“I’m not sure what is more sickeningly ironic to hear at a food summit – the thoughts of a brutal tyrant such as Robert Mugabe or a would-be genocidal murderer such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Tough call.”
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I am interested in this story as I am one of many people for whom the hopefully sunnier weather of summer is accompanied by the irritation of hayfever. I do not suffer from it as badly as when I was a child but it is still unpleasant sometimes. I once played in a cricket match and my symptoms – streaming eyes and sneezing – got so bad that I could hardly continue to play the game. Anyway, it may be soon be possible to significantly nail the problem with a vaccine. June 5th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The other day I referred to a PJ O’Rourke gag which made the crack about a guy marrying Angelina Jolie for her brains (as opposed to her looks). Thinking about it, it was actually not a very good joke, even though it did not imply that Jolie was unintelligent, far from it. Anyway, it turns out that she is indeed smart and has a fair amount of guts as well:
If the NRA wants a replacement for its former figurehead, Charlton Heston, they could do a lot worse than Ms Jolie. Do readers have any other examples of Hollywood/other actors and actresses who have come out in favour of self defence like this? There must be some, surely.  June 4th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ask anyone under a certain age as to whom Bo Diddley was, and you will get a blank stare. But for the generation that grew up listening to the likes of the Rolling Stones – heavily influenced by Bo, as well as Chuck Berry – they will definitely know. As an early 40-something, I grew up in a very different era but I also had heard of the guy and was encouraged to listen to a few of his tunes by an old friend. He’s great. I particularly like the tune, “Roadrunner” – ideal fodder for the car stereo, blasting at full volume while you are driving a convertible with the hood down and driving fast. Sadly, the maestro died a few days ago. Those hipsters at the Reason Hit & Run blog have put up a nice set of links to music of the master. He will be greatly missed. Here’s an album of some of his greatest hits. June 4th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andrew Sullivan, who supports Barack Obama despite the latter’s Big Government views and the former’s alleged hatred of said, comes up with a defence of Obama’s recent resignation from his church, of which Obama has been a member for over two decades:
Maybe the “glee” has to do with the way that the rather sanctimonious Mr Obama has, to coin a popular phrase, thrown his old church under a bus lest his membership of a church involving the likes of nutjob Jeremiah Wright damage his run at the White House. Naturally, Sullivan, whose defence of Obama gets daily more desperate, will not countenance the idea. Let’s just ask ourselves whether he would be so obliging about say, a Republican candidate that had been a member of a church taking a “Christianist” (ie, traditional Christian) view of things like gay marriage, for instance. Well, to quote the late Enoch Powell, to ask the question is to know the answer. Some time ago a commenter on this site pointed out that Sullivan is no longer honest about his political views and motivations, not even with himself. In case anyone asks, I support gay marriage. The state should be out of the business of regulating marriage between adults, period. June 3rd, 2008 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the UK administration implodes, the sort of idiotic ideas that might once have been swept aside by a pliant media can be now guaranteed to get wide coverage. The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, is obviously determined that Mr Brown’s fall from grace is swift and brutal. Oh but the voters are going to like this:
What, so being an Islamist is like being an alcoholic or crack addict. I am not sure how Muslims will react to the idea that the more extreme representatives of their faith are somehow mentally ill. In a way, the therapy culture undermines what ought to be the most important message of all: that we are rational, responsible beings, with free will, able to take the consequences of our behaviour. Islam means “submission”: to challenge that viewpoint does not involve putting some hate-filled fuckwit on a couch, but by advocating the values of reason and freedom without apology. The idea that our tax pounds should be used in some daft attempt to “cure” Islamic fanatics is frankly laughable. It also shows how profoundly unserious this government is about the problem. What next, therapy for “extreme” Christians, Jews, atheists, Communists, Fascists, Jedi Knights (okay, that was meant as a joke), Jehovah’s Witnesses? When Islamic extremists are caught for offences of violence or plotting terror, the correct object of public spending should be on things like these instead. June 3rd, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a long and quite good article at the Wall Street Journal about the recent ban on consumption of alcohol on London’s underground metro system. The ban is one of the first measures of the new London mayor, Boris Johnson. On Saturday, with the clock ticking away before the ban came into force from 1 June, large numbers of young people – they seemed to be mostly a bunch of young students – were openly drinking, some playing lots of music, and generally whooping it up on the Tube. Yours truly and Mrs P. forgot all about the ban and so we got a bit of a shock when, on the Circle line, our cabin was full of these raucous, and already extremely drunk, folk. They seemed pretty good natured although I was already betting that the end would end in arrests. It did. Walking by High Street Kensington Tube station later on, I could hear the PA system blare out the message that the station was being closed. In the end, 17 people were arrested for crimes including assault. I guess this proves Boris’s point for him. Some liberal-minded folk might claim that his ban on drinking on the Tube is nanny statism, not what one would expect from the fun-loving newspaper columnist, former MP and bon viveur. Mind you, defending the right of people to drink and get slammed on the Tube late at night is not the sort of freedom I am particularly inclined to go over the top for. It is not an obvious assault on private property rights as was, say, the banning of smoking in pubs and restaurants. The Tube, after all, receives tax funds and is not a completely private entity. If it were, then the owners could of course decide the matter. They might even ban it anyway to protect the bulk of people who find it possible to travel from A to B without holding a can of beer. Whether the ban can be properly enforced or not is another matter. I expect a raging trade in small, easy-to-conceal hipflasks. June 2nd, 2008 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy. Excerpt:
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic. The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading. June 2nd, 2008 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via the Boing Boing website – is this superb picture. Enjoy. June 1st, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, airbags, smoke detectors, bottled water or the Heimlich manoeuvre. We didn’t require child safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without being reminding that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust. We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.” – Bill Bryson, The Live and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, page 106. I adore this book. May 31st, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I recently got round to reading Peter Oborne’s “The Triumph of The Political Class”, which I would tentatively rate as the most important book written about the state of British politics in recent years. His basic argument is that today’s political class has little experience of the real world outside the corridors of power, is drawn from an insular group of metropolitan folk who consider themselves superior to, and cut off from, the ordinary mass; it craves power for its own sake and for its monetary rewards, is corrupt, venal, obsessed by controlling the media, and has damaged and is damaging any institutions and practices – such as the old House of Lords or judiciary – that get in its way. Oborne argues his case with a tremendous passion and penetrating use of argument. At the end of the 334 pages of text one is left – which I think is the idea – feeling rather depressed. With good reason. So why do I say that the book is incomplete? Well, for a start, Mr Oborne does not spend much time figuring out how the European Union and the growing centralisation of power in Brussels plays into all this. This strikes me as a bit of an oddity. Consider this: if we accept Mr Oborne’s idea that this class of people are determined to acquire power and wealth, why have they been so keen to transfer so much power to the EU? Sure, some of these politicians may have made the base calculation that they can feather their own nests very nicely in Brussels or Strasbourg, but for a lot of them, turning parliament into little more than a branch office of Brussels with a few perks is not much of an ambition. It is odd that he does not spend more time on this aspect of the question. I also think that Mr Oborne’s attack on the mainstream media for getting too close to the established parties – especially Labour – is seriously undermined by his completely ignoring the role of modern electronic media, particularly the internet. He makes no mention of things like blogging whatever. Now, I do not think that the role of the web should be exaggerated, but surely, the role of blogs in digging into subjects left alone by the MSM has, at the margins, made a positive difference. Take the scandals that have been exposed by Guido Fawkes, for instance. But perhaps the biggest mistake in the book is quite simply this: it is no good Mr Oborne or anyone else attacking such a political class unless they attack the fundamental problem at its root: Big Government. Remember, that this class is powerful because it has a large structure off which to live. Re-establishing some traditional checks and balances into public life may reduce some corruption and public venality, as Mr Oborne no doubt hopes, but it is only by cutting the state down to size that we will realistically starve the beast that feeds this class. As I have pointed out several times on this site, one of the most damaging things done by the current government was to have enabled a massive rise in the number of people employed directly and indirectly, by the state. The reversal of this process is, in my view, rather more important than wondering whether an MP is fiddling his expenses or having sex with his secretary. Even so, I urge people to read this book if they want to get a good handle on the state of public life in the UK in the early 21st century. May 31st, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Even for critics of George Bush’s Big Government brand of conservatism like yours truly, it is fair to accept that this Wall Street Journal author makes a good point:
And:
Of course, it may be that America has avoided a major attack after 9/11 due to good fortune, or that Islamic terrorists hit their peak on that horrific day and have not been able to muster the co-ordination or resources to do anything so spectacular since. I hope that is right. I think some of the security measures, such as the Patriot Act, have added a further layer of red tape and intrusion without boosting security. But on the face of it, Bush has done something right in helping prevent a further attack on US soil. It is unlikely, however, to be a fact that gets much attention these days. It does not fit with the narrative of Dubya The Texan Idiot that so many supposedly intelligent people like to play at dinner parties. May 30th, 2008 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
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