Elon Musk should understand that the priority here is that no more Teslas get burned, and that he should not have provoked aggressive lunatics in the first place. He should be told by GM and Toyota, who are brokering a truce, to surrender his ownership stake immediately.
|
|||||
|
March 19th, 2025 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west; But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest. >I let them rest from nine till five, For I am busy then, As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea, For they are hungry men. But different folk have different views; I know a person small— She keeps ten million serving-men, Who get no rest at all! She sends’em abroad on her own affairs, From the second she opens her eyes— One million Hows, two million Wheres, And seven million Whys!” – Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories (1902) March 19th, 2025 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is something deeply wrong when a law passed with cross-party consensus and endorsed by Britain’s most trusted charities has made it impossible to run an internet forum for hamster owners. — Sam Dunitriu, as screenshotted by atlanticesque to point out the wilful obtuseness of an opposing view. March 19th, 2025 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Councils begging for your savings isn’t a net zero innovation – it’s an embarrassment”, writes James Baxter-Derrington in the Telegraph.
[…]
Samizdata is not often seen as the go-to place for investment advice, but, on balance and after careful consideration, I would suggest that readers seeking a home for their money avoid “Bristol Climate Action Investment 1” like the plague and avoid “Hackney Green Investment 2” like Hackney. (“Does ‘Murder Mile’ still deserve its name?” asked the Hackney Post after a lull. Short answer: Yes.) Nonetheless, I salute these councils for seeking to raise additional money by asking for it instead of demanding it with menaces. I would salute them even more if they moved entirely to a voluntary system. Though the prospect is unlikely, I hope the investors make their money back with interest, so that this trend towards councils raising money by ethical means might spread. March 17th, 2025 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Blog is getting hit hard with spam so the anti-spam defences have become a bit less discriminating. If your comment fails to appear, it might be because we think you are a blogroach, but far more likely it’s the algorithm taking umbrage rather than us.
March 16th, 2025 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“UK hoping to work with China to counteract Trump’s climate-hostile policies”, writes Fiona Harvey in the Guardian.
A “new global axis” with the People’s Republic of China. Who could possibly object to that? The article continues,
What they mean by this is that the number of people paid to make government regulations, interpret government regulations, comply with government regulations, check that others are complying with government regulations, and punish those who do not comply with government regulations is increasing three times faster than the rest of the economy, which for some mysterious reason is growing more slowly than expected at the moment. March 15th, 2025 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of others. But Dan is right to emphasise how one-sided the debate was, with almost everyone falling in behind the government. He singles out human-rights lawyers as missing in action, given that this was ‘the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history’ (Jonathan Sumption), and we can add the ‘neo-republican’ political theorists who champion the Roman conception of liberty as self-rule, such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit. Both those intellectual giants defended the policy. I thought I could count on the Tufton Street mafia to weigh in on my side – after all, aren’t they wedded to the principle that ‘government is best that governs least’? Surely, paying people not to work, forcing businesses to close and increasing public expenditure by £400 billion was anathema to them? But most of the right-wing policy wonks became enthusiastic supporters of the Covid restrictions, a group I dubbed ‘libertarians for lockdown’. Boris Johnson passed the initial test with flying colours, urging the public to ‘take it on the chin’, but soon fell into lockstep with the more cautious people surrounding him, including my political lodestars Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings. As someone who’d shared foxholes with them during the Brexit wars, that was heartbreaking. March 14th, 2025 | 107 comments - (Comments are closed)
Those business journalists at Bloomberg ($) have noticed that some investors are betting that Russian debt – a market frozen since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine – could “thaw out” if there’s a ceasefire/peace deal. But this is a gamble that has potential to go very wrong.
Given the potential for things to go awry, such as if Mr Putin treats a pause in the fighting to re-group and launch another assault, I’d want to be in close touch with any investment managers running my savings plans to be sure that Russian debt, assuming it was ever to be considered in a portfolio, were to take up more than a few percentage points of my total holdings. In fact, I’d want to insist that Russian debt, even after any sort of diplomatic move (regardless of how it is arrived at), is out of bounds. March 13th, 2025 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit. As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance. Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling. March 13th, 2025 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The notion that Russia is inherently stronger than Europe is false, of course — Europe has a lot more people and a lot more heavy industry. All the pushups in the world haven’t prevented the vaunted Russian military from turning in a decidedly lackluster performance in Ukraine. But to the American right, perceptions and posturing and vibes are often more important than numbers and statistics. Russia gives off strength, so it must be strong. And to the American right, strength is everything in international affairs. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and concepts like the rules-based international order or international law are laughable. If Russia and Europe are to fight, Trump and company want to bet on the side with the shirtless pushups. March 12th, 2025 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
– William Pitt the Elder, speaking in the House of Lords on 18th November 1777 in opposition to the war against the rebellious American colonists. There are some things about the views of supporters of President Trump, and of Americans in general, about the situation in Ukraine that I understand very well. Consider this Bloomberg clip from the President’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 25th September 2018. The caption to the video says gleefully, “Watch the German delegation’s response at UNGA when Trump says “Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course.” The German delegation had a good laugh at the American rube and his silly ideas about not being dependent on Vladimir Putin, and all the sophisticated people on both sides of the Atlantic laughed with them. They are not laughing now. They are still asking for money, though. In the face of such arrogance, it is no surprise that President Trump and a great many of his countrymen are saying, “We tried to warn you about Russia but you laughed. It’s nice that you ‘stand with Ukraine’ now, but you can do it with your own money. Bye.” That, I get. I don’t agree with the view that the conquest of a country in Europe by Russia can safely be ignored by the US, but I can understand it. What I do not get is how many Americans whose views I normally admire have moved from saying, “This war is sad, but it’s none of our business” to speaking as if Ukraine were morally in the wrong for continuing to fight. To take one example, here is a recent tweet from Elon Musk:
Similar impassioned pleas for “peace” are being made by many accounts that I follow on X that belong to Americans who are proud supporters of the right to bear arms, people who would until recently have considered themselves spiritual descendants of those unconquerable Americans praised by Pitt. It seems to me that the position of the Ukrainians now is very like that of the Americans then, right down to the invaders of their country being reinforced by wretched hirelings from far away who have been sold by their leaders and sent to die in a the shambles of a foreign war of which they know nothing. Were the Americans of December 1776 culpable for not laying down their arms when all seemed lost? Should the famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware be covered up in shame?
Washington not caring about the meat-grinder March 12th, 2025 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
Silence over jihadi butchery in Syria tells you all you need to know about the West’s distorted view of the Middle East March 12th, 2025 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
#/media/File:Washington_Crossing_the_Delaware_by_Emanuel_Leutze,_MMA-NYC,_1851.jpg){kind=link}