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He was not a ‘show biz personality’. He did not appear in Hello magazine. He did not share his view with us about the case for toppling Saddam, and as far as I am aware, has not greatly troubled the front pages of the world’s newspapers with drunken antics. He was, boringly, one of the finest, toughest sportsmen of the age. And boy, could he use a cricket bat. Steve Waugh, cricketing colossus, has finally quit the field. January 6th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Journalism is a dog-eat-dog business these days. Lack of talent is no longer enough. No, you have to do something truly original and spectacular in order to get noticed. Take, for example, Osama Bin Laden. After years of fruitless struggle (and the customary mound of polite rejection letters) he has finally been rewarded with his own column in the Guardian:
Employing him was clearly the right decision. Who else can boast such an enticing combination of political commentary, history and anti-Western rhetoric? This is sizzling stuff. Looks like the Guardian has landed itself a new champion of social justice and the environment. January 6th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The state is something different from society; it is ultimately the servant not the master of individual human beings; its potential for inflicting horrors remains as great as ever. January 6th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Norman Lebrecht is a name familiar to all classical CD geeks, of whom I am definitely one. He has written vast books full of rage. The air is thick with the sound of nails being hammered on the head, and of thumbs being crushed with that same hammer. Excellent explanations charge headlong into ridiculous explanations for the same phenomenon, the phenomenon to be explained usually being the “death of classical music”, which is the phrase Lebrecht sometimes gives to the current travails of the classical music performing and recording enterprise. He sometimes gets that distinction right, and then in the next sentence quite forgets about it. He knows something important is happening to something important, and he hits nail after nail into the wood pile, hoping eventually to nail it all down. (He reminds me of how I write about Modern Art.) → Continue reading: Norman Lebrecht and the death of classical music January 6th, 2004 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
My friend Michael Jennings is looking for a job. At the top of his CV it says:
Michael is a one man research department, which is a very cost-effective and useful thing for a person to be. If your company or enterprise is thinking of expanding into new areas, to take advantage of newly emerging trends, technological and/or political, you need someone like Michael to answer your questions, which are liable to be complicated and which must be answered correctly. Answering complicated questions correctly is what Michael does best. Michael is the sort of person who is easily mistaken for a useless geek, but actually he is a very useful geek indeed. There are several reasons for this. → Continue reading: Michael Jennings – your questions answered January 6th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Maybe mankind, even in these dumbed-down days, can take only so much dreck. That, in my ‘umble opinion, is one lesson we can reasonably draw from figures showing a fall in the sales of Hollywood-made movies in north America. Yes, Lord of the Rings 3, Finding Nemo and some others have proven a big hit, but all too often the formula of big action movie has proven a dud. Of course, certain factors are involved here. Remaking comic strips into films is bound, after the early flurry of excitement, to leave audiences cold. DVD sales and rentals may also be playing a part, though heaven knows it is difficult to work out if there is a direct cause and effect. I would be willing to bet, though, that one factor which Hollywood film executives are missing is the changing demographic profile of our culture. All too many films are still pitched at teens and twentysomethings, but surely as populations age, as they are in parts of the West, film producers need to take account of a more mature audience. The Peter Weir historical drama movie, Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe and based on two seafaring novels by the late Patrick O’Brien, was my favourite of the year, and much better than I had come to expect of literary screen adaptations. It has not shot the lights out at the box office, but deserved to do so. Or maybe films made in Asia and elsewhere are going to pick up the slack from Hollywood over the long term. We live in interesting times. January 5th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
George Monbiot aka Moonbat has joined the great and the good in the 2004 edition of Who’s Who, described as environmentalist and writer. Oh dear. (in today’s Telegraph’s print edition) January 5th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
With a rapidity which defies belief, Mr Bezos, of Amazon.com, has delivered to my grasping hand Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense, and a copy of Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, direct from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, via standard shipping, in less than a week. Remarkable. I thought I’d warm myself up for the big one, from Herr Hoppe, with the 1944 classic from Herr Von Mises. And what a true classic it is. I’m only on page 19, of its one hundred and thirty four pages, but already it has staggered me with its guillotine-sharp language, its brutal power, and its Germanic eloquence. Magnificent. We simply are unworthy of this greatest of the twentieth century’s bearers of the flame of liberty. One quote has already caught my eye, after a recent David Carr article:
January 5th, 2004 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Wired has an article on how to have a national ID card that doesn’t threaten civil liberties.
Read the whole thing. The most relevant, in my opinion, is the conclusion of the article that says that according to Steven Brill the pressure for ID cards will be overwhelming after the next attack, so a well-designed one is better than a desperate one. It is not entirely without merit to say that rather than fixating on whether ID cards threaten privacy, civil libertarians and techno-positivists should explore security measures that might actually thwart terrorism. This might take the wind off the governments’ sail to introduce feel-good solutions that are invasive, threaten privacy and are ultimately less safe. January 5th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
There’s been lots of talk here in the UK, over the past few days, about the core beliefs of the Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard. This fragrant Man of Wales published these core beliefs in the Times Newspaper, last week, basing them heavily upon the spirit of the American Constitution. About a year ago, I would have signed up to them. But since then many good men and women have directed my thinking towards an entirely different direction. So I wondered this evening, after trying to avoid the issue for several days, if I could still support the Tory party, especially after their former Chairman, Norman Tebbit, recently declared on the BBC that he greatly admired public service broadcasting. So, right up to the minute here on Samizdata.net, what would your beliefs be? Here are Michael’s: → Continue reading: A Welshman protests January 4th, 2004 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Spy Blog has an excellent resource page on ID cards. It will also be linked permanently in the right hand column in the Links section.  January 4th, 2004 | Comments are closed
Give me dusky capitalism over Aryan socialism/fascism any day January 4th, 2004 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
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