The Onion just keeps on getting better.
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Alan B. Shepard, aviator and astronaut. I also rather like his terse message to Mission Control at the time of his flight in 1961: “Why don’t you fix your little problems and light this candle”. I am sure he would be thrilled at the private sector space ventures that Dale has been tirelessly writing about lately. May 11th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Flicking through the Reason blog, Hit & Run, I came across the link to the recent appearance by Reason’s editor, Nick Gillespie, on the O’Reilly Factor. Gillespie argues that it is silly to pass a law stating that folk should sing the national anthem of the United States in English. I agree (it is not exactly a Top Government Priority), although I would have thought that immigrants, if their intentions are to make a long-term home in their adopted country, should value it enough to try and speak the local language. Language is a part of assimilation. If I went to live in France, I would expect to learn the language, even if I spoke in an atrocious accent. But passing laws to force language is silly. That said, I do not think Gillespie helped his case by what I thought was a singularly boorish performance on the show. Not a great advert for libertarianism. Virginia Postrel would have never acted like that, and she is much better looking. May 8th, 2006 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 7th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
City Journal, the New York-based magazine, is rapidly turning into one of my favourite reads (many of its articles are now on-line). It carries writers of wit and grace on all manner of issues, many on education, urban life and business. It is now, in my view, streets ahead (‘scuse the pun) of the Spectator, which lost the plot under the editorship of Boris Johnson, whom I now regard frankly as a twerp. City Journal ranks alongside the rejuvinated Atlantic Monthly and Prospect magazine as a place to go for having one’s views challenged and stretched. I strongly recommend the latest issue, which has an appreciation of the late writer, Jane Jacobs, who helped take apart the case for centralised planning of towns, and a review of the life of Robspierre, and a must-read piece on Iran by Mark Steyn, who happily is still churning out great material despite parting ways with the Telegraph Group. May 6th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of the oldest refrains of those who bash capitalism is that speculators are bad people, inflating the ‘true’ price of X or Y from its supposed ‘correct’ level. It is no surprise that at the moment, those who speculate in the market for oil and other sought-after commodities like copper and gold are getting a lot of abuse. I guess they can take it. As I mentioned in this post on the same issue of the oil price, the level that crude oil is fetching in the market has been pushed to high levels for a whole host of reasons, with speculation playing a part, but not necessarily the major part. In any field of endeavour where there are different appetites for taking on risk, you will get speculators. Speculators take the risk of a price going up or down that others are unwilling, for whatever reason, to shoulder. If it were not for speculators trading in those mysterious things like interest rate swaps or futures, I would not be able to have a fixed-rate mortgage on my house, for example. At the moment, hedge funds and other operators are willing to bet that the price of oil will go higher, and presumably could get cleaned out if the price turns, on say, a sudden discovery of a major oil reserve, an outbreak of peace in the Middle East, return to political sanity in Venezuela, or whatever. So just as one should not weep over the losses speculators make, it would be equally foolish to carp about the gains they are making now. As for the Greens, they ought to be praising those strange-sounding investment vehicles called hedge funds. By pushing up oil to near $75 per barrel, they are doing their bit to show the folly of taking one’s children to school in those small trucks called SUVs, leaving the lights on all day and shunning alternative forms of energy. No wonder the share prices of alternative energy firms and even the nuclear sector are looking promising. UPDATE: And this guy does not think much of the economic grasp of New York legal blowhard Elliot Spitzer, on a related topic. May 6th, 2006 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 4th, 2006 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
Today is local council election day in England and Wales. As a voter in the area of Westminster, I decided to stick to my local Conservative councillors since whatever I think of the national party (not all that much), the local lot seem to have done a reasonably decent job, and I know them reasonably well as sane individuals, so I duly put my cross against their names. At a national level, meanwhile, it is hard to figure out quite what the Tories are doing. They are confronted by a ruling Labour establishment in meltdown mode, corrupt, incompetent, arrogant and, on the field of civil liberties, positively dangerous. Yet so far leader David Cameron prefers to romp around in the Artic Circle to prove his supposed Green manliness to Guardian Man. All very unimpressive. Oh well. At least Boris Johnson is honest about the future of the Tory Party: a sports club. Maybe Dave and Boris should pack up their bags and run a light entertainment show. They might even make a decent go of it. May 4th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Isaiah Berlin, reminding us of the value of stating truths over and over, even if you fear you are just preaching to the converted. May 3rd, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Ukraine is not exactly famed for its high standards of probity and decency in the field of business, as this article suggests. It was certainly a bit of an eye-opener to see this failed, disgraced British cabinet minister, Stephen Byers, on the slate to opine at a conference all about the marvellous business opportunities out in that country. Great. The man who confiscated the assets of Railtrack shareholders – in retrospect a key point signalling the true intent of New Labour towards investors – is considered worthy to share his thoughts about encouraging enterprise in the Ukraine. Riiiight. Perhaps in a fairer spirit, though, there may be a good case to make for economic opportunities in that country, and I could not help noticing that the organising firm of the conference goes by the moniker Adam Smith (no relation, it seems, to the Adam Smith Institute). It does strike me as mighty odd that a character like Byers should be prime billing at such an event, though. The citizens of that nation surely deserve better. May 3rd, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Events in UK politics are moving so fast at the moment that it is hard to know what will be the composition of the British cabinet by the end of this Bank Holiday weekend. Reuters, along with other news media is reporting that five of the foreign nationals released from British gaols – who should have been deported back to their original countries – have re-offended. The scandal of the released overseas prisoners back on the British streets looks set to send Charles Clarke down the political U-bend. All very bad and I weep no tears for the jug-eared Home Secretary. A thought does occur to me, though. We make a fuss about foreign prisoners being released onto the streets rather than being deported, and of course a primary duty of a government is to protect its citizens from foreign menaces. But many thousands of British-born prison inmates who are released from often pathetically short sentences re-offend too. A few years ago I was mugged, an experience all too common in London, and it is frankly no difference to me whether the person was a foreign re-offender or British. The negligence of Clarke’s department means he must resign, in my view. But let us not, in our understanderble desire to send these creeps, fools and knaves to the political dustbin, ignore some rather basic facts of penal life. My problem is not simply that we should send offenders back to their country of origin, it is that we send them to prison for often insanely short sentences in the first place. April 28th, 2006 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I guess one has to admire the guts of these fellows:
This may end badly, I fear. April 28th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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