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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback
On the strength of Leo McKinstry’s excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn’t find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn’t know about this famous airplane.
The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That’s the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can. → Continue reading: What the Spitfire did and what the Spitfire did next
The only other thing I would add is that I am in the advertising industry and most of the ads for sub-prime loans had dried up before the recent bail-out bill. As soon as that went through the volume for these ads went up 10 times. Whatever the government did to “fix” the problem ain’t working because all they did was just give everyone who didn’t make money the first time around another shot at the craps table.
– from a comment by “Ben Franklin” on this Belmont Club posting spotted by David Farrer
I like Fridays these days, because on Friday, David Thompsom does another clutch of Friday ephemera, and this Friday’s ephemera included three links to a black guy named Zo, explaining why he will be voting McCain/Palin. When I started listening, I kept thinking, there’s a snag. When is the ambush coming? I don’t know quite why I thought this, but I did. Cognitive dissonance, I imagine. Guys who talk like that just do not think like that. Many of them hardly think at all, except about show business concerning which they are highly knowledgeable.
Another favourite blog-ephemerist is Lynn Sislo (sp?), who will not be voting McCain/Palin, in fact in this posting, she includes a link to a report about the equal and opposite phenomenon to Zo. But best of all, in a more recent Lynn S posting, there is a link to an amazing time-map showing the growth of Walmart. Capitalism at its formidable best (talking of which, have you heard that Buffet is now buying shares?). It is an object lesson in starting slow, getting it right and then – and only then – conquering the universe. Well, not the universe, yet, just America. But give it time. Highly recommended.
There is no “responsible” route out of recession – we need radical action to rescue the economy. We need a growth package and we need it fast, the sooner it is in place the quicker we will be out of recession.
– Guido Fawkes was underwhelmed by David Cameron’s latest speech
Last night I attended a Libertarian Alliance talk/discussion evening at the Evans household, the talk being given by Antoine Clarke. Here is what Antoine said in an email about his talk beforehand. I learned several interesting things which smarter people than me doubtless already realised but which were new to me. The most interesting thing I learned, assuming Antoine was right about it, was that after the first mega-billion dollar bale-out package failed to be agreed by the politicians of the USA, the market immediately went up. But then, as soon as a revised bale-out package, containing more bribes, was agreed, the market went down. “We should do nothing” is a tough political sell, but the smart move, said Antoine. And McCain should have gone with what, according to Antoine, were apparently his instincts and torpedoed the whole damn bale-out operation, and thereby clung onto a chance of being the next President of the USA.
My take on this is that there is a crowding out effect going on here, big time. I trust we are all familiar with this idea. It says that big government plans of any kind not only do harm because the government plans fail and all the wealth it wastes on them is wasted, but, and arguably even worse, because people with better plans in the same line of business are frightened into inactivity. In this spirit, I recall the disgraced former Tory MP Neil Hamilton once saying at a meeting I attended long ago that the money that an earlier Labour government had spent on buying up and ruining the British motor industry would have done a great deal less harm if it had just been put into several thousand suitcases and chucked into the sea (I daresay this would have been good for inflation also). That way, saner motor car entrepreneurs could have gone to work making cars and car stuff in better ways than then prevailed, unimpeded by the fear of great walls of government “investment” screwing up their plans, bidding up the prices of all the people and all the things they wanted to hire and buy and put to good use.
Well, now, exactly the same thing seems to be happening in the banking industry. Were I one of the immensely rich and immensely sensible banking people who had (a) seen this crash coming and cashed out at roughly the right time, and who now (b) has plans to gobble up failed banks and reorganise them along more sensible lines, I would now, despite all my hopes of profitable new business, be sitting on my hands, waiting for all the government plans to do their immense damage before I went wading in and god chewed up too. Only when these government plans had become an obvious failure, and the politicians had just totally given up, would I be ready to move in and sort things out. Only when the politicians lapse into inactivity, which for a brief shining moment looked as if it might happen straight away, does economic optimism, among the people willing to back their optimism with money, reassert itself.
But, as I like to say from time to time when blogging, what do I know? I am no expert on the banking business, and as I say, I only realised this thing about the ups and downs of the world’s stock exchanges when Antoine Clarke pointed it out to me last night. So, did Antoine get this story right? And have I explained this phenomenon, even part of it, even approximately right? Tomorrow afternoon, Antoine, I, and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings will be getting together to record a conversation about all this, so comments now would be especially welcome.
Iain Dale quotes an astonishing piece of dialogue from a Daily Mail interview by Alison Pearson of Gordon Brown. First Dale recycles interminable chunks of sob stuff about Brown’s children and Brown’s eyesight. Pass. But then comes this:
When we finally manage to snatch some time in the study on the first floor, I ask if he has any regrets about his boast: ‘No more boom and bust.’
‘I actually said, ‘No more Tory boom and bust,’ he replies.
He did indeed actually say this, once, at a conference. So, not an actual lie. But, as Iain Dale points out, he said it without the “Tory” on many, many other occasions. The implication is that Labour boom and bust is fine. This is the kind of drivel that this man is now reduced to spouting.
Brown then explains that this particular Labour bust is not really a bust at all:
‘Fifteen per cent interest rates under the Tories! We’ve got interest rates of five per cent, that’s a bit different, isn’t it?’
Yes, and he’s managed to bring the price of oil down too. With his superhuman powers of self-delusion, and his apparently unshakable determination to continue wrecking my country, this man reminds me more and more of Robert Mugabe.
Brown himself is already a failure, doomed to electoral defeat. That is now a given. What interests me is what effect all this insanity, institutional and personal, will have on the Labour Party, whose recent feeble attempts to replace Brown seem now to have fizzled out. Sadly, there seem to be enough faithfully moronic Labour voters to keep a rump of Labour diehards in the House of Commons in quite substantial numbers. But then what? They promised an end to boom and bust. They boomed, after a fashion. They are now busting, and how. And they stuck with the lunatic who said and did all this to the bitter end. What sane person would vote for these incompetent and spineless nutters ever again? Labour could well go the way of the early twentieth century Liberals.
However, I suspect that David Cameron will actually be quite happy, after he wins the next election, to face opposition benches which are clogged up with Labour living dead, rather than populated by people with plausible things to say and serious complaints to voice like lots of new and young and optimistic Conservatives or Lib Dems. Blair coasted along for a decade on the public’s loathing of the Conservatives. Cameron now looks content to do the same, on the back of a near-universal loathing of Labour. I may be misjudging Cameron and I hope I am. But I fear that I am not.
I have started reading The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by economist Don Thompson, and it mentions (on page 11 of my 2008 hardback edition) an episode I vaguely remember:
In 2003 a 25-year-old student named Clinton Boisvert at the School of Visual Arts in New York was asked to produce a sculpture project showing how the emotion elicited by art could impact on life. Boisvert created three dozen black boxes each stenciled with the word “Fear.” He had just finished hiding the last of these in New York City subway stations when he was arrested. A dozen stations were shut down for several hours while police squads retrieved the sculptures. Boisvert was convicted of reckless endangerment, but received an “A” for the project.
I googled this Boisvert character, but found nothing else except this one episode. I guess there is bourgeois respectability, in the form of lots of things that the imaginary bourgeoisie are imagined still to take seriously and to get outraged about, which art has traded on by treading on for over a century. And then there is actual respectability, the outraging of which causes the actual bourgeoisie – the sort that likes, exhibits in galleries, and buys contemporary art rather than being outraged by it – to want nothing to do with you on account of you being just too much trouble.
More generally, I am reading the book quoted above because I find myself wanting to know more about the phenomenon of Modern Art/Contemporary Art (Thompson says Modern is before 1970 and Contemporary is after 1970). My first thought is that what caused and causes Modern Art etc. – what is Modern art – is complicated, and that there is no one thing that can explain it or describe it properly. See my cascade of self-commenting here, which was where I first blogged about Thompson’s book. The rise of photography and then of the cinema and television, the rise of and nature of the modern news media, the demoralisation afflicting European culture as a result of the World Wars, WW1 in particular, the Baby Boom and its serial obsessions, lots of new money, etc. etc. etc. … there are many reasons why the visual arts in the twentieth century and since have turned out the way they have. The temptation to reduce Modern Art and all its works to one particular sort of annoyingness – modern art is nothing but … !! – is, well, very tempting. But such temptation should be resisted, because whichever single cause you choose is just not going to be the whole story.
It would not be true, for instance, to say that Contemporary Art, or Modern Art, is only about winding people up and getting lots of outraged publicity, although of course that definitely is part of the story. But, all comments on the above ruminations will be most welcome to me, even foolishly reductive single cause comments, but citing single causes which I had not thought about before.
Just now, my personal favourite contributory cause of Modern/Contemporary Art (because so often neglected in amongst all the complaints about dead sharks) is the demand for quiet spaces which one may visit without being bombarded with multiple advertising messages and reminders of one’s disappointing place in the rat race, and where one may consort with other rats who likewise don’t like to be reminded of their insufficiently ratlike ratness all the time, for example by portraits of self-important rat race winners of the past. But all this without having to doff one’s cap to a religion that one does not believe in. If that’s your problem, an art gallery adorned with blank canvasses, or canvasses consisting of big coloured rectangular blobs, could be just what you want. Which means that the very same art objects which outrage some with their meaninglessness can simultaneously soothe others, with that very same meaninglessness.
People sometimes say they wish the politicians would get together and agree, instead of bickering and arguing. I wish the politicians and political parties would disagree more about the issues, so that actions and policies can be properly tested and choices evaluated. Consensus often breeds the worst errors.
– John Redwood
Instapundit:
I remember reading a Robert Heinlein essay from the 1940s on how absurd it would be to have your car hand-built in your driveway by a collection of artisans, and how homebuilding as practiced was equally absurd. I think he was right.
Rather than assume the rightness of this outsider’s snap judgement, I consider it more interesting to think about why things haven’t developed this way. When I was an architecture student, way back in the seventies, people had already been dreaming for decades of prefab houses. It didn’t happen then, and it isn’t, on the whole, happening now.
Here are some guesses as to why factory made houses are not happening.
Homes are not in themselves mobile. Cars, which are made in factories, are mobile. Cars have their own means of transport built in. Houses do not. Unless they are campervans or caravans. In other words, the question: Why aren’t homes made in factories? is actually a rather similar question to: Why don’t most people live in campervans or caravans? Because the engines and wheels mostly do nothing? They’re terrible to live in? People can steal them? Regular homes are simply much cheaper to make? To be transportable, whether on wheels or on a lorry, home pods have to be able to hold themselves together when being swung around by cranes, shoved about by fork lifts, etc. This extra structure is wasted, once the pod is in place. All it then has to do is stay up and solid when immobile.
Homes, especially of the more industrial looking ones, often have to do another structural job as well as a life support job. They often have to be able to support more homes on top of them. Therefore they have to be different from the ones above, and they have to be different from the ones above, and so on. Unless you just stick pods into a structure. A really heavy home pod piled on top of lots of other home pods is a shocking waste of structure, because weight at the top demands more structure under it, and so on down to the bottom.
Actually, homes are, more and more, already made in factories, but it’s the bits that are made in factories, rather than assembled into homes in factories. After failing as an architecture student I briefly worked in the actual building trade, as an ignorant sub-lieutenant “commanding” (“Carry on sergeant”) workers in the trenches. I was struck then, again back in the seventies, by how complicated and intricate and clever lots of the bits were, and how fast they were developing. And this was in suburban mini-stately homes that looked impeccably hand made, once they had been covered up with bricks and tiles. Underneath they were getting more and more like airplanes. From what I now see on building sites, that trend has not stopped. The smaller an object is, the less of a structural problem it has. Ask the insects, and the elephants. Homes are more like elephants. It makes sense to build them, on site. Out of insects. So to speak.
Washing machines, microwaves, toasters, sinks, etc. are, if you think about it, home components. They are all made in factories, because that makes sense.
Besides which, isn’t a building site a temporary factory, where it makes sense to have it? And is it really true that workers in regular factories are all morons by comparison? Surely, lots of them, more and more now, are “artisans” also. Having also done jobs at various times in my life that were supposed to be totally “unskilled”, I came to believe that, actually, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. The factory made homes proposal is just an argument about where the home assembling artisans should practice their art.
I know, I know, buildings made with shipping containers. But these kinds of buildings are not really catching on, are they? I suspect this is mostly fun/concept architecture, rather than a serious spreadable idea. Like living in a sculpture (which is a trend, I do admit).
The relative cost of land and mere home-building must have something to do with this. Home-building means making the absolute most of each site, and each site is different, unique even, which makes mass production of homes less viable, as opposed to mass producing windows or drainpipes. Roads, on the other hand, are just roads, although even more expensive than mere land. A bit of road is a flat surface the whole point of which is to be just like all the other bits of road. Roads are also assmbled on site, rather than made in factories and then just unrolled on site, for similar reasons to why homes are assembled on site, only more so. Tanks and other tracked vehicles being the exception, because they do unroll the road in front of them wherever they go.
Meanwhile, China legalises short selling:
China’s action contrasts with regulators in the U.S., Europe and Australia that have banned short selling in the past week to shore up financial shares battered by the global credit squeeze. China’s government is betting the changes will boost trading without spurring further declines after state share buybacks helped the CSI 300 Index rebound from a two-year low.
That is partly it. But mostly what China’s government seems to me to have been doing for many years now is tackling every domestic economic problem it has with a free market solution, and betting that even if such measures do not solve the immediate problem, they help in the longer run.
Via here and here.
My favourite commentary on all the financial mayhem of the last few days and hours is this, from Scrappleface:
“To sustain this shining city on a hill,” Mr. Bush said, “we need to rescue the ignorant, irresponsible folks – from Wall Street to Capitol Hill to Main Street – who got us to where we are today. We must guarantee that no American suffers the soft bigotry of being forced to live with the consequences of his bad decisions.”
The president, in remarks to the news media clearly aimed at reluctant Republicans in Congress, said, “Our financial system rests on a foundation of huge banks, brokerage houses and quasi-governmental agencies that followed Washington’s lead by gambling on long-shot, poorly-collateralized investments. Now this glorious way of life is threatened, and we must act to preserve it.”
“We need to guarantee that the structures, systems, people and products that got us to this point won’t be tossed on the ash heap of history,” said Mr. Bush. “If these giant companies fail, then America will be left with nothing but thousands of small to mid-sized financial firms that made prudent investment decisions during the past 15 years.”
I’ll skip the next paragraph, if only so that I can say read the whole thing without having already stolen the whole thing, but the final paragraph demands inclusion:
“It is a moral imperative that we guard the civil rights of these idiots,” he said. “If we fail, then we face the specter of free market capitalism run amok, and millions of Americans will feel the painful lash of personal responsibility across their backs.”
One of the reasons I like this is because it makes me laugh, while at the same time allowing me still to be Thinking About It All, rather than just escaping into pure escapism.
One thing I do strongly believe (“know” would be putting it too strongly) that is relevant to all this mess is that the Great Depression was not caused by the Wall Street Crash, but by the mistaken things done before and after – especially after – the Wall Street Crash. To say that the Crash caused the Depression is that old folly of blaming the messenger for the message. It is now clear to us all, to those to whom it was not clear at the time, that the mistakes made during the previous few years have done a lot of damage. But I fear that the mistakes being made right now will prove even more costly.
And if I had to decide about all this, right now, knowing only what I know now, I’d say: let the market now do its job. The economy has been fatally mixed in recent years. Unmix it. If you have just lost your shirt, the taxpayer won’t buy back so much as a button for you. Yes, cruel, and I certainly wouldn’t say that every shirtloser has been stupid, as Scrappleface’s Presdent Bush does. And such cruelty is certainly not how you win elections. But far more cruel would be (will be?) changing the rules of the entire game for the worse.
Update: Von Mises Institute Bailout Reader.
Mr Kim and his elite did not wilfully seek the deaths of ordinary North Koreans, but they accepted them as collateral damage resulting from their need to maintain power.
– from the Economist yesterday
|
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.
|
