It’s full time in Bloemfontein, and England have crashed out of the 2010 World Cup. Meanwhile, at Old Trafford we have a double change with Ryan Harris back into the attack.
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It’s becoming an interesting evening of sport on the television, and on the www. A teenager scored a century for Surrey (my team) in their T20 game. (I follow T20 cricket on cricinfo.com.) And Matt Prior scored a century in less than fifteen overs for Sussex, in their game. The USA, who seem to me to have a very good team, topped their group in the soccer World Cup, by beating Algeria with a very late goal, shading England from the top spot and elminating Slovenia, whom England beat, also 1-0. And the USA did this while having what looked like two perfectly good goals disallowed, one in today’s game, and one in their game against Slovenia, which might have won that for them. Now Germany are playing Ghana, and if they don’t score, they’ll be out. Hold that. Germany have just scored. If it stays like that, Germany will, I think, play England in the next round. Yesterday, France were eliminated, when they lost to South Africa. And I’ve just heard that Australia have beaten Serbia, which means that Ghana also go through. But I heard nothing else remotely as strange as this:
I had just joined them. It’s someone called Isner versus someone called Mahut, at Wimbledon. Goodness knows how it will end. Or when it will end. Or if it will end. It is now fifty six all. Make that fifty seven all. Now it’s fifty eight fifty seven to Isner. Still no breaks of serve in the final set. Apparently someone called Ron Mackintosh is commentating for the BBC. And this is his very first match. Follow this mate. Follow this. Mahut has now served fifty times to stay in the match. I think he is French, by the way, and Isner is American. John McEnroe just said he feels sorry for the umpire. Fifty eight all. They are taking a break. LATER: It’s fifty nine all, and there’s been an appeal against the light. Play is suspended. The longest tennis match ever played, anywhere in the world. And tomorrow it will go into its third day. June 23rd, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Never has there been a worse time to be a US ally. – Daniel Hannan finally admits that he was wrong to have backed Barack Obama for President June 16th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The usual explanation for the troubles now afflicting the EU that is doing the rounds now is that the Greeks and Spaniards have recently been behaving even more like Greeks and Spaniards than they usually do. But Helen Szamuely offers an alternative explanation for the EU’s current woes. Germans, she observes, are finally reverting to being regular Germans. Having quoted a Der Spiegel article about how German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now mysteriously unwillingly to bow to France in the manner of her predecessors since WW2, Helen says this:
And that fits a point that I have made over and over again, which is that when it comes to predicting the future, there is one kind of thing that one can say with certainty, when all else is guesswork. Statements of this kind are always going to be true: in twenty years time, you and I and everyone else will either be twenty years older, and influencing the world in the way that people twenty years older that all of us are likely to influence the world (in my case hardly at all), or dead. All manner of interesting suggestions about the relationship between events and later events can be derived from this kind of observation, including even events which have yet to happen, as Helen Szamuely’s own earlier versions of the above presumably suggest. Such speculations are not all going to be right. But they can be very interesting and suggestive. Historically, one of my favourite such twinning of two events is: Battle of Crecy 1346, Peasants Revolt 1381. A great many of those “peasants”, including their leaders, were the veterans of earlier continental wars. Now? Well, can it be coincidence that our current financial turmoil is happening just when, for the first time since it happened, hardly anyone is still alive and counting for anything who remembers the previous bout of such financial turbulence, that started erupting around 1929? June 15th, 2010 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Steve Baker MP’s maiden speech. Tried to finish a longer piece involving that link, but failed. There’s the link anyway. Now rushing out to a meeting organised by the very organisation that published that blog posting. Such is life. June 9th, 2010 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a report about progress, so to speak, in the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China. This dam, just as was earlier prophesied, is causing lots of environmental problems, as in real environmental problems, as in: people are finding themselves living in buildings that are collapsing, beside roads that are cracking up, on land that is sliding into the water. We are not talking imaginary rises in sea level here, but real damage to real human habitats. Earthquakes are now happening. That Telegraph piece links to this Times report, which explains things thus:
The Times report also includes this choice little paragraph, concerning some crumbling building that was hurriedly vacated by government officials and allocated instead to mere people:
A key point made by the Telegraph piece above is that less is now being done than you might expect by Chinese higher-ups to suppress such reports:
This all made me think of a book I read a year or two ago about the Western Way of War, or some such title, by Victor Davis Hanson (I think it was this book, although I believe I read a proof copy with a different title). The connection? Well, Hanson identifies one of the strengths of the Western Way of War to be the way that western war efforts are often preceded by almighty rows, often woundingly public, about how to set about, or even whether to set about, doing whatever it is they are attempting, which typically continue after the effort has begun. One of his major points being: this is not recent, it’s always been like this. The result, for all the mess and unpleasantness and unfairly ruined careers, tends not to be the division and confusion that you might expect, or not only that, but also (a) better decisions, and (b) better understood decisions. Even the losers of such arguments at least understand the plan the others fellows are now making everyone follow, so even they follow it better. Both decision-making and decision-implementation are improved. Then, often with even greater doses of injustice, wars, even successful wars, are then raked over and argued about yet again, afterwards. It’s all very indecorous, and “debate” doesn’t do justice to the chaotic nature of such public rows. But the result is better decision-making and better informed and better prepared decision-makers, at all levels. And for war, read: everything else big and dangerous also, like mega-engineering projects. Tyranny, aka dogshit government, in war and in everything big, imposes bad and un-thought-through decisions on baffled subordinates, decisions which still might have worked after a fashion if implemented properly, but not if even quite senior subordinates don’t really have a clue about what they are supposed to be doing and are just following orders blindly, or worse, perhaps not even doing that, because, you know, who gives a shit. It must now be becoming clear to quite a few Chinese high-ups that had they had a big, messy, public ruckus about how exactly (or indeed whether at all) to build this damn great dam, then it might at least have been a damn sight better dam than it now looks like being. It might have been messier and more difficult and more stressful deciding about it all beforehand, but far better afterwards, once all the dust, and in this case also all the mud and all the various bits of collapsing land and roads and buildings that are now sliding and tumbling hither and thither, had settled. And even if they failed to argue about the Three Gorges Dam properly beforehand, it would be better than nothing to at least have a bit of a public row about it now. At least that way, some harsh lessons might be learned and spread around, and such things might be done a bit better in the future. June 9th, 2010 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We are building socialism … and as long as we are building socialism but have not yet built it, we will also have homeless children.” – Anne Applebaum quotes Nadezhda Krupskaya in this review of Children of the Gulag June 7th, 2010 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ultimate cause of the problem with the banks was indeed chronic government interference, in the form of implicit and explicit guarantees supplied to them free of charge, which hopelessly weakened the entire industry. Reserve ratios – the percentage of deposited cash which is actually retained by the bank rather than lent out – has fallen from over 50% in the 19th century to 2-3% today (or a negative percentage in Northern Rock’s case). That could not have happened in a free market, at least not on an industry-wide scale; nobody would lend to a bank if it tried to take on that much leverage without a government guarantee. The banking industry had been rendered so unstable by government intervention that it was only a matter of time before it had a crisis, and the crisis could have been brought about by any number of proximate causes. Unfortunately most commentators blame the proximate causes, the particular individuals who happened to be involved at the time, and “free markets”. In a free market, firms fail from time to time; they aren’t bailed out, people don’t expect them to be bailed out, people arrange their affairs accordingly and so the failure of one firm doesn’t bring down an industry or an economy. Banks were a long way from being a free market. – “Some Guy” (that’s what he calls himself) commenting on the Bishop Hill piece also linked to below by Johnathan Pearce in connection with Matt Ridley’s inglorious career as a banker June 4th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have only two quibbles about this otherwise excellent press release by Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. One, I don’t believe Sean was ever “speaking in London”, as the press release claims. I believe he just sat down and wrote what follows, probably in his home on the south coast. Two, the word “premature” seems an odd way to describe the ending of a similar killing spree in the USA in 2002, by the better armed citizenry that they mostly have over there. Was this interruption to be regretted? The first blemish above is just a pet hate of mine, probably best ignored. And the second I put down to Sean’s eagerness to get his press release out quickly, which I applaud. Indeed, this press release was how I first heard about this horror:
Indeed. How many more such slaughters must be perpetrated in Britain before it is realised that making guns really, really, really illegal, which disarms everyone except those willing to break all such laws and go out a-slaughtering, is only making things far worse? I remember the Hungerford Massacre, which went on for as long as it did because the police had to get guns from London, which took hours. After which, inevitably, they made guns even more illegal. The Libertarian Alliance predicted further massacres, and we were not wrong. The more rural parts of Britain used to be full of guns, and were, partly because of this, very law abiding. Not any more, on either count. Why do such killing sprees now happen? Because, now, they can. June 2nd, 2010 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Opinions about new architecture differ a lot, but from where I sit, in London, and when I walk about in London taking photographs, I think that new architecture, having gone through an all-time-worst phase (apart from the BT Tower) between about 1960 and about 1980, has of late been doing rather better. This chap seems to agree, although it’s all in Russian and I could be quite wrong about that. The latest London Big Thing to be completed is this:  It’s called the Strata, and that’s a view of it from Vauxhall railway station, just across the river from where I live, towering above a concrete stackapleb cluster between it and me with my camera. → Continue reading: Strata May 29th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
There have been some good postings at Rob’s Blog recently, in particular an informative review of a new book called The Spirit Level Delusion, and a vivid description of some rather uncaring care. But this …  … is particularly good news. You can’t assume that children will have even approximately similar opinions and ideas to their parents, but that’s the way to bet. But however his ideas and opinions turn out, warmest congratulations to Mr and Mrs Rob’s Blog. May 29th, 2010 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I try to carry a digital camera with me at all times. Here is a reason why, which I happened to encounter this afternoon in Victoria Street. It was a seriously cool version of the latest Rolls Royce, which looked to me like it was a particularly scary member of the Wehrmacht:  I particularly liked the intimidating hubcaps, so often an opportunity for gold or silver glitter on cars like this, but here, like everything else, painted in scary military dark grey:  The only gold I could see was the classic Rolls Royce statue on top of the radiator. Click on either picture to get it bigger. I don’t know what kind of money it was that paid for this vehicle, but I bet it’s quite a story. Failing that, it is the kind of money that at least wants you to think it’s quite a story. Any ideas? The driver wasn’t wearing a uniform, by the way. He was young, and casually dressed. He completely ignored me, although he must have known I was photoing his car. And he must get this a lot. May 28th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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