The whole difference between statistics and astrology is supposed to be that statisticians make statements of statistical significance to determine how likely or unlikely it is that an observed outcome could have happened chance, while astrologers are satisfied with merely anecdotal confirmation of their hypotheses.
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Politicians are like parents who tell you what time to go to bed but can’t put dinner on the table. – Matthew Taylor, now Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Arts, quoted in a 2002 article by Janan Ganesh April 9th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston’s conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don’t live on the planet of the apes. – Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a ‘liberal’ in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit. April 8th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obama’s speeches frequently include passages that flatter their listeners who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow his thinking actually is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are. – Stephen Bainbridge. Ouch. April 7th, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
To hell with constructive engagement. This is a state that imprisons, tortures and kills its political opponents. It is a state that pollutes public discourse with untruths, and that not only seeks to suppress truths, but that seeks to suppress the free exchange of thought between its citizens. It is a state that gives succour to the genocidal regime in Sudan, and has backed itself into the position of casting Buddhist monks as dangerous terrorists. – Sam Leith, writing in the Telegraph why we should subject China to an Olympic boycott April 5th, 2008 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘Market’ was the sixth word I ever learnt – after ‘This little piggy goes to…’ – Dr Eamonn Butler, author of The Best Book on the Market. Isn’t it great how we get children understanding buying and selling months if not years before the anti-market teachers can get their claws on them? April 2nd, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 29th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations.” Aren’t they? Actually, the Olympics seem an ideal place for demonstrations. – Anne Applebaum, pointing out the obvious fact that the Olympic Games are highly political by their very nature. I am feeling a greater and greater sense that the Beijing Olympics are going to be highly memorable, quite possibly in the sense that a trainwreck is highly memorable. And I am not sure this is bad. March 25th, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Can you believe this place?” Admiral Driscoll said to me. He sounded like a bit like a kid on Christmas morning. I felt weirdly like a jaded old man who had seen it all even though he is older and more accomplished. I understood then what some American soldiers and Marines mean when they say the top brass lives and works at “echelons above reality”. I’m not blaming the admiral. His job requires him to be isolated from nuts, bolts, and the street most of the time. March 24th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of this Government’s proud achievements has been helping to bring democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq – where elections were policed by imprinting a finger of every voter with indelible ink. Yet at home it has corrupted an electoral system that the world once looked up to. Ministers were warned as long ago as May 2000 about the lack of security in postal votes. Yet they ploughed on, claiming that postal voting would reinvigorate the electoral system by encouraging more to vote. March 20th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are no causes of poverty. It is the rest state, that which happens when you don’t do anything. If you want to experience poverty, just do nothing and it will come. – Madsen Pirie explaining the folly of Common Error No. 61 March 18th, 2008 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
Iran is also the theatre of very optimistic developments. Hashem Aghajari is an Islamic revolutionary-turned-history-professor. He was one of the student activists of 1979 who later fully participated in the brutal repression after Khomeini’s coming to power. He is now challenging the infallibility of the ruling mullahs and calls upon Iranians to think for themselves instead of blindly accepting whatever is preached in Friday sermons, a piece of advice for which he has been sentenced to death. But he is now supported by the students and professors at most of the country’s universities and thousands of ordinary citizens, workers, and cultural leaders. Where Aghajari wants to reform Islam; the students want a total separation between mosque and state. He wants an Islamic Reformation, but the demonstrators are interested in the creation of a secular civil society. He is a reformer, but they are revolutionaries. – Ibn Warraq who is both optimistic (as in the above quote) and pessimistic (as elsewhere in the same piece) about whether the Muslim world can become civilised March 10th, 2008 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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