I have always endured a distinctly uncomfortable ambivolence on the subject of the physical chastisement of children. My rational inclinations are to disapprove of it as a whole. The law protects adults from being physically assaulted by other adults and I find the arguments that seek to exempt youngsters from this law to be flawed and unpersuasive.

That said, I know that there are many good and loving parents who sometimes smack their children out of frustration or a temporary flare of temper. It may not be beneficial thing but, rarely does this cause any real harm. Consequently, I view the engagement of the machinery of law enforcement with family life with the utmost trepidation:

Parents in England and Wales who smack children so hard it leaves a mark will face up to five years in jail under new laws in force from Saturday.

Mild smacking is allowed under a "reasonable chastisement" defence against common assault.

The purported distinction is not one in which I have any degree of confidence. Law enforcement in this country is often patchy, capricious and incompetent. I expect that truly serious abusers will slip the net while normally conscientious parents who lash out once in a moment of uncustomary anger will find themselves facing a custodial sentence and ruination.

Even if that were not the case (and it is very much the case) the new laws will result in an entrenchment of a culture of fear and suspicion. Children contrive to harm themselves all the time by flying off of their bikes, falling out of trees and sticking themselves with sharp implements. I have already heard far too many plausible accounts of parents who are scared of taking their wounded charges to a hospital in case they are accused of abusing them

In another age and in different political and legal circumstances, I would not be too concerned about these new laws. I may even (cautiously) approve. But it is not possible to see these developments as anything other than another step in the process of the gradual nationalisation of the family.

Nor will anyone's life be improved by this legislation. It is enacted, in part, because it serves the interests of the professional welfare classes whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on this kind of state activism and partly because of the unfortunately fashionable view that people cannot be trusted to arrange their own affairs in a satisfactory manner without the external discipline of regulatory control.

None of this means that I necessarily approve of parents who smack their children. Generally, I do not. But just leaving matters be is probably the least worst solution. Over the coming years, that object lesson will be driven home.

There is an article in the Spectator which seems a bit complacent to me:

If a violent criminal breaks into my house I, too, may react violently, but if I do so I doubt whether I shall live in fear of ending up like Tony Martin. This is because the law already accepts the right to self-defence and does so in such a way as to take into account an individual’s assessment of the threat in the heat of the moment. Strip away the Tony Martin case, which unfairly dominates all discussion on this topic, and just look at other recent cases. In November 2002 the retired businessman Anthony Spray heard somebody trying to open the door of his Cumbrian home and went downstairs, armed with an air rifle, to investigate. Seeing a figure at the now open door, he shot 19-year-old Paul Evans in the eye from a distance of four feet. Evans, it transpired, was not a burglar: he had mistaken Spray’s house for a B&B where he was staying. As a result of his mistake, Evans lost an eye, yet Spray was not jailed: he was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay £3,000 compensation.

Riiight. So the author of this piece, Ross Clark, thinks that the case of Tony Martin, the west Norfolk farmer jailed for killing an intruder at his farm and injuring another, is just a freak, a one-off case which need offer no special insights into the rights of self defence. The Spray case, as is clear, still resulted in the householder being convicted, albeit not having to serve a term of imprisonment.

Clark's piece is not without merit. He argues that the United States has achieved a large fall in crime due, he claims, to such factors as 'zero tolerance' policing, tough sentencing and the like. No doubt these have played a part but it is a distortion to suppose that America's much lower level of aggravated burglaries is not partly linked to widespread ownership of firearms and a different approach on the part of the courts to householders using force to defend themselves.

Clark is correct to state that hard cases make bad law. He is, however, dead wrong to suppose that apart from the Tony Martin case, there are no examples of homeowners having been prosecuted for self defence. And it is abundantly clear that burglars have got the message: raiding a person's home is a low-risk activity in Britain, as Perry de Havilland's former neighbour, the late City financier John Monckton, found out last year.

Fortunately, we have the historian Joyce Lee Malcolm to set us straight on the real lessons to be learned from recent trends in British and American policy on self defence and the law. I urge everyone interested in this issue to read her book if they haven't already done so.

UPDATE: In thinking through the Spray case mentioned above, I do accept that it was right for the householder to compensate a man mistaken for a burglar, but the suspended jail term strikes me as quite wrong although I have not studied all the particulars of the case, including whether the householder had been the victim of multiple burglaries in the past, like Tony Martin.

The New Labour administration has provided a worthy example of how governments mess up systems of accreditation, especially those established by themselves. Since these are designed to mirror the political biases and triumphs of their founders, rather than provide an objective appraisal of developments, governments begin to tinker with the tables when they produce the wrong results.

One example of this is the education league tables where the government has recently introduced the recording of vocational qualifications in order to offset the academic predominance of private and grammar schools. This has the additional consequence of downgrading academic performance even amongst state schools which are run on an adequate basis.

Under the new system, a distinction in a certificate in cake decorating is worth 55 points – more than a GCSE grade A in physics.

And a City and Guilds progression award in bakery was worth more than five GCSEs at grade C.

The public sector professionals thought this was a terrific wheeze.

But John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads' Association, said the added complexity gave parents a better picture.

"In the past the tables have been too simplistic.

"The new tables give parents a broader view of the achievements of schools," he said.

The more complex the better. No doubt parents prefer complexity since this makes those important decisions so much easier. Time for the market to provide an alternative.

This government hopes to cut its cake, cook it and eat it. However, although Britain is ending up like Golgafrincham, we cannot offload the cake decorators or the telephone earpiece cleaners, so all of the skilled workers and the professionals are emigrating, leaving the Golgafrinchams behind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And of course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPI has this, about Cat Stevens:

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

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

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

Jaguar's Big Cat is best in show.

WYTV reports that CAT scanning is old hat:

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine it, a catamaran jumping through a hoop.

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

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

CAT news from Kolkata:

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

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

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

Catisfied?

The Guardian reports today on an announcement from Tom Ridge, to the effect that a quick fix has been put in place by the US government to allow low risk passengers to get on and off their airplane's more quickly:

Acknowledging that travellers resented the stringent security checks at US airports, he announced that "low risk" flyers to John F Kennedy New York would be allowed to register their fingerprints and other biometric details so that they could avoid the long queues at Schiphol by stopping at a fast check kiosk.

The Guardian complains only about how it is Schiphol that is getting the benefit of the new arrangements, rather than Heathrow, making the story a hook for another cheap gibe about American geography knowledge.

This is a perfect example of the way the world now works. This register is voluntary, but the process is now well in hand to enable the authorities everywhere in due course to demand such information from everyone, as a condition of international travel. How long before it starts being claimed that an unwillingness to register is an admission that one is a high risk flyer?

If you doubt this, read the rest of the story:

He said the system was based on that used for frequent flyers on US domestic flights.

He told Associated Press in Amsterdam: "The main advantage to the United States will come if this program successfully and efficiently moves traffic through and other countries say: 'We ought to apply this on a much broader basis.'"

Precisely. We are rapidly entering a world in which the world's various Big Brothers know our every move. Our best hope will be that, on the whole, Big Brother does not care.

It is entirely my fault. Because I have failed to read the Dave Barry blog as regularly as I should, I can only now tell you of the link to this crucial news story, published as long ago as last Saturday:

Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" – variations from one to five centimetres in length.

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.

It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.

Good to see that comb-overs will still be allowed, within reasonable limits.

A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.

In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.

The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.

Typical media. Why can they not show good news, instead of harping on about bad stuff all the time?

"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."

For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.

"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.

Some people evidently do have long hair in North Korea, despite the danger of their personalities being downgraded, and the nation definitely is coming to ruin. But might they not be confusing correlation with causation?

Personally I suspect that this robbed North Korea of a lot more energy than long hair does.

And the North Korean government campaign to stamp out smoking has apparently not worked very well, so I expect long hair in North Korea to go on being an official worry for some time yet.

Via Natalie Solent, I got to this Guardian report that Waterstone's has sacked one of its staff, for blogging:

A bookseller has become the first blogger in Britain to be sacked from his job because he kept an online diary in which he occasionally mentioned bad days at work and satirised his "sandal-wearing" boss.

Joe Gordon, 37, worked for Waterstone's in Edinburgh for 11 years but says he was dismissed without warning for "gross misconduct" and "bringing the company into disrepute" through the comments he posted on his weblog.

Published authors and some of the 5 million self-published bloggers around the globe said it was extraordinary that a company advertising itself as a bastion of freedom of speech had acted so swiftly to sack Mr Gordon, who mentions everything from the US elections to his home city of Edinburgh in the satirical blog he writes in his spare time.

My main opinion about this case is that, in a form of wording that I often use on these occasions, an employer should have the right to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes, provided there is no contract which between them which says otherwise. It is their money. If they want to stop giving it to an employee, fair enough.

But what you are, or should be, entitled to do legally is not the same as what is managerially advisable. Which leads me to my second opinion about this case, again a generic one rather than specific to it, which says that there may be more to this case than meets the eye, and more reasons for the Waterstone's decision than have so far been made public. This is also (in connection with my opinings here) what I think when I hear that some child has been chucked out of a school for flicking a rubber band at a another pupil. Maybe there was more to it than that, and the rubber band was just the final straw, so to speak. And maybe this blogger has been a pain in the arse to his bosses for years, and a useless bookseller, and they finally said: get rid of the tosser.

(And maybe – just maybe you understand – this chap really does need therapy.)

For me, one of the big arguments in favour of the free society is that people are allowed to make their own decisions about who they associate with, instead of having such decisions made for them by a mob, or by a tyrant, acting on the basis of more or less misleading scraps of information about the case that the contending parties have squirted into the public realm. As part of the mob, we in the blogosphere can beat our drums and argue about cases like this in loud voices, but in the end, we should not be deciding these things.

Nevertheless … (and you saw that coming a mile away, did you not?) … nevertheless … if a bookshop chain is not the kind of enterprise which ought to have employees blogging up a storm, about books, about the pleasures of literacy, and about anything else on their minds, with all the arguing and occasional public rows that this would inevitably involve when the storminess got too stormy … what I am saying is: bookshops and blogging ought to go very well together.

Maybe Waterstone's regard employee bloggers as a menace to their interests far more profound any menace to their interests presented by this one blogger, and they made a huge decision of principle here. Maybe, but I doubt it. My guess would be that they had no idea what a s***storm would explode around them. I think they have no conception of what a force the Internet could be, for their business or against it.

I hope the blogosphere gets Waterstone's to think through – rethink through – what they really think about blogging, and about the Internet in general. If they do not, they could find themselves at war with the Internet out of sheer carelessness. And thus miss a big chance to sell lots of books.

As it is, I can see a lot of people switching to Amazon because of this, and that too would be their perfect legal right.

Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons.

However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer.

That is what I call good news.

We have said it before, but it bears repetition, that the coming EU referendum campaign will be the first internet campaign in our history and I remain convinced that the material on the net will have a decisive impact on the course of the campaign.

- Richard North, already quoted and linked to by Patrick Crozier as a response to my gloomier posting here

One of the current controversies around the war on terror is how to treat the prisoners. Dale Franks at the excellent Questions and Observations blog gets it pretty much right, I think.

My preferred method of dealing with these terror prisoners would be to get two captains and a major together as a tribunal, declare them to be unlawful combatants, and put them in front of a firing squad. Now, maybe, because we're nice guys, we could let them know that if any of them give us verifiable, useful information, then we'll commute their sentences, and won't shoot them. Otherwise, however, it's a blindfold and a last cigarette for the lot of 'em.

The difference of course, is that doing so would be legal. It would be part of the accepted customs of warfare that have been generally agreed upon for over a century. Torturing or beating them to death, without even the convenient fiction of legality, is not.

I found very little to quibble with in his excellent essay on the subject.

Nothing gets the political class to lying their faces off like the chance to spend your money on their legacy.

I saw it in Madison, Wisconsin when the new Frank Lloyd Wright convention center was being pushed through. The lies included (a) we will not build a new hotel next to this facility (it was built a year or two later (b) this facility will not block views/access to the lake it is built on (it does, in spades), and (c) this facility will not be a drain on the public purse (it requires a taxpayer subsidy ad infinitum.

I am seeing it again in Dallas, where the legacy project revolves around the Trinity River that runs through downtown Dallas. Jim Schutze, the excellent political writer for Dallas' alternative newsweekly (the one with the sex ads) details the lies now on offer from the City of Dallas and its allies and puppets.

For example, recently arrived on my desk is the slickly produced special D magazine Trinity River edition, just out, called "The Trinity: How the river will change Dallas forever." This magazine--a collection of preposterous whoppers, fibs, prevarications, exaggerations, subterfuge, propaganda and Orwellian doublespeak--is an omen of things just ahead.

The D magazine special edition goes on and on about the recreational amenities the Trinity River project will create: "...the Trinity River will accommodate small sailboats and paddle boats," the magazine tells its readers. "More interestingly, a reverse-flow lake is planned with a 17-foot drop where it curves back to the river, creating rapids and a perfect whitewater course for winter kayaking competitions...

"But the most visible benefit will be on the Oak Cliff side, which will have easy access to downtown, great views and--most important of all--along the levee, direct entry into the country's largest urban park."

All of this is a lie.

Read it and weep.

I have been on the road for the last week and God only knows how much longer. Right now I am backstage doing edits on the webcasts from the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco. Twelve hour plus days... but the pay is good. A few minutes ago the Surgeon General of the United States spoke and I took a photo, not of him, but of the video monitors and the backside of the scrim.

I imagine this is a slightly different view of things than the media out in the Grand Ballroom are getting!

I was so struck by the hostility expressed inthe comments section of my previous post about Virgin airline boss and entrepreneur Richard Branson, in some cases for quite valid reasons, that it got me thinking of whether there is, in today's business world, any entrepreneur who would pass the kind of harsh ideological standards we libertarians might want to set and be able to become a major business player.

I doubt it, sadly. If I am wrong about that, comment away.

While driving down Virginia's crowded Route 28 this afternoon, I heard a radio spot from our good friends at UNICEF that almost caused me to drive right off the road. The announcer solemnly intoned that with your help, UNICEF would create "a tsunami of love, a tsunami of hope" for children affected by the Dec. 26th disaster in the east Indies.

A "tsunami of love?" Even if these people have their hearts in the right places, just how tone-deaf is this organization? Apart from the fact that "tsunami of love" sounds like it could be the title of a song by Def Leppard, who actually thought that this was clever? Somehow, I cannot imagine soldiers liberating the German death camps of WWII telling prisoners, "We are going to build you a concentration camp of compassion!" or Amnesty International offering "a gulag of love" to political prisoners.

UNICEF must have gotten complaints about this, because the downloadable version of the ad available on their website now says "a wave of love." Which isn't a huge improvement, actually.

Of course, that still is not as bad as this Seattle Times column, from Saturday which dismisses tsunami victims as "clutter" apparently worthy of a tsunami of scorn for deigning to develop beaches into tourist attractions.

(A tip o' the hat to Jesse Walker of Reason Online for the Seattle Times link.)

Al-Muhajiroun was the extremist organisation that recruited or converted young Muslims and British men to their political goal of a worldwide Islamic state, starting with the Emirate of Great Britain. It was never clear whether they would recognise England, Scotland and Wales but the overall objective was clear. A troublesome development was the disbandment of this organisation which appeared to portend greater underground activity on the part of the radicals.

Hannah Strange, UK correspondent for UPI, was attending a women's conference where Sheikh Omar, the former head of Al-Muhajiroun, was setting out his philosophy: Since Britain had invaded Iraq, the covenant of security that protected these islands from Islam was now broken, and as a consequence, war was declared. No doubt these sentiments weighed heavily on his heart since his patriotism was not in doubt:

Either withdraw your own forces or don't expect Muslims not to support the Muslims abroad," said Sheikh Omar, adding that the West supports dictators abroad when they see fit.

If the government met those conditions, Muslims could continue to live peacefully in Britain, he said.

"After that there will be no need to fight anybody, we've been living in peace here for years, and we can continue to live in peace," he said. "We love Britain."

However, the usual epithets on 9/11, killing all non-Muslims and blaming the Jews outweighed his love of bully beef and the Queen. It was the story that they always tell themselves. They are not to blame. They were invaded. They are merely defending themselves against the hand that is raised against them. Indeed, their pathology is a puzzling outpouring of delusional bombast reinforced by the blood of innocents.

Their bloodcurdling enactment of 9/11 demonstrates the distance between our compassion and the hatred of these extremists.

The speakers, all leading members of the group, called for war against the kuffaar (non-Muslims) and lead chants as a projector screen showed images of dead American soldiers in Iraq.

As the infamous images of two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center replayed again and again, the rapt watchers thrust their fists in the air and chanted "Allahu Akhbar! (God is great!)"

"Nine-eleven was one example of some people who chose to show us they are men, real Muslim men," said one speaker

Muslims must also beware of "the enemy within" -- moderate Muslims such as those on the Muslim Council of Britain, he said.

They side with "the Jewish conspirators, the Jewish occupiers and the Christian crusaders," he said, and "will sell out their Muslim brothers."

"Please raise your hands if you think the Muslim Council of Britain represents you," a speaker at the conference instructed the crowd.

All stayed silent.

"Put your hands up if Sheikh Osama Bin Laden represents you!" he called.

Every hand shot in the air, even those of three or four year old children and their mothers in the back rows. "Allahu Akhbar!" echoed through the hall.

The MCB, continued the speaker, even condemned the "beautiful" attacks in Madrid last year. The chants grew louder.

Muslims must reject the integrationist calls of such people, said Sheikh Omar.

Instead, an Islamic state must be established here in Britain, he said, an aim that is the duty of every Muslim.

"If people reject the call of mighty Allah," he continued, "... death will be inevitable."

To confirm this, images of people dropping dead and burning in flames appeared on the projector screen.

If only this were shown on BBC News at Ten. Then I could start to arrange the nine other impossible things on my list, such as anti-aging, which is far more important.

I find this all too persuasive. George Trefgarne sketches out how Tony Blair could win not only the next election by a mile, but then the Euro-referendum by enough to settle the matter for ever.

Key towards-the-end paragraph:

As the polls start to switch, other arguments are deployed by the pro-constitution lobby, of which the most potent is that the real choice is between ratifying the constitution, with all its disadvantages, or being reduced to a colonial outpost of George W Bush's America. Scare stories are spread that withdrawing would also mean the end to cheap flights to France and Spain. Then, in March 2006, a referendum results in a Yes vote, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent - and Teflon Tony will have done it again.

At the heart of Trefgarne's view of Britain now is the utter and continuing hopelessness of the Conservatives.

I confess that once upon a time I expected that America would be an issue to unite the Conservatives while still dividing Labour. But for many months now the Conservatives have been as split about America as they are about everything else. This means that they will remain a shambles for the foreseeable future, and that they will be in no state to argue persuasively against all that "colonial outpost of Bush's America" stuff, as and when it comes on stream. Even more than now, I mean.

Identity cards are a cause of much controversy here in the UK, and are especially hated by Samizdata writers. Next week, on Tuesday 18 January, there will be a roundtable discussion on identity cards, held at the Adam Smith Institute in London. Speakers will include Peter Lilley MP (former Secretary of State for Social Security), Sarah Arnott (journalist at the IT industry newspaper, Computing), Seamus Heffernan (Civitas) and others to be confirmed. The event will start at 6:15pm for 6:30pm, at 23 Great Smith Street, London SW1, and will be followed by a champagne reception. If you would like to reserve a place, please e-mail events@adamsmith.org.

Our hosting company has been under sustained DOS attacks from some worthless scrotes over the last couple days and if you have been finding it hard to reach samizdata.net, that is why.

It is also why there has been a low volume of posts here as we have frequently been unable to access our blog's 'back-end'. The good folks at Hosting Matters have been doing their best to keep things operational under difficult circumstances.

And speaking of rain, so here I am in Los Angeles, having escaped dreary grey London for a while and...

...it has been pissing down with rain here for 11 days now! Wonderful.

Severe irony has swept the northern parts of Britain over this weekend. Samizdata readers may be interested to know that Britain, the north of it especially, has been afflicted with flooding caused by the old fashioned method: a lot of water dropping out of the sky, all of it trying to use the same rivers.

It has also been extremely windy. It has been fairly breezy down here in London.

The city of Carlisle, the most northerly habitation in England, has been especially hard hit. Last night, the place with without any power, and tonight I heard a TV weather person predicting more rain for the area. There have been casualties, but the deaths so far are in single figures and look like they will stay that way.

[Correction!! Carlisle is NOT the most northern place in England. See comments 3, with a link to a map, and 4. I had at the top right of the Anglo-Scottish border but it is at the bottom left. Apologies.)

Under the circumstances, this report, dated last Friday just as the city was filling up with water, is particularly ironic. It is about Carlisle's efforts to collect money for the Asian Tsunami victims:

THE DEVASTATION wrought by the tsunami disaster was brought close to home this week as one Carlisle woman waits for news of her missing brother, another family recovers from the trauma they suffered, and thousands contribute to fundraising.

Disaster caused by un welcome water was about to be brought a little closer to home even than that.

Musicians and singers Will Harris, James Formby, Martin Lee, Ben Gates and Tony Mason will perform in The Source tomorrow night at 8pm.

I do not think that this event was able to proceed as planned, and if anything similar is rearranged in the near future, I suspect that at least some of the proceeds will be distributed nearer home.

There are a lot of big shiny 1940s-era aircraft zooming across our cinema screens at the moment. Yeh! We have had Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, we are due to get the remake of The Flight of Phoenix, based on the wonderful old movie starring James Stewart, and I have just returned from watching The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio as mogul, test pilot and eccentric, Howard Hughes. It is a fine film, and makes a number of important points about the man himself, the nature of doing business in America in the mid-20th Century and the evolution of modern air travel.

The story is quite well known of how a rich young oil family son becomes a major player in the aviation industry, challenges rivals like PanAm, produces smash-hit movies, before descending into madness and solitude. Director Martin Scorcese has long been fascinated with Hughes' tale and gets DiCaprio to convey the mixture of driving ambition, brilliant engineering skills, bravery and craziness. Hughes could be seen, from one vantage point as an almost Randian-style business hero, challenging rivals like PanAm, whose boss was played with appropriate menacing charm by Alec Baldwin.

There are two great scenes which get the pro-enterprise, unpretentious side of Hughes across. He drives with his then girlfriend, Katherine Hepburn, excellently played by Cate Blanchett, to see Hepburn's family. At lunch, Hepburn's mother, instantly declares to Hughes that "we are all socialists here", and "I do hope you are not a Republican", and Hughes, bless him, looking around the vast mansion and its grounds, is too dumbstruck at these comments to make a fast and smart reply. Recovering his composure, later Hughes tells the preening Hepburns that his favourite reading is technical engineering reports on planes, which of course has the welcome effect of shutting the ghastly Hepburns up.

In a later scene, set in 1947 when Hughes is fighting for the future of his airline TWA against the monopolistic ambitions PanAm in cahoots with the U.S. Senate, Hughes makes a number of fine points about competition and business risk-taking that almost got me cheering in the stalls. Hughes wins his battle and PanAm is forced to concede.

Hughes was a troubled man and spent the last two decades of his life in circumstances so lonely and depressed that it of course will colour one's view of his life in the round. But I came away from the film feeling a certain admiration for Hughes in how he was willing to challenge the status quo. Long after people have forgotten corrupt U.S. senators and complacent airline bosses, they will remember the man who built and flew some amazing planes. I also cannot help but wonder whether people will think something similar in future about our contemporary airline boss and daredevil man of action, Britain's own Richard Branson. We shall see.