Comment is free but facts are sacred.
C.P. Scott, who knew about running newspapers in the 20th century. The New York Times has decided to reverse this maxim.
(Via Ann Althouse)
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May 18th, 2005 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am one of those sad and tragic people that only goes to the movies once in a blue moon, but I’ve already booked ahead to see the “Revenge of the Sith”, because I am a Star Wars tragic (mock in the comments all you like, I still get a kick out of these films.) So I have been surfing round to all sorts of different sites having a look at what other people think of the film. I happened across this article in the Houston Chronicle. But my thoughts were dragged back towards this Galaxy by the final paragraph, about the reviewer:
I did a double take at that. This kid has been reviewing films for a newspaper since he was 14? What I think is impressive is that the Houston Chronicle is willing to take a punt on young faces with fresh ideas. When you consider this compared to the very high barriers to entry that exist in Australian journalism, I have to say that I am amazed. It is possible of course, that James Hamilton’s Dad owns the newspaper. However this sort of risk-taking and innovation is, as I say, a world away from the closed-shop of Australian journalism. May 18th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Steyn comments here on the absurdity of trying to legislate to make our charming youth appear less menacing by stopping them from wearing hooded tracksuit tops of the sort familiar in any major city. As he goes on to write, the attempt by the government to try and regulate this sort of thing suggests the government has a terrible naivety about the ability of the State to improve things like manners and standards of conduct by brute force of law:
As Steyn points out, the habit of wearing hoods, large baseball caps and the like is in part a rebellion against the gazillions of CCTV cameras which now festoon so many of our town centres, shopping malls, public buildings and even, so the government hopes, our countryside. The law of Unintended Consequences, as Steyn says, applies. If you treat the populace like kids being minded by nannies in a creche, some of them will try and hide from nanny the best way they can. Of course, there is no reason why owners of private premises cannot enforce dress codes, as happens in pubs which ban people from wearing soccer shirts etc. However fair or unfair, owners should be allowed to insist on the dress code and behaviour they deem fit. Perhaps this government might try to treat us like reasonably intelligent adults. You never know, the habit might catch on. May 17th, 2005 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Paragraph one of this BBC story goes thus:
And the most chilling quote concerns what the South Koreans think of the North Korean nuclear bomb programme.
In other words, this is a hostage situation, the hostages being the people of North Korea, and the hostage takers being the government of North Korea. The usual way to end hostage situations is to storm the place and capture or kill the hostage takers. Although, come to think of it, giving the hostage takers a free, escorted trip to the nearest airport and then plane tickets to the alternative scumbag country of their choice, in exchange for the lives of the surviving hostages, would also be a good way to end this thing. Either scenario would be a big improvement. My favourite bit of the story comes right at the end. How come the people of North Korea are being so cruelly treated? Communism perchance? Actually, not:
Blame capitalism! Capitalist reforms are causing people to starve, and the capitalists are refusing to pick up the tab. The North Korean government should be more communist, in order to feed the people of North Korea properly, and the rest of the world should become more communist, in order to feed the people of North Korea properly. Well, if the way to get someone to sort this mess out is for them to be allowed to announce that they are rescuing North Korea from the ravages of freedom and the free market, then I say: make the announcement, and get on with it. May 17th, 2005 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Occasionally, life throws up little synergistic surprises. Last Sunday, I was reading a rather interesting opinon piece in the Daily Telegraph in the morning and then (quite unexpectedly) found myself breaking bread with the author of that article in the evening. In common with a great many pundits (both amateur and professional) John O’Sullivan casts his eye over the persistantly and curiously comatose Conservative Party and, in doing so, makes a rather astute observation:
That may seem like a strange and rather radical suggestion to some but, actually, it does make quite a lot of sense. A great swathe of what we now call the ‘middle-class’ are not really bourgeois in the true sense of that word. Rather they are public sector professionals or elsewise beneficiaries of the client-state whose wealth and status is entirely dependent on a bloated and active government. Lower tax and less regulation is simply not in their interests. On the other hand, members of the lower-middle and working class are having to hand over ever more of their hard-earned (either directly or by stealth) for ever less in return. It is their elderly parents who are expiring, neglected, in the corridors of state hospitals; it is their children who are being turned out from state schools without being able to read, write or articulate themselves. This changing dynamic is just begging to be seized by anyone with the political savvy to spot the opportunity. Mind you, that probably rules out the Tories. May 16th, 2005 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The recent television programme which has made the most difference to Britain has, I would say, been Jamie Oliver‘s show about school food. I did not see the show myself, but my sister, who used to be a General Practitioner, did see it, and was hugely impressed by it. She has not been the only one, to put it mildly. Never in the field of human cookery will so much be eaten, so differently, by so many, at the behest of just one celebrity chef. My sister was especially impressed by the bit of his show where Jamie persuaded just one family to change the diet, for just one week, of their extremely troublesome and badly behaved children. The behaviour of the children was utterly transformed! They became nice, companionable people. Even more striking was that, as a treat for having eaten their meat and two veg (or whatever it was) and for behaving so well, the children were given another junk food meal, and they immediately reverted to being their old monstrous selves. I have two comments to make about this story, beyond observing that it has had an electrifying effect upon Britain’s educrats, and school food providers. First, it is quite wrong to blame the free market for this sorry episode. In a real free market, schools would fall over themselves to offer good meals rather than bad ones. Insofar as there is something resembling a private sector in British education, it does supply quite nutritious food. (I went to a succession of private sector schools, and the food was pretty good, in the adult sense of being nutritionally good.) When British state schools were instructed, by Margaret Thatcher, to farm out school catering to the lowest bidders, that was an exercise in state diktat, not of the freedom of a free market. In real free markets you are not compelled to buy the cheapest version of what you want. No, you buy what you truly want, and if you choose to buy something good but more expensive, fine. That is your choice. But when the same old single customer (the government) decides that its purchases shall be obtained from slightly different suppliers, that does not make a free market. One single word, ‘privatisation’, was invented to blur this distinction, the idea being that moves in a free market direction had to be made one small step at a time, and once you have lots of separate school food suppliers, that might make it easier to move towards having lots of genuinely independent schools. And that may even be true. But the distinction thus blurred should nevertheless be insisted upon. Second, since this is not actually a free market versus state diktat issue, but merely a good food versus bad food issue, then, if like me you agree with my sister that the kind of food Jamie Oliver has been recommending would be an improvement over junk food, then you will welcome the influence he is now having. I agree that a free market in education, as in everything, would be better. But given that education is largely nationalised, it is good, other things being equal, that the inmates of this system should be well fed rather than badly fed. May 16th, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sorry about the lack of new bloggage but a great many Samizdatistas are nursing serious hangovers in the aftermath of Saturday’s Close Encounter of the Third Kind with Vodkapundit, Jane Galt and twenty five other fine bloggy type folks… 
The smokers lurked outback
Yankee bloggers invade London!
The conversations ranged from artificial intelligence to real stupidity
Epicurian Samizdata editor
Who the hell invited this guy? May 15th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I confess that I didn’t give any money to the tsunami relief effort, mostly because it became apparent to me within a few days that there was far more aid on its way to the area than could possibly be put to good use. I prefer that my donations go where they can make a difference. Mark Steyn confirms that I was right not to waste my money (or rather, to give my money to the tranzis to waste).
It was apparent to me that the US and Aussie military were doing everything possible to ensure that casualties would be minimized during the immediate crisis. Since long-term relief was being farmed out to the UN, and no fundamental reforms of either the UN or the countries receiving it were contemplated, well, the outcome and effectiveness of the long-term relief program was pretty predictable. The UN was being put in charge, so I sent my charity dollars elsewhere.
May 15th, 2005 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
As tonight Samizdata.net HQ will be playing host to the Anglosphere Blogger Bash, featuring such A-list bloggers from across the Atlantic as Jane Galt and Stephen Green, blogging may be a bit erratic and/or ‘under the influance’. May 14th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
  Much has been said and written (some of it by me) on the growth of the Chinese economy and the rise of China as an economic power, and of the growth of an immense manufacturing region on the sides (particularly the east side) of the estuary of the Pearl River between Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton). If there is a workshop of the world today the way there was in the north of England in the mid 19th century, then this is it. I have for a while wanted to go and look at it, but I have usually lacked either the time or the money. Ideally I would like to start in Hong Kong, work my way upstream through Shenzhen and Dongguan to Guangzhou, and then back down the other side of the estuary via Zhongshan and Zhuhai to Macau, on the opposite side of the estuary to Hong Kong.  But alas I have still not been able to do this. However, in March I arranged a trip to Australia to visit my family. And I was able to manage a stopover in Hong Kong for three days. Although I was not going to be able to do the trip up and down the estuary that I had hoped to do, I was at least able to spend one day doing something a little interesting, which was to cross the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen in China proper. Well, sort of in China proper.Shenzhen is a “Special Economic Zone”. China gave Shenzhen this status in 1980 . (The status was subsequently given to Zhuhai across the border from Macau, the port of Shantou north of Hong Kong, Xiamen in Fujian provice across the water from Taiwan, and the southern island province of Hainan). These areas were given more economic freedom that the rest of China, and more importantly were open to investment from and trade with the rest of the world. This was convenient with the people of Hong Kong, as at that time Hong Kong was undergoing the transition from poor to rich, and labour in Hong Kong was becoming too expensive for the traditional textiles and other low cost manufacturing base to survive in Hong Kong. What happened was that the manufacturing moved across the border to Shenzhen, a boom ensued, and people (to the extent that they were allowed to) flocked to Shenzhen from other regions of China. Since then, much the same thing has happened to Shenzhen as happened to Hong Kong,although Shenzhen remains a less sophisticated place.  A lot of trading and lower level services, including that with slightly more questionable business practices, has moved to Shenzhen. Labour has become too expensive in Shenzhen for a lot of the low cost manufacturing to take place there, so it has moved further upriver, particularly to Dongguan. (Capacity constraints are much more stretched on the east bank than the west, which is the impetus for a proposal for a huge bridge connecting Lantau island in Hong Kong with Macau and Zhuhai on the other side of the estuary, construction of which is scheduled to commence later this year). In any event, on Sunday morning I got the train from Kowloon to Lo Wu and (after a few hassles with getting a visa at the border) crossed over into Shenzhen.  I guess this makes David Carr happy
Initially it felt like sleazy border towns everywhere, but it ultimately turned out to be far more interesting that that. → Continue reading: A belated report on a trip to the wild East. May 14th, 2005 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
There can surely be no more conclusive evidence of market success than the trademark name of a particular company becoming the commonly used verb to describe the activity for which said company provides its products. Have you ‘googled’ anyone today? Have you ever been ‘googled’ yourself? As someone who ‘googles’ on pretty much a daily basis, I can find no material fault with this richly-deserved and glowing tribute in the UK Times:
I cannot recall such a mystical (and, for some, blasphemous) suggestion ever crossing my mind but, like the author, I am only too ready to wax lyrical about the benefits of Google’s simple and effective information gathering machine.
To whom could he possibly be referring? → Continue reading: Stick to what you don’t know May 14th, 2005 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
An assortment of cool web stuff* encountered in recent days: Most excellent puppeteering in General Electric’s Facing That Void. Fun CG animation ride. (warning:contains computer simulated amphibian genitalia) I can’t remember a purer shot of joy than this Kokonono promo. *Don’t even waste your time over a dial-up – this is all broadband stuff. Thanks to our rather disturbed friends at Screenhead, BTW. May 14th, 2005 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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