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I wonder what that would be in Latin?

Eamonn Butler on the Adam Smith Institute blog makes some interesting points about so-called consumer watchdog groups set up by the state. On one hand the state privatises because markets work better... and on the other it actually refuses to let markets do what only markets can do.

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Chris Goodman revisits Waller R. Newell important 2001 article Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left and looks at from where the Islamists really draw their inspiration

It is noticeable that when followers of Osama bin Laden film themselves cutting off the heads of non-combatants, they seek to extinguish the still small voice of their conscience by shouting out the name of God ['Allah']. Either they believe Allah to be Satan or they do not believe that God – in the sense of objective goodness - exists. An act of moral goodness does not require you to blank out your conscience.

You could argue that they exist in such a primitive state of mind that they view the taking of life as worship. Indeed you do not have to go back very far in European history before you find people being burnt as offerings, and it is possible that they view exploding a bomb in a crowded night club, market, or bank as an act of devotion, possible but unlikely.

The people who decided to murder over 3,000 citizens of the world in New York came from the most educated strata of their societies. To seek to comprehend their actions with reference to a medieval religion is to neglect the extent to which they are a product of modernity.

The ideology that motivates the followers of Osama bin Laden is derived more from European Romantic Nihilism than it is in Islamic conceptions of God. I think that Waller R. Newell explains it well in an article that is available on the internet called Post-Modern Jihad: What Osama Bin Laden learnt from the Left which I have just read.

Waller R. Newell claims that to understand Osama Bin Laden we ought to remind ourselves of the work of Heidegger, a Nazi who inspired several generations of European leftists. Heidegger is part of a tradition of nihilistic romanticism that can be trace via Nietzsche and Marx and Fichte all the way back to Rousseau. A key theme is the total destruction of existing bourgeois societies and their replacement by a new authentic social order. Heidegger influenced French post-war Left apologists for Stalin and Mao such as Sartre, and via the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon whose book on the Third World The Wretched of the Earth (1961) it influenced Middle Eastern radicals.

Many of the leaders of the Shiite revolution in Iran that deposed the Shah had studied Fanon's brand of Marxism. The Sorbonne educated Ali Shari'at – who many consider to be the intellectual father of the Shiite revolution - translated "The Wretched of the Earth" and Sartre's "Being and Nothingness into Persian." Inspired by Fanon, such figures as Lin Piao, ideologist of the Red Guards in China, and Pol Pot, justified revolution as a therapeutic act by non-Western peoples. Violence exposes the egoism and hedonism of bourgeois societies, and facilitates the creation of a new world based upon collective self-sacrifice. By destroying existing power structures they will regain the dignity lost due to Western oppression and materialism, selfishness, and immorality.

Many elements in the ideology of al Qaeda – see the 1996 Declaration of War Against America by Bin Laden – rely upon the same analysis. While Pol Pot sought to return Cambodia back to Year Zero, Osama bin Laden dreams of returning to the supposed purity of Seventh Century Islam.

Osama bin Laden is poorly educated in Islamic theology. A wealthy playboy in his youth, he fell under the influence of radical Arab intellectuals who blended calls for Marxist revolution with calls for a pure Islamic state. Many, such as Sayyid Qutb in Egypt, a key figure in Islamic fundamentalism, were executed. His followers compared the coming Islamic revolution to the French and Russian revolutions. The influence of Sayyid Qutb's Signposts on the Road (1964) is clearly traceable in pronouncements by Islamic Jihad. The tract by Yasser Arafat's terrorist organization Al Fatah The Revolution and Violence, the Road to Victory has been called "a selective précis of 'The Wretched of the Earth.'

While Al Fatah still used the language of class struggle, the increasingly radical groups that succeeded it blended Fanon with the revolutionary desire to impose an Islamic social order. While Qutb sought internal revolutions, the focus shifted to attacking the external American 'hegemony'. "We declare," says the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah in its "Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World" (1985) "that we are a nation that fears only God" and will not accept "humiliation from America and its allies and the Zionist entity that has usurped the sacred Islamic land."

Waller R. Newell notes that some French intellectuals have been inspired by Islamic terrorists, because they have sought to realise the longed for revolution against American 'hegemony'. He cites the example of Foucault and Derrida, two leading avatars of post-modernism.

Michael Foucault was sent by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera to observe the Iranian revolution and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Like Sartre, who had rhapsodized over the Algerian revolution, Foucault was enthralled, pronouncing Khomeini "a kind of mystic saint." The Frenchman welcomed "Islamic government" as a new form of "political spirituality" that could inspire Western radicals to combat capitalist 'hegemony'.

For Foucault as for Fanon, Hezbollah, and Osama bin Laden, the purpose of violence is not to relieve poverty or adjust borders. Violence is an end in itself. It is exalted by Foucault as "the craving, the taste, the capacity, the possibility of an absolute sacrifice."

Derrida reacted to the collapse of the Soviet Union by calling for a "new international." Whereas the old international was made up of the economically oppressed, a new alliance of “the dispossessed and the marginalized" would unite to combat American led globalization.

Newell notes that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their recent potboiler Empire depict an American dominated global order as the contemporary version of the bourgeoisie, with Islamist terrorism the spearhead of "the post-modern revolution" against "the new imperial order." Why? Because of "its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony."

What the terrorists have in common with that strand of European nihilism, whose consequences in Europe in the C20th were millions of deaths, is belief in the primacy of the radical will, unrestrained by any existing moral teachings. This is the reason why Al Qaeda finds it easy to ignore the teachings of mainstream Islam, which prohibits the deliberate killing of non-combatants; they not only hate their [former] selves, they not only hate the [contemporary] world, their religion is based upon hatred of God.

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So the UN says that Israel's wall is illegal, and demands they take it down.

That would be the same UN that Jacques Chirac is so fond of- the same Jacques Chirac who lately told off President Bush for having opinions about how other parts of the world should run themselves. That would be the President Bush who led the invasion of Iraq which the UN apparently did not approve of very much.

Oh well. Evidently they regard wall-building as a more serious humanitarian issue than Kurd-gassing, children's prisons or helping out organisations that openly state their ambition to be the total destruction of civilisation and all who sail in it.

The court ruling said the barrier could become tantamount to an annexation of Palestinian land, and impeded the Palestinian right to self-rule.

Oh, the horror. Not to mention that-

...some of it juts into the West Bank, cutting Palestinians off from their farmland and dividing some villages.

Whereas, removing the barrier would only redouble terrorist attacks nine times over, thereby impeding the right of four year olds not to have their arms and legs blown off, etc. Which is irrelevant, because it's just a vain claim unsupported by factual evidence;

[Israeli officials] argued it has already saved hundreds of lives since building work began.

Well, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs invents statistics for bombings that never really happened, obviously. No doubt they pay actors to lie around in the road covered with blood so there are pictures for the TV screens, too.

Still, could be worse.

At least nobody who works at The Hague has to live in Israel, right?

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I don't have Sky Sports TV, because then all pretence of doing anything at all with my life would disintegrate. But I am a sports fan, and I am currently watching a game of cricket, on Ceefax.

You'd be surprised how enjoyable this can be. Ceefax is especially good for following limited overs cricket, where each side only has a fixed number of balls to bat against, and where it's all finished and done with in one day. These kinds of games can fluctuate wildly, and just watching the scorecard tick over can be very enjoyable, and fits in well with performing other tasks.

And there is no kind of cricket of which the above is more true than Twenty20 cricket, where each side has only twenty overs (equals 120 deliveries) to make its runs, and where the whole thing is over in one evening. And as if to emphasise the extreme extremity of this extreme form of cricket, the teams are not called boring old Yorkshire or dull Derbyshire. They are called things like the Yorkshire Hystericals and the Derbyshire Desperados.

These games fluctuate particularly wildly, and as if to make that point, one of the star batsmen of my team, the Surrey Psycho-Killers, just got out, for 32, against Kent Velociraptors. Another dismissal now, and Kent would definitely have the whip hand. More Surrey slogging and they should win. Okay, I would rather be there, especially since the Oval, where this game is being played, is only a walk away form my home. But Ceefax will do nicely, and this way I get to write this.

Last week, I swear I witnessed another game of Twenty20 cricket which was reduced, by our characteristically vile and windy weather last week, to each side only having five overs to bat each. Yes. They each had just thirty balls to score their runs. Northants Something Scary Beginning With Ns versus the Gloucester (inevitably) Gladiators, I think it was. Five5 cricket, you might say. But I can find no trace of this game on the internet. Did I dream the whole thing? No I did not. Here it is!

The point of all this is to emphasise how lively cricket seems to be in England just now, despite the fluctuating form of our national side, and in the world generally.

This guy is extremely down on these guys, just now. But however well or badly cricket's mere administrators do, the underlying strength of the game is now a world sporting fact, if only because of the rise and rise of India, in the world generally, and as a great cricketing nation in particular.

Twenty20 cricket is already part of the Asian Games. Next, the Olympics.

David Carr will not he happy.

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I smell blood so i lie and smear chocolate lather on your bare butt after drunks lick a frantic puppy's bitter, delicate love leg but i say he would use weak honey spray as purple breast wax & drive a smooth finger from my sausage to get juice with enormous power with a delirious boy lusting mad feet sweat through thousands of rusty and elaborate meat gardens yet easy you chant only ugly behind raw produce in their beauty ships so why not sit your shiny white apperatus and crush the tiny hairy symphony of void summer death petalness and shake your luscious tongue you repulsive mother of true peach fluff who said the milk never worshiped the pink rock as i did and my fiddle is singing to drool.

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Blogs cannot change the way newspapers are written, but they can change the way people read them

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From Mark Steyn, a crystalline summation of the reasons to fight Islamist terrorism here and now, rather than later:

So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.

The Islamist ideology is profoundly inconsistent with life as we now live it in the West (which includes all that libertarians hold dear, as well as much that we like to decry). Indeed, it is hard to find any aspect of their ideology that is consistent with the West. Because Islamism is inherently exclusionary and expansive (unlike, say, Buddhism), it cannot coexist in the long run with the West, so conflict at some level is inevitable. In a purely cultural and economic contest, the Islamists were doomed, which undoubtedly explains their decision to escalate their struggle with the West to the level of terminal violence.

Steyn notes that demographics indicate that the Islamists are not going to just fade away. Further, unlike crackpot groups in times past, modern transport and communications technology means that Islamists cannot be held at a safe distance from Western societies. So much is historical fact.

Based on what we have seen to date, and setting aside the question of WMDs altogether, I am quite comfortable with the conclusion that the Islamists pose a threat to liberty that cannot be ignored or tolerated. The demonstrated ability and willingness of Islamist terrorists to inflict catastrophic damage on Western societies will eventually lead to either the subjugation of those societies or to their transformation into defensively closed and unfree societies.

I think the question of whether to deal with Islamism on less than a war footing was settled on 9/11/01. The only remaining question is how best to win this war.

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An armed individual who just wishes to be left the hell alone will last
longest under which system?

a. Communism

b. A corrupt Democracy that is racing to embrace Fascism

c. Anarchy

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I always knew there was something fishy about the Spectator. My suspicions were confirmed by the article which surfaced for air last week (but which I have only just got around to reading).

The author is very troubled by the apparently catastrophic collapse in fish stocks:

In a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans, comparable to what Stone Age man did to the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, what 19th-century Americans did to the bison and the passenger pigeon, what 20th-century British and Norwegians did to the great whales, and what people in this century are doing to rainforests and bushmeat. This crisis is caused by overfishing.

The emotionally overdone analogies (integral to any discussion concerning wildlife or the environment it seems) could well tempt me into dismissing his entire thesis. But that would prevent me from making what I regard as a more important point so, for now at least, I am willing to play along with the proposition that fish stocks are, indeed, under some degree of threat. In any event, I have no evidence to the contrary.

But at this point the author of the article and I part company, as the former goes on to lay the blame for impending eco-disaster on the proliferation of celebrity chefs with their apparently insatible appetites for exotic fish dishes. A conclusion so absurd as to be almost worthy of satire.

In common with every other 'opinion former', the author draws on what he regards as an unarguably correct and obvious equation: if some species of fish are dying out it can only be because we greedy, selfish humans are eating too many of them. Not once does it seem to occur to the author that if that equation were true then we surely would have chomped cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens into extinction long ago.

The dwindling numbers of marine animals is a 'tragedy of the commons' arising from the fact that the high seas are insufficiently owned. Apart from some nationalised coastal waters, fishermen are pretty much at liberty to trawl for as much fish as they can lay their hands on anywhere they please, anyhow they please and as often as they like. There is simply nothing to stop them.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they fail to husband or manage the species they live off. There is no incentive for them to do so. However, if stretches of sea were owned in the same way as land is owned then not only would the owners be able to bar trespassers but (as with land farmers) they would have an commercial incentive to find ways to breed as much edible marine life as possible for human consumption and resultant profit. Hence the countless millions of farm animals in the world despite the prodigious rate at which we humans kill and eat them.

Until such times as the oceans are parcelled up into 'watersteads', stocks of marine animals will continue to decline. If you want to save the seas from becoming a watery grave, privatise them now.

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As the sort-of unofficial Samizdata consiglieri, I have occasionally had to advise the editors about the laws that govern them things we can and cannot say. Fortunately, we have managed, thus far, to steer clear of unwelcome attention from the authorities.

However, that task (and my sort-of job) could be about to become a degree of magnitude more difficult:

Inciting religious hatred is to be made a criminal offence under plans unveiled by Home Secretary David Blunkett.

The government failed to get laws introducing the offence passed by Parliament in the wake of the US terror attacks in 2001.

In a speech in London, Mr Blunkett revived the proposals.

He said he was returning to the plans as there was a need to stop people being abused or targeted just because they held a particular religious faith.

As mentioned in the linked article, this proposal was first hastily put forward by David Blunkett as a knee-jerk response to the WTC attacks in 2001 and justified as necessary measure to counter the whirlwind of anti-Islamic hatred he believed was about to blow (but which never actually did).

At the time, an outcry made him back down but once these ideas get into gear it is next to impossible to prevent them trundling forward. They are like cancer; you think you may be in remission only until such time as it comes creeping back.

I have yet to see the draft legislation so I consider this to be an interim condemnation. However, if recent history is anything to go by, then the laws that finally get embossed onto the statute books will be badly drawn, inchoate and so indefinite in scope as to be open to alarmingly wide interpretation by a now thoroughly politicised police force and judiciary.

Nor can we expect enforcement to be anything like fair (insofar as I am able to use that word at all in this context). Again, precedent indicates that it will range from selective to chaotic with the really nasty creatures going unscathed while the unlucky and politically easy targets have the book the thrown at them.

As much as anyone, I love to lampoon the 'PC' culture but I don't much feel like laughing anymore. Current public discourse is already sufficiently timid and amaemic without further legal mechanisms designed to lock up our minds and sterilise our conversations. I do worry that the effect of all this will be that people eventually turn inwards to small groups of family and trusted friends, eschewing any sort of public life or discussion altogether for fear that it is just too risky.

I realise that some may find these concerns a little overwrought but just as it takes time to construct the machinery of public control, so it takes time for the effects of that control to manifest themselves and a nation where people have to speak in whispers or codes is a despotic and unpleasant one regardless of how bouyant the economy may be.

This is not what the future should be.

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The wife of British footballer, Ray Parlour (of Arsenal) has won a landmark court award giving her an unprecedented right to take half of his future wage earnings. Already comments are flying out to the effect that this ruling makes a mockery of marriage arrangements, giving further amunition to gold-digging spouses with an eye on their partner's wealth.

I do not know about the full particulars of the Parlour case - for all I know the ex-Mrs P. may have justice on her side - but developments like this make me fear for the future of marriage. Rulings like this give out a bad message, telling people that marriage is even more of a lottery than before and that a man or woman who hit difficulties in their relationship can endure heavy demands on their income for years to come. Given the pattern of child custody arrangements after divorce, I can predict that most of such heavy wage demands will be borne by men (though women could also be affected if they were divorced from a former "house husband").

I would like to know what those with legal knowledge think about this ruling. Does it really fundamentally alter the marriage contract, and will it put potential super-high earners off marriage? What is for sure is that pre-nuptial agreements currently have no legal standing in Britain, as they do in some other countries, such as the United States.

In my view, couples should be able to make whatever kind of marriage agreements that suit them best, such as pre-nups and the rest, and the State should be kicked out of the field. Another part of our life overdue, I feel, for a dose of Thatcherite privatisation.

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On August 17, 1980, a woman named Lindy Chamberlain reported to the police that her nine week old baby daughter Azaria had been taken by a dingo (ie a wild dog) from the tent where she and her family had been holidaying in a campsite near Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia's Northern Territory.

The events of the resulting Azaria Chamberlain case, in which Chamberlain was ultimately convicted of the murder of her daughter, and the conviction was later quashed after the forensic evidence was completely discredited, are epochal and notorious in the country's psyche. There are occasional media and news events when a whole nation is watching. What they are and will be is sometimes hard to predict, and it's sometimes hard to tell just why everybody is watching, but this was one of those cases where people were watching because of the bizarre quality of the case and the luridness of the allegations. And as nothing has ever really been settled, the case has lingered on in the media in the 24 years since. Despite various claims, most people (including myself) have been of the belief that we would never see definite evidence as to exactly what happened.

At least, not until this week. As it happens, a story that has been told this week that may or may not be true (although once some excavations have taken place we will know), but which is almost as strange as the original events, and which would (if true) explain all the facts. Although maybe it will be true and we still won't have any definite proor, because four of the five people involved are dead, including those who would know the location of the body. So perhaps an old man has just made up a story.

But first, the background.

After Mrs Chamberlain reported the loss of her baby to the police, a huge search took place, but the body of baby Azaria was never found. However, some of the baby's clothes, in particular the jump-suit that she had been wearing at the time of the attack, was found. At a subsequent inquest, it was determined that in the state it was in, the suit could not have been ripped off the baby by the dingo, and that it would have had to have been removed by a person. The inquest came to the curious conclusion that the baby had been taken and killed by a dingo, and that the body had been later disposed of "by person or persons unknown".

This was a curious and unsatisfactory finding, and in the belief that additional evidence had been found, the relevant coroner's office reopened the case later that year, and a second inquest took place. Evidence was presented that bloodstains had been found on the floor of the Chamberlain's car, and that the car had been used to dispose of the body after Lindy Chamberlain had killed her own daughter. It was ultimatelly ruled that sufficient evidence had been found for a prosecution, and in 1982 Lindy Chamberlain was put on trial for murder.

At this point, all kinds of allegations flew around Australia. Michael Chamberlain was a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which was not a religion most Australians knew much about, and strange stories went around about blood rituals and other goings on in this in fact fairly inoffensive church. Lindy Chamberlain had been calm and collected after losing her baby, and had later sold her story to a women's magazine, which somehow wasn't "appropriate behaviour" in the circumstances. (Hysterics and crying would presumably have been better). In any event, the case went to trial, and Lindy Chamberlaiin was convicted of murder, and spent four years in prison.

However, as the years went on, it became clearer and clearer that the evidence against her (which had been mostly circumstantial in the first place) was weak. There was a question of motive, and there was no body, and there were obvious defences that were actually not used in the trial but one thinks would have been if the Chamberlains were lying. ("So what if there was blood in the car. Azaria had a nose bleed on the way to the camp site"). Eventually, the forensic lab that had supposedly identified the blood was demonstated to be completely incompetent and it seems now more likely that it was red paint (yes, really). Azaria Chamberlain was released from prison, and evntually her conviction was overturned and she was paid compensation. Her marriage to Michael Chamberlain collapsed at some point, but since then she has remarried and got on with her life.

And that is where the case has rested for the more than a decade. In Australia the story has come up in the media from time to time. Every now and then some suggestion as to what happens will come up, or there will be a report of a dingo attacking another child (but being fended of by the child's parents) or similar, strengthening people's beliefs that Lindy Chamberlain's story of the dingo was true. That is certainly my own feeling. At the time of the trial (I was 13 at the time) I professed to not caring, as a reaction against the extent of the media coverage, and I didn't pay enough attention. A few years later I came round to the view that I didn't know what had happened but that Lindy Chamberlain had clearly been denied her presumption of innocence, and the case against her had not been proved beyond reasonable doubt. I few years after that I discovered that I in fact completely believed her, and that I believed that the baby had been taken by a dingo (as I still do).

In 1988 a film was made about the case, directed by an Australian but starring an American (Meryl Streep) and produced by a British company, and the case became well known around the world. Not in the all encompassing OJ sense it was known in Australia, but as one of those things that people might know about Australia. "Oh, there was that story about the baby and the dingo". (For some reason, the even stranger story that Australia once lost a serving Prime Minister who went swimming and was never seen again is less well known). The story has sort of worked its way into global popular culture. There have been references to it in The Simpsons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and various other places.

Which was where we were this week. Australia was going through one of its periods where it remembered the incident. A second dramatisation of the story has been made for Australian television, this one starring Miranda Otto (most famous internationally for playing Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings but very well known on Australian television in Australian movies prior to that). A television program had coaxed Lindy Chamberlain into doing an interview for what is believed to be a substanial sum of money. And then this week the extraordinary story came out. A 78 year old man from Melbourne named Frank Cole has stated that he and four friends were shooting for dogmeat at Uluru on August 17, 1980. One of them shot a dingo, and discovered the body of a human baby in its mouth. They were shocked by this, but were reluctant to go to the police, because shooting (and having a dog) in a National Park was illegal.

The friends separated, and drove back to Melbourne, and Mr Cole states that he does not know what happened to the body. One of his friends may have buried it anywhere between Uluru and Melbourne, which is a very long way. There is some thought that one of his friends may have buried it in his back yard in Melbourne. It may be that excavations will take place shortly to determine if Azaria's remains are there. Certainly the rest of the story will be investigated, and Mr Cole and his late friends will no doubt be investigated to see if the rest of the story matches, if they were indeed at Uluru at that time, and if perhaps the location of the remains of the body can be determined.

If indeed the story is true. It could be a complete fabrication. In combination with the dingo story in the first place it is just so weird that one almost thinks it is true. And if it is true, Mr Cole and his friends allowed a tremendous injustice to take place, which they could have prevented at any time by coming clean about their story.

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I spend a lot of my time writing a sports minded blog, Ubersportingpundit, which tries to do to sports what Samizdata.net does for economics and politics. Indeed, many of the contributors to this blog also contribute to Ubersportingpundit.

Ubersportingpundit covers the various Australian football codes, cricket, rugby, and UK football. However, I would like to 'beef up' the UK football coverage for the coming season. With this in mind, I'd like to invite Samizdata.net readers who have strong views about football and the willingness to express them on at least a weekly basis the opportunity to write for Ubersportingpundit.

I'm not looking for someone to write match reports on Aston Villa vs Charlton Atheletic; I'm more interested in someone writing about David O'Leary's strategy to take Villa forward on a tight budget and how Alan Curbishley intends to fill the hole left by the sale of Shane Parker to Chelsea.

I am also looking for another cricket correspondent, preferably someone of South Asian background, who will give a different view to the Anglo-Australian cricket coverage that Ubersportingpundit currently supplies. Residence does not matter, but a willingness to cover India, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi cricket issues does.

If you are interested, please drop an email to 'scott' at 'ubersportingpundit.com'. Renumeration is at Samizdata.net rates. (i.e., the goodwill and esteem of the editors!)

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The world's largest Muslim nation went to the polls on Monday in its first ever direct elections for President, in a difficult climate. The three main candidates were incumbent President Megawati Sukarnoputri (the daughter of Indonesia's founding President), General Wiranto, the candidate of the Golkar Party, which was the political vehical of long serving President Suharto, and also General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a late entrant who had been President Sukarnoputri's Minister for Security until he resigned earlier this year.

It is hard to tell what the actual issues in the campaign were. To grossly oversimplify, President Megawati Sukarnoputri is offering more of the same corrupt, inept and incoherent governance, while General Wiranto seemed to be campaigning on a platform of corrupt, inept and repressive governance. General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's platform of trying to have somewhat less corruption and incoherence in government has proved to be more popular, although not popular enough to get an absolute majority.

So what happens now is that General Yudhoyono and the second placed candidate will fight another run-off election on September 20.

What is really pleasing from a western point of view is that it has been an orderly and fair election, and also, Islamic fundamentalism is not a big issue in Indonesian politics. In a nation of this size, there's always going to be the extremist fringe, but this election helps demonstrate that extremism is not a vote-winner in Indonesia. As an Australian, I personally am relieved to see this.

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The official Iranian delegation to the "Crans Montana Forum" in Switzerland were rather surprised by the special appearance of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran. His speech on the "Risks of Doing Business with the Islamic Republic" are available in their entirety on the SMCCDI website.

This small sample will give you some idea how blunt the Prince was in his takedown of the mullahcracy:

Second, my message to Western governments is to demonstrate their unity against the Islamic Republic's policies in a less mistakable and much more pointed manner. Diluted signals are likely to lead to the nuclearization of the world's foremost terrorist state. I fear that, at some point, a limited military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities may become inevitable, giving the regime an excuse to fan a nationalist reaction. Considering the fact that Iranians, particularly the young generation, favor the West more than anywhere else in the Islamic world, the military option will be the most unfortunate. It will damage the popular base and natural anchor of an increasingly connected globe in the Islamic world, an outcome that serves no one's interest but the Islamic Republic."

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Many of the DOD press conference transcripts are yawn inducing... but not this one. On June 16th, Lieutenant General Thomas F. Metz, Commander Multi-National Forces-Corp Iraq gave one of the most candid and informative presentations I have yet seen.

This is good stuff. Read and enjoy.

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I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the Beeb's latest gaseous emanation regarding global warming.

Now, I am no climate scientist, but I harbor a suspicion that maybe, just maybe, one factor impacting on the Earth's climate just might be - now, I'm just throwing this out - the sun. I find discussion of the sun's impact on global weather to be oddly absent from the reams of paper speculating on how minute variations in various gases here on earth may affect climate, rather like speculating on how adjusting the air pressure in your tires a few ounces might affect fuel efficiency without ever considering the, well, fuel you are putting in the tank.

I have noted the occasional article exploring the correlation between temperature variations and solar activity, and so I read this with interest:

Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.

They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.

However, the scientists made sure that the reigning anti-materialist orthodoxy of those providing their grants was not called into question by these merely scientific observations, scurrying to observe:

This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.

and

This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.

The notion that non-human forces might occasionally affect the Earth's weather can not quite be denied:

Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, a trend that has accelerated in the past century, just at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer.

The data suggests that changing solar activity is influencing in some way the global climate causing the world to get warmer.

but of course if this truth were recognized then it would quite knock the props out from under the latest rush to regulate under the banner of Kyoto and global warming. Even when evidence of the obvious - that the sun's output is what really controls global temperature, and that global temperature swings regardless of human activity - is presented, it must be spun so that human agency, and thus the need for regulation, is paramount.

Laugh or cry? I can not quite decide.

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So the loathesome (second post down) John "interesting" Kerry has chosen John "even less interesting" Edwards as his running mate. This is obviously a bad move as people will confuse them, and maybe even vote for someone else called John Nondescriptname instead, but on the other hand, their policies seem to be mostly about saying whatever crowd-pleaser pops into their heads at the time, so perhaps it is a deliberate ploy to make people so confused they can't keep up with all the turnarounds, and surrender their powers of reasoning altogether (unless that happened already).

Here are some of the things they said about each other in the past. Notice the recurrence of the word "different". Now see if you can spot which statement belongs to which John. Answers on Fox News.

[John's policies would run the country] deeper and deeper into deficit.

This is the same old Washington talk that people have been listening to for decades.

I think he's said some different things at different points in time … So I think there's been some inconsistency.

[John] and I have very different positions on the issue of trade

This one is easy:

No. No. Final. I don't want to be vice president. I'm running for president.

And my personal favourite (remember, John is criticising John here)...

I think that the world is looking for leadership that is tested and sure. And I think that George Bush has proven that this is not a time for inexperience in the White House.

How very unintentionally right he is.

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I recently wrote about Belinda Stronach's Conservative Party candidacy in Canada. Reader Jim Bennett reports:

"Don't know if you noticed, but Belinda Stronach did win her seat in Canada. She'll probably be shadow International Trade minister -- a good place for her."

Canada could use the touch of an Iron Lady. It will be interesting to see if Belinda can grow enough to fill those shoes.

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I am still catching up with my email backlog after a week in which my server was 'under attack' by a storm of spam. High on my 'must read' list are the transcripts of the various DOD press briefings. I found a gem in this briefing from Saturday, given by Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, Deputy Director for Coalition Operations; and Dan Senor, Senior Adviser, CPA. In the words of Dan Senor:

"And if you look at where we are now, unemployment is about a third of where it was when we arrived. There's an unbelievably liberalized economy here, free trade, no -- outside of natural resources, no limits on foreign investment, tax rates capped, personal income tax and corporate income tax rates capped at 15 percent provides in the long run a very foreign investment friendly environment for Iraq, which is good, while we are in the midst of deploying some $18 billion just from the United States alone, not to include other commitments of the international community. Independent central bank."

Virtually anyone who reads Samizdata would understand tax rates this low necessarily lead to economic growth and the betterment of all citizens.

Could we perhaps borrow Paul Bremer for a year or two? I believe he may be in need of a job...

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Samizdata.net will probably be moving away from Moveable Type and to Expression Engine some time in the not too distant future. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has made this move with their own blog or who has experience using Expression Engine.

It has been obvious to us for a while that MT is groaning under the weight of Samizdata.net (the comments are agonisingly slow for example) and a full site rebuild now takes about 4 hours! We really do need to move on to something better!

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Some readers will have observed that I fight an often lonely battle against the forces of the militant lesbian, anti-humanist, fascist, tree-hugging puritan conspiracy to wipe out masculinity. We know as a scientific fact that the best lovers are larger men. I have previously commented on the sexual inadequacy of skinny types.

It is therefore clear that the current obesity obsession in this country is part of a nefarious conspiracy aimed at wiping out Great Britain. Was Henry VIII skinny? Did Winston Churchill eat tofu?

Help is at hand in the form of a marvelous new book Eat What you Want and Die Like a Man: The World's Unhealthiest Cookbook. The reason for this masterpiece is set out in the Foreword:

I wrote this book because I was tired of being told what to eat. I was tired of the Food Pyramid and vegetable oil and small food. I was tired of pinch-faced little people who actually got angry when I talked about lard and egg yolks. I felt it was time for a backlash. Time to celebrate things like bacon grease and heavy cream. Don't we have better things to feel guilty about? Like the resurgence of velour?

This is not a serious cookery book, says the author. No doubt he could be sued by the pinch-faced little people.

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This post is one of my articles that explains how it is possible to screw an industry up beyond words with excessive regulation, and the consequences of doing so can occur in unexpected places. The story is in this case about how government attempted to protect the BBC and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Rupert Murdoch. Next week, I shall post a similar history of the regulation or television in Australia, which explains how government attempted to give enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer, and ended up giving enormous quasi-monopolistic powers to Kerry Packer.

Until a week and a half ago, British people were watching the European Championship football championship between the national teams of the best footballing countries of Europe, the English in the hope that England would win the tournament, and the Scottish in the hope that England would be eliminated early and embarassingly. Neither of these things happened: England played decently but not spectacularly and were eliminated on penalties in the quarter finals. If England had stayed in the tournament the number of cross of St George flags attached to people's cars in this country would have steadily increased, it would have been impossible to go into a pub and had a discussion of anything else, national euphoria may have even broken out and, sady, there would have been a somewhat unpleasant yob element on the streets shortly after closing time. As an Australian, I think I would have found that (and the fact that the English would have been gloating for years if not decades) a bit much, so I am glad that it didn't happen. Instead, I watched the rest of the tournament (which finished yesterday evening) with interest both on television at home and in pubs with much smaller crowds than would have been the case if England were still participating. The story of the tournament was that the large heavyweight countries of Europe were eliminated relatively early, and the teams from the smaller countries excelled themselves.

In yesterday's final the host nation Portugal (regarded as a good side from before the start of the tournament, although not one of the extreme favourites to win it) took on Greece (who at the start of the tournament were absolute rank outsiders who most people would not have picked to win a match let alone the tournament). And as it happened, Greece won a perhaps a little dull and defensive (but with lots of heart) 1-0 victory, and a team that had never won a match in the finals of either the European Championship or the World Cup before are now champions of Europe. (The slightly desperate question of whether the Olympic stadium in Athens will be complete in time for the start of the Games in six weeks now has the added question of whether the Greeks will have stopped partying by then. I was in Sydney four years ago for the 2000 games, and at this point we were just coming to grips with the fact that the games were almost upon us. We didn't really start partying until the games actually started.

It was not hard to find a place to watch yesterday's final, because it was on two terrestrial television channels (licence fee funded BBC1 and advertising funded ITV1) simultaneously as well as satellite channel Eurosport. This followed what happened earlier in the tournament, which is that the matches have been divided evenly between the two broadcasters. Half the matches were on the BBC, and the other half on ITV, and who got to show which matches was decided more or less randomly. Neither network has been able to gain an advantage over the other by advertising itself as "The Euro 2004 channel" or anything like that.

This may seem curious. Why is what should be one of the biggest sporting events of the year on two television stations simultaneously? Given that lots and lots of people are likely to want to watch it (or would have if England were playing) would it not be of lots of value to advertisers and therefore wouldn't the organisers of the tournament want to make huge amounts of money by auctioning the television rights to the highest bidder.

Well, actually no.

Well, actually probably yes, but this is not permitted.

You see, the European Championship is what is known as a "listed" event under the laws that govern British television. There is a list of events that subscription television channels - satellite and cable - are not allowed to bid for. In the interests of the nation, or of small boys living in deprived areas of Liverpool whose parents cannot or will not pay for satellite television, or perhaps in the interests of self-righteous, patronising and meddlesome bureaucrats, or in the interests of members of the House of Lord's who think it is much too declasse to have cable, or something, these events are only allowed to be on terrestrial television that is free to watch (after you have paid £120 a year that you must pay to the BBC to watch television, even if you want to watch some other channel or just a couple of DVDs at home).

Most sporting events on British television are no longer regulated like this. Most events (including virtually all football between club teams) are not listed, and of these a huge portion are on Rupert Murdoch's subscription Sky Sports channels. The remainder are on the private terrestrial channels ITV1 and Channel 5, with a few on the BBC and a few on the commercially funded but state owned Channel 4. Some would argue that this proves the need for the "listing" of events of national importance. If the list did not exist, these events would end up on satellite and cable television too, and that would be bad.

Disregarding the question of whether there is such a thing as a sporting event of national importance, and disregarding the fact that this law basically amounts to the theft by the state of whatever money the organisers of the sporting events could have got for the rights if they had sold them to the highest bidder, this is probably true. If Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB were allowed to bid for the exclusive rights to the European Championship, Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, the Olympic games and the like, they probably would, and even big events like this probably would would end up on satellite television exclusively. Supporters of the status quo would probably take this concession from me as a concession that the status quo is good, and is necessary. But they would be wrong.

On the other hand, our readers in the US are probably just wondering whether what I have just said is really true, because the most important sporting events in the US generally do not end up on subscription only television. The Super Bowl and the World Series and the NBA finals and the Olympic Games etc generally end up on one of the free to air networks, as they are of more value to networks who want to sell advertising than to networks who want to sell subscriptions. Is this not so in Britain, and if not, why not?

Well, the answer is no, this not so in Britain. As to why not, that is a long story, which isn't going to stop me from telling it.

Until the mid 1950s, the BBC had a monopoly on television in the UK. The establishment at the time thought that this new medium was such a dangerous and potentially powerful medium that if commercial interests had access to it, they would use it to vulgarise the nation, and therefore it was necessary for people like them to control it and control what people watched. So came the peculiar tradition of the BBC, which was traditionally run by people who considered them too good for the medium they were working for, but did it because as they saw it somebody had to in order to protect the nation from itself. And thus started the BBCs tradition of relentlessly middlebrow programming (that was recycled for Americans and shown on "Masterpiece theatre) for "people like us" (or at least people who aspired to be like us) mixed in with rather ghastly game shows and soap operas for people not like us. (Thankfully, these seldom make it out of the country).

In any event, by the mid 1950s it was clear that there was a problem with this model: not that the BBC had a monopoly on programming (this was generally seen as a good thing) but that there was no television advertising in Britain. You see, this new form of advertising had come into being in other countries, and businesses wanted to be able to advertise on television. (Radio advertising was considered much less important, and as a consequence Britain had no legal radio stations other than the BBC until 1972, something that I find mindboggling). After a few years of arguing over this, the problem was eventually solved by the creation of a new channel named ITV in 1955, to predictions of civilizational collapse by certain parts of the establishment. This new station was funded by advertising, and was in theory owned by private companies, but with a really strange caveat, which was that the owners of the network essentially did not control their own programming. Everything that could be done to prevent the owners of the new channel from gaining any power, and as a consequence a television network was created with an astonishingly bizarre corporate structure.

The United Kingdom was divided up into 14 pieces, and a different company was required to own the ITV franchise in each region. London, Manchester, and Birmingham were considered too big to allow one company to have the franchise, so different companies got to broadcast depending on the day of the week (and later also the time of day). Economies of scale and marketing realities meant that the different regional companies would show essentially the same programming as each other, but an extensive process of negotiation was necessary to decide precisely which of the individual companies got to provide how much programming to the network. The market could have decided this, but this was not allowed, and a government set up bureaucracy came into existence to decide just who got access to how much of the schedule. News was considered much too important for the same companies that theoretically controlled the rest of the programming, and yet another company (ITN) was created to provide news for the ITV companies. This was required to be "impartial" and another set of bureaucrats got to judge this. (As an aside, this rule still exists for all television news transmitted in the UK, and the successor to this body recently ruled that America's Fox News, which is shown on satellite television, is not "impartial" and it may theoretically therefore be illegal to broadcast it in the UK. But I digress). I government appointed bureaucracy named the Independent Television Authority (ITA,), later the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and later still the Independent Television Commission (ITC), was set up to regulate the new station.

Now, the licenses to operate the pieces of this new television network were not granted in perpetuity. They came up for renewal ever few years, at intervals that have varied over the decades. At the end of of a franchise period the bureaucrats of the ITA got to decide whether the operators of a licence had satisfied something called a "quality threshold". If the programming did not satisfy the bureaucrats views of what comprised quality, then the ITA could direct the franchise operator to change its programming, or conceivably could awrd the licence to someone else. And over the years this happened a few times.

And this created exactly what was intended. Commercial television came into being, and advertisers were able to advertise on television. And what all these regulations added up to was that a new bureaucracy had been set up by the government to control the programming of this new commercial networks. Commercial ownership of the network was fragmented. The owners had no certainty that they would control their piece of the network in future, and different regional owners were not allowed to merge with each other. A substantial portion of the profits of the networks (over and above normal taxes) had to be paid to the state, which kept the network poor.

Which is where we get back to the question of sporting rights. The concept of a "listed" event is not actually a new one. It actually came into being at the same time commercial television came into being in 1955. At that point we had two sets of bureaucrats, one running the BBC and the other running ITV. Actually competing for the rights to show things like sport was the sort of thing that these bureaucrats found unseemly. And it could lead to money that could be spent on programming or given to shareholders or the government being given to other people, such as sports administrators. The bureaucrats found it better to divide the rights for such events up between themselves, in much the same way that the rulers of Europe divided up the African continent by drawing lines on a map in Berlin in 1884. Some events (eg Wimbledon) were left to the BBC, but most events were divided up the way in which the European Championship football were divided up. "Listing" was the legal justification for this. A "listed" event could not sell exclusive rights to only one television network, but had to share them. Half the games were given to one network and the other half to the other. This suited the BBC - it was able to spend licence fee money on "important" programming and didn't have to justify doing things like giving licence fee (ie tax) money to sporting bodies - and it suited ITV, which got a share of the television rights to many sporting events without actually having to pay any significant amount of money for them. And while the BBC and ITV did sort of compete with each other for audiences, it was a strange game they played, becasue ITV had 100% of TV advertising revenues.

And that is how things remained until the 1980s. The BBC got a second national television channel in 1967, but there was a gentleman's agreement that this would not produce programming aimed at mass market audiences. Things changed a little with the introducation of Channel 4, a second advertising funded channel, in 1982, but even this was subject to a manner of gentleman's agreements and regulations. For one thing, Channel 4 was (and is) state owned, with a charter declaring that it is to provide programming of interest to audiences less well served by the traditional channels. And again there were bureaucratic stretches designed to prevent it competing with ITV for advertising in any serious way. Essentially Channel 4's budget was set by bureaucrats, and ITV was then put in charge of selling Channel 4's advertising. Once Channel 4's budget had been recouped, ITV got to keep the remainder. (That's right. If Channel 4 managed too boost its share of television advertising revenue at the expense of ITV, it was rewarded by being forced to give the additional money to ITV).

In terms of sport, this had essentially no impact. Channel 4 did dabble in odd American sports like baseball and foreign football a bit, but that was all. Sport remained largely on ITV and the BBC, which between them provided a pretty feeble selection of sporting events, and with production values that demonstrated a level of incompetence that was hysterically funny unless you were actually trying to follow the sport. (It was not uncommon in the 1980s for television networks in Australia to take the pictures from the BBC or ITV and provide their own commentary. I have one or two recollections of this commentary consisting largely of apologies for the poor quality of the pictures).

Finally, in the late 1980s, things started to change. They were bound to. Internationally (at least outside America) sporting bodies had failed to properly take advantage of television prior to about 1980, but at this point they started to realise that they had considerable bargaining power. Worldwide, the number of television channels available was increasing, and things were changing for there being a limited number of television channels for which it was a privilege for a sport to get its programming on one of them to a world where there were many many channels and only limited audiences. Much of the world had had the number of channels artificially reduced from what was technically possible as was done in the UK, but this was not sustainable, however tried the rent seekers and the bureaucrats would try to maintain the status quo. And in the UK, the rent seekers and the bureaucrats did at least have an enemy. For television rights were valuable, everybody was starting to realise this, and sporting bodies were not going to put up with receiving a pittance for their valuable rights for much longer. And in any event, in Britain the status quo had an enemy.

And that enemy was of course Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher loathed the BBC almost as much as I do, but she was never really willing to take on the status quo. The political fallout from doing so was simply too great, and the number of people in Middle England who were willing to declare that "Britain has the best television in the world" as if it was something said by God to Moses on Mount Sinai was simply too great. (Even a decade ago you heard this a lot, although I haven't heard it recently). What Mrs Thatcher was willing to do was to give Rupert Murdoch a relatively clear run to get subscription satellite television off the ground in Britain. Different regulatory decisions in the distant past had prevented Britain from getting cable television in the way that America did, and by the late 1980s a national platform for subscription satellite television was viable.

Whereas in America the companies that created premium cable television channels and the companies that owned the cable networks themselves were largely different from each other, in Britain Rupert Murdoch was able to create a system that owned most of the principal premium channels and the (satellite distribution system as well. (Yes, there were and are some companies in the US involved in both businesses, but it was usually the case that if you were watching cable television the company that owned the channel you were watching was different from the company that owned the cable network). Murdoch and has BSkyB company was able to package his channels in such a way that he maximised his revenues by forcing people to pay for his premium channels, even if they had minority tastes and didn't really want them (And he was willing to gamble his whole empire on his ability to dominate subscription television in the UK, coming close to bankruptcy in the credit crunch of 1991). And he quite correctly figured out that there was a market for far more sport (particularly football) than was being shown on television, especially if production values were improved dramatically.

Prior to 1990, the amount of club football that had been shown live on British television was quite small, but BSkyB changed this for people who were willing to pay for it. BSkyB paid unheard of sums for the rights to the new Premiership of the top 20 clubs, and provided viewers with several live matches a week. The gamble paid off spectacularly, and by the mid 1990s BSkyB was worth many billions of pounds, was immensely rich, and was able to outbid all other television networks in the UK for any sporting rights it was legally permitted to buy. And it did so.

Meanwhile, things grew worse for ITV. While Mrs Thatcher was not willing to take on the BBC in any substantial way, she did attempt to try to turn ITV into a company that obeyed something like market rules. She proposed that rather than being required to satisfy a spurious "quality threshold" to retain their licences, companies should be simply given the right to bid for the licences once in a while and the licence would be given to the highest bidder. This is one of those arrangements that Treasury likes because it brings in revenue, but for which isn't ideal for competition, because people will pay more for a monopoly.

However, by the time this came into practice things got worse, because politicians kept amending and complicating the new process (particularly after Mrs Thatcher lost office in 1990) and the auction that took place in 1993 ended up applying both a financial auction at the same time as a "quality threshold" question. Companies were forced to bid large amounts of money for the quasi-monopoly licences, because they were sure to lose their licences if they didn't, but they could still be disqualified almost arbitrarily if bureaucrats didn't like them. This left us with an ITV that was owned by companies that had a lot of debt, but which still didn't especially control its own destiny.

However, there were other things in the 1993 change in the law that did lead to greater competition. Channel 4 was still state owned, but was now entirely independent of ITV, and was allowed to keep the revenues from its own advertising. Since then it has behaved far more like a normal company than it could before. And the 1993 bill also allowed some mergers between regional ITV companies.

By 1995 BSkyB was an enormous success, and the terrestrial sector and even the bureaucrats that ran it knew that their real enemy was BSkyB and Rupert Murdoch. It became clear that Britain had no commercial television companies that could compete in a globalised market, due to the fact that regulation for the previous 40 years had been specifically designed to prevent them from being able to compete. In addition, many of the ITV companies had bid so much in the previous round of franchise auctions that they could barely afford to service their debt. To bail them out, the regulation of ITV was relaxed even further, the merger rules were relaxed further, and no government has felt the need for any further "quality threshold" tests since then (although they are technically still on the books). This process culminated this year with all the major ITV companies finally merging into a single company.

This was expensive and time consuming, and the resulting ITV plc has lots of debt and little capital, particularly after an expensive attempt four or five years ago in which the two largest ITV campanies attempted to take on BSkyB at its own game by buying sporting rights and selling subscriptions to a sports channel that eventually foundered due to the fact that BSkyB had the rights to the most popular events already, that BSkyB had much wider distribution, and that ITV had lousy management and BSkyB had outstandingly good management, it means that the resuliting ITV Inc. has large quantities of debt and a limited ability to compete.

But, finally, ITV has a fairly sensible ownership structure, (mostly) has control of its own programming, is listed on the stockmarket as a single company, and is generally the sort of television company that exists in fairly competitive markets. Except that it is broke. On the other hand, given that ITV had had 50 years of regulation that was specifically designed to keep it broke, to contol its programming, and to prevent it from getting decent management, none of this is perhaps surprising. On the final merger into a single company earlier this years, institutional investors insisted on sacking the mangament. I do sympathise, but it didn't really help. The legacy of 50 years is too much.

One other change occurred in British terrestrial television in the 1990s. In 1997, a fifth terrestrial station was finally launched in the UK. This was from the start regulated in an entirely sane way. The licence was given to a single company for the whole country, with relatively few restriction on its programming. However, it was a new channel started up with relatively little capital that had to establish an audience, and its programming was on the whole fairly "cheap and cheerful". Channel 5 is profitable, and great for that portion of the viewing audience that wants to watch programs late at night in which people wear relatively few clothes, but it presently lacks the money to really compete for mass audiences.

Which is where we come back to the original question. Why would Rupert Murdoch's satellite channels win the rights to all the listed sporting events if the rights were sold on the open market? The reason is simply that BSkyB is very rich, and the private free to air terrestrial networks are very poor. Whereas in the US the privately owned free to air networks are rich and can more than compete in an auction for rights, in the UK BSkyB will always win. The reason why the private free to air terrestrial networks are very poor is that 50 years of regulation designed largely to prevent them competing with the BBC and operating in an open market has kept them poor, and it did so quite deliberately. In the end, this regulation backfired, which is why Rupert Murdoch and satellite television gained the immense power that it has in Britain today.

From time to time the European Competition Commissioner looks at the immense pile of television rights held by BSkyB and suggests that it would be good if they weren't all in the hands of one company. However, auctions always end up the same way, with BSkyB winning everything it wants. Talk of compeition law being applied comes up, but sporting bodies then become unhappy. For the problem is that BSkyB is the only company with any money. Not so much can really be done.

There is only one way in which the terrestrial networks will ever be able to compete with BSkyB in these sorts of situations, and that is if one or both of the two privately owned networks ITV and Channel 5 is bought by a new owner with very deep pockets. This means a foreign media conglomerate. As it happens, Britain was compelled by EU law to open up ownership of its media to investors from anywhere in the EU. Britain decided that if Germans and Greeks were allowed to own its terrestrial TV stations, then there was nothing wrong with them being owned by Americans or Brazilians either, and the law was changed last year to remove most foreign ownership restrictions. Therefore, it is now possible for an American media conglomerate to buy a British television station, recapitalise it, and then compete in a big way.

At least it is in theory. But in practice it is not going to happen in the short term. American conglomerates have other things to do with their money, and entering the British market would mean competing with Rupert Murdoch, very expensively. And nobody really wants to do that.

So for now it we watch premium sport on BSkyB most of the time, except for the occasional listed event that is shared between the BBC and ITV. And even these are declining in number, for sports are being slowly removed from the list, due to the fact that administrators and athletes want the money. And one tends to think that the listing system wouldn't stand up in court if anyone really wanted to contest it.

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On Saturday afternoon, a gorgeous looking Russian seventeen-year-old called Maria Sharapova won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title, and the media have been in raptures ever since. Personally I was enraptured ever since she won her quarter final against a Japanese lady. But when Sharapova beat Serena Williams in the final, the world really noticed.

When Sharapova plays, she looks like a Bond girl. When she has won, she immediately becomes a giggly American schoolgirl. She is, from the female gorgeousness point of view, the biggest thing in tennis since the now somewhat ageing Anna Kournikova. Plus, she can really play. (Kournikova never won Wimbledon, or anything else big that I recall. Not that I ever cared.)

So, I was not surprised when our very busy-with-other-things but still very caring and concerned editorial supremo asked me last night to dash off a posting about the lovely Maria, so that we could have a picture of her up here.

However, underneath all the drooling from the likes of me and Perry, there is a more serious story here, which is why it took me a bit longer to write this than I promised last night. Yes, Sharapova is gorgeousness personified, and long may it last. But there is more going on than this.

I can imagine some Americans regretting that their champion, Serena Williams, got beaten by a Russian. Yet, for all that she is Russian, Maria Sharapova is also as American as Apple Pie. She and her entire family came to America. On the back of betting the farm on young Maria's talent as a tennis player, her family chose America, and what could be more American than that?

Born in Siberia, the one-time pauper took home over $2.5 million in Wimbledon prize money - but that will be only the beginning of an earnings career that looks likely to make her the wealthiest Russian tennis player in history.

...her father, Yuri Sharapov, who travelled to Florida 10 years ago after leaving Chernobyl with life savings of $1200 in his pocket, will shield his striking daughter from many of the offers, but there is no shortage of suitors.

Sharapova was spotted as a 6-year-old during an exhibition match in Moscow by Martina Navratilova, who took her under her wing, a relationship that earned her a spot in Nick Bollettieri's prestigious Tennis Academy in Florida at the age of nine.

I had already decided that I was going to tie this story to the similar tale of Martina Navratilova, because Navratilova has a lot in common with Sharapova. Navratilova also went west to find freedom, on the back of her extraordinary tennis talent. A picture of Navratilova is not what Perry de Havilland had in mind when he asked for this posting, yet I feel that it is entirely appropriate. Navratilova found the exact same thing in America that Sharapova has found: freedom. The freedom to develop her amazing talents, and the freedom to be herself.

Now, I agree that when confronted by Martina Navratilova, the Samizdata droolometer behaves very differently to when it is confronted by the likes of Sharapova, especially when you factor in Navratilova's sexual preferences, but underneath all the joking, the story is very similar.

"I was so stubborn, so independent, that I was more American than Czech, even as a little kid," she reflects in her autobiography, written in 1985 with New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey. "I didn't feel I belonged anywhere until I came to America for the first time when I was 16. I'm not a mystic about many things - I tend to be pretty pragmatic about life - but I honestly believe I was born to be American."

I bet Sharapova would say just the exact same thing. Believe it or not, Martina Navratilova actually played again, this year, at Wimbledon, at the age of 47 (but this time really for the last time), eventually losing in the women's doubles semi-finals.

After Sharapova had won her title, the BBC's commentators all started clucking anxiously to the effect that, although in itself very sweet and all that, this story might be setting others a bad example. What if dozens of other families bring dozens of other wonder-kids to America, but then the wonder-kids do not win Wimbledon, and what if they are all then disappointed? Don't risk everything and come to America. What if you fail? What if you don't live out the American dream? It was all so desperately British. (British national motto: Better safe than American.)

But I cannot for the life of me see that any sort of bad example is being set by Sharapova and her redoubtable clan. The worst that could have happened to them was that they would have become rather poor and disappointed Americans, and the same applies to any others who follow their example and arrive in America with their super-tots but do not do so well as the Sharapova family did. Being a poor and disappointed American is nothing like the worst thing that can happen to you in this world, no matter what the BBC may say.

In the unlikely event that no one has yet done a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty waving a tennis racket, this omission should be corrected at once.

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The odious dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has long been able to rely on the lack of loud criticism from many of his neighbouring African neighbours, afraid perhaps that they are seen to be lining up with their old white colonial oppressors against Zimbabwe. Well, if this report at Reuters is any indication, the coyness on the subject may be changing. More and more African nations are speaking out at the murders, pillage and looting carried out by Mugabe's henchmen.

Zimbabwe is a humanitarian catastrophe, occuring in slow motion before our very eyes. The sooner that the more decent regimes in that troubled continent apply the necessary pressures to help bring this bastard down, the better.

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This has been on Fox News for a few days now, but it made me laugh: the individual behind the first WTC bombing, now under lock and key, is going on health-strike:

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence, has reportedly stopped taking his insulin medicine and started eating M&Ms to make his diabetes worse. The blind cleric has apparently been upset about not getting the specific brand of tea he likes in prison.

Abdel-Rahman is a highly regarded spiritual leader among his militant followers, and there is still concern that should his health decline, those followers would retaliate against the United States.

Still, things could be worse- at least the Sheik is not expecting retalliation about other, more significant wrongs. Being forced to drink Tetley's rather than Twining's is one thing, but not being able to leave the building in order to blow up places is another thing altogether. Really quite a serious constraint, when you think about it.

I suppose if he was angry about bigger things than tea, Abdel-Rahman would be beating himself up even worse than by eating M&Ms. A few dozen Krispy Kremes, perhaps? The ones with lemon-custard inside are especially good. Then again, so are the raspberry jam ones. Tough call.

Perhaps this sort of thing could become a trend as more major terrorists get arrested. On the one hand, we could be seeing suicide-bombers all over the place blasting people to smithereens because some mad old cleric wanted the central heating turned up a couple of degrees. On the other hand, there might be a drastic reduction in the costs of keeping said evil lunatics alive, if they all manage to kill themselves by refusing their blood-pressure medication and overdosing on tubs of lard.

Coming soon: Saddam gets angry about being tried for murdering all those people, and shaves off his beard to incite retaliation against the US. While eating M&Ms and refusing to take aspirin for his headaches.

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I came across this recent lyrical effort by reader (and recovering ex-NASA employee) Chuck Divine in another forum. With his permission I am sharing the fun with you.

Rutan Spaceship

A Song of great social and political significance
(To be sung to the tune of Janis Joplin's Mercedes Benz)
(With both apologies and thanks to Janis)
by Chuck Divine

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?
My friends all fly shuttles
We've got to get hip
Worked hard all my lifetime
No hope for space trip
So Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?

Oh Lord, won't you get me a space apogee?
The X Prize people are trying to fund me
I'll launch every day
Until I put up three
So Lord, won't you get me a space apogee?

Oh Lord, won't you give me a night on the Moon?
I'm counting on you Lord
That's why I wrote this tune
Prove that you love me
And get me there soon
So Lord, won't you give me a night on the Moon?

Everybody!

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?
My friends all fly shuttles
We've got to get hip
Worked hard all my lifetime
No hope for space trip
So Lord, won't you buy me a Rutan Spaceship?

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The annual London Gay Pride march took place earlier today.

Typically, I pay no heed to the occasion. This is partly due to the fact that I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other but also because it has now become just another piece in the cultural jigsaw of London life. A part of the social furniture really.

However, now into my 3rd year as a blogger, I find that I have a heightened sense of curiosity so I wandered over to have a look at the promotional website.

I rather regret bothering to do so as it makes excrutiating reading. Apparently as much devoted to disabled and asylum-seeker 'rights' as homosexual ones, every page drips with exquisitely pitched right-on-ness. In fact such is the extent of the dogmatically po-faced sincerity that some of it is unintentionally hilarious. For example, the line up of guest speakers includes:

Ida Barr, artificial hip hop from Music Hall Veteran and Rally Compere.

Now that means that Ms Barr plays hip hop music that is not genuine or does it mean that she merely hops around on an artificial hip? If the latter, then that is not what I call entertainment.

Julie Felix, singing against inequality, injustice and war for the last 40 years.

Clearly the number one choice when you really need to get the party swinging.

Wesley Gryk, Solicitor for the UK Lesbian and Gay Immigration Group Gay Asylum seeker.

If I made up a group called 'Gay Asylum seeker' (and I consider myself somewhat remiss for not having done so) then not only would I not be believed but I would also be pilloried for exaggeration and hate speech.

There is no mention anywhere of any stop-the-war or anti-globo ranters but given their leech-like ability to latch themselves onto any passing warm-blooded creatures it would not surprise me in the least to find out that a whole sackload of them had tagged along for the ride as well.

There is nothing here about pride, much less freedom of association or individual sovereignty. This is all about group-think and the fostering of grievance cultures. What was once an understandable public protest against unjustifiable persecution has become a portmanteau of victimologies. It is as if the organisers are seeking to stitch together some coalition of alleged unfortunates with the thread of an earnestly cultivated sense of self-pity.

There was a time (and not all that long ago either) when homosexual men in this country were unfairly treated by the state so I fail to understand what is so attractive about revelling in an alleged pariah status that is demonstrably no longer the case. If homosexuals who are inclined to buy into this sophistry could learn to chuck it off and just live their lives, then that really would be a liberation.