Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs – and the best are very clever – have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are a new Tocquevillean elite. Much of the web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it
– Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom
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February 17th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 For a wonderful account of the BBC’s world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out. Some views are more welcome than others it seems. February 17th, 2004 | 81 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”  Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)… PS:  February 16th, 2004 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add). The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should! However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed. It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?” If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you. February 13th, 2004 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools. Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore. Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy’s views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them. February 12th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
An Australian swam 300 yards with a live shark clamped to his leg before driving a mile for assistance to have it removed (the shark, not the leg)! They make ’em tough down-under! 
G’day, Sport! February 12th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an interesting article by Peaches Geldof about the perils of being a little bit too free and easy with one’s innermost thoughts on-line. Mandatory reading for all Journal Bloggers! February 12th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Now that it seems Saddam Hussain may not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction, Dubya and Blair are being pilloried for having gone to war to oust that particular mass murderous fascist regime. Sometime in the not too distant future, when it looks like war with North Korea’s mass murderous regime is inevitable, Dubya and Blair (or their successors) will be pilloried for threatening war because the North Koreans have weapons of mass destruction. And it will be the same people doing the pillorying in both cases. February 11th, 2004 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are being warned that there is an obesity ‘timebomb’ in Britain (which is to say, as in so many things, we are headed where the USA leads). The great and good of the medical establishment intone in sententious voices that “a far-reaching national strategy is needed” to deal with this. So we can look forward to the state taking even further control of our very bodily functions, for our own good of course, no doubt starting with the children interned in state’s educational conscription centres. But then why the hell should we care about this whole problem? If obesity causes us to fall ill, we have the state’s National Health Service to look after us and pick up the tab! If being a porker makes us unhappy, we have the state’s social workers to tell us that there is nothing for us to worry about and in any case, how dare anyone utter ‘fatists’ slurs? Do these nasty doctors calling for “a far-reaching national strategy” not realise that by stigmatizing fat people, they are undoing the work of thousands of Guardian reading self-esteem councilors paid for out of tax money? The solution to this statist regulatory tangle is to set one part of the social-welfare class again the other in a bitter begger-thy-neighbour “our victims have it worse than your victims” battle to the political death. We could be on to a winner here… Let the welfare state eat itself. 
I’m not fat! I’m a February 11th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the economy of Zimbabwe continues its steady collapse into a Mad Max like wasteland under the thuggish tyranny of Robert Mugabe, perhaps we are seeing the first signs of resistance.
As I have suggested before regarding the Logistics of Tyranny, if the ‘aid lobby’ was actually serious about the welfare of people in the Third World generally, and places like Zimbabwe in particular, they would do better to call for ending 90% of all aid payments to the kleptocratic governments that rule them and in place of the remaining 10%, send an equal value of weapons and ammunition to people who actually oppose the regimes keeping Africa from sharing the vast economic improvements elsewhere in the Third World. One would think that because the vast majority of Mugabe’s victims are not white land owners but are in fact the common black people of that woeful nation, this might move even the chattering classes in Islington, Berkeley and Grenwich Village to feel a spot of indigestion over their morning bowl of Muesli and hense to demand ‘something be done’, but I guess that only applies when the designated ‘bad guys’ are Jews (or Donald Rumsfeld), not black African socialists. The only message people like Joseph Made understand weighs 55 grains and moves at about 3,100 feet per second. I do not lightly wish for bloodshed anywhere, but the occasional grimaces of the Guardian reading classes have not stopped the long nightmare of the people of Zimbabwe. Arm the workers of Kondozi!  A couple truck loads of ammo and one for these each of the workers of Kondozi and you will have a real rebellion February 10th, 2004 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just as the Tory Party (the party that has given us Chris Patten, Edward Heath and Ken Clarke) cannot be counted on to reverse the march into regulatory Euro-statism (they at best slow the rate at which it happens), similarly the Tory reaction to plans by Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett to lower the burden of proof in criminal cases where the state really wants to convict someone is one of essential support. So… we are left with only one half-way significant party who seems to care even the slightest about civil liberties in the court room: The LibDems. But then again, when it comes to regulatory statism and abridging economic free association in society at large, the LibDems are even more keen than Labour to replace all social interaction with politically derived formulae for just about any kind of behaviour you can think of. And people wonder why I urge folks not to vote for anyone? So how does one resist the increasingly panoptic regulatory state? Good question. February 10th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind (or read nothing but the Guardian) to have failed to notice that there is rather a large constituency in Britain whose feelings regarding the European Union lie somewhere between dislike and loathing. As a consequence this would presumably lead the leader of the opposition Tory Party to firmly align his troops with the Euro-sceptics, correct? I mean, there is no way in hell that he would sign up the Tory Party to be a member of a group within the European ‘parliament’ who had a charter objective that included “the realisation of a United States of Europe”, right? Anyone who sees the Tory Party the solution to Labour marching Britain into a bureaucratised regulatory pan-European dystopia is deluding themselves. There is opposition to the EU within the Tory Party but they are not the people in charge, and the LibDems are even worse than Labour. But of course the Tory Party can talk a fine Euro-sceptic game when it suits them, but then they can also talk a fine ‘we are the party of low taxation’ game when it suits them. It is a delight to hear someone making the moral case against high taxation. Except of course, ‘white man speak with forked tongue’…he does not actually mean it. The Tories talk about the importance of civil society and yet you will look in vain for a list of state functions that the Tory party intends to amputate to actually stop the regulatory gangrene killing off civil society. Don’t support the Tory Party… you will only be encouraging more of the same. And of course if you like the state of civil liberties under ‘Big Blunkett’, you will just love them under Michael ‘a touch of the night’ Howard. Until there is a meaningful choice, do not vote for anyone or you will be deluding yourself that you are making any significant difference.  February 10th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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