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A few weeks ago, I attended one of the talks that are hosted in London by Brian Micklethwait on the last Friday of every month. The speaker was fellow Samizdatista Alex Singleton, and was essentially on the subject of why globalisation is good (and was incidentally about Alex's new think tank devoted to this very issue).

In the discussion after the talk, one thing that came up was the benefits of global economies of scale and global competition in manufacturing, retailing and the supply chains in between. A point made was that although it is certainly the case that prices on many goods (clothes and electronics being the examples brought up) have dropped due to retailers being able to easily shop throughout the whole world for products to sell, we do not really yet see customers buying goods directly from foreign retailers. Internet commerce is becoming large, but mostly it is domestic in nature.

However, something happened to me this week that made me think that perhaps more international commerce is happening than we realise, and that a lot of it is happening under the radar.

My present mobile phone is a Motorola v500, which is a lovely phone. (Motorola has always had great engineering. Five years ago they were losing badly to Nokia, who had inferior engineering but better industrial design and better user interfaces, but in recent times they have caught up in both regards). However, it has a small external antenna, which is removable and screws into the phone. As it happened, the thread on the antenna became damaged, and I needed a new antenna.

I went into the Carphone Warehouse store from which I had bought the phone, and they were sympathetic but not very helpful. They were more interested in selling new phones and high mark up accessories than tiny replacement antennas. (They suggested that I visit their repair centre in a different part of London or check the Motorola website). I went to a couple of other mobile phone shops with similar results. Checking the Motorola website led to similar results.

So what to do. Well, I checked on ebay, found that there were plenty of people selling replacement antennas for my phone, put in a bid, and purchased an antenna, online, for £2.77 including postage. Although an antenna probably costs 5 cents to make, I suspect that if I had gone to a "repair centre", I would have been charged considerably more than £2.70 for a new one, and the other advantage of buying on ebay is that the new one would arrive in the mail in a couple of days.

Just as I was logging out of ebay, I noticed something else, which was "Location of Seller: Singapore". So it turned out that it was easier and cheaper for me to obtain a new antenna from some guy in Singapore than from a local retailer in London.

Thinking about it some more, I suspect that a lot of this is typical. If you set up a "shop", then there are still restrictions on where you can obtain goods from and who you can sell to. The producers of branded goods still try very hard to make sure that retailers only sell goods that have been bought from the "authorised distributor" of their brand in a particular country, and that they only sell to people in the same market. In a world where every buyer is also potentially a seller, and where goods can be sold on to people elsewhere in the world, though, this is hard to enforce. And what we do have now are large, trusted companies that act as brokers of goods of all kind. Ebay is the classic example, but as I have discussed before, more and more of Amazon's business is of this kind too, acting as a broker for third party sellers. I haven't seen any statistics in the percentage of this kind of trade that is cross border, but I suspect it is growing. (I also buy large numbers of DVDs from the US and Canada through third party sellers via Amazon).

Quite sadly, there is also another obstacle to the growth in this kind of cross border commerce. If you send something through the mail, it is subject to cross border bureaucratic interference in the terms of customs duties and local taxes. (In the case of importing most goods into Britain, the issue is the payment of VAT). If you receive a package and HM Customs and Excise decides to charge you VAT on it, then rather than receiving the goods through the mail, you receive a card explaining the situation. You then have to visit the local post office, and pay the VAT plus an "administration charge" before receiving your goods. The inconvenience and the administration charge can between them make it no longer worth your while to buy from overseas in the first place, which is irritating. Ultimatelly it isn't so much the tax as the inconvenience that goes with it.

But of course there is a loophole. The VAT is waived if the total value of the goods is less than £18. This regulation was presumably brought in some time in the past to avoid the inconvenience of having to charge tax on every small gift sent throught the mail, but it has now grown into being an examption widely used by customers of internet commerce. You learn not to order multiple DVDs in the same package but to order them one at a time. The additional postage costs are often as much or greater than the tax would be, but this way you avoid the bureaucracy. This doesn't precisely improve the economic efficiency of the whole process, but the exemption is great enough to allow a large global economy to exist in goods under about £18, whereas there are substantial restrictions on trade in goods of higher value. None the less, some stores have set up specifically in order to take advantage of this tax advantage (Amazon Jersey for instance).

One would hope that someday this exemption would be so widely used that it will lead governments to remove the taxes in resignation, but this is sadly much too hopeful. More likely are attempts to charge taxes on all goods, however small, and much more government intrusion into commerce. And it is the intrusion and bureaucracy that is likely to really be economically destructive, even more so than the taxes themselves.

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One of the more depressing discoveries I made from my first year or two of education blogging (Brian's Education Blog still not working sorry blah blah) was the inexorable spread of cheating in Britain's schools and colleges. The BBC reported yesterday that a diktat has just been emitted by a committee you will probably not have heard of until now, called JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), saying that this must stop and here is how blah blah:

A rise in the number of students in the UK, including undergraduates from overseas, is likely to mean increased plagiarism, a report has said.

Colleges and universities are being sent guidelines written by experts in the higher education technology organisation, Jisc.

The authors say: "student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so".

JISC makes much of the presence of foreign students in large numbers, but presumably phrases this more delicately than the BBC's report does, in its first paragraph above, with verbiage more like the following:

A "holistic" approach is needed which establishes "underlying cultures and beliefs", "placing academic issues at the centre of the discussions".

When you are saying that foreigners are cheats, words like "holistic" come in very handy, I should imagine.

However, another reasons why academic cheating is on the up-and-up is diktats from national committees, demanding that British schools (where most British students are still incubated despite all those dodgy foreigners) must do better and better, and get better and better marks, and better and better exam results. This is the process I call sovietisation, and the rot afflicts everyone in the entire education system, up to and including the Secretary of State him (now her) self. Simply, the politicians want the educational numbers to look better than they are, and they cheat.

Time was when the teaching profession was pretty much left to its own devices by London, but those days are long gone. And time was when, if you cheated, you had to make sure your teacher did not catch you at it. Nowadays, your teacher is liable to be the one helping you to cheat, so you can get through your exams, and he can tell London that he is doing a good job. And London will believe it, because London wants to believe it. I think the Soviet vibe here is clear enough. Steel production figures anyone?

Sending out yet another instruction saying that you jolly well must not cheat has a distinctly Gorbachevian air. It amounts to begging that our top-down command-and-control education system must please, please, not behave like what it is. There will be quotas, but no quota fiddling. Dream on.

See in particular, this posting, where I noted how continuous assessment encourages cheating, because it involves asking teachers themselves to tell the higher-ups how well they, the teachers (and the higher-ups), are doing. Exams at least get someone else to say how well things are going, and are more likely to be honest. Although of course the politicians put pressure on those to dumb them down too.

David Gillies responded to that posting of mine, with a comment which I copied over to Samizdata. Gillies noted, you may recall, that there is another reason why foreigners equals cheating. Foreigners equals money, and British colleges do not want to lose it by telling said foreigners that they have done badly in their exams. There is a lot of this about just now, and the less corrupt educational exporters must now be very afraid.

Perhaps there will now be yet another Initiative, demanding that each school and college must set in motion an Anti-Cheating Plan. The more obedient ones will comply, as best they can.

Others will say that they have done this, but their Anti-Cheating Plan will only be observable when the inspectors come calling.

They will, that is to say, cheat.

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Leon Trotsky's views on the role of arts were well known. He argued that art in all its forms existed to convey political messages to the masses and that any other use of the arts was bourgeois nonsense. The idea that it was acceptable for the arts exist to express the personal views of some artist or to simply 'entertain' in a non-political sense (not that anything is really non-political to a statist) was just preposterous to Trotsky. Thus if the state wished to advocate or depreciate something, it was the role of the arts to assist with that process. A modern day example of this would be, say, the relentless demonization of smoking.

Which brings us to the views of the Orwellian sounding Centre for Tobacco Control. This group of lobbyists is infuriated that their calls for smoking to be censored by the British Board of Film Classification (who were once simply known as the Film Censors) has been rejected.

The board's cautious mention of smoking for the first time falls far short of demands that smoking scenes, particularly in any film likely to be seen by children, should be banned in Britain and consigned to the cutting room floor. Professor Gerard Hastings, director of cancer research at the UK's Centre for Tobacco Control, said: "If the BBFC doesn't accept its moral responsibility, it might as well pack up and go home."

And so we discover that this lobby thinks is the 'moral responsibility' of the state to impose standards on entertainment to make them more in accordance with the wishes of our technocratic betters (them, of course). Not only do they wish to make it as difficult as possible for you to make your own non-coerced choices as to what stresses and chemicals you expose your body to, they wish to prevent you seeing images which do not conform to the message they wish to indoctrinate you with. I would be curious to know if Professor Hastings also supports forcing people to take favoured chemicals?

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I am just back from supper with Perry, Adriana and co., and now just about, before sleep overtakes me, have time to report – and to expand upon the fact – that before I left I had another drool over Adriana's portable computer, with its look-at-it-from-everywhere screen. This time, instructed to feel how light it is, I picked the thing up, and did so with considerable ease.

Earlier in the day, I chanced upon this item of techno-news about something called FOLEDs. FOLEDs are even better than OLEDs. OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes, and FOLEDs are Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In English, what this appears to mean is … well, put it like this. When I bought my digital camera recently there was a film of transparent plastic to protect the camera's little screen which shows what the picture is going to look like or does look like. What all these acronyms appear to mean is that in a few years time, that thin film of plastic will be the screen.

Over the last couple of decades, mobile computing and communications have changed the way we act – and interact. Notebook PCs, PDAs and cellular phones make it easy to carry information with us whenever and wherever we go. Yet, despite enormous advances in form and functionality, today's devices can still prove clunky and challenging to carry on planes, trains and automobiles.

However, if researchers have their way, we will soon be able to bend the rules of physics. Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode (FOLED) technology could pave the way for notebook computers with roll-up screens, toys that show vivid images on their surfaces, even clothing with displays woven into the fabric. "Within the next decade, flexible displays will open up all sorts of possibilities," states Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. "It will change the way we access information and entertainment."

Manufactured from transparent plastic films or other ultra-lightweight materials filled with special polymers, these devices could lead to less expensive and far more convenient consumer electronics. Already, researchers have developed prototype roll-up displays, and more basic Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been built into display screens of a handful of cameras, DVD players and mobile phones. "It is only a matter of time before OLED becomes a predominant display technology," says Steve Van Slyke, a research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co. and one of the inventors of the technology in the early 1980s.

What makes active-matrix OLED technology so appealing is that it provides a few more vivid image than LCDs and other displays; offers a viewing angle as high as 160 degrees without backlighting; and requires far less power than today's mainstream display technologies. The latter is particularly appealing for those using battery-powered devices, such as notebook computers. "Any incremental gain in battery life is a significant issue," Thompson points out.

And so on. I am not sure how long this piece will stay up on the www, so I have quoted it at some length.

When all this comes to pass, Adriana's portable computer will then seem like my very first portable computer, which was called an Osborne, and was only portable in the sense that your holiday luggage is portable (if it is), or that my mum's ancient sewing machine is portable.

And how about clothes that change colour and pattern like a movie?

I realise that there will be more to the good life in the future than better gadgets, and that better gadgets might coincide with worse life, but better gadgets are still very, very nice, and I am impressed. Not even the fact that the EU has backed it can suppress my interest in and enthusiasm for this technology.

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From Babel to Dragomans
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2004

Two passages from this collection of essays catch the eye for quotation. The first is from the author himself, written in 1999, in an essay entitled The Taxonomy of Group Hatred:

Let me begin with a proposition that may seem outrageous: to hate the other, the outsider, the one who is different, who looks different, sounds different, smells different; to hate, fear and mistrust the other is natural and normal - natural and normal, that is to say, among baboons and other gregarious animals, or in the more primitive forms of human existence, such as forest tribes, cave-dwellers and the like. Unfortunately it survives into later forms of human development. It survives in even the most advanced and sophisticated civilised societies. It is, and we should not disguise this from ourselves, a very basic human instinct, not just human, but going back beyond our most primitive ancestors to their animal predecessors. The instinct is there, and it comes out in all sorts of unexpected situations. To pretend it does not exist and that it is some sort of ideological aberration cannot lead anywhere useful.

The second is itself a quotation, from the Baghdad-born conservative British historian Elie Kedourie (1926-92), and is the epigraph of Lewis's essay Islam and the West:

There was nothing unreasonable in believing that the Muslim world would attain the power and prosperity of Europe by the same methods Europe had used, and that this could be done without endangering any of the essential values of Islam.

Sad to say, I have encountered the work of Bernard Lewis late in the lives of both of us, but this collection of essays written during the last fifty years, between 1953 and 2003, provides some samples to encourage investigation of his more extended productions and here I can only discuss a sample of his samples. His territory is what used to be called the Near and Middle East, that area of Asia (like Europe, a strictly non-Islamic term) extending from Turkey to Pakistan. It is probably best to say at once, for those who do not know it, or others who might think that I was trying to conceal a relevant fact, that Bernard Lewis is Jewish, though how "observant" I do not know and cannot infer from these essays. The xenophobia, elucidated in his first quotation and amply displayed in his subject matter, past and present, does not lead him to lose hope in the fulfilment of the belief stated in the second. Yet his explanation of how Islam and the "West" (another non-Islamic term) fundamentally differ in their political philosophies makes it clear how difficult such a fulfilment will be.

When, in the 7th Century the Arabs conquered all the land mass stretching from the borders of India to the Atlantic, bringing Islam, their new religion with them, they were also bringing a social system with no distinction between the sacred and the secular and certainly not between church and state. There was (and is) no "church" or indeed any religious hierarchy, as Lewis keeps pointing out. Christianity had penetrated the Roman Empire in quite a different way, over a period of some three hundred difficult years, resulting in two organizations, church and state, ideally harmonious but often antagonistic. For Muslims, by contrast, religion seamlessly laid down both the rules by which they lived and the authority by which they were ruled.

Until comparatively recently Muslims were rarely subjected to infidel rule and the Islamic core lands when conquered were conquered by Muslims. Lewis points out more than once how this promoted isolation from and ignorance of their Christian neighbours until it was too late: a medieval Muslim description of European political geography is quite ludicrous, but, its author apologetically explained, only put in for completeness. Even as late as the seventeenth century, when the Thirty Years War (1618 - 48) was devastating central Germany, the Ottomans seemed unaware of the opportunity this gave them to smash through the Habsburg bulwark.

Lewis makes clear that almost all of the traffic and travelling, such as it was, between the two rival civilizations took place, until almost the end of the nineteenth century from Christian to Muslim lands. Muslims were used to Christians, as such, for there were tolerated communities of these living among them. The converse was certainly not the case; Muslims were unwelcome in Christendom, had no incentive to go there and for centuries could assume, as members of a superior culture, that nothing was to be gained from visiting such a benighted place, one of whose main exports was slaves.

Compared with what educated Muslims knew about Europe, educated Christians during all this time knew far more about the Near and Middle East; it was, after all, where their beliefs, and much of their intellectual heritage had come from. They would know more, indeed, of the pre-Islamic Persian, Mesopotamian or Egyptian Empires than any of the Muslim historians who knew next to nothing about them.

The title essay, From Babel to Dragomans extends this theme of physical isolation to that of mutual linguistic incomprehension. A dragoman (a word Lewis derives ultimately from ancient Assyrian) was an interpreter, used, by the sixteenth century by Europeans to make themselves understood to Turkish officials, merchants and others. He was usually Greek and something of a professional, having been sent to Italy by his well-to-do family for his education, returning fluent in that language which perforce became the medium of communication.

The reliability of such translators was suspect, and rightly so when it is taken into account that they were Ottoman subjects who had to be careful what they said to whom and how they said it. Thus a firm ambassadorial message tended to get turned into a humble supplication. (The Russians apparently got round the problem by ending any such communication with "Do so, or I will declare war," which was normally effective.) The plea of the British Ambassador's dragoman to a top Aga who had locked him up for some reason is the most obsequious piece of writing I have ever read (p. 26) - and that was just its page one.

By the eighteenth century clever young men were being sent out to their embassies to pick up the language and matters were not lagging behind back at home: by 1800 there were 70 Arabic, 10 Persian and 15 Turkish grammars in print, with 10, 4 and 7 corresponding dictionaries, as well as a lot of matter to use these aids on. The preponderance of Arabic was due to its acceptance as a "classical" language, fit to be studied at universities: the others were not - any more than were English, French, German or Spanish. The old system of making oneself understood at official (as distinct from tourist) level might be said to have packed up for good when the Grand Dragoman was publicly hanged, together with the Oecumenical Patriarch, in 1821 on suspicion of complicity in the Greek Revolt of that year.

As distinct from travelling outside it, within the Muslim world from its beginnings there was wide scope for such activity and "Mediaeval Islamic society enjoyed a far greater degree of voluntary, personal mobility than did any other known premodern society (p. 399)". The obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, instituted by Muhammad, who died before the Arabs broke out of Arabia, gave the impetus to those with more secular matters on their minds. Merchants did not suffer from the low status they had in most other contemporary societies, for was not Muhammad himself a merchant? Scholars, attaching themselves to the merchants' caravans wandered as far as China in search of knowledge. Borders were permeable and, during the first few centuries, non-existent. Quite a large travel literature (rihla) emerged as a genre, the best-known example of which is probably that of Ibn Battuta in the first half of the 14th century who started from (and returned to) Tangier and got as far as Canton in China, with considerable journeys to places in between, including a visit to Constantinople and an eight-year stint as a judge in India.

Lewis is also much impressed by Islamic history-writing: "The first thing that strikes us is its immense richness and variety, as contrasted with other history-writing civilizations. It has been calculated that the historical literature of medieval Islam is far greater in bulk, just in Arabic, that the literature of medieval eastern and western Christendom in Latin, Greek and all the vernaculars combined." It would be interesting to know whether the availability of paper, common in the Islamic world long before it reached Europe, had anything to do with this. "Islam, from the very beginning, has attached enormous importance to history. Indeed, in many parts of the world, reliable history begins with the advent of Islam (p. 406)." This last applies particularly to India. Lewis also stresses that Muslim historians were scrupulous with their facts - and as frank about their defeats as about their victories. It seems strange that with all this material to transmit, printing did not "take off" until the 19th Century.

One can almost see Lewis licking his lips as he describes in an early essay (1960) the opening of access to The Ottoman Archives, which date back to 1453, when they began to be kept in Istanbul; but their perils started when the Empire came to an end in 1923. However, when nearly 200 "bales" faced what is now called recycling, the scandal involved ensured their proper treatment. Official obstruction over the centuries to their inspection has ceased and now researchers have merely to face "a difficult language and an obscure script . . . an involved chancery style and a highly technical official vocabulary (p. 419)." Lewis makes clear just how hard a job this will be.

The last essay, undated and "previously unpublished" and which I suspect may have been written especially for this collection is On Occidentalism and Orientalism and is more or less a justification of the author's specialty. It may even be a riposte to Orientalism, by the late Edward Said (1935-2003), though neither the book (which I have not read) nor the author is mentioned by Lewis. Googling a long way down an article entitled Debunking Edward Said, however, I came across "If Said can be said to have a bete noir it must surely be Bernard Lewis," with quotations to prove it. It might be mentioned, for those who do not know it, that Edward Said, a Christian Arab born in Cairo, for many years until his death held a secure academic position in the US. Lewis quite mildly points out the natural, if irrational, resentment those from one culture feel when practically all the study of it has been carried out by members of another. Somehow we are back at the first quotation from Lewis's essay The Taxonomy of Group Hatred: "to hate the other, the outsider... is natural and normal." Amongst academics? God forbid!

Can this reader suggest to the editor of such a collection as this that the source of each essay be placed near the essay itself, either at its beginning or end? The information itself is there, but printed at the beginning of the volume. Some of the essays in the text, justifiably arranged thematically rather than chronologically, are headed by the date, but many are not. The absence of an Index is regrettable, but forgivable.

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This is the year that Denys Watkins-Pritchard was born, one hundred years ago, a minor children's author who bought joy to many schoolboys lurking around public libraries. Although Tolkien was the pre-eminent fantasy author, there were others to delve into on rainy afternoons, and under the pseudonym of 'BB', Watkins-Pritchard produced his own elegies to the passing of a pre-industrial England.

The most famous books were The Little Grey Men and The Little Grey Men Go Down The Bright Stream. The adventures of the four last gnomes in England, with the fantastical names of Cloudberry, Dodder, Sneezewort and Baldmoney, and their escape to a rural Ireland remind me of the 'rural retreat' that pervaded English literature from the beginning of the industrial age. As with the Cottingley Fairies, that famous fraud perpetrated on the gullible, BB recounted seeing a gnome:

The seeds of the idea for The Little Grey Men were sown when, as a small child, BB saw 'a diminutive being.3 It had a round, very red, bearded face about the size of a small crab apple. It wasn't a dream I can still see the little red astonished face.'

When myths and fairie-tales wove a stronger spell on the populace, brought up on rural tales of an idyllic past, the ring of authenticity provided that extra magical effect for the young audience, an extension of Peter Pan into real life.

There is a strand of merging reality and fantasy in British children's books and plays that can be traced to J.M. Barrie and probably precedes his Neverland. This proved a strong influence throughout the twentieth century and 'BB' tapped into the long retreat of magic that was to pervade the work of Alan Garner as well. Some may explain this as the workings of modernity or industrialism or empire but these authors wished to infuse their own pasts with a magical glow and pass it on to new audiences as part of their long summer childhood.

Sometimes, as I take the Bluebell Light Railway, I can imagine that it is passing through the Forest of Boland.

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Relieved as I am temporarily am of my Cultural and Educational obligations, I have resumed contributing to Ubersportingpundit, which is bossed by Scott Wickstein. Yesterday I did a somewhat belated piece about the first weekend of the Six Nations rugby tournament, on the Saturday of which Wales beat England 11-9. Wales had not beaten England in Wales in this fixture since nineteen ninety something, and the Welsh were very eager for their side to win, and more to the point, they rightly sensed that this year, they had their best chance for years.

Just how eager they were for a victory I had not realised, until I followed up this link, from a commenter at UbSpPu:

A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles after his team beat England, police confirmed today.

Why did he do that?

It was reported that the man told his friends: "If Wales win I'll cut my own balls off."

Perhaps his idea was that when England duly won, again, he would be able to console himself by saying: "Well, if Wales had won I would have had to cut off my balls, so thank goodness they did not win." If so, the plan went badly wrong.

After the 11-9 victory in the Six Nations clash, the man is reported to have gone outside and severed his testicles before bringing them back into the club to show fellow drinkers.

So much for the Welsh desire to win rugby matches. The story ends with the voice of typical killjoy Welsh puritanism:

A local was reported as saying that the man was on medication and should not have been drinking.

As Dave Barry would say, under a headline about creeping fascism: "What, suddenly you're not allowed to chop you own balls off?" Amazingly, Samizdata now has a link to this severed testicles report, and, as yet, Dave Barry seems not to.

If England beat France next Sunday, I intend to celebrate by cutting my toe nails.

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British citizens living abroad in Spain, as many now do, may be barred from voting in the forthcoming European Referendum, according to this article in the Daily Telegraph filed a few days ago. I hope the article turns out to be wrong, if only because the margins deciding this vital poll may be quite thin, as I fear during my gloomier moments. There are hundreds of thousands of Brits, many retirees, who have forsaken these shores for sunnier climes to the south. It would be unconscionable but entirely in keeping with how the EU operates, if they were to be denied the chance to have their say.

I have a sick feeling in my stomach that in the year we mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar, in which Admiral Nelson vanquished an early form of European transnationalism, the fate of British independence could be sealed due in part to a shoddily run referendum. I fervently hope I am dead wrong and there is high turnout for this poll when held.

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"This is why all goods must have a price set on them; for then there will always be exchange and, if so, association of man with man."

Aristotle, quoted in Nicomanchean Ethics.

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As an ugly woman, I totally agree with everything that Brian is saying. However, Pynksparx, you are a bitchass and me and my posse are coming to kick your ass. I may be ugly as sin, hairy and around 200lbs, but at least I own my own corporation, have a cushy 6 figure job at another corporation, am rich, and YOU'RE NOT.

- Brian's Culture Blog (and Brian's Education Blog come to that) is still non-functioning for new postings, but old postings can still be reached via the archives and can still receive comments. That, from "Tali", concerning an August 23rd 2003 posting tactfully entitled Why expensive clothes rescue ugly men but not ugly women is the Culture Blog's most recent comment.

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A few years ago I spent a week on a small sailing yacht off England's South Coast, training for a sailing examination which, I am proud to say, I passed. I subsequently enjoyed plenty of good times afloat, even including a gruelling but fun trip across to France and back, sailing across some of the busiest shipping lanes at night. Assuming I am not flat broke after completing my current house move (gulp), this is a hobby I intend to seriously pursue.

What anyone who has taken part in this great activity will tell you is how tough sailing can be on the human body if you have been sailing in rough weather for any length of time. After one particularly tough week, I felt more physically drained than at any time I can recall. Which makes me awestruck at the achievement today of 28-year-old Ellen MacArthur, who has just set the world record for fastest single-handed non-stop trip around the world.

Her vessel is a huge trimaran, fitted with rope winches the size of small barrels, the latest satellite navigation technology, a mast more than 100 feet tall and made of super-light material. These modern vessels are incredibly fast although they lack some of the rapier-sharp elegance of an America's Cup 12-metre.

Will it be possible to squeeze even further speed gains from modern yachts? Is there a limit to how fast these modern boats can go? I don't know, but I guess this amazing Derbyshire lass is going to have a lot of fun trying to find out. (Maybe she should team up with Bert Rutan).

And this being a libertarian blog, I ought to mention that of course, Miss MacArthur seems blissfully unaware that her behaviour demonstrates the sort of risk-embracing attitude increasingly frowned upon in today's nanny state Britain, as this article makes clear.

But now is not the time to draw great cultural insights from what has happened. Instead, I am going to raise a glass to someone who has shown enormous courage, tenacity and flair.

Update: A commenter asked what my sailing qualifications are and where I got them. I am a Day Skipper, trained by this excellent sea school in Portsmouth and I recommend them. I intend to follow this course with what is called a "Coastal Skipper" course and eventually, a "Yachtmaster", giving me the ability to sail across the ocean. Modern insurance and growing state regulations require you to have at least one person skippering a boat with proper qualifications. Alas the pastime is getting more closely regulated with time.

Oh, and for those that wonder what is the "point" of Ellen MacArthur's trip, my reply is simple: it is the thrill of demonstrating human efficacy and daring against heavy odds. I celebrate it as much as I celebrate Messner's climb of Everest without artificial oxygen or Rutan's space flight feats last year.

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Being a casual and undisciplined surfer of the net means that I often get guided towards stories right in front of me, and very late, by somewhat circuitous routes. For instance, I only got to this as a result of Harry Hutton linking to a James Lileks piece in the Washington Times. But never mind, I got there:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

This is as classic a case of an ( I presume) unintended consequences as I have ever encountered, and it is an unintended consequence of two opinions both of which I hold myself. First, I do think that prostitution should indeed not be illegal, and second, in the absence of the abolition of state welfare, I do think that persistent welfare claimants should be obliged to lower their sights about what work they are willing to accept. Very unemployed information technology professionals should not lounge around watching day time television for year after year until such time as someone finally offers them a job in the information technology profession.

So, add to all of the above a tiny pepper shake of that Germanic manic logic of the sort that we all know about from our history books, and you get: be a prostitute, or lose your benefits. Amy Alkon, commenting on this post, explained why being a prostitute can be a fine and noble thing and can have very good consequences for society, but she surely did not mean this

That is the trouble with micro-managerially interventionist welfare (or attempted welfare) states. Arguments have a tendency to degenerate into whether any and every imaginable sort of human behaviour or employment or enjoyment should be either (a) illegal or (b) compulsory. (c) Take it or leave it/your choice/we do not care/enjoy it - shun it - it makes no difference to us/you decide . . . has a way of getting squeezed out.

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This is an interesting titbit, in today's Guardian:

Peter Mandelson has attacked the BBC's coverage of Europe and accused Today presenter John Humphrys of "virulently anti-European views".

In a letter to BBC chairman Michael Grade, Mr Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, says the corporation has a "specific problem with the anti-European bias of some presenters" and said it was failing in its charter obligation to promote understanding of European affairs.

I seldom listen to the Today show, but it is clear from further remarks of Mandelson's that the Guardian goes on to quote that what Mandelson means by "anti-European views" is "anti-EU" views, which is a typically sneaky piece of EUrophilia. Has Humphrys been denouncing French cuisine, or Italian opera, or German engineering? Has he been saying that the French are all rude, the Italians rotten at driving, and the Germans all crypto-Nazis under a veneer of politeness. Has he been saying bad things about Estonians? No, of course not.

What Mandelson has accused Humphrys of is making EUroscepticism sound convincing, in the following rather interesting way:

The former trade secretary, who was appointed to the European commission last year, says the BBC gives too much coverage to moderate Eurosceptics and not enough airtime to extreme Eurosceptics such as UKIP.

So Mandelson has now become a UKIP supporter. How is that going to look? No doubt it is all part of some cunning plan designed to split the anti-EU camp and present it as all bonkers, xenophobic, etc., but it sounds to me like a somewhat high risk strategy. What if UKIP gets more airtime, in accordance with Mandelson's demands, and uses it to be rather persuasive?

I wonder if Mandelson also thinks that this man should have more airtime?

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People love to demonize greedy bosses who don't care for their workers. However, after going through this bout of downsizing my company, I know that my surviving employees are not unhappy about the change, because it was accompanied by a renewed sense of discipline and focus. Employees – or, at least, my employees – have understood and responded positively to their boss' determination to succeed financially. A boss who tolerates low financial returns will not deliver the wherewithal to provide raises and job security. In retrospect, my biggest sin was not in laying people off during my bout of downsizing – despite the pain involved – but in not demanding enough of them or myself previously. In short, I should have been more greedy ... I would have been more socially useful.

- Friedrich Blowhard last Saturday, in the course of explaining why he has been obliged to stop blogging for a while

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... is also sauce for the gander, so the old saying goes.

The preposterous EU proposal to extend the ban the symbols of the German Worker's National Socialist Party that is already law in France, Germany and elsewhere, has prompted a move to also ban communist and socialist symbols.

So now let us also ban Imperial Roman symbols (they were a slave owning political system), Christian symbols (Inquisitions, religious wars and sundry other nastiness), Confederate Flags... oh hell, let's just ban all symbols except the 'peace symbol' and the EU symbol.

Via Rex Curry.

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The cover of print version of The Economist is titled 'Taking Britain's Liberties' and the issue discusses many of the very serious abridgements of our civil rights that have recently taken place.

But rather than link to any specific article, what interests me is that the truly grave situation is finally 'front page news' in a fairly mainstream publication. It is nothing less than amazing that it has taken this long for the seriousness of the situation to reach the collective editorial consciousness of any significant element of the media outside the blogosphere and other elements of the activist fringe.

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Until today I knew nothing of Pete Doherty, but this poor woman knew far too much about him. She had the extreme misfortune to live next door to him.

Ms Latteck, who shared a wall of her maisonette in Bethnal Green, east London, with Doherty, said she had decided to speak out after being incensed by the glorification of the singer as a modern rock legend. "He is presented as some kind of hero. He is not. The truth is that he made me very sick with incessant loud music, day and night," she said. "It was like having a 100 watt speaker at full volume in my bedroom. The walls and furniture would shake."

That is the Telegraph version of this horrible creature.

Here is the kind of thing that Ms Latteck was complaining about:

He went into jail rambling and incoherent, but is set to emerge as a poet. Pete Doherty, the drug-addict pop star, will find himself pursued by publishers as well as paparazzi when he emerges from HMP Pentonville tomorrow after being jailed following a rumpus that left a documentary-maker with two black eyes and a broken nose.

Already famous for his drug-fuelled antics as the former frontman for The Libertines, as well as his on-off relationship with the supermodel Kate Moss, Doherty is being seen as a hot property after agents learnt that he had been scrawling volumes of verse since his teens. Publishing houses are bidding to sign up the wayward star, who is due to be released tomorrow on bail after being charged with robbery and blackmail. A source close to Doherty, 25, said that he had been approached by a number of publishers.

Now I know what you are thinking. How good is the Horrible Creature's poetry? Well, ask a stupid question.

I would like to see the Horrible Creature's poems make an enormous amount of money, and for all the money to be given to Ms Latteck, with just enough set aside to enable the Horrible Creature to buy enough drugs to kill himself. That is surely what the wiser sort of publishers would prefer. The Horrible Creature is the kind of person who does more good for his fellow humans when dead. When he does die, which surely will not be long now, those who want to can enjoy his poetry and have fun telling each other what it all means, without anyone having any longer to put up with him. Art is often like that, I think.

Rows of dutiful school children in matching desks and matching school uniforms can then study his poems for their GCSE English exams.