A mere coincidence? Not when election results go wrong:

A fire burning out of control in southern California has grown four times bigger in less than 24 hours.

Several thousand people have been evacuated, as the flames move towards built-up areas.

By Tuesday at the latest, there will be op-ed in the Guardian blaming this on Arnold Schwarzenneger.

Woe to those who enact evil statutes, and to those who constantly record unjust decisions, so as to deprive the needy of justice, and to rob the poor of my people of their rights, in order that widows may be their spoil, and that they may plunder the orphans.
- Isaiah 10: 1-2

We have written a couple articles recently about the passing of Concorde, but I have just seen yet another twist which, as I am also someone who lives directly under what was that magnificent bird's flight path, brings an incredulous smirk to my lips.

Anti-noise activists in Queens, New York, are claiming that it was their protests against the aircraft that lead to its withdrawal from service. Ok, so let me get this straight... this supersonic aircraft has been flying in and out of the USA for 25 years following the utter defeat of attempts to prevent that in 1977, and against a backdrop of the well known fact that civil aviation has suffered a general reversal in fortune in the aftermath of September 11 , and yet we are to believe¹...

"We lost a few battles, but after 25 years, we finally won the war," said Frans C. Verhagen, the president of a coalition of civic groups in Queens, Sane Aviation for Everyone. "It took 25 years, but a bunch of citizens in Queens stopped the SST from proliferating into the rest of the United States and the world."

I wonder if this is all a result of the irrationalist cult of self-esteem. It reminds me of the comical Greenham Common Women jubilantly dancing and banging drums claiming they had seen off the USA when the missiles were removed from the UK between 1989 and 1991... as if the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 with the rapidly collapsing Soviet Union did not have just a little something to do with it. Doh!

It is widespread delusional mindsets like, these with an inability to grasp anything beyond the most rudimentary causal links that sometimes get me muttering things like "the more people I meet, the more I like my cat".

¹ = NY Times link requires free registration.

This year's hunting trip to the Great American West was (another) success, venturing forth heavily armed into the lovely country in south-central Wyoming, amongst the sagebrush flats and quaking aspen. The view from our line cabin:

Another look at the countryside:

To my eyes, admittedly raised in the flat and arid regions of Texas, this is some of the loveliest land around.

I was hunting on Battle Creek Ranch, along the Colorado/Wyoming border. The ranch family was exactly like most every one I have ever met: taciturn yet friendly, with no hesitation whatsoever to help neighbors and even virtual strangers such as myself. The well at our line cabin was clogged with silt (it has been droughty for a few years), so we were offered (and used) the showers at the ranch house. We stored two deer carcasses in the family's meat locker, which in turn provided the opportunity for a familiar (to me, as someone raised in ranch country) scenario. I knew there was no way that the rancher would charge for this service (as he had every right to do), but I also knew it was incumbent on me to offer to pay. Sure enough, he waved me off, but making the offer allowed mutual recognition of the favor he was doing for me. Civil society in action.

The mule deer hunting was extraordinary. The ranch of over 10,000 acres has 6 hunters for one week a year (although, to be sure, a few more jump the fence), leaving the deer herd unpressured and with a good number of the prized older bucks. In fact, we saw a handful of bucks that were obviously well past their prime, with snow white faces and racks of antlers that were clearly on the decline. Seeing genuinely old deer such as these is quite rare, and a good sign that you are into top quality deer habitat and a well-managed hunting program.

My guide was a fire-breathing hunting nut, who also happened to be a long-haul trucker and a former cook on a nuclear submarine tasked with SEAL team insertion (you meet the most interesting people while hunting). We ate well (crawfish jambalaya, breakfast quiche) and had plenty of entertainment. The rest of the hunting crew ranged from colorful to civil, with one exception who kept mostly to himself after screwing up my first stalk on a mulie by blundering around the mountainside like the big-city lawyer he was.

I tagged a very nice mule deer one evening just as the light was going down and a storm was rolling in. We spotted the deer from our vantage in the sagebrush at the foot of the mountain, just as he was coming out to feed in the evening. He was 650 yards away, requiring that I make up as much ground as I could before we lost the light. This turned out to require about 400 yards of hands-and-knees crawling through the sagebrush, periodically easing up to confirm that he was still about. At one point, I had to crawl past group of cows, who objected to my presence and stood in a half circle around me staring at me in bovine indignation. When I checked the deer, he was looking back in my direction, incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of his headgear, and heading into the woods, leaving me to meditate on the iniquity of cattle, the price of replacing a half-dozen head, and the stupidity of pissing off a man with a high-powered rifle.

My guide assured me the deer wasn't really spooked, so we finished crawling to a point that offered some good cover, and spent the next 40 minutes minutely glassing the treeline. With five minutes of shooting light left, the big boy moseyed back out of the cover and offered up a good shot at 250 yards. My confidence in my shooting was shaken by a miss the evening before at 450 yards (even though I zeroed my rifle, it was shooting 5 inches high), but 250 yards is, literally, point-blank range for the 300 Winchester Magnum that I lug around. And I do mean lug; it weighs just over 12 pounds, but it shoots into less than an inch at 100 yards, so what can I do?

He dropped like a stone, which was a very good thing as we would not have been able to blood trail him in the rain, which started 5 minutes after the shot. The old boy will feed my guide's family this winter, and by March the taxidermist will be done and I will be arguing with my wife about where to hang the mount.

Not to mention planning my next trip.

Nick Timms recounts a new yet sadly familiar tale of how the state just sees us as things to be managed for its convenience. The state is not your friend.

My friend Ron, a semi-retired gentlemen, who after a working life fairly high on the corporate greasy pole, now pursues several different activities including taking his pedigree dogs to shows and sitting as a magistrate, told me today about a visit he had recently from an employee of his local planning office. I should explain that first he had a visit from the local environmental health department because a lady neighbour of his had complained about the smell of his kennels. Ron has kept fairly rare pedigree dogs for showing for the last fifteen years and he is meticulous about hygiene and cleanliness. His home is in a semi-rural area backing onto some woods and running behind his house is a pathway used by some of the locals as a shortcut. This area is also frequented by foxes and the dog foxes mark their territory with a particularly pungent urine. Apparently when Ron's bitches are in season the dog foxes make a special effort and spray the whole area thus causing the offending stink.

Ron showed the environmental health officer around his kennels and the officer was apparently satisfied that he kept his dogs in a good and healthy manner.

However, very shortly after this he was visited by the local planning department. His visitor told him that as he kept more than six dogs at his home he had to apply for change of usage. Ron asked for what usage he should apply and was told he should apply as a breeder. Ron explained that he was not a breeder as he only occasionally had litters and he kept the pick and sold the rest only to what he considered would be good homes. He did not do this as a commercial venture so he was not a breeder.

He was told he would still have to apply for change of usage because case law indicated that local town planners could decide for what purpose he used his home and they had decided that having more than six dogs was one of their criteria. (Apparently all homes are granted rights of usage when they are registered and the local planning office can withdraw or alter these rights.)

Ron asked how much this application cost and was informed that it was around £250 [note: about $400]. Ron then asked would his application be approved and was told "No" because the local planning office wanted him to appeal so that they could have a test case. The appeal application would cost Ron another £200-£300. And he could still lose the case.

Ron resorted in the end to telling his officious visitor that he was a local magistrate and that under the Human Rights Act - and he made up some paragraph - the local planning office was unlikely to win the argument.

This seems to have silenced the secret police for the moment, although they may just have decided to pick a softer target. Ron is anxiously awaiting further developments but as he commiserated to me, his council tax went up by nearly 20% this year which is probably paying for more little führers who cannot get a real job.

Nick Timms

It is a little late in the week for all the dust to have settled, but surely by the following Sunday's talking head shows, a big winner will be Donald Rumsfeld, and the big losers John Kerry and the sensationalist liberal media, over Rumsfeld's recently leaked memo concerning the War on Terror.

The reason for this is simple: these are precisely the sort of questions the effective senior executive must ask of his/her subordinates. This war calls for outside the box thinking. If you want that, than it is necessary to shake the box from time to time.

I wonder if Rumsfeld is a fan of Denis Waitley?

Nothing like a nice bit of Frog-bashing to fire up the commentariat and get the weekend off to a good start.

Alstom, builder of high speed trains (TGV), nuclear plants and cruise liners, was the showcase of French technology. It is now the showcase of French bankruptcy.

Like France, Alstom is badly managed, unable to balance its accounts, and encumbered with debt. Alstom illustrates the failure of French "social-capitalism," a state driven capitalism that is actually closer to socialism.

Hmm. State-driven capitalism. Where have we heard of that before?

The socialo-gaullist elites, who control French media groups, buy their support by distributing money to Communist (CGT) and Trotskyite (FO) unions, to 7 million public servants (often useless), to 12 million retirees (often pre-retired), plus millions of immigrants living on welfare. But French politicians are so "generous" that even with the highest taxes of any OECD country, they chronically accumulate huge debts in all public entities: state, regions, cities, social programs, public companies. Having been unable to balance any French budget for more than 30 years, they are driving France to a financial crisis that will shake all of Europe.

A very satisfying rant against the enarquist elite ensues, bringing on a moment of nostalgia for past French contributions to the cause of liberty.

Matthew O'Keeffe also feels the same pangs as Johnathan Pearce at the passing of that magnificent artifact of the 1960's

I had mixed feelings watching the footage of Concorde's last flight today.

Concorde belongs with Eurotunnel in the category of things which should never really have been built - at least not by profit-seeking realists. This may even be unfair to Eurotunnel which will now be with us in perpetuity and was built with private money. Concorde, by contrast, was financed by the British and French taxpayers at the behest of the very ridiculous Tony Benn (as Minister for White Hot Technology or some such nonsense). And now it is heading for the scrapyards.

And yet, and yet, through the 1980's and 1990's Concorde was the very symbol of the bull market. The shock troops of capitalism could lunch in London before having dinner and closing their deals in New York (it never really made sense the other way round, incidentally, on account of the time differences). As Jeremy Clarkson put it on the radio today, fast is good.

I travelled on the rocket only once myself - and that was the day after the Paris crash. I had a business trip to Wall Street planned that week, purely by chance. Meanwhile, all the supermodels, actors and other weak-kneed types had cancelled their Concorde tickets leaving British Airways happy to upgrade me from Club World to Concorde - with a seat in row one to boot! I was almost ecstatic as we went through the sound barrier and promptly ordered a bottle of their finest champagne - much to the disapproval of the partners from Goldman Sachs who were siiting next to me. Happy days ...

One of the more striking statistics of 9-11 is that Concorde lost 40 of its frequent flyers. I'm not sure how many Concorde frequent flyers there could have been but my guess would be not more than a few hundred. Concorde has suffered from the slump in the stock markets on either side of the Atlantic in general but from the particular horror of 9-11.

To end on an optimistic note, historians may look back on this day as the real start of the next big upturn in the world's economies. One thing that denotes economic cycles is that companies nearly always invest too heavily at the top - and cut back too savagely at the bottom. (British Airways is particularly bad in its timing - they sold Go for £100m to venture capitalists who sold it on to EasyJet a year later for £400m). That our national carrier should retire its flagship, on a route between the two centres of world capitalism, suggests to me that we may be at such a trough point right now. So farewell Concorde - but here's to the next twenty year bull market.

Matthew O'Keeffe

Yep, I know it was supported by taxpayers' money (boo, hiss) but I think one would have a piece of brain missing not to feel a pang of sadness that Concorde, the world's only supersonic jet airliner, has landed for the last time at Britain's Heathrow airport. An incredible plane, beautiful and able to take folk across the Atlantic at a speed unthinkable to our ancestors.

As a free marketeer, I do of course recognise that state-backed endeavours such as this are largely indefensible, particularly as only the rich could take advantage of something paid for by the poorest taxpayer. But on a more upbeat note, let's hope that in the years to come, the possibility of superfast transport such as this remains a reality, and not just the stuff of science fiction novels.

And that is why, like Dale Amon and other contributors to this blog, I am eagerly awaiting the start of the race for the X-:Prize. You can read about all the privately-funded space ventures involved here

The age of Concorde is over. But another age may hopefully be about to begin. Chocks away!

Ivelina Konstantinova has made the transition from native of a small city in Bulgaria to US citizen and USAF Airman serving in the Middle East:

"I wanted to serve my country, continue my education, and travel," said Senior Airman Konstantinova, a recreation services specialist assigned to the 379th Expeditionary Services Squadron here. "The military opened doors. And even though I may not be a natural citizen, I feel proud to serve America."

With people like her out there, keep those "...huddled masses yearning to breathe free" coming!

Adriana & I recently returned from a two week business/fun trip to the USA which took us to initially to New Jersey for a couple days...

Samizdatista Walter Uhlman demonstrates conclusively
that things are... bigger... in America

Adriana thought she should practice a little before venturing out

And thence to Los Angeles, where we lurked in the stygian cigar fog that is Brian Linse's rather nice home in the Hollywood Hills. We also ventured from there into the equally pungent Cigar Club The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, as this proved to be the perpetual hang-out of our illustrious host. Therein amongst its Armani'ed and Prada'ed denizens, we encountered the splendid actor Robert Davi, who had some, interesting, things to say to us which I cannot repeat

Welcome to Los Angeles!
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
Your papers, please
your papers, please

It took a while to convince Adriana that this 'drive by' she had heard
about was not a sport much practiced in the Hollywood Hills

Hell, in Crimson Skies, I used to fly through the
second 'O' in the Hollywood sign... I dooooon't think so!

...then back to NJ/NY area for a blogger bash in the Big Apple organised by the mighty Jane Galt...

Time Square on a grey day really does look
like something straight out of Blade Runner

In the murky darkness that is the Shahel Lounge on 70th Street...

...we peered through the inky gloom...

...trying to make out who we were talking to

We then ventured into the wilds of rural Pennsylvania, a ways north of Scranton, a land known for its 'punkin pie'. The wildlife (a different sort than that which we encountered in Manhattan) looked apprehensive as we arrived at fellow Samizdatista Walter's stupendous property...

And I do mean stupendous!

Conditions were harsh and we had to eat typical hillbilly fare

Why does this thing have a honking great bottle opener on one end?

Adriana was looking forward to some sight-seeing

Perry shot a large number of leaves stone dead

It is nice to have enough land to shoot and not have
to worry overly much about where the bullets ended up

Glad to be back in London? Er, no, actually.

Mark Steyn is one of those writers whose effortless prose intimidates me into not taking up a writing career. An expat Canadian who lives in New Hampshire, he has a very nice piece on the apparently permanent supine position that conservatism has assumed in England. Starting about halfway down, though, he gets to the really interesting part, when he talks about the dangers of centralization and the benefits of devolved power:

Conservatism should be committed to as decentralised a politics as possible. If my town has lousy policing, it’s no skin off my neighbours 15 miles down the road. Conversely, if my town hits on a good idea, my neighbours are happy to borrow it. Decentralisation is the best way to ensure a dynamic political culture, full of low-key field studies. That’s one reason why every good idea Britain’s law-and-order monopoly takes up was started in a local American jurisdiction (the ‘broken window’ theory) and every bad idea was cooked up by the national Home Office bureaucracy (the gun ban).

Decentralisation is also the best way to get new politicians in. London’s Euroleft conventional wisdom disdains not only the rude unlovely electorate at large but also any representatives chosen from without the full-time political class. As the Guardian sniffed, ‘Putting Arnie in charge of the world’s fifth largest economy is like making Benny Hill Chancellor of the Exchequer: quirky but unreal — and not very funny.’ Get a grip, lads. Benny Hill would have made a terrific chancellor.

Go for the wit. Stay for the ideas. Ponder how to raise decentralization and devolution on the political radar screen.

There is an enormous hill to climb, of course - politics seems to be subject to a law of centripetal gravitational convergence, where power naturally centralizes, but only devolves during catastrophes or revolutions. Still, devolution strikes me as a fundamentally libertarian project, if for no other reason than it lays the groundwork for that bane of statism - competition between jurisdictions.

George Galloway has been expelled from the Labour Party. Well, well, well. I wonder on whose toes he trodded. Perhaps Tony's? He must have seriously pissed off the NuLabour powers to be since expulsions from the party are extremely rare.

But to be fair he was accused of inciting Arabs to fight coalition troops during the Iraq war and encouraging British troops to disobey what he called "illegal orders". Although the official reason for giving the flamboyant Mr Galloway MP a boot was his denouncement of U.S. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair as "wolves" during the Iraq war, there were other charges, most of stemming from an interview the left-wing firebrand gave to Abu Dhabi Television in March 2003.

The charges faced by Mr Galloway before the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party were understood to be that:

1. He incited Arabs to fight British troops
   
2. He incited British troops to defy orders
   
3. He incited Plymouth voters to reject Labour MPs
   
4. He threatened to stand against Labour
   
5. He backed an anti-war candidate in Preston

He was found guilty of all but the third charge.

His supporters praised him for speaking his mind while his critics accused him of being an apologist for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, whom he visited in 2002, and mockingly labelled him "MP for Baghdad Central". He was defiant to the end, telling reporters:

This was a politically motivated kangaroo court whose verdict had been written in advance in the best tradition of political show trials.

I want to apologise to the wolf. Mr Bush and Mr Blair are a jackal and a jackass. I will ensure Mr Blair regrets this day.

Unfortunately, Mr Galloway has supporters and the anti-war movement will now turn him into their very own martyr. Let's just sit back and watch the garbage percolate through the British political system.

Many of you know me already. As I have been haunting the blogosphere for the last three years through comments, emails, and guest articles. Those of you that do not will in due time, so I will skip the typical bio/Curriculum Vitae stuff. I was going to post a Micklethwaitian tale of my 50 mile journey of Southern California's quite righteously maligned public transit system to Brian Linse’s blogger bash, where I met Perry & Adriana face-to-face for the first time. But that got a bit longish for a forum such as this, so I guess I will have to save it for a chapter in my memoirs.

One of the subjects which has piqued my fancy recently is the concept of N-dimensional variants on the classic Nolan chart. This was initiated a few weeks ago when I read this TCS article by Eugene Miller, on a link from Virginia Postrel. In it Miller attempts, quite successfully, to typify political philosophies on a Nolanesce grid – embrace of change forming one axis, and the need for control over change forming the other.

click for larger image

It occurred to me that one could map this function on top of the typical Nolan chart by equating 'liberty' with 'change'. Further analysis led me to sumise that this conjunction of the two concepts was better expressed in differentials. But, for the purposes of both brevity and accessibility, we will spare that dissertation for another day.

Further indulgence of my curiosity led me to this article by Kelley L. Ross. Therein, Ross expands upon the basic Nolan chart with another dimension of what form of government safeguards what liberties (or not). It’s an interesting read. But the average Samizdata.net reader would likely find the first ten pages review, and should skip right to Liberties in Three Dimensions. Although, this little graphic, concerning the US Supreme Court is rather interesting:

click for larger image

The final seven or so pages constitute the meat of the article, where he makes the point that democracy is no guarantor of liberty. In it, he makes an interesting and rather open-ended point with this:

A Republican form was envisioned by people like James Madison, who wished to impose practical, and not just theoretical limits on government by the use of the Separation of Powers and a system of Checks and Balances. This worked well enough but was ultimately undermined by one grave oversight: The United States Constitution provided no mechanism for its own enforcement. That task was soon taken up by the Supreme Court, but Thomas Jefferson realized that the Supreme Court, as a part of the federal government, could not be trusted to faithfully maintain the limits to the power of the federal government itself: "How can we expect impartial decision between the General government, of which they are themselves so eminent a part, and an individual State, from which they have nothing to hope or fear?"

[Autobiography]

In the end, especially during the Civil War, World War I, the New Deal, and the Sixties, the Supreme Court began to concede extra-Constitutional powers to the federal government simply on the principle that it wanted them. The only mechanism that existed to check the failures of the Court was the torturous avenue of Constitutional Amendment, politically impossible when so many people had begun to believe that unlimited power for the federal government was actually a good thing. And then again, it is hard to know how a newer version of the 10th Amendment could be more plainly worded than the old one. A new Amendment would have to descend to the ignoble level of contradicting specific Supreme Court pronouncements that the original Amendment was simply a "tautology" or "truism" that wasn't really meant to limit federal power. (See Two Logical Errors in Constitutional Jurisprudence.) An effectively updated Constitution would have to address all the sophistry and dishonesty that was used to undermine the original one, besides providing for such additional checks and balances as would abolish the dictatorial powers of the Court.

Indeed, how does one establish practical limitations on power within a republic? Jefferson's answer was to have an armed revolution every twenty years or so. Serious talk of that today will get you twenty years or so behind bars.

A hastily convened Blogger Booze Up has been called by Gavin Sheridan and Dan Gillmor

When: Friday at 6:30 pm.

Where: Red Lion, Westminster, 48 Parliament St.

Who: Whoever wants to show up.

Why: You have to ask?

I'm about to install some bot-killing software, so if comments happen to break for awhile or the site rolls over with its itty bitty paws flailing in the air, you'll know why...

Update: Samizdata.net comments will now require you to enter a security code that you copy off a graphic that will appear in the comment pop-up window. This should prevent spam-bots from auto-posting their garbage all over the blog.

Also, we have updated some code to stop spammers harvesting the e-mail addresses of commenters as well.

During my recent travels in the US, I encountered many a 'security' measure at various airports. By the end of my stay and a fair number of flights, these were beginning to really get on my nerves. I am not singling the US as the only security-mad country, although it seems that something certainly got out of hand there. The airport searches are interminable - going through metal detectors that seem to have the highest sensitive settings was most annoying as my travel companion is one of those people who will fail to fish out the last quarter from their pockets or forget to take off his watch/belt/keys. (By the way a dime in my pocket did go through just fine...)

Another inexplicable measure is the never-ending checks of one's boarding pass. After the full check-in with bells and whistles on - passports and security questions, our boarding documents were checked no less then five times before we finally settled down in our seats. Most of them happened within three yards of each other.

My harping on about this may be a bit off the point especially as I was not subjected to anything as drastic as overzealous security personnel and most people seem to accept the ordeals. The flights were uneventful and most likely not delayed by the searches and checks and screenings. What is most frustrating is the fact that none of those measures are effective or make much sense. They certainly are not efficient, spawning a huge mass of regulation, petty rules and turning customers into a fair game for any hung-up, power-crazed 'little official'. While they may provide an effective therapy to thousands of sufferers of inferiority complex and to the ordinary people who would otherwise never have 'tasted power', the costs, born by the airlines i.e. their customers, act as a throttle on the demand for air travel.

It is a sad ocurrance that airports, the hubs of modern travel and civilisation, have become Kafkaesque worlds where bureaucracy has been allowed to run amok. To be fair, there are other places and institutions that manage similar achievements as the winners of Privacy International Stupid Security Contest testify.

Over on the Adam Smith Institute blog, Madsen Pirie makes an excellent point about the joys of borders and the competition they bring:

In the US I like to cross state lines to go for the lower sales taxes and duties. It is reckoned that 'leakage' (cross border shopping) will be a significant factor if there is a 3 percentage point tax differential. And it's not only competition in sales and purchase taxes which works. I love French food and wine, and the priority they are given, but I don't feel the same way about their income tax and social insurance. The Danes do pickled fish on rye bread superbly, but there's no way I want to pay Danish taxes. I enjoy the Swedish forests and lakes, but not their government.

Which is of course why so much of the USA's political class have supported the steady march towards ever more federal power and why the EU's political classes love 'harmonization' to prevent 'unfair' tax competition. The Adam Smith Institute is often seen as just being about the life of homo-economicus but as Madsen's remarks show, they are in fact concerned about the impact of liberty on culture and society and not just the Dow Jones Index.

One of the reasons so many French families can be found living in Kensington ('Frog Valley') is that there is a two way exchange going on between Britain and France: a 'brain drain' in which French entrepreneurs, executives and high tax bracket individuals are moving to relatively less regulated more dynamic Britain to escape the deadening (and grasping) hand of the French state, whilst at the same time retired British people who do not actually have to work for a living, and are thus unlikely to have to deal with the nightmarish French state, are buying up property in the Dordogne to experience the cheese, fois gras and claret idylls of bucolic France.

Yes, there is something to be said for borders.

Adam Nicholson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, tells what presumably are its predominantly middle class readers that it is entirely fit and proper for Britain's finance minister, Gordon Brown, to take a big grab at the wealth locked up in our homes through a new tax .

I suppose Nicholson is one of those writers the Telegraph occasionally hires to annoy its usual readers. I was inclined to dismiss the piece as usual class-warfare nonsense until, after various paragraphs of tortuous logic and barely disguised dislike of Middle England, our scribe hit on a fair point. That point being that the construction of new housing in the south of England, the most prosperous bit of it, has fallen off dramatically in recent years.

I agree. Nicholson may be a jackass in his support for a swingeing tax assault on millions of people, who have already seen their pensions looted by the government, but he is right on the money in his understanding that unless supply of housing comes close to matching demand, the only way folks like me will be able to afford anything decent will be by winning the National Lottery.

Such a rise in supply will, of course, annoy a lot of people, particular those who's homes have been made artificially expensive due to our planning and zoning laws. But Nicholson deserves some praise for grasping this point.

Of course, there is always the option of emigration. I have been thinking rather a lot about it lately.

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article at his other blog about breaking the law, and the simultaneous growth and loss of legitimacy of the regulatory state.

There are too many laws — many of them contradictory or obscure — for any person to actually avoid breaking the law completely. (My Criminal Law professor, when I was a law student, announced to us that we were all felons on the first day of class. There were too many felonies on the books for us not to be: Oral sex in Georgia? Oops!) And given that many laws are dumb, actually following all of them would probably bring society to a standstill, just as Air Traffic Controllers and pilots can make air travel grind to a halt by meticulously following every safety rule without exception.

Stop and think about that for a minute. What does it say about a society, when strict adherence to its laws would be an unmitigated disaster?

The other problem is that law is like anything else: when the supply outstrips the demand, its value falls. If law were restricted to things like rape, robbery, and murder, its prestige would be higher. When we make felonies out of trivial crimes, though, the law loses prestige. As the old bumper stickers about the 55 mile-per-hour speed limit used to say: “It’s not a good idea. It’s just the law.”

Instawisdom, in my book.

Almost anything you say about how ideas spread and eventually get accepted and acted upon is liable to be (a) true, but (b) over-simplified, because the whole truth about how ideas spread and get acted upon is far, far too complicated ever to keep complete track of. Where the definite falsehood creeps in is when people say, or more commonly imply through the other things that they say, that ideas can only spread in this way or that way, and that all the other ways they can spread don't count for anything.

There is one such implied falsehood which we at Samizdata, for humiliatingly obvious reasons, are likely to be particularly interested in and cheered up by contesting. This is the idea that what matters when it comes to spreading ideas is sheer weight of numbers. It's the idea that getting some other idea to catch on and be acted upon is a question of assembling a sufficiently huge number of people who believe this idea to be true or good or appealing, and then for this vast throng of supporting people to prevail against the other almost equally vast (but not quite) throng of people who believe the opposite.

Clearly, as a partial description about how some ideas spread, at some times and in some places, this kind of thing can definitely happen. Political elections are often just like this. This vast throng of humanity votes for this idea, that throng votes for that idea, and the winners are the ones who appeal to the biggest throng.

But as a complete description of how ideas spread this picture is false. Most things, after all, are not decided by political elections. For example, I would say that when historians look back on our era, they will say that the development of the Internet was a huge historical event, up there with the first printed bibles in local languages, or with the development of the railways or of the motor car. Yet neither the internet, nor printing, nor railways, nor motor cars were any of them set in motion merely by political electorates, and nor, once they had got underway, were any political electorates ever invited to vote against them.

The weight-of-numbers model is even seriously false when it comes to understanding the full story of most political elections. Yes, elections decide who will occupy various political offices, and what will be written about in newspaper editorials for the next few years. But these elections seldom decide very much about what actually gets done from these offices. Instead, democratic true believers (the ones who really do believe that absolutely everything should be decided with a head count) constantly rage at how "undemocratic" democracy typically turns out to be. They have a point.

I will now offer you a thought experiment, the point of which is to explain how unimportant mere numbers of believers in an idea can be, and how much more interesting and complicated the spread of and adoption of ideas can sometimes be.

Suppose that a group of about a dozen men are stuck in the first floor of a building, the ground floor of which is seriously on fire. They can't run down stairs, because if they do they will be greeted by a deadly wall of flames. Worse, if they don't somehow escape by some other means they will also die horribly, just as soon as the fire reaches the first floor, and only a few minutes later than they would if they tried to run through the flames.

What to do?

There are two schools of thought, consisting of One Man with a Plan, and Eleven Men telling that One Man that his damned Plan is crazy.

The One Man with a Plan says: We must all jump out of the window.

The Other Eleven all say: No! The ground on which you want us to jump is hard, not soft. The window from which we must jump is quite a long way off that hard ground. Most of us are likely to get hurt, and maybe some of us quite badly. One or two of us might even die.

Not content with denouncing the Plan of the One Man for being mistaken, the Other Eleven – who are panicking and consequently desperate for someone or something to blame – actually get quite angry, and start calling the One Man a fiend and a sadist and a murderer, who seems to want them all to get hurt and even to want all of them to die. What kind of monster are you? – etc. etc. etc., blah blah blah.

Nevertheless, the One Man wins the argument, and all twelve of them do duly jump out of the window.

Many of the gloomy prophecies about the harm this might do are proved right. One guy does get killed, and almost all of them suffer more or less severe injuries. As a result of these misfortunes, although some of the Other Eleven realise afterwards that the One Man was right and even say thank you to him, others among them go to their more or less speeded up deaths cursing the One Man for "making us do that".

The reason this One Man won this argument, and his Eleven opponents lost is that the contending ideas were of two different kinds. The Eleven were not actually offering any answer to the question posed by Reality, in the form of the fire. They were merely saying that getting out of this mess was going to be painful and dangerous, which added nothing to the debate because all present already knew that. They might just as well have said "oh bugger", for all the difference they were making with their "argument". The One Man, on the other hand, was answering the question posed by Reality, and was supplying the only answer that anyone was offering. Therefore, that is what ended up being done.

That Reality is what it is doesn't mean that men like my One Man will always be heeded. I can reveal that this One Man had spent the previous few years before the fire arguing that the building they all ended up jumping out of needed a fire escape. He also argued for better anti-fire safety procedures in the restaurant below that started the fire. The Eleven pointed out, again quite correctly, that a fire escape would be costly, and furthermore that it would increase the chances of burglary. They added that starting an argument with the restaurateurs downstairs would be most unpleasant, and once again, they were correct. And because not having a fire escape and not arguing with their neighbours were decisions which it was possible to make without immediate disaster, that is what was decided, even though the One Man was later able to claim that he'd been proved right about all of that also. So sometimes, weight of numbers wins.

But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is enough simply to flag up, so to speak, a set of ideas, which are of the sort that can now be ignored in relative safety and relatively easily, but which in the future will not be so easy to ignore, because in the future Reality may be asking different questions. At which point, this set of ideas stands ready to save the day.

Our answers here at Samizdata may not now be doing very well, numerically speaking. But the questions can change, and if they do our answers might suddenly become very popular indeed. Meanwhile we must keep them visible and ready. (This is one of the reasons why sheer repetition is such an important propaganda technique. Repetition means that if the question changes to something more favourable, the answer will still be around to answer it.)

Final point. My "thought experiment"? All very nice in theory, Brian, but give us an example. Right? Okay: Margaret Thatcher. She had a Plan to rescue the British economy from going down the toilet in the early 1980s. Her vastly more numerous opponents merely said ad nauseam that her Plan was itself decidedly toilet-like also. They were right about that, but they lost the argument that mattered most, the one about what should be done. That there were about a thousand of them to every "Thatcherite" had nothing to do with anything. She had a Plan. Her opponents, as she constantly challenged them to admit – "There is no alternative!" – had no Plan. Therefore, she won.

A week or two ago, it was rather fancifully suggested in a comment thread here that the British electorate had voted to "roll back the state". They did no such thing.

All they did was prefer Britain jumping out of the window to Britain getting burned to death. At which point my metaphor breaks down because then we get involved in arguing about whether what I've been calling "jumping out of the window" wouldn't actually be rather a good thing, which of course really jumping out of the window wouldn't be.

But as I said at the beginning of this, it can get complicated. Any short description of how ideas catch on and get acted upon is going to be an over-simplication, but I trust that this particular over-simplication has been useful.

I hope to have many further over-simplications to offer on this topic of how ideas spread and catch on in future postings.

I hate emails like this. But now, instead of suffering alone, I can spread the load to all of Samizdata's readers. That way, even if the problem remains unsolved, it can at least rot out there in the Commons where it belongs.

Dear Mr Micklethwait

I am writing a concise statement of ancient rights as part of a longer publication.

I want to include all the most important Common Law rights: life, liberty, property, family life, fair trial in open court, Habeas Corpus, trial by jury etc.

I cannot find a comprehensive list anywhere. Do you know of one please?

Regards,

Richard Marsden

My irascible Libertarian Alliance colleague Chris Tame is fond of translating such communications until they read more like this:

Dear Mr Tame

Please do all my work for me.

Regards,

Lazy Bastard

But maybe I now have friends and acquaintances who can be a little more constructive and polite than that. I don't know the answer to Mr Marsden's question, but maybe one of you clever geezers does.

Any suggestions?

All I advocate is that the free market is the only known method of solving the calculational problem of allocating work to those talents that can engage in it most productively. The free market means in practice comfort, prosperity and abundance for all economically as well as maximising the sphere of personal autonomy within which we can enjoy our liberty and prosperity. Attempts to find other solutions to this key social problem have always been failures, practically and conceptually.
- Paul Coulam

Another day, another public enemy.

The campaign to add so-called 'junk food' to the tobacco-alcohol 'axis of evil' has been fulminating for quite a while. There is nothing on the Statute books yet but I think we all know that it is only a matter of time.

In the not-too-distant future, the Samizdata will be reporting the police raids on clandestine onion-ring factories and publishing underground recipes for 'academic and research purposes only'. By that time, I sincerely hope that there will be a wider understading of the social-working class mentality that has led to that woeful state of affairs. Nothing could illustrate that mentality more starkly than this article from the UK Times:

People are incapable of saying no to junk food and other health risks, and it is the duty of the State to influence them, according to a senior public health official.

In defence of the "nanny state", Professor Dr John Ashton, regional director of public health in the North West, said yesterday that government intervention was needed to protect those incapable of protecting themselves. "Individuals cannot protect themselves from bioterrorism, epidemics of Sars, the concerted efforts of the junk food industry, drug dealers and promoters of tobacco and alcohol," he said.

Thus lumping together consumer choice, forces of nature and murderous aggression into one misleading and grossly stupid soundbite.

He said that it was the job of the State, not of the individual alone, to resist health problems brought about by drink, food or drugs. The State had a duty to protect and influence young people, many of whom were building up problems by adopting sedentary lifestyles and eating junk food.

"It is in no one's interest to have an obese generation, riddled with diabetes and degenerative heart disease and a burden on the taxpayer," he said. "The Government has a duty to take action about it.

It is in no-one's interest to have a power-obsessed generation, riddled with this kind of contemptuous paternalism.

The State is the guardian of the weak and underprivileged. It should intervene to encourage people to eat healthily and take exercise.

"Furthermore, it has a duty to ensure that those less well-off in society have safe, warm, low-cost housing, convenient transport links to shops and amenities, and the protection of police on the streets. The State is our protector and we must defend its right to fulfil that function."

There are no citizens, only 'clients'.

He has three grown-up sons, but recently became a father again with his partner Maggi Morris, 47, a director of public health in Preston. Their baby has been named Fabian Che Jed, after the Fabian Society, Che Guevara and the Old Testament prophet Jedediah.

And doesn't that say it all.

There are lots of dark forces at play here but the oft-overlooked one is the element of kulturkampf. What these people mean by 'junk food' is hamburgers, hot-dogs and milk-shakes. For people like Dr.Ashton the hamburger has become a symbol of what they consider to be American cultural imperialism and that is the real basis of their animus.

Quite aside from the fact that the fashionable demonisation of 'fatty food' is ill-founded (which it is), an Indian or Chinese meal contains more fat and calories than McDonalds could ever dish up. As does the homegrown popular delicacy of 'Fish and Chips' (all deep fried). Nonetheless when these people speak it is 'burgers' that they invariably identify as the alleged enemies of public health.

The 'War against Junk Food' has been carefully crafted to fulfil both the practical and ideological needs of the social-working class. Not only will its successful prosecution provide them with more wealth and status but it also opens another front in the cultural and political war against America.

[My thanks to Nigel Meek who posted this article to the Libertarian Alliance Forum]

Wall Street Journal Online's Claudia Rosett has a stunning article on repression in North Korea, where the prison camp state may have reached its apotheosis. The article served to remind me of the righteousness of our project here at Samizdata. I can only pray that our small efforts make a difference, somewhere down the line.

Of immediate interest is the link she draws between the utter savagery of the North Korean regime and the newly ascendant strategy of appeasement of that regime. Sadly, it appears that the Bush administration has opted for appeasement as well, after resisting such a policy for many months.

The latest hallucination of geopolitics has it that if only we can make North Korea's Great Leader Kim Jong Il feel safe from the fate of Saddam Hussein, maybe he'll stop testing missiles and making nuclear bombs. So the experts--whose ranks have now swelled to include, alas, even President George W. Bush--have been scrambling for ways to make Kim feel more secure.

Bad mistake. Even in the exquisitely complex realms of geopolitics, there comes a point at which right and wrong really do matter. Ensuring the safety of monsters is not only an invitation to even more trouble ahead, it is also wrong. Before Mr. Bush says another word about security for North Korea's regime, before any more policy makers suggest any more deals to gratify Kim Jong Il's deep appetite for his own ease and longevity, there's a report the entire civilized world needs to read--released today by the Washington-based U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. In landmark depth and detail, this report documents the filthiest of all Kim's backroom projects: North Korea's vast system of political prisons, which underpin Kim's precious security right there in his own home.

As an aside, I never cease to be amazed at the useful idiots who view corporations and the market as more of a threat to their well-being than the state. When Microsoft and Exxon order "babies tossed on the ground to die, with their mothers forced to watch. . . , or assign [grandmothers] to help in the delivery of babies who were thrown immediately into a plastic-lined box to die in bulk lots," I will be willing to listen to these morons, but not before.

The state is not your friend.

I've just killed off another comment spamming attack against Samizdata. It was clearly automated so I expect many of the rest of you are getting hit as well. The methodology is an attempt at subtlety... but it ignores the fact that a blog is actively monitored.

I suggest you all immediately ban the ip if you haven't done so already: 80.58.11.45.

The attacker hits comments sections of old articles; the comment itself is trivial and innocuous. "nice website" "interesting post" and the like. They payload is the URL field.

This looks like a google-bash for hire scheme to me.

It took a while but the truth is no longer 'out there', it has landed smack dab onto the pages of the Guardian. Yes, the Guardian.

This long-overdue confirmation of the real centre-left agenda comes courtesy of David Walker who is gleeful about the viral growth of tax-consumers:

Tony - reform is my middle name - Blair isn't obviously the public sector's friend. Nor, for all his protestations of affection, is Gordon Brown, the man who insisted on putting the safety of London's tube travellers in the hands of profit-maximising companies.

Yet under them the public sector prospers. Since 1999 it has just kept growing as a source of jobs; the UK's approximation to full employment owes a lot to council, NHS and government recruitment. Paranoid rightwingers, for whom the Guardian's thick advertising sections are a weekly torment, don't know the half of it. Under Labour, "indirect" employment has also boomed. Yesterday John Prescott published an evaluation of his new deal for communities, a set of participative projects in run-down areas. Between the lines it noted that a sort of reserve army of tenants and activists has been recruited, subsisting of government grants.

Imagine how 'paranoid' those 'rightwingers' would get if they suspected the truth about how many people are suckling at the state teat? Why, it would be enough to drive them round the twist.

Now here come new figures for direct government employment. Whitehall is booming. During the past year, the Inland Revenue took on 8,500 extra people, at a time when total civil service numbers increased by nearly 4%. Even the tiny Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 450 strong in April last year, added 30 people to its roster.

Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!!! Roll on the glorious day when everyone works for the state!

In theory, that ought to mean up to 6 million households -perhaps 15 million people - with a direct interest in buoyant public expenditure, and hence in having a government likely to keep it that way. Labour's formula for permanent re-election, you might think. But turkeys will vote for Christmas.

And to think it is capitalists like me who are generally regarded as 'self-serving'.

Not once does Mr.Walker even attempt to invoke the mendacious tropes about 'social justice' and 'caring' and while his candour cannot be regarded as admirable it is, nonetheless, refreshing. His is as bold an admission as I can imagine that the motivation behind voting Labour is to increase one's chances of joining or staying on the government payroll. Of course, libertarians have been saying this for years and I suppose I must extend some muted thanks to Mr.Walker for publicly admitting that we were right.

But being right is one thing and prevailing is something else. In order to prevail this message must filter down to the remaining 45 million or so other British people who struggle to support themselves and carry the burden of this parasite class on their backs.

Ou readers may have noticed that the Samizdata was down for a few hours today. It appears that the cause was sustained DOS attack directed to our hosting company Hosting Matters.

Little Green Footballs was also affected and has further details.

The Bush administration recently has been pummeled by a quasi-scandal involving the leak of the name of a purported CIA "covert operative." I won't go into any details here, as I don't think there is any "there" there. One of the responses of the Bushies was to crack down on leakers in the administration.

This new anti-leaking policy was, of course, promptly, well, leaked.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he 'didn't want to see any stories' quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used."

There is an excellent round up of the current nuclear threat in today's Opinion Journal.

According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large "electrical generating" stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.

It is a long article but well worth the time it takes to read it.

For a while now I've been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.

There's more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.

The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you'll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.

Here's the start of the New York Times coverage today:

Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration's mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration's domestic policy?

The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.

In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called "in need of improvement." The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.

This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that's what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these 'education reformers' would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.

The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply "better" education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!

No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.

I guess it's all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it's all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.

The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.

If more money is spent, that'll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.

As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.

Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:

A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.

When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.

At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.

To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.

An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.

I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.

I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun's reporting of the story. They regard the "response from the international community" as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does...

With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass "filter" with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.

They invented their "electrokinetic" water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.

...and how significant it might be:

The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.

The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.

The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?

More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?

And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?

Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.

I've lately been following the writing of the new kid on the Baghdad block.

Good stuff, well worth a regular read.

From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance, a very interesting article on the close historical links between fascism and socialism (or at least Marxism). It has never ceased to amaze me how many people think that fascism/nazism and socialism are somehow divided by a wide gulf.

Sure, states professing fascism and nazism went to war with a state professing to be communist/socialist, but the most bitter struggles are always internecine, and anyway how can you miss the fact that the name of the Nazi party was National Socialist?

The article should provide you with ample ammunition to make uncomfortable the many, many socialists out there who view "fascist" as the ultimate in derogation.

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.

Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures.

Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?

What indeed? The remainder of the article, on first read, seems to be well-researched and well-thought out story of intellectual and political ferment.

James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.

Yes, the authoritarian acorn never falls far from the collectivist tree.

Here is an interesting bit of development work being let by the DOD which I found while reading through a list of contracts:

United Technology Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla., is being awarded a $49,405,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development for the Robust Scramjet. The Air Force will issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum amount indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $220,000 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by September 2010. Solicitation began April 2003, and negotiations were completed September 2003. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33615-03-D-2418).

A SCRAMjet is a Supersonic Combustion Ram jet, an engine which is of use only for hypersonic speeds. It would needed for missiles or near-suborbital warcraft.

PS: For those not familiar with the space community, the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson (AFRL-WPAFB) is where very interesting future-looking propulsion systems work is done. If you want to talk about things like antimatter engine design, these are the lads.

Much is being made, rightly, of China's growing economic importance in the world, following China's recent and very newsworthy space mission.

But now here's a really interesting and encouraging New York Times article about the rapid and highly visible economic progress now being made in India. The most encouraging thing about the piece for me is that not only is this progress described, it is also explained:

This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history's most famous ascetics.

The change in values, habits and options in India – not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago – is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India's economic prospects.

Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles and opening to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country's population.

The lesson – and being taught in the New York Times, please note, rather than merely in some free market Think Tank think piece – is that if you want rapid economic progress and a sense of optimism, you have to shake off your "statist shackles" and open up to the outside world.

The use of the word "statist" I find especially interesting. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that's a very common usage over here, and for that matter how common is it in the USA's mainstream media? It makes the point perfectly that the important divide now is not between different factions wanting to use state power to do this or alternatively that, but rather between all of those who want their country or state to be or to remain bound by statist shackles, and all those who want those statist shackles shaken off. (You may need to slow down a bit when you try to say things like this out loud.)

For the sake of the entire world, I hope that the Indians themselves draw this same lesson from their own emerging success, and then teach that lesson to the rest of the world. Combine them doing that with the Chinese having so visibly retreated from their own far more horrific statist mania unleashed by the lunatic Mao-Tse-Tung and as a result also emerging into economic superpower status, and the twenty first century could end up being a very good one. It already looks like being a very prosperous one.

Natalie Solent has some striking gun-control analysis from Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, Here's a bit of the bit she quotes:

There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that. Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.

Vimes wondered if he'd sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he'd dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers - say, three per citizen.

Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing' and it was this: criminals don't obey the law. It's more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. …

Natalie concludes her comments thus:

I suppose Pratchett might say that Vimes' opinons are not his own, but, even so, Vimes is not just a one-off hero but a much loved character who stars in several books: this shows at the very least that Britain's best selling living novelist sees where we're coming from.

I guess it's a case of read the whole thing.

Independent TV news has just reported that Tony Blair has been admitted to hospital with a suspected heart irregularity.

No updates yet.

The ambitions of the political classes are danger enough but let no-one underestimate the threat posed by the therapy culture:

New York City taxpayers are probably going to be liable not only for the physical injuries inflicted in Wednesday's Staten Island Ferry crash -- which include ten deaths and about 60 injuries resulting in hospitalization, some of them horrific -- but also for damages potentially payable to all of the unhurt passengers, widely estimated to number 1,500. A "federal maritime doctrine allows all those who were in the face of danger and who suffered emotional distress to file for compensation, even if they were not physically injured". Among likely claims, according to Columbia law dean David Leebron, are those from "passengers who claim to now have a fear of ferries that affects their ability to commute and earn a living".

Damn, I'm thinking of making a claim myself. So what if I actually live in London? So what if I was 3000 miles away when the tragedy occured? I saw it on the news, didn't I? As a result I have been emotionally scarred, my life has been ruined, I can't sleep at nights, I keep getting flashbacks and...yadda, yadda, yadda.

Of course, the therapy culture wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't so well incentivised with rewards.

These must surely be salad days for our Labour government. Free of any concerns about an effective opposition, they can roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands and get down to some really serious looting:

Gordon Brown is considering imposing capital gains tax on the sale of all houses in an attempt to plug the widening gulf between his spending plans and public finances.

The Telegraph has learnt that Treasury officials have held confidential discussions with private sector tax consultants on extending the levy to domestic properties.

The reform would mean homeowners facing a tax of up to 40 per cent on any profits made from the sale of their home, which for many people is their principal asset. The levy would, however, raise £11 billion a year, equivalent to 4p on the basic rate of income tax, according to government figures.

I think some clarification is required because the opening paragraph is not entirely correct. Currently a tax of 40% is charged on all capital gains which includes the capital gain made on the sale of property or land. However, one's principal dwelling home has always been exempt from this charge. Now HMG is proposing to abolish this exemption (although the effect is the same as imposing the tax on ordinary homeowners).

The Chancellor has already indicated, however, that he believes that homeowners are "lightly taxed" and is looking for additional methods to control the buoyant housing market.

'Lightly taxed'?!! The guy has got some nerve. And it's abject drivel that this is about controlling the 'bouyant housing market. This has been on the cards for a while. Gordon Brown has already plundered private pension funds and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he turned his avarice on the last stores of privately owned wealth. There was no way he could leave all that booty untouched with a ballooning public sector into which money must be shovelled like coal into a roaring furnace.

It's a no-brainer for the government. A general election is still as much as three years away and they are going to win it handsomely anyway. In the meantime they can placate their opponents on the left and reward their supporters in the state sector.

The way things are now, there is nothing to stop the state from growing until the bones of the last taxpayer have been picked clean and left to bleach in the sun.