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One of my hobbies is photographing landmarks, but in the course of doing this, I spot other less landmarky things, and snap them too. That was the origin of this photo:  It was taken in Harrow, which I visited not long ago, to photograph the new and I think magnificent Wembley football stadium. Click to see more clothing graphics. Very Samizdata, I hope you agree. Apart, maybe, from where it says John Lennon. June 18th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 It is my understanding that, in law, First Amendment issues are decided with a preference for the least restrictive alternative. In this context, the PMRC’s demands are the equivalent of treating dandruff by decapitation – Frank Zappa discussing the Parents Music Resource Center, a pro-censorship group lead by Al Gore’s wife, Tipper Gore June 17th, 2006 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been watching the Wikipedia story unfold with great interest. I know that many turn their noses up at this ‘militia encyclopedia’ because of its inherent problem: sometimes contributors either do not know what they are talking about or they are not entering information in good faith. And yet I often find it is my first port of call when I want some information on a non-critical subject because it is just so damn usable. True, I often tend to cross check data with other sources but if it is regarding a subject I already have some knowledge of (say I want to jog my memory about some detail of the war of the Spanish Succession) or fairly trivial (such as what is Eliza Dushku’s ethnic background (and the answer is Albanian)) I usually just use Wikipedia rather hunt for a book or look elsewhere online. I have no idea how Wikipedia will develop in the long run but it is already an astonishing example of user-generated content that explodes so many long held notions of value exchange and ‘commons’ that I have a feeling that looking back in twenty or thirty years we may see this experiment as one of the internet’s ‘Gutenberg moments’. June 17th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
In every language, the first word after “Mama!” that every kid learns to say is “Mine!” A system that doesn’t allow ownership, that doesn’t allow you to say “Mine!” when you grow up, has, to put it mildly, a fatal design flaw. June 16th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Israeli state appears to be doing the same thing that the British state does when it accidentally shoots the wrong person. The latest horror in which a Palestinian family were hit by a shell whilst on a beach is a case in point. The Israeli military is now claiming that it was not a naval shell that had caused the unintended deaths but rather some unexplained mine or old buried shell in the sand which just happened to go off at or about the same time as an Israeli gunboat was shelling a terrorist target in the Gaza strip. Well that story is coming unravelled and it is a marvel that they thought any reasonable person would believe that during a bombardment from the sea over the heads of the innocent victims, this explosion just ‘happened’ by complete coincidence. Any critical observer should realise that the Israeli military had no interest in killing the hapless Palestinians who died when one of their rounds went short, so why not admit it was a terrible error and move on? All concocting fairy tales does is confirm the prejudices of those who see the official Israeli line as being fundamentally untrustworthy. Hamas and their useful idiots in the west will not believe anything done by the Israeli state is not done out of pure malevolence regardless of the facts, so they can be ignored. Israel’s ethno-nationalist cheerleading squad will just assume anything Israel does under any circumstances is completely justified regardless of the facts, so they too can be ignored. However between those two poles of mindless unreason exists a large group of people who tend to judge things on the basis of ‘reasonableness’ and the likely facts. What the Israeli military spokesman should have said was: “Whilst firing on a legitimate terrorist target, one of our shells went short. It is unclear if this was due to a firing error or a defective round, and as a result some innocent bystanders were killed. We are truly sorry that happened and we wish like hell that the sons of bitches we really were trying to kill did not keep putting us in the position of having to do things like this”. Mistakes happen and in war, mistakes cost lives. Admit the truth and move on because in the long run it actually helps your cause if people have reason to believe what you say. June 16th, 2006 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am now donating about $0.01 to the Mises Institute each time I do a search online. As my various writing committments require me to look things up at a rate of at least 20 a day, this means that I am raising a dollar a week (excluding weekends). Goodsearch, a Yahoo-based search engine, donates the money on the basis of the number of searches carried out. Details can be found here. Most Samizadatistas will disagree with the Mises Insitute for being isolationist on foreign affairs, although this position is motivated more by a refusal to support collectivism (even the ‘good collectivism’ of a war of liberation) rather than the desire to see the USA lose, which is closer to the left’s position. On the other hand, the Mises Institute is consistently against bad economics, government regulation, taxes and socialist theory as much as practice. If the Mises Institute is too radically libertarian for your tastes, you can select another charity, you can even switch from time to time. Come to think of it, I could switch beneficiaries as I search different topics, or on different days of the week. June 16th, 2006 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Daryl Hannah was arrested yesterday for sitting in a tree, defending the South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles scheduled for development by the property’s owner, Ralph Horowitz. The City of LA, which has most recently owned the land, had been kind enough to allow locals to use the acreage to grow tomatoes and corn whilst it lay fallow. Then it sold the land to Horowitz, who evily has decided to develop the property… The kicker? Horowitz is the property’s rightful owner from away back – the city having seized the land from him in the first place in 1986, citing immanent domain, when it wanted to build an incinerator on the site. He’s now being accused of being an ‘evil developer’, and member of the LA Jewish Mafia. Then along came the D-list celebrity activists, including Hannah and folk singer Joan Baez, who took up the ill-conceived cause, found a tree on the property, and started sitting in it. Far from being a bleeding-heart shoe-in, the farm is so stinky a lefty effort that the local alt-weekly newspaper, the LA Weekly, ran an investigative expose about thuggery on the part of pro-farm organizers and their intimidation tactics in pressuring the ‘farmers’ to support the ’cause’. The only net effect, of course, will be to prevent any landowner, including the government, from allowing community gardens anywhere, ever, or any other benevolent use of property, for fear of squatter confiscation. A brutally ‘fair’ outcome, satisfactory only to those who fail to recognize that unfairness is the basis of benevolence – it is what we call charity. June 15th, 2006 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my all-time favourite bloggers – who also happens to be the funniest man in the blogosphere – is under attack from DailyKos contributor ‘dday’, who does not think Harry Hutton is particularly funny at all. This post raised the ire of ‘dday’ and provoked this response from the little pet. ‘dday’ starts off by qualifying his monumental whinge with a “some of my best friends are black, but…” type defence of his sense of humour :
For one so allegedly adept at the art of piss-taking, he does not seem to understand that whole irreverence thing. Later, ‘dday’ flashes his humour credentials again – just so everyone is sure it is not him with the problem :
You can imagine the sort of emasculated, PC jokes this guy would crack. I bet he’s about as funny as a gender feminist. Anyway, if the plight of those living in intellectual poverty concerns you, take a look at the “debate” via the links provided above. The related comments thread on DailyKos and that attached to the offending post at Hutton’s are also worth a read if you enjoy the spectacle of uncomprehending, outraged mewling from humourless dolts. June 15th, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Most of us are familiar with Parkinson’s Law, the one that says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. However, a TV news report last night, discussing one of the recent travails of Britain’s Home Office in front of its recently constructed and newly occupied headquarters reminded me of another Parkinson’s Law – same Parkinson but different law – which says that whenever an organisation moves into a new, custom-built headquarters, it is likely to be not just heading for disaster but already there. Parkinson’s Law of Custom Built Head Offices alludes to the way that the process, first of deciding about the new building and then of getting settled into it, takes the attention of the people who matter away from the real job that they are supposed to be doing, and towards their own, as it were, domestic arrangements. They are celebrating past successes instead of contriving further success. Contrariwise, people who are busy doing important and productive work that they are determined to press ahead with have no time to be fussing excessively about furniture and fittings, and they make do with whatever they have or can easily obtain from a catalog. Once again, this law would appear to vindicated, and I can only apologise for not noticing this sooner. I’ve long known of this law. I often walk past the new Home Office, designed by star architect Sir Terry Farrell, on my way from my home to Free Market Think Tank Land, which is just the other side of the new Home Office from me. The Home Office’s very public difficulties in recent months have not escaped me. But the penny did not drop until last night. The new Home Office was moved into in the Spring of 2005. June 14th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Cereals Authority makes its hay with what is grown; The Asset “Recoverer’s” take what you think you own; The Office of the Regions now does what the council did; The control of state surveillance is quite completely hid; Elections are conditional, the Standards Boards insist;
Chorus:
June 14th, 2006 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Attending a Bruges group bash at the IEA yesterday, I had the opportunity to listen to the cogent James Bennett elucidating further on the concept of the Anglosphere. As always, the talk was clear and precise, dodging the pitfalls of contemporary topics that can blind many to long-term opportunities through a strong pessimism about Britain’s current predicaments. Bennett’s arguments on the pervasive individualism that biases the English speaking countries towards liberty proved a welcome long-term antidote to the current gloom. Indeed, his accounts of the spread of English through India, and its transformation from a language of the elite to the masses, was described in terms of a social revolution. Whilst we are trapped in the short-term carcrash that is the EU, the positive trends of globalisation and the adoption of English throughout India, China, Asia and Africa will prove far more beneficial in the long-term. We will know that the world is becoming far saner and far brighter when we see the outsourcing industry open its first call centres in Kabul or Waziristan. Their turn will come… June 13th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Christopher Buckley, interviewed in the Sunday Times Magazine He’s talking about the US; but there are some discomfortingly morally aggressive Christians in charge on this side of the pond, too. June 13th, 2006 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
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