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Leo Hickman of the Guardian is apparently angry (as Bishop Hill mentions here) that the Spectator published an article by sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner, an article I recycled the concluding paragraphs of as a(n) SQotD here on Thursday, and Leo Hickman isn’t the only one. The general mood in the CAGW camp is: get Mörner!
To this end a commenter (“schoolswot” – today 11:10am) at Delingpole said this of Mörner:
This is the guy that claims that dowsing works but doesn’t actually want to prove it?
To which commenter “rastech” (circa 1pm) replied:
Dowsing does work, and you can prove it yourself (everybody can do it, some are just better at it than others).
The guy that taught me how to do it (yeah I was surprised I could do it), was a water well driller. He told me exactly where the springs were that he was going to drill, where two springs crossed, their depth (18ft and 24ft), how much water an hour they would produce to start with (it improves the more you pump), PLUS, where there was an even better spring to drill, if those two didn’t work out (it would have been twice as expensive to drill it, as it was almost 50ft deep) too reliable, as they were both in sandstone (but ideal for drinking water as it is beautifully filtered – you should taste the tea!).
He was spot on (you know when you hit a spring as the colour of the rock changes as you go through it – I watched every stage from start to finish on many wells with him, as all my neighbours had boreholes drilled by him and I helped him with them, as he got me practicing the dowsing on them).
Let me guess, from a position of complete ignorance and inexperience in the subject, you are an ‘expert’, right?
Well don’t feel bad about it, I felt exactly the same until I felt that damned divining rod dive for the deck with me holding it.
PS. What convinced me to try him, wasn’t a money back guarantee. I didn’t have to pay him AT ALL until he had delivered a good water supply. He got years of work in the area from that borehole, and he never let anybody down.
So, it’s now officially official. Dowsing, like cold weather, is now right wing.
All this in a comment thread attached to a Delingpole piece about Jeremy Clarkson, and about how all the shouting about Jeremy Clarkson is really about diverting attention from the fact that the recent public sector strike, some time last week, was a failure. Although, Guido reckons Clarkson is now laughing all the way to the bank. They haven’t so much diverted attention from the failure of their strike as given a ton of free publicity to someone who said, admittedly in his characteristically OTT manner, that the strikers were idiots.
Please try to keep your comments on topic. The topics being: Leo Hickman, the Guardian, Nils-Axel Mörner, dowsing, whether tea really does taste better if made with water filtered through sandstone, James Delingpole, the BBC, public sector strikes, Jeremy Clarkson, whether it’s okay for Jeremy Clarkson to joke about people being taken out and shot without really meaning it, Guido Fawkes, how to get tabloid publicity by the ton, paper money collapse … well, I didn’t mention paper money collapse until now, but I thought I ought to.
Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Tim Blair have described the universe. Blair’s Law is “the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force”.
On the 15th November, the Guardian gave over its comment pages to people from Occupy London. Most of the resulting articles were produced by earnest but weak-minded hippies. Two of the articles made the hippies look sensible.
The first of these was sad. It was the last of a set of three mini-articles by Occupiers on welfare, education and law; the law part being by written by a person “commonly known as dom.” It is important to him that you use that formulation, including the lack of an initial capital letter. He says,
Most days I walk around the site teaching people about the legal system, about the law, about how they’re being enslaved by a body of rules and statutory instruments. The prison without bars is made by bits of paper.
Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright. The legal definition of registration is transfer of title ownership, so anything that’s registered is handed over to the governing body; the thing itself is no longer yours. When you register a car, you’re agreeing to it not being yours – they send you back a form saying you’re the “registered keeper”. It’s a con. That’s why I say I’ve never had a name.
I must stress that I do not dispute the right of the entity commonly known as dom to call himself what he pleases, and in politeness I shall act in accordance with his preferences if ever I meet him. Apparently he wears one of those jester’s hats with bells on it. Later in the piece he suggests that we google “lawful rebellion”. I did, and soon it came to me that I had heard that phrase before, on this post and others on the EU Referendum site. That post in turn links to a site called The British Constitution Group. One glance at the site is enough to show its appeal to libertarians, Tory Anarchists and allied trades. I want to like it. I’m usually a complete sucker for a bit of Magna Carta and the Rights of Englishmen. But on reading around the various links within the site, not that complete. Someone has been reading too much Artemis Fowl. In those books, if you recall, a fairy cannot enter a human dwelling unless invited in. In the British Constitution Group website under the heading “CONSENT – The Most Important Word in the English Language” you will see the following:
An essential part of the arrest procedure is to read you your rights and then ask you ‘do you understand’ – the word ‘understand’ is synonymous with ‘stand-under’ – they are asking you whether you are prepared to ‘stand-under’ their authority… and when you answer yes – you are giving your consent.
…And because Persephone had eaten food in Hades, be it only six pomegranate seeds, she was doomed to return there. The concept of the hero being safe so long as he does not inadvertently perform some symbolic act that gives his enemies power over him is an ancient one and has great mythic power, but do not try this on irritable cops late at night.
The second Guardian article, by one Jon Witterick, was more clued-up and more sinister than the one by t.p.c.k.a.dom. Its title is Yes, defaulting on debts is an option. At first I thought it was about the financial situation in Greece and passed on to another story, thus nearly missing the tale of how Jon Witterick has avoided paying his debts and how, he claims, you can too. The key idea seems to be that debts cannot be sold on, and once again we meet the concept that you are safe so long as you do not speak the forbidden words:
I also realised how debt collectors trick us into contracts with them, by asking us how much we could pay. When you agree to one pound a month, which costs more to administrate, they now have a contract with you, where none existed
Topping and tailing this admission of fraud and theft are a genuinely pitiable account of what it is like to be pursued by debt collectors and a genuinely repulsive attempt to argue that his decision not to pay what he owes is Iceland writ small. He does not say what he spent the money on, back before he decided it was not real.
Witterick’s website, to which I prudishly will not link, contains the following message:
→ Continue reading: Freemen of the land: an instance of Blair’s Law
Nice comment at the Bishop’s, on this, about “Climategate 2”, from “simon” (4:35pm):
I so hate it when my vicar quotes from the Bible. I can’t take such quotes seriously as they are out of context.
Perhaps the institution of the Samizdata quote of the day should be abolished. Time and time again, we here quote quotes, out of context.
Not all of the snippets that are now doing the rounds of the anti-CAGW blogosphere strike me as being as damning as some of them are. But, if anyone chooses to wonder about the degree of wickedness revealed by any particular snippet, it is the work of a moment for that person to find the context, this being one of the features of the internet. Provided, in presenting your preferred snippet, you supply the means of inspecting its context, then you have at least supplied the means by which your interpretation of the snippet may be challenged. And some of the snippets are very damning indeed.
If you are caught saying you are guilty only half as many times as the prosecution lawyer says you have been caught, that still makes you guilty.
Earlier in the thread, Viv Evans (4:02pm) says:
This ‘out-of-context’ excuse is favoured and generally used by shifty politicians who try to defend their misdeeds.
Indeed. And shifty politicians is exactly what these people are.
I trust that simon and Viv Evans will forgive me for quoting them out of context.
… because “This is private property” or any other version of “You have no right to be here” are open to some fairly obvious ripostes.
“We were here first” – “Er, not quite first. The actual owners of the space were there before you.”
“We are the 99%” – “We’re poorer than you, you middle class ****-ers”
“We represent the 99%” – “Who voted for you, then?”
“We are the official accredited Occupiers” – “We refuse to be defined by your oppressive structures, and hereby declare ourselves to be Occupying this Occupation!”
I have been reading the minutes of the General Assembly of the Occupy protesters who have taken over the empty UBS bank building in Sun Street, Hackney. One area of concern does seem to be people “abusing the space”.
If people want to stay over night (sleep-overs) they need (1) to be part of a working group (2) They need to have an on-going task that warrants their stay. There will be ‘monitors’ to make sure sleep-overs are not abusing the space. Individuals that stay over and are found to not be working will be given one warning before being asked to leave.
And if they say no, what then? When a warning is given, it must be a warning of something. Presumably it is a warning that the bigger group of Occupiers will eject the smaller group of Occupiers – because they can.
Unless, of course, they can’t. If a fight develops, what then? Call the cops? Problem with that.
The Daily Telegraph has an article defending the idea that general practitioners can and sometimes do out-earn the banking business. Of course, people have not traditionally gone into the medical field looking to make millions, although some innovators of medical patents, for instance, may have done just that. Generally speaking, I take the view that so long as doctors are operating in a free market, then what they receive is a matter of indifference to me. Good luck to those who do well, I say. If we had a genuine market in healthcare, then the high salaries paid to the best doctors would, in time, attract bright people to become doctors rather than say, derivatives traders, or whatever.
Of course, this is not the present situation. With many doctors, their pay is partly driven by their membership of a restricted profession and in the case of the UK, by the money spent by the taxpayer. And as for bankers, or at least some of them, they too benefit from the privileged access to central banking funding of their employers, from bailouts, from barriers to entry erected by regulators, and so on. So if people in Wall Street and the City do get sniffy about how much the men and women in white coats sometimes get paid, remember, they are not quite operating in a free market world, either.
“This sub-prime revival is part of an alleged “growth package” which will have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. It will further stoke inflation, inflict more misery on savers (pensioners especially) and further distort the market mechanisms whose proper functioning is vital to our economic recovery. One might expect this kind of crazed Keynesian recklessness from President Obama: he does at least have the excuse of being a Marxist, hell bent on destroying the US economy, with Paul Krugman as his adviser. But Cameron? Please can someone, anyone, explain what exactly the point is of voting in a conservative prime minister if he won’t cut taxes, won’t deregulate, won’t support free markets, won’t promote sensible energy policies, won’t defend Britain’s interests in Europe, won’t in fact do anything that Ed Miliband wouldn’t have done in the same position. And at least Ed Miliband has the decency to admit to being a socialist, so we’d know more or less what we were getting.”
James Delingpole.
Our own Perry de Havilland had Cameron more or less figured out in January, 2006. I have had no reason, and neither has Perry, to change my mind about him.
“As the Church of England keeps telling us how much it shares the aims of the St Paul’s protestors, I notice an advertisement in the Financial Times. The Church Commissioners need a chief operating officer. He will be paid a `six figure salary’, says the advertisement, to manage their `£5 billion multi-asset portfolio’. There is no mention of anything Christian, or even anything ethical. The language is all management-speak. The ideal candidate will have a `proven track record of driving continuous and consistent operational performance’. The job’s responsibilities include `to build and maintain internal controls and process and to lead a no-surprises culture’. Although it is pretty hard to reconcile a `no-surprises culture’ with the mystery of the Incarnation, one must admit that it might have come in useful in dealing these various `occupations’. As well as St Paul’s, there is no one else outside Bristol, Exeter and Sheffield Cathedrals. You have only to study the websites of the various Occupy groups across the country to see that they, too, stick to a no-surprises culture. Events include Palestine Solidarity Campaign rallies, performances by Billy Bragg, strikers’ benefit gigs, meetings of the Anti-Cuts Alliance. They are not forerunners of a Second Coming: they are the usual suspects. There is nothing unchristian about rounding them up (caringly, of course).”
Charles Moore, page 11 of Spectator, 19 November. (This is behind the magazine’s pay-wall. Be grateful to your humble Samizdata scribe for re-typing these words from the dead-tree version).
I like the point about Billy Bragg. He’s in danger of becoming a “national treasure”.
I remember, about a quarter of a century ago, speculating that the way things were heading, in Britain, all “drugs” would eventually be legal, except tobacco. We seem …
All smoking in cars should be banned across the UK to protect people from second-hand smoke, doctors say.
The British Medical Association called for the extension of the current ban on smoking in public places after reviewing evidence of the dangers.
… to be on course for exactly this arrangement:
Ex-MI5 chief Baroness Manningham-Buller is set to call for cannabis to be decriminalised in a speech.
The crossbench peer believes that only by regulating the sale of cannabis can its psychotic effects be controlled.
She is also expected to say the “war on drugs” has been “fruitless”.
I am reluctant to urge consistency in these matters. That might mean them banning the lot, which actually seems a rather more likely outcome. And note that the Baroness favours legalisation because illegal drugs are the sort over which They have less control. So both proclamations are consistent with one another, in wanting Them to have more control.
“A paramedic was also told to remove his harness and halt an attempt to reach Mrs Hume because he was not familiar with fire service equipment”
That is from a report in the Herald on the Fatal Accident Enquiry carried out by Sheriff Desmond Leslie on the slow death of Alison Hume while the Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service read up about “the parameters of their engagement” and concluded that these did not include her rescue. She was eventually pulled out by a police mountain rescue team, but by that time hypothermia had taken hold. She died of a heart attack in hospital.
Sheriff Leslie said that some degree of “imagination, flexibility and adaptability were necessary” in conducting a rescue of this kind. He described “a preoccupation with adherence to Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service policy which was entirely detached from the event with which Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service was confronted.”
He said: “There was clearly a balance to be struck between the interests and safety of the rescuers, and those of the casualty they were there to rescue.”
Sheriff Leslie directly criticised two senior officers, group commanders Paul Stewart and William Thomson, for their attitudes at the inquiry. He said they were “focused on self-justification for the action or non-action taken by them”.
The sheriff said: “I found their evidence to be bullish, if not arrogant, in their determination to justify the subservience of the need to carry out a rescue to the letter of Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service Brigade policy.”
It is good that the sheriff has named names. There is precious little penalty other than public shame that will touch a public sector employee who has adhered to procedure. Although the report says that criminal charges “may be brought”, I have a presentiment that the route between the Procurator Fiscal’s office and the criminal courts will turn out to be full of deep holes that an embarrassing report can fall down.
The Fire Brigades Union also made a contribution:
John Duffy, of the Fire Brigades Union Scotland, said: “If we are going to do these specialist rescues you need specialist teams who know what they are doing and know how to use the equipment. We have three statutory functions – to fight fires, prevent fires and deal with road accidents. The problem is we are being asked to do a whole range of duties with no more funding.”
As a commenter to the Herald story suggests, specialist equipment sat there unused and highly trained men sat there debating while Alison Hume slowly died beneath their feet.
Some past Samizdata posts that are also relevant: Alameda County Cowards, We have to wait for the fire brigade because of health and safety, and my first Loss of nerve post.
This evening I dined with a friend, and on my way there took this snap of an Evening Standard headline. A couple of years ago I thought that the Evening Standard itself – never mind these billboards – would soon be extinct. But although diminished in number, these headlines are still a familiar part of the London scene, now as then usually telling of catastrophe of one kind or another, public or personal. This evening’s offering was no exception:
Here‘s the story. Depending on your preferred explanation for this sad circumstance, you’ll pick out a different bit of the story. I pick this:
The shocking new total was published today as Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King warned Britain is in danger of sliding back into recession.
He downgraded his growth forecasts again, saying the economy will expand by one per cent this year and next, a fraction of the hoped-for rate.
As Instpundit would say: Unexpectedly! It would appear that quantitative easing is proving less than completely stimulating. We here are not shocked by this bad unemployment news.
For a little light relief, here’s a snap I took later, on my way home:
The advertising trade was bound to take advantage sooner or later of the wave of health and safety signage that is such a feature of British life just now. This is the first time I’ve noticed it, but I’m sure others have seen such things many times already.
I have long thought, first, that the United Kingdom has for some time been heading towards being the Non-United Kingdom, and second, that this would probably be a very good thing.
If such a separation is indeed happening, then what is causing it is the end of the British Empire. That and what followed around half a century later (i.e. around now), probably as an inevitable next step, namely the abandonment of the English-stroke-British attempt to remain a top ranking Great Power.
The British Empire meant that lots of Scots wanted to be attached to England, to get in on all the deals involved. Then Britain, empireless but still trying to remain a Great Power, needed Scotland to remain in. Scotland provided and still provides military manpower, and projected and still projects British power in northerly and westerly and easterly directions, in a way that England without Scotland will never be able to match. Could England without Scotland (to say nothing of Northern Ireland) have won the Battle of Atlantic? Hardly. Could England then have even threatened to win the re-run of that battle that from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union, dominated British naval thinking, and Britain’s strategic thinking generally? Again, hardly. For as long as the Cold War lasted, the English plus whichever local allies went along with them, were determined to square up to the Russians and thus keep their seat at that Top Table that politicians are all so very keen to be seen sitting at. A dis-United Kingdom was a non-starter, for contriving all that.
But now? Russia remains a looming monster, or a huge wreck if you prefer the Perry de Havilland take on Russia, which I think I probably do. But even if you think that Russia remains very strong, it no longer fancies itself as a global ideological magnet, bankrolling and talking up every nutter in the civilised world with a mad plan to derange civilisation. It no longer even goes through the motions of attempting to conquer everywhere else. Russia is now just another Problem, along with government debt and bank turmoil, the Euro, the Dollar, the Pound, China, energy shortages or “climate change” (again according to taste), crime, schools’n’hospitals, etc. etc. etc., rather than The Problem.
The global ideological derangement torch has now been seized by Mad Mullahs, and they won’t be re-fighting the Battle of the Atlantic any time soon. Nor do they have nearly so many nuclear bombs, or nearly such potent means of chucking them about in the world. They require very different strategies. Given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by the Mad Mullahs, and given the weaknesses and difficulties faced by us, their enemies, I wouldn’t now want to call them anything more than just another Problem, among all the others.
Other career paths for English politicians to that Top Table have since been identified, based less on British power and more on personal skills and individual contributions to the new global elite. To put it bluntly, you don’t need to be part of one of the old empires in order to participate in running the New World Order.
England’s Great Power-ish inclined warriors and foreigner-scarers, of greatly varying social grandeur from Air Marshals to ex-army pub landlords to army-fan dog-owning T-shirted denizens of south of England housing estates, are being presented with a fait accompli. This warrior tendency has traditionally been very pro the Union with Scotland, but is now being being starved of resources and humiliated by its consequent failures to make very effective uses even of those resources that it does still receive. Its last serious throw of the dice was the Falklands War. Since then, Britain been militarily “powerful” by supporting America, which is not nearly so satisfying, or so impressive to spectators. Britain’s more recent military escapades, against those Mad Mullahs, seem to have accomplished, and to be accomplishing, less and less with each passing year. Chasing terrorists in foreign parts is all well and good, but it seems foolish to be trying to impose democracy upon such places as Afghanistan, given the problems we now have domestically. And even if you don’t agree about that, you can hardly deny that most English people surely now do think thus. The Will to Great Power, to adapt Nietzsche, seems more and more to be lacking in Britain. Too costly. Not worth it. Time to consign all that to the history books.
And with it, the overriding imperative for England and Scotland to remain politically attached to one another.
Meanwhile, that strand of English opinion which favours trade, free markets, and so on, is, in the absence of any continuing great power logic to justify union with Scotland, likely to become ever more irked but it. This tradesman tendency, so to speak, of free market inclined businessmen, City of Londoners, shopkeepers, and bookish students who like reading Hayek and Friedman and, these days, clicking onto mises.org, has lately suffered a severe dose of Scottish moralistic … I don’t think anti-Englishness is too strong a phrase for it, at the hated hands of Gordon Brown. More and more they (and count me in too) now think: well Jock, if you want out, then you just go ahead and get out. We might then get the sort of government we want, instead of having our choice vetoed by you all the time.
The above thoughts were triggered again in my head just last week, by a recent report (thank you Bishop Hill), which said that if Scotland does go independent, it will as a direct consequence have to stop being nearly as crackpottedly ridiculous as it is now about “renewable” energy, i.e. the sort of energy of which there is not now and for the foreseeable future never will be enough. Suddenly, I found myself becoming a passionate Scottish Nationalist, if only to put the wind up the idiotic wind-farmer tendency. Although, Bishop Hill jokes that such greenery in Scotland is actually a plan to keep the Union with Scotland going, by making Scottish independence impossible.
For wind-farming in particular, read Scottish economic thought and policy generally. Libertarians like me have another reason to want to see Scotland separate itself from England, which is that once the indignity of being told by annoying English people like me to favour more rational economic theories and economic policies has been removed, the Scots, once independent, will then almost certainly become far more ready to tell each other to think and to behave in an economically more sane manner.
If Scotland goes independent, then Scotland will, for reasons of sheer economic self-preservation, have to stop being a huge drag on the global pro-free-market tendency in general and the libertarian movement in particular, and might even become a net contributor to such tendencies. Again.
Final thought. Where will all this leave UKIP? Changing its name for a start. But then, as the EIP, much more likely to get what it wants. And that’s another reason for England to eject Scotland from its union with England. It would then be a lot easier for England to eject itself from the EU.
Given the proximity of Remembrance Day (11 November), there is something particularly nasty about the theft of metal from war memorials. With prices of some metals at high levels, thieves are tempted to desecrate such things, as well as steal bells from churches, and so on. Boris Johnson is in trenchant form on the subject today.
Once again, I am reminded of how awful a lot of the comments on the Daily Telegraph now are, as shown by much of the commentary linked to BJ’s piece. A lot of the sentiment is to the effect that all this thieving is caused by immigrants. But as one person put it, to steal scrap metal, you need scrap dealers, and they are, often as not, from the indigenous population. It is not as if thieving is something invented by people who come to this nation from abroad.
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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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