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If you believe – as in: if you believe that if you went into it thoroughly you believe that you would believe – that Noam Chomsky is a monster, but have better things to do with your life than wade through all the disgustingness that would prove it, then this is the interview you should read. My thanks to David Thompson. August 21st, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A few days ago I stuck up a couple of postings here pertaining to the forthcoming US Presidential election, one specifically about Paul Ryan, and the other about, more generally, whether it makes sense to worry about which particular lizard is elected Lizard King. Does the fact that the wrong lizard might get in really signify? My own opinion is that it all depends on the Tea Party, people who I want to believe to be good people with good ideas. I would like the Tea Party to make a big and visibly decisive difference to America electing the least worst lizard to be Lizard King. That would mean that they would then really count for something. But what I would really like would be for the Tea Party then to use the clout they thus amass to subject the new Lizard King to political pressures such that, whatever his personal inclinations or past habits, the new Lizard King finds himself obliged to do Tea Party things. By which I mean run the US government less like a sting-the-suckers-for-all-they-have crime syndicate. To put all that another way, I really want to believe that this (by David Kirby and Emily Ekins for the Cato Institute) is true:
That’s as far as I’ve so far read. There’s another fifty or more pages. Meanwhile … I wish. August 21st, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
And no, this is not an attack on Microsoft. Via the Architect’s Journal, news of a new kind of glass, which looks just like regular glass to us humans (i.e. we see right through it), but which looks entirely different to birds …:  … and stops them flying into it. They tried things like stickers on the glass, but although irritating to humans, the birds paid no attention to them. Just flew into the glass “around” them, presumably. Makes a nice change from wind farms. But, this Guardian piece on the subject is very odd. The headline above it goes “Wind myths: Turbines kill birds and bats”. The piece itself describes how wind turbines kill birds and bats. Can a “myth” also be true? But it does also say this:
So glass windows have been slaughtering birds on a far grander scale than wind turbines, and for far longer of course, and will mostly continue to do so. However, glass windows are very useful. August 18th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m at least a week late with this picture (illness blah blah), but it remains one of my favourite Olympics images, snapped by one of my favourite bloggers, Mick Hartley:  Suddenly I heard myself asking: Yes, why couldn’t those damn rioters have waited until the Olympics? Not really, but I did think it. (What I really think is that rioters shouldn’t. And before anyone says, it’s different if all you do is call yourselves a Riot and play noisy tunes.) But to take my question seriously, I suppose rioters can tell when they’ll be allowed to run riot for a little while, and when they absolutely will not. Had they tried anything seriously wicked during the Olympics, they would have been crushed without mercy, the crushing egged on by the very people who, during and after the actual riots, were most sympathetic towards the rioters. Interestingly, a little two-part BBC2 TV show about the riots was billed in the Radio Times to be shown just before the Olympics. But then it was postponed. August 18th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Photoed by me in Vauxhall Bridge Road, earlier this week:  I liked this enough when I first set eyes on it to snap it up, and that was two days before I even noticed the “we’ve got one ‘ere” bit. Like I always say, my camera regularly sees more than I do. Website here. August 17th, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was surprised to discover today (unless I have been more than usually let down by my internet searching “skills”) that this, by Douglas Adams, has never been mentioned here at Samizdata before:
That’s from So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. In the place I found it on the www (see the link above), it does not say on what page. I was reminded about this snatch of dialogue by a recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 show Quote Unquote. A lady participant said she thought Douglas Adams very wise and very funny, this quote in particular. I post it here as a corrective to today’s SQotD, below, in which Paul Ryan says something good, thereby proving himself to be a more likeable lizard than nasty lizard Obama and his lizard gang. But, alert readers will note that this is a classic example of a piece of writing that will have everyone nodding, but each thinking his own thing. It’s like if you say you favour “common sense”, “principled government”, or “democracy“. Each person listening to you agrees. Each has his own distinct idea about what each phrase means, in ways that often wildly contradict the ideas in the heads of his nodding neighbours. All agree, that these are fine things. Far fewer actually do agree about anything of substance. For some, reading the Adams quote above, the lizards in charge of us are too capitalist inclined, for others they are insufficiently capitalist inclined. Some want the lizards to be keener on policy X, others curse the lizards for being insufficiently opposed to policy X. All agree only in being unsatisfied with the rule of the lizards, and that the lizards are indeed lizards. Which is one reason why the lizards usually survive and thrive. We, their victims, can so very rarely agree amongst ourselves about what species, or indeed if any species, ought to replace them. August 16th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the government doesn’t define what happiness is. You do. – Paul Ryan, quoted in this report. What do our American commenters make of this guy? He seems to make a lot of good noises, which I think is a hell of a lot better than no good noises. Put it this way, if America did not now vote for these good noises, that would really be a disaster, I think. August 16th, 2012 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am now recovering from an illness. While ill, the only thing I could manage to pay much attention to, other than the various pains in my head, was the Kevin Pietersen Affair, the contemplation of which, to an England cricket fan like me, is a not dissimilar experience to that of being ill. Today at Lord’s, the sacred home of cricket, England are embarking on the third and final game in their five day test cricket series against South Africa, but without Kevin Pietersen. Pietersen scored a brilliant century in the previous game. But no, he is not injured. He has been dropped. Pietersen sent out disloyal tweets about the England captain and coach, for which transgression he did apologise, but too late. You can read the details, in the unlikely event that you want to, in media reports like this one, where phrases like “underlying issues on trust and respect” appear. Where my interest in all this (I could write about it for ever) and the interest of Samizdata readers (who would presumably prefer me to keep a lid on it) may overlap, or so I hope, is in the big picture background to all this. Which is, in a word: India. From time to time, usually, as now, from a writer trying to use such circumstances as a metaphor, you read about planetary objects being subjected by much heavier objects in their vicinity to gravitational forces so severe that different parts of the smaller planetary object start to be pulled in different directions, perhaps so severely that the smaller object threatens to fly into pieces. This is what is now happening to cricket in England, under the influence of that much larger cricketing object, cricket in India. Cricket is now like a solar system, and the quite big planet that is England cricket is being yanked about by the gravitational forces being exerted upon it by the Sun. And that Sun is: India. The background to the argument between Kevin Pietersen and the E(ngland and Wales) C(ricket) B(oard), the people who run the Engand cricket team, is that Kevin Pietersen desires to be both an England international cricketer, and also to maximise his income (and also enjoyment and ego-massage) from cricket by all other available means, while nevertheless contriving somehow not to drop dead from physical and mental exhaustion. In particular, Pietersen yearns to be both an England cricketer and a fully paid up (very well paid up indeed) player in the Indian Premier League, the Indian twenty overs tournament that takes place in April and May of each year. The ECB treats the IPL as just another foreign cricket league, concerning which they need to care very little. It’s a nuisance to their arrangements, but no more. They do not – or such seems their attitude – need to contrive any “window” to allow England cricketers to neglect their early season England cricket in order to cash in from a meaningless foreign slogfest, and then allow them time off from England games, or preparations for England games, so that they can avoid becoming completely exhausted. They pay England players well, and that should be quite enough, is their attitude. But for any cricketer good enough or lucky enough to get a contract to be part of it, the IPL can be the difference between an anxious transition, when the time comes, from professional sport to the rigours of real life, and being financially secure for life, especially if he does well in it and gets asked back several times. During the limited time when Pietersen was able to play in this year’s IPL (he had to leave before the tournament ended), he did very well, scoring another brilliant century, for the The over-arching fact about cricket now is that the IPL is not just another tournament in a faraway country. It is the first great assertion in the cricket world – the cricket world – of the massive economic power of Indian cricket fandom. As I never tire of saying in my various cricket blog postings, there are more cricket fans in India than there are people in Europe. I remember when the millions of India were famous only for starving. Now, these same millions are striding towards twenty first century affluence. And they are taking cricket with them. If India really, really wants to watch you play twenty twenty cricket for a month and a half, at a time when cricket in England is only getting started in weather that is often vile (despite anything the Met Office may have told cricket people about such months getting warmer), then if you are a cricketer, you really, really want to say yes. → Continue reading: Kevin Pietersen and the rise of India August 16th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The world’s energy problem seems to have been solved, but governments do not seem to have noticed. August 10th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peter Schiff is an economics guru held in high esteem by several of my libertarian acquaintances, and he is is starting a gold-based bank. The good news:
The bad news:
In the comments on my previous posting here, about what went wrong and when, much was made of the idea that in addition to knowing what went wrong it would help a lot if we can also say how to put it right. Personally, I believe that “politics” is never going to sort this mess out, certainly not politics alone. What might is people just recreating the gold standard on a freelance basis, by such means as joining in with enterprises of the sort described above. Yes, governments can shut such things down, as the above report makes abundantly clear. But if large numbers of people start placing side bets in enterprises of this sort, then it starts to become politically hazardous to just forbid such arrangements. One of my favourite slogans just now is: “This isn’t gold going up; it’s the dollar (the pound, the euro, the yen, the whatever) going down.” That is because I consider this to be the basic idea behind a non-state imposed (which is the good kind of) gold standard. When large numbers of people measure state fiat currencies by how badly they do against gold, rather than gold by how “well” it is doing against this or that collapsing currency, then that is surely the beginning of the end for these currencies. August 10th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my understandings of the current financial mess that the world is in concerns when the various contending diagnosticians think that the rot set in. The earlier the more Austrianist, seems to be the rule. Instapundit recently linked to a piece by James Pethokoukis concerning the diagnosis offered by Robert Hetzel. Hetzel thinks the problems only got seriously serious around 2008. Until then, it had been a bit up and down, but nothing that bad. But then, in 2008, the Fed, and central banks the world over, adopted money supply policies that were too restrictive. By not creating enough more money at that moment, the Fed turned a little temporary difficulty into a far bigger difficulty. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but this is similar to what Milton Friedman et al said about what triggered the Great Depression, is it not? Hetzel is, I presume, some kind of Friedmanite Monetarist. He reckons he knows exactly how to skipper the nationalised industrial ship that is money. I reckon he doesn’t. For if Detlev Schlichter and the other Austrianists are right (I think they are), the rot set in a long, long time before 2008. The idea that, if things had been handled just that little bit more deftly in 2008 all could have been well – bar a slight bump or two – is just wrong. The world by then was full of bad investments, and these investments were – are – going to have to be liquidated if the world economy is ever going to start motoring again. Encouraging even more bad investment, which is what Hetzel is saying should have been done, would only have made the grief still to come that much more grievous. Whether James Pethokoukis agrees with Hetzel with anything resembling the vehemence with which I disagree with Hetzel, I do not know. Perhaps he just wants an excuse to blame everything on President Obama. But if the Austrianists are right (they are – reprise), it goes way back, to Nixon and before, to the very creation of central banks as a means of sucking wealth out of economies (traditionally to wage war) without people getting the chance to complain too loudly in some sort of parliament. The idea that Obama, or for that matter George W. Bush, could have entirely solved the world’s present financial problems, i.e. solved them without any political grief, is absurdly mistaken. They could make it worse and they both did, with only a bit less Hetzelism than Hetzel now thinks they should have perpetrated. The idea that, with one Hetzelian bound, they could have freed us all from any grief is crazy. As is the idea that dumping Obama and replacing him with someone less malevolent, anti-American, socialistic, Christian, atheist, Muslim, environmentalist, Chicagoan, incoherent, lazy, golf-loving, devoted to black magic (take your pick), will fix everything. In my opinion dumping Obama would be better than not dumping him. But doing this could merely be the difference between jumping off the cliff instead of sliding down it. August 9th, 2012 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Earlier this year, I bought myself an FZ150. But now there’s an FZ200. And the torture begins:
Now they tell me.
Is this why some people hate progress? The thing is, my FZ150 is the best camera I’ve ever owned. And now there is a better one. August 7th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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