A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
– Barry Goldwater
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December 25th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A few weeks ago, i was looking through old issues of The Spectator and I found a piece by Mark Steyn from a little over a year ago. He was talking mainly about his dislike of the UN, and the silliness of Libya being at the time the newly elected chair of the UN Human Rights Commission and Iraq being about to become president of the UN Conference on Disarmament. (Looking back, I think Iraq and Libya have both learned quite a bit about disarmanent and human rights since then. But I digress). However, Steyn went on to say that some international organisations were okay.
I’m not so sure, actually. Certain aspects of the Berne Copyright Convention are somewhat controversial, and I would argue that parts of it are more about certain countries attempting to implement protectionist policies more than anything else. No doubt we could now have one of those long heated arguments in the comments section as we often do when intellectual property issues are brought up. But let’s not. It’s Christmas. For it was the other one of those international organisations, the Universal Postal Union, that made me think about Steyn’s article when I was posting Christmas presents too my family in Australia a couple of weeks back. You see, there are three postage rates for air mail. The most expensive is the “standard letter rate”, which can be used to send anything, other than items considered actually dangerous to send through the mail. The first of the other rates is “printed matter”, which is defined as
Got that? The other is the “small packet” rate which is defined as
These definitions are defined by the treaties that created the Universal Postal Union, and it is impossible for any one country to change them. This is what happens when you put representatives of lots of governments together to negotiate anything. They come up with stupid, overly bureaucratic definitions and rules. But somehow the idea that it is their business what I choose to put in the mail is taken as a given. They probably had some reason for setting rules like this, at least theoretically. Were books and newspapers considered morally virtuous and letters and photographic negatives not (huh?), or was is considered desirable for people to write their letters on thin paper but it was not considered desirable for people to send light gifts rather than heavy gifts?. In any event, letting people who send things from one almost arbitrary list of things subsidise people who send things from a different list seems somewhat peculiar to me. But I suppose the international postal system does work on the whole. And even if it does produce silly outcomes like this, multilateralism is generally better than bilateralism And things are changing. I cannot remember the last time I sent a personal letter to anyone. Business letters occasionally, and occasionally Christmas cards, but otherwise I use the mail service entirely for sending packages. Perhaps the letter rate will fade into non-existence and the costs of sending packages will revert to something resembling the actual costs of sending them because there is no other mail. I suppose we can hope. But I still have this peculiar vision of somebody working for the post office whose job is to open people’s packages to check that they haven’t written any more than five words on their greeting cards. Clearly this is important. Civilization would obviously collapse if it was not done. Anyway, Merry Christmas everyone. December 24th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
This just in:
Turkeys are “benefits in kind” apparently, which they are now getting very hot on. Another of those stealth taxes, in other words. This time there was a happy ending, because he complained and they changed their minds. Christmas turkeys are trivial, they said, perhaps after thinking about the publicity angle. Good luck next year mate, and a Merry Christmas to all our readers. December 24th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The following is taken from a list of authors names as published in the British Library Catalogue: Florence A Bagelhole I am reliably informed that these names have been checked and that these people do indeed exist. [My thanks to Dr Chris Tame for posting this to the Libertarian Alliance Forum] December 24th, 2003 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, not quite. The Royal family’s horrible little dogs have been fighting each other to the death, is all. Not for cash bets, which would be much more exciting, if less hilarious: just because that’s what animals sometimes do if you let them. Sometimes animals kill people too. We sentimentalise them at our peril. We British folk, especially the upper classes, have long been renowned for our perverse attachments to four-legged creatures over normal human beings. Personally, I can’t see the point. They can’t think, they cost money, you have to clean them, take them for walks, pay vet’s fees, if you go away for a couple of months they destroy the house and/or die and make a mess, and all this for nothing other than the proximity of a creature that can’t do anything except perform basic bodily functions. Why? On second thoughts, don’t tell me: I don’t care. What I do care about is people getting attacked by other people’s vicious animals in public places. Why this crime which Anne was found guilty of last time only merited a £500 fine, I have no idea. But there’s a definite poetic justice to this seasonal next chapter of the story, in my view. Jokes about pets, life and Christmas, anyone…? December 24th, 2003 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
Neither Instapundit nor I stop for a little thing like Christmas, and he links to this piece by Jay Rosen, which quotes Frank Rich saying this, which I think is rather smart:
And Frank Rich saying this also:
I like that. It’ll be extremely interesting to see what happens to the Dean campaign. That all suggests that it may do rather well. However, I saw a tiny glimpse of Dean on TV last night, on a BBC Newsnight report of his efforts, and both the BBC reporter and Dean’s performance suggested to me that he’s a crazed demagogue and that when he comes flapping out of the caves of the internet into the cold light of those “impromptu televised press conferences” that JFK started all those years ago, he’ll crash and burn very quickly. But like I say, it’ll be interesting to see. Even if Dean himself has (metaphor switch warning force six) flown on the wings of the internet too close to the sun of real politics, he has certainly done a lot to give political credibility to the internet, blogs etc. And sadly, what that means is that there will soon be a zillion blogs out there, but that they won’t be linking to the likes of this blog; they’ll be linking to each other. I am about to be an even smaller fish in an even bigger pond. You can feel the word ‘blog’ and ‘blogger’ (the BBC also made much of Salam Pax) becoming something that everyone will soon understand and have an opinion about and which about half of everyone will have to have, like ‘website’ before it. Respectable political opinion has stopped ignoring the political impact of the internet and has switched to worrying about it. “Weimarization” is the word I am hearing, although I can’t recall where. The idea is that the internet is empowering the extremes. But that’s only because the non-extremes aren’t using it, and that’s surely about to change. Indeed, I keep thinking that this ‘the internet is predominantly conservative and libertarian’ vibe is about to roll over and die. And in terms of sheer square yardage of verbiage, it probably already has. If we continue in any way to ‘dominate’, it will be (a) because our ideas and arguments are better, not because we merely proclaim more of them, and (b) because to the liberal left, a media system not biased in their favour – not owned or captured by them – feels like it’s biased against them, even if all that’s really happening is that anyone can now say what they want and read what they want. That of course being one – and I speak as a libertarian rather than as a conservative now – of our ideas. By the way, who exactly is Frank Rich? December 24th, 2003 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve just got off the phone with my mother, who included in among all the family chat some grumbles about this year’s Christmas stamps. She prefers more obviously Christmassy imagery, and she said the people at her local Post Office didn’t much care for them either. What are they? – she said. I’d heard distant grumblings about these stamps, and had seen the one with the ice twiddling around a tree because presumably that was the one which people were particularly grumbling about. Controversial blah blah. But I hadn’t seen all of them, or given any of them any thought until my mother mentioned them. I should guess that there is a sort of ideological agenda here, in the form of a non-agenda. They avoid anything very Christian. Like most readers of this blog I should guess, I utterly despise the notion that Christian Christmas stuff should be set aside in order not to upset Muslim stroke atheists. (a) No sane Muslim stroke atheist could possibly be upset. (b) If insane Muslim stroke atheists are upset, to hell with them. Nevertheless, and perhaps because I am myself a devout atheist, I actually quite like these particular stamps, although I do agree that the ice twiddle one is rather silly. I especially like the ice star. But I’m guessing others might prefer something more along these lines. December 23rd, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Will you join me in a special Christmas prayer? “Oh Lord, please spare us from the Olympics“:
Don’t do it, Tony. Just keep those Treasury purse strings tightly drawn and, with a bit of luck, the organisers of the whole foul jamboree will look for another city to infest. No sane person could possibly want the Olympic carnival let loose on London. It is the equivalent of begging the government to add a zero or two to everybody’s tax bills for a decade or more. Quite aside from the gargantuan cost of hosting the wretched thing, we will also have to endure blanket security measures that render every resident under virtual house arrest and months and months of laboured ‘anti-drug’ messages on every medium imaginable. And, given the times we live in, the whole chabang will be saturated with enough stomach-churning PC mummery to induce a vomitting fit. And for what? So that we can assailed with wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of a bunch of physical education students from Uzbekistan competing in a culturally-sensitive, enviromentally-friendly, non-judgemental, compassionate, caring, 1500m peace-march. Feh! I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever. December 23rd, 2003 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
All going well, on December 25 at 2:45 am GMT, The Beagle 2 lander will touch down on the Isidis Planitia impact crater on the surface of Mars. This lander, which has a planned six month mission on the Martian surface, was developed and built in Britain and forms part of the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission, from which Beagle separated on December 19. Mars Express will be inserted into Mars orbit at 3:00 am GMT on December 25 for a planned mission of between one and two years.  A mockup of the Beagle 2 lander at Sandy Quarry, Bedfordshire. (All rights reserved Beagle 2). All going well, Beagle will be followed by two identical American landers that are scheduled to land in January. These two Mars Exploration Landers will have wheels and will be fully mobile when they arrive, being able to travel distances of up to 40 metres per day. (Everything important is self-contained in the Rover, and the rest of the lander is just a delivery vehicle). Spirit will land in the Gusev Crater on January 4 at 4:35 am GMT on January 4, and Opportunity will land on Meridiani Planum on January 25 at 5:05 am GMT. If all three missions land successfully, we should be getting back lots of interesting data on the red planet.  Projection of the Mars Exploration Rover leaving the lander shell. (Copyright NASA/JPL). If all are successful (about which there is a caveat that I will get to in a moment) these will be the fourth, fifth and sixth successful lander missions to arrive on Mars, after Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder in 1997. (I am excluding the Soviet Mars 3 mission from 1971 which transmitted data for only 20 seconds after an apparently successful landing). All three missions will use the landing method pioneered by Mars Pathfinder in 1997. → Continue reading: A very exciting year for planetary exploration December 23rd, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I lunched today with our Great Leader Perry, and one of the things he mentioned was how he doesn’t care for ploughing through the collected works of the Great Philosophers (something to do with preferring simply to find out “the truth”), and prefers instead to read … and I can’t remember the exact phrase he used, but the one I use in such circumstances is ‘Bluffers Guide’. I share Perry’s tastes in this matter. However, like him, I do want to know approximately what these people did say. I was thus particularly pleased to encounter this posting, by Friedrich Blowhard. It is number three in a series of postings he has done about Friedrich Nietzsche. (Something tells me that there may not be many more in this series of potted guides.) But since Friedrich B starts Nietzsche posting number three with a brief summary of postings number one and two, I reckon that means we can skip postings one and two and just read three. There is a definite air of challenge in what Friedrich B says to the likes of us, especially in these paragraphs:
Heh. Nice little joke that. But after that laugh dies away, I am left with the definite feeling that I am being got at. My problem is that I think that the Nietzsche described by Friedrich (Blowhard), who identifies the twentieth century as the time when God died and the God gap got filled by a succession of philosophical/political catastrophes, is pretty much correct. However, I am also part of the God is Dead tendency myself. In the words of Michael Caine in The Last Valley (a movie which, it so happens, Perry and I share a taste for): “There is no God! It’s a legend!” My sentiments exactly. And if you combine that with “You can’t get an ought from an is!”, you get that pretty much all ‘meanings’ you get nowadays are actually meaningless, other than the ones I make for myself. Okay, well that’s something for you all to think about. If your tastes are more in the direction of cool gadgets, Perry also allowed me to take a photograph of this.  December 22nd, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ok, socialists, answer me this! What exactly is the point of your stupid idiot religion? I thought it was all about stealing money off the rich to give to the poor, you know, the old Robbing Hood theme. That’s why I used to support it. But under ‘New’ Labour, it seems the spirit of the that filthy old capitalist miser, Scrooge, is alive and well and inhabiting the numskull mind of Dawn Primarolo, that overpaid chauffeur-driven socialist bigwig, who never misses a five-star cooked meal, or a round of Christmas drinks, down in the oak-panelled warmth of Her Majesty’s Treasury. Just in time for Christmas, it seems Red Dawn is going to claw back some welfare benefits from the poorest in society, in order to get Gordon’s borrowing down a bit, so he can continue subsidising wealthy Guardian Readers with tax credits, to fund their post-Christmas skiing holidays in France. Not quite why I was prepared to man the barricades with a copy of ‘Militant’ and a pair of unnecessary NHS spectacles to make me look more credible. You socialists, and anyone else who votes for ‘New’ Labour, ought to be ashamed of yourselves. You and your party are beyond the pale, ‘stealing’ off the very poorest in society, particularly at this time of year. Shame on you. All of you. You disgust me. That it demonstrates the total corrupt hypocrisy of welfare state socialism is of course obvious, perhaps even to those of you wearing pink-tinted NHS spectacles. But how can you continue living with yourselves and supporting these sleek self-pampered crooks in the New Labour executive when you hear news like this? Or maybe you’d prefer to bury your heads in the sand when hearing news like this? I know I would if I was still with you. I succeeded in this cowardly behaviour for years, much as you’re probably doing right now. Consider this, though. Maybe this kind of rank hypocrisy is inevitable because socialism doesn’t work. I know, it’s a real mind-bender isn’t it? Maybe it’s even time you woke up and came over to join us on the light side? Consider it as a New Year’s resolution. You’re all welcome, anytime, by the way. You just have to drop hypocrisy off at the door. December 22nd, 2003 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
My day has been deranged by the discovery, which I made at about 4 pm, that Simon Schama’s televised History of Britain has been shown and is still being shown continuously on UK History (one of the free digital channels) throughout the day, from 7 am until 1 am tomorrow morning. I’ve been dipping into it ever since I found out about this, having only caught bits of it when it was on one of the bigger channels first time around. Most of the historical personalities mentioned by Schama were reasonably familiar to me. I know who Elizabeth I was, and when. I know who Thomas Cromwell, Tom Paine, William Wordsworth were, approximately speaking. But one name, in the the episode about the Victorian age, was entirely new to me: Mary Seacole:
That’s her. That’s definitely who Schama was talking about. Denied an official nursing position, she simply went out to the Crimea on her own initiative, and got to work, feeding the soldiers before they went into action in the ‘hotel’ she somehow contrived to have built (I think that’s what Schama said), and then prowling the battlefield searching out the wounded and feeding them and caring for them, and even curing them with her West Indian remedies, which, said Schama, saved many a life, as the word “doctress” certainly suggests. I’m guessing that knowing about Mary Seacole is probably a generation thing. I am of the generation that learned dates and maps and chaps, but which made no great effort to search out worthy people other than White Male worthies for deserved – and I dare say sometimes undeserved – celebration. So I’m guessing that Mary Seacole is now an increasingly well known figure among younger people with any curiosity about Britain’s past. But I’d never heard of her. Thanks to Simon Schama and the UK History channel, now I have. And thank you also to the Internet, and in particular to Google (apparently some are complaining about Google – for its sinfulness in wanting to make money). All I had to go on was how the name sounded, but soon, up came the magic words: “did you mean Mary Seacole?” and the means were in front of my to satisfy any curiosity I might feel about this remarkable woman. December 21st, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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