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Today I received an email from the LSE (that's London School of Economics) Hayek Society. I've been in occasional touch with this operation over the years, and have attended a few of their events, which have always been lively and well organised. It would appear that, this academic year, under the leadership of Nick Spurrell (whom I met again a few weeks ago at the office of the International Policy Network office where he was helping out over the Summer, alongside samizdatista Alex Singleton), the Hayek Society is keeping all this going in fine style.

They have elected a new Committee. Here it is:

President: Nick Spurrell; Vice-President: Lauri Tahtinen; Treasurer: Sarah Meacham; Secretary: Natalia Mamaeva; Financial Officers: Vicky Yuen, Peter Bellini; Events Officer: Szymon Ordys, Louis Haynes, Oliver Dully; Editor-in-Chief: Erica Yu; Co-editors: Michael Chen, Harry Cherniak; PR Director: Daniel Freedman.

Now apart from Nick, I don't know who these people are whose names I've just put up here in lights. But I like it that many of these names are female (Sarah, Natalia, Vicky, Erica), and that many are non-British (Tahtinen, Mamaeva, Yuen, Ordys, Yu). All the non-Brits could just be Americans, but I'm pretty sure that there are more places of birth involved that that. These people are bound to attract lots more people, of lots of types, from lots of faraway places. I mean, if each of them invites four friends … In a university, a mere two or three people can make a huge difference. The Hayek Society already has a definite thirteen, and the year has only just started. Extraordinary.

The Hayek Society has for years now been dosing the LSE with the message of limited government liberalism – liberalism, that is, when it really was liberalism and before the socialists of the sort who infested the LSE during an earlier era got hold of the word liberalism and turned it on its head. And through the LSE, the Hayek Society will dose lots of other places besides in the years to come. Get them when they're young …

The LSE is an important place and always has been. For good or ill, what they think today, the world thinks tomorrow. And this time around it's for good.

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There have been a great many animated films produced in the last 15 years. Many have been ordinary, but a surpringly large number have been good to wonderful. This article is an overview of these movies.

In the world of animation, once in a while see an animator or an animation studio going through a wonderful creative period. Over the last fifteen years, we have had three or four such hot patches. They do, I think, all owe a lot to the resurgence in animation that occurred due to the first of these, at Disney.

Until the late 1980s, Disney's animation division had appeared to be in terminal decline. However, this somehow changed: Disney went through a stunning (but relatively brief) period of drawn animated musicals at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, thanks to the wonderful musical work of Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin. In retrospect I think there were two great movies that came out of this, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but these changed animation forever. The two Disney movies that followed these (and which were as anticipated as they were because of them) were more financially successful, but I don't think they were quite as good. Aladdin was an Ashman/Menkin movie, but the influence of Robin Williams made it a little uneven, in my opinion. And, very sadly, Howard Ashman was dying when he wrote the music, and it is not as finished and polished as on the earlier movies. The Disney movie that followed that was The Lion King, which had its music written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and although I think this movie is nicely made, it lacks the style of the earlier ones. After that, Disney's drawn animation went into a steep decline, from which it has not recovered. (Just out of interest - the music and choreography of the first song - Going Through the Motions - of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deliberately intended to look like a number from an Ashman/Menkin musical).

Financially, these four movies were extraordinarily successful. Prior to these movies, animation was considered to be something of a niche business, but these movies changed that idea utterly. They grossed far more than anyone had believed possible. Still, though, the audience was mainly children, and this fact made them some of the most financially successful films ever made. This was because they were made after VHS video recorders were ubiquitous. VHS video was a rental business, as people generally only wanted to watch movies once. However, the exception to this was films aimed at children. Children would (and will) watch the same movies over and over, and therefore parents would actually buy VHS tapes for their children. At the time, the prices of such tapes were high, and stunning numbers of the tapes of these four animated movies were sold. (Low quality direct to video sequels were made of these films as well, and these raked in even more). The films had not cost all that much to make (animation was not an art held in high regard just prior to The Little Mermaid) and the levels of profitability were just amazing. (The profit on The Lion King is in the billions of dollars, on an investment of maybe $50 million). Even better, children's films are hugely valuable things in studio archives, as a new generation of children comes along every few years. (The Ashman/Merkin films also were helped by the fact that they coincided with the arrival of the baby boom echo generation of children. Hollywood was too dumb to be actually aware of this, and didn't actually figure it out until after the release of the horror film Scream in 1996, but that is a different story, although one well worth telling some other time).

Disney's competitors saw all this, and felt that they wanted a part of this profit.

Therefore, animation divisions were set up by two other existing studios - Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. A third, new studio - Dreamworks - was formed by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a studio executive who had fallen out with Disney after running Disney's animation division through the golden period. Animation was central to Dreamworks's business plan.

All these studios set about producing animated movies in house, and they also set about looking for independent animation studios doing interesting things, who they could commission to make films for them.

What happened was that the cost of animated films went up dramatically, as talent was in demand, and the average quality dropped, as it was more widely dispersed. But, of course, with voume going up, masterpieces did get produced as talented people found it easier to get their work made.

And Disney themself were on the lookout for external talent. And they really found it, in a company called Pixar that had been founded by George Lucas and was owned by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs.

The biggest success in animation in recent years has been Pixar, creators of the two Toy Story films, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo. The story of Pixar has been told elsewhere (even by me), but the summary is that they make beautiful movies. As it happens, I finally got to see Finding Nemo yesterday afternoon. My expectations were very high, as it got wonderful reviews and it is the biggest grossing film of the year so far in the US. And it was very, very good. Technically, it is utterly beautiful. The animated creation of the ocean and its creatures is simply wonderful. Some of the characters are hilarious, especially the surfer Tortoise voiced by director Andrew Stanton and the pelican voiced by Geoffrey Rush. It was particularly nice to see all the sea creatures supposedly in Australian waters voiced by Australian actors with real Australian accents. And the plot was well put together. But I thought it had maybe a little too much schmaltz. Monsters Inc. and particularly Toy Story 2 had a bit more depth to them. Still, a beautiful movie.

Of the other studios, 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers were not very successful with their animation divisions. Fox produced a traditional Disney style movie, Anastasia in 1997 which was sort of okay but lacklustre. They then produced an animated movie with a space theme aimed at teenage boys, Titan AE in 2000 which, although it was written by Buffy genius Joss Whedon, was an unqualified disaster. It cost a huge amount of money and found no audience at all. 20th Century Fox chief Bill Mechanic was fired by Rupert Murdoch a few days after it was released, and that is why. Fox then stopped making conventional animation. They did then move into computer animation, and they had a hit with Ice Age, in 2002, but their work in this regard is still fairly unremarkable.

Warners was financially no more successful. Their new division's first film The Quest for Camelot in 1998, which was a disaster from both financial and critical viewpoints. In 1999, they released a film called The Iron Giant, directed by a film-maker named Brad Bird.

Bird is considered something of a god by the animation world - one of the best people out there. He was involved in the early days of The Simpsons, and is most famous for creating the characters of Krusty the Clown and Sideshow Bob. The Iron Giant was adapted from Ted Hughes' children's book The Iron Man., which seems quite well known by my English friends, but which was not well known to me. This film is perhaps the great masterpiece of animated film of the last decade: sweet, gentle, dark, disturbing, and uplifting. And having had Bird produce it for them, Warners had absolutely no idea how to market it, and it pretty much vanished without trace at the box office. This is seem by many people as a tragedy. The film was so good that it should have launched a new era of great animation at Warners, led by Brad Bird. However, it didn't.

But as it happens, before Finding Nemo yesterday the cinema showed the trailer for The Incredibles, a computer animated film about a family of superheros and Pixar's next film. Also, it is Brad Bird's next film, as after the The Iron Giant debacle, Bird left Warners and was hired by Pixar. This film comes from an artistically different direction from all of Pixars previous films, which have been made either by director John Lasseter or his proteges in what is essentially his style. The trailer is hilarious, showing a retired and out of shape superhero preparing for one last mission, or at least trying to. This is the film that much of the animation world is looking forward to. The question, however, is whose dynasty it is going to belong to. Will it be of Pixar's legacy of family friendly technical brilliance or the slightly darker and edgier one of Bird. Or will it be some brilliant fusion of the two.

The Iron Giant was, none the less, about the end for Warner's independent animation division. We are left with the question of the new studio, Dreamworks. And I think, even after quite a few films, the jury is still out on this one. Dreamworks started producing traditional drawn animation: their first film was an animated biblical epic The Prince of Egypt in 1998, which was quite well received and which made money, but which was not the blockbuster Jeffrey Katzenberg had hoped. This was followed up by The Road to El Dorado in 2000, which was a clear misfire, and Stallion: Spirit of Cimarron in 2002, which probably broke even. Drawn animation at Dreamworks had clearly not lived up to Jeffrey Katzenberg's hopes, but Dreamworks was still doing interesting, ambitious work in the genre in 2002. Possibly, though, not for much longer, because Dreamworks was making far more money elsewhere.

Dreamworks had also set up a computer animation subsidiary, PDI, which produced the film Antz in 1998, which made money, although technically it was much cruder than what Pixar was doing, and then produced Shrek in 2001. Shrek was and is by far the most successful animated film in no way associated with Disney, but it rather left me cold. The film contained various references to Disney animated films and Hollywood in jokes made at the expense of Disney CEO Michael Eisner. It was more satirical than we had seen in animated film before, but not in my mind in a very sophisticated way. Still, it was very popular and actually a good film. I simply do not think that it is as good as some of the other films I have discussed in this article.

Dreamworks has however also bought animated films from one external source, and this source does in my mind produce the best animated work they have been associated with. Nick Park, the brilliant claymation animator of Aardman animation in Briston, has done wonderful things with the short form, particularly the Wallace and Gromit films, but hasn't quite got things going with feature animation. Aardman have made one feature, Chicken Run, which I think is very good but not quite a great film, and they have had a certain amount of trouble getting more features made. Their film of The Tortoise and the Hare was aborted after going into production, and while a Wallace and Grommit film has gone into production, it is taking a long while before we get to see it. However, audiences love Aardman's work, even more so outside the US than in it, and everyone is eagerly waiting for their next film. Eagerness to see it is perhaps not quite as strong as eagerness to see The Incredibles but people are pretty eager.

And that really is where we are with animated film in the English speaking world. There was a brief era of great movies at Disney around 1990, one great film from Warner Brothers in 1999, an extraordinary body of work from Pixar over the last seven or eight years, and some good stuff coming from Bristol. Plus a fair bit of dross.

However, in the animation world, there is one other force. And that is Japan. Japanese animation has always been a different product living in a different world from animation elsewhere. It is often frenetic in quality. It is often science fiction, often apocalyptic, often has German expressionist influences, and is often at least semi-pornographic. It has an audience in the west, but it is a different demographic to that of western animation.

Except that within Japanese animation, there is one great artist working. He transcends his genre in the way that some artists do, and his films are popular with virtually everybody in Japan. The artist in question is Hayao Miyazaki, and his films - Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service have over the years been slowly gaining an audience in the west on home video. They are beautifully drawn films, with beautifully told stories of considerable depth, and in terms of quality are amongst the best animated films ever made. Miyazaki is revered by producers of animated films the world over. John Lasseter of Pixar is a particular fan.

And yet Miyazaki's films have been unable to gain mass audiences in the west, particularly in the United States. Possibly heartened by the success of other animated films, Disney prepared a carefully dubbed version of Miyazaki's 1997 film Princess Mononoke, a story telling the story of a journey through a supernatural medieval Japan, with just the beginnings of industrial society being apparent. (Actually, in a way the setting of this film rather resembles a Japanese version of Tolkein's Middle Earth, now I come to think of it). The English translation of the dialogue was adapted by Neil Gaiman, but the film didn't cross over to mainstream audiences, and grossed only $2.2 million. I was living in Australia at the time, and it barely got a release. Eventually, an independent cinema in Sydney, the Cremorne Orpheum, imported a subtitled print, but they were only able to show it for a frew weeks in their fairly out of the way location before it had committments elsewhere. During its first week the screen showing that one print grossed more than any other screen in Sydney, and once again everyone who saw the film loved it, but it didn't get released in multiplexes the way that was necessary for it to cross over to mainstream audiences.

Two years ago, Miyazaki's Spirited Away was released in Japan. This is set in modern day Japan, but is an Alice in Wonderland type story. The main character, Chihiro, is a little girl who is perhaps a little battered by life, and who is separated from her parents in what they think is an abandoned theme park ("They built so many in the early 1990s. And then the economy collapsed....") but is in fact a bathhouse for the Gods, and tells the story of her strange and wonderful adventures there as she tries to find her way back into the real world and find her parents.

Despite having made many films, Miyazaki seems to still be improving, and this is I think his best film - or at least it is his best of those I have seen. Again, most people feel this way. It was loved by the American animation industry the moment they saw it, John Lasseter of Pixar helped make sure the US release version was as perfect as it could be, the film was released in the US around a year ago, and it eventually won the Academy Award for Best Animated feature. However, it still didn't cross over to mainstream audiences, grossing around $10 million in the US. This compares with its gross of $230 million in Japan, which in per capita terms is far more than any animated film has ever grossed in the US, and is the highest gross of any film in Japan.

In Britain, the film was finally released three weeks ago, in both subtitled and dubbed versions, and since then it has grossed around $1m. I have finally got to see it. I had been anticipating it for a long time, and it is just beautiful. Still, though, it didn't get a major release in the multiplexes. Given the quality of the product, and, quite frankly, the accessibility of the product - it doesn't feel culturally alien if you see it - it is a shame that general audiences have not seen Miyazaki's films. An American film can be a worldwide hit. A British film can even be a worldwide hit. Taiwanese director Ang Lee managed to produce a worldwide hit from a Kung-Fu movie spoken entirely in Mandarin. But it seems that a Japanese animated film, however good, cannot break through in this way. Which is a great shame, because Miyazaki's films are some of the unmissable masterpieces of animation today. And as a medium animation should be, and generally is, particularly translateable.

Still, though, they are all available on DVD, and there are many I have not seen. And Miyazaki has another film, Howl's Moving Castle in pre-production and due for release next year. I am looking forward to this eagerly. As I am looking forward to The Incredibles, to John Lasseter's new film Cars in 2005, and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit movie in 2005, or whenever we see it. There seems, in fact, to be a lot of good animated films coming.

Update: When I first posted this article, I got the name of the main character from Spirited Away wrong. The girl is named Chihiro, which I have now corrected in the article.

Further Update: I also repeated a few paragraphs of this post when I initially posted it. This was actually a consequence of the server problems we were having when I first posted it. Sorry.

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Steven F. Hayward
The Age of Reagan: I 1964 –1980
Prima Lifestyles, 2001

This is a very long book (718 pages + another 100 pages of notes etc.) and it is somewhat daunting to realise that in due course a second volume will come to complete the story. It might be as well to say that this is emphatically not a biography, not even a political biography; the title and the sub-title The Fall of the Old Liberal Order make this clear. It is more a history of the times, from the anti-Goldwater landslide of 1964 to the Reagan landslide of 1980. The cumulative impression of the book itself is its richness and how its detail ministers to its analysis.

And it is a sorry, not to say a frightening tale, telling as it does of the collapse of American self-confidence and the rise of the counter-culture of self-hatred amongst its elite. The narrative is admittedly partisan, but at the very least a case that needs to be put. As for the Presidents of the period, Hayward's judgements are that Johnson was irresolute, reacting to events minimally, Nixon misguided, obsessive and unfortunate, Ford a mere stopgap and Carter simply disastrous. All of them seemed to have underestimated Soviet malevolence and overestimated Soviet stability; for the latter the intelligence services seem to have been especially at fault.

For anyone who has been misled into thinking that Reagan was an intellectual nullity, here is ample evidence that he was an independent and original thinker, often insisting on keeping to his own line or script in face of criticism from his advisers and speechwriters. Many of his statements, which at the time seemed naive, questionable, wrongheaded or too extreme now seem merely farsighted. He was also optimistic about America and had no time for any rationale for its decline, such as Kissinger, student of the rise and fall of European states, believed in, or at least feared. Nor was he put off by the "complexity" arguments of those who despised him for his simple attitude to problems and their solutions. Some of his difficulties with his own advisers and supporters lay in persuading them that this attitude could be made plausible to the public as electorate.

As much as the first two thirds of the book, however, has little mention of Reagan, for it is a history of how the US got into the messes that Reagan, it is fair to say, rescued it from. By far the biggest mess, which he was too late to do anything about, was, of course, the Vietnam War and it is quite plain that the left-leaning media and intellectuals, combined with political ineffectiveness and downright ignorance, contributed overwhelmingly to its being lost. To illustrate US political masochism: the two "war pictures" that had the greatest negative impact on home support - execution of the Vietcong prisoner and the napalmed little girl - won Pulitzer Prizes for the photographers.

It is not exactly necessary to be reminded, but it is necessary to bear in mind that it was under two Democrat Presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, that the US entered and enmeshed itself in the Vietnam "quagmire" (though this is not a term I recall being used by the author). The muddled, incremental escalation of the conflict by Johnson is described in Ch 4. It was also a Democrat Congress, not the President, the hapless Ford, that abandoned the South Vietnamese, even refusing to supply them arms.

Even more so was Cambodia betrayed, and the dignified reproaches of their leaders, as they refused the offer of evacuation by the American ambassador, to face certain death, make sad reading (p. 408). It is a terrible comment on what the consensus was that Reagan's characterisation of the US effort in Vietnam as a "noble cause" was regarded as eccentric and chauvinist, just as later was "evil empire" (but for the latter's vindication see The Week, 15/2/02, p. 13).

All through the account is woven the political manoeverings of various, almost forgotten presidential hopefuls and their minions. The ups and downs of Reagan's two bids for the Republican nomination and the campaign that won him the Presidency, are given in great detail. On the other hand, his two terms as Governor of California are more lightly sketched in (or are perhaps less memorable). A fine book, which should be better known.

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Could there be such a thing a 'Legal Laffer Curve'? What I mean is, a point where there are so many laws that the State cannot possibly enforce them and their agents start to wilt under the pressure of trying to do so. From then on the whole thing starts to go downhill and the lawlessness begins to grow uncontrollably.

Has that point been reached?

A chief Constable admitted yesterday that his officers are being forced to ignore thousands of burglaries, thefts and car crimes because they are swamped by increasing drug and gun violence.

The public's perception that the police were not interested in low-level and non-violent crime was underlined when Steve Green, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire police, said there was not enough money or officers available to investigate all crime.

The emergence of Britain's drug and gun culture had impacted on his force to such an extent that "something had to give".

A very telling admission from a man who is clearly under pressure. However my sympathy-meter is stuck at nought. The police have spent decades campaigning vigourously to abolish just about every right of the citizens to preserve their own security and, of course, the means to do so. The natural consequence is that they have arrogated that burden onto themselves and it is a burden the can neither cope with nor discharge. Truly that is a zero-sum game.

Yes, I think something will have to 'give' but knowing this country as I do, I doubt very much that it will be the pathology of total control that has caused the problem in the first place.

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Another bracing dose of perspective from Victor Davis Hanson:

[A]fter September 11 we will either accept defeat and stay within our borders to fight a defensive war of hosing down fires, bulldozing rubble, arresting terrorist cells, and hoping to appease or buy off our enemies abroad — or we will eventually have to confront Syria, Lebanon's Bekka Valley, Saudi Arabia, and Iran with a clear request to change and come over to civilization, or join the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

[B]y any historical measure, what strikes students of this war so far in its first two years is the amazing degree to which the United States has hurt its enemies without incurring enormous casualties and costs.

As always with VDH, it pays to read the whole thing.

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Over at the Adam Smith Institute's Weblog, Madsen Pirie says:

There is another view which says that politics matters less these days. When the UK government provided houses and jobs for many of us, and ran the electricity, gas, oil and phone companies, together with steel, coal, ships and cars, it mattered who was in charge. With less coming from government and more from ourselves and the private sector, it is not as important. People tend to vote heavily in high tax countries such as Denmark, and less so in low tax countries such as the USA.

In other words, if politics (i.e. the scramble for the favour of the majority) becomes less important, voting goes down.

Many libertarians, notably Perry de Havilland of this blog, believe that the same idea in reverse is true - that by not voting we can reduce the politicisation of our lives. 'Let them wither away to irrelevance,' he says. I'm not so sure. It might be one of those nasty paradoxes such as the one whereby safety breeds lack of vigilance, which makes us less safe.

Perhaps the first to stop voting are those who have achieved relative independence, leaving disproportionate influence to those still at the trough. Have any studies been done on this? And does anyone know what percentage of those eligible to vote in, say, 1900 when the State was very weak, actually did so?

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Johan Norberg
In Defence of Global Capitalism
Cato Institute, 2003

Another welcome book in the Simon, Lomborg line, this time from Sweden, an auspicious sign. The Preface was reprinted in Liberty, where I first read it and where it makes a good summary of the argument of the book. In 1988 when the author was 16, his party – the Anarchists – got the largest percentage of votes, 25%, in the school mock-election, running an agin-the-government campaign. His position has changed somewhat – capitalism has difficulty working without a legal system and transparency in transactions – but is basically the same.

He starts by insisting that over the past three or four decades things have got better, particularly in the poorer "developing" countries. Income per capita has increased and mortality been reduced. This he ascribes to opening of the countries concerned to "the market", both internal and external. He is, moreover, strongly against national barriers, not merely to trade, but also to migration, though here he doesn't take into account our xenophobia. The case against tariffs is succinctly put by the quotation: "Either a branch of enterprise is profitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection; or else it is unprofitable, in which case it deserves no tariff protection (p. 152)."

Although not explicitly against the EU as such, his analysis of its CAP agricultural subsidies and protectionism (pp. 148-) is damning, and it is even more shaming that so-called pro-Third World anti-globalisation protesters do not target them.

There is a separate chapter on "The African Morass" (p. 98-) where per capita GDP has actually decreased since the '60s, though I think the statement that "The African countries have inherited a hierarchic, repressive political structure from the colonial powers" needs to be modified: what they did inherit, according to Bauer, was a late move to a command economy and a socialist intellectual outlook. The situation has been exacerbated by international aid, and debt cancellation would only be an encouragement of the behaviour that brought the bankruptcy about

The author refutes the prevalent belief that world inequality is growing, either between (p. 53) or within countries. He also points out that social mobility means that "the poor" are not the same people from one year to the next (p. 76). This, incidentally, is the factor most frequently, in fact always, omitted from discussions on poverty, whether absolute or relative; in fact, only 4% of the US population remain in the "poor" bracket (20%) for as long as two years, though some will remain longer.

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Radley Balko has an article in Fox News today on a subject near and dear to my heart. Senator Fritz Hollings is at long last ending his dismal career.

This is the same Senator who in 1986 attempted a media grand stand play over the graves of the seven Challenger Astronauts. He is the luddite who can not deal with the modern world of technology and information and who wants us to return to a post-WWII world of backbreaking labour. He is the Senator who wants to make the internet safe for Disney and the RIAA.

For decades he has been the best Senator money can buy. I'm sure someone will miss him, but it certainly will not be me.

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There is nothing a power-freak likes better than replacing a muddle with a slab.

Natalie Solent

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Here is an idea all libertarians can agree with: removing marriage law and regulation from the State.

My only disagreement is they do not go far enough. The State has no place in matters of faith or of love. It is up to individuals to make their own decisions on such matters and self-regulate within the framework of their choice, whether it be church or private marriage registry.

It is nice, just for once, to see a wronged minority calling for a solution requiring less government intervention. The 'solution' of problems created by government by demanding more government is sadly the rule, rather than the exception.

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I honestly think I have grossly underestimated the entrepreunerial skills of the social-working class. It must take a certain talent to keep inventing new make-work schemes and then successfully sell them to the government.

I cannot imagine how I would begin to pitch this one:

The Government is losing its war against flab after spending £9.6 billion on projects to tackle obesity across all departments.

I just love the idea of porcine civil servants being sent to huff and puff their way around an army assault course but I rather think they are not the intended target of this new 'war'.

Anyway, it seems the government is losing the war. They cannot make fat people slim again by bureaucratic means. I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you.

The fat epidemic shows no sign of abating.

'Epidemic'! Now there's a panic-inducing trigger-word if ever there was one. I bet that was the deal-closer. 'Minister, unless you write out a blank cheque there's going to be an epidemic!'.

Obesity is serious.

At £9.6 billion, yeah I would say that's bloody serious.

It kills 34,000 people a year in Britain...

And HMG is going to keep spending money until the target of Zero deaths from all causes is reached.

...and costs the economy in England £2.6 billion a year, estimated to rise to £3.6 billion by 2010.

How can they possibly know that?

It cannot, however, be tackled by the Department of Health alone.

Well, it might be helped by fat people going on a diet but we wouldn't want them taking the law into their own hands, would we.

Strategies to deal with obesity in children and adults now involve four Government departments with support at Cabinet level.

The Department of Health and the Health Development Agency, the Department for Education and Skills, the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport are all players in the anti-fat campaign.

Defeating the Third Reich didn't require this many people.

And, therein lies the rub because even this public admission of failure will do nothing to stop the flab-fighting government juggernaut now that it has been sent rumbling forth onto the highway of national life. The conspicuous failure of fat children to shrink to normal size will merely prompt demands for 'more resources' to fight yet another phoney war. Problems are not meant to be solved because careers aren't built that way. Problems are to be fabricated and then carefully nurtured and maintained until...well, ever.

The £9.6 billion wasted thus far was merely the appetiser. Small change. Petty cash. Mere peanuts already swallowed up with a forest's worth of reports, initiatives, projections, surveys, committee minutes and action plans. This is Britain where the new national ethos is to throw good money after bad into the bottomless sinkhole of guilt and paranoia.

If any reader is tempted to laugh out loud at the Swiftian absurdity of it all then I can hardly blame them. But really it isn't funny, it's pathetic and it is only a matter of time before it moves beyond the sad to the downright nasty:

One is the Food and Health Action Plan which aims to promote healthy eating in all age groups.

An aspect of this is the schools fruit programme, now being implemented, which aims to give all primary school children in their first three years, a portion of fruit a day.

The second is the Game Plan, a strategy for promoting physical activity with the somewhat vague target of ensuring that 70 per cent of the population is "reasonably active" by 2020.

This is what they call a 'consciousness raising exercise', a customary pre-cursor to new expansions of state power. 'The voluntary approach hasn't worked', they will cry. 'What we need is tough legislation'. And they will most likely get it too and disapproved products will start to be pulled from supermarket shelves and nobody will be allowed to open a bank account until they can produce a 'Physical Fitness Certificate'. This may sound alarmist but the one thing I have never underestimated is the vanity and ambition of our political classes.

Britain isn't obese, it's anaemic. It's life-blood is being drained from it by an army of worthless, self-propogating parasites.

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If I was a Californian I would be wary about expecting too much from the newly-elected Governor Schwarzenegger. Events may prove me wrong but I rather doubt that he will have much impact on life in California. Or even that much impact on politics in California for that matter.

Some people, however, are expecting the worst. Below is a selection on unedited posts from the forum of the Democratic Underground and I give you my assurance that these are far from being the most lurid:

This nation is jam-packed with starfuckers, let's face it. No one seems to give a damn about issues that affect their own goddamn wallets, but "it would be soooooooo cool to have a movie star for governor, woo-hoo!!!!!!!!"

There are dozens of reasons why Colly-forn-eeya went for Arnie, but don't underestimate the power of the starfucker vote. It is very, very closely linked to the booger-eatin' vote.

But who will speak for the 'booger-eaters' if not Arnie?

No way in HELL was that recall legit. NO WAY. I don't care what anyone says, FIX.

We all know the 2000 Pres. election was a FIX, I'd bet the farm that Jeb being re(s)elected was a fix too (keep in mind this state's election process is brought to you by...KKKatherine Hairass). And there is NO WAY in hell that such a liberal state like California would vote for a roid freak, sexist, Nazi...unless...IT'S A FIX.

Do you honestly imagine that Arnie would work without a script?

what things would these kind of people do to us?

whenever something like this happens the innocent people always suffer first. it is not just a political enemies thing. hitler did not just go after his rivals, he went after defenseless jews. when bush and rove and that gang finally get the power they need what will happen to normal american citizens?

Ze Democrats vill be deported. California vill be 'democratrein'. Ze pure-blooded Californian Aryan folk must haf ze lebensraum.

DU is a great place, but it would be too easy to be infiltrated and contaminated here. We need someplace online that is well-encrypted and secure from prying eyes to do our serious planning. We also will want to get in touch with ANSWER and MoveOn, work with them, maybe set up some kind of rebel high command.

And while you're about it, get in touch with Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They've got a score to settle too.

Oh come on, chaps. Stop trying to put a brave face on things. You're a bit upset, aren't you. I can tell. I can always tell.

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Ralph Peters bangs one out of the park today, echoing and expanding on the sentiment behind my earlier post on "I hope we win". A few tidbits:

The truth is that today's media shape reality - often for the worse. The media form a powerful strategic factor. They're actors, not merely observers.

The media is a key strategic factor today. And it is profoundly dishonest for so powerful a player to pretend it bears no responsibility for strategic outcomes.

The selectivity with which the news is reported shapes opinion, here and abroad. The news we see, hear and read from Iraq is overwhelmingly bad news. Thus, the picture the American electorate and foreign audiences receive is one of spreading failure - even though our occupation has made admirable progress.

We're on the way to talking ourselves into defeat in the face of victory. Much of the media has already called the game's outcome as a loss before we've reached half-time. Even though the scoreboard shows we're winning.

To an extent few journalists will admit, terror as we know it depends on the media as its accomplice, amplifying the terrorist's deeds and shaping successes out of terrorist failures - the opposite of the media's approach to American efforts.

From the terrorists' perspective, 9/11 was, above all, a media event - a global demonstration of their power.

This is not an argument for propaganda, or for turning our press into mindless red-white-and-blue cheerleaders. But the media must face up to the responsibility that goes with their influence.

The terrorists, from Arafat to Hussein to bin Laden, all count on the media as a critical element in their campaigns, relying on the faux objectivity of "the cycle of violence" and moral relativism to conceal their barbarity, counting on the instinctive oppositionism of the Western media to undermine support for the war, and relying on the "news appeal" of bad news to give their side the bully pulpit while draining the life out of our victories.

The media have to understand that they are not neutral bystanders, but, against their will, have been made into combatants in this war. The only question is, whose side will they aid? So far, the verdict is pretty clear that the mainstream media, unwitting as it is, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

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It is over. Arnold basically has kicked in the teeth of the opposition with a margin of nearly a million votes over his nearest competitor, former Hispanic secessionist Cruz Bustamante.

Through the use of our secret Illuminati time communication technology (Codename Peabody), the Samizdata Editorial staff prepared deep cover for its two covert agents in California well ahead of time.

With a libertarian intelligence matter of such extreme importance facing us - regime change in one of the largest economies on this planet - we have unstintingly sent two of our finest undercover agents: Perry "007" deHavilland and Adriana "Lara Croft" Cronin to look into the matter.

They have left these shores and are expected to remain 'in theatre' for several weeks. We hope they will uncover details of the new governor's purported Weapons of Mass Employment (WME's).

Good luck and good hunting!

Agent 007 practices laying down protective covering fire...

...while Agent Lara handles team self-extraction from maddened hordes of LA socialists

I was given the names and details by an unnamed high Samizdata administration official who will remain unnamed but should of course be the target of a lengthy Blogosphere investigation so long as it is damaging to the administration and no one dares ask me any questions.

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Matt Drudge is predicting a comfortable Ah-nie victory in California.

LATEST EXIT POLLS SHOW 59% VOTE 'YES' FOR RECALL, TOP CAMPAIGN AND MEDIA SOURCES TELL DRUDGE REPORT, 51% FOR SCHWARZENEGGER, 30% FOR BUSTAMANTE, 13% MCCLINTOCK....

My prediction: the Guardian will denounce the result as an 'illegitimate power-grab' before the end of the week.

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Alice Bachini sincerely wants to be rich.

Hello. While I am on light blogging duties, I thought I would set you all some homework. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that my quest to become a hard-nosed international millionaire businesswoman is still pretty much in its pre-foetal stages. I have considered many career paths, and various means of propulsion along them, including the possibility of multiply launching the whole set, yet somehow time still feels short (which, as we all know, is merely a conceptual illusion and not a true insight on anybody's reality), learning still seems really difficult due to the technomoronicism curse, and generally other more urgent things seem to get in the way. You know, things like making toast and gallivanting around London.

Therefore, I am calling upon my readers yet again to offer their suggestions, tips and positive ideas (no need to tell me I'm an idiot doomed to failure, thank you) in a financially-improving direction. Whatever I do has to be extremely flexible, realistic, and clever enough to work for me. And that means clever. But you people are clever, right?

Some calling himself "I'm serious, and I'm too lazy", supplied this really rather intelligent comment:

Interview the twenty richest persons in the UK. Or set your sights higher, and interview the twenty richest people in the world. Write it all down. Find a publisher. Title it, How the twenty richest people in the world became that way and how they keep it. Or just title it, How? and put a big green dollar sign on a yellow background, or pound or euro if you wish. Put your picture on the back in dark glasses (see above). You will make lots if you find a publisher. Even if not all twenty give you an interview, the reasons why they won't will make a book that sells. If none of this works at least you will have had fun gallivanting, and you will made some excellent contacts and some good stories to tell your grandchildren. By all means wear those dark glasses and only remove them once you have the interview booked.

Anyone here got anything to add to that? Read Alice's blog a bit to find out what kind of person she is, and then tell her what to do. (You people are clever, right?)

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It may be silly that sport affects politics, but it does. In 1966, England won the soccer World Cup, and it definitely did rub off on the Labour Government then in power and on Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. British proles can do it, who needs the bloody toffs?, etc. etc. Wilson certainly milked that win all he could for his political team.

So when, in the quarter-finals of the next World Cup in 1970, the England soccer team was gut-wrenchingly beaten 3-2 (after being 2-0 up) by the very same opponents they'd beaten in the 1966 final, West Germany, they were widely debited/credited with tipping the balance in favour of the Conservatives at the general election held very soon afterwards. The proles weren't so cool after all, you see.

The England soccer team has never since scaled the heights of 1966, but the infusion of television money and foreign stars nevertheless gave English soccer in the 1990s a glamour and a cultural clout that it had probably never had before. Soccer now completely dominates the sports pages, having utterly routed the now very forlorn cricket as England's "national game". And ("New") Labour has once again made use of all that in its propaganda about rebranding and modernising and generally being Cool Britannia.

There is now another World Cup approaching which may have a similar, although more muted, political effect, in the form of the Rugby Word Cup, which kicks off next Friday when host nation Australia plays Argentina in Sydney. England are strongly fancied to win this, although the truth is that any one of about half a dozen closely matched teams could win, of whom England are just one. If England do win or at least do very well (by winning through to the final in grand style and then being heroically and narrowly beaten, say), this could have party political vibes back here in Britain. If England disappoint, ditto, in the sense that the dog I am about to describe won't have barked after all.

Basically, it would suit the Conservatives if the England rugby team were to triumph, while many Labour supporters would probably prefer England to make a humiliatingly early exit.

I've already alluded to the class nature of Britain and of British sport, when referring to the proles who are – and the toffs who are not – involved in British soccer. Something equal and … not opposite exactly, but very distinct, can be said about rugby. Here the class that dominates is what is called the "middle" class, although by middle what is really meant is the class of people who are upper, but then not too far upper. The class I'm getting at is the "upper half" class, the class sufficiently numerous to hold its own numerically when set beside beside the working class.

To be sure, there are toffs who play rugby, or "rugger" as such people call it. But the people from whom this England team come are not toffs. They come from the people who keep the wheels of British society turning by turning up themselves every morning for work and making sure that the wheels turn, rather than merely by owning the wheels and complaining about them in unattractive accents as they read the financial pages.

The England rugby team is widely regarded – certainly among British sports people – as the best major sports team in these islands just now, and it is a middling class, middle managerial atmosphere that this excellent team now gives off. They are professional in their economic status (without being as outrageously paid as the soccer stars), and they are professional in their social attitudes. They practice hard, and play hard, and almost always these days, they win. The England cricket people observe the rugby guys with unconcealed envy, and the soccer people are starting to pay serious attention also.

After they've won a game, the England rugby players talk in managerial clichés about how "I was lucky enough to get on the end of" a score, which was really created by a huge team effort, blah blah. What is absent is either any yobbish, prole-ish childishness, or any upper-class ironic detachment. They are not very wordy, and when they are it's generally rather dull and you wish they'd stop. Humour, when they do display it, tends to be of the laconic variety. They prefer to let their upper and lower body strength do the talking.

It isn't that these guys are without feelings. They have powerful feelings, but they also have an ability bordering on genius to control and to channel those feelings into the "job" (a favourite England rugby word nowadays), rather than, say, into quarrelling with referees or smashing up hotels. They are "Middle England", to use a politically potent phrase. During World War 2, their grandfathers would have been officers and NCOs in the civilian and conscripted bit of the Army. They aren't squaddies, but neither are they Guards officers. Nowadays, blokes like this go to universities, but not to the posh ones.

Professionalism has definitely made a difference to all this. The general run of amateur rugby players are a rowdier and more off-putting bunch than the top internationals, a lot more like professional soccer players. But behaviour like that doesn't win you good press coverage and hence good sponsorship deals, and more to the point, it gets you hurt and fat and it doesn't win you games.

The man who epitomises all this is England's star fly half and goal-kicking automaton Jonny Wilkinson, and it speaks volumes that David Beckham has been so content to share a pre World Cup photoshoot with Wilkinson. Wilkinson is now making a small fortune as the face of half a dozen advertising campaigns, from Tweed jackets to Lucozade.

You can see where I'm going with this. The England rugby team now gives off the precise atmosphere of teamwork, toughness, modesty, effectiveness, confidence-without-arrogance, upward economic mobility, emotional commitment, patriotism and yet non-toffness and non-ghastliness that the Conservative Party is trying to radiate, or ought to be trying to radiate if it knows what's good for it. If England do shine as brightly as they well could in this World Cup, it will be one more little boost for the Conservatives, and one more little nail in the coffin of the New Labour project.

Which is not the same as saying that seemingly very ineffectual person who now leads the Conservatives will make any worthwhile use of whatever rugby card he gets dealt. In fact, there is no better way of summing up what's wrong with the current Conservative Leader, a man called the Iain Duncan Smith (this has to keep being spelled out because it is a name that many, many millions of Brits continue to have trouble with), is that he doesn't look or sound or feel like anything remotely resembling an England rugby international, but that in order to do his job properly he should. There's a bloke called, I believe, David Davis, who, I further believe, passes what one might call the "rugby test". There are probably some younger Conservative MPs who likewise give off that rugby pro vibe. Most of the Conservatives fail the rugby test dismally, being varying mixtures of inbred toff genetic failure and soccer referee. They come across as privileged but undeserving of their privileges, and too weak and silly even to cling on to them.

Don't get this wrong. I'm not saying that the England rugby team consists entirely of Conservative supporters, any more than the England soccer team all votes Labour. I'm talking about whose people these people are, who identifies with them, who went to school with them, and would like their sisters to marry them.

Tony Blair's political triumph has been built on his ability to split Middle England down the middle and bite off a great chunk of it, without offending the proles and their various representatives too much, and there's plenty more mileage yet in that political bandwagon. But an England rugby win would suggest, perhaps subliminally, that if you want England (the country) to do well (and by extension Britain), then it ought to be run by the kind of people who now run the England rugby team, and by the sort of political party that most resembles the people in the England rugby team.

Soccer just now, by comparison, is suddenly looking threadbare and unappealing. It has been paid too much but has delivered too little. Following a traumatic slump in TV revenue, the latest infusion of money is now coming from the Russian oil tycoon/politician/gangster who has bought Chelsea. Soccer is not now Britain, or England, at its best. Stories like this or this really do not help. Coming as they do just before the Rugby World Cup, they point up the current contrast between England soccer and England rugby with particular force.

And as for soccer's supporters … While the rugby players dream of World Cup glory, the England soccer team is on the verge of being kicked out of the next European Championships because of the fear and hatred aroused throughout Europe by the aggressively drunken yobbishness of the working class louts who support it, and of the inability of the Soccer bosses either to control or to dissociate themselves from this mayhem.

The totemic David Beckham, as much Mr Cool Britannia as Tony Blair has ever been, has now moved to Spain, to play for Real Madrid. Coincidence? Probably. But there's definitely an air of fading glory about England soccer just now, and what is more of glory that never quite was glory in the first place.

So, a lot is riding on the England rugby team as they sweat through their final preparations in the heat of Australia. England's first game is against the unfancied Georgians, but, taking nothing for granted, they have picked their best team.

Meanwhile, Ireland also have a decent side, and are a good outside bet to get all Irish and fervent about everything and win the entire thing. What the political vibes of that would be, I haven't really given much thought to. I think it would probably weaken the case for Britain staying out of the Euro by "proving" that the enthusiastically European Irish are doing fine with the Euro. That's what would be said, anyway. But that's another argument.

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Over at Hit & Run, Jesse Walker notes that Robert Anton Wilson is a candidate in the California election, and reprints one of his position papers:

GUNS AND DOPE PARTY POSITION PAPER #23

Little Tony was sitting on a park bench munching on one candy bar after another. After the 6th candy bar, a man on the bench across from him said, "Son, you know eating all that candy isn't good for you. It will give you acne, rot your teeth, and make you fat."

Little Tony replied, "My grandfather lived to be 107 years old."

The man asked, "Did your grandfather eat 6 candy bars at a time?"

Little Tony answered, "No, he minded his own fucking business."

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The US Centers for Disease Control (for our UK friends, that's the same as "Centres for Disease Control") recently admitted that gun control laws can't be shown to do much of anything to reduce violence.

From the press release:

The Task Force review of the effects of various laws showed insufficient evidence to conclude whether firearms laws impact rates of violence.

Among the areas under task force review were: bans on specific firearms or ammunition, restrictions on firearm acquisition, waiting periods for firearm acquisition, firearm registration and licensing of firearm owners, “shall issue” concealed weapon carry laws, child access prevention laws, zero tolerance for firearms in schools, and combinations of firearm laws.

A finding of “insufficient evidence to determine effectiveness” means that, based on the current body of literature, the Task Force is unable to determine whether the intervention was effective or not. The task force agreed that additional scientific studies relating to these interventions might help to provide clearer answers.

A little background and a few points to consider:

The CDC has a long history of being virulently anti-gun. That it would make such an admission, even in such painfully hedged terms, is no small thing. The diversion of the Centers for DISEASE Control into the gun debate was a prime example of mission creep and of the notion that violence is not the result of personal decision and (ir)responsibility, but rather was the result of impersonal forces and even of inanimate objects.

Alternatively, this may also be cited as an example of the way that administrative agencies bend to the political winds - the CDC was pro-gun control under pro-gun control administrations, and now . . . . My acquaintance with the tenured civil servant class, though, tends to undercut this attack. The folks who generate these kinds of reports are very nearly untouchable, and if anything their motivation increases when they disagree with the politicals.

I have always said that the burden of proof rests on those who would restrict our liberties. This report would seem to pretty well indicate that the burden has not been met on gun control.

It will be interesting to see if this affects the coming expiration of the assault weapons ban. Bush has said he will sign an extension of the ban if it lands on his desk (another black mark on his permanent record). The CDC report should be useful to opponents of the ban.

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About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as "Pierre55", suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.

There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington...

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So much for European unity:

Seven out of ten German voters would reject the euro if they were given the chance, a new poll has shown.

Maybe surprisingly, it is younger Germans that are the most eurosceptic, with 73 percent of 18-24 year olds saying they would reject the euro.

The poll also showed that French voters would reject the euro, but by a much more slender margin (approximately 51-49). This has provoked fears that French voters may use a referendum on the Constitution to voice their concerns about the euro.

Nothing surprising to me. The European Union is yesterday's solution to the day before's problem. It is a sullen, unloved political dinosaur fixed only by a combination of political inertia and the career-ambitions of a cossetted technocratic cadre. It is doomed.

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One of the most notorious features of Britain's socialist-inspired near-collapse of the 1970's were the insanely militant trade unions who helped drive much of our remaining smokestack industries either out of the country or onto the scrapheap.

Industrial disputes were such a common feature fo everyday life that they became a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. I can remember in particular a popular joke about a trade union official who calls a meeting of his members to announce that, from now on, they would only have to work on Wednesdays.

A moment's silence while this sinks in. Then one worker shouts from the back: "What, every bloody Wednesday"?

I wonder if a Gallic version of this joke has been doing the rounds in France:

The French government called yesterday for a renegotiation of the 35-hour working week introduced four years ago by the previous, Socialist-led government to create jobs and reduce unemployment.

It begs the questions of exactly what these people have rattling around in their heads that leads them to believe that forcing everyone to work less will create jobs? I suppose we should call it the 'fixed quantity of time fallacy'.

Left-wing politicians countered that the government was starting a "witch-hunt" to disguise its bad economic and budgetary management. Even independent economists poured scorn on the government's arguments and figures.

Well, I would love to know exactly who these 'independent economists' are. Unless they actually meant to say 'economists from the Independent' in which case their opinions deserve about as much respect as those of French left-wing politicians.

But the Grand Union of Philosophy Professors (which probably counts most of the adult population among its members) is not going to lie down for this. In fact, they will vote with their feet. From the cafes and bookshops they will pour forth onto the streets of Paris in droves and legions, complete with banners, drums, whistles and George Bush rubber face-masks. Nobody is going to tell them to work for a living when they can agitate for a living instead. Street protest is their last growth industry.

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Bjorn Lomborg
The Skeptical Environmentalist
Cambridge University Press, 2001

This is not exactly a book of surprises for me, since I have read Julian Simon, Donald Bailey, et al., but apparently it has caused a stir and much hostility, which I can only assume is because all the other sources haven't attained the same (desired) publicity. It is a big book – 352 pages plus 160 pages of notes etc., divided into six sections:

1. The Litany – the media consensus that things are getting worse. Lomborg sets out to counter this in his section "Things Are Getting Better" and examines "Why Do We Hear So Much Bad News?"

2. Human Welfare – population, life expectancy, food stocks, general prosperity, leading to the conclusion: unprecedented human prosperity.

3. Can Human prosperity Continue? The "Are we living on borrowed time?" worry, is answered reassuringly in the sections following on food, forests, energy and raw materials, water.

4. Pollution – air pollution (decreasing in the developed countries, correlated with increased prosperity), acid rain (a false scare), indoor air pollution (greater everywhere than outdoors, resulting in allergies and asthma), water pollution (exaggerated and decreasing), waste disposal (not a problem as far as enough space is concerned).

5. Tomorrow's Problems – exaggerated fears over chemicals and pesticides causing cancer etc., also over biodiversity loss and species extinction, the last from figures grabbed from the air, and a long section of global warming (pp. 258-324). This may be the section that has caused most trouble. Lomborg does not deny that "anthropogenic" additional carbon dioxide may have caused, be causing or will cause global warming but he does make clear the variation possible and the excessively alarmist nature of some of the forecasts. He also points out that money spent on reducing the earth's temperature could be better spent and that the dislocation of the world economy would reduce the expanding prosperity that makes possible the necessary efficiency needed to bring about the desired results.

6. The Real State of the World is a generally hopeful one, basically summarising the message of the rest of the book and including a section on GM foods. There is also a discussion of the costs of protection measures; thus the Environmental Protection Agency (in the US) spends $21.4 billion to save 592,000 life-years (though how this figure was attained isn't clear to me). A Harvard study estimates that 1,230,000 life-years could be saved for the same money. This is a good source-book, with something interesting on every page. I find it pretty convincing.

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For those who find Mondays blue and tired and for those who might be inspired to a change of career... Ladies and gentlemen I give you:

Dissect a frog online!

Via Monkeyfarts

Note: Any resemblence to characters real or imagined is purely coincidental and the editorial team of Samizdata.net shall not be held responsible for any dissections of the insinuated individual.

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Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article with links on violent crime. US murder rates have continued to drop over the last ten years and are now at the lowest seen since the 1960's.

Meanwhile, as we have seen in the last week, murder in the UK has been skyrocketing. One of the linked articles also reports something many of us have predicted. If cheap guns cannot be bought, they will be manufactured.

It turns out that is exactly what is happening in the UK. It is not as if gunsmithing were a high technology endeavour. Is there anyone out there who truly believes hand-made items manufactured in 16th century London workshops cannot be built to much higher standards in a 21st Century London garage?

Where there is a customer, there's a way.

PS: An interesting thought struck me whilst off in the shower... we may be on the verge of a new generation of experimental and creative armourers here in the UK.

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Stephanie Gutmann
The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars?
Scribner, 2000

First published in 2000, nothing could better illustrate the subordination of the military to the civil power than this account, by a woman journalist, of the submission of the male-oriented former to the feminist-dominated latter. Since it is modern political dogma that men and women are equal, the recruitment of women into the fighting forces becomes obligatory. This book is a description of how this is done, and what happens afterwards. As yet, the result has barely been tested in battle conditions, so the problems are being confronted in peacetime.

There is ample evidence that if physical equality was the criterion, few women would qualify – after training intensively, a batch of women, in it for the experiment (not recruits), reached the standard of the weakest males (p. 251). At the same time as trying to pretend that females could be the equivalent of males in tough fighting with enemies out to kill them, they were presumed so vulnerable that they needed protection from all forms of harassment by their comrades, which meant that the sexes couldn't really interact – and when harassment changed into acceptable behaviour, that was just as bad – the pregnancy rate soared.

There is a long account and analysis of the notorious "Tailhook" party in 1991, post-Gulf (pp. 156-188) "when we had finally gotten over Vietnam" which led to numerous dismissals of top airforce brass and a greatly lowered morale of the rest, resulting in a haemorrhaging of disgusted qualified pilots, at a cost of $lm each for training. This was ostensibly about harassment, though most of the women present could either take care of themselves, expected what they got or went there to get it. Even during a rowdy "gauntlet", when someone shouted "I've lost my pager", everything stopped until it was found. The woman who led the complaints benefited to the tune of $5+m – and left the service. After Tailhook, everything was about gender, ... [it was] the worst event for the Navy since Pearl Harbor."

Of course, the whole burden of the book is that the US armed forces are not being treated by Congress and the media as a fighting force whose efficiency is paramount, but as a section of society which can be moulded into something with quite a different agenda from fighting and killing, though what that is is difficult to define – that men and women are basically equal and if it doesn't always work out that way, it's the men's fault.

The book ends with a series of recommendations, granted that the forces should remain open to women:

1. Eliminate recruiting quotas for women;
   
2. Have separate-sex "boot camp" training;
   
3. Have high and equal standards there;
   
4. Restore "openness" and be frank about the problems, not just put them down to "sexism";
   
5. Exonerate the personnel victimised after Tailhook ("Witchook");
   
6. Separate the social service personnel from the fighting forces;
   
7. Copy the practice of Marines, who seem to have fought through the "gender" nonsense largely unscathed.

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There has been much amusement lately at the promises made by the Conservatives here in Britain - higher government pensions and lower taxes. Although Arnold S. in California has been making similar promises (indeed he actually got a new spending program passed in California as recently as last November - the after school thing).

Whilst I would agree that the Conservative Party does look very silly with the headline "Conservatives promise higher pensions and lower taxes" (whatever the details about getting the money by abolishing certain means tested benefits for the old and getting rid of a lot of the "New Deal" - "welfare to work" programs), I think that the all the amusement does miss an important point.

There seems to be no great support among the voters for the reduction in the size and scope of government. Now I can remember when there was such support - the late 1970s, then very many people (perhaps most people) supported the reduction of government spending, but this is simply not true now (in spite of government spending on the Welfare State being vastly higher now than it was then).

To abolish the Conservative Party and create a new party of the 'centre right' would solve nothing if there is no market for such a party.

To be fair some of the enemies of the Conservative Party seem to understand this. For example Peter Hitchins (of the Mail on Sunday) wishes to get rid of the Conservative Party, but he does not wish to replace it with a free market party. No, he fully supports government railways (in fact he still bangs on about the foolishness of the private ownership of the railways even though the structure was re-nationalized some time ago), and he supports anti-Americanism, the B.B.C. 'Licence Fee' (TV tax) and lots of other nasty things.

It would not be fair to say that Hitchins and his ilk favour "Social Democracy plus black leather and goose-stepping" (Peter Hitchins is not a Nazi), but he and his friends are certainly not free market folk, and have nothing but contempt for the old free market 'ideology' of Britain. They are rather like the old 'socio-imperial' crowd of paternalists that surrounded Joseph Chamberlain.

Whether the Conservative Party continues to exist or not the problem (for free market people) remains the same - the vast majority of voters do not support cutting back the Welfare State and the believe that every economic and social problem should be met by new government laws or better enforcement of old laws (this, again, was certainly not true in the late 1970's - when most people supported deregulation).

Why has public opinion in Britain changed so much? This is a question too long and complicated for me to answer here (if I can answer this question at all), but I do know that until public opinion changes or can be made to change, no political party favourable to liberty will prosper in Britain.

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I've just bought a new digital radio and it's wonderful. Finally, I can receive BBC Radio 3 without analogical interruptions, which are perpetual where I live, in London SW1. You'd think that London SW1 would get good radio signals, wouldn't you? But no. Too many towers? Too much electro-wizardry protecting the Queen and her Ministers? The weird weather conditions here in inner London? You tell me. (Truly, do tell me. We have a famously informed commentariat here.) Whatever the reason, until now I simply could not listen confidently to a Prom, say, without having to get up and fiddle with the damn radio every ten minutes, and as often as not all my fiddling would be powerless to stop the bonfire noises and the distortions.

But the new radio is fabulous. The sound is damn near as clean as a whistle, with no hint of an interruption. And it is especially fabulous when attached to my existing lo- to medium-fi CD playing system, thereby enabling me to tone down the treble and tone up the bass, which is how I prefer things. For some annoying reason, portable radios and CD players no longer seem to have treble or bass nobs built in to them. Is this the influence of the rise of Pop and the fall of Classical? (There goes another opportunity to distinguish yourself with a pertinent and informative comment.)

Talk of treble and bass makes me sound like a hi- rather than medium- to lo-fi-er. But so long as the sound meets my minimum quality threshold, I'm content, and my minimum quality doesn't cost that much. The main thing is that treble/bass thing. I certainly don't need to spend the many hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds that you see mentioned in the review pages of hi-fi magazines, or in the hi-fi pages of the classical CD mags at the back, where loudspeakers look more like Daleks than the rectangular little boxes that I have.

The new radio is little handbag type object and it only cost a hundred quid, reduced by twenty at Dixon's. It also has a built-in CD player, which means, what with my previous portable CD player having conked out, that I can now again play CDs quietly in my bedroom or living room, instead of having to switch up the main system in the kitchen whenever I want to listen outside the kitchen, and infuriate my neighbours. The treble/bass thing is a nuisance, but some kinds of music are more vulnerable to this limitation that others, so I'll be fine. Harpsichord music, for example, doesn't seem to worry about what would normally be too much treble.

So this is a quantum leap in my listening pleasure, like being given a vanload of unfamiliar CDs. And I also think that my pleasure throws light on three apparently rather separate sonic issues of the last few decades.

– First, hi-fi-ers were disturbed by what they regarded as the sonic imperfections of CDs compared with the old vinyl gramophone records.

– Second, the recording industry itself is infuriated by the apparent indifference of the public to the new Higher Figher formats like SACD.

– And third, there is the fact that the fastest growing sector of the music business is "historic" reissues on CD.

What gives?

What gives is that when it comes to sound quality, good enough is good enough. What matters is not being interrupted. Speaking for myself, I can get used to mediocre sound pretty quickly. What I can't ever get used to is serious sonic interruptions, whether in the form of scratches on an LP, or the nonsense white noises that routinely emerge from analogue radios.

This was what fuelled the Great Switch, from LP to CD. So what if the sound was, supposedly, arguably, a bit worse? The point was, you could depend on hearing it every time, and often as you could ever want. Is the sound quality of some gloriously anachronistic playing by Pablo Casals or Fritz Kreisler or of that magical first Menuhin recording of the Elgar Violin Concerto (with Elgar himself conducting) is way lower than the highest fi? So long as there are no bangs and scratches you can quickly adapt, like a cat getting used to noisy kitchen equipment, or children sleeping soundly right next to a busy railway line. It's the irregular interruptions of a damaged record or an interfered radio signal that enrage, not the constrictions of pre-war mono or the alleged dryness of a lot of digital recordings.

A particular joy is that the many treasures hitherto buried in the world's various radio archives are also being put out on CD. The BBC's Legends series is wonderful. Every time a big name played in London, there the BBC would be with their microphones. And my absolute favourite recording of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto these days is not one of those carefully made and shiny recordings done in the West by Brendel or Schiff or Perahia, but a caught-on-the-wing live performance by a young Andrei Gavrilov done at a Moscow concert in 1981. The sound is okay, and the playing is fabulous.

I'm a classical nut myself, but my pop friends tell me that the CD shops are also awash with clutches of old Frank Sinatra tracks, with the complete early recordings of John Lee Hooker, with obscure Surfer Group tracks and with collections of tunes by the early rivals of Louis Armstrong, often with excellent notes, and in perfectly adequate, cleaned-up-a-bit sound. This is where a large slice of the music business action now is.

Price certainly helps here. That you can get a hundred great early jazz tracks for the price of one latest pop CD certainly makes a difference. But I don't think it's only price. I think the bottom line is that music is what counts, not the mere sound of it. Remember that line in an old Flanders and Swan song, "I never did care for music much, just high fi-DEL-i-TEEE"? Well, it turns out that most people prefer music.

SACD, which stands, I believe (I only believe because I truly do not care), for "Super Audio Compact Disc" or some such thing, does no harm (and there's another similar acronym along similar lines, I believe, which is likewise higher and figher than ever before, but which has made even less impact than SACD). SACD does not introduce interruptions, but nor does it remove any. It merely polishes up the sound a little. It is therefore superfluous to requirements. SACD, for most listeners and most definitely for me, is a classic example of solutioneering, which means the unleashing of a solution upon circumstances which are not a problem. Do I want to hear Barenboim's Beethoven Symphony set in somewhat better sound than I do now? I can hear it fine already, thank you. Thus it is that in the still huge classical departments of the big London HMV stores, you can find vast arrays of Naxos historical releases of just about everything classical that is worth listening to that is now out of copyright, and over in the corner there is that forlorn little clutch of SACDs which is neither bought from by anybody nor added to by anybody.

I guess the idea was that SACD etc. would rescue the music industry by making us all go out and buy our entire collection of CDs all over again, like we did when CDs first arrived. It ain't happening and it ain't gonna.

Let's face it, the Next Big Thing in the music industry is getting the whole Internet Thing sorted out.

And there's another whole point, which I hereby add to all of the above as Point Number Four. Sound on most people's computers and hand-held sound kits is likewise only so-so. Yet it turns out that so-so sound is okay sound. Hence the Big Internet Music Steal that the music companies rage against. That too is a hi-fi-isn't-that-important thing.