I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.
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Patrick Crozier and various others, of whom I am one, continue to put stuff up at Transport Blog from time to time (although my contributions are not always very profound). One of the more interesting Transport Blog items of recent weeks has been this recorded conversation in which Samizdata’s own Michael Jennings talks with Patrick Crozier about low cost airlines. Says Patrick: “Here‘s my favourite bit.” This favourite bit is worth quoting in full:
One of Patrick Crozier’s relentless Transport Blog memes is that safety and profit are not alternatives; they go hand in hand. As he says here in connection with railways, where exactly the same equation applies:
No wonder Patrick was glad to hear Michael saying a similar thing not just about airlines, but in particular about cheap airlines. My favourite bit is where, reflecting on the impact on low cost aviation of the Second World, Michael says:
It’s not so much that I never knew that as that it had never occurred to me to even think about it. January 28th, 2008 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am fond of telling people who are asking or reading about my views on the rights of employers, employees, etc., that I think that an employer should be allowed to fire an employee if he has taken a dislike to the colour of her eyes. But I think that, courtesy of the ever alert Dave Barry, I may now have found a more vivid way of making the same point:
Yes, how appalling. A man, who clearly likes very much being a man, struts about in his own property, behaving like some ancient God of Fertility. Worse, what with his enterprise being a “multi-million dollar retail giant”, I’m guessing that a great many of his employees actually enjoy all this horsing about, and work harder and more alertly than they would if employed by somebody like lawyer Fink. Working for Charney probably wouldn’t suit me, although you never know, maybe I would enjoy it too. Mr Charney overstates his case when he says he can wear only his cock sock “anywhere in the United States”. The essence of his defence should be his right to wear what he likes in his property, not any right to upset other property owners with their different and duller ideas about what constitutes suitable apparel. But as for everything else, my verdict would be that Mary Nelson and her lawyer, Fink, should leave Mr Charney alone. If Ms. Nelson has discovered that she does not like working for Mr Charney and his multi-million dollar retail giant, she has a simple alternative. Find somewhere else to work and someone else to work for. Clearly this was the arrangement Mr Charney preferred, once he discovered Ms Nelson’s perverted taste for litigation. Ms Nelson should simply acknowledge the wisdom of Mr Charney’s decision, and look elsewhere for employment. January 22nd, 2008 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have just chanced upon a copy of the Review section of the Observer of a week ago. In it there is a double page spread, entitled Is this the best way to run the arts?, which is about how various performing enterprises have now got grants they used not to have or who have had their grants increased, and how various other performing enterprises have had their grants cut or abolished. As is the way in politics, the ones who are suffering are the ones now making the most noise. They blame horrid men in suits who do not understand art. Politicians in other words.
But if you want money from politicians, you ought not to be surprised when those same politicians take an interest in the money they are giving to you. After all, they were the ones who stole it, and they have to justify this thievery and to ensure that its proceeds are distributed in a way that satisfies their supporters and quiets their critics. True, the men in suits probably do not understand art very well. But these artists could do with a crash course in politics. They are getting it. Politicians, especially the ones making the running now, like inflicting a radical shake-up every so often. To feed their friends, they are willing to make enemies, and their “cuts” (i.e. decisions to stop giving you money) are often hastily decided rather than “thought through”. And if they do decide to slash or abolish your grant, why would they warn you about this? As for those among them who are genuinely trying to shun mediocrity and to fund only “excellence” etc., how are they supposed to know what that is, or worse, is going to be next year or the year after? Arts funding is either politics, or a lottery. The bottom line here is: if you place yourself at the mercy of politicians, they are all too liable to behave just like the politicians they are and show you no mercy at all. The way to avoid being at the mercy of these horrid men in suits is not to depend upon them for any of your income. Oh, it takes far longer to build up an arts enterprise which relies on voluntary support from eccentric or socially aspirational donors, and from customers who are actually willing to pay in sufficient numbers for your efforts. But once you have done this, you are far less vulnerable to politics, and you will have to waste far less of your life doing politics. True, the politicians might still shut you down or rob you blind, blinder than usual I mean. We must all live in the shadow of such threats. But at least, if you are not getting a government grant, closing you down ceases to be a routine decision that the men in suits are liable to make at any moment. Some while ago now, I wrote this and this (also available as an .htm) on the above subject. Both still stand up pretty well, I think. January 20th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
This recent enraged attack on John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the LSE, recently linked to by Arts & Letters Daily, explains that Gray spouts an almost continuous gush of bilge. Gray is described as one who “flip-flops across the old right-left ideological chessboard”. But this Samizdata posting by me from 2002 explains the method in this man’s madness. My 2002 piece does contain one error, however. I assumed from his accent when I knew him in the eighties that Professor Gray was from Wales. Apparently he is from the North of England. My apologies to Wales. January 18th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Germany recently, there was a pleasing moment of defiance in the face of the determination of the banning classes to ban smoking. Boss fires staff for not smoking is what the headline says, and this is – surprise surprise – inaccurate, assuming that the report under the headline is accurate. The boss fired the non-smokers because they were making a damn nuisance of themselves by demanding that the smokers stop smoking, and he has now announced that he will not hire any more non-smokers, in case they behave similarly. Nobody got fired merely for not smoking. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. But this is only a very small and temporary victory for the right of employers to hire and fire at will, restrained only by whatever contracts may have been made that require otherwise.
It is the little word “still” that tells the true story here. And big offices have already been sorted out. This tiresome little anomaly will soon be corrected, and Germany will proceed methodically towards making smoking illegal everywhere. Adolf Hitler (not even he was able to give legal force to his detestation of smoking) is smirking in his grave, doing no turning whatsoever. January 15th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The decision to go nuclear has exposed the whole environmental cause for what it is: not a well intentioned drive for clean power but a spiteful, mean-spirited drive for less power. Because less power hits richer countries and richer people the hardest. I’ve argued time and again that the old trade unionists and CND lesbians didn’t go away. They just morphed into environmentalists. The red’s become green but the goals remain the same. And there’s no better way of achieving those goals than turning the lights out and therefore winding the clock back to the Stone Age. Only when we’re all eating leaves under a hammer and sickle will they be happy. I’m serious. All the harebrained schemes for renewable energy are popular among Britain’s beardies only because they don’t work. January 13th, 2008 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit has linked to this story, but I am not yet wholly convinced. I am happy to add to the general blog-yell that may or may not now be going up everywhere in the non-pro-Islamic blogosphere, but suspect – although I could be entirely wrong in my suspicion – that this may turn out to be a bit of an exaggeration:
At the risk of being pedantic, what precisely happened? Did Lionheart get a letter? If so, what, precisely, did it say? To be even more pedantic, the phrase “This charge if found guilty” It does not fill me with confidence. Nor does it that, on what is obviously such an important matter, Lionheart has allowed a pair of inverted commas to go awol. But maybe that is to read too much into what is merely some stressed-out grammar. I suspect that, if any ruckus does now occur, there will in due course be an announcement to the effect that Mr Lionheart has entirely misunderstood the situation and has nothing to fear, free speech is sacred, blah blah. If that does happen, it may then be hard to know how much this official clarification will be a true clarification of what had, truly, been the attitude of the authorities, and how much it will be a tactical retreat in the face of an Instalaunch, and of any blogosphere and mainstream media fuss that follows from it. But whatever has been and turns out to be the true story here, I would now like to know a bit more. Lionheart’s central claim, albeit floridly expressed, is one I have come around agreeing with, having started out (on 9/12) believing the opposite. The enemy is not “Islamic extremism”. The enemy is Islam. Although please note that this says nothing about the manner in which this enemy should be responded to. I daresay I might disagree somewhat with Lionheart’s ideas about that. But even if I disagreed with Lionheart about everything, I still agree with Instapundit’s attitude:
If Lionheart’s claim that he faces arrest just for blogging his mind are correct, then of course it is everything-and-the-kitchen-sink time. Let battle be joined. But for now, I would like just a little more reconnaissance. January 4th, 2008 | 77 comments - (Comments are closed)
An extraordinary interlude – an aberration, you might say – in the history of music is now drawing to a close. The musical opportunities created by modern electronics, in the form of electronic recording, radio, and then later of actual electronically powered musical instruments, were responded to by the music profession in two profoundly contrasted ways. The “classical” fraternity concentrated first on popularising – and then on recording in opulently perfect sound – their resplendent back catalogue. “Pop” music has been just as profoundly shaped by electronics. Indeed, it is the creation of electronics. The most fundamental effect of electronics on “pop” music has been that popular music (by which I mean the old folk traditions) has no longer been obliged to rely either on musical literacy skills, or, for those in whom such skills were lacking, memory. “Folk” music always teetered on the edge of oblivion, relying as much of it did on the human brain as its hard disc, so to speak. And folk musicians were forced to concentrate on remembering the old songs, having little brain space to create new ones (folk music before recording was rather like literature before printing. Written manuscripts were about as perishable as the people who created them, for they lasted about as long). Recording, for folk/pop musicians changed everything. No longer did the lowest class of musician depend upon their own memories to keep their previous creations and inherited repertoire alive. They could compose at their instruments, and record it, confident that it would then survive, and they were thus liberated to get on with creating the next would-be hit. And pop musicians were as uninhibited in their use of new, electronic instruments as the classical fraternity were mostly stand-off-ish about them (I know: Boulez, Stockhausen etc. They’re worth a mention). This is a complicated story. Technology takes time to develop and get cheap, and it’s still hurtling along of course. Electronic recording (and CDs) took nearly a century to get good enough to do justice to Beethoven, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner. At it took a similar time to get cheap enough for working class teenagers to play with it in bedrooms and garages. The classical recording enterprise is now basically concluded. Oh, there are still occasional gems to be found in among the dross at the battle of the barrel. But, the great works are now recorded, and re-recording them again and again cannot count for as much now as making similar recordings did fifty years ago when classical fans were still hungry to hear their core repertoire. “Classical” musicians must now look to create new repertoire of a sort that can earn them a living, the inverted commas there being because a lot of them won’t really be “classical” musicians anymore and are becoming a lot more like pop musicians, from whom they have much to learn. The music profession will once more be a single (if huge and sprawling) entity, full of varieties of taste and of technique, but without that cavernous gulf that divided it during the twentieth century (in this respect it resembled and resembles politics. Discuss). I could go on, and on the night I will, but I’ll end by briefly discussing my qualifications to do this talk. Well, first of all, I am a music fan, possessing an small-to-average sized pop CD collection and a gargantuan classical CD collection, having been a classical collector and listener all my now long life. I was a teenager during the sixties musical revolution. I have also been studying the history of the means of communication and information storage for as long as I can remember. I am no great shakes as a musician, although I did play the flute in my school orchestra, and I had a fabulous treble voice as a boy, which I used to sing in choirs of various kinds, at home around the piano and at school. But in the end, I’ll just have to hope that my audience finds my talk illuminating and enjoyable. For the truth is that they know most of the facts pretty much as well as I do. The question is, will I make more sense of those facts for my listeners? I’ll try. December 29th, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
My knowledge of such things is close to absolute zero, but is not this, linked to by Instapundit (where more links and updates are even now accumulating) today, rather exciting?
Damn right. It seems to me that if that caught on, the rules of energy would be changed for ever. Traditionally, energy has been a huge, heavily politicised industry. If only for that reason, politicians everywhere will fight this like cornered rats.
I have always found the Samizdata commentariat to be at their best when educating the rest of us about high tech issues like this one. Is this plausible? Is it safe? Will it be that cheap? Is today really April 1st and not December 20th at all?
Bring it on. Never have I felt as optimistic about the future of nuclear power as I do right now, for this development turns nuclear power from a clunky, expensive mega-muddle that is totally dependent upon politics, to something that is small, simple, cheap and dependent only on the good sense of some people. Not everyone has to like this, and many will be flinging faeces in all directions about it. But not everyone has to. All it needs is a few countries, and a few people in those countries, to say yes. How about this as a way to sell it? If you oppose it, you are in favour of Islamist terrorism. That should loosen things up a bit. An Instapundit emailer says that this technology is old news, updated. So, it’s been around all along, has it? Do you get the feeling that some kind of political switch has been thrown? Rather than fighting like cornered rats, perhaps the politicians of the West who really matter are now willing to relax some of their their control over power supplies, if that’s what it takes to separate those pesky Muslims from their oil money. December 20th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even more predictable than the post-Thanksgiving appearance of shopping-mall Santas is the inability of pundits at this time of year to say or to write “commercialism” without prefixing to it the word “crass” – as we encounter in your pages today in Tom Krattenmaker’s “The real meaning of Christmas.” I challenge this notion. Commerce is peaceful. It involves sellers working hard and taking risks to bring to market goods and services that consumers want to buy. No one forces anyone to do anything; all is voluntary. What truly is crass is politics – that sorry spectacle of power-seeking ego-maniacs who, when not pronouncing platitudes, are promising to help group A by picking the pockets of group B. While commerce is honest, politics is duplicitous. While commerce is peaceful, politics inevitably pits citizen against citizen. Far more enlightened and ethical behavior is on display during any one day in a shopping mall than the most intrepid observer will find in a century on Pennsylvania Avenue. – A letter from Donald J. Boudreaux to USA Today. Amit Varma liked it too. December 20th, 2007 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The European Union has its uses. While rootling around for stuff to link to from CNE Competition, I came across this:
Ah, the age-old dilemma of the EUrosceptic. What do you think if the EU imposes something sensible?
When British diplomats say that something is NOT something else, it means that they have been told to say that by their political masters and that the small print of their argument will be about a very small difference. The feathers on the other something will definitely NOT be the exact same colour, but the other something will otherwise waddle and quack in an identical fashion to the original something, and will in fact be just another duck. For “NOT”, read ” “, in other words.
Sounds great. So what if it is just a plan to sell Eurostar tickets; I still like it. In the end, there is nothing like people preferring something else to whatever bogus nirvana is being peddled by the bogus nirvana peddlers. The one argument against the much vaunted Soviet Communist nirvana that the vaunters could never wriggle free from was the fact – for fact it was – that this was a nirvana that millions wanted to escape from, through minefields if need be, and with only the clothes they were wearing at the time of their escape if that was all they could take with them. A similar process is now under way with Britain’s similarly vaunted NHS, the best healthcare system in the world except for all the others. December 14th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
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