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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Two delightfully silly things, no doubt with strangely profound cultural over- or do I mean undertones attached to them if only I could think of them, are to be found linked to and exhibited at 2Blowhards today. There are singing horses (be sure, as Michael says, to click on the various horses), and there is the Americanised Mona Lisa.
Alice agrees. (And while you’re there check out her libertarian defence of the Stone Age – press “HOME” on the left if you are doing this so soon that the Blogger archiving idiocy blots it out because it’s the newest posting – google are you listening? I’m bored with libertarian arguing, so I haven’t commented on this, but all those still excited by libertarian arguing should comment away.) Alice and I also seem to agree that the LOTRhymes rappers aren’t so good. Personally I dislike rapping and am also Bored of the Rings, as the pun goes, never having been that excited by them in the first place, so I think it’s a LOT of cRap.
But the horses are great, as is the ML’s new cleavage.
The 13-year-old girl submitted the following essay to a teacher in a state secondary school in the west of Scotland and explained that she found it “easier than standard English”:
My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.
Translation: My summer holidays were a complete waste of time. Before, we used to go to New York to see my brother, his girlfriend and their three screaming kids face to face. I love New York, it’s a great place.
Text messaging, or SMS (short message service), has turned into a new mobile phone language and has rapidly become one of Britain’s favourite pastimes. As the keypad of a mobile phone is difficult to navigate, text message groupies, mostly children, have developed a shorthand to make life a bit easier.
But their English teachers don’t like it:
There must be rigorous efforts from all quarters of the education system to stamp out the use of texting as a form of written language so far as English study is concerned.
There has been a trend in recent years to emphasise spoken English. Pupils think orally and write phonetically. You would be shocked at the numbers of senior secondary pupils who cannot distinguish between their and there. The problem is that there is a feeling in some schools that pupils’ freedom of expression should not be inhibited.
However, the decline in literacy has probably more to do with teachers being ‘confused’ about how to teach reading. Another reason why many seven-year-olds cannot write properly is because their teachers do not know enough grammar to teach it effectively.
At the heart of the problem was the education strategy’s “ambiguous guidance” on phonics – a teaching method where children learn how the sounds of words are written instead of trying to memorise their shape. Brian Micklethwait has dealt with this topic on Samizdata.net here and here and I am sure the debate continues on Brian’s education blog. So go and read, if interested. I will just leave you with this txt:
If u wan2 undRst& tXt m$ges thN IMO u nEd a SMS DXNRE or no1 will think ur c%l. nuf Z.
On tonight’s TV show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ a contestant was asked “Who in 2002 became known as ‘The Quiet Man’ of British Politics?”
The contestant – an attractive if not terribly bright brunette – was offered four choices:
- John Prescott
- Kenneth Baker
- Edward Heath
- Ian Duncan Smith
She had no idea. She used her 50/50 lifeline which left her with Baker and Duncan Smith. She slightly guessed the latter but felt she needed to call her father. He promptly said: “IDS”.
Last year a programme on the same game show asked a father and son who the leader of the Conservative Party was. The programme was recorded the day after Ian Duncan Smith made his first speech as leader of the Conservative Party at the Party Conference. The son said “I haven’t a clue”, the father thought it might be Kenneth Clarke. They asked the audience. A minority knew the answer. Finally they called a friend and got the correct response, although on that occasion the friend wasn’t so sure.
One of these blokes is the leader of the Conservative Party… apparently.
Well, it seems to have been a slow day here on Samizdata. Me, I’ve been putting up CD shelves and then preparing for one of my Friday evenings, so I’ve not had much time to samizdatise. But I now have time to get a link to this up before midnight, this being a strange sort of variable diagram where a bunch of cartoon economists watch what happens. That’s a bad explanation I realise. When this diagram gets taken down and historians of this blog wonder what I was talking about, they’ll just have to carry on wondering.
I don’t know what it signifies, but I find it oddly entertaining. Perhaps it refers to the tendency of economists to be rather too attentive towards merely numerical data, and to neglect more important but less measurable phenomena. So, not Austrian economists then.
My thanks to the deeply strange people at B3TA for the link to this.
It is good to see Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of that fine weapon that was for so many years an icon of violent socialism, finally succumbing to full blown capitalism.
Coming to your neighbourhood soon… Kalashnikov umbrellas, snow boards and cocktails: products for real men!
More seriously, it seems only fair that the man who created what is pretty much the definitive assault rifle finally gets to make a buck or two out of his masterpiece.
(link via Kevin Connors)
I’ve found another capitalist Object of Desire, via B3TA: WE LOVE THE WEB, whoever they might be. It’s a toaster.
Or is it? They were trying to sell stuff like this. So they rigged one of them up as this.
This Toaster is loaded!!!
It got:
800Mhz CPU (VIA C3).
128MB SDRAM.
40GB Harddrive.
16X DVD Drive.
Built-in Video and sound.
The HD-light is wired to the Bagel LED 🙂
You turn on the PC by pushing down the lever 🙂
Anyone like to try turning my cooker into a mainframe?
Taking my life into my hands the other day, I squeezed around the London Underground and found myself pressed up against an advertisement on the Piccadilly Line for that manufacturer of jobs, I meant ‘first-rate military equipment’ British Aerospace or BAe as it would now prefer to be known.
I discovered that Royal Air Force pilots enjoy the delights of an ‘assertive’ and ‘calm’ woman’s voice, produced by electronic circuitry, telling them ‘Missile locked onto you’, ‘Pull up! Pull up’ and ‘You fool! You’re going to die’… I made that last one up, I hope.
The advertisement informed me that the pilots affectionately know this disembodied squawking harpy as ‘Nagging Nora’. Far be it from me to even hint that this nickname could be anything other than a cute moniker of endearment. However, the only person I have met in the last five years who worked in the R.A.F. was a woman, although she wasn’t a pilot. And I also know that gays are now allowed into the armed services. So this caused me to wonder… Has a pilot been sued for divorce yet, by a jealous wife, angry at her beloved calling out of ‘Nora, Nora’ in his sleep?
Can a female pilot sue the R.A.F. for refusing to provide her with a ‘Nagging Norman’ voice, perhaps modelled on the authoritarian tones of that former pilot Lord Tebbitt? Can a homosexual pilot demand the same (which would be funny given Lord Tebbitt’s known ‘enthusiasm’ for gay rights)? And if different voices are provided for women and gays, will it be considered ‘pressure’ on lesbians to reveal their sexuality to admit that actually, they rather preferred Nagging Nora’s soft and assertive tones, all along?
As we prepare for war, I hope that these vital issues for the nation’s defence are given the proper attention that they deserve. And never mind that the Tornado is hopelessly outclassed as a fighter by the Iraqi Mig 29s.
This looks as if it might be interesting, in the Far Oriental sense I mean.
Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world’s oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law, say authoritative shipping industry sources.
The vessels left port in late November, just a few days after UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix began their search for the alleged Iraqi arsenal on their return to the country.
Uncovering such a deadly cargo on board would give George Bush and Tony Blair the much sought-after “smoking gun” needed to justify an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime, in the face of massive public opposition to war.
The suspicious ones amongst us will no doubt be saying: how convenient! If it’s just what they wanted to happen, then who’s to say they didn’t make it happen?
Well, either way it is interesting. If it’s a real threat, then … well if that isn’t interesting to you then you are now having a near death experience, and the usual follow-up to that will be with you very soon. And if the Axis of Bush contrived it, then that just shows you that these guys are serious, and serious right about now (what with now being when they broke the story, the timing of which is interesting either way), which in my opinion is all to the good, but which I can understand others not liking so much. We may never know.
Here at Samizdata.net we have our own somewhat wordy house style, and we like to spell the stories out for the time when Samizdata.net roams the earth unchallenged, but paltry things like independent.co.uk have collapsed into oblivion. If this had been Instapundit (to whom, by the way, personal and Samizdata thanks for this link, which made quite a difference here yesterday), this would just have said something like: I don’t know what this is about, but it sure looks like something.
Indeed.
Dave Barry (whose blogzistence I was reminded of by Diane of Nobody Knows Anything) links to this fine young fellow. In keeping with the Samizdata policy of explaining links, I will tell you now that his site is called Rent My Chest. If you do, he puts your choice of slogan on the said organ, and sticks a photo up on Rent My Chest.com, but from now on, we don’t say dot com, we say “nipple com”. My favourite slogan of the ones up there so far is: “MajorGeeks.com – Geek it ‘Til It MHz”
The consensus seems to be now that advertising on the internet has been a disappointment. That may have to be revised. This guy isn’t just someone who likes to show off his nipples; he’s actually done some thinking. He has a blog, and it’s a typographical first for me. He has a job. In short, he has a brain. Each slogan will cost you $20, and the most recent twenty stay up, so as the site gets more popular, the messages cost the same but for less time, i.e. the price goes up automatically. Smart. Seriously, watch this guy.
We all know about those archetypal laws. Parkinson‘s – work expands to fill the time available for its completion. The Peter Principle – people get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. They’re useful laws. They answer basic questions. Like: Why all the crap? Why is everything done so badly?
Well, I think I may have discovered another one of these universal laws, which answers the question: Why are so many people who you would think ought to be happy instead so miserable? I give you: Micklethwait’s Law of Negotiated Misery.
It starts with the observation that more and more people are “self-managed” these days. Even people working inside giant business or governmental bureaucracies are being encouraged to think of themselves as free trading entrepreneurs, providing services in exchange for payment, in cash or in kind. Horizontal networking, self-starter, internal markets, intrapreneuring, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
Okay. You’re a self-manager, and maybe even self-employed.
There are four kinds of work you think about maybe doing.
- There’s work you love and are good at.
- There’s work you hate and are good at.
- There’s work you love and are bad at.
- There’s work you hate and are bad at.
The world pretty soon decides that you must stop doing (3) and (4) and of course, you are delighted to stop doing (4). If you insist on doing (3) you are going to have to do it as a hobby.
Which leaves (1) and (2), the stuff you are good at, and either (1) love or (2) hate.
How much do you get paid to do (1), work you love and are good at? If you are a good negotiator, then plenty, because you are good at it, and demand lots of money.
But what if you are a bad negotiator? You jump at the job and accept bad money.
How much do you get paid to do (2)? Chances are you get paid good money. Why? Because you will only consent to do work you hate if you are paid good money. So, with no great effort, you hold out for good money (even if all you thought you were doing was Just Saying No), and, because you are good at the work, you get paid good money. Eventually, someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse, and you take it.
So, if you are a bad negotiator, unable to repress your natural desire to do what you love and to avoid what you hate, you get paid bad money to do work you love, and good money to do work you hate.
Bad negotiators can have semi-good lives if they can afford to oscillate between work they love and work they hate. For a while, they do that. But, by the end of that period the only way they know to make good money is to do work they hate.
Then factor in the following circumstance. They switch to a life in which they then have to make continuously good money. Wife, kids, mortgage. Maybe an addiction to an expensive type-(3) hobby. Or maybe the life they lead just happens to get much more expensive. Clang. The gates of the prison slam shut. From then on they must do work they hate, continuously.
Result: An inexorable tendency for the “self-managed” classes to negotiate themselves into lives of permanent misery.
Is this a truth about the world? I think it is. Am I the first person to have noticed it? Surely not. Certainly not in so many words. But maybe I am the first person to have nailed this extremely widespread experience down into a simple law with a simple name.
(If so, hurrah! I love it. And how much was I paid? Bugger all.)
Comments and links please.
I came across this little comment on man’s foibles in the middle of the chaos known collectively as “the holidays”. At the time I couldn’t do more than check the validity of the article which, I’m sorry to say, was accurate. While the date would now classify it blogospherically speaking as an archeological anecdote, I felt the issue it addresses is still poignant.
This article appeared in a local US newspaper on Nov. 15, 2002 but it’s importance may well be global.
Absolutely the Least Substantial Reason for a Knife Fight:
Police in Mansfield Township and Hackettstown, N.J., charged Emmanuel Nieves, 23, with aggravated assault on Nov. 13 after he allegedly slashed the face of his friend Erik Saporito, 21, as the two men fought after arguing over which one had more hair on his buttocks. [Express-Times (Easton, Pa.), 11-15-02]
As with any criminal act, there is something we as a society can learn. The lesson here is obvious: the bruised male ego can be a violent thing.
The more tickilish question, and the one we must answer if we are to prevent future attacks of this kind, is what finally triggered the assault? Was it ridicule (ha ha. your butt’s hairer than mi-ine!) or was it envy (my butt’s hairer than yours! nah na nahna na.)?
Its a sensitive issue.
For the last month or more I have been paying occasional visits to Michael Jennings‘s blog. One day a picture of him appeared at the top, making him look alarmingly like the bearded bloke on They Think It’s All Over. And then it was there at the top the next day, and the next, and I jumped to the conclusion that he was on holiday and not blogging, because if he was blogging, the photo would have moved down, and have been replaced by further entries. Or so I deduced. But, I do sometimes get matters intenetted slightly wrong (see the comments). It turns out that under the picture he’d been blogging away like a mad thing.
Yesterday, for example, with an unerring eye for the main story, he focussed in on the alleged doom facing the banana. Apparently, bananas are all clones of each other, which means that they can’t do evolution properly, which means that they are now about to be completely wiped out. This was national news in Britain yesterday, and for all I know, everywhere else that bananas are cared about.
Michael notes the supposedly ferocious consumer resistance in Europe to genetic engineering, but goes on to note that banana-wise Europeans – Germans in particular – may face an agonising choice.
Actually this could be interesting. Imagine the scene in 2012. Normal bananas are extinct. Those of us who have been following the ongoing EU banana war for the last couple of decades know that the Germans have an almost legendary appetite for bananas. It may be that they will be faced with a choice: accept genetically modified bananas, or move to some other fruit. My money is on the genetically modified bananas.
Michael also had a posting at the beginning of the month about cricket. For Zimbabwean mass murder reasons I want the entire blogosphere immediately to become fascinated about this strange game, and it can plug itself into an elaborate discussion via Michael’s posting about which international cricket side was the best ever, who the all time best Australian (and English and West Indian) side(s) would consist of, and so on, also involving Iain Murray. And then when all of blogdom everywhere is lusting to watch the World Cup, others whom we have also been instructing, but this time on the political dimension of this tournament, can dig up all the pitches.
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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.
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