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This week's Economist has an article on online retailing in the UK. The basic gist of the story is simply that in the last six months it has really taken off. Online sales in November-December were 60 percent greater than in the lead in to Christmas 2002. Forrester Research forecasts that 5.7% of the British retail market will be online sales in 2004, compared to 5.6% in the US. (Actually, the difference is greater than this, as the US number includes travel and auctions, and the British number does not).

This is entirely consistent with my own impressions of the situation, and indeed my own behaviour in the last six months. I have been buying certain things (most prominently books) online for quite a few years now, but the number and more importantly the diversity of the things I have been buying has exploded in the last twelve months. Okay, my personal tastes in shopping perhaps aren't that of the average consumer - I buy too many electronic products, no doubt - but I have found that the number of websites I can find selling almost any of the things I want to buy has increased enormously.

Whereas in the insane dot com boom years there were lots of large capitalised businesses without that good an idea of their business model and with few customers, a second wave of internet retailers seem to have come into being that are small, focused, and lean. For electronics there suddenly seem to be lots of little garage based stores, selling a good selection of one very specialist type of product. The credit card handling is outsourced to a company that specialises in handling credit card transactions for small internet retailers, off the shelf software is used to run the website and keep track of inventory, suppliers have to be found, orders have to be packed and presumably the post office has to be asked to send a truck round once a day to collect the filled orders. No expensive retail premises have to be rented, and there are no losses to shoplifting. The honesty of such retailers is generally not an issue. The level of consumer protection given to credit card holders is such that the retailer will be dropped instantly by the company to which it outsources its credit card processing if it fails to deliver what it promises. And in any event other web sites exist that provide feedback on online retailers.

What does all this mean?

Well, when I wanted a new memory card for my digital camera, I discovered that I could buy it for less than £30 from a small internet retailer, when from a typical high street electronics chain (you know the one) it would have cost £69.99. When the difference in price is that great, there is no way I am going to buy it on the high street. High street stores will often offer competitive prices for very popular products, particularly when they hold a sale, but for anything more obscure the prices are high and the selection of goods is generally poor. Plus they try to make up the low margins on such products by selling very high margin and overpriced cables and other accessories along with their cheaper products. Internet retailers don't seem to be able to get away with this trick. The level of competition is too high and there is too much transparency.

Now that is small internet retailers: more competition, more transparent markets, and lower prices. What of bigger companies? These seem to be doing well too. Let's look first at the largest: Amazon. The nature of this company has changed considerably in the last couple of years as well. Most simply, Amazon have increased the range of goods they sell, although they are more competitive in some sectors than others. (In electronics their prices are often excellent, whereas their DVD prices seem less competitive). Amazon retain their traditional advantage of selling virtually every book, CD, and DVD in print, and they have expanded even further by stocking a larger range of imported (usually American) editions of books and DVDs as well. However, there has been an even more important change than this.

A few years ago, Amazon started listing used books on their website. Initially, this didn't work very well compared to specialists such as Abebooks, but ultimately they ended up with a situation where used booksellers could list their books on Amazon next to the same new book on Amazon. But why stop with used books? This has since evolved to a situation where new books from other sellers are advertised on the same page as the same book directly from Amazon. And of course it has also evolved into far more fields than simply books. There are now lots of products being offered by other sellers on Amazon. This has dramatically improved availability. In a lot of instances when a product is out of print or out of stock, there will still be a seller or two advertising on Amazon who has one or two available, even if Amazon themselves do not. (Before Christmas, i was able to find an otherwise unavailable toy for the spoiled son of a friend of mine this way). American retailers are advertising lots of products on Amazon UK that are not otherwise available in the UK (and are undercutting Amazon US's shipping charges in the process).

What does Amazon get out of this? Well, for one thing, it is good for Amazon's brand. Lots more goods appear to be available from Amazon, and fewer goods appear to be out of stock for people who want to buy them. (I suspect that many buyers are only barely aware that they are not buying directly from Amazon). This makes Amazon more likely to be the first stop for people buying all manner of goods.

Secondly, of course, it means that Amazon is at least partly evolving from being a retailer into being a broker, bringing together buyers and sellers. Amazon provides the credit card handling facilities, and provides a guarantee of sorts to the buyer. (They state to customers that the quality of service received from third party sellers should be the same as received directly from Amazon. I would assume that sellers that don't provide this are not permitted to sell using Amazon for very long). In return they charge a commission. This is probably more profitable than providing goods directly, as they have nothing further to do once they have provided this broking service. Third party sales require nothing in the way of logistics. One of the most profitable internet companies has long been internet auction company eBay, which is essentially providing a broking service. In recent years, more and more of eBay's business has become retailers selling things at fixed or quasi-fixed prices, rather than auctions directly. Amazon's third party sales appears to have evolved into much the same thing. Many many organisations tried to steal eBay's business by copying their business model more directly, but eBay's first mover advantage turned out to be too large. But now, Amazon has evolved into something quite similar. Which is interesting, and I think a very good sign with respect to future profitability of the company.

But the trend is interesting. There are lots of small players. There is lots of competition between these small players. There is lots of specialisation amongst these small players. The big players are turning more into brokers, guarantors, hosting services, etc. A lot of the actual buying and selling is better down by small specialists (or individual people) than large organisations.

And all this is very good for British consumers. Almost uniquely so. Britain has high rates of computer ownership, and internet usage. Most British people have credit cards. Britain has a traditional retail sector with notoriously high prices and low levels of competition, which can be relatively easily undercut in terms of price. However, this lack of competition largely comes from real estate and planning related issues, but other obstacles to setting up a business are relatively low. Britain has a reasonably large but dense population, so the distances over which purchases have to be delivered are relatively small. Many British people (especially in London) do not have cars, and are used to having to have goods delivered already. For British people who do have cars, the cost of using them is sufficiently high that shopping around in bricks and mortar stores is expensive and, given the levels of traffic congestion, time consuming. All this means that internet retailers are relatively more attractive to British consumers than they are, say, in the USA.

Business sections of British newspapers have also been stating one interesting thing post-Christmas. Most traditional retailers did badly in the run up to Christmas. It didn't seem to be so much that people were spending less, but that they were far more concerned with value for money than was the case in the past. The fashion industry did badly, and although what may be called the "gadget industry" did well in terms of sales, they did relatively badly in terms of margins and profits. The general press has blamed this partly on the fact that supermarkets (particularly the stunningly efficient Tesco) have been selling a much greater range of goods than in the past, which has meant that competition has increased in a whole range of areas, but the other key factor seems to clearly be that the higher efficiency of the internet retailing sector is having an impact. It may well be that the traditional inefficient British high street is going to really find itself in trouble, and much sooner than it expected.

Obviously some market segments are more vulnerable to this than others. For a lot of goods, customers want to handle merchandise and see what it looks and feels like, how big it is, and various other things about it before buying. But if the difference price is great enough, customers will go online for most things (particularly in an age of mass customisation). Occasionally somebody who is a little overenthusiastic about buying things over the internet will miscalculate (such as Gabriel Syme did with his new refrigerator, which is somewhat larger than he realised when he ordered it over the internet) but people will get better at this sort of thing. It may be that in some cases shops will evolve into showrooms specifically designed for looking and not buying, as already happens in parts of the automobile industry for instance.

But the basic trend is overwhelmingly good. It is much easier to compare goods and prices from a large number of sources. Retail markets are becoming much, much more efficient. It is happening much faster than most people realised. Especially in Britain.

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Just a short posting to say that our man Jeremy Clarkson has been doing a series of shows on BBC2 TV entitled Inventions That Changed The World, and doing them very well, to judge by last night's episode, which was about The Computer. He was particularly interesting about Tommy Flowers, the man who built the "Colossus" computer, which used valves, and which cracked German codes at Bletchley Park during World War 2. Clarkson also reckoned that Charles Babbage had done pretty well and deserved better backing for his "difference engine". Babbage never got it built, but, said Clarkson, some techies recently did build Babbage's machine, and it worked.

But my real point is not how well Clarkson said that Flowers, Babbage and their ilk did with their computers. Rather I want to emphasise how well Clarkson himself did with his TV show.

I missed the first one, which was about The Gun, and I must be very bad at googling because I was unable to find much in the way of blogosphere comment on that show, which must be wrong. But if I can, I will watch later ones in this series, on such things as The Jet, and The Telephone.

For many years now, I've been deeply depressed at the unwillingness of TV people, and showbiz people generally, to take technology and technological history seriously. The only history that really seems to fascinate these people is their own. Jeremy Clarkson, for all his flippancy, does take technology and its history very seriously. And he uses that rather over-emphatic style of his, which can get on the nerves when he is merely waffling frivolously about cars, to emphasise truly important points. Thus, of Babbage's restored difference engine he paused dramatically before saying, with heavy emphasis, that … "it worked", which is fair enough since that is after all the important point.

So, Clarkson – the man the lefties all hate with a passion, because he makes so little secret of hating them – is doing very well on the telly. That Brunel show really seems to be leading somewhere.

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British Liberal Democrat MP, Jenny Tonge, has been publicly displaying her licensed copy of 'Root Causes Version 2.0':

"I was just trying to say how, having seen the violence and the humiliation and the provocation that the Palestinian people live under every day and have done since their land was occupied by Israel, I could understand and was trying to understand where [suicide bombers] were coming from," Dr Tonge told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

She was speaking to a pro-Palestinian lobby when she said of Palestinian suicide bombers: "If I had to live in that situation - and I say that advisedly - I might just consider becoming one myself."

Well, if Mrs Tonge feels that she really must blow herself to smithereens, then so be it. But before she turns herself into an abstract art installation, I hope someone takes the trouble to ask her for an explanation of this:

With the identification of two suicide bombers in Israel as British subjects, Britain faced suggestions Thursday that young British Muslims, previously associated with militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere had now shifted focus to terrorism in the Middle East.

The identification as British citizens of Asif Hanif, 21, who died in a bomb attack that killed three people in a Tel Aviv nightclub Wednesday, and an accomplice, Omar Sharif, 27, also represented the first known instance in recent years of Britons prepared to kill themselves launching a terror attack. The news seemed to leave British officials stunned. "We think that the terrorists had British passports, which is something especially sad," said Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's ambassador in Israel.

As on previous occasions when British Muslims were found to have been fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan or planning alleged terrorism in Britain, the suspected terrorists seemed to have grown up in innocuous, middle-class or blue-collar environments far from the conflicts they came to espouse as their own. That seemed to differentiate them from the more usual image of suicide bombers molded by the hardships of Gaza or the West Bank.

Small wonder that people like Mrs Tonge have conveniently chosen to forget this particular case of 'desperation'.

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The growing examples of Western firms outsourcing or "offshoring" jobs, including hi-tech ones in software, to locations such as India has triggered a certain amount of bleating in parts of the commentariat as well as some excellent responses, such as at the blog Catallarchy. What this does show, however, is that those nations best able to cope with the ever-shifting sands of the global economy are those with the ability to harness skills to best effect.

For some time, we self-deprecating Brits have tended to downplay the extent to which we can still punch our economic weight in such a harshly competitive world economy. Well, this entertaining book, Backroom Boys, by Francis Spufford (never heard of him before, BTW) is a pleasurable, if sometimes maddening account of how the British scientists have pioneered or collaborated in a range of economic fields, such as the early space race of the 1950s and 1960s, computer games, the supersonic jet plane Concorde, and perhaps most significant for our present lives - mobile phones.

What I particularly liked about Spufford's book is how he got under the skin of how scientists work and co-operate with one another. He nailed home the point that in scientific establishments, both in the public and private sector, what counts for a scientist is not necessarily big money, but the respect of one's peers. For a scientist, you are respected as much for the ideas you share with your peers as to how many times you get your face on the front of Time magazine. In short, he says scientists operate an intellectual "gift economy" where altruism pays.

The book also shows how British scientific efforts, often "hobbled" by supposed lack of funds, often had to adapt and employ more nimble ways of research while their better-funded American rivals could just bully ahead. The best example, of course, is the contrast between Britain's puny efforts to launch its own space programme, including the Black Arrow rocket programme, and the various endeavours of NASA. (I wonder how many readers know Britain had this programme? I certainly did not).

The story of how Concorde, a collaborative Anglo-French venture came into being and was supported by the taxpayer before eventually being drawn into the maw of privatised British Airways was instructive. Libertarian purists will, of course, blanche at the idea of such a plane being created with tax funds in the first place. I side with them, but I could not help noticing that Concorde came into its own as part of an overall business package when BA became a private business. There is a lot of interesting description in the book about the "halo" effect, whereby a luxury, loss-making entity like Concorde is kept within a business to make the whole operation more appealing. Spufford also reflects about the nature of luxury goods and how they are priced. It may seem irrational that a Concorde seat costs X times more than that of a seat on a Boeing 747, but making the seat so costly was part of the cachet, like the cost of a Rolex watch or an Aston Martin sports car.

Perhaps in a moment of rare hubris, Spufford ends his book speculating about the now-fated Beagle 2 Mars project. He dreams that a "British suitcase is on Mars". Oh well, you cannot win 'em all.

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Earlier this evening the launch was held at the Institute of Economic Affairs of Dennis O'Keeffe's translation of Benjamin Constant's Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, which is published by Liberty Fund Inc. Dennis is to be congratulated for this mighty undertaking, which is bound to reverberate through the Anglosphere in the months and years to come.

At the IEA, Dennis spoke only briefly. Rather than regale us at length with his own views of Benjamin Constant, he let the man speak to us for himself. We were offered the following few Constant quotations. Dennis commented hardly at all other than to note how much sense they still made of the people and events of our own time:

How bizarre that those who called themselves ardent friends of freedom have worked so relentlessly to destroy the natural basis of patriotism, to replace it with a false passion for an abstract being, for a general idea deprived of everything which strikes the imagination or speaks to memory. (p.326)

People always take mediocrity as peaceful. It is peaceful only when it is locked up. When chance invests it with power, it is a thousand times more incalculable in its motion, more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive than talent,... (pp. 329-40)

This next one, said Dennis, could - its extreme eloquence aside - have as easily been said by the most committed twenty first century libertarian:

... society has no right to be unjust to a single one of its members, ... the whole society minus one, is not authorised to obstruct the latter in his opinions, nor in those actions which are not harmful, in the use of his property or the exercise of his labour, save in those cases where that use or that exercise would obstruct another individual possessing the same rights. (p. 384)

The final one, said Dennis, he could not supply a page number for, despite a lot of searching. It had just stuck in his mind.

If human nature is a good argument against freedom, it is an even better one against despotism.

I am ashamed to admit that until now, for me, Benjamin Constant has only been a name. Not any more. I bought the book, and I recommend you do too if you are at all interested in the history of liberty and of the idea of liberty.

UPDATE: Here is what Benjamin Constant looked like.

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A new blog has made its way onto my short list of bookmarked blogs: Allah Is In The House. The funniest stuff going, bar none, and brutally incisive social commentary to boot! His periodic surveys of the news are just priceless.

R. C. says check it out.

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Are politicians actually capable of thought and articulation or they merely making noises in return for which they think they are going to get rewards?

Barely two weeks after Michael Howard trumpeted his alleged belief that "the people should be big and the state should be small", he weighs in on the side of big state and against the little citizen:

A future Conservative government would reverse Labour's downgrading of cannabis from Class B to Class C, Tory leader Michael Howard has said.

His intervention comes a week ahead of the change to Class C, which will place cannabis alongside anabolic steroids and prescription anti-biotics and mean police will rarely make arrests for possession of small amounts of the drug.

Mr Howard said: "After thinking about this very carefully, we have come to the view that the Government's decision is misconceived and when we return to office, we will reclassify cannabis back to Class B."

Mr Blunkett's changes introduced a "muddle" which would send a signal to young people that cannabis was legal and safe, when it was not, said the Tory leader.

Well, there is a germ of truth here in that HMG is most certainly in a 'muddle' but at least it is a muddle which is shambling along, after a fashion, in a sort-of, vaguely right direction. The motives may not be entirely logical or even honourable but I think it's results that count here.

But am I to believe that Mr Howard has thought about this 'very carefully'? Cannabis is only illegal because people like Mr Howard demand that it be so and the question of whether or not it is 'safe' (whatever that means) is entirely irrelevant. If he genuinely wants to the state to be small then he is hardly likely to achieve that aim by reinforcing the principle rubric behind big government, i.e. that it is necessary in order to manage the citizen's health and welfare.

So is Mr Howard (a) disingenuous or (b) really not thought this through at all?

I think we have a right to know.

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It sounds as if brows all over Europe are being furrowed, heads are being shaken and hands being heavily wrung. What to do? What to do?

Via Instapundit:

Europe's apparently doomed attempt to overtake the US as the world's leading economy by 2010 will today be laid bare in a strongly worded critique by the European Commission.

The Commission's spring report, the focal point of the March European Union economic summit, sets out in stark terms the reasons for the widening economic gap between Europe and the US.

It cites Europe's low investment, low productivity, weak public finances and low employment rates as among the many reasons for its sluggish performance.

Mama Mia, Ai Caramba, Gott in Himmel and Merde! Does this mean that the European 'social model' is not working?

The Professor himself points the way:

Hmm. Bloated public sectors, high taxes, excessive regulation, and inflexible hiring rules probably have something to do with it.

Well, yes. They do have something to do with it. In fact, they have everything to do with it. But just because this is slap-in-the-face obvious, it would be unwise to assume any public (or even private) recognition of this obviousness in the halls of European power.

For, all this dovetails very satisfactorily with an article, via Stephen Pollard, which illustrates the excrutiating difficulties faced by political rulers in trying to institute reforms in circumstances of long-term petrification:

Make no mistake: Tony Bair's proposal for university "top-up" fees, Silvio Berlusconi's nip-and-tuck pension reform, Gerhard Schroeder's welfare and tax cuts, and Jean-Pierre Raffarin's reforms to tax and labor market policies are all, to varying degrees, departures from the social market consensus that has dominated European politics for much of the postwar period. It's progress. Possibly, they are the thin edge of the wedge, if we're being optimistic.

But if we're honest, we'll admit that as reforms go, these are mostly wimp-outs. What is really remarkable here is not that they are happening at all, but rather how ultimately skimpy they are.

In short, the reformation of long-cherished (but failing) economic models is simply too agonising for politicians to even contemplate let alone execute. From an electoral point of view they may consider it safer to leave the ship floundering and rely on future generations to try to salvage something from the wreckage. Utter madness of course but don't bet against them making exactly those calculations.

Despite that fact that there does appear to be something approaching a consensus on the nature of the disease, that is no guarantee that there will anything like a similar consenses on the course of treatment required. Given their track record the decision-makers could just as easily apply altogether different remedies. Low investment? We need more public spending. Low productivity? We need more workplace regulations. Weak public finances? The answer is higher taxes. Low employment rates? More labour laws.

Sweet-tasting medicine, yes, but the harsh kind rarely wins elections over there.

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The natives are finally growing restless. Well, some of them are, at any rate and, for just for a change, this is grass-roots agitation of the righteous sort.

Yes, the people behind the Taxpayers Alliance are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymore. The strapline says it all:

Campaigning for lower taxes because it's our money

Right on, brothers and sisters and Amen and, might I just add, about bloody time too. Ever since the mid-90's, when the producing classes were finally bullied and browbeaten into dolefully accepting that higher taxes would result in better government services, they have stoically maintained their stiffer upper lips while the fiscal thumbscrews have been steadily tightened.

But the government services they thought they cherished have remained as crap as they ever were and now, finally, a few of them have realised that they've been took, they've been had.

But (and you all knew that there just had to be a 'but') as pleased as I am to finally see these few worms turning, they still have some way to go before they address the 'root causes' of their problems:

We have already found £50 BILLION of unnecessary government spending to cut (without closing hospitals or schools, or cutting pensions). That is more than enough to abolish Council Tax or take a big slice out of Income Tax.

The objects of their attack are what they see as the 'waste and inefficiency' of the government as if those things can somehow be magically eradicated while leaving the public sector largely intact. However, 'waste and inefficiency' are not bugs requiring elimination in order for the welfare state to function properly, they are systemic features of the welfare state itself.

For as long as these campaigners continue to accept the fabian argument that services like healthcare and education must be provided by the government, then their otherwise noble campaign will remain fatally flawed. It leaves them wide open to the counter-argument that state and schools and hospitals must have the necessary 'resources' and sooner, rather than later I think, they will find themselves running smack into that brick wall.

But, that said, they are still doing the right thing. Or, at least, starting to do the right thing. I hope it is the thin end of a very thick wedge.

[My thanks to reader Gawain Towler who provided the above link via Terence Coyle.]

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A lovely interlude in the Telegraph yesterday:

Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, accused Britain and other member states yesterday of betraying the historic goal of EU expansion by depriving Brussels of the money needed to make enlargement work. Mr Prodi said he was mystified as to why some countries were proposing to reduce the ceiling on payments to the EU budget when the continent was about to unite "for the first time in history".

First time in history? How about Charlemagne? Napoleon? Hitler?

Britain and five other EU nations have challenged the Commission to reduce the maximum share of national budgets that Brussels can spend from 1.24 per cent of GDP to one per cent. How revolutionary...

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Telegraph has an article about an official parliamentary report that notes that Holland's 30-year experiment in trying to create a tolerant, multicultural society has failed and led to ethnic ghettos and sink schools.

Between 70 and 80 per cent of Dutch-born members of immigrant families import their spouse from their "home" country, mostly Turkey or Morocco, perpetuating a fast-growing Muslim subculture in large cities.

While the report praised most immigrants for assimilating and for doing well at school, it attacked successive governments for stoking ethnic separatism. The worst mistake was to encourage children to speak Turkish, Arabic or Berber in primary schools rather than Dutch. The report concluded that Holland's 850,000 Muslims must become Dutch if the country was to hold together. It proposes cheap housing in the leafy suburbs to help ethnic groups assimilate with the rest of the 16 million population.

The major parties in the centre-Right government dismissed such solutions as insufficient. Maxime Verhagen, the Christian Democrat leader in parliament, said one had to be "either naive or ignorant" not to understand that the policy had led the country into a cul-de-sac.

Immigrants in the Netherlands top the 'wrong' lists - disability benefit, unemployment assistance, domestic violence, criminality statistics and school and learning difficulties.

Holland used to be an example of multi-ethnic tolerance, spending large amounts of funding to welcome immigrants and running 'ethnic diversity projects' that included 700 Islamic clubs that are often run by hard-line clerics.

Two years ago, Pim Fortuyn voiced the resentment that had been building up behind the 'multi-culti' facade. The European Union's Racism and Xenophobia Monitoring Centre has catalogued a rash of anti-Muslim attacks, leaving girls too frightened to go out wearing head scarves. The violence has been on the increase since the September 11 attacks. The Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, has warned that the al-Qa'eda network is stealthily taking root in Dutch society by preying on disaffected Muslim youth with Jihad video cassettes circulating in mosques, cafes and prisons.

This is what happens when the state interferes with natural social processes, such assimilation. The example of the US shows that the melting pot approach works just. It is only when the state decides to promote one group or another the social sets in. As always, the state is not your friend.

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There is a story in today's Guardian about a new kind of musical gizmo, the sinfonia, which is striking terror into the hearts of West End theatre musicians:

Theatre musicians held opening talks last night with the millionaire impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh in what they suspect may be a battle for survival against his plan to introduce an electronic "magic box" in place of part of the orchestra for musicals.

Champions of the device, called the Sinfonia, maintain that it "gives more bangs for the buck" than musicians. Musicians say it "steals jobs and cheats audiences".

First reports made it sound to me like a glorified backing tape. That really would be creepy, with the conductor having to keep time with a predetermined tempo, with a predetermined performance in fact.

However the Sinfonia does seem to be a bona fide musical instrument:

The Sinfonia resembles a synthesiser but consists of two powerful computers and keyboards. It was developed by two professors of music technology.

Older versions, presumably, of that music geek in Fame who played Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (I think it was) all on his own at his high-tech keyboard.

Using a keyboard, the operator controls the instrumental output while watching the conductor's baton on video.

Virtual orchestras were a factor in a recent Broadway strike. This led to compromise on a minimum of 19-26 musicians for each production.

It occurred to me while reading the story that if costs can be reduced, maybe it will become possible to put on more musicals, thereby creating as many jobs for musicians as ever, and many more for singers and dancers. But the Musicians' Union cares not for such speculations, and the union-friendly Guardian man ends his piece not with such economic optimism but with this decidedly menacing final sentence:

Last night the Musicians' Union said it understood there were no trained Sinfonia operators in Britain.

Expect it soon, a remake of that old Kazan classic, this time called In the Orchestra Pit, with the guy in the Brando part now saying: "I could have been a concert pianist."

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If you think the French 'headscarf ban' is going to cause friction, then I cannot wait to see where this is going to lead:

A proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools could include a ban on beards, according to the French education minister.

The decision as to whether or not to grow a beard should be left to the individual schoolgirl. After all, it is what is going on inside that counts!

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Instapundit quotes from this, which is about how the North Korean regime may finally be coming to its last days.

The bit he quotes concerns aid. Apparently foreign donors are refusing to just throw good money after bad, because they are not being allowed to see if the aid they sent last time has reached its intended donees. Instead, the assumption is that the North Korean army is gobbling it all up, as I am sure it is.

This is all excellent and a credit to the aid givers. First your target the vile regime you intend to topple. You then give it a succession of vast aid bribes. The regime accordingly becomes addicted to your aid for its continuing survival, and stops bothering about finding resources anywhere else. Then you cut off the aid, and start dangling the thought of resuming aid if certain political concessions are made.

Instead of crushing the regime militarily, we simply buy it.

Bad luck for the millions of poor bastards on the receiving end of the vile regime in question, of course, but at least this way they have hope that their torment may end one day, provided they can live to see "one day".

On the other hand, maybe the aid givers achieved this outcome by mistake. They were trying truly to help the vile regime. No matter. When it comes to toppling a vile regime, idiots trying to help can be just as effective as competent people trying to topple.

I recall how the Communist regime in Poland never ever really recovered from all the aid it was given by idiot merchant banks in the nineteen seventies. The rulers of the place became addicted to a lavish lifestyle that their bankers eventually got bored with paying for, and it all unravelled from there.

As Instapundit says of North Korea just now: stay tuned.

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Hosting Matters was having some 'server issues' which caused Samizdata.net to be briefly unavailable. We are also having other technical problems but expect to be fully operational again shortly.

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Beautiful thoughts from Lileks on Monday, at the end of a piece which starts with him complaining in a humdrum way about some humdrum journalists saying that space program money ought to be spent instead on curing cripples:

Just thought of something: What holds the paraplegic in their chairs? What keeps them from shooting around the room, stopping their progress with a finger, floating from desk to desk?

Gravity.

And gravity isn’t a big issue . . . where?

I love the internet. And especially the bit where I or other intelligent people have chosen to stick something up every day, but allow themselves to put up boring nonsense if that is all we can think of. That way, two bits of boring nonsense (space programme money should cure paraplegia instead, no it should not) combine and catch fire, while you are doing the piece. Thesis (yawn – but I have to put something so I will complain about this particular something), antithesis (yawn again – but I am right, aren't I?), synthesis (just thought of something … wow!).

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Ron Crickenberger, a well known libertarian activist of several decades standing, passed away overnight.

He is survived by his partner Noelle Stettner, two children, and one grandchild.

The movement will miss him.

If you knew Ron, please add your remembrance to our comments section.

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I feel about skyscrapers the way lots of other libertarians feel about space travel. I may have all kinds of doubts about the purity of the capitalism that gives rise to them, but… wow! And I want now to mention here a particularly impressive one, soon to be built in London.

I'm talking about London Bridge Tower.

I have already commented on this tower as a mere plan on my Culture Blog, here, and before that here. But what I later missed was that last November, the building received planning permission and is now definitely going to be built.

My first reaction to the first faked photos I saw of this immense spike was that it looked like a paper dart that had already been thrown a few times and had had its spike somewhat damaged. Now, I find myself looking forward to its construction immensely. Expect photos here of it as it takes shape in the years to come. Building starts in 2005 and will be complete, or such is the plan, in 2009.

It is to be built in one of my favourite London places, namely on the south bank of the River Thames, which just gets better and better with every year that passes. Recently they have added the Wheel, and the undeniably impressive if decidedly fascist looking Bankside Power Station has metamorphosed into Tate Modern, the interior of which is very fine even if it does not seem to contain much else that is much good most of the time. Eventually they may even sort out that nothing space next to the Wheel. You can already walk all the way along the river on the southerly side through the centre of London, and this tower will only add to the fun.

The reason why London Bridge Tower will be such a draw is that we will not just be able to walk past it and gawp up at it; we will also be allowed to ascend within it and gaze out upon London, from a viewing gallery half way up, and from another public spot near the top. What this will cost I do not know, but I will be doing one of those trips at least once, I can tell you. Quite how all this public participation was contrived, I don not know, and no doubt some of the politics involved was of the sort we here might not approve of, but personally I am delighted about all this.

This tower is the work of Renzo Piano, who co-designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Of this massive object he has this to say:

I don’t believe it is possible to build a tall building in London by extruding the same shape from bottom to top. It would be too small at the bottom and too big at the top.

Likewise, symbols are dangerous. Often tall buildings are aggressive and arrogant symbols of power and ego, selfish and hermetic. The tower is designed to be a sharp and light presence in the London skyline. Architecture is about telling stories and expressing visions, and memory is part of it.

Our memory is permeated by history.

How nuanced. How European. He even manages to turn the tallest building in Europe into an anti-American statement. Well, if that is what it takes to get a thing like this built, then well said Renzo, I say.

And even if you disapprove, it can not possibly end up being as big an embarrassment as this. Although I find that I like the look of that also, more and more, however totally useless it may be. It is the Space Shuttle of skyscrapers, you might say. Concorde pointing upwards.

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See what happens when I do not pay attention to what The Dissident Frogman is doing? He sneaks off goes and makes another side-splittingly funny flash animation. I visit his site often but for some reason I neglected to 'press the red button'. Big mistake.

I suggest you go and do so... right now.

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I think it is at least plausible to propose that a vast swathe of bad ideas and damaging policies are borne on the wings not of malevolence or even stupidity, but simply economic illiteracy: a fundamental failure to grasp how money actually works.

If that is the case, then this kind of thing is encouraging:

Personal finance education looks set to become a regular part of school life, following a series of successful pilot schemes across the country.

The charity the Personal Finance Education Group (Pfeg) has been working with teachers to help them provide extra-curricular lessons covering everything from straightforward budgeting to calculating interest and getting a good deal on a mobile phone.

One teacher said: "I think it will broaden their horizons; they will certainly have a better understanding of how to manage money. I think they'll also have a better understanding of the taxation system and why you pay tax."

However, enthusiasm should be tempered by the possibility that the subject is not being taught very well or, worse, that the whole thing is the project of ghastly statists who want to use this as a means of driving home pro-tax propaganda to a new generation.

But, those caveats aside, this could be welcome because even if it transpires that this is really all part of a lefty 'get-them-while-their-young' programme, the effect might be to start prodding young brain cells in directions that their teachers never intended them to go.

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Clearly nothing escapes the hawk-eyed attention of these rapier-witted and attentive public servants:

A tax office official in Finland who died at his desk went unnoticed by up to 30 colleagues for two days.

The man in his 60s died last Tuesday while checking tax returns, but no-one realised he was dead until Thursday.

Getting a fiddled expenses claim past them must be a doddle. Let's all move to Finland!

He said everyone at the tax office was feeling dreadful - and procedures would have to be reviewed.

From now on, mandatory pulse-checks every 24 hours.

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From the Guardian, a perfect illustration of the importance of 'anti-junk-food' campaigning as the newfound cause du jour of the British left. It is hard to tell which aspect of his own report the author finds more disturbing: capital punishment or the lack of healthy food options for the condemned:

Raymond Rowsey got his deadly dose on January 9, in North Carolina. The sole white among these executed men, Rowsey was convicted for the killing of a convenience store clerk - or perhaps his accomplice half-brother did it, no one seemed quite sure at the trial. Their takings? Two pornographic magazines and $54. Rowsey had a history of horrific childhood abuse. His last meal was pizza, chicken wings, two packets of peanut M&Ms, and a Pepsi.

Junk food and judicial killing. Feel queasy?

But would not the offer of a balanced, healthy last meal be a bit...well, redundant?

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It is a seldom-recognised fact that the British are world leaders in the art of grumbling. By a long margin, it is our most popular national pastime. In fact, if grumbling was an Olympic sport (or perhaps synchronised grumbling) then it would be British competitors taking gold, silver and bronze. The other nations do not stand a chance.

And I can find no better example of this kind of world-class, cutting-edge grumbling than this article by Philip Johnston:

Do you ever feel like Howard Beale, the character played by Peter Finch in the film Network? He was a news presenter on American TV who became so frustrated at the refusal of anyone to listen to reason that he invited viewers to open their windows and yell into the streets: "I am as mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more.''

Such conspicuous expressions of indignation are more acceptable in America than they are here. When we are as mad as hell, the most forceful manifestation of our emotions tends to be a resigned shrug or a heavy sigh. Understatement is one of our endearing national characteristics; but it also means we can more easily be taken for a ride.

And that is why we lead the world in grumbling. We have the ideal training programme.

Our predisposition to react benignly to developments that would have other people taking to the streets is to be applauded. But this quintessential mildness relies on governments, local councils and others who can interfere in our lives to do so only when it is absolutely necessary, and then in a fair and balanced way. The current Government is no longer able to identify this fulcrum. It brings in legislation because it believes that its very function is to pour forth a cascade of new laws each year, even when there is no demand for them.

Suggest to a minister that he might try to get through the parliamentary session without legislating and he will look at you as if you are crazy. Propose that existing laws should take effect before new ones are introduced and expect a blank stare. After all, what are politicians for if not to bring in laws? "We legislate therefore we are," should be written on the gates of the Palace of Westminster.

But what else are politicians for? Pray tell, Mr Johnston?

For those fed up with high taxes, street crime, late and dirty trains, inane regulations, the unjustified use of fines and charges, bloody-minded parking restrictions, excessive public sector waste, preposterous European directives, multi-culturalist busybodies, useless and unaccountable council officials and six-hour waits at the local hospital's A&E centre, a shrug and a sigh are no longer enough.

And so what? What follows from that? If Mr Johnston is proposing that our time-honoured traditions of heavy sighing, eyeball-rolling, muttering and impotent resignation are no longer sufficient grist for the national mill, then so be it, but where do we go from there?

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U.S.-based music download business Napster, which is now a paid-for service after its chastening battles in the law courts against the music companies, is extending its services to European customers, according to this report. Well, when it comes to stirring up a hornet's nest of controversy, few subjects generate more angry buzzes than the case for or against the right to download music on the net, in my experience.

If the record companies ever thought that Napster would vanish without trace, they were deluding themselves. Personally, while I have my questions about the intellectual property right aspects to Napster-style downloading technology, there is no doubt that it has thrown traditional business models into the dustbin. But does it mean the death of music recordings, orchestras, book authors and film-makers? I don't really think so.

As a related point, there is an interesting article here on the website of science fiction publishing house Jim Baen, making a good point about how downloading can, in the medium to long run, raise rather than cut book sales. I suppose that the argument works for music and possibly films as well.

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Will the German embassy protest, one wonders? Hardly the spirit of reconciliation.

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French state schools, unlike the British or American varieties, were founded explicitly to oppose clerical power. They are the most visible and enduring bastions of secularism in France. Originally, the prohibition of religious symbols in schools was aimed against Catholics. Many of the supporters of secularism in the 19th century in France were non-conformist or atheist: often Protestant or Jewish. The antisemistism of such groups as Action Française from the 1890s onwards is in turn a reaction against the French radical assault on Catholic society. In the early 20th century a deal was worked out that allowed religious schools to operate alongside the secular system.

The Islamist campaign against secularism is what the headscarf law is about. In some schools, violence has been threatened against girls who refused to wear scarves. Apologists for fundamentalists (ususally socialists hoping to play the race card) condoned the violence and have allowed a climate of terror in French schools.

As a libertarian, I oppose state schools. But also as a libertarian, I also support the prohibition of Islamic fundamentalist intimidation. If Islamic schools really allowed freedom to exit, I could back Moslem campaigns for lifting any restrictions the French government might have against their own schools.

When I visit a mosque, I take off my shoes, I do not interfere with the religious devotions of the worshippers, and I do not demonstrate my own devotions to eating pork and drinking beer. The person who chooses a turban ahead of an education has got "I'm a loser!" stamped all over him. But the people who organise the headscarf campaigns do not want freedom of choice: they want a licence to coerce.

This is not a campaign for religious freedom: Moslems are free to set up their own schools. It is a campaign to separate the public and the private sphere: in the school each pupil's religious affiliation is a private and not a public matter.

Far be it from me to condone the criminal régime of Chirac. But, this is the same fight as the Turkish Army's fight to defend a secular state against the fundmentalist tyranny. It is a small corner of the War on Terror, and compared with the some of the antics of the Department of "Homeland Defense" a.k.a. Minipax, one worth fighting.

It is also a campaign against obscurantism. French people often mock those parts of the USA where it is illegal to teach Darwin, or where Creationist theories have to be accorded equal credibilty in the classroom.

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The European Commission has released the latest press release on demographic developments in the European Union during 2003. This shows that the long-awaited time when deaths outweigh births and immigration maintains the population of the European Union is beginning to arrive.

The population of 380.8 million increased by 1,276,000 during 2003, of which three-quarters was due to natural migration. However, there are two worrying trends that suggest Europe's demographic problems can only worsen in the coming years.

Germany, Italy and Greece would all have faced population declines without immigration. More countries will join this select group in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Secondly, half of the accession countries that are scheduled to join the European Union on the 1st May 2004 are already facing the problem of population decline, a problem that will be exacerbated by migration towards Western Europe.

There always has to be a disclaimer using the figures from Eurostat since demographics are one of the most unreliable of all collected statistics. Neverthless, taking this disclaimer into account, the population decline is beginning to take hold at a rapid pace.

It is the accession countries who probably have most to fear. Enlargement can be viewed as a cannibalisation of the labour markets of the accession countries by existing Member States and the newcomers face huge problems of tightening and declining labour markets in the long run. If they join the Eurozone, they will lose the remainder of the economic flexibility needed to combat this problem, since their adoption of EU laws, known as the acquis communautaire, will lead to far greater regulation from May 1st.

The European solution to the problems that they have created will be further subventions to cushion the blow of joining the European Union and satisfaction at removing a possible ring of economic competitors along their eastern border. Hopefully, Russia and the Ukraine will begin to attract more investment in the next few years and prove too large to swallow.

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Instapundit links to this:

The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair.

Instapundit is pleased because this report says what he and lots of others have also said, that it was American military muscle and the threat of more of it, not merely polite requests to Col Gadaffi to be nicer from Blair or his fellow Europeans. Quite so. The idea that recent American military activity had nothing to do with Gaddafi's change of heart is very far fetched.

But what irritates me is that Blair, the Telegraph, Instapundit, the lot of them, are all talking about "threats" and "diplomacy" as if these were two entirely different and opposite things, when in truth threats and diplomacy go hand in hand, and neither can work properly without the other.

Take this particular set of circumstances. How were those American threats communicated, if not through diplomatic channels, and how did Col Gaddafi signal his desire to comply with American wishes if not through that same diplomatic process? And did not the Americans then respond very diplomatically to the Colonel's climbdown?

As for that non-American diplomacy which is imagined by some to have persuaded Gol Gaddafi to change his ways, well, this report illustrates that this too would have consisted of threats, diplomatically communicated and responded to, in this case the threat of not allowing such things as centrifuges to journey from China to Libya on ships controlled by those doing the threatening. An unwillingness to make any such threats would have rendered European diplomacy toothless, and hence ineffective. And that seems to be what happened.

But that is not my central point. All I here insist on is the true as opposed to sentimental and ignorant meaning of the word "diplomacy". Diplomacy doesn't mean being nice only. It also means being nasty, while explaining nicely – or perhaps not so nicely – what you want in exchange for being less nasty.

What does anyone think that diplomats actually say?

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Yesterday afternoon I was out and about walking in London, and just before I got to Parliament Square I encountered a demo. It was not raucous or unpleasant. It was nice. It was old people complaining about their council taxes, which obviously I am all in favour of.

Following the example of supreme Samizdatista Perry de Havilland, I now take my DigiCam with me whenever I go a-wandering, so I was able to start snapping. At first it was just nice old people accompanied by nice policemen, with nice buildings in the background, but only very crude signs to say what it was all about. However patience was rewarded, and some of the signs were highly informative.

27.2%. Ouch! Whatever happened to stealth taxes? (Hey hey LBJ, you killed 27.2% more kids today than yesterday, you bad bad person. Not the same ring to it, somehow.)

And this one takes onlookers into the university lecture theatre.

Okay, okay, I'm excited, and I want to know more. How can I follow it up?

Wow, a website. They say, in fact Perry just said it to me in connection with this post, that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I reckon best of all is pictures with words embedded in the pictures, explaining everything. Preferably with an internet link.

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There is an interesting and deeply depressing article in Time Europe about how EUrope is falling behind the USA in the funding of scientific research. European scientists are flocking the research labs in the USA, where the money and conditions are far better.

The article reveals the usual EUro-procedure whenever catching up with America is the agenda.

Question asked by EUropeans: how much money is America spending? Answer: A lot.

Question not asked by EUropeans: where does all that American money come from in the first place? Answer: by having lots of trade, done by tradesmen.

Question also not asked by EUropeans: who is spending all this American money and how? Answer: American research money is, a lot of it, spent by those same tradesmen, who spend it quite sensibly, in ways that produce innovation and profits.

Next question asked by EUropeans: what is to be done? Answer offered by EUropeans: EUropean governments must spend a lot more on research than they do now. Result: EUrope as a whole has even less money for tradesmen to spend on anything, and research in EUrope becomes even less sensible and even more stupid. Total spending doesn't grow very fast, which is just as well, because if EUro-governments spent as much as "America" (i.e. the American government and all those American tradesmen, added together) spends on research, that would bankrupt EUrope completely.

Question: what happens when European tradesmen do get involved in investing in research? Answer:

And what if a scientist tries to cover the shortfall by procuring funds on his own? In some places, that apparently deserves punishment. Michael Krausz, a professor at Hamburg University's Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, accepted research funds from an unnamed drugmaker; German prosecutors are investigating whether he did so in exchange for promotion of its products. Clinic director Dieter Naber, who notes that a 2001 university inquiry cleared Krausz of wrongdoing, wonders how institutes like his are supposed to pay their bills. Industry is an essential source of funding – though in 2000, E.U. firms spent €79 billion less on R and D than U.S. companies – but Germany lacks a clear legal framework for the donor-recipient relationship. "Nearly every contact to industry is being criminalized," Naber says. "Because local governments are bankrupt, we are being asked to procure third-party funding, including funds from industry. But often, when we do so, prosecutors are called in."

Which makes nonsense of an earlier paragraph in the same story:

That message is getting through to Europe's politicians, including policymakers at both the national and E.U. levels. Amid the chronic complaints about bureaucracy and lack of resources, there are signs of progress. In some institutions, public and private, Europeans are stealing a page from the American playbook, offering researchers better funding, better facilities, better support for entrepreneurship and competition, and an overall better environment for world-class science. No single European country has the brain power or the financial clout to challenge America's scientific preeminence, so the E.U. is trying to develop a European Research Area — a "common market" for science — building networks, pooling strengths and raising standards regionwide. As German Chancellor Gerhard Schrõder noted last week when he presented his government's priorities for 2004, "Only if we manage to keep our innovation at the top will we be able to reach a level of prosperity that will allow us to keep our welfare system in today's changing conditions." …

"Building networks", "pooling strengths", "raising standards regionwide". If only "we" can manage to "keep our innovation at the top" (hah!) will we do as well as it says we must in our latest Five Year Plan. And the purpose of all this? To "keep our welfare system". Gerhard Schrõder is not the answer. He is the problem. By recycling this kind of drivel, and by doing so before it gets down to describing the actual problem Time Europe presumably keeps its lines open to these EUro-idiots, to ensure that the supply of idiot EUro-quotes never dries up.

Messages constantly "get through" to EUrocrats. But they don't do anything about them except interpret them as excuses to intensify the processes that were causing the problems referred to in the messages. They are in a hole, in this matter as in so many others. Tell them this, and insofar as their digging dug the hole in the first place, they will just keep right on digging. ("Nearly every contact to industry is being criminalized.") Tell them that the hole is accordingly getting deeper, and they will dig even deeper, even faster. This is what they do.

EUrope is ruled by the equivalent of pre-modern doctors. The last thing you want to do is tell them that you have a problem. If you do that, they will then inflict their solution on you. You can feel the blood being drained out of the EUropean economy, and out of Europe itself, with every year that passes.

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Government-fetishists are always trying to justify their demands for ever-bigger state by claiming that only the state can ride to the rescue of the public to correct what they call 'market failures'.

So, who is going to come riding to the rescue to put this right?

Thousands of parents who had children taken away from them on the evidence of the controversial paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow will not have them returned.

Ministers are to review as many as 5,000 civil cases of families affected over the past 15 years by Prof Meadow's now-discredited theory of Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy. This accused mothers of harming their children to draw attention to themselves.

Many mothers say that they have been vindicated in their insistence that they were wrongly accused and now want their children back. However, Margaret Hodge, the minister for children, has ruled out any widespread return.

Mrs Hodge said that the exact number of civil cases where Prof Meadow's theory had been used to remove children from mothers was unknown, but could run into "thousands or even tens of thousands".

She added, however: "If a miscarriage of justice was made 10 or 15 years ago, what is in the child's interest now? If the adoption order was made on the back of Meadow's evidence and that was 10 years ago, what is in the real interest of the child? If they were taken as babies the only parent they know is the adopted one. It is incredibly difficult. It is a really tough call to make.

"The sort of families that are coming forward are heartbroken families. But if the child was adopted at birth the sensible thing to do is to let it stay. As children's minister my prime interest has to be the interests of the child."

I would be willing to wager that the 'prime interest' of Margaret Hodge is Margaret Hodge.

As for the thousands of parents who may have had their children abducted by the state, well, tough titties. Live with it.

What the government puteth asunder, let no man join together again.