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This happy combination of headline and subheading on the Green Party home page will probably be gone by tomorrow, but if you click here and look under the heading “National news”, it says,
October 7th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Thus spake the prophet Micklethwait on September 27, a week before the US presidential debate that has just taken place:
Correct in every detail bar two. I do not think Mitt Romney knew he was going to win the debate and I do not think Barack Obama knew he was going to lose. Romney was a Mormon missionary in France for two and a half years. Apparently he met with a slightly less overwhelming proportion of rejection than most, and was promoted. Whatever your opinion of Mormonism, no one can emerge after thirty months of knocking on doors and trying to proselytise the French, in French, and not have developed some debating skills and also seen the limit of what any such skills can do. No one can do this and not learn, ineradicably, that the world contains people who do not think like them at all. Romney lives among the heathen. Obama lives among those who defend him from the heathen. Unlike some on this blog, Paul Marks, for instance, I do not see Obama as a hard core Marxist. Real Marxists live among the heathen, even on university campuses. I do not see Obama as having a hard core at all; he flows into the shape of whatever vessel he finds himself inside. His current vessel is fine and comfortable. I think he could not quite make himself believe that Romney would dare intrude. Elections are mostly mere show, but what a splendid show a hard-fought one can be. I caught myself the other day being resentful because I could not turn to the back of the book or look up the episode guide on Wikipedia to see how it will all turn out. Aesop would have sold more fables if he had thought to have the moral (better yet, a hundred competing morals) in the middle but leave the tortoise and the hare still running right until the last page. In 1992 I turned down a bet that would have obliged me to pay ten pounds for every parliamentary seat of Neil Kinnock’s majority, or gained me ten pounds for every seat short of it. I only turned down the bet because I’m a wimp who has never so much as been inside a bookmakers*; I knew that John Major was going to win because I eavesdropped on my fellow commuters on the Victoria Line. The UK media then were almost as domineering as the US media now; whenever obliged to interview someone willing to admit to the intention of voting Conservative the interviewer would visibly stand back to avoid contamination. I wanted Labour to win – I had stopped being a socialist but I was tired of the Tories – but I could tell, I could just tell that the media and the Cool People were talking each other up while the troglodytes on the Victoria Line were bullied into whispers but not into voting for the Cool Party just because the Cool People said that everyone who was anyone would. Splendid as I am and nearly always right about everything, I have also been known to make wrong predictions. In the next UK election I thought the Shy Tory effect would still be present. If it was it was washed away in a flood of voters not shy in the least about finally having had enough of the Conservative party in power. All this talk about bubbles has also reminded me of two occasions on which I specifically took note of obvious signs that the other sort of newsworthy bubble, a house price / stock market / tulip bubble, was expanding serenely away – noted these signs, cogitated upon their meaning, and ignominiously got it wrong. Or at best totally missed their major meaning because I was so keen to lecture the world about a minor sub-meaning. One such sign was seen in Ireland about six or seven years ago. My family is from Ireland and I always listen a little harder to news from there, so I was interested to learn from several different recent visitors to Ireland that everywhere you looked, on every little hillock and crammed into every little gap among the drystone walls, a new holiday cottage was going up, spoiling the austere beauty of the landscape somewhat but nice to see so many people doing well. I knew what that meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about planning laws. Good thing I never got round to that one. The other sign was from the United States. I, I will have you know, knew what “redlining” was, and knew of the laws and government pressure put upon banks to foribid this practice, and could speak knowledgeably of the Community Reinvestment Act long before the Crash of 2008. I knew what the CRA meant. It meant I could write a post for Samizdata about how the suppression of incentives for poor and marginalised people to act in ways that would help them get out of poverty (such as saving for a deposit on a house, or getting a steady job in order to qualify for a mortgage) would do them no good in the long run, not to mention encouraging them to take on debt they could not afford. There might still be a post in that, but the great floating balloon marked WORLDWIDE FINANCIAL CRISIS COMING TO YOUR TOWN SOON floated straight past me. Blow me your bubbles, tell me about your predictions, especially the ones you got wrong. *and also because the person offering it had endowed me with all his worldly goods anyway. October 5th, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Remember sing-songs down the pub? OK, do you at least remember hearing that once upon a time there were such things as sing-songs down the pub? And Fred would stroll over to the old Joanna and have a tinkle on the ivories… If this sounds as remote from modern life as the Wars of the Roses, that might be because for the last few years Fred would have been liable to arrest. The Licensing Act 2003 made live music at pubs illegal without a licence no matter how small the venue. The good news is that it is no longer a crime to play a mouth organ in a pub without a licence. The bad news is that for nine years it was a crime, and we submitted. October 3rd, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Rejoice! Ed Milliband will announce at the Labour party conference today that
At last Labour are to drop all that guff about “stakeholders” and “corporate responsibility”, although to make it compulsory to pursue profits at the cost of all else is rather repressive. But what a turnaround, eh? Can it really be happening? No. It’s all a mistake. They just haven’t noticed yet. Tim Worstall has cruel fun pointing out that Mr Miliband does not appear to have worked out that his proposal would make ethical investment illegal. Worstall concludes
September 29th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
So, Glenn Reynolds makes me buy this book. It hasn’t made me any thinner yet, despite my having followed the world’s most popular diet strategy: Getting Thin by Reading About It. Never mind. I shall talk about it instead. I do not know if Gary Taubes has any particular political views, but if the case he makes is true his book has political implications. In extreme summary it says (a) the experts, the official health guidance, the posters in doctors’ surgeries, the healthy eating lesson plans – all wrong; (b) it’s not fat that makes you fat, it’s carbs; and (c) eat as much meat as you want. Eat almost nothing but meat, if you like. No need to go hungry. (a), if true, will please the C-AGW sceptics. So much for scientific consensus. It will also please the libertarians and minarchists. So much for government advice. (b) and (c) will distress everyone who has ever worn a mung bean. Fat and meat good. It’s so… so… American. (c) is especially annoying to some because, if Taubes is correct, the solution is relatively easy. How vexatious to think that these self indulgent fat slobs might escape just punishment! And how troubling to think that the obesity “epidemic” might be solved without the assistance of counsellors, coordinators or facilitators. Things do not break entirely one way. One of the other messages of the book is that it is not the case that fat people are fat because calories in exceeded calories out. Anti-Puritans though many libertarians claim to be, they rediscover their inner Cromwell when it comes to that sort of equation. When they – oh hang it, when we – hear the pathetic excuses of fatties that they are fat because of genes or metabolism we rather enjoy pricking the bubble of their delusions. It is like being a deficit hawk, but for calories. Only this man Taubes says it really might not be their fault. September 26th, 2012 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons mocking the Islamic prophet Mohammed. The magazine’s website is at CharlieHebdo.fr. It was very slow to load when I tried it, and although I did eventually find the front page I could not see the actual caricatures. My opinion has not changed since I contributed a “Mohammed emoticon” (((:~(> to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. I said then and I say now,
Obviously Charlie Hebdo itself stands proud where most other newspapers and magazines in the Western world cringe. If other journals had been as brave no one would have to be that brave. September 19th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Guardian editorial, 17 September 2012 Despite having a belief in CAGW two-and-a-half letters to the left of most commenters on this blog, it told me something about my own beliefs that my first thought when I saw this was “why have they reverted to making their bets public, short term and easy to measure? I thought they had given that up after the Himalayan Glaciers fiasco.” Only later did it occur to me that “they” might be making this public prediction because they believed it. ADDED LATER: 2022? No, 2016. Right or wrong, and I am inclined to think “wrong”, kudos to Professor Peter Wadhams for not hedging. September 17th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Putting your wishes aside – whatever they may be – what is likely to be the state of Islam ten years from now? September 16th, 2012 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Joan Brady, a previous winner of the Whitbread literary prize, writes:
I liked the comment by scepticalhawkeye:
Joan Brady appears upset that Whitbread has taken over the Costa Coffee chain, so instead of authors being given dosh by noble brewers they are getting it from effete caffeine-fiends. For a moment the flame of hope flickered within me that Ms Brady might be emulating the staunch heroes of of God Emperor of Didcot, in which mighty vows are made that never more shall the arm of the honest tea drinker be made limp by the latte of foreign oppressors! Alas, she just has a thing against Costa:
As every second comment says, if local people in overwhelming numbers do not want Costa Coffee then Ms Brady’s problem will not persist long. Local people in overwhelming numbers won’t go there, and Costa will cut their losses and go. In fact there is an issue worth discussing here. I cannot help wondering what Ms Brady would say if local people in overwhelming numbers expressed the view that they did not want immigrants of a different race, Egyptians for instance, setting up shop in their town and making a profit “at the expense of” UK shopkeepers. Would opposition to incomers on those grounds still count as the “fully expressed will of the people” and if not, why not? Isn’t this supposed to be a democracy? Perhaps if she reads the many pointed comments, the CiF crowd being on the right side for once, Ms Brady will be prompted to question the limits of majoritarianism. Perhaps she will also be prompted to do as so many of the commenters suggest and send Whitbread / Costa back their money. Given that she thinks that only the involuntary contributions of taxpayers are pure enough to fund a literary prize, that would be the principled course of action. September 15th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the aftermath of electoral defeat, a Labour MP and former minister wrote:
As things turned out, once in power the Conservatives preferred “pragmatism” to an ideology of laissez-faire, and the commitment to lower public spending displayed about the same level of commitment as Ming the Merciless did in his marriage vows to Dale Arden:
The election concerned was, of course, that of
– Anthony Crosland in A Social Democratic Britain, Fabian Tract 404, based on a lecture given in November 1970. (Price 3s / 15p.) I do not entirely share Perry’s view that between Ruling Lizards Group A and Ruling Lizards Group B there is no difference worth a damn. By gum, though, when you think that Edward Heath was once seriously feared as a rampaging warrior of laissez faire, there is no difference worth much. September 14th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky and two colleagues from the University of Western Australia published a paper called ‘NASA faked the moon landing – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax:An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science’. Johnathan Pearce mentioned it in this post. As I said in the comments, Bishop Hill and other sceptical blogs made scathing criticisms of the survey. For instance, according to Australian Climate Madness, the headline finding about disbelief in the moon landings was produced from a mere ten responses, some or all of which looked likely to be jokers. The whole internet survey had only about 1100 self-selected responses. That self-selection makes it about as reliable as the surveys of the readers of bridal magazines that claim that the average cost of a wedding is £20,273 in the UK, or $26,501 in the US and are every year quoted as fact by credulous journalists. To their credit, some commenters from the warmist side of the aisle also queried the obviously leading questions. Questions were asked from all sides as to why almost no effort seems to have been made to gather responses from AGW-sceptic blogs, leaving the sceptic responders to come almost entirely from those controversialists who post at warmist blogs. There was a farcical subplot in which Lewandowsky initially refused to reveal which sceptical blogs he had contacted. He does not seem to have asked many of the biggest sceptical blogs, such as Watts Up With That?, or to have made more than token efforts to get noticed by those sceptic blogs he did contact. Shall I go on? There was no option for “don’t know” or “no opinion” in the survey questions. The conspiracies chosen were mainly “right wing” conspiracies, such as Birtherism, rather than “left wing” ones, such as those relating to “Big Oil”. There were inadequate safeguards against multiple returns by the same person, or joke returns by any person. Different versions of the survey were sent out to different people – but not randomly, which would have been defensible; rather some blogs got one version and others got another. Results were being discussed online while the survey was still open, corrupting later responses. I will stop there. If you want to read more, just Google “Lewandowsky”. Professor Lewandowsky’s response to criticism was revealing.
Don’t give up the day job, Professor. On second thoughts, maybe a career in comedy is the way to go. There was a time when a scientist responding to criticism in such a fashion would have had a career change forced upon him. This survey was published in the journal Psychological Science. It does make you wonder. Compared to most readers of this blog, I am still a warmist. But ever since I first saw the term “climate denier” I have worried about what an opinion becoming a cause would do to scientists. I feared, and still do fear, that if having a certain scientific opinion can get a scientist bracketed with Holocaust deniers, then perhaps researchers might unconsciously shy away from results that might have that result. Now that fear is joined by another. As for sticks, so for carrots. If a scientist can be published and lauded for coming up with the equivalent of “nine out of ten cats we tested prefer KittyTwinks to swamp mud” so long as his or her findings promote the Cause, then perhaps researchers might unconsciously prefer results that get that result. September 12th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to Der Spiegel, the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt. This is not because of the imminent fulfilment of the words of Isaiah 2:4 but because the Russian army stopped buying Kalashnikovs, and because of competition from cheap Chinese knockoffs. They dare not tell Mikhail Timofeyevich himself; at 92 the shock would kill him. I draw no moral. I just shake my head at the sheer difference between the world as it is and the world as it used to be. If you had shown me the headline “the company that makes the AK-47 has gone bankrupt” in 1988, I would have assumed it was an unusually amusing randomly generated phrase. September 9th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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