they hate that. Their hero reduced by marketing opportunists to selling little cans of a generic fizzy drink to a target demographic of adolescent and agingly adolescent fools! Their precious revolution reduced to "the revolution of energy", and it's not even proper energy type energy, just stuff to keep kids awake for a few more hours. The horror. And I love that. This is the kind of thing that may eventually cut this beautiful, dead, deluded, murdering incompetent down to size.

Also, this is a photo-opportunity for the likes of us to remind ourselves, yet again, just what a bastard this particular bastard was, and just how stupid it is that so many people still worship him.

By the way, it was most gratifying how quickly google yielded up all those links. As one of the authors linked to above says, I forget which one, it is not at all hard to learn the ghastly truth about this ghastly man. Typing "Che Guevara" into google doubtless engulfs you in evil delusions. I don't know. I didn't do this. What I typed into google was: "truth about Che Guevara", and most of what I very quickly found was very good and very anti-delusional.

According to one lady writer, when Che was a child he used to kill dogs for fun, a sure sign, she adds, of a psycho. Is that true? "Che Guevara killed dogs for fun" only got me back to the article I read this in. But if it is true, I think we might spread this around. Perhaps some little labels should be printed saying "When Che was a child he killed dogs for fun", or maybe just "dog killer" because that's quicker and simpler - and maybe tactically more effective because more cryptic and weird and disconcerting - and could then be stuck on Che tee-shirts, on Che posters, and on these little Che tins.

Germane to Michael Jennings' post below pertaining to Prince's declaration that the "Internet is completely over", I had a brief conversation with a decidedly winsome 20-something young lady, elegant yet edgy (she was a cut glass accented thoroughbred Sloane Ranger wearing 'All Saints'). She was sitting in a sandwich shop in a well-heeled part of town... expensive Apple laptop open as she availed herself of the free WiFi whilst having luncheon...

The following really happened, serious, not joking.

Samizdata Illuminatus "Did you read that Prince thinks the 'Internet is completely over''? He refuses to release any of his music on it at all"

20-Something-Young-Lady "Really? Umm... I did not even know he was a musician."

SI "Well, yes...he is. He is one of the great guitarists of our time."

20-S-Y-L "Hah, that's funny! I cannot picture that old foggy playing a guitar! I thought he just spent his time playing polo, messing with architects and hugging trees..."

SI "No, no, no, not Prince Charles... "

20-S-Y-L "Prince William? No, I am sure you must mean Harry! Oooo! Yummy Harry with a guitar!"

SI "No, the American musician called 'Prince'."

20-S-Y-L "Oh, I see. And this chap calls himself 'Prince'? That's hilarious!"

SI "He used to call himself 'Squiggle'."

20-S-Y-L "I'm sure I've never heard of him."

SI "I suddenly feel very... old'."

20-S-Y-L "I'll download something of his off Bit Torrent and see if he's any good."

I do not believe she immediately grasped the sheer transcendent irony of the moment.

Michael Jennings just emailed me the link to this, "You may have seen this" being the title of his email. No, I hadn't. "This" starts thus:

There was an unusual match between Barbados and Grenada.

I'll say. Read the whole thing. Really, read the whole thing. It's a classic of perverse incentives, showing how the wrong kind of rules can cause everyone to want to do badly. It's about much more than football, in other words.

The ultimate quack remedy

- Simon Singh on the Today Programme a few minutes ago, describing how France's biggest-selling homoeopathic flu remedy, earning zillions of dollars, is made from the heart of a single Muscovy duck per year.

It's becoming an interesting evening of sport on the television, and on the www. A teenager scored a century for Surrey (my team) in their T20 game. (I follow T20 cricket on cricinfo.com.) And Matt Prior scored a century in less than fifteen overs for Sussex, in their game. The USA, who seem to me to have a very good team, topped their group in the soccer World Cup, by beating Algeria with a very late goal, shading England from the top spot and elminating Slovenia, whom England beat, also 1-0. And the USA did this while having what looked like two perfectly good goals disallowed, one in today's game, and one in their game against Slovenia, which might have won that for them. Now Germany are playing Ghana, and if they don't score, they'll be out. Hold that. Germany have just scored. If it stays like that, Germany will, I think, play England in the next round. Yesterday, France were eliminated, when they lost to South Africa. And I've just heard that Australia have beaten Serbia, which means that Ghana also go through.

But I heard nothing else remotely as strange as this:

"If you've just joined us, do not adjust your set. It is indeed fifty five all in the final set."

I had just joined them. It's someone called Isner versus someone called Mahut, at Wimbledon. Goodness knows how it will end. Or when it will end. Or if it will end. It is now fifty six all.

Make that fifty seven all. Now it's fifty eight fifty seven to Isner. Still no breaks of serve in the final set. Apparently someone called Ron Mackintosh is commentating for the BBC. And this is his very first match. Follow this mate. Follow this. Mahut has now served fifty times to stay in the match. I think he is French, by the way, and Isner is American. John McEnroe just said he feels sorry for the umpire.

Fifty eight all. They are taking a break.

LATER: It's fifty nine all, and there's been an appeal against the light. Play is suspended.

The longest tennis match ever played, anywhere in the world. And tomorrow it will go into its third day.

As seen in a signature on a Star Wars: The Old Republic games forum:

[Luke:] I can’t believe it.

[Yoda:] That is why you fail.

[Ayn Rand:] Success does not come from believing in a steaming pile of mystic gibberish, you stupid little green man [ignites her lightsabre and advances threateningly]

- Act IV, The Fountainhead Strikes Back

A 'muslim' babe called Rimah Fakih wins a beauty pageant in the USA and apparently this is a Hezbollah conspiracy.

Yup, clearly a sign of how deep radical muslim infiltration of key American institutions go. Moreover as we all know that beauty pageant winners are known for their original thinking and deep political insights, and moreover some radical in Lebanon (this one, not this one) shares her family name apparently, the Islamisation of the good ol' USA is clearly at hand.

I have posted these images as a wake up call to American to act before they are overrun with bikini wearing pole dancers intent on destroying the home of the free and land of the brave.

No need to thank me... just another high minded public service from samizdata.net

When I was a wee kid growing up on my folks' farm in East Anglia, it was a common sight, in the 1970s and 80s, to see RAF Jaguar and Tornado jet aircraft practicing very low flying over the flat (ish) fields of that part of the UK. Typically, a Jag could fly no more than 100 ft off the deck, so low in fact that you could see all the markings on the side of the aircraft, what sort of stuff it was carrying, etc. The idea was to get under the opposition's radar. These aircraft were practicing the sort of flying that would be needed against the-then Warsaw Pact ground forces of the time. (The Jaguar was a very effective strike aircraft).

But nothing, absolutely nothing, compares with flying as low as this. Ye gods!

Here's another.

I have been rushed with work lately - hence no update on the blog yesterday by me or indeed, by anyone else. But hey, it is Friday, and time for a spot of photo nonsense.

I am not sure I would want to play chess with any of them, mind. (H/T, David Thompson).

Trawling around some sites to find a corporate statement, I came across this gem:

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Attend The Daily Beast's Women in the World Summit."

Blimey. Is the writer of that headline channelling the late Evelyn Waugh?

Captain America did not dis the teabaggers. Only his writers and artists. It is time for some new superheroes: The Entrepreneur, Atlas Shrugs, The Tax Return (only in taxes paid...), Death Duty and so on

Why name superheroes after animals when you can dispel you favourite tax. I am designing the uniforms for the supervillains: VAT Package, Solvency 2, KPMG and IFRS...

"The Pope? How many divisions has he got?" Joseph Stalin is reported to have said dismissively. And we all know how that turned out.

Ron Paul, the "Dr No" of US politics for his habit of being the only member of the House of Representatives to vote against some measure to increase federal government spending, debt or power, could witness the repeat of such a peaceful realignment.

Tim Evans, writing on the Cobden Centre's blog, has found that a Google search for "Ron Paul" will find over 28.8 million entries, whereas one for "Karl Marx" will generate a mere 6.26 million. As he concludes: "it is true that these things take a long time to play through, but as a sociologist I am excited by the long-term cultural, political and economic impact of these sorts of numbers" for the cause of a free world.

Presumably, a rise in online interest about Ron Paul, relative to Karl Marx, should translate into tangible results at some point. The election of Scott Brown the Republican challenger in the recent Massachusetts special election to replace Senator Edward Kennedy, was also preceded by a similar gap between the Google ratings of the various political parties' candidates.

The battle over Google and Bing search engines

Google - Scott Brown has been mentioned 53,200,000 times on Google, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 50,600 times on Google, the appointed Senator Paul Kirk has more mentions than the current Democrat candidate for that seat!

Bing - Scott Brown has been mentioned 52,800,000 times on Bing, while Martha Coakley has been mentioned 219,000 times on Bing...

It seems that Congressman Paul could put together more divisions than the cause of Marxism. Seems like a cheerful note to end the week.

In my browsing through the Web I enjoy the site of David Thompson. After getting a pointer from Brian Micklethwait on his own site, I started to check in on Mr Thompson's site pretty regularly. On Fridays, he manages to get his hands on all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, often with fabulous photographs.

Well, if you have thought of living in a tree house (as I did as a young boy on my parents' farm in Suffolk), then check out this.

In Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman.

- Keith Olbermann, MSNBC host.

To which Mark Steyn responded, under the heading "Homophobic Nude Teabaggers on the March":

That's certainly why I'm supporting him. But who knew there were so many of us?

Today's Guardian leader, purportedly on social class, is worth reading. It is utter rubbish. But it is worth reading because it is utter rubbish.

It is an informative compression of the muddled thinking of the reflex left: non sequitur piled on fallacy, piled on miscomprehension of both theory and real people, piled on all-or-nothing thinking, piled on misprision of fact, bonded together only with a sticky, sighing outrage. Read it out loud and you may find yourself using that furious-sobbing-child tone and plonking emphasis affected by professional radical activists—especially women—to convey how strongly they feel about the world. As is universally acknowledged, strength of feeling is the same as strength of argument.

I say 'the reflex left' because the alternative, 'the conventional left', though it offers the pleasure of mocking the unoriginality of the radical, suggests a developed coherence in what is usually just attitudinal stamp-collecting reinforced by mutual approval (libertarians beware). Considering that the reflex left is obsessed with economics and sociology, and professes to derive its policy from them, the arrant ignorance of either, even as they are invoked, is an unending wonder. (Libertarians beware, bis.) That is on fabulous display here in a jazz hands incursion into social mobility, offering numbers that are not numbers ("But a child born 20 years later who is a successful professional now would probably come from the top quarter...") and that lead to no detectable conclusions, which can only have been included for emotional colour. Impersonal social forces are held to dominate, but paradoxically regarded as tools of the wicked if they do not do what is wanted.

There is another way that 'reflex' is appropriate: this is reflexive discourse. It preaches to the converted. It says, "Look! We were right all along." And assumes therefore that nothing need be said to engage the unconvinced (and again, beware). It is offered within code.

The best non sequitur in the piece is an epitome of an epitome. I considered offering it as a quote of the day. It has everything: it erupts into the discussion from nowhere, is complete nonsense, is nowhere meaningfully followed up, involves an appeal to shared attitudes and beliefs in the reader as reinforcement, and contains an implied accusation of wicked motives in others:

Politicians want us to believe that it is possible to make better-off people richer without making poor people poorer.

The Guardian leader-writer thinks we already do believe that it is impossible. Not even unlikely. Impossible. If we object that sometimes people have got rich by enslaving and impoverishing others, but that mostly both rich people and poor people have got richer together, though at different rates, then we must be wrong. The rich are richer ergo the poor are everywhere poorer. If the Prince of Wales is running his Aston Martin on spare wine and skiing every winter, it can only be at the direct expense of the Duchy of Cornwall's serfs - who are now starving in greater numbers than in 1337. The politicians stand accused of denying such an inconvenient truth

No wonder the people think they are out of touch.

"Our exercise program can dramatically improve a woman's sexual performance," says Olga Nikitina, 40, the founder of the School for VUM-Building in central Moscow. "She can transform herself from a slow Russian car like a Lada into a Ferrari." To disguise the fact that the equipment really does look like it belongs in a car-mechanic's workshop - it's all pressure gauges and rubber hoses - the school's two rooms are painted pink and blue; stuffed animals model phallic devices.

"Once a woman reaches optimal fitness, she can shoot a fountain of water up out of her vagina in the bath," boasts Nikitina, a ponytailed blonde in a leopard-print top. The core device is a small silicone balloon that is inserted in the vagina and inflated with a pneumatic pump. "You squeeze against the balloon and measure the pressure on the attached gauges," says Nikitina. Fine-tuning can be achieved by learning to shoot out pebbles onto a metal target.

- Russian women learning how to get - and to keep - rich and generous husbands (with thanks to Instapundit)

Mr Rudd made it clear that the deal had been an exercise in saving the international climate change process.

“As of 24 hours ago, these negotiations stood on the point of total collapse … at midnight last night, we were staring into the abyss,” he said.

He said the “big step forward” in the talks came with rich and poor countries agreeing to the goal of containing global warming to 2ºC.

Hmmm... Staring into the abyss... and then a big step forward. Not often you hear a politician speaking the truth!

(via Francis T, quoting The Australian)

There is beer... and then there is Tactical Nuclear Penguin (what an exquisite name for a beer).

I must confess I have a soft spot for any company that can also make a low alcohol beer called Nanny State... and as 'Goat in the Machine' pointed out (what an exquisite name for a blog), any outfit that can outrage an arch-statist lobby like 'Alcohol Focus Scotland' is certainly going to get my business once I am no longer sick as a parrot (being ill for coming on a week has allowed my blood/alcoholic levels to fall to zero... the horror, the horror).

This story, in The Times (of London), caught my eye:

Gerard Earley was so impressed by Ian Hart’s performance in the West End that he got to his feet to applaud. Ian Hart was so unimpressed by Mr Earley that he ran from the stage to scream threats at him. Ignoring the appeals of John Simm, his co-star, the actor lunged at Mr Earley, whom he accused of talking during his performance. When Mr Earley protested that he had not been talking Hart launched into a furious rant and had to be restrained by ushers. Hart, who says that he does not enjoy the relationship between performer and audience, could now face police action.

Chatty theatre-goers are very irritating. I am sure that readers can understand how annoying it is to sit in front of a noisy person while watching a film, or listening to a concert of a certain type, etc. Usually, the theatre/venue relies on the audience being sufficiently well-mannered to behave, but in this increasingly infantilised culture, I notice that there tend to be more and more signs and instructions, such as telling people to switch off their mobile phones, etc.

Of course, when such venues are privately owned, the owners can set whatever restrictions they want and hope that customers accept them - if they do not, they will go elsewhere. So if a steward working in a cinema, say, observes a couple chatting away, using their phone, eating loudly or being generally boorish, they should be able to chuck them out without a refund.

But while the circumstances of this case I mentioned are in dispute, it does appear that this actor is particularly sensitive to perceived noise or interruptions. He sounds as if he is not cut out for live performances. Better take up something less stressful, old chap.

I first wondered whether this story was a spoof, but it appears not to be so.

I wonder what Patri Friedman, moving light in the Seasteading Institute and an advocate of the idea of creating new nations, makes of this story.

Sealand is one of the longest-running attempts to create a micro-state. It is off the Suffolk coast, based on an old anti-aircraft tower. The article, by the local newspaper in the East Anglian region, contains a nice photo of the place.

I suspect that if Sealand ever provided services - such as totally encrypted financial service facilities - then a tax-hungry UK would not demur at sending over a frigate to shut the place down. But the guy who set up this place has been known to defend his territory vigorously. For a supposed old eccentric, he's held out remarkably well.

1. Why has the null hypothesis been the backbone for testing for decades
2. Epic fail
3. Brazil miniskirt woman
4. Bratislava babe
5. Does my carbon footprint look big in this
6. Opinions about healthcare
7. Miss Japan porn scandal
8. Communism collapse
9. Best national anthem
10. Dystopia satire

The internet is strange.

Much is being made in some circles about this "9 Principles, 12 Values" thingie being bandied around by Glenn Beck. So as I am in the grip of insomnia yet again, I though I would run my sleep deprived eyes down that list and see how I would stack up were I an American politico, presumably running not under the Republican Elephant Banner but some sort of vaguely libertarianish 'Don't Tread on Me' Rattlesnake Flag or maybe a Star-Spangled Hippopotamus Vexillum (I did warn you I was sleep deprived)...

The 9 Principles

1. America Is Good.

- America is a nation-state and even the least bad nation-state can never be more than a necessary evil. It is the nature of the beast.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

- Nope and she ain't ... but "Hail Eris" just in case.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

- Um, Glenn ol' buddy... this 9/12 shtick is addressed to politicians, no? And anyway, I think I strike the right balance between honesty and tactical duplicity.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

- The family is a pretty good idea, so yeah, but in truth I am pretty much owned by my other half as she can be pretty scary when she wants to be.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

- Justice is blind and achieving it is a vital life objective ... the law on the other hand is not just blind but rather prone to be deaf, dumb, stupid and as often as not utterly malevolent. So yes, it needs to be applied to politicians good and hard.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

- Hell yeah.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

- Amen to that.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

- Indeed.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

- Quite so. In theory. Sort of.

The 12 Values

* Honesty

- Great idea, at least with people likely to reciprocate.

* Reverence

- Very overrated... to me 'reverence' is something that I only feel when confronted by a juicy medium rare Argentine steak or a 10mm that never jams.

* Hope

- Essential.

* Thrift

- As politics is about Other People's Money and Liberty... utterly essential.

* Humility

- Nice but hardly essential.

* Charity

- Also nice but how does this fit into politics? You cannot be charitable with other people's money.

* Sincerity

- Indeed and anyone who can fake that has chosen wisely in their decision to pursue a career in politics.

* Moderation

- To quote Barry Goldwater... "I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

* Hard Work

- Essential and I intend to hire people capable of doing exactly that.

* Courage

- Essential in all things.

* Personal Responsibility

- The cornerstone of all moral calculus.

* Gratitude

- I would be grateful to get a few hours sleep at some point tonight.

What is the world coming to? A man who has not confiscated money from taxpayers, oppressed anyone or plundered their way into wealth was allowed to enter the UN and shake hands with all manner of sainted kleptocrats who are supposed to be there!

This is an inexcusable lapse of security... the predators of the world and their willing minions must be protected from being mocked by harmless capitalist restaurateurs! This must not be permitted to happen again!

Fact One: preposterous surveys cost the British economy £1.38 billion

Fact Two: prior to the invention of Twitter, no one employed in British offices knew how to waste time that should be spent working, as no one was surfing the internet, flirting with co-workers, staring out the window at that hottie over there with the short skirt and high leather boots, photocopying their bums, telling jokes, gossiping...

Fact Three: 97.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

So if you purchase a Baby Einstein for your child and he/she does not in fact attain legendary levels of accomplishment in the subjects of physics and mathematics (and become laughably inept at economics), i.e. become just like Albert Einstein... apparently you can get your money refunded.

I assume any parents who dangled a 'Baby Mozart' over Hank and Britney's cribs and were rewarded with nothing but derivative Anton Salieri pastiches from their children, they too can demand Disney put them into funds to compensate them for their bitter disappointment at the mediocrity of their offspring.

A good friend of mine who purchased a 'Baby Guderian' for his child several years ago is now expressing some alarm that young Rupert may not in fact turn out to be the military genius that Britain is sure to need in future years when we inevitably take our final leave from the EU, not to mention liberating Aquitaine from the intolerable yoke of the French state.

Is there no end to corporate misrepresentation and malfeasance?

Via the David Thompson blog - which has a weird and wonderful collection of oddball stuff every Friday, I came across this aspect of science fiction movies.

Some nifty photos and links on this website as well.

Snakes.

A chance encounter? Perhaps not.

We need to try this in the UK as well. Releasing rabid pit bulls in Parliament (and then locking the doors with everyone inside) might be more culturally appropriate however.

I am not quite sure how robust this report is in terms of its data sample, but it does rather undermine the standard complaint that the British are the worst tourists. I am still not entirely convinced, but still:

PARIS (Reuters Life!) - French tourists are the worst in the world, coming across as bad at foreign languages, tight-fisted and arrogant, according to a survey of 4,500 hotel owners across the world. They finish in last place in the survey carried out for internet travel agency Expedia by polling company TNS Infratest, which said French holidaymakers don't speak local languages and are seen as impolite.

Blimey.

"It's mainly the fact that they speak little or no English when they're abroad, and they don't speak much of the local language," Expedia Marketing Director Timothee de Roux told radio station France Info. "The French don't go abroad very much. We're lucky enough to have a country which is magnificent in terms of its landscape and culture," he said, adding that 90 per cent of French people did their traveling at home.

Yet we Anglos are not that great at speaking foreign languages either. I mean, I speak passable French, German and a few phrases in Italian, but most French folk I have met abroad do speak English of varying degrees. To a certain extent, such a finding might depend on the type of tourist and the places they go to: most French tourists or expats living in London will tend, I find, to be pretty keen to find out about where they are and so will learn the language a bit.

The report concludes:

"But French tourists received some consolation for their poor performance, finishing third after the Italians and British for dress sense while on holiday."

Touche!

President Obama must have heard of my disappointment. He heard how my slothful and procrastinating ways lost me the opportunity to essay a therapeutic fisking, and considerately stepped in to give me another chance. I refer, of course, to this gushy article in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I meant to comment when it appeared on May 28 but I was busy and the moment passed.

I will get to Obama, but Macintyre first. After some mostly unexceptionable stuff about the importance of history in schools, Macintyre wrote:

History follows politics, and the Bush-Blair years were Dark Ages for the subject.

O frail flickering light of knowledge, only kept aflame by the devoted labours of Channel 4 documentary producers! I would say that we were a teensy weeny bit lacking of a sense of proportion here, except that all the history nobs these days say the Dark Ages weren't. Plagues, Normans etc. can happen to anyone after all.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan showed scant understanding of the history of those regions.

Mr Macintyre wrote a well-received book on the American adventurer who was the inspiration for Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. So I suppose he cannot really be promoting the currently popular racial theory that Iraqis or Afghans are essentially "unconquerable" or "untameable". But let us put it this way, he is content to leave most of his readers with that impression. Personally it seemed to me that Afghan women were pretty much conquered and enslaved by the Taliban but I have high hopes that their untameable Afghan nature will be proved by their never again returning to that state.

Both Bush and Blair were technocratic leaders, more concerned with the mechanisms of power than the human context in which it was wielded. Neither possessed a historical hinterland.

Hinterland is one of those irritating words that dates the person writing it, usually to a wet Monday. Actually Bush read so much history that a professor of history at Yale had trouble keeping up with him. Blair, I suspect, is a man more fond of thinking about History than history, but all the same, I expect he reads enough to power his reveries.

Today history is suddenly central to politics again. Gordon Brown repeatedly invokes Adam Smith, an earlier son of Kirkcaldy, in his defence. David Cameron refers to the essential importance of “a shared history” in building a coherent society.

"Central to politics again" my hinterland. More like two routine examples of politicians ticking the boxes marked "famous person with connection to self" and "buzz word."

And Barack Obama is the historians' president, the apostle for a distinct view of the world seen though the prism of the past. His election campaign was firmly based on his own history.

A little too much so, some might say. His life prior to the presidency seemed to consist mostly of writing autobiographies.

His historical allusions are occasionally inaccurate,

Yeah.

but his references to Abraham Lincoln's “Team of Rivals”, to the horrors of Auschwitz, to Churchill, to the Crash of 1929, are not merely political positioning (although they achieve that too), but a subtle recasting of politics that invokes a shared historical memory.

Anyone know what this means? When trying to work out what something means it usually helps to ask "as opposed to what?" but that gives no answer here. How does the new, recast politics invoke a shared historical memory in a way that the old politics did not? And does he mean any historical memory in particular?

Next week Mr Obama comes to Europe to mark the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings, and to Ohrdruf, a satellite of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald that his Uncle Charlie helped to liberate at the end of the war.

The visit is a clever melding of personal and general history, evoking shared aims, spectacular heroism and the defeat of evil.

When Bush came to Europe for the 60th anniversary five years ago, was that a clever melding too?

But more than that, the historian-President will be enlisting the past to a cause, at a time when the power of history to shape our lives has never been greater, or more necessary.

Despite evoking so much gush that you would think Mr Macintyre had struck oil, the historian-President sometimes comes out with rather odd views. It might be more accurate to say that he does not notice when his speechwriters come out with some rather odd views. One example came up in the (generally pretty good) speech he just gave to the Muslim world. He said, "Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition."

Hmmm. I do not claim to know much about Spanish history but I do know that the Reconquista was practically over - and was certainly long over in Cordoba (by more than two centuries, I see from Wikipedia) - by the time the Inquisition came along. To my chagrin, David T of Harry's Place spotted the same gaffe while I was writing this post, and he seems to know a good deal. There are at least four comments before anyone makes a Monty Python reference.

I am quite tempted to vote for Robespierre in the European elections, masquerading as Jean-Louis Pascual, a bus-driver who has lived in Reading for many years. Will he be asking, in monster mode, for cheese and wine orgies. Alas, no! His goals are more mundane: he wishes to become President of France. From 2006, since this competitor to Sarkozy has been around for a while:

The "Roman Party" is listed in the Evening Post as:

'Jean-Louis Pascual, a bus driver who was born in France but has lived in this counrty for 11 years, explained the Roman Party referred to the phrase "When in Rome do as the Romans do".

He said: "This is all about people coming to this country and becoming part of the community.

"There are some people who come here and stay separate, living in groups and keeping to their own culture.

"It is fine to keep in your own culture in your home, but outside it you should not be separate."

Mr Pascual, 36, of Watlington Street, is standing for Reading Borough Council because he wants to be a "minister or president" in his own country.

He told the Evening Post: "I believe that if I get recognition in this country then I will be recognised in my own country. It is difficult to come to power in France if you are not wealthy."

He said because he was single and without children and family here, he could not be corrupted.

He also suggests British jails should be moved abroad to Russia and the money saved should be spent on the NHS.

I rather prefer his criminal justice policy. Remember tomorrow is the day when you can stand up and be counted.

I am not a very musical person, but the following juxtaposition in the tv schedules last night struck me as remarkable:

9:30 ITV1 Britain's Got Talent (results show). Amateur variety acts are ranked by the viewers. Predicted audience 14 million. An industry in itself.

9:00 BBC4 Standing in the Shadows of Motown. Documentary on the Funk Brothers, the Motown Records house band, who played on everything even the amusical like me have heard of, and incorporating live sets with the surviving old guys backing top modern soul artists. Predicted audience, way under half a million.

Hereford T-bone has none of the attractions of udderburger. And sometime in the next year they will let those 14 million vote for a government, too.

First there was the financial crisis; then, our entire political numpties were found out to be embezzlers. But now, we have a real black swan.

Nul point Norway wins Eurovision with the highest number of points ever achieved in the competition.

Click on the link. You know you want to. (H/T: David Thompson).

Yes, it is Friday. I just cannot face writing about the UK economy/corrupt British government/Chicago Community Organiser for a few days. The sun is shining so enjoy the weekend, have a barbecue, drink chilled wine, etc.

Comics taken to a new level:

So Marvel has finally gone porno. In last week's issue of the new "dark" Spider-Man Reign, it was revealed that Spidey killed his wife MJ with . . . radioactive sperm.

Have they been channelling Dr. Manhatten?

We occasionally get some pretty nutty comments on the threads but I often think that this blog's comments are models of coolness and restraint compared with what else is out there. In response to a fairly decent article by Niall Ferguson, the historian, at the Daily Telegraph today, is this zinger from some character by the name of King O'Malley. Enjoy:

What a load of Tosh. Adam Smith is a discredited lackey of the Lord Shelburne camp who promoted the idea of a market based 'hidden hand' when in fact the 'hidden hand' was, as everyone at the time knew, the supranational elite banking/gold cartels that dictated policy to already indebted British governments. Smith lacked the moral courage and intellectual ability to address the control of money and its value, fractional reserve banking and fiat paper in his laughable diatribe 'Wealth of Nations'.

As far as I know from reading Adam Smith, the great Glasgow professor was in favour of some form of gold-backed currency, although the exact details escape me. But no matter; what this splendidly nutty comment shows is that its author has heard words such as "gold", "fiat money", and "fractional reserve banking", and is convinced that there was some dark conspiracy by the great economist and the UK establishment to obscure or suppress knowledge of these things, or that Mr Smith "lacked the moral and intellectual courage" to talk about them in his "diatribe" (WoN being in fact a calmly-argued piece, the very opposite of a rant).

The depressing thing is that is that is a bit of a debate - admittedly on the sidelines of the economics debate - about things such as the proper structure of banks, monetary systems, and the like. The danger is that if a person who has not heard of criticisms of fractional reserve banking, etc, encounters comments like the one before without first understanding a bit about the subject, they'll be put off for life. "These guys are crazy", he'll say, and move on back to the same old complacent, wrong-headed consensus view. All the more reason, then, for such gloriously normal characters like Kevin Dowd to set the pace in arguing for free banking.

By the way, I make no apology for keeping banging on about this free banking issue. It is a subject where a steady stream of blogging commentary can make a difference, I hope.

This (which I just had trouble getting back to - it was linked to from here today, top left) is very strange:

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

Very strange because it seems to me that with about five seconds thought one can easily arrive at an evolutionary advantage associated with a belief in eternal life, and accordingly an evolutionary explanation of it.

Tribes of ancient humans often battled each other to death – literally to death, the losers being completely wiped out – and in these battles, a willingness to die might be the difference between victory and defeat, between your gene pool spreading, and your gene pool being wiped out.

Tons of stuff has been written about the prisoner's dilemma associated with infantry battles. If you all stand together and fight, your side has its best chance of winning. Anyone breaking and running exposes all others to annihilation. Etcetera. Military cultures ancient and modern were and are suffused with ideas of honour and courage and self-sacrifice, all of which resulted and result in everyone in your army standing firm and holding the line.

In such a world, a belief in some kind of Valhalla of dead heroes is pretty much a certainty. Even now, effective military units do everything they can to ensure that their heroic dead-in-battle are treated with tremendous solemnity and never forgotten, giving them eternal life of a limited kind, and pour encourager les autres. Such notions have even greater force if eternal life is literally what everyone in the front line of battle believes in. I am amazed, absolutely amazed, that any academic could be unaware of such notions, or if aware, then unpersuaded.

It's as if this guy Scott Atran has never seen a war memorial, and never even read The Selfish Gene, which is all about how our selfish genes cause us, in certain circumstances, to become raging altruists, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good of society.

You do not have to have to have any particular view of the truth of religion in order to see the force of this explanation. As an atheist, I am obviously on the look out for evolutionary explanations of the phenomenon of religious belief, given that I don't think such beliefs are correct - so why do people persist in believing them or in their absence, invent them? But religious people often use such genetically-enhanced-altruism notions to argue for religion, on consequentialist grounds. In a similar spirit they also argue, perhaps rightly, that religious people are more inclined to have children, and hence to outbreed us atheists, childbirth being, for a woman, not unlike taking part in a battle, especially in earlier centuries. Religion makes your society stronger, because it make you more willing to sacrifice yourself for the collective!

Notice that if you didn't care at all about the collective in the first place, the argument in the previous sentence would have no force for you.

It's somewhat off topic, but this is one of the many reasons why I am, although an admirer of her in many ways, not a devotee of Ayn Rand. Her stated plan of saving the world by abolishing altruism flies in the face of the known facts of human nature. The trick is to do altruism well, not to try to abolish it. Which is easier said than done, as our current economic troubles illustrate well, and which is actually, I would argue, what most of Ayn Rand's stories and heroic characters were really all about, despite what she and they insisted on telling us.

Following on directly from some of the things Johnathan says immediately below this, here is visual proof that surveillance cameras are not quite the innocent gadgets that some tell us:

The bloke who sent this in to Idiot Toys found it "somewhere on Amazon", so we may never know where this scary camera is, who it is snooping on, and what its future plans might be.

Caption anyone?

Yesterday Chris Grayling unveiled a new Tory slogan, which must be the worst offered by a British political party for a while, despite the impressive competition provided by "Forwards, not backwards," "British jobs for British workers," and "The real alternative." It is:

Fewer rights, more wrongs.

OK, so I am a bit of a weirdo, and I do not always take the same view of what is right and what is wrong that most people do, but when I say something is wrong I do not want more of it. I am fairly sure the general public is against wrongs, and expects politicians - however implausibly - to advocate reducing them.

A large number of people, certainly the majority of the political looter class, think the best way to deal with the rapidly deepening economic crisis is via 'stimulus packages' with money plucked off the magic money tree... which is to say, by trying to re-inflate the credit bubble that actually caused the crisis. This is a bit like treating alcoholics by urging them to buy more whiskey.

So is this actually any more daft? Frankly I do not think so and it is at least a whole hell of a lot more funny.

When visiting China in October of last year, I found myself in a supermarket. I like visiting supermarkets in foreign countries, as despite globalisation, imports, and exports, there are still many products that are produced and only available locally, and a supermarket tells you far more about the culture and consumption habits of normal people than anything you would learn by (say) going to a restaurant.

For instance, China is now one of the world's top ten (in terms of volume, at least) wine producers. Chinese wine is not generally seen anywhere outside China, but is very readily available in China. The producers have even mastered putting some mixture of faux-Frenchness and Chinese clicheness on the labels.

I suspect that they may not realise that "vin de table" on a French wine label means approximately "This is bad wine" (ie it failed the quality control tests that exist under French wine laws and which would have allowed the winemakers to put anything else on the label), but in the case of most Chinese wine it is for the moment fairly appropriate.

However, I digress. While Chinese wine can be made fun of a little, there are other products at which the Chinese are indeed the experts. It was not long ago that China was principally known in the west for its tea, and although China now produces and sells many other things, the country still produces and consumes truly vast quantities of the stuff. When I was in the supermarket in Shenzhen, I found seemingly most of an aisle devoted to the stuff.

This happened to be convenient, as my sister happens to enjoy interesting and exotic teas. My thoughts were immediately that I would buy a couple of packets of some of the more interesting teas in the shop, and ultimately send them to her as a Christmas gift. I purchased them, and took them back to England with me.

I rather failed to get my act together in December, and as a consequence, on December 31 I posted a package containing tea to my sister from Clapham Junction post office in London to the Blue Mountains near Sydney in Australia, along with various other parcels that I posted at the same time. I made a deliberately vague statement on the customs declaration sticker. Australia has amazingly (and at times idiotically) strict quarantine regulations, and it is possible that the unauthorised importation of tea is prohibited.

Thus when my sister told me last week that she had not received anything from me, I was not completely surprised. I had visions of Australian customs office going through enormous stacks of mail with large Alsations looking for illicit tea, and the package sent to my sister being confiscated by some stern official with a moustache.

However, as it turned out, I was imagining things. The truth, to the extent that I have discovered it, was far stranger than that. This morning, my sister received a package with my handwriting on the envelope and my return address on the back. One side of the envelope had been ripped open, and had been sealed again with plastic tape. Attached to the envelope was a sticker from Canada Post, stating (in both English and French)

Package found damaged, torn, or opened and officially repaired. Adressee: If liability coverage applies, please contact Canada Post on 1-800-267-1177 or www.canadapost.ca Please note the packaging and contents may be required.

When my sister opened the envelope, it contained a data CD entitled ‘Canon Step Up Photography – Accessories to enhance your creativity’ for Windows and Macintosh, but no tea.

Okay, I can just about imagine that some mail was damaged and the postmen had difficulty figuring out what had fallen out of which envelope. But what in the name of Micklethwait was the package doing in Canada in the first place?

In all, I think this has to go down as my oddest experience since the time a French policeman called me in my flat in London from a village in the Pyrenees to ask if I was lonely. If people ask nicely, I will tell that story next week.

Also, I am intrigued as to what happened to the tea. Perhaps the mysterious world odyssey of this product that was never intended to leave China is continuing, and it has somehow, Teela Brown style, found its way to South America, or is somehow plotting its way to the far side of the galaxy in search of Arthur Dent.

I could not resist...

EIGHTEEN illegal immigrants attempted to smuggle themselves into the UK hidden in a lorry-load of lettuce heading for Merseyside.

UK Border Agency officers stopped the Spanish-registered lorry in the French port of Calais at 5.50am last Sunday.

A search revealed the eighteen men – fifteen Iraqis, two Afghanis and one Iranian – hidden in the load of lettuces.

I just love gadgets, and this has to be one of the funniest. Ideal for bloggers at breakfast.

I came across this eye-popping collection of strange building pictures here. Some of them are quite familar to me, such as the Lloyds of London building, but others I have not seen before.

Thanks to Stephen Hicks for the link. His site is definitely worth a visit.

This fellow, meanwhile, also has regular nifty pictures on architecture, with a strong enthusiasm for the works of Frank Lloyd Wright.

The weather has been cold this year, yet we did not take proper precautions for the likely consequences. These events should not have taken us by surprise. After all, it is in the data.

On the brighter side, the clear increase in the number of pirates indicates that global warming is receding as a problem. This is good to see.

The picture has been very respectfully stolen from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I hope they do not mind.

Oh dear! It is not that the services the PCS is proud of having delivered will not generally find much favour with denizens of Samizdata, that prompts me to clip this. It is that this is a disastrous committee-driven ad. They end up showing their members as miserable, whinging, ugly and colourless petty bureaucrats, who want taxpayers to be grateful to pay them more.

Even a minimal government would need officials. And even a big bureaucracy will contain some witty, energetic and attractive people. Sir Humphrey was much closer to being the hero of Yes, Minister than Jim Hacker.

Were I a PCS member then I would want to be represented as someone normal and likeable who cheerfully keeps the wheels of the country turning regardless of all the political shit thrown at me. And I would be looking for the head of whoever signed-off this ad. (Preferably to be displayed on a pole outside the Department of Work and Pensions, though perhaps my view of the possibilities of staff organisations are too influenced by Terry Gilliam's The Crimson Permanent Assurance.)

Short cryptic link-posts, of the sort which will make absolutely no sense as soon as the link stops working, seem to be accumulating here just now, so here's another. Check this out. It's Friday Ephemerus (?) number one at David Thompson's today.

Seriously, forgetting about the short cryptic thing, but assuming you now know what I am talking about, I think this might make a good visual metaphor for the television people as they chatter about the Glenrothes bye-election, just won by Labour. Suddenly, David Cameron must now be becoming afraid, very afraid. Is the utter cluelessness of the Conservatives about all the financial turmoil grabbing defeat for them from the jaws of victory? Are they starting to McCain themselves? Are they, the party that is confused and hesitant about doing the wrong thing, going to be beaten yet again by the party that is unconfused and brazen about it?

I was wrong. I thought I had already found the world's most ludicrously named chain of clothing stores.

However, the world is full of things that one has not dreamed of. In Hong Kong last week I found this.

Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC's television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.

For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don't remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.

Now here's where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don't worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it's warming; when it gets cold, it's warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it's warming twice as fast.

Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.

What does predict the weather we're having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]

Here's a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008's weather than anything cooked up by the "capitalism causes tsunamis" crowd. Farmer's Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.

Jonathan Ross has not followed his own advice. His new book is entitled "Why do I say these things". How apt!

Perhaps he should employ a chimpanzee as a personal censor. Especially when his foolishness focused upon a member of the satanic sluts. I would not dare to cross them.

I am a sovereign wealth fund. This is a position that I never expected to be in. I and every other British taxpayer.

I have been told that this was necessary or indescribable consequences entailing the destruction of my life and welfare would have followed. This hypothesis was not tested, due to the supposed costs, and, therefore, I became a sovereign wealth fund.

This sovereign wealth fund is not like other sovereign wealth funds, in that the Chairman is one Gordon Brown and the money that he uses to purchase whatever assets he likes is mine. This does not give me confidence, and I suspect the wealth in the fund will decline in value. This is what Gordon Brown does.

There will be a shareholders meeting in 2010. I think we need to vote for a return of all assets to the shareholders. Voting for these managers certainly has not worked and the alternative consultancy offers more of the same.

I have always regarded Lloyd's List as hard-packed with hard fact (as about the most expensive newspaper by weight you are likely to find anywhere, it should be). But can this really be true?

British Foreign Office officials are understood to have advised the Royal Navy not to confront or arrest pirates in the region [the horn of Africa] for fear of transgressing human rights legislation or encouraging their seeking asylum once taken to the UK.

If such advice is followed, it seems there is precious little reason left to even have a Royal Navy.

Hat-tip: The Register

Peter Tatchell, selling Green policy under the guise of giving advice to the PM, has a number of suggestions. One of them fully restores the Green Party's reputation for plain weirdness:

Raise tax-free personal allowances from £6,035 to £8,000 for people earning under £20,000 a year and to £7,000 for those earning £20,000 to £25,000, which would be funded by a rise in tax on incomes over £80,000 and which would assist the lower-paid at a time of rocketing food prices.

That top limit of £25,000 implies he's leaving personal allowances where they are for people earning over £25,000, so that they drop by £1,000, twice. Lots of people, including me, have suggested reshaping the tax system by raising allowances. But no-one I think has before suggested that it would be a vote-winner openly to treat very large numbers of people to marginal rates over 100% by clawing back an extra £200 when they cross an arbitrary threshold. Twice. At close to the median earnings level so the maximum numbers notice.

In fact, it was a disaster for Gordon Brown when he did it as a concealed one-time-only adjustment. Possibly it was the disaster for Gordon Brown, where he finally came unstuck. It's probably not something he wants to try again once, Peter. Let alone twice.

Probably it is the whole world I do not understand, but I am going to stick to not grasping it a bit at a time. It seems less daunting.

How does this work? Some commentators are saying that Senator McCain picked Governor Palin as his running-mate in order to attract supporters of Senator Clinton who are cross with Senator Obama for not giving up when he was winning the Democratic nomination.

Just who is crazy here? The Clintonites who think Obama is such a middle-of-the-road disaster for failing to appeal to the activist base that they might consider voting for a party that is over the other side of the road? And having done so, I look forward to their saying is the racism of the American public not Democratic-party petulance that has kept him out of the Whitehouse. Or the super-Clintonites who say they are mad at Obama for not being a woman? Republican strategists (if they exist) who care about what the tiny number of leftist Democratic activists think, but nevertheless think Palin will attract them, despite her being of the religious right persuasion and ideologically about as far from a leftist Democratic activist as possible? Or the commentators who assert such a strategy would make sense?

Or are there really large numbers of Americans who will vote for McCain solely because Palin is female and for no other reason of policy, personality or competence dividing the candidates and their platforms? That would be crazy. Wouldn't it?

This morning's superstrangeness:

Ministers are being urged to stop faith schools in England selecting pupils and staff on the basis of their religion.

Accord, a new coalition of secular and religious figures, wants the government to stop state-funded schools engaging in what they say is "discrimination".

As an atheist I find a lot of things to do with religious faith incomprehensible, so maybe I'm missing something that's obvious to a believer, but in what way is a school with no religious requirements of pupils or teachers a "faith school"?

I'm sure that Hugo Chavez has done some good. Much more bad than good probably, but some good. And Ken Livingstone is certainly not totally evil. But when the two of them get together it is very implausible that it is good news for the world on average.

Though if Mr Livingstone spends a lot of time in Venezuela, that will be pleasant both for him and for Londoners, I am really quite puzzled what Latin America, or even Mr Chavez, gets from this deal:

Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, has found a new role as an adviser to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and his political allies. During a surprise visit to Caracas, Livingstone said yesterday that he would act as a consultant on the capital's policing, transport and other municipal issues.

"I believe that Caracas will become a first-world city in 20 years. I have a very extensive network of contacts both domestically and internationally which I will be calling on to assist in this," he told reporters at the presidential palace after meeting Chávez.

But the most puzling thing of all is that use of the phrase "first-world city". I was under the impression that the 'first world' was the capitalist western countries, the 'second world' the realm of state-socialism, and the 'third world' the unindustrialised rest, not clearly part of either. Continuing the metaphor of separate worlds - and wishing away trade and travel and telegraph - the Rev John Papworth has even coined "Fourth World" for the poorest of the poor and those rejecting economic development altogether.

I cannot believe Red Ken was trying to suggest that the Bolivarian Revolution will fail, and that in 20 years Venezuela will be fully part of the capitalist first world again. Surely Mr Livingstone means he wants Caracas to be a second-world city?

It may be disgustingly authoritarian, but it is risibly incompetent too. It appears the Home Office has just spent a very large amount of UK readers' money making a vast online advertisement for NO2ID. We'd despaired of reaching 'the youth' ourselves, too expensive. I'm very glad they decided to do it for us.

With audience participation. Which embarrassingly for the Home Office shows 'kids' not to be quite the suckers they'd hoped. Enjoy.

I have spent twelve of the last sixteen years of my life living as a foreign citizen in the United Kingdom. I have spent this time on a mixture of student visas, the "UK ancestry" visa (which allows citizens of Commonwealth countries with a British grandparent to live and work in the UK) and for the last two and a half years as a permanent resident (or with "Indefinite Leave to Remain", as the British immigration jargon has it). My immigration status has always been pretty uncontroversial, I have never been a drain on the resources of British taxpayers (quite the opposite, given the taxes I have paid). This has not stopped the Home Office from insisting that I jump through a whole variety of bureaucratic hoops, answer a large number of impertinent questions, and suffer an assortment of petty humiliations with a fair amount of regularity. The level of competence of the Home Office in administering all this has never been high - when I was studying at Cambridge, it was well understood that the usual way of renewing a student visa involved sending your passport to the Home Office, and then applying to your country's embassy a few months later to replace a lost passport before making a quick trip to France to get your paperwork processed at the border on the way back - but in recent times (the start of which coincides quite closely with the Labour Party coming to power) the frequency with which hoops must be jumped has increased and the fees that must be paid to jump through each hoop have become ever higher.

However, last week, my need to deal with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate of the Home Office came to an end. At an in truth rather touching ceremony at Wandsworth Town Hall, I affirmed my allegiance to Queen Elizabeth the Second and was naturalised a British citizen. This does not affect my Australian citizenship, and I now have dual nationality. A couple of days later, I did what most new citizens do fairly quickly, and sent off an application for a British passport. The fee that is payable in this instance is not nearly as high as that payable when renewing an immigrant visa these days, but must none the less be paid. The passport application form came with another form on which I could fill out credit card details to pay the fee. The form stated that I could check the current fees on the website of a different section of the Home Office, the recently renamed Identity and Passport Service, or that I could alternately leave the amount blank on the form. The amount of the fee is not printed anywhere on either of the forms: this presumably makes it easier for the Home Office to increase the fees repeatedly without the trouble of reprinting forms. If I did this, the Home Office would charge the correct amount to my credit card and there would be no delays due to the possibility of my incorrectly sending the wrong amount. I therefore left this blank. On Tuesday, I noted that the approximate amount that I expected had been charged to my credit card, and I was set to receive my new passport within a couple of weeks.

However, yesterday I received a letter stating that my passport application could not be processed because I had not paid the correct fee, and this would not be done until I sent an additional £3. What apparently happened was that someone received my form, filled in an incorrect amount, and then somebody else noted that I had paid the incorrect amount and sent a letter to me demanding more money. If I had filled in the form with the correct amount in the first place, this would not apparently have happened. I was able to rectify this today by calling the enquiry line of the Identity and Passport Service, explaining the situation, and giving them my credit card details again so I could be charged the additional £3. My passport will hopefully still come in a couple of weeks, but it has been delayed by this and I have been inconvenienced. The enquiry line was an 0870 number, for which the charges are high and the called party receives a portion of the charge for the call, so I have paid a small amount of additional money for this, too.

This is all mildly amusing, but there is perhaps a moral. Theoretically, when I became a citizen, one thing I gained was the right not to suffer the petty humiliations and bureaucratic hassles and incompetence from the Home Office that a non-citizen goes through just to live here. I would personally argue that such humiliations and hassles are no more justified in the treatment of non-citizens than they are in the treatment of citizens, but the population as a whole does not generally seem to agree with me, and politicians seem to believe that there are electoral points to be gained in actually increasing and enforcing such hassles.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just a demonstration of the nature of our government and our bureaucrats. It is not hard to see the ID card as little more than a way to extend the humiliations and hassles that non-citizens receive to the time after people become citizens, and to extend them to the native born as well. The Home Office body that will implement and enforce the ID card and associated database is of course the Identity and Passport Service. It is not terribly encouraging that my first interaction with this Service after becoming a citizen involved their making an error for which they blamed me, charged me, and inconvenienced me, even though I had done everything correctly. I suspect we should all get used to it.

Sometimes the internet opens one's eyes to whole new ways of seeing the world. A fabulous comment over on David Davis's semi-blog (no permalink I could see, under "Sky News Debate with Tony McNulty"):

David Davis doesn’t want a real debate on the Orwellian State – he wants a controlled one that's only on his terms with safe people like Tony Benn and Bob Geldof.

As a current resident of Beijing, my social life is already being affected by the slew of new rules and bylaws raining down upon the citizens of this city to best ensure that the upcoming Olympic Games is "safe" and - more importantly - free of episodes that might embarrass the notoriously thin-skinned government of China. Consequently, less easily controlled events in celebration of the Olympics such as street parties, spontaneous parades and other assorted manifestations of public revelry have all been banned. According to a BOCOG website, restaurants, bars and clubs will be subject to a 2am curfew. Even establishments that usually set up tables and chairs on footpaths for patrons to enjoy their food and drink in the balmy evenings have been forbidden from doing so this summer. Considering the above, I can reasonably confidently predict that if the Olympics goes off without a hitch, this colossally expensive event will be the most boring in living memory. Still, at least the fun-deprived foreign visitors will have something to snigger at:

Dinky little machine guns: check. Shiny gold targets on helmets to give opponents something to aim at: check. Segways: check, baby, and welcome to the future. Look out, bad guys - here comes the recently unveiled and Segway-straddled Chinese anti-terror/crowd control unit, charged with protecting the Olympic Games from universally acknowledged threats, as well as those that keep only CCP apparatchiks awake at night. Judging by the way China's finest are handling their weapons in this photo, however, they look to be more of a danger to each other than to anyone not behaving.

That is not a sensational boxing headline being concocted; it is the name of an American athlete, being yanked around by some rather pompously programmed software. This morning one of David Thompson's bits of Friday ephemera is a link to this, which is a link to this, which says this:

The American Family Association has a policy at its new outlet, OneNewsNow, never to use the word "gay" but to replace it with "homosexual." And that works absolutely perfectly until they write an article about an athlete whose last name is Gay, as in Tyson Gay, the fastest man on the US Olympic track team.

This was of course hastily corrected, but the magic of copy-and-paste had already done the damage. Most quoters have quoted the searched-and-replaced version, but I'll let you do it. Change "Gay" to "Homosexual" in this, from the revised-and-then-revised-back-again version:

Tyson Gay was a blur in blue, sprinting 100 meters faster than anyone ever has.

Or this:

"It means a lot to me," the 25-year-old Gay said. "I'm glad my body could do it, because now I know I have it in me."

Or, my favourite, this:

After the race, Gay and Dix looked at each other and slapped palms, then hugged.

But amidst all the joking, it should not be forgotten that this guy sounds like he might be a real athletics superstar.

No one ever has covered 100 meters more quickly.

I say "might", because when you hear that an athlete is really, really fast your first thought may be wow, but a close second in a photo-finish is: I wonder if it's just that the dopesters have now found a new and cleverer way to do it. Gay might, that is to say, be a very quick runner but a fake superstar. If you don't want to be at the centre of universal suspicion, do not be a superstar sprinter, and in particular, do not come to the boil just for the Olympics. Lawyers may forbid constant reference to this suspicion in official big-media sports reports, but this is what all of us casual onlookers now think, and all the lawyers on earth cannot stop us. For Gay's sake, I hope that this proves to be a real, drug-free record.

I also hope that, come the Olympics, Gay doesn't choke. Ditto all the other athletes. But then again, if such a PR catastrophe in some way makes the government of China a little less nasty, maybe a bit of athletic choking would be a good thing. Sadly, however, if the story so far is anything to go by, such an eventuality would probably cause that government behave even more nastily, perhaps by inprisoning all the TV cameramen who concentrated too much on the choking.

The Duchy of Cornwall proudly announces that the Prince of Wales's old Aston Martin has been converted to run on bio-ethanol - which is sourced as surplus wine from one of his Wiltshire estates. Which is fine by me. If a very rich man wishes to spend his own money in mildly strange ways, and is not really hurting anyone, then who am I to complain? (I personally benefit from the other-wordly advantages of living on the Crown Estates, and very nice it is too, even as a humble tenant without grace and favour.)

I think he should sack his PR, though.

What is presented as a noble austerity for the sake of the planet comes across as a highly elaborate self-indulgence, when just laying up the Aston for a slightly less thirsty car would surely achieve the same thing.

One might also say (and it might be the truth): "We had a lot of wine we couldn't sell, so we looked around for something sensible to do with it, and discovered we could use it as fuel - even for the Aston Martin." But they didn't. Quite the reverse:

Sir Michael Peat, the Prince's private secretary, said: "The bioethanol from our supplier happens to be made from wine. I think our wine is surplus English wine. It is wonderful. It is not corked."

That quote's in all press, so it isn't a mis-statement coming out in a single interview. It was what the Clarence House establishment decided it would be best to say. They seem to think it is better to advertise not sane frugality, but his massive use of resources in being green - in judgment.

'Champagne socialism?' Is that when middle-class people drink it? In - you know... - restaurants?

And nor should they be, but here is Patsy Kensit interviewed in last week's Observer Magazine:

Q. How do you feel about plastic surgery?

A. If it means you can look like Sharon Osborne, then why not?

If it is not a fierce deadpan joke, then that's a spectacular case of body dysmorphic disorder you have there, Miss Kensit.

This is what I call gratitude.

On the subject of rare musical instruments, and as a sign of how desperate some investors are to make money away from the standard stock and bond markets, you can even invest in violins. I can see the jokes coming: "So, what do you invest in?" "Violins". "Hmm, I've been on the fiddle myself".

Groan.

Via this blog, comes this awesomely silly story:

The Greek Isle of Lesbos is suing the group Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece to stop using the term Lesbian. Seems they are tired of having the term for people from their isle be synonymous with the followers of Sappho. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” said Dimitris Lambrou, one of the plaintiffs.

Fantastic. Just imagine how one could play with this. Suppose the town council of Dorking, southern England, sues anyone who is referred to, or uses the pejorative term, "Dork".

Greece: did not that country once come up with clever chaps like Aristotle or something?

As ever, those interested in silly lawsuits should keep an eye on Overlawyered, an invaluable blog.

I recommend this short illustrated talk given by an American academic (no: businessman - see comment) who taught at Beijing University and who went with his family on a trip to North Korea. Here is part of what he says:

This is a woman that was directing traffic with great resolve and military precision outside the front door of our hotel. We watched her for at least ten minutes, as she moved and rotated with complete control of her little domain, and we didn't see a single car go by. [Laughter] I mean, you do have to wonder what they think. ...

He then sees one of those giant stadium displays, done with thousands of big hand-held squares which keep changing.

This big display, which sat opposite most of the people is just a huge communist video monitor, one person per pixel. The resolution of this screen was about seventy by four hundred. The frame rate was one to two hertz, and you could get up to two frames a second, before muscle fatigue set in.

And then we see this screen in action. It is actually rather impressive, especially when you consider how much the poor bastards doing it probably get to eat each day. And they're the lucky ones.

It often happens that people who report not on "the situation" in wherever it is, but simply on what they happen themselves to see, can supply an extraordinarily vivid feeling of what it must be like there. They don't tell the whole story. But then again, they don't pretend to.

Meanwhile, the latest "news" from North Korea, is that they are building a huge underground fighter runway, right near the border with the hated South, Thunderbirds style. It is supposed to be invulnerable to military attack. Fat chance. I wonder how many people will die while making it.

Belatedly, I joined the craze and had a go on one of my friend's Wii games the other weekend. Terrific stuff: I played the golf, tennis, ten-pin bowling and shooter games. Bloody marvellous. You do need to get a large-enough television to make it work; unfortunately, I don't really want to mess up my sitting room by putting a huge plasma screen on the wall, but some of my friends seem to be less squeamish.

The main downside, I find, is that if you are playing this game and have not stretched and warmed up properly first, you can actually do a bit of damage. The next morning, when I woke up, the left side of my back was quite painful. This is what happens to a 41-year-old wealth management geek who has not spent enough time doing sport for real. Time to turn off the technology and put on the training shoes.

A link to some Wii-related injuries. I wait for the first politician to try and bleat about the "Wii menace".

The reasons why people upset their neighbours continue to grow:

A weightlifter has been fined £70 for exercising too loudly. Giran Jobe, 36, was charged with 47 breaches of a noise abatement order after neighbours complained that his two-hour training sessions with dumbbells left them unable to sleep. A council team investigating complaints about noise from his top-floor flat in Margate, Kent, found that at times the level hit 100 decibels - as loud as a rock concert.

I have not come across this reason for neighbour annoyance before. Anyway, in my experience, the most irritating thing about going to a gym - as I do at least twice a week if possible - is the pounding, Chavvy music that these businesses insist in piping into the rooms. There seems to be some assumption that you get better exercise if there is lots of noise assaulting the ears. Maybe it is to do with the idea that certain sounds encourage quick exercise: there might even be academic studies proving the link between a raised exercise rate and music. I suppose this makes sense; anyway, dancing is one of the best exercises of the lot. Although the JPearce dance technique is unlikely to catch on anytime soon, you will no doubt be relieved to know.

I found a guest ale that is marketed by attacking Gordon Brown's high tax economics and his ceding of power to "dictators in Brussels". Not a conventional marketing approach. Probably an effective one, though.

The top headlines from BT Yahoo! news a moment ago:

* Anger problem 'ignored' in UK

ITN - Chronic anger has reached endemic heights in the UK but is often ignored, according to a new report.

* Miss Bimbo website provokes outrage

In my neighbourhood of Pimlico stands one of the ugliest public buildings in the known universe: Pimlico School. Unbearably hot in the summer (all that glass), miserable in the winter, with the sort of cavernous, Stygian style unlikely to suit enquiring young pupils, the place is being demolished for hopefully something rather more attractive. I cannot help but wonder, though, at the resemblance between the school and the main spacecraft in Battlestar Galactica. Mind you, I have not seen any Raptors flying out of the end of it.

Some people actually like Brutalist architecture.

As you may or may not know, today is International Women's Day (IWD) - it falls annually on March the 8th. This anniversary is not especially remarked upon in the Western world, yet it is a widely noted event in many of the countries that were closely allied to, had ideologically similar political ideologies to, or constituted the Soviet Union. I am living in China at the moment, and was first reminded of the advent of this year's IWD by my Vietnamese girlfriend, and then by the Chinese state press. Otherwise, it would have passed me by completely.

I have to say I find it a little amusing that two countries I have spent a fair bit of time in of late - Vietnam and China - so noisily celebrate IWD, considering that women in both countries face considerable and ingrained discrimination, despite the official socialist repudiation of gender inequality. Still, the show must go on and my girlfriend came home from work on the 8th with a gift; the same one that all the women in her company (a large Chinese software firm) received to commemorate IWD. And what was her present? A gift pack of anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner. A lot of women work at this company, so obtaining all that haircare product would have been a substantial purchase. There must have been a conversation in the HR department a few weeks ago that went something like: "I think this Head & Shoulders pack is suitable. I mean, we're all for equal rights for women, but can we at least ensure that they are not leaving bits of their scalp about the place if they must work with us? Yes, I know, it's a shame that the deal on the girdles fell through, but there's always next year..."

I do not normally like receiving emails selling me products, but I thought I would have to make an exception for this:

Dear Antoine,

Virgin Galactic is delighted to announce a new destination... space. Climb to 360,000ft. at a cruising speed of almost three times the speed of sound, in unprecedented levels of safety and comfort. See our beautiful planet from 63 miles up and experience the magic of weightlessness.

Redeem 200,000 miles to receive 10% off the cost of a spaceflight, that's an incredible $20,000 saving!* Join our future astronauts and book your place in history.

I look forward to the Nigerian version:

"My name is Mr.Moses Odiaka. I work in the credit and accounts department of Union Bank of NigeriaPlc,Lagos, Nigeria. I write you in respect of a foreign customer with a Virgin Galactica ticket. His name is Engineer Manfred Becker. He was among those who died in a plane crash here in Nigeria during the reign of late General Sani Abacha.

Since the demise of this our customer, Engineer Manfred Becker, who was an oil merchant/contractor, I have kept a close watch of the deposit records and accounts and since then nobody has come to claim the airmiles in this a/c as next of kin to the late Engineer. He had only 18.5mllion air miles in his a/c and the a/c is coded. It is only an insider that could produce the code or password of the deposit particulars. As it stands now,there is nobody in that position to produce the needed information other than my very self considering my position in the bank."

But not green television the way you think. South African blogger 6000 is "not sure where this came from originally or if it's true", but he adds: "But you know, this is SA and people are nothing if not resourceful. It's a cool story - I choose to believe." Me too.

Spending fever has reached all walks of South African life. Here's a fellow who lives in a squatter camp beyond Somerset West in Western Cape who now wants a television set – a new one, mind, not that second-hand thing in the pawn-shop window – so he buys one from the High Street furniture retailer.

But he's back next day, saying the things keeps switching off just at the crucial moment. The shop checks it out and can find nothing wrong, but soon enough he's back with the same complaint.

This time the shop sends out a technician to pop round to see what the problem is. When the technician gets there, he discovers our guy's shack draws its electricity from a nearby traffic light, and that the TV only works when the light is green.

Good to know that almost everybody down there can afford to have "spending fever", even if some prefer to economise on their electricity bills. 6000 has this as a mere scanned image of a newspaper report. I think it deserves the .html treatment.

Via the excellent engadget blog, here is a nifty item to put on the wall for all you health-freaks out there. Perhaps I should strap my arm to one of the controls the next time I read about the Archbishop of Canterbury, the eco-Leninist thoughts of Madeleine Bunting, or watch the English rugby/cricket/football team give up a lead?.

Or maybe I should stop doing all these things for a longer, happier life.

Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with.

- Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace 2005, as quoted by Canada Free Press

Afterwards, another activist clarified the remark by stating that of course taller can also be evidence of shortness, richer can mean living in poverty, baboons can mean chairs, giraffes can mean pencils and hello Ms. Robinson, your lacy trousers are well buttered with smoked trout, can you hear what I'm writing with my toaster?

My father told me a while back that I was distantly related to Henry Blofeld, landowner and legendary cricket commentator. The Blofelds are an old Norfolk landowning family. Well, if it turns out I am related to a family that has the same surname as one of the greatest Bond villains, then maybe I should invest in something suitably sinister.

It may be cheaper than a hollowed-out volcano, if only slightly.

Staying with the Bond theme, you can now, if you have the wealth, live in a beach resort in the same part of Jamaica as Ian Fleming's old beachside home of Goldeneye. Back in 1956, during the Suez crisis, Anthony Eden, then prime minister, stayed at the Flemings'.

How's this for a title and opening for an article:

Gender or race: White male voters face tough choices in S.C.

For these men, a unique, and most unexpected dilemma, presents itself: Should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?

The howls of outrage that framing an article in such terms would cause is easy (and rather fun) to imagine. If ever there were two things that should not have have an impact on whom a person votes for, it should be the genetic characteristics of skin colour and gender. Dare I suggest that ideology and honesty might trump those two non-factors every time?

And yet this article will most likely pass without the slightest murmur from a great many people.

Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C.

But if it is reasonable for black women in South Carolina to vote on the basis that someone is black or female, presumably they cannot object if other people decide to vote for candidates on the basis they are white or male. After all, it does appear that framing the choice on whom to support on the basis of racism or sexism is perfectly acceptable to the mainstream media. And there I was mistakenly thinking that those things were the cardinal politically incorrect sins of our day! Who knew?

I would not normally be moved to link to a 'product listing' page for a chain of Dutch department stores called HEMA, but that is exactly what I am doing now.

Why? Because it is cool and for no other reason than that. Click and just wait a few seconds to see what happens (and no, I assure you it is not another video 'screamer').

There is a truly bizarre story on Reuters saying that the French car manufacturer Citroën has apologised for running an advertisement featuring a scowling Chairman Mao.

"As a Chinese, I felt greatly insulted when seeing this ad," a posting on web portal Tianya (www.tianya.com) said. "It is not only insulting Chairman Mao, but the whole Chinese nation." [...] "Chairman Mao is the symbol of China, and what Citroen did lacks basic respect to China," another posting said.

Astounding. The man who was probably the most prolific mass murderer in history, who murdered between 44.5 & 72 million mostly Chinese people and brought tyranny to almost one fifth of the world's population, is regarded by some people in 2008 as "the symbol of China"? That is truly surreal.

Well, I suppose he is in the same sense that Jack the Ripper is the 'symbol' of Whitechapel. Yet somehow I cannot see the residents of Whitechapel taking umbrage at an advertisement by Citroen featuring Jack the Ripper being portrayed with a less than congenial expression.

Just how many people does a tyrant have to order killed before he becomes absolute anathema in China? How many lives does he have to ruin to stop being 'the symbol of China'? What kind of moral derangement is required to take insult in this manner? Well people in China should indeed be insulted, but by the fact Citroën used the image of that vile psychopath to portray anything other than horror, death and misery. How dare someone trivialise suffering on such a colossal scale? How would people react if they had used Hitler instead? People would certainly protest but somehow I do not think all too many Germans would be saying "The Fuhrer is the symbol of Germany".

A Chinese person I know described the Mao era as 'The Long Nightmare'. It seems some people in China do not want to wake up.

I was channel surfing the other day when I came across a strange caption at the top of my television that caught my eye, causing a definite double take...

           WH O RE 1

Anyone care to guess what I was watching?

Part of the problem with modern democratic states is they have far too much time to figure out new ways to regulate and control every aspect of life. They do this in order to pander to the sectional obsessions of this or that element of the electorate, and to satisfy the pathological control freak mindset that defines most people who are attracted into politics. Japan however find much less damaging and far more interesting ways to spend legislative time.

A debate over flying saucers has kept Japanese politicians occupied for much of this week, ensnaring top officials and drawing a promise from the defense minister to send out the army if Godzilla goes on a rampage. "There are debates over what makes UFOs fly, but it would be difficult to say it's an encroachment of air space," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba told a news conference Thursday. "If Godzilla were to show up, it would be a dispatch for disaster relief."

Oh how I wish the UK Parliament and US Congress would spend less time on implementing laws to abridge our liberties and more on how to prevent 170 foot tall radioactive fire breathing saurians from stomping on our cities and destroying our skolzandhospitalz.

Obviously the whole absurd 'Islamic terrorists' shtick was just a ruse to hide the terrible truth of what really happened on 9/11. After all, as so many people keep endlessly reminding us, Islam is a religion of peace, so huge Japanese monsters (no doubt under the influence of Haliburton mind control rays) are a far more plausible explanation if you think about it. Clearly this is something that should occupy legislative time from the moment our fine representatives go into session until the moment they go home at night. For pity's sake, honourable members, do it for the children.

Magna Carta: yours for $21,321,000 (£10.6M);

Tales of Beedle the Bard: £1,950,000 ($4M)

Of course tha latter may be a more useful guide to one's liberties in New Britain ™

I want one.

The website is great fun for over-grown teenagers like me.

I am feeling rather groggy after a wonderful party yesterday - I also watched the excellent Barbarians-South Africa match in a pub - but this item on a website called Sharp as a Marble is an instant hangover cure. Good heavens - the stuff you can find on the web.

Here are some wonderfully good photographs, ideal browsing for a grey Sunday afternoon.

The Sunday Times carries the story that two men have been remanded to await trial on charges of blackmailing a member of the royal family. They are said to have demanded £50,000 not to publicise stories about sex and drugs.

Haven't the perpetrators missed the point of blackmail? Surely if they had anything that would stick, they could get many times that amount from the world's tabloids? The point of blackmail is to take advantage of the embarrassment of the person concerned for gain. They seem to have attempted to do it for loss.

Phone conversation just now with Alex Singleton:

Me: "I hear that yesterday was your birthday."

Alex: "Yes. I found out about it on Facebook."

Alex will be the main speaker at the Libertarian Alliance Conference dinner tomorrow evening at the National Liberal Club, in other words the star speaker of the entire event. An excellent choice for this task stroke honour, I think, and I am looking forward to hearing him very much.

Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between "the left and revolutionary Islam" at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America's "earth-devouring ambitions" were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a "truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union".

Che's daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. "My father never mentioned God," she said, to the consternation of the audience. "He never met God." During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. "By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence," the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the "supreme guide" of Guevara, was also a man of God. "The Soviet Union is gone," he affirmed. "The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words."

Don't say you haven't been warned, comrade, when you flirt with "revolutionary Islam" as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. ...

LOL indeed.

I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.

Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.

Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: "That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA." That would change things a bit.

If you are opening (say) a chain of casual clothing stores in Portugal, and you want to give them an English name that you hope provides an image of stylish people driving fast cars, you might want to check with a number of native English speakers whether the word you choose might not have other meanings or connotations in English.

As a minimum, I cannot see Throttleman conquering the world in the way that other clothing labels from cities nearby have been known to, and however good their supply chain management appears to be (Zara of course are masters of this).

I have considered over the last couple of days whether or not to write about an event. I feared, and still fear, that many people will either think I am making the whole thing up or that, at least, I am exaggerating to make a more 'entertaining' story. I am not making this event up, and I am not exaggerating - but I have no way to prove this.

Anyway here goes...

On Tuesday I went to an event 'East Midlands Expo' organized by the 'East Midlands Region' government. These 'Regional' governments are not desired by the public - but they are forced to pay for them anyway. The event was supposed to be about the 'environment'. It was held in the buildings that form part of the Rockingham Speedway. This is sporting facility that is on the outskirts of the town of Corby in Northamptonshire.

Why this site was chosen I do not know. If the public were intended to attend this event it was a very bad choice of site - but if the event, and the cost of it, was meant to be hidden from the public it was a good choice of site. I overheard someone pointing to the helicopters that seemed to be flying round the site and saying "they are to keep the public out" - but I do not believe that to be true (it was just a coincidence).

There were some members of the public at the event. Some confused looking children, some in yellow helmets, were led around to various places. A few of these children were brought in to be photographed when a government person presented a cheque [pdf document] to two women dressed as 'Eco-Pixies'.

However, nearly everyone at the event was either a councillor, a Local Government Officer, or a representative of a commercial enterprise trying to sell something - via various stalls. There was one stall that did not seem to be trying to sell anything - it was from the Romania government and its function at the event seemed to be to publicise Romania. This led a Local Government Officer I talked with, to describe the event as "Eco-Pixies meet Romania" - although, as far as I know, the Eco-Pixies did not visit the Romanian government stall. There were some stalls, outside, that were selling actual products (bread, cheese and so on) but the main stalls inside the event were from various large enterprises trying to interest politicians and officials in their services (to be paid by the taxpayers). The objective seemed to be to 'network'.

Outside there was also part of a building made of straw. Not panels made of straw, just bales of straw. There were also various 'workshops' which were conducted in the English language - but a highly distorted form of it. As I went around talking to people and visiting stalls I found myself having difficulty in suppressing high pitched involuntary nervous laughter (what British people call "the giggles" - which is not as pleasant as it sounds) and I had to retreat to the toilet to recover - in order to avoid being rude.

After I recovered I took the special bus back to Kettering.

However, the events of the day had disturbed me and I went shopping, buying lots of 'bad' things. For example, bread and cheese, which I could have bought from the stalls outside the "Expo" - but I felt uncomfortable buying things there, I intend no disrespect to the people at the food stalls - perhaps the most honest people at the event.

Bread is denounced because of carbohydrate, and cheese is denounced because of fat - especially the high fat 'Danish Blue' cheese that I bought. I also bought alcohol for the first time in months, partly because alcohol had just been denounced on BBC Radio 4 that morning "there is no safe lower limit" (this did not concern driving - it was meant as general health warning). The alcohol I bought was Yorkshire 'Old Peculiar' beer - which I thought fitted the peculiar nature of the day. My shopping the local supermarket which might be considered environmentally unsound, but many of the organizations at the 'Expo' were rather big so I suppose the organizers are not totally against big business.

Anyway I then ate some bread and cheese and drank my beer in an effort to calm my mind - but I was not totally successful.

For every rational cause you can guarantee there will be someone who tries to pursue it in a crazy and counter-productive manner. A Cambridge school caretaker has just been gaoled for sending letter bombs in protest against the surveillance state. Quite how he thought it might help is obscure; there is no Bakhuninite theory of precipitating revolution on offer, nor the intimidation/revenge motive of animal-rights terrorists. Perhaps he is a product of what the LM people identify as "therapeutic culture" and believes (compare Mr Blair) that strength of feeling is truth, and demonstrating the strength of one's feelings by hurting others - a Big Howl - is persuasive.

All of which is by way of introduction to the strangest point in the whole affair: the post trial commentary from the officer in charge of the investigation. This is becoming a standard feature of any notorious case, one which I dislike intensely. I think the job of the police is to investigate crime disinterestedly, and they should not have a say in or comment on the process of the courts, any more than they should prejudice the position of suspects beforehand.

Detective Superintendent George Turner, from Thames Valley Police, said of the criminal,

"He utilised his interests in anarchy, terrorism and explosive devices in support of his political views."

Uh?

Let us be clear. This is not a slip of the tongue. It is a pre-prepared statement, given out in a press release to be reproduced verbatim.

How could an interest in anarchy (which does not seem to have been made out in any account I have read, and I would be grateful to be pointed to the evidence) have utility in bombing people? It might, just, provide motivation, although there are lots of pacifist anarchists and few violent nihilists, but practical assistance?

And "in support of his political views"? No, quite back-to-front. His crimes were in (mistaken) pursuit of his political views. There is a worrying muddling of means and ends there. What Cooper did was wrong; it does not support his views in the slightest. The criminality is founded in his intent to damage property and injure people. But we are left with the impression that the views are the mens rea.

Except I do not think he should be making it at all, I would have no quarrel with D-Supt Turner's prepared statement had it said:

"He utilised his interests in terrorism and explosive devices in support of a politically motivated criminal plan."

What he actually said is a disturbing glimpse of an official mind-set in which non-conformity and violence, dissent and criminality, are confounded.

This is both an historical and an historiographical puzzle.

It might well be true. It would be interesting if it were.

I do not think it is of any consequence for current affairs or community relations whether it is true or not (and I could not give a damn what anyone thinks on that point either way). But I thought my naval history was pretty good, and I have absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

The BBC reports Trevor Philips speaking at an event today:

"When we talk about the Armada it's only now that we are beginning to realise that part of it is Muslims," Mr Phillips told the meeting. "It was the Turks who saved us, because they held up Armada at the request of Elizabeth I."

Now what is he going on about? How would one arrange that with 16th century communications? Elizabeth certainly chartered a Levant Company, and had diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. But where is the evidence? Did the Turks hold up the Armada at all? And if so did they do it by arrangement? If so, what's the new research that "only now" gives us this information? If not, where does Mr Phillips get the idea from?