It seems that Alain de Botton, who I might add is a weapons grade plonker of the first order, has finally come up with a good idea.

As his next project, the philosopher and founder of The School of Life is aiming to revolutionise pornography. Driven by the way society has been saturated by explicit images and videos, de Botton is asking 'what next for porn?'. The writer intends to meet with leaders in porn and the arts in order to bring about a better kind of pornography.

Well I am all for anything that leads to better products. And perhaps he will use this opportunity to point out to these "leaders in porn" that boob implants are to porn what McDonald's is to fine dining.

What does anyone know about the outfit calling itself FairSearch?

Based on growing evidence that Google is abusing its search monopoly to thwart competition, we believe policymakers must act now to protect competition, transparency and innovation in online search.

Policymakers? That is a bit like asking a collective of rapists to protect chastity, virginity and privacy. In my experience nine times out of ten when I hear people calling for a market leader to be kicked by 'policy makers', it is because they find it cheaper to pay lobbyists to do in the competition's legs than actually compete with them.

Anyone have the low down on these guys?

A Dead Statesman

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Rudyard Kipling

Ponder...

James Taranto (with thanks to Instapundit for the link and the quote):

In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy” to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government.

A little googling tells me that this word hasn't been completely ignored since 1999. But if the internet had been more of a Thing in 1999, I surmise that it might have become a universal commonplace by now.

So far it seems to have been mostly Americans using the word, but we could sure use it here in the UK. That link takes you to a quote of Tiger's original suggestion, with some more context from him.

What may have been holding this word back is that it is not instantaneously clear (or not to me - comments?) whether it should be pronounced byoo-rogue-amy, or byoo-rog-amy. It has to be the latter, but I found myself having to stop and work it out, which is not what you want with a neologism, however badly needed. It's that "eau" in a slightly unfamiliar setting that slows you (me) down. Is the answer actually to change the spelling, to "burogamy". i.e. switching from "bureaucracy" to "monogamy" one syllable sooner? Neither is perfect, but it's probably better to stick with the Tiger original.

What is very excellent about the word is that you know at once what it means.

(Last minute editing of this, changing "byoo-roe-gamy" to what you see above, suggests also a word like "buroguery". Or should that "bureauguery"? Time to stop this.)

We are in the top four of the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame, in which listeners, aided by diligent wretches paid a pittance to post on Twitter, choose their favourites and they are played in reverse order of popularity. Currently something by Beethoven is playing. Don't ask me. I quite like classical music but know almost nothing about it, being only slightly better off than Ulysses Grant who knew two tunes, of which one was the Star Spangled Banner and one wasn't. However, better educated members of my family were ranting about which pieces of classical music should be expelled from the Top Twenty for being over-rated, boring, associated with the European Union or similarly cursed.

My daughter, a musician, threw a particular wobbly at the appearance of Pachelbel's Canon in the list.

What else would you suggest? And no complaining about that Final Fantasy thing being there; I thought that was nice.

Update: I have the beginnings of a Sociological Observation to make this post respectable. It is that the compère seemed very relaxed about the fact that the diligent wretches paid to post on Twitter were having an effect. He seemed to quite admire the internet campaign that got the Final Fantasy VII music into the top twenty. I am sure that in the old days organised campaigns would have been seen as cheating; now it is just the way things go.

Ineptocracy - A new word for our times

*Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy)* - A system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

This via a comment by our local neighbourhood 'ukipwebmaster'.

I have though for a while now that this term deserves wider currency and to be used in all seriousness.

It may be Christmas, Cthulhumas or Whatevermas for you.. but Samizdata wishes all friends of liberty peace and prosperity over the festive season and for the coming New Year.

For the last few weeks I have been trying to organise my home, and in particular the many papers - everything from hugely portentous to utterly pointless - piled up in it. But to derandomise and thin out the paper, I need space, and I have had no space. I also hope to be doing more entertaining in the months to come. So, where to find space?

Space is always achievable if you try hard enough, and I have now, at last, identified a spacially significant category of object which I will henceforth be doing without. Cardboard boxes.

Amd that's just the ones I have already found. There are more, I know it.

Whenever a New Electronic Thing enters my home, as Things often do in these times of ever more miraculous and less expensive Things, I have felt the need to preserve the box in which the Thing came. I have done this in case I - or merely it - ever needed to move. Also, these boxes may come in useful to accommodate other things.

But Things can be moved without being in their original boxes, and actually, they usually are. Frequently to the dump, as will be the case with that huge television you can also see in the picture, now broken and worthless. Also departing in the same rubbish vehicle, my photocopier, and a chair the bits of which also appear in the photo above.

But it's the boxes that really take up the space, which is why boxes always get chucked out eventually. The boxes are most unlikely ever to be as useful to me as the space they now occupy.

If, at some future moment, I need a big box, I will get get one, perhaps by buying one.

So now, there will be a great cull of boxes, even of boxes which contained Things purchased quite recently. This involves chopping and tearing them up into pieces small enough to fit inside rubbish bins. This will be quite a labour, and I would love to be able to say that this job will be done on Boxing Day. Sadly, I won't be waiting that long.

You live in chains. In this awful century just passed, more than 150 million innocent people died in chains. And yet every person ever born was born free—unalterably, inviolably, immaculately free...

This is not the sort of thing I am used to finding in holiday tales, so I was delighted to discover these individualist holiday stories published for Kindle. Christmas at the Speed of Life (subtitle: Seasonal brutality - gift-wrapped) by William F. X. Connell focuses on what really matters, from a decidedly individualist viewpoint. I found this book thanks to Richard Nikoley, whose blog is a humorous mix of Paleo lifestyle content and anti-state, anti-religion polemic.

So if you are still searching for the perfect gift for a hard-to-buy-for individualist, or if you would like to gift your favorite stasist/statist with a subversive collection of short stories for the holiday, check it out.

I am sure there is some anti-EU moral to be squeezed out of this strange song of worship for a big (and apparently real) German excavator built by Krupps, possessed of a artificial mind, feared even by Beelzebub and used for fighting Godzillas.

My title comes from a comment by one crashstitches79.

Perhaps there is more of a pro-EU moral? Or an anti-Godzilla moral. Awesome, regardless.

Rudy Guede gets 30 years for the murder of Meredith Kercher.

On appeal he incriminates Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, in contradiction of his own first testimony. This claim buys him a reduction of 14 years in his sentence.

Knox gets 26 years, Sollecito 25, on the basis of Guede's evidence - and bungled police forensics.

After Knox and Sollecito have lost four years of their lives, the courts admit there was never any significant evidence against them and acquit them.

In Seattle a crowd cheers. In Perugia a crowd howls.

The British redtops are beside themselves. All gibber that Meredith Kercher has been "forgotten". One puts a headline over Knox's picture: "Meredith Who?"; as if these words come from her. One shows a photo of Knox, elated at getting her life back, and describes her as "grinning from ear to ear" - which, as we know, is something bad people do when they're gloating over some undeserved gain.

Amanda Knox is home in Seattle. She has to live with the lingering ghost of a possibility that the Italians may yet demand that she go back. But at least she doesn't have to worry about a European Arrest Warrant.

What an insane, vicious farce.

We tend not be very nice about the BBC around here. It is a state-created broadcaster that forces everyone to pay for it, etc. (Boo, hiss, throw rotten tomatoes, etc). But it does occasionally put up programmes of some value. In view of the popularity of shows in which the rich, famous or infamous track down their ancestors, such as "Who Do You Think You Are?", there is a show that runs in the dead-zone of daytime TV, called Heir Hunters. It shows how various financial/legal professionals earn a living by trying to track down people who could inherit money from the deceased but who don't know about it because there was no will signed. The actual commission or fee that these people charge for this work is not disclosed but the general effect of what these businesses are doing is positive, in my view. The reason for my saying that is that at present, if a deceased person's estate has not be carved up in a will, then it is grabbed by the state.

A friend of mine who works in this area reckons that in his own, modest way, he is keeping private wealth out of the hands of the state by making sure that those who could inherit the money actually do so. Anyway, the popularity of the show suggests that inheritance of wealth is something that Brits of many backgrounds are comfortable with. Most of the people highlighted in the programme are not exactly the Duke of Westminster type.

The popularity of this sort of programme also, of course, speaks of the enduring interest people have in history, family traditions and roots. Like certain other passions and enthusiasms, it appears to be ineradicable, and woe betide the politician who attacks it, however indirectly, via taxes.

I like this, towards the end of a long comment from Michael Strong, on this piece by Clay Shirky:

Democracy is a fabulous way to prevent the most horrible errors such as the massive famines, death camps, and large-scale wars of aggression that are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, but one should no more imagine that democracy is a finely-tuned instrument for determining the public good than that a hack saw is suitable for brain surgery.

"Deliberative" democracy, i.e. the sort less like a hack saw, doesn't work beyond about 10,000 people, he says.

See also Amartya Sen, who also admires what the hack saw can do.

Being an American with a knowledge of history, Strong does not claim that democracy prevents civil war. But I would say that democracy does make civil war far less likely, provided certain other conditions are also met, like a relatively static political entity and not too much tribal voting (i.e. a willingness of at least some voters to vote this way or that way, depending).

In many ways (but not the most important ways), democracy is civil war. Which is precisely why it works as well as it does as a substitute for civil war. Whoever wins the democracy civil war would probably also have won the real thing, using not unrelated methods – bribes, threats, propaganda barrages, opinion polls, friendliness towards turnable enemies, treachery towards dependable friends, and so on and so forth. That being so, the losers take their defeat. Instead of contesting the result of the election by force (i.e. starting a real civil war) they wait for the next round.

Which, by the way, means that the reasonable certainty that there will be a next round is crucial to democracy's effectiveness. It is often said of Hitler that he was impeccably democratic. He was indeed democratically elected, but promptly cancelled all subsequent elections. At best, democratically speaking, he scores one out of two. Other political strong-arm men, who got power by old fashioned civil warlike methods, but who then left a democratic legacy, that is, they contrived (or at least permitted) the circumstances which would allow elections in the future, get denounced as "totally undemocratic", when they also score one out of two. And which election matters more, the last one, or the simple fact of the next one, when it comes to how safe and sound life would be right now?

None of which means that I love democracy, merely that I prefer it to civil war, famine, concentration camps etc.. Cue clichés about democracy being the worst system, except … More to the point, here's what looks like another quite good link to the sort of notions I and Michael Strong agree with.

One of the many reasons why I would like to live for more like the next two centuries, rather than the mere two decades which is my likely best shot, is that I would love to see what happens to democracy in the next little clutch of decades. Currently, it is just growing and growing in strength, for all of the above reasons. I'm not the only one who wants a quiet life, and will settle for a disappointing one if that's the price to be paid. But, will democracy last? Will it, for instance, attach itself to the emerging government of the world which I believe we are now witnessing in our time? If it does, will it then do anything to prevent global civil wars? If democracy fades, what might replace it?

When I say "democracy" please understand that by that I mean big noisy elections deranging regular television for weeks at a time, political parties, legislative assemblies of self-important bores, lying, cheating, thieving, grandstanding, moral self-aggrandisement and relentless disappointment for almost all concerned, bar only a tiny few particularly rapacious and particularly lucky winners. I do not mean that fatuous construct of political malcontents known as "real democracy", as in: everything the malcontent wants from democratically elected politicians, however far fetched, such as financial security for all (especially him), equality for all (ditto), openness of decision-making (by others rather than in the unlikely event that he is deciding anything of importance), environmental perfection, and immediate answers to his mad letters or emails to politicians, telling him that his mad arguments, no matter how numerous or how many CAPITAL LETTERS they may contain, have all triumphed.

Speaking of political malcontents, what I want is free markets in everything, a cheap internet connection, a cheap digital camera with a twiddly screen which takes perfect pictures with just the one (mega-mega-zoom when I want it) lens, and to stay comfortably alive for at least the next two centuries (see above). But, I never refer to these desires as "real democracy".

"Johann Hari, you are a plagiarist!" I shoot those words at him and let them hang in the air between us.

He shifts uneasily, but when he replies his voice is surprisingly unapologetic."When dealing with an inarticulate interviewee, or one whose English was poor," he confides, "I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible."

"Yeah, right," I say, my outrage rising, "but when you talk about what they said more clearly elsewhere what you really mean is what they said more clearly when interviewed by someone else, huh?"

He furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die unless he got his copy in on time. "It depends, " he says, looking away, "on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon."

"Intellectual accuracy," I cry, grabbing his patting-hand in a jiu-jitsu lock and hurling him over my shoulder, "cannot exist independently of reportorial accuracy."

Floored equally by my logic and a martial arts technique taught to me by a secret order of fighting monks living in the high passes of Chingford, he apologises to a lampshade for having once supported the Iraq war and hobbles away.

This interview was true in spirit.

It was also almost entirely an excuse to say something that I had been meaning to say for ages, but was too short to be a post on its own: never mind all this twitter and email and communication-y stuff, the underreported way the internet changes everything is the way that everything anyone writes is still there years later. I cannot even safely assume that you have forgotten that I said this before, on Tuesday March 1st 2005.

-

UPDATE: Today's Guardian carries an interview (which I am fairly sure really happened) in which Stuart Jeffries talks to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Why we must remember to delete - and forget - in the digital age. Much there to disagree with, in particular the way Mayer-Schönberger chucks around the word "should" in "He argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date". Does "should" mean "it would be nice if manufactures put this in" or "let's have a law to force them to"? When a professor of internet governance and regulation fails to make this distinction it strikes me as sinister. Nevertheless the interview is fascinating, particularly when Mayer-Schönberger talks about how "the Panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace".

It has emerged that the Provisional IRA, rather than its deniable offshoot the South Armagh Republican Action Force, was responsible for the 1976 Kingsmills Massacre. If you do not know about that event, the grim story is here.

On 5 January 1976, the 10 textile workers were travelling home from work in the dark and rain on a minibus in the heart of rural County Armagh.

....

A man asked their religions. There was only one Catholic left on the bus. He was identified and ordered away from his Protestant work mates. He was able to run off.

The lead gunman spoke one other word - "Right" - and the shooting began.

Mr Black was the only one to survive.

It seems almost indecent to let such an event be the starting point for a more general line of thought, but that is the way the mind works sometimes.

I had remembered the Kingsmills massacre. The last question put to the men and the awful choice of what to answer when you did not know whether the terrorists asking were Loyalist or Republican had stuck in my mind. Today I have advanced a little further in knowledge: I now know that analysis of the guns used confirms that it most likely was the IRA after all. The thing is, though, that my level of knowledge, which I tend to think of as average, is actually way above average. I have known for three decades that this massacre occurred. I knew that a few days previously five Catholics had been murdered and that the Kingsmills massacre was carried out in reprisal for this. And here's the point, I know that there are Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Republicans and Loyalists, and could give you a basic account of which side is which and how that situation came to be.

My own background is Irish Catholic. My family loathed the IRA. So I grew up paying a slightly above average amount of attention to Northern Ireland and I noticed over the years that plenty of people in the world literally did not know that there were any Protestants there. These people thought that that it was a case of "the English" occupying Ireland. Partisans on the Republican side also spoke thus, but selective rather than complete ignorance was their problem, as it was for partisans on the Loyalist side. The way in which those soaked in the history of a conflict can blank out the other side and talk of "the people" when they mean "our people" is tragic but a quite different phenomenon from that of ordinarily well educated members of society who simply have no idea - but not, alas, no opinion.

I have explained the existence of a Protestant population in bad French and worse Italian. I remember reading of angry editorials in American newspapers of thirty years ago that appeared to be unaware that the Republic of Ireland was an independent state. Colonel Gaddafi of Libya - now there's a name from the past, wonder what happened to him? - at one time was visited by a delegation of Protestant paramilitaries who convinced him that this was not a straightforward anti-Imperialist struggle and got him to cease sending arms to the IRA.

I think a few of the commenters to this article still literally do not know of the existence of the Protestant population. If they do know of it, they ain't showing it.

The ignorance that is rational for individuals can do great harm.

What are your experiences of spectacular historical ignorance? What effect does that ignorance have? To count, examples should not be the ignorance of the illiterate and semi-literate. There are millions on Earth who do not know the world is round. That is sad but not interesting. What is sad but interesting is the state of those for whom some basic historical fact is an "unknown unknown", to use Rumsfeld's formulation.

On second thoughts, why confine ourselves to history? A Scottish friend of mine relates that some of people she talks to in her part of the world literally think that the financial crisis of 2008 arose because bankers took "all the money" for bonuses. They think the government could get all the money back and make everything OK again, had it but the willpower. Discussing the matter, she modified that slightly, and said that if these friends and acquaintances were ever to articulate the idea I have just described they would probably see that it could not be correct, but they never have articulated it. This is in a Labour-voting but by no means deprived area near Glasgow, but I would not bet on the proportion of people thinking thus in my Tory part of Essex being much different, for all that 'banksters' keep the local economy going.

These holes in peoples' knowledge will have their effect in the end. One could call it trickle-up ignorance.

The historian and libertarian writer, Robert Higgs. is most upset that some Americans had celebrated when Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces a few days ago:

"The caretakers who comfort the sick and dying are often great. The priests and friends who revive the will to live in those who have lost hope are great. The entrepreneurs who establish successful businesses that better satisfy consumer demands for faster communication, safer travel, fresher food, and countless other goods and services are great. The scientists and inventors who peer deeper into the nature of the universe and devise technologies to accomplish humane, heretofore impossible feats are great. The artists who elevate the souls of those who hear their music and view their paintings are great."

"But mere killing is never great, and those who carry out the killings are not great, either. No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity."

I agree utterly with the first paragraph. We should celebrate goodness more than we do. Absolutely right. But come on. I really have had it with the moral posturing of people who wax indignant about their countrymen feeling pleased because an evil man has been killed. When an evil person, in a confrontation such as occurred a few days ago, is killed, then why should not the admittedly rough justice of what happened be marked by a certain degree of grim satisfaction? I don't imagine for a moment that anyone who voiced satisfaction at OBL's death is under the illusion that this can possibly put right the evil that was done on 9/11. There are times, however, when grim satisfaction at what happened to OBL is not only the understandable reaction, but the just one.

It interests me how some on the almost pacifist wing of the libertarian movement - if I can call it that these days - have reacted to the demise of this man. After all, such folk often complained that "neoconservatives" who supported the overthrow of Saddam or the Taliban, say, were going beyond just retribution in response to the 9/11 attacks. So what I would ask of Higgs, and for that matter, would-be POTUS Ron Paul, is what exactly do they suggest should have happened in the case of OBL, had by any chance a pristine, moral libertarian regime have managed to find him and track him down? File a lawsuit? Suggest he surrenders to the nearest police station where he can be read his Miranda rights? That was not going to happen: the most probable outcome for a person such as this would be a messy arrest, and the charade of a trial and lifetime jail term/execution, or a firefight. Welcome to reality.

Higgs finishes with this:

"Glory to the USA, glory to its hired killers, glory above all to its heroic Great Leader. The whole spectacle is profoundly disgusting. Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made."

"Unseemly". Oh get over yourselves.

Here are some more thoughts over at Pajamas TV. I particularly enjoyed Bill Whittle's comments. I share his take.

Here.
Scroll right out, then right in. Rotate. Wonder.
Hat tip: Photon Courier

It seems almost unbelievably crass that attempts to take down Julian Assange should revolve around such a patently obvious ploy as concocting 'sexual assault' charges against him.

It reminds me of some other oh so obvious black bag operations, i.e. the patently absurd planted media articles to link Saddam (a secular socialist) to Al Qaeda (Islamists) in the run up to the allied attack on Iraq.

I have grave misgiving about Wikileaks releasing operational military information but the fact the governments of the world are all baying for his blood and starting to cooperate with operations to discredit him speaks volumes about the damage he has done to the leviathan state everywhere... as was always his intention...and for that Assange has already assured himself a very special place in history. I suspect people will be talking about him long after the current crop of political leaders have been consigned to the mundane sections of historical record.

John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.

Max Hardberger makes his living by stealing back stolen cargo ships, beating pirates at their own game from Haiti to Russia.

In 2012 there will be a US presidential election using a new distribution of the electoral college. This will use the population data of the current US census. After last night's elections, there has been a dramatic change in what happens if the Democrat and Republican candidates end up with a tie (for example 269 votes each).

Short answer is that, assuming the politicians stick to their party, the Republicans win the presidency, but the Senate would pick a Democrat for Vice President. Details at my election blog.

[Update: correction made from comments, thanks Lone Ranger!]

 

This gave me a bit of a laugh:

"Vampire Diaries" star Ian Somerhalder, an outspoken critic of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, appeared at Thursday’s Washington Post Live conference on energy policy in the nation’s capital. The actor, who was "chill" about speaking in front of members of both houses of Congress, fit in so well in his suit and tie that some wondered about possible future political aspirations down the road.

No, I had never heard of Ian Somerhalder before either... and that was not what made me giggle... it was one of the comments on this article:

It is just wonderful that being an actor gives you such profound insight into the world that politicians actually want hear what you have to say in person.

Certainly when I ponder energy policy or any of the other difficult issues, the first thing that comes to mind is "Now I wonder what Ian Somerhalder’s take on that is?"

I really wish that instead of grinding that economics MA I had gone to acting school as maybe people in DC might actually decide to ask me what I think about energy policy or the economics crisis. Oh well.

- Bell Curve

Hehehe.

Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is "the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes." He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese.

The problem is that hipsters are nothing like their namesake predecessors who attempted to operate outside convention with distinct agenda of cultural and social change. Nothing about the modern hipster is anti-anything. Rather, hipsters now are a manifestation of late capitalism run amok, forever feeding itself on the shininess of the Now: an impatient, forgetful mob taught to discard their products as quickly as they adopt them. They are not a cultural movement, but a generation of pure consumers. If capitalism were to really be altered in any way, the hipster as we know it would lose its raison d'etre.

And I thought hipsters were knickers that came up to your hips. Now I know better. Chap in the Guardian says that because this clothes company called American Apparel went bust it just goes to show what he always said about capitalism.

Death spirals of a co-opted public relentlessly co-opting itself, knowing acceptance of our generation's role in the capitalist meta-narrative, knickers losing their raison d'etre... I tells 'ee, one of these nights we'll all be murthered in our beds.

I just did a posting about iScream at my personal blog, iScream being a type of ice cream which I tasted earlier this evening when I dined at Chateau Perry. And then I thought, why confine the news of this delicious dessert to such a tiny demographic? The whole world should be told about this superb dining experience.

I guess one reason why people make things like this, concentrating entirely on making them tasty rather than making stuff that tastes like cardboard, and spending all their time, money and tender loving care on a lot of ridiculous and expensive advertising, is that word of whatever it is will now spread far and wide at no cost, provided the product tastes good. In my opinion, this iScream ice cream tastes wonderful, and word of it will surely spread fast. I suspect that "iScream" may prove to be a rather silly name, but better a silly name for superbly tasty ice cream than superbly named frozen mediocrity.

The website is here, but is not that informative about iScream ice cream. So if you live in or near London, or if you are ever in London, why not visit the Artisan du Chocolat shop in Lower Sloane Street, just to the south of Sloane Square, where the above supply of iScream ice cream was purchased.

I'm told their chocolate is very good too.

Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing this out.

My husband thought this webpage, produced by three ladies from the state of Texas, might be of interest to Samizdata readers.

I always go to the polls. I dutifully scrawl some libertarian slogan on the ballot. Some vote-counter reads it, puts my paper in the "spoiled" pile, and - who knows? - maybe has their life changed by a Damascene conversion to the cause of liberty, years later.

A pitiful exercise? Perhaps. But I could not bear to stay away and be thought apathetic.

I have given up trying to make my nearest and dearest understand. She says I am opting out - or sitting on the fence - or I think I don't make a difference.

I try to explain that my vote makes precisely as much difference as hers: namely, infinitesimally more than zero. Her vote and mine are symbolic acts.

My explanation is useless too.

Suppose there were a "None of the above" box on our ballot papers? Should I use it? Or would that be validating the whole rotten system? Do those who stay right away and watch the movie channel making a more valid protest?

Abstaining even from a "None of the above" box would be an act of exquisite hyper-rejection. Hmmm ... attractive.

"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.

No doubt it must be global warming that has caused the most severe snowfall on the US capital in ninety years. I eagerly await an IPCC report on this!

I can only wonder if Dave Cameron actually reads the newspapers. The first rumbling of disquiet on his caring/sharing Green Tory-ism started last year and it is not too late to get rid of this half wit and replace him as leader of the Conservative Party with, well, a conservative.

Gah. Sorry, I think I just had a 'brain displacement'... this is the Tories I am talking about! What was I thinking! The party that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity! Silly me. Still... is it not enjoyable to watch the unravelling of an overarching global narrative?

Reason magazine's Nick Gillespie - writing in the WSJ - has a nice article up about how the 'Noughties (sorry, I cannot think of a better term) have been generally miserable ones for those concerned about liberty and constraining government. He also has a few predictions for the next 10 years. Even leaving aside the response to 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, governments have lost few chances to find reasons, or excuses, to tax, monitor and generally annoy us. I love this paragraph:

"As a sadly appropriate parting gift to this grim first decade of the 21st century, a period so debased that the Boston Red Sox managed to win not just one but two World Series, we can thank Nigerian would-be suicide bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab for robbing us of our inalienable right to use a cramped bathroom at 30,000 feet. Indeed, we can only await Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano's directive that all frequent fliers must now go commando as a condition of air travel."

Nudity as a condition of air travel. There's an idea to conjure with on this cold Sunday afternoon.

Usually differing opinion should be met with reasoned debate... but sometimes they should be met with statements like "if your side ever managed to get that into law, my response would be to urge people to start shooting at anyone who supports that position". The notion that state action must be used to reduce the population of this planet falls well into that category for me and so when I see an 'ethicist' writing about his reaction to this subject, moreover in the context of him having a child, it does make me wonder what sort of thing different people regard as the final line beyond which they stop talking and reach for the rifle or the semtex.

One reader of my blog last week asserted that "the human population could do with a good 25% knocked out."

He goes on to suggest that we should: "restrict every woman to a single pregnancy, once she has had that then sterilize her, restrict every man to causing a single pregnancy, after that castrate him, stop ALL forms of artificial preganancy (test tube etc.) This way we will reduce the population - and quite quickly."

Strong stuff! But it is certainly true that for the last couple of centuries population growth has been inextricably linked with the use of fossil fuels.

Now I do not begrudge 'Ethical Man' his response, but rather than replying, in effect, "steady on chaps", personally my intemperate inclination would be more alone the line of inviting the person suggesting we need mandatory state enforced population reduction to go jump off a bridge and die, for the greater good of course, if he felt so strongly about it... and the sooner the better.

This is no different to the sorts of people who say about Stalin when his policy of mass murder is brought up "yes but at least he industrialised the Soviet Union"... thereby equating the millions who died in the man-made Ukrainian famine and in the the gulags as, in effect, simply fuel burnt in a justifiable bonfire to power the Soviet Union's engines. I usually ask such people if they would have accepted they and their families would have been a reasonable cost had they lived in some Soviet village at the time and been deemed expendable as a way to crush anti-communist nationalism, and if not, why not?

The problem I have with this whole discussion is that it grants what is a monstrous totalitarian perspective a polite hearing rather than the sort of response it truly deserves. It strikes me to just dignify the proposition "the state should spay women and castrate men" with "wouldn't it be better if we just find a way to reduce the fuel we burn?" is to in effect tolerate the intolerable. A far better response, and dare I say a more ethical one, would be "your policy will indeed reduce the world's population because people like me will put a 10mm hole between the eyes of totalitarian scum like you."

To accept such vile notions such as forced sterilisation as acceptable to advance, even in theory, is not tolerance... it is moral cowardice. It is a bit like giving a polite airing to the chap who wants to argue that we would all be better off if we just gassed a few Jews, and then tutting gently before calming pointing out the error of his ways... as opposed to throwing him out the door (ideally without bothering to open it first). I know which I think is more appropriate.

I occasionally come across comments, usually expressed with a sort of "how terrible!" undertone, that more people recently voted in the X-Factor singing talent show on the ITV station in the UK than voted in the 2005 General Election. But there is another way of looking at it: the fact that more people care to vote for their favourite singer than the various types of authoritarian statist twerp in fact shows that the Great British public have a healthy set of priorities.

In case any commenter sniffs at my possibly making nice comments about the X-Factor, I don't like the show, although I find that there is something gruesomely compelling about Simon Cowell and some of the acts.

Finally some meaningful gestures I think we can all support...

Simply... delightful.

Here is a diverting read: a trip to Napa Valley's wine country. It involves a robotic grape picker. The Singularity is coming!

I followed a link I spotted for 'great science hoaxes'... and imagine my surprise when it turned out to not be about Anthropogenic Global Warming!

I repeatedly read non-atheists saying that atheists are foolish in various ways. Strident, arrogant, irrational, even unscientific. I obviously read a better class of atheist because I seldom see this, but today I did come across a foolish piece in which atheist Paul Fidalgo tries to accuse Tony Blair of saying, in a recent speech at a Georgetown University get together of Muslim and Christian scholars, that atheists are terrorists.

I say "tries", because Fidalgo himself admits that he was obliged to remove the word "equates" from his first version of the title, and replace it with "groups". In other words to admit that he had failed in what he was trying to argue.

This article originally used the word "equates" in the headline, which I have changed to "groups." Realizing that Blair never specifically makes a perfect equivalency between atheism and religious violence, I thought this was a fairer word to use.

But instead of admitting that his argument is holed below the water-line, Fidalgo leaves it there, accusing Blair of wanting to say or trying to imply, blah blah, what he never did say, and actually never even tried to say.

Blair does indeed group secular critics of religion with terrorists, but not in a way that is inaccurate. Both categories of person are, he says, a problem for religious believers of his sort, which they are. Terrorists use religion to do and to argue for bad things, thereby discrediting religion and making people not like it. Atheists say that religion is nonsense (and agnostics say that it might be), thereby discrediting religion and making people not believe in it. Fair enough. But Blair never claims that the two groups are identical. He does use the rather rude phrase "scorn God" to describe what atheists do. But if, as he and his audience all assume, God does exist, and yet here are these people saying that God doesn't exist, "scorn" is okay to describe such behaviour. I don't hear Blair saying that atheists believe in God but just don't like him, in the manner, I believe, of atheists in former times.

I and many other atheists and agnostics agree with Islamic terrorists about what their particular religion says. They say it supports, even demands, terrorism, and we think it does too. About that we disagree with Tony Blair. So, Blair could have grouped such atheists and agnostics with terrorists in that way also if he wanted to. But to have said anything like that would have undermined what Blair did say, which is that Christians and Muslims should stick together in the face of the two front conflict they now face against terrorists, and against secular opponents of religion. What unites Christians and Muslims, Blair said, is more important than what divides them. Their shared belief in God should, that is to say, count for more than their contrasting beliefs about what God wants and who has had and now still has the hottest line to him and what should be done about this and how it should be done. If you want to criticise this speech, then criticise this implausible project of ecumenical unity, achieved by airbrushing out what Muslims especially actually say and actually believe. Don't complain that Blair regards both secularists and terrorists as being, in their (our) different ways, opposed to him. They (we) are.

Tony Blair is, to put it mildly, not my favourite contemporary. Gordon Brown has been a very obviously disastrous Prime Minister of Britain, and before that, it is now clear to all but the willfully blind, a disastrous Chancellor of the Exchequer. But Brown's predecessor in Downing Street, Tony Blair, was the one who made the whole Brown slow motion car crash possible. He set it all in motion with his disastrously effective charm offensive. He appointed Brown. He failed to sack Brown. He handed the whole ship over to Brown, as soon as it became clear that it was headed very publicly for the rocks. Now there is even talk of Blair becoming the ruler of Europe. Whether that happens or not, this man has clearly not given up trying to be powerful.

All the more reason, then, when people criticise Tony Blair, for them to get it right.

There is a bizarre article over on liberalconspiracy (liberal as in "not-liberal-in-any-way" kind of liberal) called "Are all libertarians so childish?", whose category error starts in the title, saying 'mean things' about a fringe Tory party conference outfit called The Freedom Zone.

The theme of the meeting was ‘the bully state’, and the panel included Roger Helmer, the MEP for East Midlands. Mr Helmer made a gallant defence of his rights to get pissed, stuff his face, pollute his lungs, and ruin the atmosphere by driving as fast as he likes in a great gas-guzzling monstrosity. People were sick of being told how to live, he said. The state should butt out.

Fair enough. But then, after making this impassioned defence of the rights of the individual, he jumped seamlessly to the rights of decent English sorts to tell travellers (”we’re not allowed to say gypsies any more”) to piss off. He told a story about how villagers in Bedfordshire had objected to proposals for a travellers’ encampment, because of what it would do to their quality of life. Ninety percent of those complaints had been disregarded, he said, because the powers that be considered them to be racist. This was an outrage. The state should be on the side of the people.

Is anyone else detecting just a hint of hypocrisy here?
[...]
Things don’t work like that, of course. Society has rules, to make sure that by exercising my freedoms I don’t crap all over yours.

Those rules don’t just apply to people we don’t like. The laws that stop Mr Helmer from getting pissed and going joy-riding in an SUV have nothing to do with a deeply felt desire to restrict his freedom, and everything to do with stopping him from buggering things up for the rest of us.

Now these are very reasonable observations, but the steaming pile of elephant poop in the middle of this pool table is that the people in question maybe Tories... but they are not in fact libertarians.

My reply in the comment section was:

I always laugh when I see the phrase "libertarian" and "Tory" anywhere near each other. And probably best not to conflate society with state when you talk about rules (and mean laws).

Rational libertarians understand that the "freedom" to get drunk in your SUV is trumped by my freedom not to have you impose clear and present risks to life and limb on me, but hardly anyone on the Stupid Party, sorry I mean Tory Party, are *any* sort of libertarian, let alone the rational kind. If a few souls are trying to move them in a libertarian direction, well power to them, but I don't fancy their chances.

But regarding gypsies, really it just comes down to property rights, which are something very few Tories support any more than you do, as asking them questions about gypsies are indeed a wonderful way of showing: the issue highlights the fact they are not libertarians (people who support several liberty), they are (gasp) Tories (people who support "people like them"). It is simple: if the gypsies rent property from the legal owner, they have a right to be there and too damn bad if the neighbours object to their mere presence. End of story. If said gypsies then nick stuff and trash adjoining properties, then action should indeed be taken against those responsible. Also end of story (and it is a different story to the first one).

Nevertheless listening to you discussing the failings of libertarian thought, with some Tories as examples, is a bit like listening to two members of different religions discussing the failings of atheism. Entertaining but not very enlightening.

This morning, my twitter network delivered a bit of a red herring argument due to lack of differentiation between the internet and the web. So it helps to say first what is internet and what is web (these are not proper official definitions but will have to do for the purposes of this post):

The internet is a set of open protocols that have given rise to a specific type of network - a heterarchy. By heterarchy, in this case, I mean a network of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role.

The wikipedia article also points out that heterarchies can contain hierarchical elements and DNS is an example. But an (infra-)structural heterarchy such as the internet ultimately undermines hierarchies. I often paraphrase what John Gilmore famously said: The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - replacing censorship with control.

This feature of a heterarchical network:

...no one way of dividing a heterarchical system can ever be a totalizing or all-encompassing view of the system, each division is clearly partial, and in many cases, a partial division leads us, as perceivers, to a feeling of contradiction that invites a new way of dividing things.

- is the internet's greatest advantage. Built into the fabric of the internet is the ability to bypass missing or 'damaged' nodes and so imposition of hierarchical structures is incompatible in the long run - such control is perceived as an obstacle and therefore damage*.

The above is the 'defence mechanism' of the internet as a network. Now the 'offense mechanism' or better yet, the disruptive one:

What makes the Net inter is the fact that it's just a protocol — the Internet Protocol, to be exact. A protocol is an agreement about how things work together.

This protocol doesn't specify what people can do with the network, what they can build on its edges, what they can say, who gets to talk. The protocol simply says: If you want to swap bits with others, here's how. If you want to put a computer — or a cell phone or a refrigerator — on the network, you have to agree to the agreement that is the Internet.

The web, on the other hand, is a network of platforms and silos, with many intermediaries. Some of them have considerable ability to control large chunks of it in ways that would not be possible on the open network that the internet still is. Facebook and any platform based around control and management of my data spring to mind, regardless of how much 'use' or functionality they provide.

Still, even on the web, hierarchy is not the defining organisational structure though closed platforms undermine openness of the web as a whole. There are overtones of feudal serf-lord relationship - you can farm my land in exchange for tithes and/or working for me (just substitute platform and data and you've got the current relationship between users and Facebook etc).

That said, there are emerging orders on the web which structurally can be described as power law and socially/politically sometimes as meritocracy. So not all order is automatically a hierarchy.

Another fallacy is due to the term democracy having two meanings. Those who argue that the web is a force for democratisation often use them interchangably which can lead to confusion about the nature of democracy online.

Democracy as open access i.e. right to and equality of voting - one man, one vote (though sometimes it's not hard to see the one Man with the one Vote) and democracy as rule of the majority. The web is strongly driving the first meaning of democracy - anyone can connect (assuming sufficient resources such as a device and internet connection) and interact online. I can set up an email (communication tool), a blog (publishing platform) and twitter (distribution network). Pretty powerful and heady stuff considering that in the offline world all three capabilities are very expensive and highly controlled and controlable.

Democracy as a rule of the majority is not applicable to the internet or even the web. Nobody tells me what to write on my blog or who I connect and interact with. There is no General Will or Greater Good that would dictate or subjugate my actions online... though social pressures and technical limitations make this a far cry from a utopia. :)

With that out of the way, let's look at the argument that the internet (or the web) is being used and abused by various government to oppress their citizens. How is that evidence of either the internet or the web being hierarchical? If it is evidence of anything, it is of the effectiveness of online in distribution and management or monitoring of data... and governments' eventual catching up with those capabilities.

As Alec pointed out in an IM conversation about this - would those citizens be any more free or less oppresssed without the governments (ab)use of the internet? I don't think so.

The real problem with countries using the internet to oppress its peoples is not in the 'virtual' world - they wouldn't be able to control that any more than the rest of us can - it is in their access to its infrastructural underpinnings.

The use of hackers and cyberwar techniques against other countries by Russia and many other countries is not a sign of governments' control of the internet either. Such techniques are not limited to governments and can be (and sometimes are) applied to the government.

Finally, I do take issue with the concluding paragraph of the blog post that sparked off this rant:

The exaggerated claims of those who say the internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies or that it is bound to lead to greater democracy and collaboration are an unhelpful distraction from the important study of the internet’s real impact on real lives.

The claims that internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies are not exaggerated, they are based on understanding of the nature of the internet as a heterarchy. As long as that is unassaulted, the internet will be able to re-route around censorship, control or hierarchies as damage.

That said, none of this can or should be taken for granted. The web does reflect our mental models of organisation, social conventions and power structures. However, it is build on an infrastructure - the internet - that has already profoundly shifted balances of power, brought about phenomenal technological innovation and is currently having a go at social and organisational conventions. Let's give it a hand where we can by keeping protocols, data and technology as open as possible.

*An important proviso - the underlying infrastructure of the internet has to remain open and not in the hands of some mega-hierarchy such as government, directly or via telcos.

cross-posted from Media Influencer

I see that the swear-blogger with a nice turn of phrase, Obnoxio The Clown, has developed a love for Malta. Good observations he makes, not least about the lovely ladies of said island. Indeed - I am married to one of them. Anyway, in a week's time from today, yours truly will complete his scuba diving course - done with the PADI organisation - in the island of Gozo, just to the north of Malta. Weather conditions should be good. I will not be allowed to dive more than a certain level in my course - you have to do more training to go much deeper - but the views promise to be spectacular.

The seas around Malta are very deep, so I don't know whether I will get to see any wrecks. One of the grim aspects of that part of the world is how much stuff was sunk during WW2. There must be loads of bits of old RAF and German aircraft down there as well, I would imagine.

I have never really understood the point of facebook. Yes, I know it is popular but the fact is it is being used for things it is very poorly suited for, such as pro-liberty activism, by a great many people. There is even a samizdata facebook group (largely inactive, as again I really cannot see the reason for it and only created it as several people asked me too).

So when I was asked to join a (worthy) facebook group lamenting the fact facebook summarily and without explanation shut down a (worthy) group of anti-anti-smokers with 800,000 members, I joined it and posted this:

This is why the whole facebook model (a corporate controlled walled garden) is not suited to activism in the way a network of blogs on the wider internet is. To be honest although I joined this group, I think facebook is more suitable for discussions about LOL-cats than anything serious. I lost interest in facebook the day they took it upon themselves to change how "my" page looks, which just drove home that unlike a blog, my facebook page is not really "mine" at all. Anything you do on facebook is at facebook's sufferance. I just do not see the need for facebook to be honest.

Facebook... yawn. No thanks... I have the internet.

Oh, and by the way I have nothing against LOL-cats.

I always thought gleaming, European or US wooden motorboats were the height of cool. One can imagine David Niven, Cary Grant or Sophia Loren behind the wheel of one of these beauties. Yes, I know that in technology terms, some of the modern stuff is much better, but never mind. All I need now is my private Italian lake, and I can use one.

(You can tell I have been out of the country for a few days and my mind is not entirely on TARP, Gordon Brown's mental health, taxes, ID cards.....)

Did you hear that Michael Jackson has gone to meet his other maker?

- Adriana Lukas, delivered deadpan during luncheon.

Bryan Appleyard, who writes a whimsical blog, likens the wondrous Barcelona FC forward Lionel Messi to the doomsterish intellectual, John Gray. I mean, what the f**k?

Considering how thoroughly Mr Gray has had the tar kicked out of him by this blog and a few others for his less-than-convincing opinions, I fail to see the connection. A certain trickiness, perhaps, a slipperyness? But in a footballer, trickiness in defeating a defender and goalkeeper is a skill to be admired. In Mr Gray, an ability to say six contradictory things before breakfast betokens a certain deficiency, a lack of rigour. But as Brian Micklethwait has pointed out, Gray is actually consistent - consistently pessimistic. He's an Eyeore come rain or shine.

There is a lot of stupidity about. To come up with examples from the world of politics would merely be depressing. In Act Two Scene Three of Macbeth the play takes a break from people murdering each other and Scotland descending into civil war so that a comic doorman can make lame jokes about brewer's droop. In the spirit of that doorman, here are two wavelets in the world tsunami of stupidity that flowed my way recently:

Example 1: Barnado's, the children's charity, has put one of those collection bags through my door. The slogan on the envelope reads:

"We believe in children, do you?"

I would so like to say, "No, I'm a paedgnostic," but that might be misunderstood. This slogan does not quite reach the heights of meaninglessness scaled by "Us needs you 'cause you're Younique" that featured in the book Spacetime Donuts, but that was fictional and meant to be stupid.

Example 2: Several thousand of those things in which Barnardo's so ardently believe took their Biology GCSEs today. One syllabus, extruded by Edexcel, is called 360Science. Yeah, without a space. No further evidence that it will be 360Stupid is really required, but in case anyone is wondering... a family informant swears that one of the questions on today's paper featured a picture of a cat bearing the caption "This photograph shows a cat."

What have you seen lately that is amusingly stupid?

UPDATE: to my mortifishameification I realise that "paedgnostic" would mean almost the opposite of what I meant. Consider it replaced with paedo-agnostic, which sounds even worse. Of course one could also tell the Barnardo's collector that one takes either the weak or strong apaedist position.

Time Rice has said that to write a great pop lyric you need to "fall in love with cliché". Shahid Malik MP, who is one of the smartest and most personable of the younger New Labour generation (full disclosure: I know his brother, who is a brilliant computer scientist and an IT entrepreneur), has had a go at repudiating accusations about his parlimentary expenses. He says his allowance claims were "a million percent within the rules".

If that is a deliberate attempt to package in a soundbite the suggestion (1) that he is intensely distressed to have been traduced, with the hidden message (2) that he is insufficiently numerate to have been conscious that the figures might look a bit odd, then it is an impressive subordination of cliché to the political purpose of asserting his honesty. It comes across as demotic and with the right tone of shock at being singled out. As long as Mr Malik is not subsequently proved to have done anything seriously wrong, he will be one of the winners out of this political crisis.

It is a weird world. A political career can be built on or destroyed by a few words. And the words need not be obviously rhetorical. It is all the smarter if they are not.

Update: [& typo corrected above.] He's "stepped down" as a minister while suggestions that he has broken the ministerial code are investigated. That too strikes me as a smart damage-limitation move. Some commentators seem to assume I am defending him. I am not. I don't have any opinion on the allegations. I'm admiring his chutzpah and musing on how subtle the game of media democracy is.

Rihanna's music is not particularly 'my thing' but clearly she is an internationally known high profile star. Thus when she was recently allegedly beaten up by her then boyfriend, this made it onto newspapers world wide. Unsurprisingly the police got involved, as indeed they should do in such cases.

But low and behold, far from treating the victim of a domestic assault with sensitivity, some piece of crap working for the police decided to make some money and sold the evidentiary pictures of her, which can now be seen across the internet. I would not even link to this if they were not already hard to avoid by anyone connected to the web.

I mean how low can someone go to have done this? I sure hope they find who is responsible and lock them in a dark hole for a portion of their life for a grotesque breach of fiduciary responsibility. The more I understand people, the more I like cats.

Dr. Douglas Young, Professor from the Political Science & History at Gainesville State College has a question for you to ask the next person you see wearing a Che Guevara tee-shirt

Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean to a leftist 'martyr', this time Ernesto Guevara. So let us recall the real 'Che' and try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer.

The meticulous myth of Senor Guevara is of a handsome Argentine heroically helping Fidel Castro's guerrillas liberate Cuba from Fulgencio Batista's military dictatorship in 1959. Then he became a global revolutionary icon inspiring the downtrodden to rise up everywhere, even personally leading rebel warriors in the Congo before being executed doing the same in Bolivia in 1967. The (communist) party line says Che personifies the selfless humanitarian courageously fighting for 'social justice'. He is the Marxists' martyred Christ figure replete with pictures of his half-naked corpse riddled with bullet holes. And the classic poster of an angry young Guevara has scarred countless college dorm rooms for over 40 years, putting a face on the eternally young rebel for angry adolescents everywhere.

The real Guevara was a reckless bourgeois adrenaline-junkie seeking a place in history as a liberator of the oppressed. But this fanatic's vehicle of 'liberation' was Stalinism, named for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, murderer of well over 20 million of his own people. As one of Castro's top lieutenants, Che helped steer Cuba's revolutionary regime in a radically repressive direction. Soon after overthrowing Batista, Guevara choreographed the executions of hundreds of Batista officials without any fair trials. He thought nothing of summarily executing even fellow guerrillas suspected of disloyalty and shot one himself with no due process.

Che was a purist political fanatic who saw everything in stark black and white. Therefore he vociferously opposed freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly, protest, or any other rights not completely consistent with his North Korean-style communism. How many rock music-loving teens sporting Guevara t-shirts today know their hero supported Cuba's 1960s' repression of the genre? How many homosexual fans know he had gays jailed?

Did the Obama volunteers in that Texas campaign headquarters with Che's poster on the wall know that Guevara fervently opposed any free elections? How 'progressive' is that?

How socially just was it that Che was enraged when the Russians blinked during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and withdrew their nuclear missiles from the island, thus averting a nuclear war? Guevara was such a zealous ideologue that he relished the specter of millions of Cuban lives sacrificed on the altar of communism, declaring Cuba "a people ready to sacrifice itself to nuclear arms, that its ashes might serve as a basis for new societies". Some humanitarian!

Che was a narcissist who boasted that "I have no house, wife, children, parents, or brothers; my friends are friends as long as they think like me, politically". This is a role model for today's 'post-political' voters claiming we should get beyond partisanship?

Adding to the ridiculousness of the Che cult is that he was virtually a complete failure. As a medical doctor, he never even had a practice. When put in charge of the Cuban economy at the start of Castro's government, his uncompromising communist diktats ran it completely into the ground, from which it never recovered. Humiliated, and also angry that Castro was not fomenting enough revolution abroad, he then tried to lead such quixotic adventures in Argentina, the Congo, and Bolivia, failing miserably everywhere while sacrificing the lives of scores of naïve, idealistic young followers as deluded pawns in the service of his personality cult.

Another reason he fled Cuba in the mid-1960s was the complete mess he made of his private life. Though he preached sexual purity to his colleagues, he was a shameless adulterer who abandoned two wives and many children, some legitimate, others not. As a grandson put it, "he was never home". The public Che who supposedly had such great love for humanity privately could not stand most folks.

Guevara's promiscuous communist adventurism was the pattern of a terminal adolescent running away from his problems to get caught up in some heroic crusade against his eternal bete noir, 'Yankee imperialism'.

So why do so many well-heeled American libs still admire this thug? Are the young simply ignorant of his execrable record and drawn to the image of the dashing young rebel? Do older progressives feel guilt for their free market prosperity, and showing solidarity with Che absolves them? Do hippies-turned-yuppies get nostalgic for their youthful protests and rationalize that the symbolism of Che as a 'social reformer' eclipses his actual horrific human rights record? And are some American Guevaraistas truly dangerous leftists who seek to emulate their icon and destroy our free, democratic, capitalist society?

Ask that guy wearing the Che tee-shirt.

Last night I heard an argument used in relation to the climate change argument and Man's alleged role in driving it, that went along the following lines: We have a responsibility to ensuing generations, maybe even those around 1,000 years or so hence, which means we should do X or Y to curb CO2 emissions etc to ensure that these future generations' lives are not blighted.

Now of course nothing is more likely to get your humble blogger annoyed than the "Do it for the children" line. The precautionary principle: do nothing if you cannot prove it will not cause harm - would have killed the Industrial Revolution at birth, prevented any life-saving drug from having been brought to market, been used to shut down scientific speculation, space-faring, advanced dental surgery, modern medicine, the whole 9 yards of human endeavour. And the problem with the argument that says "We have a responsibility to generations yet unborn" is that it demands a great deal. How on earth can I or others evaluate the proper limits or scope of such a responsibility? What about the Law of Unintended Consequences? For instance, if we adopt the PP, and we severely curtail the pace of industrial development, scientific advance or economic growth, will we not bring about disastrous consequences for our children, grand-children and so on? In fact, if folk want to bring up the issue of "Do it for the kids", I tend to respond that if we are to take this sort of multi-generational responsibility, then we should go for as much freedom and growth as possible, and not the other way around.

Another way to think about this is from the position of scarcity, both in terms of time and resources. I only have so much time in my life to make the sort of adjustments that I might hope to benefit my kids, or my grandkids, or whatever. I also only have so many resources at my disposal. And with that in mind, I think that governments - which after all are only collections of persons - have only fixed resources and time at their disposal too, and that there are major tradeoffs to be considered in stifling a technology A to benefit a technology B. Simply repeating that we "owe it to our children" does not take us very far. All too often, in fact, the line about protecting future generations can easily descend into a form of argument by intimidation, a sort of moral bullying.

When it comes to bad arguments used in conversations on topics like this, Jamie Whyte's gem of a book repays a lot of reading for avoiding pitfalls.

Of course, as a final point, the "Do it for the kids" argument frequently comes from those advocates of greater state controls who are blind to the damage that the state does, sometimes deliberately, to the institution of the family. The ironies abound.

Via Will Wilkinson's blog, a term I think is ideal for the crazed Keynesian policies now being applied: disaster dirigisme.

Being charitable to my fellow motorists, I guess a lot of them were in a hurry to get home last night and start off the first full working week nice and early, judging by the amount of tailgaters I encountered while driving down from East Anglia to London. At least half a dozen motorists drove very close behind me, full headlight beams on, doing probably about 90mph, forcing me to get out of the way and then watch as these idiots drove at up to 100mph or more. Odd, really, since as Samizdata readers are only too well aware, the UK has become the land of the speed camera. For whatever reason, a lot of motorists seemed not to give a damn about getting a speeding fine last night. But maybe this was nothing unusual and I was just a bit unlucky.

I actually enjoy driving fast along a motorway although I find the strain on the eyes of driving at night, with lots of drivers' lights shining in my eyes via the reflection off a rear-view mirror, to be pretty difficult after a couple of hours. I can understand the frustration of motorists with a very slow driver who, frankly, should not be on a motorway at all, but tailgating is bloody dangerous particularly when road conditions are less than perfect. In this case at least, I am on the side of the police taking a firm line.

Anyway, after a splendid break spent in the contrasting locations of Malta and Northumberland, I am back at the blogging coalface. A belated Happy New Year from me.

Timothy has an absolute blinder of an article here. The next time you read of some liberal - in the American usage of the word liberal - attack one of their opponents as a "hick", or "redneck", or whatnot, consider his words.

Read the whole thing.

At 8 pm on Friday 14th, the day after tomorrow, I am giving a talk to the Oxford Libertarian Society, as mentioned here. I killed two birds with one stone by listening this evening to a talk given on October 24th to the Society by Professor David Friedman, concerning which they have a report (and a link to the recording) on their blog, here. I wanted to hear what Professor Friedman had to say because I always want to hear what he says, he having been one of my favourite libertarians ever since I first read The Machinery of Freedom in about 1975. And, by listening to what Friedman said to the Oxford Libertarians and to the questions they asked of him after he had spoken, I now have a better idea of what kind of audience they will be and what they've recently been attending to and thinking about. More recently, their blog flagged up their video of the same event. I'll be watching some of that too.

Today, they put up a blog posting advertising my talk. Its heading is a little out of date, but it describes what I used to do far more energetically than I do now, and what I will be talking about: Propagandising for Liberty. My use of the word propaganda is deliberate in this connection. For me, propaganda is a neutral term, meaning simply: that which should be propagated. But there is, I agree, a whiff of intimidation about the word, of weight of argument in the gross tonnage sense as well as merely in the sense of intellectual power. But how to contrive such effects without incurring crippling costs? I don't have all the answers, but will offer some and I will be paying particular attention to universities.

By the way, David Friedman's talk to the LA/LI conference on the afternoon following his Oxford talk, on the impact of various revolutionary near-future technologies, can now be viewed as well as heard, here.

Enough of terrible politicians. What people should really know is what to drink during social and business encounters. Over to you, John Tierney.

Barataria - A new edict was promulgated last night forbidding the people from making public comments on clothing other than their own. The Master of Protocol is also looking at more severe punishments for seamstresses and button-makers who give fashion tips.

The Guild of Tailors has announced itself very pleased. "This is a major contribution to preserving the fine traditions of aristocratic couture, so recently under attack from vulgar speculation," a spokesman said. "The country only just survived the panic and chaos recently caused to his Imperial Highness' wardrobe by a malicious peasant-boy, so everyone can now understand where that sort of thing leads to. More sumptuary laws will mean an orderly clothes trade where people are able to buy what experts know is good for them at an approved price. "

Darryl Watson wrote in with something that is indeed a topic worthy of pondering...

I am not sure if this is a worthy topic of discussion, but the issue is gnawing at me right now, and thought I would share:

I have a ten-minute walk to my preferred parking spot, from where I work in downtown Denver. The parking lot is in a less savoury neighbourhood. While I was on my way to my vehicle, half a block away, I saw a man come around a corner quickly, pushing a bicycle. He was moving too quick to simply be going from point A to B, and I immediately knew something was wrong. As he hopped on the bike and started pedalling toward me, another man came around the corner, grizzled, a biker type, with a big beard and leather hat. He was shouting, 'Hey! Hey!' at the man on the bike, who started to increase his speed.

It was clear that the man on foot wanted the man on the bike to stop, and that the man on the bike was fleeing. And both were approaching me quickly.

I was immediately conscious of the motorcycle helmet in one hand, my bag of work sundries in the other, and the distance between us. There was no one else anyone else within a block. I immediately moved to block the fleeing man's path on the sidewalk; he saw me and swerved sharply out into the street, trying to stay out of my reach.

This is the instant where I disappointed myself. If I had not hesitated, I would have been able to clothesline him and bring him to a stop, but instead I was thinking:

1. This situation might not be what it looks like... a bicycle theft
2. I knew without a doubt the fleeing man would have to be knocked off the bike to get him to stop
3. I had my cowboy boots on (yes, I work in an office in cowboy boots... it is Denver) and they were terrible for running
4. If I injured the guy, I could get charged with battery

It was option '4' which caused me to hesitate and let the thief slip by. He got away, and the man on foot ran after, calling for police to no avail.

I imagine the threat of criminal charges for being decent and willing to apply a little violence to better one's neighbourhood is a sore topic in this blog. We in Colorado have not quite gotten as bad as England, but, I fear it will come to that as people increasingly rely on authorities to rescue them when there is trouble. I would be interested in reading commentary on the issue.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, and D. H. Lawrence's own explanation, the "Propos", do reveal how the consumptive both embraced and escaped his country. Lawrence encapsulated a rootless contempt for his background and his people, the coalmining communities of the midlands. His last novel, rewritten three times, rails against the perceived deadened inauthenticity of English life; the mannered abstraction of a scientific worldview denying the consummate union of man and wife in a real marriage. Thus, science, technology, capitalism and money are unified into a system that saps and destroys what it means to be human.

This is not a particularly old or unusual message. Nevertheless, Lawrence weaves and reinterprets conservative themes in modernist frames. Authenticity will invigorate marriage and the nation of England. To view this focus as a conservative strand within Lawrence's writing is to surrender to political constraints, when the author restructured his sense of alienation against his country. The consumptive's exile pours out through the novel, as he tries to explain why using obscenities as norms becomes a marker for an honest world of sexual union, recreating an England worth living in for the author (though it does lend the novel an air of pomposity and ambitious challenges for bad sex writers to the present day).

How sad that exile and censorship obliterated our understanding of a state of the nation novel that set out an ideal of England, standing foursquare in a wider artistic tradition that speaks with more urgency today.

It is a measure of how far we have travelled in the world of ideas that the case for state central planning, as was once championed by British Fabian socialists and similar people 100 years ago, struggles to get a respectable hearing these days. That is not to say that the idea is dead, merely that it has been subjected to a sustained intellectual and practical hammering, not least the fall of the old Soviet Union.

One person who has the good sense to realise how discredited central planning has become is the American leftist writer, Jesse Larner. Who deserves some of the credit? It is a certain FA Hayek, he says, telling this to readers whom, one imagines, might have called for his defenestration by saying anything nice about Hayek only 20 or 30 years ago. The article, which focuses on Hayek’s early book, The Road to Serfdom, is fairly respectful of the case against central planning, and one might hope that this shows that parts of the left have fully grasped the folly of said. But there is a lot left in this article that is misleading, besides-the-point, or which misses some crucial points. In a way, the muddle of this article explains perfectly the mindset of what can be loosely called the left today, and yet is also suggestive of how libertarians might yet be able to engage with the smarter of them and bring them over to our side. So I have decided to take a look in some detail. Let’s start with this:

Politically, Hayek is not the cynic I had braced for. Plainly, transparently—and in stark contrast to many modern conservative intellectuals—he is a man concerned with human freedom. One of the unexpected things in Road is that he writes with passion against class privilege.

That is very revealing of the circle that Mr Larner keeps. He is amazed, apparently, that a guy who defends the free market order is not a political “cynic”. Well, if by cynicism one means a low view of those who seek to attain by power and influence what others do by enteprise and hard work, I guess he has a point, but that hardly is a sin in my book. Also, Mr Larner should have read enough right-of-centre authors to know that liberty is actually a regular concern. One of the very reasons why there was a counter-movement against socialism after WW2, from all those think tanks and academics with those strange central European surnames like Mises and Polanyi, was precisely because they saw, in socialism, the loss of liberty.

Here’s another one:

Indeed, he is often eccentric. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist. Many of his arguments rest on a reductionist idea of socialism, and his conception of the sources of law can only be called mystical.

Huh?

But Hayek is not merely an eccentric mystic.

The only justification I can think for that remark is that Hayek was a notable defender, and explicator, of the value as he saw it of the English Common Law and the post-1688 settlement in England. He called himself an “Old Whig”, was a great fan of the legal scholar Blackstone as well such figures as David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith (of course) and Edmund Burke. In the case of Burke, the influence is interesting, since the great Irish politician, now mainly remembered as a scourge of the French Revolution, was a supporter of the American Revolution, moved for the impeachment of Warren Hastings, of the old East India Company, was a notable denouncer of political corruption, and was primarily a Whig, and not a Tory. It is also true that Hayek valued the Burkean notion that there is a value, not always easily grasped, to traditions that have developed across the centuries. I’ll readily admit though that this is a weakness: just because something is traditional, does not of course make it a good thing. There is, in fact, a tension between those Hayekians who praise certain traditions and those, who, from the more natural rights portion of the libertarian camp, think that we should send some traditions to the scrapheap.

He goes on:

One of Hayek’s most original contributions to economic theory is the insight that economic systems are based primarily on information rather than resources. To plan an outcome and to direct economic inputs and outputs toward this outcome is to stifle the emergence of a spontaneous, democratic response to the needs of the individuals who make up the community—a response that will necessarily have winners and losers, but that will not privilege the vision or depend on the limited information of a governing elite, and that will encourage further experimentation.

That is a pretty good summary. I’m buying.

He points out that any economic master plan would necessarily have to delegate so many important issues of policy to non-elected technocrats as to be inherently antidemocratic, and that a society in which the value of goods and labor were defined according to their utility to the plan would necessarily allow no room for individual choice and subjective valuation.

Yep.

Today, these observations are merely obvious. Yet it is worth pointing out that Hayek understood at least one very big thing: that the vision of a perfectible society leads inevitably to the gulag.

Yep.

The absence of any consideration of more libertarian, less top-down approaches (the socialisms of Luxembourg, Kropotkin, Proudhon, many others; or of the possibility of nontotalitarian models of social democracy, like those that emerged in Europe after the war) should alert the reader to Hayek’s limitations. Admittedly, Kropotkin’s ideas had little impact on the world of 1944, Stalin’s a great deal.

That comes across as a bit disengenuous. I guess Hayek probably did know about these other, “bottom-up” forms of socialism, but as he, and his mentors like Ludwig von Mises pointed out, such “libertarian socialism” is an oxymoron since it ignores whether a member of a “voluntary” commune would be allowed, in practice, to leave with his or her share of accumulated capital and strike out on their own. If the answer to that is yes, then you would quickly find quite a lot of ex-commune dwellers reverting to old-fashioned entrepreneurial capitalism. If these “bottom-up” socialists prevent this, or demand that the profits of the break-aways be wholly or partially confiscated, it is hard to avoid the conclusion of the late libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick that socialism involves the preventing of capitalist acts between consenting adults.

Mr Larner trudges on:

Hayek doesn’t seem to grasp that human beings can exist both as individuals and as members of a society, without necessarily subordinating them to the needs of an imposed social plan (although he acknowledges that the state can legitimately serve social needs, he contradictorily views collective benefits as incompatible with individual freedom).

That is not right at all. Hayek wrote a lot about traditions, the benefits of inheriting cultural values via institutions such as the family, and so on. He certainly did not think if collective benefits of things like laws and defence of freedom as clashing with liberty; in fact he made it abundantly clear that law and liberty were intertwined.

And:

He rejects the very concept of social justice, for much the same reasons that he rejects the arbitrary valuation of labor: in Hayek’s view there is no way to put an objective value on a grievance or to weigh it against other claims. And because he locates all responsibility and agency only at the level of the individual, he sees no way in which any claim can be generalized to society.

He did reject it, for the very reason – as Mr Larner knows perfectly well – that is a question-begging term. Social justice requires, as a premise, that wealth somehow exists “out there” and that the collective of humanity has some prior claim to said. But that puts the cart before the horse, as Hayek explained. He also pointed out that terms like “social justice” smuggled egalitarian, illiberal concepts into more neutral terms, and this was a pernicious thing, since it disabled clarity of thought.

Perhaps it is because of this outlook that Hayek does not, in Road, address collectivism as a spontaneous, nongovernmental, egalitarian phenomenon.

He probably does not address it as, to the extent that any collective effort involving more than one person is freely undertaken by said, there is no need for it to be addressed. Individuals band together to form foundations, charities, firms, clubs, whatever. So long as they are free to leave and their property is not seized, what is the issue? There is not one. What Hayek was against was coercively shoving people together into collectives not of their choosing.

Even a brief survey will show that there are all kinds of imaginative ways in which libertarian collectivism can coexist with capitalism and markets.

If that is true, what is the problem? People can and do share ideas for free – as on the internet – or band together to form common cultural, economic and political groups all the time. This is the paradox of a liberal society; far from being a cliched world of individuals pitted against each other in a war, a free society allows enormously complex and rich examples of co-operation. The market is, in fact, the most remarkable example of co-operation that there is.

It is a bit chilling to read the words of the British socialists quoted by Hayek—E.H. Carr, C.H. Waddington, Sir Richard Acland, H.J. Laski—who, when Hayek wrote, were calling complacently for what can only be read as an enlightened totalitarianism, even in the shadow of Hitler. And Hayek is very convincing, and most interesting, when discussing the romantic roots of German antiliberalism and of the illiberal statism of the left and right. But this does not mean that public disbursements in the social interest necessarily start us down a slippery slope to the totalitarian state, and Hayek, in suggestively conflating government spending with government planning, pulls a bit of a sleight of hand in Road.

Well I do not know. I think that although the direction of socialism that Hayek predicted may not have been entirely accurate. But Larner is surely missing a point that frequently exercises the likes of us at Samizdata: what might be called the regulatory form of socialism. Under this form, one might nominally own a house, or a company, or whatever, but there are so many rules telling you what to do that you might as well have nationalised ownership. This is a much harder form of socialism to fight. I am certain that Hayek would have addressed this issue. He would have been horrified by the loss of civil liberties in Britain and the constant demand for a government “solution” to this or that problem.

There are glimmerings of respect for Hayek here in Mr Larner's article, and this is by far from being the worst left-of-centre review of Hayek that I have read. Mr Larner clearly respects what the great Austrian thinker stood for, and has the good grace not to engage in gratuitous name-calling. But there remain problems. Oh well, this is the sort of person that libertarians need to patiently cultivate.

Last night I attended a flat warming party, given by fellow Samizdatista and newly certified Brit, Michael Jennings, and very enjoyable it was. Just the right mixture of nice people I know well (such as Johnathan Pearce and his Missis, and I rather think I may have met the legend that is Thaddeus Tremayne), nice people I know a bit, and nice people I didn't know at all. And while there I found myself trying to think of good party questions, to replace the often excruciating "And what do you do?" that can cause such tedium and such embarrassment. And rather to my surprise, I overheard myself asking a rather good party question, namely: Have you ever been near to death? The good thing about this question is that brushes with the Angel of Death are fairly random, and that quiet little bod in the corner is almost as likely as the grand and confident ones stage centre to have a good yarn to tell. Granted, if you have a very grand job which involves clearing up minefields in war zones, you'll probably trump anyone who is merely talking about being missed by speeding bus by half an inch, but despite that tendency, this question, together with the answers it elicits, does take us all out of our everyday preoccupations and make us see the world, and the people in it (e.g. the strangers you meet at parties), a bit differently, just as nearly being dead itself does. Which is what parties are partly for, aren't they?

Someone asked, by way of clarification, whether I meant that thing where you feel you are moving towards a very bright light. No, not necessarily. That's a great story, of course, if you have one like that. But any terrifying or dramatic circumstance that could have killed you, and preferably which you knew at the time could have killed you, is a good answer. Having to tightrope-walk across a burning beam a hundred feet above the ground, being violently attacked or robbed, missing a plane flight when the plane you missed subsequently crashed, getting your toe stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool and thinking that this was about to be your last swim and your last anything, that kind of thing. Bright lights are strictly optional.

The best answer I heard last night was from a guy (one of the ones I'd never met before) who was doing some sketching or painting or whatever in Jordan, and was accused by some knife-wielding locals of being a spy. They held the knife to his throat. Luckily a third party convinced them that he was harmless, but for a few moments there ... you get the picture.

My best near death experience was when I was a very small boy and I fell out of a second story window at my grandmother's house. I landed on a small strip of lawn, right next to some very spikey railings. All I remember was waking up afterwards, so it missed that element of pure terror ("I really thought this was It" etc. etc.) that the best near death stories have, but like I say, that's my best shot. An A&E doctor recently started choking me, while looking down by throat with a small, flat little wooden poker like you used to get with icecream, and I briefly experienced what death by asphyxiation must feel like. But I howled at her to stop which she did, and I never really thought I would die, so that hardly counts at all. My point being that this is not an excuse to tell my own personal right-out-of-the-stadium story along these lines, because I have no such story.

But maybe you do have such a story. This evening it occurred to me that this question would also be a good way of starting a Samizdata comment thread, and in a way that might take us away from our usual stamping grounds, of politics (appallingness of), space rockets and flashy airplanes and cars (splendidness of), and such like.

So, what near death experiences have you had?

As a voracious reader and hoarder of books, I have a bit of a problem. I live in a small flat in Pimlico. My wife is also an avid reader. I work from home for some of my day before heading to the office and have to keep a fair amount of literature connected to my job at home. The place is getting full.

There is some advice here on how to handle it. I would like to ask commenters what you folk do about this. I have thought about putting some of my books into storage, but the rental price on storage can be pretty high. I have given away some books to charity shops and flogged a few of them on E-Bay, but I am reluctant to part with some of them as I like to dip into them if I am researching anything. And I am not yet ready to move into a larger house, although one day I shall do so and create my own private library.

I guess this is a problem if you are a libertarian geek like yours truly. The late Chris R. Tame, founder of the Libertarian Alliance, had a huge personal library; his flat in Bloomsbury was crammed with books, which I happily enjoyed going through when I briefly lived at his flat. Sadly, when he died two years ago, dealing with his book collection proved quite a headache for the executors of his estate. I have wondered whether, in my own case, I should create a sort of virtual online "library" that close friends and ideological comrades can use to borrow some of my stuff - and send it back of course - to ensure that my collection does get read and valued by people who might enjoy them. I honestly do not know whether that is workable, though. In my experience, lending books or DVDs to friends can often be a problem if you want them back by a certain stage.

Of course, some people may argue that in the internet age, this issue will eventually no longer be a problem because all books can be stored online. Up to a point. The trouble is that this old fart rather likes to have the physical examples of his favourite books on hand, on the shelf. I like them as physical objects as well as for their content.

There is poetry, there is bad poetry and there is an order of magnitude revealed by the “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Fifth Annual Horrible College-Student Poetry Competition.

Some snippets from a piece that has a fluidity we can only dream of:

When I see the fungual discoloration of my toenails, I see all of the free people not given a living wage by America.

And when I see all of the problems my body has
But I have no national health care plan to help,
I see that I, too, have been victimized by America.

Or this:

[NOTE: Next verse recited stoic’ly, almost Gaelic’ly, like in the movie “Rob Roy” or “Braveheart, with one lone mournful bagpipe weeping from behind] The dogs of a chicken-hawk war run blindingly on! Their fateful howling screams a den of fearul shame! Can they see not the havick they so retchedly reek upon us all! And that they’re woeful day of wreckn’ing is writ large upon them! While their currish tails all but hide their rancid fowl deseats?

Will we stand most righteous against the patricianarchal neocon hordes?
Against the hatemongrills, the warmongrills, each mongrills all!
That would dog-wag us into unjust genocide with their hateful doggerills?
For in their primate fear can they not see the truth afire?!
The truth all burning …all … afire?!

Do read the whole post.

I never thought I would find myself agreeing with anything written by Johann Hari, but in today's Evening Standard he has a piece deploring the rehabilitation of Mary Whitehouse. I agree that she was a dangerous evil old woman, not remotely funny, not a gentle eccentric.

However, there is in the piece something that does not ring at all true, viz -

In an old episode of her favourite show, Dixon of Dock Green, you can see the dark side of the world she fought to preserve. When Constable Dixon stumbles across a woman being beaten black and blue, he reassuringly tells the camera it's nothing to do with the police.

If that is true, it is appalling. Not actually a mark against Whitehouse (which illustrates why Hari is untrustworthy - Whitehouse cannot be held responsible for every item of content in a programme she allegedly liked), but appalling nonetheless. Dixon of Dock Green was a top-rated show, and one criticised in the 60s and 70s for its rosy-tinted view of East End police-work. So if a sentimental prime-time show really did show domestic violence as accepted by the police (whether it was in reality or not at the time), then the social attitudes endorsed by the BBC in the early 60s were even more alien than I thought... Except, as someone who takes and interest in cultural change, I would have heard about it before now. And the clip would be familiar from dozens of documentaries, would it not?

Is my education very lacking, or is Hari just making this up? If not, where has he got it from? Who else makes the claim? Is there an incident in Dixon of Dock Green or some other contemporary drama that has been so interpreted as to have directly or indirectly given rise to the tale?

Christopher Booker has a great article in the Telegraph titled Watch the web for climate change truths, which shows that The One True Faith of Anthropogenic Global Warming, having used the internet to preach their gospel, are going to have a hard time suppressing global warming non-conformists using the 'net to do the same.

Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said "we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change". Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon's summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding.

[...]

On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a "tipping point" where "irreversible change" takes place. This was based on last September's data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million. What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded

So not such a bad time to be a polar bear after all. It is also nice to see in-article out-linking to a source on a newspaper site.

Also Daniel Hannan has a Telegraph blog article called How bad does the UN have to get? which presents the difference between the ideals and reality of that vast organisation, mentioning ivory poaching, the Iraq food-for-oil scandal, the betrayal of Bosnian Muslims massacred in Srebrenica and the appalling UN role in the Rwanda genocide. However the most interesting part for me was in the comments, a defender of the UN replied thusly:

I don't think you have bothered to give us enough information regarding the various allegations you have made about the UN.

There isn't enough information on the Bosnian Muslims being betrayed for any of us, lefties or righties, to make a reasonable assessment. Where in the chain of command did this betrayal happen? What, exactly, was the UN betrayal of these Muslims? What else was the UN doing in Bosnia and in regard to Bosnia at the same time, so that we can come to some opinion as to whether what happened in Srebrenica was a small part or a large part of the total UN activities there in that region?

Was the oil-for-food scam [in Iraq] the activity of a small group of UN employees or was it what all UN staff were engaged in directly or indirectly? We don't know because you haven't told us! Was the UN institutionally guilty right through all its employees for the oil-for-food scam or was it down to a few individuals, whom the UN may have disciplined in some way by now? You didn't tell us!

What were the UN reasons for not seizing the arms caches [in Rwanda]? We need to know! Did they make a mistake in not realising that the genocide would follow? A mistake is not corruption nor is it a failure to deliver overall.

So we need more information before rushing to judgement. That is a very representative defence of the UN of the sort I have heard for years. It is the equivalent of the time hallowed tactic of a UK minister responding to embarrassing questions by saying "we must hold an enquiry before rushing to judgement" in the knowledge that by the time the enquiry gets under way, said embarrassing news will be months or even years in the past and the the headlines have vanished down the memory hole, allowing harsh reality to be safely reinterpreted into something more 'nuanced' and the gravy trains will still keep running along their well polished rails undisturbed... except in the cases of Srebrenica, Food-for-Oil and Rwanda, the nasty truths are very well documented and understood. All this is only ten seconds of typing and click of the Google button away.

The internet really does change almost everything.

The pseudonymous Sunfish is well known member of the Samizdata commentariat and brings some interesting perspectives as when he is not throwing down pixels in this parish, he is a policeman 'somewhere in the USA'. And Sunfish has a question...

Governments have goons. That's what makes them governments rather than debating societies. Even the governments of relatively free societies have them. I would like some guidance from my fellow goons now.

Back in the 1990's, when I first graduated the academy and became a cop, I thought I was going to go out and slay dragons. I also thought that I would not have to compromise any of my beliefs in order to do so. I can not have been the first libertarian to go into this line of work. However I did not originally sign up to be a drug warrior, tax collector, or the mailed fist of the 'Mommy Knows Best' state. Yet somehow, I occasionally end up being all three of those things. Most of the time, though, I think that we still do more good than harm.

But at what point do we actually do more harm than good for liberty? When is it time to quit?

I came across a couple articles that puzzled me. Advocates of all beliefs, be they religious, political or philosophical, generally try to argue their position and convince other people their view of the world is the best one. Of course some religions (and pretty much all political systems) are evangelical, whereas some, like Judaism for example, are not. Nevertheless even Jews will argue their corner on why their beliefs are sensible and it is far from unheard of for people to convert to Judaism, something most Jews would probably regard as A Good Thing.

Yet strangely as of late, some Jews and Muslims seem a bit bent out of shape when another religion, the Roman Catholic Church, either lands a high profile convert or prays openly for non-believers to convert.

Being God free myself, I have no dog in this fight but this all strikes me rather like shop owners protesting that some other shop is advertising and therefore 'stealing' their customers. Guys, like everything else, religion is a market... why are you shocked that the Boys in Rome engage in marketing?

I'm grateful to an anonymous commentator on a The Register story for this, which deserves a wider audience.

Are there any other examples? Does anyone have an estimate of how much it cost?

Some people are their own worst enemies. Take, for example, the rather eccentric-looking chap in the photograph below. He appears to have rather clumsily allowed himself to be portrayed as a depraved menace when he is but a makeover away from becoming a card-carrying member of The Great and The Good.

A network of "suicide gurus" who use the internet to advise people how to kill themselves has been exposed...

One of the most notorious figures on the internet suicide scene is Nagasiva Yronwode, a self-confessed Satanist who runs a shop selling occult books and charms in the small Californian town of Forestville, north of San Francisco.

Yronwode, 46, describes himself as the "outreach director" for an extremist cult called the Church of Euthanasia, which advocates suicide as a means of saving the world from the effects of overpopulation.

Does this self-defeating fool not appreciate just how seductive his central message would be to the bien pensant? Indeed, they are treading water just waiting for someone like him (only a plausible, marketable version) to come along. All he needs to do is to make himself a bit more presentable.

First off, he should drop the 'Satanist' thing. Satanists are nowhere near homicidal enough to be taken seriously.

Secondly, he needs to change the name of his cult from 'Church of Euthanasia' (too many negative connotations, especially the 'Church' bit) to something like...let's see...'Earth Guard'. Yes, something like that.

Next, the hair. I see where he is going but it is actually a bit too scary. He needs a team of stylists to give him that immaculately unkempt, tousled look that suggests that he has just spent the last six weeks trekking through the Amazon basin while actually remaining clean, sexy and approachable.

While it is difficult to criticise a man's wardrobe when he appears to be wearing nothing, he must, in fact, give a lot of thought to this. It is very important. He must dress in casual but expensive designer clothes (but avoiding anything pin-striped or which may smack of business). He must also learn to wear them without even a hint of self-consciousness, developing the kind of incidental nonchalance that says he does not spend even a second thinking about anything so trivial and consumerist as his appearance and that these designer togs all just fell on him as he unthinkingly walked past a wardrobe.

His name is good. He can keep that. It is appropriately ethnic and difficult to pronounce and will enable him to fabricate some cock-and-bull story about his native land and peoples being despoiled and plundered by the predations of the greedy, Western, warmongering profiteers. They will lap that stuff up on the college circuit and the less truth there is behind it the better. He can also keep his job title - "Outreach Director". Nobody has the slightest idea who they are or what they are supposed to do but they get hosed down with money drawn from the public well. Why change that?

So, by taking his central idea of mass suicide for the sake of the planet while undergoing a few easily-achievable adjustments, this man could turn himself from a pariah into a much-admired ethical voice for decency in the midst of a wicked, uncaring world. Instead of being hounded by and pilloried in the press, he would find himself the subject of fawning editorials, his merest utterances carried away and borne forth into the popular lexicon almost before they have left his lips. He would be whisked off to every international climate jamboree where he would rub shoulders with all the governmental and non-governmental glitterati. He would be glad-handed by politicians who would earnestly seek his advice on framing their next round of legislation. He would be slobbered over by dewey-eyed Hollywood celebrities and the legions of vulnerable teenage followers that he seeks would flock to him in such numbers that he could never have imagined in his most flagrant flights of Satanist fantasy.

Yes, Nagasiva Yronwode is a man for our times. He just doesn't know it yet.

The Dissident Frogman brings us some of the highlights in our broadening understanding of our good friends across the English Channel...

Bobby Fischer, chess genius and generally unpleasant wacko, has died in Iceland. Perhaps he will play Beelzebub for his soul?

Update: noted by commenter Walter Boswell: "I just realised he died at the age of 64. The same number of squares on the chess board. Bobby, spooky moves right up until the end."

Hundreds hacked or burned to death in Kenya, in response to and election that may well have been rigged. Shootings and suicide bombing by Islamic radicals in many parts of the world. And news of record prison suicides and savage violence here in Britain. And, of course, the centralization and growth of government. Less wildly violent than the preceding, but hardly welcome and based on the same principle - the threat of violence.

Yesterday Cyprus and Malta became part of the Euro Zone. Thus further centralizing power in the hands of the EU and the magic circle of politically connected banks and other business enterprises that depend on the credit money which, in the end, comes from the European Union Central Bank. In this way competition between government currencies, and the possibility, that some might expand the credit/supply less than others, is reduced.

The smoking ban in France is also coming into force, although I hope the French resist. Although other Europeans seem in a passive mood - in "Belgium" the Flemish Liberal party leader is back as Prime Minister although he lost the General Election way back in June - but there is no resistance. And in Switzerland the Swiss People';s Party got the highest vote of any party for many decades yet its leader is out of office and the Social Democrats, who got only 20% of the vote, remain in office - but there is not resistance. In both cases "Parliament had a vote" is the defence, and it is true it did.

And, of course, it is yet another year of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Things have come to a strange pass when President George Walker Bush is what pro-freedom people have to rely on - the wild spender facing even wilder spenders, the regulator facing more fanatical regulators.

In Britain also we have regulations being presented as freedom. Prime Minister Brown promises more regulations and calls them a "Constitution for the National Health Service" and there are yet more bans and regulations in other areas.

One can only hope that 2008 does not carry on as it has started.

Bebe is now three, and has taken to the proper feline adult life of sitting in chairs, demanding to be fed at four in the morning, catching lizards, and occasionally waving her claws at people.

I remember having a discussion some years back about what was the oldest pub in the world. I still do not have the answer to that, but I recently came across the list of contenders in Britain.

The oldest ones in Belfast are from the 1640 era, White's Tavern and Kelly's, the latter of which actually looks the part as the floor is enough below street level now that there are small ramps at the entryways.

Are there older pub's in Europe, perhaps in Rome? Some little wine establishment tucked away near the ruins of the forum? Or perhaps in China. where one could imagine some spice road inn from Biblical times.

Could there perhaps be some ancient establishment in India with a sign saying: "Buddha Got Pissed Here?"

Will Smith has expressed his view that people are essentially good, they just do bad things as a consequence of following the logical train of thought from faulty premises.

Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming. I wake up every day full of hope, positive that every day is going to be better than yesterday. And I'm looking to infect people with my positivity. I think I can start an epidemic."

And this remark has sent the Jewish Defence League into a hissyfit of rage.

Smith's comments are ignorant, detestable and offensive. They spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought so valiantly to save the world from those aspirations of Adolf Hitler. Smith's comments also cast the perpetrators of the Holocaust as misguided fellows rather than the repulsive villains of history they truly were. If people do not understand how idiotic and insensitive it was to make such a comment, it is like a Jew saying that James Earl Ray, the assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, was basically a good person who did a "bad thing."

Now that is a very dubious interpretation of Smith's remarks, to put it mildly. I am not sure I agree with Smith that all people are essentially good, although I do think most people are capable of good. I think that absent a biological defect, we develop towards goodness or evil or, more usually, somewhere in the middle, through the exercise of our free will in accord or in conflict with our genetic predispositions, but all people are capable of both good and evil. Some are more predisposed to good, others to evil (and a disproportionate number of evil people are drawn to politics as a career as it offers such rich possibilities for doing just that), but I do not think we are inexorably forced down either path... and thus find it hard to entirely disagree with Smith.

However the theory that Will Smith is presenting is an entirely reasonable one to argue and using the example of a man not unjustly held to be the very epitome of evil seems a fair and relevant way to express his view of human nature. Without a doubt Smith is in excellent philosophical company on the issue of innate goodness and his position is a deeply Christian one.

When Hitler looked in the mirror, I am sure he did not see an evil man gazing back at him. Of course he did what he thought was 'right' within his world view, his meta-context, which was framed by the axioms of a collectivist racist drawing on a long history of collectivist and racist thought. To Hitler 'right' was whatever was good for the 'herrenvolk' which he perceived as being in perpetual conflict with other racial groups. As a consequence his concept of 'right' was always going to be monstrous (i.e. the "twisted, backwards logic" of which Smith speaks).

What Smith seems to be saying is that if someone had the chance to sit Hitler down and 'unpick' his 'twisted, backwards logic', then perhaps they might have been able to 'reach' his deeply buried innate goodness. Although I have serious doubts on that score, it is a far from unsupportable argument and in no way speaks to Hitler's actual manifested goodness but rather the notion of an innate goodness being intrinsic in us all as a species. If you take that charitable view of humanity then of course Hitler (and Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan and Caligula) had an innate goodness buried somewhere in the deepest basement of their dark souls.

That the JDL feels that is an intolerable position to take rather than just an incorrect one, makes me deduce they are probably not worth the effort of debating, particularly given their preposterous characterisation of Smith's remarks. And although as I have said, I do not entirely agree with Smith's theory of innate goodness, if I was him my response to the JDL would be something along the lines of "Screw you, buddy" whilst proffering the Mighty Forks in their direction.

I do not know a great deal about the JDL but a brief trawl of the internet suggests to me that anyone not following certain ritual forms of abomination when discussing anything whatsoever relating to Hitler, is immediately branded as The Enemy Beyond The Pale. What an excellent way to make yourself look like a complete prat, not to mention wrapping yourself in the same psychological cloth as certain Islamofascist crazies who become unhinged at the sight of irreverent cartoons.

It is half two in the AM as I write this Christmas greeting, warm in my well worn Aran jumper and to a soundtrack of carols playing on a 1990's left over computer to which I have delegated such things. It struck me some of you might be interested in Christmas elsewhere, so I have selected a small number of photos to try to give you some of the atmosphere of a Northern Ireland Christmas.

Simon Heffer has written a very sensible (damn, I hate that word) article about why atheists rooted in our culture should have no problem at all enjoying Christmas. I agree whole heartedly with that view but...

We atheists are supposed to feel bad about Christmas. After all, what is it to do with us? All the present-swapping, drinking and over-eating is merely taking advantage of someone else's festival, isn't it? I have always had my doubts about that analysis, all the more so since the Archbishop of Canterbury this week refined the Christmas story as "legend". I start to wonder whether I am any more of an atheist than he is.

Oh Simon, Simon, Simon...really. You are talking about the head of the Church of England...of course he is more of an atheist than you are! Folks like you and I simply decline to believe on the whole beardy-guy-in-the-sky thing and that is good enough for us, no need to bang on any drums about it and generally be a tiresome crypto-fascist prat like Dawkins. Dr. Rowan Williams on the other hand drives more people into our way of thinking every time he opens his yap. Clearly he and Dawkin are batting for the same side no matter how much they pretend to not like each other.

So try to have a Merry Christmas one and all, even you Dr. Williams and Prof. Dawkins.

Rupert Everett is a serviceable actor but he does seem a little confused:

“Hollywood is a place that pretends it’s very liberal but it’s not remotely,” he told The Times. "It’s like Al-Qaeda." Everett, who is gay, believes that his sexuality has cost him “tons” of leading roles during his career.

Silly man! Because Hollywood is like Al Qaeda, you keep losing out on jobs not because you are a poofter of moderate talent but because you do not have a beard!

Given how Hollywood is famous for stoning adulterers and gays to death, making snuff porn videos of Muslims cutting off the heads of western journalists, forcing women to hide their bodies from view (something Hollywood is particular well known for), prohibiting secular movies (another one of Hollywood's strong points) and making men wear beards, clearly poor old Rupert is lucky to still be alive.

Alec Muffet, redoubtable trencherman that he is despite his dainty frame, pointed me at this splendiferous expression of the manifest superiority of western civilisation:

Multi-bird roasts, where different types of bird are stuffed inside a larger one, have become the thing to carve this year - and the more birds involved the better. One of the top-sellers is the Waitrose four-bird roast: guinea fowl, duck and turkey breast stuffed inside a goose. Demand has soared 50 per cent this year - even though each roast costs an eyewatering £200 [about $400 USD].

The surge in popularity may have something to do with TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's creation of a ten-bird roast on his show two years ago. He stuffed an 18lb turkey with a goose, duck, mallard, guinea fowl, chicken, pheasant, partridge, pigeon and woodcock - producing a remarkable Russian doll-like dish. But now his effort, inspired by recipes dating from Tudor times, has been dwarfed by a behemoth containing no fewer than 48 birds of 12 different species. This massive roast, the proud creation of Devon farmer Anne Petch, weighs almost four stone (more than most airlines' baggage allowance), costs £665, and has enough meat to serve 125 people.

Magnificent! However after reading the comments attached to this Daily Mail article decrying the practice, I could see my enthusiasm was not shared by all. The best comment and a real contender for the Samizdata Pig's Head on a Spike Award for Thigh Slapping Hilarity was:

See, it's because of madness like this that the terrorists hate us
- Marcus, Northampton, UK

The man is either a sage-like wag of the very highest order or a deranged Imam in need of an extended holiday in a certain part of Cuba... and an honourable mention also goes out for:

These graceful animals were alive and living a short while ago. Go veggie this Cristmas and let more of gods creatures experience what you do ...Life
- James Mills, Nottingham

Naturally I felt the need to leave one of my own, as indeed you might:

This year for Christmas we are having one of these wonderful multi-birds and I am very much looking forward to it. However after reading some of the comments here, next year we are going to eat a PETA activist stuffed inside a Greenpeace activist stuffed inside a Animal 'Rights' activist stuffed inside Gordon Brown's voluminous carcass (with a non-'Fair Trade' apple stuffed into his mouth).

Merry Christmas and God Deliver Us All... from priggish activists of all stripes.

Yummy! Nom nom nom!

Just a thought for the day:

A world in which all personal success depended on virtue would be insufferable.

It always amazes me the number of businesses who use the Internet without really understanding how it has changed everything in business, not just the bits they find useful. The entire balance of power has been shifting towards information rich customers for years now and one of the things about this shift is that people's tolerance for a company's behaviour when things go wrong has also changed dramatically.

It has always been the case that when things go wrong, the single worst thing any company can do is to make a customer feel he is being ignored. In many ways, even a half-arsed press release is (just) better than none at all, but frankly the days when a press release drafted by a PR professional whose job it is to pretend everything is all right are long gone. That approach never worked, only now the fact the PR Emperor has no clothes (and in truth never did) is impossible to hide. Customers are going to tell each other just how much they hate you, if indeed they do, regardless of whether or not you participate in the discussion because companies can no longer frame the terms of the debate. This article is an example of that, in fact.

And so I was amused by a fairly trivial incident: a purchased a copy of the Epic/Microsoft games studio shooter Gears of War for the PC. Cool game. How do I know? Because I have repeatedly played the first two to ten minutes of the game before getting a wargame-g4wlive.exe crash to desktop. And judging from the number of screaming customers on the Epic forums, I am far from alone in experiencing this.

Now the truth is, games these days are bloody complex things and it is rare to get a major game released without some significant kinks, so far be it for me to criticise Epic for releasing a bugged game... it happens and is probably an inevitable fact of life.

Also I have no doubt that Epic has an army of coders working to fix the (many) issues that people have reported and most likely they will solve them all soon. Looking at their forums, both Epic and Microsoft developers posted early comments and that is exactly the correct approach. If people know for sure that someone is on the problem, it is amazing how much slack they will cut a company and in many cases, dealing frankly with the issue and frequently acknowledging there is a problem makes people empathise rather than criticise.

But after the initial surge of developer input, the forum started filling up with often highly irate and typically semi-literate gamers cursing and howling because they had become convinced that as the first attempts to patch the game had not helped a great many people, the companies had just banked their money and written the game off. In truth I think that is highly unlikely at this stage and it is an avoidable self-inflicted wound to have well paid programmers working to fix what may be a difficult problem but because your inept PR department does not make that clear on a daily basis, customers whose game is about as useful as a prismatic beermat are left incandescent with rage at being ignored (as they see it). Crazy corporate behaviour.

Interestingly, posts to the forum filled with F words and imprecations about the marital status of the developer's mothers when they were born, seem to be generally left on the forum. I posted an invective-free article urging Epic to get themselves a new PR director and the post was taken down, which I must confess I find vastly amusing. So no prize for guessing which department is responsible for the Epic forums then.

There is a huge plume of smoke rising from Stratford, east of the City. Nothing on the news as to the origin of this. Mobile networks are already becoming overloaded.

UPDATE: Spectacular plumes, but terror motive "discounted". Any jokes about London's taxes going up in smoke can be made in the comments.

First turn up volume as soundtrack is quite soft...

Are UFOs evidence that we are being visited by extraterrestrial beings?

Lincoln Allison, a contributor to the excellent Social Affairs Unit blog has this rather amusing, if at times harsh, list of various people he thinks are not quite the greats they are cracked up to be. Revealing the conservative tilt of that blog, his candidates are:

Princess Diana, Che Guevara, Salman Rushdie, John Lennon, George Best and John Osborne.

Maybe I am getting soft and liberal (in the US sense) in my early middle age, but with the exception of Guevara, I rather like most of the above, or at least I do not get as exercised as some right-of-centre folk do. Diana? Well, she was annoying, or at least the hysteria over her death was, but I was saddened by her death, sorry for her sons and relations and would rather she was still with us.

Lennon? A bit of a nob as a person, maybe, but a brilliant musician - Revolver is one of my favourite albums.

Osborne - no real opinion, although I loved his personification of evil in Get Carter.

Then there is Rushdie: I just cannot agree with Allison; for all that I cannot be bothered to tackle his fiction, I admire his unbending stance on Islamic fanaticism and his no-compromise approach to free speech.

And then there is dear, dead George Best (I met him a few times). Allison makes the rather unusual approach of not actually attacking George Best's drinking or womanising but attacks his skill as a footballer, claiming that Northern Irish players like Danny Blanchflower were greater as they achieved success with "lesser" teams (I am sure Spurs fans will be galled to hear that their lot was a lesser team in the 1960s than Manchester United. Spurs in fact won a sackload of trophies in that decade). He also says Best could not cope with Italian-style defenders. Well, he did not play against Italy much so how do we know and Best made mincemeat of the likes of top European sides Benfica and Real Madrid. His demolition of the former team at their home ground in 1966 - the year I was born - remains one of the highlights of 20th century football.

.... of what we are up against:

If Labour had suggested the return of Credit Controls can you imagine the wails of protests from the Tories with their cries of 'You can't buck the market' and 'We want to be free' and other libertarian bollocks like that.

- a commentator on Guido Fawkes' blog.

In the lexicon of some people who can be regarded as within the Westminster village, 'libertarian' is a pejorative modifier, and, "We want to be free," is a discreditable sentiment.

Badoo Mac...
Originally uploaded by ( ¯`'•.ღ!~ღ NauGHtyAh ღ~! ღ.•'´ ¯)
There is not much I can say about this, that is how loaded this picture is. Thought I would share... :-)

The ever-reliable Jamie Whyte has a superb piece in The Times in which he identifies quite precisely what's wrong with 'the precautionary principle':

Suppose that, in return for an annual premium of £1, someone promises to pay you £1 million if you are abducted by aliens (such insurance exists). ... You lack the information required to know if the insurance is a good deal. It is in such situations of uncertainty that the precautionary principle is supposed to apply. ... [T]his principle tells you to buy the ticket. You should incur the £1 cost of the premium if there is any chance that it will save you from the greater cost of experiencing an uncompensated alien abduction. Whenever the prize is greater than the bet, and you do not know the odds, the principle says you should gamble. Bookmakers must dream of the day when punters bring such wisdom to the racetrack.

That's a very illuminating parallel. What those who preach precaution are doing is secretly evaluating the likelihood of the Very Bad Thing we are supposed to be scared of as certainty, and their avoidance policy as perfect.

I would add, now Whyte has given me the right analytical start, that the way that the problem is usually posed should give this away directly. The precaution preacher says that: the Very Bad Thing (B) may be unlikely, but it is so very very bad, that however unlikely it is, it is too horrible to contemplate not doing onerous things P prevent it. It might as well be certain, but for P. That is implicitly a claim that both B is infinite in horribleness and that P is guaranteed to reduce its (unknown) likelihood.

Not only is it a bad bet, but the claim to the efficacy of P should be treated with skepticism. As well to remember that when dealing with Greens, securocrats and panic-mongers of all kinds.

In one of several articles supporting 'universal' (i.e. tax funded) health care in the United States in last weeks Economist magazine (the people who control it call it a 'newspaper' for tax reasons), the line "nobody denies" that the lack of a "universal health system" undermines "economic security" in the United States was used.

It was the words "nobody denies" that interested me. A very obvious obvious lie, as a great many people deny this, but I had heard this sort of lie somewhere before. In another article it was said that some Conservatives wished to "do nothing" about health care - good 'conservatives', like Mitt Romney, of course wished to go along with the demands supported by the Economist for 'universal health care' (see above).

In reality many American conservatives have long argued for less government subsides and regulations, what with government subsidies and regulations being the main reason that health care is expensive in the United States today. But the idea that anyone could want less statism was not even mentioned, let alone refuted - a 'conservative' (of the bad sort - i.e. someone who did not want more statism) was simply someone who wanted to "do nothing".

I had seen that lie someone before as well. And then I remembered - these are the methods of John Stuart Mill.

In, for example, Principles of Political Economy (1848) whenever J.S. Mill comes out with a demand for more statism, whether it be for police, or for government supply of water or other things, he tends to say something like "nobody denies" that the government should provide X, Y, Z. It was a lie as Mill knew perfectly well at the time as many of his contemporaries did did indeed deny these things - but it was a useful lie in that it meant that he did not have to refute their arguments because he pretended that opponents of his statist views did not exist.

J.S. Mill did a similar thing with the theory of economic value. He did not refute the arguments of such writers as Richard Whately and Samuel Bailey who had largely discredited the labour theory of value in the English speaking world (it had never been the main theory of economic value in the no- English speaking world), he just defended the theory of his father James Mill and his friend David Ricardo by saying the labour theory of value was "settled", no one denied it. Again a blatant lie - but a very effective one when dealing with young people whose first (and in many cases last) book on Political Economy would be J.S. Mill's work.

As for 'conservatives', J.S. Mill was careful to avoid writing much about conservative minded people who had ideas to roll back the size and scope of government activity, such as Edmund Burke (although the word "conservative" was not used in Burke's time, J.S. Mill knew of him via the Mill family and friends membership of the "Bowood Circle" a informal grouping of people who were sympathetic to some of the ideas of the French Revolution and hated Edmund Burke). It was much better to either write about poets like Coleridge, or to pretend that conservatives were just 'stupid' people, who wanted to 'do nothing'.

J.S. Mill wrote and spoke like this because he was a utilitarian, i.e. he defined right and wrong in terms 'good' and 'evil', defining 'good' as nice consequences and 'evil' as nasty consequences. It is quite true that he did think in terms of "higher and lower" pleasures, but that "good" might not mean pleasant or that "right" might not mean "good" was not something he was willing to concede.

In short he was a man without an ethical basis for honour (I do not mean that as abuse - I mean it as statement of fact). To such a man such old sayings as "death before dishonour" are simply the ravings of mad people, and refusing to break faith even at the cost of one's life is irrational. If to lie produced good consequences (with "good" being defined as the greatest happiness of the greatest number) then he lied. And his followers follow in this tradition - right to the writers in the Economist to day.

"We are proud to be associated with the founder of modern liberalism" is the sort of response I would expect from such folk (although no response at all would be more in their tradition). This shows the vast gulf between modern 'liberals' and conservative minded people. Although, almost needless to say, there are few such folk in the British Conservative party.

Great piece today in the Times (of London) asking why businesses are not more vigorous in defending themselves and why they do not demand that people, as individuals, stop looking to the 'blame culture' and demand that people take more responsibility for their actions:

So where is the business voice telling us that we the public – egged on by politicians, the media and NGOs – have got it all wrong? Where are the companies fighting back at the wilder allegations of publicity-hungry campaign groups, self-interested organisations and junk scientists? I'll tell you where they are: they are at corporate social responsibility conferences, “engaging” with other people’s agendas.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with listening. Companies must always listen, learn and seek to improve. But this 'engagement' is too often a one-way street: the terms of engagement are dictated by others. The 'corporate responsibility' agenda in particular is dominated by anti-business campaigners. And their style is not generally to engage; it is to criticise, demand and oppose. This is understandable: NGOs, like the media and politicians, all thrive on conflict. Quiet and constructive dialogue is rarely in their interests

Amen, brother. One quick observation from me on this is that the litigation culture, which is still far worse in the United States, has spread to our shores; also, the general desire to blame others for our misfortune is possibly also a side-effect of the Welfare State and encouraged by the MSM.

Nice to see such forthright sanity from a major newspaper.

The Libertarian Alliance has published a new pamphlet by Samizdatista Paul Marks called A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson's Contract Feudalism.

He is in splendid and splenic form, I am pleased to say.

At last, a blow is being struck for truth, justice and equality:

Gingerism in the workplace could form the basis of formal grievances or constructive dismissal cases, an employment lawyer has warned. The news comes in the wake of one Newcastle family having to move house because of abuse about its members' red hair.

The Chapman family has moved home three times in three years in the Newcastle area because of abuse directed at its six red-haired members. Kevin Chapman told reporters that his 11-year-old son even attempted suicide after becoming depressed following years of abuse.

The story has led to speculation about whether insults over red hair could have the same legal status as insults regarding a person's race or gender.

This country is plagued with ugly and unchecked gingerism which is completely unacceptable in a multi-folicle society. According to scientifically-proven statistics more than 100% of ginger-haired people die before the age of 6 due to ruthless oppression and rampant pilophobia. This has serious repercussions for their future employment and housing prospects. This is the worst problem facing the world today and it is high time that the politicians did something to combat it. Hirsuitism must stop. Full stop.

There is an article on the Guardian site called Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce, by Yvonne Roberts, in which she urges people to boycott Israel because of its human rights record.

Now I know nothing about Yvonne Robert and have never even heard of her before, but I assume she also an avid campaigner for people to boycott products from Cuba, Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China (good luck doing that), Iran, Syria, Belorus, Zimbabwe, North Korea (assuming they actually produce any products) etc. etc. etc... after all, if she is such a tireless campaigner for human rights, surely she could not possibly feel it was alright for people to trade with all those places, given the state of human rights in those places. Right?

Anyone want to take any bets on this?

I do not have any time for Scientology (bunch of total loons, judging from their stated beliefs). I am not a fan of religion, full stop. Believing that one's sins get removed on account of a guy who was tortured and killed by Romans, or believing that we come back on this Earth as animals, or get something called Karma, or Original Sin, are just so much rubbish to me. I do not think life lacks meaning without some Supreme Being. But then plenty of highly intelligent folk believe in these things, and pose no threat to me, nor do their adherents expect me to support their views. For me, tolerance is what counts.

Even so, religions, certainly those which make enormous claims about the world and arguably, mess up the lives of the people they influence, deserve to be scrutinised hard. For that reason, I watched the BBC 'Panorama' show on Monday and I must admit that it was a pretty compelling bit of television. The journalist who completely lost his temper with some very dubious characters from the Scientology outfit has my sympathy (yes, I am sympathising with a BBC journalist). These folk are jerks, and employ tactics that, as the journalist said, would not be the usual operating procedure of your average Anglican vicar.

On a lighter note, here is a reference to the classic South Park episode on Scientology.

What should be the collective noun for moonbats?

I was struck by this interesting spin appearing in a BBC news report (not the BBC's fault, they just printed what the spokesman said):

The Commons public accounts committee, headed by Edward Leigh MP, said urgent action was needed to ensure an adequate service was provided.

Its report said the electronic patient clinical record, central to the project, was already two years late.

But the government said the MPs' report was based on out-of-date information.

Does this mean the system is less late than it was, and that time flows backwards in the NHS? No. Not even the current administration would try to sell that.

Has it been completed in the meantime? No. Limited trials begin in Bolton sometime soon (so Lancastrians in particular should attempt to opt-out while they can).

Does it mean there will be more up-to-date information presented by the government to prove the committee wrong? No. The government resists providing information about ongoing projects as much as it can, even to the public accounts committee. Giving out detailed evidence voluntarily (let alone in a checkable form) is unknown.

What it means is the government wishes you wouldn't pay attention to the committee report at all, and wants you to believe it is of no value. Since the committee relies entirely on material presented by the government, simply saying it is wrong presents some problems. That might be taken as admitting government numbers are unreliable. But by saying "out-of-date", it implies some fault in the committee without specifying quite what. You are invited to believe its conclusions are not valid and discount everything it says on that basis.

The pope is publishing the first part of his book Jesus of Nazareth. An authorised biography, I guess.

I wish I could play the piano well. What skill that you lack do you most wish you possessed?

I love the Far East. And hey, this may be my all time most crass post to Samizdata.

After global warming, what will be the next hysteria?

What I only guessed to be a possibility on Tuesday night, and repeated as a guess here on Wednesday, has now been officially confirmed:

Jamaican police today confirmed that British-born Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer was murdered.

Next question, as Michael Jennings commented here yesterday, and which he also copied-and-pasted to his own blog: How about Hansie Cronje? Just to remind you of what Michael said:

I have always been very suspicious about the death of former South African captain Hansie Cronje in a plane crash in 2003. When someone as mixed up with gangsters as Cronje dies mysteriously, one tends to think the worst. I wouldn't have thought that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters. However, nobody would have believed it of Cronje (who had a reputation for being honest, upstanding, and God-fearing) until he was caught red handed. Secondly, perhaps the situation is that to enter the Pakistan dressing room is to be mixed up with gangsters.

I don't think that Woolmer was mixed up with gangsters if by that is meant that he was personally involved in match fixing. More probable is that he was about to publish in a book what he had merely observed. But, who knows?

If this was a Poirot murder mystery on TV, the real killer of Woolmer would turn out to be someone entirely unconnected with cricket or with cricket betting, who killed him or who had him killed for entirely different and perhaps purely personal reasons.

But this is not Poirot on TV. This is for real, difficult though many are now finding all this to believe. Today, the entire Pakistan team was questioned and finger-printed by the Jamaican Police.

International cricket matches involving Pakistan now become more than somewhat ridiculous, and are likely to remain so for quite some time, even supposing that cricket's administrators permit them to continue. It makes no sense at the moment to shut down the entire Cricket World Cup. What purpose would that serve? (At least Pakistan are now out of it.) Nevertheless, Ireland's 'surprise' win against Pakistan on St Patrick's day now looks more like a gift than an achievement.

England are looking well below what it would take to get very far in this competition, even if they do get past lowly Kenya tomorrow. Yesterday New Zealand thrashed Canada, and Holland were far too good for fellow minnows Scotland. Commentators will want to avoid words like "murdered" when describing such games.

Just thought I would share an extract from a letter I wrote to someone asking if I was ant-war or not:

Not all the contributors to Samizdata support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not an 'editorial policy'. Some of us do and some of us do not.

I am no more anti- or pro-war than I am anti- or pro-knife. It rather depends what it is used for. There are justified wars and there are unjustified wars and in this imperfect world in which we live there are wars which are shades of both.

I am not a neo-con who supports anything the US or UK state does overseas because it is the US or UK state doing it. I spent a considerable time in Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990's observing the war there at very close quarters indeed. That experience well and truly cured me of any residual pacifism or squeamishness about the fact there are many truly evil people in this world who need to be confronted with violence. In fact there are some people with whom the only reasonable form of interaction is to put 8 grams of copper jacketed metal through their skulls at 710 metres per second.

However I suspect that is not what you are asking me...if you want to know do I have a problem with just shrugging my shoulders at the fact a homicidal mass murdering tyrant with a history of invading neighbouring countries had controlled Iraq for two decades with some help from my tax money ... well, I do have a problem with that and so I did support the drastic remedial action of ejecting Saddam by force on the basic and rather non-purist notion "the bastards are going to tax me to fund the volunteer military regardless, it might as well be used for something that actually reduces the sum total of evil in the world even though that is going to be messy as hell".

Afghanistan on the other hand was a no-brainer: the Taliban governed state supported a direct attack on the USA, ergo the Afghan state was the one who actually initiated the war, not the USA.

Unlike many, I did not expect the aftermath in either Iraq or Afghanistan to be pretty but I did not (and still do not) see that as an excuse for giving the Ba'athists a free pass to keep gassing entire villages and feeding people they do not like into wood-chippers feet first.

Ideally the Iraqis themselves should have done for Saddam, but of course when they tried immediately after Gulf War Episode I, the wonderful George Bush senior left them hanging out to dry after having previously openly encouraged them.

So yes, I supported the war in Iraq (for rather different reasons to the US and UK govts, it must be said) because I find nothing libertarian about drowning out the screams of two decades of tortured Iraqis by holding a couple copies of Murray Rothbard's 'The Ethics of Liberty' over my ears.

For Crumpler bags and Honda Element cars.

As Michael has posted some interesting pictures from sunny Mozambique, I thought I would contrast that with a picture out of my window of the freezing USA...

... I am here to do some shooting and maybe some skiing in the Land of the Free(ish). More later.

I was swapping recipe tips on a comments thread recently, and the recipe in question involved soy sauce. I am a big fan of this particular seasoning, and I launched into a lengthy discussion of it. When I had finished regurgitating, I got to thinking - hey! This is good stuff! Why am I wasting this on a comments thread? It could be a discrete blog post! So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado I present to you Everything You Needed To Know About Soy Sauce (But Were Afraid To Ask):

There are two - and only two - important points that need to be considered if you are to get the most out of your soy sauce investment. The first is in the buying. Look at the ingredients list of the soy sauce you are interested in. It should consist of soy beans, water, wheat flour and salt. That is it. If it has some kind of hydrolyzed protein shit in it or any other weirdness, recall that that is the mark of an inferior sauce. Desist.

The second is in the storing. Soy sauce goes stale. Remember this when considering storage options. Once opened, most leave their soy sauce on the shelf at room temperature. This is not optimal. Storing it in the fridge will keep it fresher (much) longer. Unfortunately, the majority of non-Asians require a couple of years to work their way through a bottle of soy sauce. No wonder; it will start to taste pretty ordinary if opened and subjected to a few months at room temperature. When soy sauce goes stale, it tastes like salty brown water. It loses complexity. Who would want to cook with that? You will see what I mean if you compare the taste of fresh sauce to that of the stuff sitting in your cupboard for the past half-decade. Look, just keep your soy sauce in the fridge and stop quibbling. And if you have not used the bottle after - say - no more than a year, replace it.

Of course, soy sauce is not soy sauce. There are many breeds of this beast, from the light soy poured over cheong fun (the so-called Cantonese cannelloni) at a dim sum banquet, to kecap manis, the viscous, sweet soy sauce common in Indonesian cuisine. The recipe mentioned at the start of this post benefits from a light soy sauce.

And what is this recipe? Perhaps you have had Hainanese chicken - this dish is very similar and very easy to prepare. You need a whole chicken, some roughly chopped shallots (spring onions), a handful of roughly chopped ginger and eight to ten star anise cloves. Put the shallots, star anise cloves and ginger into a large pot and place the chicken on top of it. Fill the pot with cold water - enough so that the chicken is comfortably submerged. Heat until boiling, then allow to boil for a further thirty minutes. Turn off heat and allow to cool for several hours; overnight is ideal. Remove chicken and place on a platter - it should fall apart with little effort and be very tender. Sprinkle flesh with light soy sauce immediately before eating - "immediately" as in when the chicken is on your plate and you are about to stuff it in your mouth.

Some asides - a whole chicken works best with this dish, but you can use whatever chicken you have, as long as it is on the bone. DO NOT use breast fillets - they will become unacceptably tough. Breast meat is over-rated, anyway. It may well be the leanest part of the bird, but it is also the chewiest and least succulent. Why would you pay more for it? It is crap. Thigh meat is by far superior.

Strain the ginger, star anise and shallots out of the remaining water, skim any fat off the surface and add some salt - you now have a pot full of proper, home-made, not-bought-from-the-supermarket, gourmet-approved chicken stock!

This recipe may not sound so tasty - cold, boiled chicken - but trust me, it works. It is ideal picnic food and goes brilliantly with a salad. Perhaps this salad. Enjoy.

Whilst having lunch the other day, I saw an attractive young woman wearing a tee-shirt with a slogan that made me laugh:

I'd rather wear fur than go naked

No doubt she was reacting to this campaign. And when she and her gentleman friend were finished, she put on her fur trimmed coat and they left. It reminded me of this. Bless.

I am not mad myself, but I rule over mad, impious and arrogant folk. It is for this reason that I play the madman myself and pretend to be possessed by demons in order to frighten them and prevent them from harming the Muslims.

- Askiya Dawud (1549-83), emperor of Songhai, quoted in I.M. Lewis, Islam in Tropical Africa. No doubt he would also have fitted right in as a fictional mid-20th-century character in John Brunner's The Squares of the City or a real late-20th-century emotional tyrant in Faking It.

A while back I had not read my email for a day or so and found several waiting in my 'IN' box. Two were from Perry. Oh no. What have I done now? In the halls of debate, I am not very house broken. Fearing a 'please cease and desist' is in store, I open one. To my startled surprise, Perry is offering me a byline and contributing privileges! Startled is an understatement. Apparently I am doing something that Perry actually wants to continue. But what?

I have one all encompassing principle. 'Reality.' This is a more complicated choice than it may first seem, but still an easy one..

There are very few guidelines for contributors to Samizdata. Basically, the content guidelines are simple. The key position statement is "liberty - good, big government - bad". Surprisingly, this is the one I will need to be careful with. For it is possible within my principles, to hold a collectivist position that is both philosophically consistent and morally sound. But while I am acknowledging that a collectivist can be morally sound and philosophically consistent, I am also mustering my defences and preparing for a 'debate' that can only be resolved by physical contest. I have made my choice and there is no middle ground.

Unlike many here, I do not believe morality is a continuum from collectivist - bad, to individualist - good. In my philosophy of morality, the middle ground is immoral. Relativism, subjectivism and pragmatism are my immoralities. Unprincipled decision making. Good morals are at my end of the spectrum. Evil morals are at the other end of the spectrum. But immorality is to be found in the middle. And to those on the other end of collectivist - individualist spectrum, I am the evil and they are the good. That is as it should be. Like matter and anti-matter, the legitimacy of each is not in question. But sustained contact is impossible.

I am not sure if this understanding of my outlook has been obvious. I have never explained it here to any extent, but this position has been the foundation of every stance I take. Though incomplete and sometimes misinformed, there is a coherent and consistent framework available for all of my rational decisions. With Perry's generosity, I will lay it out for those of you who are doubtful or curious. Digging into the essence of many years spent winnowing philosophies and developing my own moral base, I will try to clean some of it up enough to present a little at a time.

Two absolute moralities exist, and they carry contrary and absolute moral imperatives.

I am and will continue to be amazed that I am being offered this forum. I would like to say that I will behave and conduct myself with restraint and deference, but I think if Perry had wanted me to change, he would have said so. Or more likely, not have made the offer. Feel free to offer advice. In addition to the two bases for morality, I will occasionally post conversation starters that tickle my interest. Sometimes truisms of the 'why didn't I think of that?' sort. Certain topics, particularly actions that have irreparable consequences, will cause me to blow a gasket from time to time. And suggestions for any topics and themes you want me to pursue are much welcomed.

This cheerful seasonal scene, complete with 9-foot inflatable Santa, is brought to you from the Beckham Salon, Crawford Street, W1. This small Arab hairdresser's shop is normally merely a shrine (verging on homoerotic, to my eye) to the most carefully coiffed man in international soccer, and hangout for young men whose hair is almost as insanely tidy as their hero's.

But this time of year it sprouts, with utter disregard for the cultural apartheid strangers suppose to operate in Marble Arch - and danger to low-flying aircraft - the most fabulously gaudy Christmas decorations.

Milton Friedman has died at the age of ninety four. Others will list the vast number of honours that he achieved in his life time and will speak of him as a husband, father and friend.

I remember Milton Friedman from my youth via the mainstream media, because he belonged to a time when it was still possible (although difficult) for a free market thinker to have large scale exposure in the mainstream media. I remember the interviews, I remember the television series (Free to Choose - and the book of the same name being in every bookshop and library in the land), and I remember the articles in Newsweek magazine.

Milton Friedman replaced Henry Hazlitt, but he was given an article only every two weeks (Hazlitt had a weekly spot), These days of course it would be almost unthinkable for a free market thinker to be given such space in a main stream magazine - and it is not really a question of modern free market folk being inferior writers to Professor Friedman (it is the message that is no longer tolerated, not a higher standard of writing that is demanded).

If 'conservative' voices are heard in the mainstream media it is more likely to be voices like that of President Bush who was speaking today (in Singapore) - the normal confusion of 'freedom' with 'democracy' and the normal promises of aid from the Western taxpayer to various governments in return for these governments 'investing in people' ("schools 'n' hospitals" and the rest of the standard speech).

Milton Friedman refused to meet President Bush, perhaps this was intolerant of him (for all I have written above President Bush is not a bad man and he means well), but Professor Friedman's argument was that as he had tried for eight years (during the Reagan Administration) to explain the basic concepts of liberty to George Herbert Walker Bush, to no effect, he was not going to waste what little remained of his life talking to the son.

As for Milton Friedman's message I (and many others) could argue over many matters. Were "right to work" statutes (i.e. bans on the closed shop) really bad things (as Professor Friedman believed) or were they a counter weight to pro-union laws (as some of us political folk believed)? Was the 'negative income tax' really a good way to save people from poverty, or would it lead to people not working if they could not find a good job? Were education vouchers a way of combining freedom in education with support for poor parents, or would they corrupt private schools?

The arguments were endless, but they (by all accounts) tended to be debates conducted in a good spirit - and Milton Friedman always at least held his own in debates (against anyone).

Also one could trust Professor Friedman not to say something really stupid. Murry Rothbard may have been from the school of economics to which I am more sympathetic (the Austrian School), but he (and so many other of my fellow libertarians) could never be one hundred per cent trusted not to say that the IRA were "defenders of freedom", or that the United States was conducting an imperialist war in Vietnam (the communists not really being communists or whatever) or some other really stupid thing (I am not saying that Ulster being in the United Kingdom is a good deal for the British taxpayer, or that Vietnam was a good place to fight communism - but this is not the sort of attack that one got from Murry Rothbard or many other radical libertarians, their position was much too close to that of the left "the West is evil, the enemies of the West are good").

Milton Friedman might argue many things with which I might not agree, but there was never a fear of something moronic coming out of his mouth.

One can regret (I do regret) that Professor Friedman's work often seemed to have so little political effect. For example, he exposed the scam of medical doctor licensing more than half a century ago (and so many other cost raising regulations that do not "protect the consumer"), but such scams continue stronger than ever (and the costs that such regulations produce is used as an excuse for demands for such things as government health care), but one could never fault Milton Friedman for not fighting the good fight - for example in trying to spread the truth that if an organization is really just concerned with standards of care it will not (as the American Medical Association always did) spend so much of its time on political activity designed to keep down competition (regardless of the real level of qualifications among potential medial practitioners).

Lastly there is the 'big question' - at least the big question to those interested in the debates between the Chicago School (of Milton Friedman and others) and the Austrian School (of Ludwig Von Mises and others).

Are busts caused by a decline in the money supply (as Milton Friedman taught) or is the previous credit money boom the bad thing that leads to the bust (as Ludwig Von Mises taught).

Or, to put it another way, is "inflation" a rise in the "price level" (as American economists have taught since at least the 1920's) with a "stable price level" being the goal of policy, or is "inflation" a rise in the money supply that will cause damage even if there is no general rise in the price of goods in the shops (as Mises and the Austrian School taught and teach).

I will certainly not attempt to give a solution to the "big question" here (even if I was crazy enough to think that my opinion mattered to the great thinkers involved in the debate). But I will point out one thing.

Milton Friedman, in the latter years of his life, moved towards a practical political solution of the great question. He did not move his position in economic theory, he still held that it would be nice if government expanded the money supply so that prices did not generally fall over time. However he came to the conclusion that government could not be trusted to expand the money supply in a regular and moderate way.

Once allowed to expand the money supply government, in practice, would act in a chaotic and expansive way - so it was better if government did not have this power.

Milton Friedman did not support the gold standard (or any other commodity money), but he did support the "freezing of the monetary base" - i.e. that government no longer be allowed to expand the fiat money supply.

Of course banks and other financial institutions might still play some dangerous games on top of the supply of fiat money - but that would take us into complex matters, and if it was clear that government would never back up the credit expansion of private financial insititutions perhaps even arch reactionaries who believe that all lending should be financed one hundred per cent by real savings (stone age folk like me) would be at least half satisfied.

The Classic Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

The Modern Version
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he’s a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. BBC, ITV and Sky show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. Britain is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on ‘Newsnight’ and charges the ant with 'green bias', and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It’s Not Easy Being Green". Tony and Cherie Blair make a special guest appearance on the BBC Evening News to tell a concerned interviewer that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Thatcher summers.

Gordon Brown exclaims in an interview with Jonathan Dimbleby that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his 'fair share'. Finally, the EU drafts the 'Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism Act' retrospective to the beginning of the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, has his home is confiscated by the government. Cherie gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of judges that Tony appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursday’s between 1:30 and 3pm when there are no talk shows scheduled. The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him since he does not know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant’s food, they are showing Tony Blair standing before a wildly applauding group of New Labourites announcing that a new era of 'fairness' has dawned in Britain

(original provenance unknown)

Lie and cheat. It is empty bureaucracy, and the people asking the questions do not care either:

[A]lthough I was born in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, I used to say my ethnicity was Irish because I resented the question.

- Rear-Admiral Amjad Hussain, Royal Navy logistics chief, quoted in The Guardian

I have been experimenting with Firefox because of its superior ability to block annoying advertisements, something I was advised to do by a host of readers last month... but ever since upgrading to Firefox 2.0, I have been very grateful for its ability to 'restore browsing sessions' after a crash because I get five or six crashes per day, something I certainly did not get with Firefox 1.5 (or the Devil's Browser IE 6, for that matter). Are many folks out there experiencing anything similar?

I have noticed that many writers, professional or otherwise, do not capitalise the word 'Nazi' in their work. I am aware that 'Nazi' was originally an acronym, however I believe its ubiquitous use in preference to 'National Socialist' has transformed 'Nazi' into a discrete word in the modern vernacular. According to the rules of punctuation, it should be capitalised. In fact, it should be capitalised regardless of whether it's an acronym or not - 'Nazi' is a proper noun. So why is it that many writers fail to heed this rather simple rule? Is there some convention that stipulates an exception in the case of the word 'Nazi', because of its association with the terrible crimes of Hitler and his followers? Or is it an affectation of a group of writers, striving to express disgust at Nazism in every conceivable manner, withdrawing from it even the privilege of an introductory capital letter? Either/or, it strikes me as rather odd that people would ignore the rules of written English as part of an effort to display their disdain for an ideology. Do they see it as a linguistic equivalent of denying someone the Last Rites? How silly. What's wrong with conveying disapproval in the manner most writers find useful; by, er, writing something disapproving?

In a centrally heated and climatically warming world, I have never been able to see much fun in fur. I certainly would not want to wear it - too much hassle and discomfort. However, it has been brought to my attention that a number of attractive models and actresses have revived the "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" protest campaign for PETA, and are posing naked for publicity photos. This has raised my interest in the topic considerably.

Please help them continue in this valuable charity work for as long as possible. Do not stop buying fur.

There is an interesting post on 'Classical Values' that people who share my view that we are indeed in a war of civilisations might want to see. I may not be a Christian or a Jew but I do know who my enemies are... and are not.

Sign me up for the Oriana Fallaci Society.

Today whilst at the fuel station, I had a rather one-sided encounter with a smug Toyota Prius-driving oaf. The guy was fuelling up his car and wearing the most ridiculous grin. I did not think my face conveyed any surprise at such an improbable expression, but it must have - as soon as he saw me glance at him, he said "it makes me laugh to think how much less I spend on fuel these days". My instant response was "it makes me laugh to think that there are people who will pay $40,000 for a Toyota Corolla". I lie - that's what I instantly thought. To the oaf, I simply smiled and nodded - a technique I find useful and effective if I wish to limit interaction with a whole manner of people best avoided - from the vexatious to the unhinged. This time, however, I wish I'd spoken my mind, for taking smug Prius owners down a rung or two is surely the most worthy of pursuits.

I blame my parents - they raised me to be too polite.

AmazonBay by Sean Park is a short film about where technology and trends in financial markets get us in 2015. Fantastic. Literally.

Thanks to a brush with the financial services in my previous life, the film brought a rueful smile to my face. Especially the bit about assets and cashflows of government programmes being managed dynamically and in real time and with perfect liquidity and every financial instrument...

Heh. Watch the whole thing.

Link via Confused of Calcutta.

An alteration of my domestic arrangements is afoot, and that caused me to have to relocate a bookcase today, so to do this, I had to empty the case of its books. Deep in the depths, I came across a tattered dictionary.

Because I am the sort of idler that will do anything to avoid work, even to the extreme of reading a dictionary, I opened it. In faint pencil, the name 'Jack Wickstein, Port Augusta, 1928' was written. It had been my grandfather's. I wonder if it was a gift. Those were different times when you would give a young man of 20 a dictionary. However because he'd spent much of his childhood interned on the family farm, he never got a complete education, and he was the sort of fellow that never stopped trying to improve himself. So maybe the dictionary was not so illogical a gift after all. In the wake of the Great War, Jack's Father had issued a family edict that henceforth the family was to avoid looking or sounding German, and an excellent command of the English language was a good way to go about this.

The dictionary itself is rather odd. The first pages are a series of colour plates devoted to underwater sea life. Then a list of worthies who contributed to the articles in the dictionaries. The names mean nothing to me, but the Universities were, and are, the cream of New England learning. I read the Introduction. One passage sprang out at me.

Every word, every term in this Dictionary is standard; that is, classic, or, in other words, adapted for use by the best speakers and writers. None other has been admitted, consequently the work will commend itslef to not only those who want to keep abreast of the times, but to all those who wish to have a thorough working knowledge of the language in which they are constrained to express their thoughts, ideas, and requirements. This is the language spoken today by almost 200,000,000 of the human race. It is believed that it is destined to become the universal language of mankind, as it is spreading to the uttermost corners of the earth, and even supplanting other tongues in their native strongholds.

Thus wrote the editor, Joseph Devlin, in 1925. Eighty years into the future, and his optimism about the future of the English language seems, if anything, to have been restrained. However, it is also a sign of the times that it is rare, if not impossible, to see such rampant optimism about the future in print.

Oh well. Blogging about it will not get the chores done. Back to work I go...

According to this BBC news report, the Labour party spent £ 7,700 on Cherie Blair's hair during the election campaign. Not my idea of value for money. Sure they won, but still...

I am in a teahouse in the Hongkou district in northeast Shanghai. This is not the most fashionable part of Shanghai, although I get the impression that it was a district in which Chinese artists and writers lived in the 1930s, and (like much of Shanghai) it is full of interesting architecture from that period. And it may be a little like that in character again - it feels like a slightly bohemian, slightly studenty neighbourhood. A new metro line has recently been built through the area, which certainly can boost a neighbourhood.

The teahouse I am in is a branch of a chain named "Chatea", which seems to build outlets in nice malls, and which appears to cater to an early twenties middle class demographic, and one that is more female than male judging by the customers in this particular branch. They sell a wide variety of traditional Chinese teas, as well as those funny multicoloured bubble tea drinks that are so popular with young people in the Chinosphere. And they have a food menu consisting mostly of Dim Sum. The music in the background is bubblegum music from six or seven years ago, so that would be right for a mid twenties female demographic. (Specifically the are playing the album Shades of Purple by M2M, who are perhaps best known for doing the theme song in the western world for the first Pokemon movie).

It is pleasant, but for me there is one more possibly more important thing, which is there is WiFi. And the attitude to the WiFi is right. The internet access if free, and I was smiled at when I sat down, ordered a pot of tea, and got out my laptop. A couple of minutes later, a waiter came over to me and pointed out the electrical outlet on the wall, next to the table. (Hang on a moment. My shrimp dumplings, turnip cakes and crab dumplings have just arrived).

Okay. I am back. That was not bad at all. Slightly trendier sorts of Dim Sum than one would find in the backstreets of Kowloon, and fancier service and crockery, but definitely good. A couple of rather studious looking girls at the next table did give me one of those "These foreigners are crazy" looks when I started taking photographs of my lunch, but I am used to that. I am going to get revenge. Little to their knowledge, thousands of people on every continent are shortly going to be looking at a picture of them.

I do like the way they have the standard "studying in a coffee shop" look that is instantly familiar, complete with the sprawling papers, and the mobile phones laid out neatly in front of them. Human nature is endearingly familiar, wherever you go.

But anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The free WiFi and the electrical outlet that I was encouraged to use. I left my power adaptor in my hotel, as I was not expecting to find anything this good. The reason why I was not expecting this is that I find it so seldom in London. WiFi in cafes and coffee chains in London is far too often of the "This will cost £7 per hour" variety. A cafe can set up WiFi on this basis if it wants to, but I am simply not going to pay that. However, if you provide me with free WiFi (which will cost you hardly anything) I will buy more coffee and food, possibly more than £7 worth. And then a cafe might provide WiFi, but will not provide an electrical outlet, or (even worse) if it has one conveniently placed they will tell you that you are "stealing electricicy" if you try to use it, or they will put a cap over it to prevent you using it. This isn't greed, but just stupidity. There is a lack of appreciation as to what customers want and value, and a lack of appreciation of the cost of providing it. (My laptop will run for about four days on 10 pence worth of electricity). And a lack of appreciation about how providing it will create warm and fuzzy feelings about your business.

And if a chain of teahouses in Shanghai can understand this, why can't a chain of coffee houses in London? Just one. If you figure out what your customers want and give it to them, then you will get repeat business. It is that simple. If I lived in Shanghai (and who knows, someday I might) I would have lunch here all the time. And I will recommend it to my friends. As in fact I just have. Thousands of them.

A waitress keeps coming back to top up my teapot with hot water, too. I clearly could spend all afternoon here. However, there is much more to see, so it is time to post, drink up, and leave.

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry, I just had to share that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days ago, Findlay Dunachie died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite so. All things in moderation is my motto.

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

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

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

Make of that what you will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Making the Law, Hansard Society, 1993.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It could always be worse!

Way to go, Pret A Manger! The food is good, too.

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

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

In today's Times Daniel Finkelstein reminisces.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most important shop in the centre by far (apart from the sushi bar) is the Asian supermarket, which, once again, is overwhelmingly Japanese with other things added to the Japanese-ness. Which is great, allowing me to stock up on a few things I like to have in my cupboard. For one thing, there is Japanese beer. One thing foreigners don't always appreciate is just what an enormous beer drinking country Japan is. And also, just how excellent is Japanese beer. It is mostly mass produced lager, but it is extremely good mass produced lager. Australia is also a land of mass produced lager, but Australian lagers are sweet, whereas Japanese lagers are much drier, which is more to my taste. Asahi Super Dry and Sapporo are fairly widely available in England, but the Japanese breweries make a variety of specialty and premium beers which are not as easy to find. In Colindale, however, there is a full range for me to stock up on. And of course I did.

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

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

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

And of course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:

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

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

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

Jaguar's Big Cat is best in show.

WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:

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

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

�

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop.

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

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

CAT news from Kolkata:

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

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

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

Catisfied?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

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

Here is my mother's new kitten.

Happy new year everyone.

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

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

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

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

I mean, what else does one need?

Update: Cool. God bless Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take a look at this picture:

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

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

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

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

Here's a possible DVD candidate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love travelling. I can't help it.

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

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

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

Er...or something.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if anybody does not know what to expect!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two cups of hot, steaming piety, please!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new front has opened in the struggle for freedom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PS:

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

Have fun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow I doubt it...

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

Oh dear.

(in today's Telegraph's print edition)

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, here it is:

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

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

Not so the German toilet.

Last chance. Okay, you asked for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And whine for more funding, of course.

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

Then make war, not love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are going to make such an adorable couple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AK: Sorry that the point was unclear.

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

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

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

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

Some people have far too much time on their hands:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...lectures, seminars and talks on politics.

Same thing.

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

Translation:a load of incontinent, incomprehensible drivel.

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

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

The event is the European Social Forum...

No kidding?!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least he will be able to get some sleep.

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

CONDUCTOR: "Tickets, please?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't wait to see their election manifesto:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the end is nigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They'll be looking for a very long time.

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

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

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

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

Chomsky sometimes loses his thread.

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

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

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

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

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

Chomsky doesn't miss a beat.

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

Widely known for his incendiary political writings...

And even more widely known for his utter gibberish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





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

But what do you think the captions be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he really lays in to "whatever":

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing an audience of schoolchildren...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The regular Samizdata contributors are reading and listening to:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Headhunters keep the severed heads of their enemies as trophies.

He understood immediately.

I missed these excellent brios first time around, but on the theory that highlighting any negative exposure for ol' Sauron can never be a bad thing, let me commend these well researched exposés to you all.

Over on Front Page, David Horowitz systematically exposes Noam Chomsky to the light of day in The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky.

He drops his second daisy cutter The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky: Part II Method and Madness to complete the mission. A job well done, Dave.

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

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

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

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

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

I have had several e-mails taking me to task over my remarks in A matter of geography and culture. Methinks some people took me a tad too seriously.

I also am a great admirer of:

Czech beer (real Budweiser)
Italian clothes (Armani is God)
French wine (St. Emilion Grand Cru)
Lebanese food (Just call me Shawama dude)
Herzegovina baklava (nectar of the Gods)
Croatian women (sublime...mad, but sublime)

I was cruising the besotted Dawson's blog whereupon I saw this little paean to one of the delectable Capitalist Chicks:

Tara ('that's Tear-ah, not Tar-ah'), let that lovely word roll off your tongue...Tara, just emailed me a very intimate note. I should not do this, but I'll (sigh) share it with ya'll:

"Glad to see you like the site! We're going through a major rennovation at the moment, so expect to see a more dynamic bit of site coming up in the next week or two with some new content. I'll let you know when it's up! ~Tara J."

Think she likes me? (The Site in question is Capitalist Chicks btw, and since I go there ALL THE TIME, I'll let you know when she let's me know, you know...)

I hate to burst your bubble Dawson, but that is the e-mail she sends to everyone who sends an enquiry to the site.

They are rather delectable, though.

The Capitalist Chicks site is very much 'under construction' (it does not work properly with IE and has various layout problems), but like the moon-struck Dawson, we shall report loudly when the site is presented in a 'combat ready' form.

Just out of curiosity, I e-mailed our own delectable contributor, Natalija Radic to get some female feedback on the Capitalist Chicks site. Her last e-mail of the exchange was:

Oh, shame on you. Why you surprised I like it? Am I not a capitalist chick too? You nickname me 'Versace babe' but can only be a Versace babe with lots of MONEY. Not all Capitalists have fat tummy like you.

Ouch.