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One of the things blogs do is edit the news, that is, look at lots of it, and point readers to the best stuff. And when it comes to this story – about a jeweller who chased and was then shot at by a robber, and who was struck in the chest by one of the shots – what counts is this picture:
Maybe other organs have this too, but I first found it, after seeing it on the ITV news, at The Sun. Well done them.
But hang on. Is it not supposed to be illegal even to carry a gun, let alone to fire it at people? These criminals. No respect for law and order.
If the jeweller had been armed, or if he only might have been, the robber would have known it, and this event would probably not have happened. Which in this particular case might have been a shame, because this really is an excellent picture.
In general, I hasten to add, I am against armed robbery, which is why I so completely despise the laws here in Britain which ensure that only armed robbers are armed when they unleash their villainy.
Comrades!
I am terrored! A film has just arrived on the markets of Cameroon, this film the American Police Team or some name that is similar. My nephew, purchased this and asked me to watch because he said is had something to do with DPRK. The shock I see! The general, beloved general, Kim Jong Il is a puppet character in this film and speaking the most offending things! He swears in English, kills his interpreter, and turns into a small insect at the end. They make the Dear Leader to be evil man, and lonely man. They find risible the undying love of the Korean people? They think the leadership of DPRK and the revolution is a joke? Forgive me for saying but makers of this film are bastard people! I denounce them and curse them! Bastard people!
Can we not complain to someone about such slander? Why has not the KCNA denounced this piece of capitalist propaganda? To think that they make light of the general and debase his greatness!
Angered
– J Nelson reacting to this – thank you Mark Holland
I love the internet. I went from this, which I posted here, to this, to this, to this, to this:
. . . to this:
. . . . which is the work of Ha Qiongwen. Of this particular poster, Stefan Landsberger says:
The design reproduced above was at the root of Ha’s problems: why had he depicted a bourgeois woman instead of a female proletarian? Where was Chairman Mao? Why didn’t the poster praise the Chairman more explicitly? Every time the literature and arts world held a criticism session, he was dragged out as an object of public abuse. As a result, Ha was publicly beaten and humiliated more than thirty times.
Personally I think the Red Guards were on to something. I think these delightful and amazing Chinese propaganda posters and China’s current, rampantly aspirational and bourgeois rise towards superpowerdom are cause and effect.
I offered further thoughts along these lines in this ASI blog posting . This is the bit that is relevant:
I recently encountered, in a remainder shop, a big book containing hundreds of Chinese Communist propaganda posters, much like these ones. They depict a vivid and colourful fantasy world of industrial excellence and economic triumph, of collective progress and personal fulfilment, of joy. The people who now preside over China’s current economic miracle were teenagers when posters like these were at the height of their influence, and I think this is no coincidence. It makes perfect sense to me that the more imaginative and impressionable people brought up on imagery like this would turn away in disgust from the lumbering state centralism that these posters were intended to sell, once they realized that state centralism could never deliver such wonders, and instead switch to being enthusiastic pro-capitalists and even capitalist entrepreneurs. After all, only if China switched to capitalism could a real future like this be even hoped for, let alone rationally anticipated.
If you follow the link in that and scroll down to the bottom, you get to this:
Red Guards eat your hearts out.
(I now possess that book.)
Did Ayn Rand have anything to say about these Chinese posters? She should have.
For centuries, philosophers and poets have tried to understand what happiness is, and what might contribute to it. In recent decades, scientists have started to come up with the answers. Happiness is electrical activity in the left front part of the brain, and it comes from getting married, getting friends, getting rich, and avoiding communism.
– Johan Norberg
Last Monday, England won the Ashes. (If I tell myself this often enough, I will eventually believe it.) And when I mentioned this fact (for fact it is) here, I mentioned also the rather fine new stand that they have just built at the Oval, where that final clinching game of the series was played.
Today I walked across the river to the Oval and took some photos of this new stand. And I have done a posting about how it looks at my personal blog, together with some pictures snapped from the TV coverage. And then I found this really great picture of it that someone else took:
Last Tuesday, London celebrated England winning the Ashes, and I also went along and took photos of that. They are not perfect photos, if only because I had such a lousy view of the proceedings. I ended up taking a lot of snaps of the giant TV screen they had behind everything, just as if I had been at home. But, this giant screen yielded some fine imagery, with no interference patterns or surprise black horizontal splodges of the kind that I get when I photo my TV at home, and I am very happy with the photos I did manage to take. You can see my favourites ones here.
Some of favourite pictures were of the words they stuck up for us all to sing:
So there you have it. England won the Ashes because God was on our side.
In circumstances which for an hour or two were excruciatingly tense, but which in the end bordered on farce, England today regained the Ashes, by not losing the final test at the Oval to Australia. Champion Aussie bowlers Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne gave England a fright by having them five down by lunch, and it looked as if Australia could soon be in and knocking off the runs. But a first test match century by Kevin Pietersen – what a day to pick! – soothed England nerves. Once it became impossible for either side to win, everyone wanted to end it – England and their fans to celebrate, the Aussies to say their goodbyes and get out of there. But the idiot laws of cricket, or lack of the right law of cricket to cover the situation, caused an absurdly anti-climactic period during which the umpires first said that the light had got too bad, and then faffed about while everyone else just stood about, before they eventually declared the game over.
Channel Four had no intention of just switching off their television coverage, but after all the foolishness, things got back on track, with the celebrations duly being drowned with red, white and blue confetti, jetting out of confetti machines.
It had looked, after more seriously farcical proceedings yesterday when not very bad light had stopped play for the second half of the day, as if the final day might, as a result, not be very tense, but McGrath and Warne soon saw off that idea.
Warne also got two more wickets at the end when it no longer mattered, bringing his tally in the match to twelve, and his tally for the series to forty, if my calculations do not deceive me. Despite ending up on the losing side, Warne has been the Man of the Series for me. Without him, England would have been out of sight in this game by the end of the first day. But Warne beat England back from 82-0 to 131-4, and it was game on from then on.
The turning point of the series, it is pretty generally agreed, was when Glenn McGrath, who dominated in the first test at Lords, trod on a ball and hurt himself just before the start of the second game. He missed that game, and was never the same deadly accurate bowler again, despite manful efforts. In that one moment, the series went from being Australia’s for sure to anybody’s, and it stayed anybody’s until late this afternoon, when England finally got their noses properly in front.
Duncan Fletcher, the Zimbabwean who has been coaching England for the last few years, had to be told to smile at the end, and he fleetingly obliged. He must have been doing a lot right. He is good at avoiding the limelight.
But most of all, I think the difference was sheer luck. England played very well indeed, but they also had just that tiny bit more luck of the good sort, and just a tiny bit less luck of the bad sort. The commentators talk about how England “dominated more”. But England damn near lost that second game, and coming back from 2-0 down would surely have been beyond them. England won four tosses out of five, which made a big difference. And just to take today, Pietersen was nearly run out, and was also dropped three times before he got seriously going – although you could say that this is only fair considering that Pietersen dropped every catching chance that came anywhere near him all summer.
I want to believe that Shane Warne is one of the very greatest players there has ever been, what with England having finally got him to be in a losing Aussie team. But Flintoff got the “Man of the Series” award. But I suppose they have to pick someone from among the winners. (Maybe Warne lost it by fluffing the easiest chance Australia had today to get Pietersen out, and with it, as it turned out, Australia’s best chance of winning the match and keeping the Ashes.)
Read more here, a lot of it by our very own Aussie, Michael Jennings. Scott Wickstein reckons the Aussies did not show England sufficient respect. Maybe.
Finally, a word of praise for all the people associated with Surrey Cricket Club who were responsible for the vast, flat arch of a new stand that now graces the Oval. It has turned a great ground into a ground that is less great in size, but even greater as a place to go and to see.
If you have any interest at all in the history of classical music, then I warmly recommend this fascinating article by Jane Glover in last Friday’s Guardian (linked to yesterday by Arts & Letters Daily). I already know Jane Glover as an excellent conductor, and before writing this I played a CD of her conducting some of my very favourite Mozart symphonies. Wonderful. But, I had no idea until yesterday how much of a Mozart expert she is.
Her article, which doubles as a plug for her forthcoming book called Mozart’s Women, concentrates on Mozart’s wife Constanze.
Glover states the Constanze problem succinctly:
Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus brilliantly explores the confrontation between genius (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart) and mediocrity (Antonio Salieri). But there is one person to whom his take on Mozart’s life does no favours at all: his wife Constanze. Portrayed as a vulgar, bubble-headed sex kitten, lacking any appreciation of her husband’s phenomenal gifts, Constanze shares and encourages only the immature aspects of Mozart’s personality.
What is more, in portraying Constanze like this, Shaffer only echoed contemporary gossip about her, now believed to be utterly without foundation, to the effect that she had no idea to whom and to what she was married.
But it turns out that Constanze was a hugely more formidable figure than that. She thoroughly appreciated her husband’s genius, and it was during their very happy marriage that Mozart wrote the vast majority of his finest works. Coming herself from a famous musical family, the Webers, she was in fact the ideal composer’s wife, assisting and inspiring in equal measure.
Even more important from the point of view of posterity is that after Mozart’s tragically early death – which most scholars now agree to have been accidental, despite how Peter Shaffer tells the story – Constanze did everything she could to ensure that Mozart’s music was made available to posterity. All who love Mozart’s music are in her debt.
The history of art is shot through with horror stories of lost masterpieces, of destroyed manuscripts, of mislaid musical scores, and nowadays, of things like destroyed tapes from the early days of television. That nothing like this happened to the wondrous creative output of Mozart is due to the industry of many people, not least to that of Constanze’s second husband, whom she got to know because they worked together to preserve and publish husband number one’s compositions. But pride of place in ensuring that Mozart remained for ever Mozart, so to speak, goes to his beloved Constanze.
As for the “sex kitten” stuff, I cannot believe that, musically speaking, this did any harm either. On the contrary, even the smallest acquaintance with Mozart’s music – especially his operas – suggests quite the opposite.
And another thing to think about when we start pointing fingers is this. The government is never equipped to handle a crisis like this. There’s too much bureaucracy – initiative-stifling bureaucracy which prevents swift, effective action. I would like to hear from government employees on this. The nature of that bureaucracy is such that you have very specific guidelines to follow for even the most minute tasks. You need approval for just about everything, and the person you need approval from usually needs approval to give you the approval.
It’s not as easy as say rounding up 4 of your co-workers and saying, “We’ve got someone at such and such an address, let’s go grab her and get her out of there.” Now add a destroyed or disabled command and control center to that bureaucracy and you’ve got a total and complete mess.
You (as a civilian) don’t need “Approved” stamped on 3 different forms before you can run into your neighbor’s house and pull them out. I hope this makes sense.
Anyway, I’m sure there’s been human error in this catastrophe. How could there not be? But what I’m saying is that I’ve come to expect poor decision making and a total lack of initiative from government. They can’t even balance a budget, at the federal, state, or local levels. I could balance my checkbook and spend within my means when I was a teenager. But I’m not gonna point fingers and get into the blame game. If you want me to blame something besides the storm herself, I blame the nature of government in the first place. It’s too big, it’s too slow, it’s too inefficient, it’s too bloated, and it’s too intiative-stifling to be effective in normal circumstances, much less in a disaster. It’s a systemic issue, more than an issue of individual people in government.
– The Interdictor writing yesterday
The EU Referendum blog links to this fascinating article about the engineering history, so to speak, of New Orleans, referring in particular to this paragraph:
The lower Mississippi is in no way a natural river anymore. A law instituted in 1724 by a French colonial governor, whose name was Perrier, of all things, demanded that early homeowners in New Orleans raise the low natural levees upon which they all built. Three year later, Perrier declared the little city floodproof.
So there you have it. Do not blame Bush. Blame France.
Not really. The situation is a deal more complex than that. But it does seem to be true that once they decided on living lower than the Mississippi River, they found that the methods they chose to protect themselves from it only served to make it rise ever higher into the air, and themselves to sink lower and lower.
David Herman, writing in Prospect, does not think the Old Media are giving way to the New Media. He just reckons that some of the Old Media are crap:
The reason the Guardian’s circulation is falling is not because of the internet or because young people have gone blog-crazy but because G2 is full of uninteresting new columnists and the op-ed page has a kind of infantile ultra-leftism that no sane person would go near. Similarly, ITV is haemorrhaging viewers not because of the challenging new multi-channel environment but because it keeps making programmes like Celebrity Wrestling and Celebrity Love Island. After all, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times do not seem to be losing too many readers and the viewing figures for BBC2, Channel Four and Channel Five are remarkably stable. Interestingly, it is the losers in the ratings wars who tend to be the hardcore technological determinists.
But hang on. If the numbers for some of the Old Media are “remarkably stable”, while other bits of the Old Media are “haemorrhaging” viewers and readers, does that not mean that the total amount of attention being paid to the Old Media is in decline?
It makes sense to me that the New Media should be better at supplying infantile ultra-leftism and uninteresting new columnists for free, than they are at replacing the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail. So, if infantile ultra-leftism is what you want, you no longer have to pay for it. However, free substitutes for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail will be a bit longer in catching on, not least, I should guess, because their readers are more conservative in their reading habits as well as more Conservative in their opinions. The picture that Herman sketches is entirely consistent with the notion that the New Media are losing out, starting with their youngest readers and viewers.
And when the brains of all the not-so-infantile not-so-ultra-leftists cut in, as Blue Peter loses its influence over them and as Real Life impinges, will they suddenly switch back to reading newspapers, in the form of a smartened up Guardian, or the Sunday Times, or the Daily Mail? It seems improbable. They will surely carry right on with their New Media, and the New Media will expand to accommodate them, as viewers, as readers, as writers, and in whatever other ways develop.
David Herman sounds to me like he is saying that sailing ships will sail on unscathed, and that this steam stuff will never catch on. His title is: “Am I missing something?” Yes he is.
Americans are working on nanotubes. In Germany, they are making artificial diamonds that are tougher and denser than the naturally occurring kind.
Here in Britain, in Somerset to be precise, we are harnessing, as Ananova reports, hamster power:
We’ve often wondered for what purpose exactly hamsters were put upon this earth, and now we know: to charge mobile phones.
Sixteen-year-old Peter Ash, of Somerset, finally cracked this age-old poser after his long-suffering sister complained of pet hamster Elvis scuttling away for hours during his nocturnal exercise wheel regime.
Ash told Ananova: “I thought the wheel could be made to do something useful so I connected a system of gears and a turbine.” He then patched the output to his mobe’s charger and voila! – free hamster energy at around thirty minutes’ talktime for every two hamster wheel minutes.
My thanks to Michael Jennings for emailing me the link to this important news. In his email, he noted the educational angle. Apparently this was a school project, but was not marked very highly.
Surprisingly – and considering all the current moaning about falling exam standards, etc, etc – Ash only got a “C” for this contribution to his GSCE science course and, undoubtedly, a clean-energy future for all our children. Perhaps if he’d knocked together a desktop cold fusion reactor powered by supercharged, neutron-emitting guinea pigs suspended in deuterium gas he might have earned himself an “A”.
To be a bit more serious, I think the real story here is not just a new way to get power, but the fact that nowadays a little bit of power can go a whole lot further than it used to. Hamsters have long had it in them to crank out a dribble of electricity. What is new here, surely, is the “mobe” which makes such good use of it.
Over the weekend, Bill Oddie fronted a TV show about dinosaurs, in which, in order to learn how fast dinosaurs could run, an ostrich called Sharon was asked to run on an exercise machine. She apparently enjoyed doing this a lot. (The point was that ostriches have similar legs to what dinosaurs used to have. Work out how fast and for how long ostriches can run, with their legs, and you can calculate how fast and for how long the dinosaurs could run.) Maybe Sharon and her sisters and brothers could get jobs generating electricity.
Maybe gymnasia could double up as places where you can recharge your phone. By the sweat of your brow, I mean. Not just by handing it in at the desk and collecting it later. That way, you earn the right to spout rubbish over it to your idiot friends.
Yesterday I expressed the hope that England would beat Australia at Trent Bridge, and today they did.
But England fans like me were once more put through the ringer. England should have had no difficulty knocking off the 129 runs they needed in their final innings. But the Australians fought like hell to claw their way back into the contest at exactly the moment when they should have been accepting the inevitable, and once again they nearly succeeded, England scrambling home by a mere three wickets. Warne and Lee are such ignorant fellows. They never seem to know when they are beaten.
The general opinion is that this is one of the greatest Ashes series ever. And this England win is good for that series in the sense that if England had lost this game, Australia would have retained the Ashes, no matter what happened at the Oval. As it is, the Oval game is winner take all.
The closeness of this Trent Bridge game makes it all the more regrettable that this otherwise fabulous contest was disfigured by yet another important and hideously mistaken umpiring decision. Australian batsmen Simon Katich was given out leg before wicket, at a time when he was batting very well and might have gone on to help set England a lot more than 129 to win. We all make mistakes. Umpires cannot be infallible. But on this occasion, technologically generated evidence made it clear to everyone before the unfortunate Katich had even walked off the pitch that the ball (a) pitched outside the leg stump, and (b) would have gone over the top of the stumps, and that the umpire was accordingly wrong on both counts to give him out.
Some erroneous decisions by cricket umpires take many minutes to deconstruct fully, but this Katich decision was immediately revealed to be wrong. So, if the umpires had had the same technology in their hands as the commentators now have, not only would a correct decision have been given at a crucial juncture in this very close match; it would have been given with almost no delay.
The current circumstances, in which umpires are made public fools of within seconds of giving their verdicts, cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.
The LBW decision that did for Gilchrist also looked dodgy, but, assuming that I understand the finer points of the LBW law, the technology was able to show that this decision was almost certainly right. But that just means that the umpire guessed right, this time. He should not have had to guess. He should have known.
Cameras are already used to settle run outs, to the general satisfaction of all involved. Today, cameras were used to show that a possible run out was not, because England’s wicketkeeper had knocked the bails off before the ball arrived, and again to establish that the catch which later on dismissed Andrew Strauss was properly held and had not hit the ground first. There was a bit of a delay, but not an excessive one given the importance of such decisions.
I understand how this situation has arisen. This clever LBW technology could not immediately be given to the umpires. It had to be refined and proved to be satisfactory. But now it has proved itself. We all – fans and players alike – now trust its verdicts more than we trust the umpires. Had the umpires had it in their hands today, who knows how the result might have gone? Who knows how many runs England might have had to chase in their final innings?
All of which made the characteristically sporting manner in which the Aussies took their defeat today all the more impressive. Considering how little practice they have had at it during the last fifteen years, they are good losers.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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