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Look, I don’t blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do. In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health – and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are. – Andrew Stuttaford, referring to this. February 4th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 … the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief. – Jacob Burckhardt, from lectures on the history of the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries given at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, later included in Judgments on History and Historians. February 3rd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
We saved the world. I say we party! – Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Is it just me, or is the thought of Gordon Brown attempting to party even more frightening than the thought of Gordon Brown trying to ‘save the world’. February 1st, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is as much or more reason to be afraid of bigotry, narrow-mindedness and capricious censure in a village than in a large and complex society. It is worth noting that those who complained of a present or impending “age of cant” never thought that their minds would become less independent – it was always directed at opponents and, principally, down the social scale.” – Ben Wilson, Decency & Disorder, 1789-1837, page 444. One of the most arresting and entertaining works of social and cultural history I have read for some time. This quote is particularly relevant in our own time when one occasionally hears people bemoaning the loss of “small, tight-knit communities” and the supposed soullessness of urban life. In fact the ability to choose one’s networks of friends rather than get lumbered with whatever is on offer in a small community is one of the unacknowedged joys of modern life. January 31st, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
“The folly and immorality of the “stimulus” plan passed today can be attacked on many fronts. For one thing there’s the awe-inspiring irony of a Democrat-dominated Congress and a Democrat president spending taking nearly a trillion dollars from the hardworking middle class people of this country and giving it to corporations and businesses—and precisely as a result of the apparent improprieties in which those same businesses were engaged! Honest liberals who resent corporate welfare must really have a headache at this point.” January 29th, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has taken this Labour government longer to wreck the economy than previous ones, but they have done so comprehensively. – Fraser Nelson, The Spectator. January 22nd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
IKEA customers across the world are led to believe, naively, that the world is composed of simple elements that we can understand, interlink, and repair if necessary. Populist politicians throughout the world exploit similar social engineering… I respond critically to this European hypocrisy with an IKEA flat pack in the shape of the Swedish kingdom, which conceals an inconvenient truth. – ‘Sonja Aaberg’, the Swedish sculptress, quoted by Mark Steyn in Euro-artists Speak January 21st, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the mind of the anti-free-marketeer, the government occupies the same kind of intellectual territory as the divine designer in the mind of an anti-Darwinian. January 20th, 2009 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Let me say it again, the only newspapers around in the future will be very upmarket, all the downmarket stuff being more readily available on the internet or in magazines made of pulped squirrels that will be handed out free to the unemployable and the insane.” – Bryan Appleyard. Those squirrels cannot catch a break. January 13th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Politics is all very well in its place, that place being very much on the periphery of life.” – Tim Worstall, who has had an impressive year on his own blog, and seems to have quite marvellously upset one of the main figures of the Guardian’s columnists. Excellent. December 30th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The forgotten man… He works, he votes, generally he prays, but his chief business in life is to pay.”
December 19th, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am deeply concerned about the sort of world we will bequeath to our children and I promise you, the minute I get back from my holiday I will write a letter to my MP demanding that they do whatever it is you want them to do. But please, for the time being, fuck off bastard hippies. – A fictional character articulating the sane human response to PlaneStupid, courtesy of the Daily Mash. I fear that for a lot of campaigners, being a nuisance is an end in itself, and other people’s annoyance is taken to signify how stupid and morally worthless ordinary people are – and thus as reinforcement by comparison of the overweening self-esteem of the campaigners themselves. Something similar is found in the shock-jockery of the blogosphere. I frequently spot the attitude in some NO2ID-ers but I do try to counteract it. People are entitled to want to get on with their lives in a way that is meaningful to them. If you want to persuade them, then give them a reason to care and listen, don’t bully and excoriate them. In the words of Dale Carnegie: “You can’t win an argument.” December 10th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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