We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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I’m watching the news, in particular the news that the airplanes will be allowed to fly again over Britain. Thank goodness.
Inevitably, a professorial head popped up – Professor Hayward was the name, I think – to argue that what had been revealed was that there were problems with who was in charge. Yes, it must have been the same Professor Hayward as the one quoted in this story. He described the muddle of different jurisdictions – with one Euro-quango governing this, and another that, and France and the UK actually, to quite a large extent – sniff – controlling their own airspace. I don’t know what the Professor really thinks about this, but he or the TV editors made it sound like he thought there ought to be one Euro-authority in charge of everything. There should be, that is to say, a Single European Sky. Recent events, he said, highlighted the fact that there is a muddle of different jurisdictions, when it comes to whether airplanes can fly or not.
And a good thing too. Thanks to that muddle of different European jurisdictions, some planes have been flying over Europe, including one KLM plane which this afternoon flew over London. And the ban is melting away, for all the world as if Europe was still governed by a gaggle of sovereign states, each in charge of its own affairs. No planes have so far dropped out the sky. They didn’t put it like that, but if a plane has fallen out of the sky, they would definitely have said. As more planes have taken to the air, the claim that flying in them is a death sentence becomes harder and harder to accept.
Had European airspace been commanded by a single despot, as will surely be argued by many others besides that Professor in the next few days and weeks, this disaster might have lingered on indefinitely, at a cost (and never let it be forgotten that economic disruption on this scale is, for quite a large number of severely stressed and severely impoverished, severely financially ruined people, a matter of life and death) which would have defied calculation.
Now Paxman is talking about pressure from “vested interests”. Airlines wanting to stay in business, in other words, airlines who have become convinced that this scare has been massively overdone. Airlines who prefer to pay attention to evidence of what is actually happening in the sky, rather than trusting mere computer models. Computer models are getting a rather bad name these day, aren’t they?
If, now that the ban is being lifted, planes do start crashing for mysterious reasons, or if the aircraft maintenance people start to detect the damage that they now say is non-existent in the planes that have already flown, then fine. Ground the planes again. But I’d be amazed if that happened. Airlines know better than anyone that plane crashes must be avoided at almost any cost. It is clear that they think that the risk of crashes now is negligible, for the reasons alluded to in this earlier posting here.
I hope that Simon Jenkins’s phrase, health and safety Armageddon, catches on. My thanks to EU Referendum for the link to that piece, and in general for being all over this story.
But, note that North is today defending the Met Office. North implies that the problem is that muddle of jurisdictions, which has enabled the European commission to evade its responsibility for this mess and heep all the blame on the Met Office. I see what he means, of course I do. But which would you prefer? A muddle of jurisdictions, with all the inevitable buck passing and mutual recrimination, plus pressure from vested interests, and from politicians trying to get re-elected, and derision from bloggers, and by and by from the mainstream media, in short the semblance of a still-free society? Or a pristine tyranny, willing and able to be totally wrong, indefinitely, rather than admit to the embarrassment of being wrong? Widespread panic for a few days? Or, total panic for weeks or months on end, that refuses even to admit that this was what it was? I know which I prefer.
I recall a time when President Clinton was really quite unpopular, or so it appeared from where I was sat, then as now, in London. It was during his first term. In particular, I recall a libertarian friend who had recently been in America (although he may not himself have been American – not sure about that), sitting on my sofa in my living room, at one of my last Friday of the month libertarian talk evenings, telling me that President Clinton was absolutely not going to be re-elected. Too many people just did not like him. I pressed for details. Are you sure it’s not just that you don’t want Clinton to be re-elected? No, he isn’t going to be re-elected. And the point is, my libertarian friend was sort of right. Clinton wasn’t going to be re-elected. At the very least he didn’t then look like being re-elected. But then, Timothy McVeigh blew up that big office block in Oklahoma and from then on, Clinton never looked back.
Politics is all about story telling. It is about, as we like to say here, the meta-context. And what this explosion accomplished for Clinton was that it completely changed the story being told at that time about what the state was and is. It turned the state from an economic and regulatory threat to the people, into the leading protector of the people. And it turned right wing grumblers about all those damned taxes and regulations into enemies of the state, and hence enemies of the people. Clinton no longer had to struggle to tell the story that he had been trying all along to tell, of the state as the necessary partner of the people, and of the people who were suspicious of the state as people who, at best, simply did not get this. Timothy McVeigh did that for him. And I remember how my heart sank when I heard about the Oklahoma bombing, and who had done it, and why, because I feared exactly the story switch that then happened.
Now the grumblers against taxes and regulations are back being the people. And the Democrats might yet find themselves losing their epic battle, the one which was supposed, in the words of Kyle-Anne Shiver, to have …
… delivered the plum of America to the international socialist collective, or at least pushed us past the point of no return.
Even if regular people forget what turned this kind of story around for Democrats last time around, Democrats surely do remember. And just in case anyone has forgotten what a difference Timothy McVeigh made to the story told by President Clinton in particular and the story of America in general, Clinton is himself now reminding everyone.
But Bill Clinton, not for the first time in his life, is taking a chance. The danger for the Democrats is that they risk looking like they want another Timothy McVeigh. As quite a few of them surely do.
However, if the Democrats do get lucky and another McVeigh really does materialise, there is a big difference between now and the time when the original McVeigh did his thing. Then, there was no internet. The story was whatever the then mainstream media decided it was. But that rule no longer applies.
Incoming email from fellow Samizdatista Michael, just received:
This morning, I forgot to pack the charger for my laptop before heading for the airport. Therefore, once the battery had run down, I was faced with the real possibility of being without a computer for a week.
The horror, the horror.
Obviously, this could not stand, so I needed a charger. I had to do this is Rzeszow in Poland, or perhaps in Lviv in the Ukraine tomorrow. (Lviv is a bigger city, but Ukraine is a more backward country). After trying a few local stores, and a branch of Media Markt (the German equivalent of Curry’s), I eventually found a universal laptop charger. I found it in a branch of an obscure, East European chain named “Tesco”. The price was very reasonable, too.
“Markt”? Is that proper spelling, or just email spelling?
I have no idea whatsoever why so many people in places like London find the spread of Tesco – really a wonderful company – to be such a bad thing.
Well, here are some ideas. They are snobs who only want good stuff to be available to richer people such as themselves? They are anti-capitalist scum who hate humans and want humans to die out, but only after they have died first? They oppose international free trade in food (or in anything) and blame Tesco for it? They used to run inefficient food shops that sold stale and overpriced food, until Tesco drove them out of business?
I’m sure commenters can suggest further motivations for Tescophobia.
Recently I’ve been suffering from shingles, hence my silence here in recent weeks. Shingles has been no fun, but it would have been even less fun had it not been for Indian Premier League cricket on the television to take my mind off my discomforts. For the last forty and more days, there’s been at least one twenty-overs-each-way slogfest every day, and often, as yesterday, two. The last Brian Micklethwait posting here, written originally for here but then featured here (which cheered me up a bit just when I most needed that – thank you JP), was about the IPL, and about one of the things I most like about the IPL, namely the fact that it involves lots of Indians getting rich and being happy.
I know what people mean when they claim that IPL-type cricket – slam bang, slog slog, all over in three and a half hours – is very unsubtle compared to proper day-after-day first class and test match cricket. I know what they mean when they say it’s not real cricket. But for me it’s real enough, and I like it, just as I like pop music and classical music. I also like very much that ITV4’s IPL coverage is free. I have never subscribed to Sky Sports, because that would mean wasting forty quid a month on a very few sporting events that I care about (mostly test match cricket in my case), and then, even worse, being tempted to waste the rest of my life watching a lot of other sporting nonsense, just so as not to waste all that money. If only I could spend a tenner a month and get all the best cricket, but nothing else.
But there is still a price to be paid for IPL watching, in the form of adverts between overs, advertising logos all over the players’ shirts, and constant commercial self-interruptions by the numerous, obviously very well paid and hence thoroughly compliant commentators. Nothing exciting ever happens in IPL without it being described as a “City moment of success”, whoever or whatever “City” (“Citi”?) might be. All catches are described as being “carbon” Kemaal (sp?). Actually it’s Karbonn – a mobile phone enterprise, I think. And there is a big blimp that hovers above the grounds with “MRF” on it, which is something to do with a fast bowling scheme paid for by a rubber company, that the commentators talk about incessantly for no reason except that they have been commanded to. But I don’t care. For me this is all part of the Indians making money angle. And if all the Karbonn City Moment of Success DLF Maximum (a six) Maxx Mobile Time Out (a bigger than usual advertising break) crap gets too annoying, then I wait an hour or two and instead watch my recording of it all, fast forwarding through all the commerce. Which is also a way to waste less of my life. This didn’t matter when I was ill. Wasting my life watching cricket games all day long was all I was capable of, other than sleeping and being depressed. But now, as I improve, that’s an important consideration. → Continue reading: IPL and the changing culture of cricket
Repeat after me, you greenie morons … cold kills, cold kills, cold kills … greenies kill. You granny killers should be up for manslaughter.
– The indefatigable Richard North spells out just how much worse cold weather is than hot weather.
The late Chris Tame, whom I used to assist in the running of the Alternative Bookshop and of the Libertarian Alliance, used to say, of blogging, that it was “here today and gone tomorrow”. Well, indeed, most of it does pretty much fall off most of our merely mental radar sets by around the middle of the following week, but most of it is still there, and if you want to remember and refer back to an ancient internet essay or blog posting, you can usually find it. And actually, as the internet gets older, what is striking is how much better it remembers things than did the old print media, or even than did the pre-internet apparatus of print-based scholarship. Why? Basically, because anyone (you don’t have to spend the entire day in some newspaper library in North London) can type a few vaguely remembered words or phrases into Google, and up it comes. So long as you have even a vague recollection of whatever it was, then you can dredge it all up again, and tell the world all about it, again.
I was reminded of all this by a posting yesterday by Mr Eugenides, which is basically a quote from something written in 1995, which is about – please forgive how self-referential this is becoming – how the Internet wouldn’t ever amount to anything:
Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data.
The author now admits he was quite wrong. He has had to, however much he might have wished that his unwise words could just have been forgotten.
The central point is that the power of the internet to entertain, inform, and by and by to change the world for the better, is not derived from the average quality of the average internetter, but from what the best internetters manage routinely, and from what us more routine internetters manage at our best. And that power just grows and grows.
The internet adds up to a brilliant bunch of reviewers, a brilliant bunch of critics, and a brilliant bunch of editors, brilliant meaning whatever you think brilliant means. It corrects errors. It draws your attention to things that on your own you would have entirely missed. It plants numerous flags and banners in that “wasteland”. It filters data relentlessly, to suit all intellects and tastes. A “wasteland of unfiltered data” is exactly what it is not.
It helps that almost all persistent internetters, as a natural consequence of what we do and of how others respond, also learn and learn.
Which reminds me, I must dig up an ld posting that Mr Eugenides did a few months back about what a useless git Richard North is. Ah yes, here. This took me about ten seconds to find. I wonder what Mr E thinks about that now.
Personally, I’d like to see some Congressmen forced to testify before a panel of car dealers, about the budget deficit’s Sudden Acceleration Problem.
– Instapundit reflects on the travails of Toyota.
Last night I listened to this podcast, in which Patrick Crozier interviews our own Michael Jennings, globetrotter extraordinaire, about how the English Premier League (i.e. soccer) is followed with a passion in faraway countries of which most English people know very little, and of which many English soccer fans would be rather scornful, if they gave them any thought.
Points made (recycling (and expanding upon) Patrick’s blog posting on it): that the Premier League is a big deal in Asia (and Africa); that it’s really big; how it got that big; why the 39th game is going to happen (because so many English clubs are strapped for cash); and how it might be done fairly (not hard to contrive if they really want it).
I enjoyed it very much. Did you know that there are firms in Vietnam which reach potential Vietnamese customers by putting signs up at English football grounds? Me neither.
Every time Labour show a whiff of recovery the pound crashes.
– Guido Fawkes comments on his graph showing that The Market Hates Labour.
My Climategate pieces here have been of two sorts. There have been the big set-piece pieces where I at least try to say vaguely original things about it all, which given my life experiences tends to mean what sort of argument this is, how it is going and how it seems likely to go on going. And, there have been little bits like this one which basically just say: be sure not to miss this.
So anyway, be sure not to miss this, which is a report, from one of Bishop Hill’s readers, of a tactical discussion by a bunch of climate alarmist journalists, thinking aloud about how to handle the situation now that the general public has started smelling rats all over the place, rats which they helped to bury, but which those mad bloggers have been digging up. How to bury all the rats now?
Typical quote:
I used to think sceptics were bad and mad but now the bad people (lobbyists for fossil fuel industries) had gone, leaving only the mad. We published a string of articles in late Jan, early Feb showing that people had misinterpreted the emails as casting doubt on CC.
We as in the Guardian. And that worked really well, didn’t it?
Oh well, at least they are finally getting that we sceptics say what we say because we actually believe it, rather than merely because we have been paid to say it. That’s something. Next thing you know, they may even be admitting that some of their fellow climate alarmists are only still climate alarmists because someone is paying them, and that many more who would like to be sceptical are staying mum for similarly economic reasons.
Don’t miss the comments, which say everything that the good Bishop himself didn’t feel the need to say.
LATER: Bishop Hill now has a Tip Jar. The Bishop has a wife and three children, and I am guessing that even a quite small amount of cash that has been earned directly from his blogging efforts would make him an even more potent force in the Climategate debate. If the commenter who says Big Oil might be about to switch sides in this argument, again, is right, then how about a little oil money in the Bishop’s collecting plate?
One of my current top bloggers Richard North points to a new blog, Political Facts, where posting number one is about the Convenient Criminal. And since Richard North is now one of a lot of other people’s top bloggers also, that means that news of this new blog will spread fast, perhaps faster than its writer might have preferred.
The story its first posting tells if of how the British police, animated by the desire to meet targets rather than to mete out justice, have resorted to arresting the easiest persons to arrest, rather than the guiltiest. The guilty ones flee before the police arrive but the victims of the villainy stay, waiting for help and support, unpractised in the arts of obstructing the police. So they, or their angry sympathisers, get arrested, basically for being a bit angry about having been set upon by actual criminals.
Police arrive. One police officer tells the violent drunk, now a few yards away, to leave the area. The bleeding victim is helped to his feet and tries to point our his attacker but by now he has already left the scene as instructed by a police officer. Not good for the police who have attended an assault but now have no boxes to tick.
One girl tells the police they are useless and is arrested for a Section 5 Public Order Offence for screaming and swearing at the violent drunk as he assaulted the young man. A female bouncer from the nightclub who has witnessed this rushes across the street and tries to tell the police they have the wrong person. (Captured on CCTV) Police tell her to go away and proceed to issue a Fixed Penalty notice. Another Convenient Criminal without police having to take the time and effort of now trying to find and arrest the violent drunk. Effortlessly ticks all the boxes the officers need ticked for their performance targets while justice is thrown away.
But are that event and another similar one outside a pub real events, or were they merely, as they say in the movies, “based on fact”? Are these actual people, or merely composites. This first posting is strong on principle, not so strong on chapter and verse. A widespread set of prejudices about how the police now operate is eloquently laid out. But where are the actual reports of actual events, in local papers or in other blogs? At first glance, the posting looks to be full of links, but all that bold-and-in-colour stuff turns out merely to be bold-and-in-colour. It doesn’t lead anywhere.
But, as I say, it’s early days for this blog and with luck it soon will start to lead somewhere. More to the point those facts alluded to in the blog’s title may start gravitating towards it. After all, the blog’s readers now at least know the kind of facts being sought. The man can obviously write, and with luck, he will turn out to be well placed enough, near enough to the kind of dramas he now describes in a generalised way, soon to be deploying some serious facts and making some serious waves.
The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.
And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation. When Michael Mann had to be hauled in front of a congressional committee to force him to follow the simplest of scientific requirements, transparency, you guys were all wailing about how this was a huge insult to him.
An insult to Mann? Get real. Mann is an insult and an embarrassment to climate science, and you, Judith, didn’t say one word in public about that. Not that I’m singling you out. No one else stood up for climate science either. It turned my stomach to see the craven cowering of mainstream climate scientists at that time, bloviating about how it was such a terrible thing to do to poor Mikey. Now Mann has been “exonerated” by one of the most bogus whitewashes in academic history, and where is your outrage, Judith? Where are the climate scientists trying to clean up your messes?
The solution to that is not, as you suggest, to give scientists a wider voice, or educate them in how to present their garbage to a wider audience.
The solution is for you to stop trying to pass off garbage as science. The solution is for you establishment climate scientists to police your own back yard. When Climategate broke, there was widespread outrage … well, widespread everywhere except in the climate science establishment. Other than a few lone voices, the silence there was deafening. Now there is another whitewash investigation, and the silence only deepens.
And you wonder why we don’t trust you? Here’s a clue. Because a whole bunch of you are guilty of egregious and repeated scientific malfeasance, and the rest of you are complicit in the crime by your silence. Your response is to stick your fingers in your ears and cover your eyes.
– Willis Eschenbach is unimpressed by Dr Judith Curry‘s ideas about reestablishing trust in climate science. Lots more Climategate commentary and links from North.
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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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