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Via CityAM, here is an interesting article about the UK’s own space industry. It is bigger than might be supposed from first glance. (Thanks to my good friend Tim Evans, over at the Adam Smith Institute and the Cobden Centre, for the pointer). BTW, one of the big places for registering space-related companies these days is the Isle of Man. No doubt, in centuries to come, the Tranzis will be trying to shut down tax havens in outer space. November 3rd, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Favourite climate-related quote of the week so far:
It’s a comment, from Nicholas Hallam, on this, at Bishop Hill. Heh. Although, actually, the recent Bishop Hill posting that I find most interesting is this one, which is about a bunch of solar power grant guzzlers begging to have their grants renewed at the level they have become accustomed to. Something along those lines. The absence of any widespread public support for these chancers will reveal just what a propaganda beating the greenies have been taking for the last few years, not least from blogs like this one. Most people will react to these green supplications, if they react at all, only by saying something like: “Oh you’re losing your jobs, bad luck, join the club, but actually what we really don’t like is our fuel bills doubling.” Until now, it’s all been sane people begging the politicians to stop chucking money down the green drain. Now the politicians are starting to rearrange things a tiny bit against the interests of some of the politically less well connected greenies, and these greenies are now also starting to beg. Yes, folks, it’s the reversing of the burden of proof. We no longer have to convince them that all that “settled science” isn’t so settled after all. They have to convince us that they aren’t scam artists. Or deluding themselves. Or a bit of both. Good luck guys. Billions are still being tipped down the green drain. This is only the very beginning of the end of the great green scam, which will probably never completely disappear. But, once the politicians realise how little support there is for green subsidies, they will get bolder, and cut them some more. And the greenies will scream some more. And the arms of the general public will remain folded, their faces blank with contempt. About time. LATER: More:
Or government-sponsored anything else, come to that. Welcome to politics, mate. October 31st, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is priceless. It is a Friday, and it is good to have a laugh, even of a dark sort. Halloween’s on the way:
A letter from “Antony Black”, of Dundee, published in the 22 October print edition of the Spectator, page 30. I love the way that this man likens skeptical views on Man-made global warming, and resistence to things like giant windmills, to the appeasement of a proven thug. It is worth quoting people like this man, not because it will have the slightest effect in changing their views, which constitute religious belief in its mix of fervour, self-righteousness and faux-rationality, but because it is important to show how such seemingly articulate people can believe such tosh, and get it printed in what is a relatively respectable publication. James Delingpole, the British journalist, has a good take on the sort of folk that form part of the Climate Change alarmist crowd. October 21st, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Snapped by me earlier this evening:  One of the key arguments in Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse concerns the oft-repeated claim that the world’s central bankers won’t allow inflation to get out of control, because they are fully aware of what a very bad thing it is. But what if they also fear something else that they regard as even worse? Like the monster economic correction that a decades-long policy of easy money is now demanding, from the entire world? The huge pile of paper next to this Evening Standard billboard seems rather appropriate, I think. October 18th, 2011 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit chooses the first few sentences of this piece about the Occupy Wall Street … thing, to recycle. But my favourite bit is where George Will summarises the OWS position:
I also agree with the following comment, which was attached to this:
Which says part of what George Will said, and which I agree with because I wrote it. It is, when you think about it, easier to write about something that is rather small. When you encounter an OWS event, you can listen to anyone there who wants to say anything in about ten minutes. Compare that with working out what the hell everyone thinks at a Tea Party get-together. To do an honest job on that you have to be there for hours. But then again, these protesters are not, perhaps, all of them, complete idiots. They are very right that things have gone very wrong. We’re due an OWS copycat demo here in London this weekend. Someone called Peter Hodgson, of UK Uncut, is calling for, among other things, “an end to austerity”, by which he means him and his friends keeping their useless jobs for ever. Good luck with that, mate. There is actually some overlap between what some of these Occupy London characters may or may not be saying this weekend, and what my team says about it all.
It’s like the Tea Party in Britain is too small, and has to climb aboard Occupy London. Well, maybe not, because Laura Taylor neglects to mention the role of the world’s governments in setting the various trains in this giant train-wreck in motion. Who caused the banks to cause this crisis? That’s what my team wants to add. The banks were only doing what the politicians had long been incentivising them to do, and the banks are doing that still. The banks are only to blame for this mess in the sense that they are now paying the politicians to keep it going. But that is quite a big blame, I do agree. So anyway, the British government, like the US government, is now also grotesquely corrupt, and it should jolly well pull its socks up, its finger out and itself together. And then be hung from lamp posts. Seriously, I remember back at Essex University in the early 1970s how the Lenin-with-hair tendency thought that the answer to every problem in the world then was to occupy something, fill it with rubbish and then bugger off and plan their next stupid occupation. They were tossers then, and they, their children and their grandchildren are tossers now. Farce repeating itself as farce. Maybe I’ll dress up (as in: down) in shabby clothes and sandals with no socks (which I would never dream of doing normally) and join in, with a camera. Although, I promise nothing, because this weekend there is also the Rugby World Cup semi-finals to be attending to. October 13th, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Somehow, this man, Eoin, appears to be so thick (he’s a Doctor, apparently) that I fear he should be banned from handling heavy machinery:
So my wife, for example, who set up her own business (marketing for SMEs) has done nothing to reduce unemployment. So all those people who, for example, lost a job at a firm and who set up on their own are not doing anything to reduce unemployment unless they employ someone? Is this man for real? Of course, given the job-destroying impact of red tape, employment protections on full-time and part-time staff, taxes, and so on, it sometimes is a marvel that anyone ever gets a paid job at all. I am a minority owner, and employee, of a small business in wealth management/media sector and every decision on hiring someone is taken with the utmost care, since it is difficult to fire someone if they are not up to scratch. There are times when I fear that some people out there are so fucking stupid that Darwinian ideas of natural selection are in need of revision. Thanks to Tim Worstall for spotting this piece of lunacy. October 13th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday afternoon, I attended the meeting at the House of Commons that I flagged up here a few days earlier. It was a fairly low key affair, attended by about thirty people or more. Not being a regular attender of such events, I can’t really be sure what it all amounted to. Things happen at meetings that you don’t see. Minds get changed, in silence. Connections are made, afterwards. You do not see everything. But what I think I saw was this. The first thing to clarify is that this was the Detlev Schlichter show. Steve Baker MP was a nearly silent chairman. Tim Evans was a brief warm-up act. Schlichter’s pessimism about the world economy was the heart of the matter. He did almost all the talking, and I believe he did it very well. It’s not deliberate on his part. Schlichter just talks the way he talks. But his manner is just right for politicians, because he doesn’t shout, and because he so obviously knows what he is talking about, what with his considerable City of London experience, and that flawless English vocabulary spoken in perfect English but with that intellectually imposing German accent. He foresees monetary catastrophe, but although he has plenty to say about politics, and about how politics has politicised money, he is not trying to be any sort of politician himself. Basically, he thinks they’re boxed in, and when asked for advice about how to change that, he can do nothing beyond repeating that they are boxed in and that monetary catastrophe does indeed loom. But what all this means, for his demeanour at events like this one, is that he doesn’t nag the politicians or preach at them or get in any way excited, because he expects nothing of them; he merely answers whatever questions they may want to ask him. He regards them not as stage villains but as fellow victims of an historic upheaval. Despite the horror of what he is saying, they seem to like that. He didn’t spend the last two months cajoling his way into the House of Commons. He was simply asked in, and he said yes, I’ll do my best. Present at the meeting were about five MPs, besides Steve Baker MP I mean, which is a lot less than all of them, but a lot more than none. One, a certain Mark Garnier MP, seemed to be quite disturbed by what he was hearing, as in disturbed because he very much feared that what he was hearing might be true. Mark Garnier MP is a member of the Treasury Select Committee, which I am told is very significant. Another MP present, John Redwood, was only partially in agreement with Shlichter. He agrees that there is a debt crisis, but doesn’t follow Schlichter to the point of seeing this as a currency crisis. In other words, Redwood thinks we have a big problem, but Schlichter thinks the problem is massively bigger than big. Redwood was also confused by Schlichter’s use of the phrase “paper money”, by which Redwood thought Schlichter meant, well, paper money. Redwood pointed out, quite correctly, that paper money that has hundred percent honest promises written on it, to swap the paper money in question for actual gold, is very different from the paper money we now have, which promises nothing. Redwood also pointed out that most of the “elastic” (the other and probably better description of junk money that Schlichter supplies in the title of his book) money that we now have is mostly purely virtual additions to electronically stored bank balances. We don’t, said Redwood, want to go back to a world without credit cards or internet trading! All of which was immediately conceded by Schlichter, and none of which makes a dime of difference to the rightness or wrongness of what Schlichter is actually saying; these are mere complaints about how he says it. Such complaints may be justified, given how inexactly “paper money” corresponds to the kind of money that Schlichter is actually complaining about. But Redwood seemed to imagine that what he said about what he took “paper money” to mean refuted the substance of what Schlichter said. Odd. For me, the most interesting person present was James Delingpole. (It was while looking to see if Delingpole had said anything about this meeting himself that earlier today got me noticing this.) The mere possibility that Delingpole might now dig into what Schlichter, and all the other Austrianists before him, have been saying about money and banking was enough to make me highly delighted to see him there, insofar as anything about this deeply scary story can be said to be delightful. But it got better. I introduced myself to Delingpole afterwards, and he immediately told me that he considered this the biggest story now happening in the world. So, following his book and before that his blogging about red greenery, Delingpole’s next Big Thing may well prove to be world-wide monetary melt-down. I would love to read a money book by Delingpole as good and as accessible as Watermelons. If Delingpole’s red greenery stuff is anything to go by, the consequences in terms of public understanding and public debate of him becoming a money blogger and a money book writer could be considerable. So, no pressure Mr D, but I do hope you will at least consider such a project. October 12th, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
– From the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the Congress of July 4, 1776 to the London E.17 postal district and a very expensive cardboard box is something of a comedown, but there is a common theme. I used to live in Walthamstow, East London, a place with what they call “character”, i.e. a bit of a dump. Sorry to any loyal Walthamstowites out there but think about Hoe Street on a Saturday night and deny it if you dare. Apparently it is even more of a dump than usual at the moment because of fly tippers. So one would hope that the council officers would zealously pursue the fly tippers, would one not? Nope. That would be too much like work. Much easier to persecute and prosecute one of the diminishing number of successful business people in the area for giving away a cardboard box to a passer-by.
How many years on average do you reckon it takes for a newly instituted Government to decline to this level of simple predation? October 12th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yes, on Tuesday 11th, at around teatime, at the House of Commons, Steve Baker MP, Tim Evans and Detlev Schlichter (the links because both of the gents in the bold and blue lettering have had recent (favourable) mentions here) will be asking: Is the global economy heading for monetary breakdown? I’m guessing the answer is going to be: yes. Although, I’m already imagining a comedy sketch where the first two say, actually, we’ve changed our minds, the answer is no. The world’s currencies are all absolutely in the pink. Quantitative Easing is working a treat. We can all relax. And Speaker number three finds himself forced to agree with the first two. “Guys, you’re right. My book is rubbish.” If only. Please spread the word about this event, not just so that people in the London area who are able to attend it may be persuaded to do that, but so that people all over the world may learn that ideas of monetary sanity are being argued for inside the House of Commons. October 7th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve said it here before and I am sure I will say it here again. Steve Baker MP is a remarkable man. Last week, Steve Baker published, in a new Spectator venture, this list of books that he admires, with very brief notes saying why. The list contains several books by authors of the sort that no normal MP would admit to admiring, whatever he might privately claim. Nozick, Jesus Huerta de Soto, Schlichter (Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse being Baker’s answer to the question: “What book best describes now?”), Nigel Ashford (an excellent populariser and clarifier of libertarian ideas), Bastiat, von Mises (the books of those two authors, along with the King James Bible, being the ones that Baker would snatch from a British library fire). Amazing. I thought I would die before I witnessed a British Member of Parliament publishing a list of books like that, as opposed to merely chatting about such things between ourselves, dear boy. Baker is out and proud about it. He knows what are the big ideas that matter the most just now, and he doesn’t care who knows that he knows. October 2nd, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I cannot see him in David Cameron’s inner circle, somehow. For all my worries about where it is headed, the fact that someone like Mr Cain (has to be one of the best surnames in politics) can reach such levels says a lot about what the US is in terms of how people can surmount obstacles to build a successful business despite prejudice and the rest. September 30th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
I live in the Westminster area of central London – Pimlico to be exact – and I am planning to get out of London next year when the Olympic Games are on and spend some time with my Dad and also travel abroad to get away from the mayhem. Luckily, my job enables me to work remotely for a while. Sometimes, when friends ask me about this, they ask if I am thinking of letting out my property for a couple of weeks or whatever, and earn a bit of extra cash to compensate for the cost of paying for the Games and the associated hassles. In general, I am against the idea of letting my place to strangers, and would only consider letting it to people I know and trust. (I am worried about strangers stealing my entire Robert Heinlein collection, 50th anniversary Playboy album and cufflinks. You know how it is). However, it turns out that Westminster City Council has decided to kill the idea anyway – people who let properties for short periods without permission will, it says, be fined. Other London boroughs are taking a more liberal line. I was not aware that to let out my property for a few days or weeks was something that the council had any power to prevent. Now we know better, alas. Suppose I decide to let my Dad house-sit my place for a few days, or let other relatives use my place and possibly reimburse me for the electricity, gas and water bills. It appears that the council officials are entitled to check who is in properties during the Games and make sure they are not being used illegally as rentals. Of course, some people will chance it and let their places out. I must say, Britain is becoming more like East Germany. That country liked its Olympics, if I recall. The next time anyone talks about the UK and property ownership, please try not to laugh. Update: The commenter Laird asks if we could legally challenge this edict. I suppose it is possible. September 28th, 2011 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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