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The interests of do-gooding organisations are always at odds with their goals. Succeed and you put yourself out of business. With racism in rapid retreat and mixed-race children on the rise, there is one great contribution the Commission for Racial Equality could make to its official cause. Stop existing. – Jamies Whyte, who is what he sounds like and who has a black wife and a brown daughter, ending his comment piece today in Times on line today (also linked to by Mick Hartley) January 26th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. … They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. – Martin Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his City Journal review of America Alone January 23rd, 2007 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
So, Yates of the Yard has arrested another lacky of the Blair Regime as part of his investigation into the cash for peerages crimes. When will the Godfather himself be nicked? I hope that the boys in blue are forcibly taking blood samples from these perps. After all, as Blair himself would say, it is in the interest of all our security that suspects contribute samples to the National DNA Database. What if Levy or Turner or Blair’s criminality manifests itself in other ways? We must have samples in case they offend again. January 20th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I seem to recall someone, maybe even Iain Dale himself, saying to me some weeks back that what 18 Doughty Street TV needs is for someone important to say something newsworthily scandalous on it. The world, and in particular the Mainstream Media, would then start to pay attention to it. So, could this be the breakthrough? Iain Dale is surely hoping so:
Judging by the email that I (and presumably the rest of the world) just got, in the small hours of this Wednesday morning, I get the feeling that Iain Dale reckons that this just might be the media ruckus he has been waiting for. Now do not misunderstand me. I care very little for the fortunes of the Blair government, nor for the fortunes of whichever political gang – Brownies? Cameronics? – gets to replace these people for the next few years. 18 Doughty Street TV would like it be Mr Cameron and his friends, but I really do not care. I consider them all to be as psychologically flawed as each other. Whoever wins the next spasm of electioneering, we already pretty much know what will win, and it is unlikely to be nice. What I am interested in, and do feel entitled to be optimistic about, is seeing the British broadcasting media go the way of the British print media and of the internet itself. I want British broadcasting – in particular British broadcasting about politics, and about what politics is and what politics should be – to lose its air of cosily unanimous religiosity, in which the only competition is in who can present the same centre-to-left news agenda and the same stale centre-to-left editorialising about it with the greatest earnestness and piety, and to become instead a bedlam of biases, biased in all imaginable directions, with no meta-contextual assumption left unchallenged. 18 Doughty Street TV has been a small step in that direction, not so much because of what has actually been said on it, but because of the example it has set to others concerning the viability of non-majoritarian broadcasting, and about the possibility that truly different things could start getting broadcast. Although I do not know or care who Lance Price is, lots of others do, and I am accordingly still intrigued by the possibilities opened up by what he has said. Because of it, a whole lot more people are liable to hear, not just about 18 Doughty Street, but about “internet broadcasting” in general. British print media people have always been quite diverse in their tone, so although the internet has been a technical and professional challenge to these people, it has not been that much of an ideological jolt for them. British broadcasters, on the other hand, have tended to understand the new ‘social’ media rather better, in the purely technical sense. The BBC web operation has had a huge impact. But ideologically, British mainstream broadcasting people are far more uniform in their ideological outlook, and potentially therefore face far more of an ideological upheaval at the hands of the new media. So, I hope that neither Iain Dale nor I are making a fuss about nothing. I hope that this proves to be a fuss about something. In conection with the above, this BBC report (credit where it is due) about Skype offering internet TV services, also makes interesting reading. January 17th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Castro Reportedly in Grave,” begins an Associated Press headline. Unfortunately, the next word is “Condition.” January 16th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
If water were not so obviously essential, I wonder if it would now be even allowed:
Professor Forrest continues:
No sniggering. This is exactly what happened to a Californian lady after she had taken part in a water drinking contest (a sport which should obviously be banned forthwith). A government task force is clearly needed to keep a constant eye on the water threat. Once that happens, health warnings on water bottles are only a matter of time. “Water can seriously damage your kidneys”, and so on. “Big Water” will be accused of peddling scaremongering stories about the alleged need for water, and the alleged benefits of water, and even nonsense about how, if you don’t regularly wash with it, that might be a danger to your health. Some time ago, I recall someone translating “water” into “hydrogen oxide” or “oxygen di-hydride” or some such thing, and listing all the dangers of this profoundly dangerous fluid, such as the definite danger of contracting cancer if you drank, say, forty gallons of the stuff at one sitting, and quite a few safety nazis fell for it. Well, now such anti-water campaigners have some hard evidence to work with. January 16th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I and several other assorted bloggers and Samizdatistas dined at Chateau Perry, at a gathering hosted by Jackie D. The guest of honour was Mr Squander 2. Of course we all asked after Mrs and Baby Squander 2, and the good news is that mother and child are doing much better. For me the most memorable thing that got said last night was when Mr Squander 2 told of how, during the Brezhnev era, poor old Mr Brezhnev apparently consumed an annoyingly large amount of Soviet and in particular KGB man hours trying to get various of his minions to answer for him the question: “Who runs capitalism?” Presumably so that they could take him/her/it out, in some way or another, and score a cheap and quick victory in the Cold War, although sadly that wasn’t part of the story as told last night. Or, maybe the idea was for Brezhnev then to able to sit down with this controlling mastermind, and to ask him/her/it: “How can we do it?” Knowing the damn Bolsheviks, it could well have been both. First find out how they do it, then kill or enslave them all, starting where it makes most sense, with whoever is in charge. Anyway, (1): Heh. And (2) does anyone know anything more about this? I tried googling: Brezhnev “Who runs capitalism?”, but that yielded nothing. It is such a great story that it is the kind of thing people believe because they want to believe it. I know I want to. But, is there any truth in it? January 13th, 2007 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well-intentioned politicians are of two kinds, those who want to help people directly and those who want to free people so that indirectly they can help themselves. The distinction may sound like a quibble, but it is not. – paragraph one of a Telegraph piece yesterday in which Tim Congdon explains why from now on he will be voting UKIP (thank you Iain Dale) January 12th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently I have been reading gadget blogs a lot, and it would seem that I am not the only one who likes to do this. This week, all the gadget blogs,along with the rest of the world, have been screaming, in among their regular stuff about incomprehensible boxes: iPhone iPhone iPhone. Which is understandable. Either the iPhone is a truly remarkable thing, or the hype surrounding this unremarkable thing is all the more remarkable. Now hats off to Apple and all that, especially for keeping it all so secret for so long, although, they do rather seem to have screwed up the calling it the iPhone side of things. But the iPhone, for all its various innovatory features, is just another mobile phone with some add-ons. It is the embodiment of the claim that mobile phones are destined to swallow up all the other mobile objects people like to travel around with, such as music machines and digital cameras (the camera is the only iPhone add-on that really gets my attention), but this notion has been rattling around for some years now. The iPhone looks like being a smash hit precisely because so many people already understand why they want one. However, of all the things I have read about on the gadget blogs this week, this item was the one that I found the most striking. This, for me, has the look and feel of a life changer:
Now once again, this is something that the sort of people who saw this coming saw coming. But, to me, when adverts change moment by moment in a semi-intelligent way, perhaps even in response to their understanding of who is in the area that they are pointing at, then that will be a very different world to the one I have become used to. It will look different and it will feel different. → Continue reading: Billboards are about to become computer screens January 12th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O’Rourke telling me about the history of California’s state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger – they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted. O’Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan’s political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O’Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely. Two things have somewhat distressed me about O’Rourke’s career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts. → Continue reading: P. J. O’Rourke does British television – very well January 11th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is good that Perry has supplied us Samizdatistas with a category called How very odd! to describe our oddest postings, because how else would you describe the calculation that England are now, still, the second best test match cricket side in the world? On the other hand, England really are that bad at one day cricket. January 11th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alex Singleton has been watching the Running Man. I have just been watching a Newsnight report about mobile phones in Kenya. The gist of the report was that mobile phones in Kenya in particular, and Africa generally, are a stunning success. As if by magic, they are transforming the prospects of ordinary people in Africa, and the relationship between ordinary people and their corrupt, aid-gobbling governments. We watched a deeply impressed BBC reporter, Paul Mason, being told by a black lady, who I rather think may have been one of the authors of this report that indeed, mobile phones are having an impact upon Africa comparable to the switch from dictatorship to democracy – she mentioned other technology as well, like fire, the wheel and the railways – and that the mobile phone industry provided a model for progress in other areas of African life, such as education and healthcare. Her message to the governments of Africa: get out of the way, at let the business people do these things, and the people pay for these things, themselves. Paul Mason went deep into the Kenyan countryside, braving the chaos of Kenya’s government supplied road system, into Masai territory, to study the difference between places where mobile phone technology was working its magic, and where the wretched of the earth did not have mobile phones. He was, in other words, looking for one of those gaps. But he did not find any gap. The Masai already have their mobiles, and they love them. Not all the news nowadays is good, to put it mildly, but this Newsnight news was very good news indeed, and not just because of its news about Africa. It was what it said to me and to my fellow countrymen, and (via the BBC’s excellent internet operation) to the entire world, that really pleased me. January 8th, 2007 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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