This theatre review’s headline takes the prize as one of the best I have ever seen. It involves Shakespeare.
Talking of the Bard, there is a lot about him at the moment on the BBC and elsewhere. London’s Globe Theatre is running all of his plays.
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A blogger called Archbishop Cranmer is being investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority after ten people complained about an advertisment on his blog that tried to get people to sign a petition against gay marriage. Says he:
I like this because it cuts through nearly all of the information hiding abstractions like ‘Advertising Standards Authority’, ‘investigation’ and ‘complaint’. What is really happening is that A does not like what B is saying and rather than respond with words they have asked C to threaten B with violence. Note that Archbishop Cranmer can not simply ignore the ASA: there are requirements and deadlines imposed upon him. Notice also how notions of ‘complaining to an authority’ who will then ‘conduct an investigation’ make this appear more sanitary than it really is, to the point that I would have a hard time convincing A that violence is involved. Since the ASA exists to respond to words with violence, its existence can not be justified. Advertising should not be regulated. One might worry that without regulated advertising we would be bombarded with lies, claims and counter-claims and that the world would become a more confusing place. I think instead that it would only reveal confusion that is already there. H/T Tim Worstall. May 11th, 2012 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Via Guido Fawkes, are these comments from UK Education Secretary Michael Gove. He is not bashing private (or as we Brits confusingly call them, public schools) but making a point, which I think need to be made, that many of the leftist-leaning people who run important media and related institutions were educated privately:
Food for thought. May 11th, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
In India we used to have a more socialistic economy. Everything was rationed. Sugar was rationed, kerosene was rationed, rice was rationed. [What I can remember of] a remark made by one of the commentators on the Indian Premier League cricket match between the Chennai Super Kings and the Rajasthan Royals. It was prompted by Chennai’s apparent “rationing” of all-rounder Albie Morkel, who despite being restricted to a mere 6 balls, still managed to score 18 runs, thus saving the game, Chennai’s interest in the tournament and, by extension, civilisation itself. May 11th, 2012 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
There has been a bit of a buzz in the internet and elsewhere about a new development off the US West Coast, known as Blueseed:
One of the bitter ironies of recent years has been how the US, a country that operates a worldwide system of taxes, as well as tightening its visa and other regulations, has made it not just harder for people, including the likes of software engineers, to enter the country, but also far less easy for expat Americans on short- or long-term trips abroad to do so and gain access to even basic financial services. (To view more on the latter point, see this entry of mine about the FATCA Act.) But as the Blueseed venture demonstrates, entrepreneurs and other liberty-loving people will try and find a way around the tentacles of Big Government. No doubt the Eyeores will say this is all futile, that the authorities will shut this sort of thing down, yadda-yadda, but the very fact that such ventures are being worked on at all is itself a kind of victory for certain ideas. Reason magazine has a nice roundup on the Blueseed venture. And Patri Friedman’s Seasteading Institute is still going strong. Here is a great book on the subject, How To Start Your Own Country, covering the failed attempts and the mini-victories along the way. May 10th, 2012 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Poverty is a solved problem – all they have to do is abolish taxes and regulations which cripple those intelligent, capable, and responsible men and women and destroy their productive capacity, then stand back and watch the economy boom. – L. Neil Smith May 9th, 2012 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am off to southwestern France to coincide with the London Olympics. I shall be swimming in the Med, guzzling delicious red wine and food, reading some gloriously downmarket novels, enjoying the tranquil scenery, and also, avoiding shit like this:
May 8th, 2012 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
So why do voters hope to solve the crisis by accelerating the policies which led to it? Much of the blame must attach to the Centre-Right parties currently in office in most national capitals. Though they talk of fiscal prudence, many of them are in reality locked into Euro-corporatism. With a handful of honourable exceptions, they have presided over crony capitalism, more spending, more taxes and more debt. – Daniel Hannan, the best Prime Minister that Britain will never have. This is pretty much my view… that having ‘conservatives’ and ‘capitalists’ in power who are neither conservative nor capitalists (other than in the statist ‘crony capitalism’ sense) is not ‘better than the alternative’… no, in the long run is it actually worse than leaving the ruination to the other side for the sake of ever so slightly slowing the rate at which the First World circles the drain. The problem is not the left, the problem is the statist right who use the language of markets, choice and liberty whilst working tirelessly to abridge all three, just ever so slightly slower than the left-statists would. May 7th, 2012 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Heartland Institute has aroused much controversy with its recent anti-global-warming billboards, such as this one:  Here is their announcement concerning these billboards, and the fact that they have now taken them down. Many climate skeptics are most unhappy. Ross McKitrick, for instance, is “absolutely dismayed”:
I’d be very interested to hear what others here – fellow posters, regular commenters and for that matter irregular commenters – think about this. Is this an own goal, as we say in soccer-playing England, or has the Heartland Institute actually accomplished something valuable and important with this operation? Me, I am genuinely unsure, but at present think that this operation may actually play out rather well. For instance, I would never tangle with McKitrick over things like bristle cones, but is he right to say that the big advert above is “fallacious”? Surely not. “Believing in Global Warming” is a muddled phrase. ( I have long preferred C(atastrophic) A(nthropogenic) G(lobal) W(arming).) But it just about serves. My over-all hunch as of now is that these billboards seem outrageous but actually, they are not. They seem down and dirty. Because they pull no intellectual punches, they seem like some of the more disgusting statements perpetrated by CAGW-ers against their skeptic enemies. But, they make various points which are true, and very important, and they tell no lies. The big point they make, I think, is that all this talk about cute polar bears and melting ice caps and so on, quite aside from usually being mistaken, is not nearly as nice as it seems. It is a part of a huge argument, and not a nice argument at all, which says that modern industrial civilisation is evil and should be trashed, and the human species savagely culled to the tune of millions, sometimes billions. Or: not. Most of the people who fret about polar bears have no serious designs on western industrial civilisation, nor do they have fantasies of mass genocide. However, all those who do now want industrial civilisation trashed and humanity culled, and a global despotism of people like themselves superimposed upon the ruins, use CAGW as either an excuse or a reason for their nightmare projects. The psycho-politicians who launched the various global institutions which funded the “science”, and the mass propaganda, behind the CAGW scare had exactly these murderously destructive ends in mind. (For a brief summary of this story, I suggest, once against, the excellent Watermelons.) One of the few Big Points about which I entirely agree with the more fanatical CAGW fanatics is that this is indeed a very important argument. However, I think it very important that my side should win and that theirs should lose. The CAGW scare is indeed not a small spat about polar bears. It is a very big confrontation, right up there with such things as Civilisation versus Communism. Indeed, again as these posters indicate, the CAGW scare is in many, many ways, Communism 2 (and to a somewhat lesser degree also Nazism 2). This is why, exactly as these posters highlight, a succession of history’s recent villains, great and small, have aligned themselves with the CAGW scare, and have in some cases been strongly influenced by it. I presume many on the CAGW side are now also getting very angry about these billboards. But again, this was one of their purposes. You shouldn’t be this horrid, eh? Well no, maybe you shouldn’t. Comparison is invited, between these insultingly true billboards and the insultingly false abuse that has been hurled over the years at people who have opposed the whole CAGW scare, people like Ross McKitrick for instance. Far from lowering the tone of the CAGW debate, I suspect that these billboards may well end up raising it. I always have my doubts about that “moral high ground”. Yes, it’s good to have it, but not if you leave all the other ground in the possession of the enemy. Also, I think that a great many people will read that Heartland webpage. I may, after I have studied that webpage and further reactions to it some more, change my mind about all this. But I thought it worth posting my half-formed thinking-aloud thoughts nevertheless, and also hearing anything others have to say here in response. May 7th, 2012 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
In a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority – Edmund Burke May 6th, 2012 | 55 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am presently in the Kingdom of Jordan. It’s a pleasant place. Developing quite rapidly. Friendly, welcoming people, although with a slight excessive tendency to charge foreigners more than they might charge locals for the same thing. That’s a sign of the stage of development the country presently occupies, however. Those higher prices are still cheap, by the standards most westerners are used to, and it is easy to get away with. Such are the joys of using an alphabet that westerners generally cannot read, too. (This sort of thing happens much more in Thailand than it does in Vietnam, for instance, as the Latin alphabet used by the Vietnamese makes it much harder to get away with. Despite the preponderance of alphabets used in India, it happens far less there, given that every establishment has an English language price list that is used by Indians far more than by westerners). Amman is a city with quite a lot in common with somewhere like Bangkok, actually, although Bangkok is clearly more developed right now. A huge number of people have arrived in Amman from the countryside in recent decades, boosted by greater economic opportunities in the city than the desert as well as for political regions. Huge, relatively poor neighbourhoods have sprung up in East and South Amman. Crowded, sure. Desperate, not at all. In these neighbourhoods you find clusters of souks and markets and stores devoted to most imaginable products. The new and rapidly growing middle classes are in West Amman. This is a mixture of highway flyovers, international restaurant and hotel chains (including many American restaurant chains not seen in Europe), shopping malls, and bad driving. It resembles Dubai in some ways, but is much less manic, much less the product of ruthless absolute monarchy and a viscous caste system (the Jordinian royal family being much more moderate) and contains many more pedestrians, even if the road infrastructure does not appear to have been invented with pedestrians in mind. There are various signs that money has entered Amman both from and via the UAE in various ways, but it doesn’t appear to be dominating the place. Plus, the weather is a good deal nicer, which helps a lot. Go into the nicer shopping malls, and you find many of the expected international tenants that are generally to be found in middle class districts of rapidly developing cities with aspirational middle classes: Starbucks, Zara, etc. Anchoring each mall is a huge supermarket, selling vast amounts of food and non-food items at good prices – devoting roughly 50% of floor space to food and 50% to everything else, an outlet of the French chain Carrefour. As I usually do in foreign countries like this, I devoted some time to wandering around the aisles of this supermarket. There is no section devoted to alcoholic drinks, this being an Arab country. Jordan is not an especially difficult place to find a beer. There are (fairly expensive due to high taxation) liquor stores throughout the country, mostly operated by members of the sizeable Christian minority, but drinking alcohol is something you separate from good wholesome activities like doing the regular shopping or having dinner in a public place, so there is no alcohol section and most restaurants do not serve alcoholic drinks. More entertaining is the section that would be devoted to things like ham, bacon, and salami in a European country. It is really amazing what you can do with turkey meat if you try, as anyone who has ever been served a halal English breakfast can vouch. And along with the Turkey salami there is the lamb salami beloved of Indian pizza aficionados. The regular meat section is full of lamb and beef, some of it imported from places like Brazil and Australia, and some of it sourced locally. The seafood section contains lots of fish that are described as coming from Dubai. An almost landlocked country is not going to be able to source most of its seafood locally (and, in the modern globalised world, who does, anyway?). The food section in general contains much catering to local tastes, and contains a very impressive mixture of local and imported. Go into the non-food section and you find cheap TVs, computers, and other electrical appliances of all kinds. Cheap, but not too unsightly clothing in a mixture of western and local styles, kitchen utensils, tools and light kitchen, household and garden stuff. Toys. People familiar with the non-food section of a Carrefour or a Tesco anywhere else will be familiar with the contents here. A larger portion of this is imported, and needs to be less localised than the food, but where local sourcing and catering to local needs and taste is necessary, it is done. Get a bus or taxi to the poorer neighbourhoods of Amman, and there are more downmarket malls in existence or under construction. These also have Carrefour outlets in them, possibly smaller ones. While Starbucks and Zara don’t necessarily travel all that far down from the upwardly mobile middle classes, supermarkets can. Everyone wants to buy good and inexpensive food, and cheap TVs and mobile phones appeal to all social classes as well. Carrefour have moved into the market by first providing cheap goods to relatively upmarket purchasing power by opening in malls that want them as tenants and with which signing contracts and negotiating bureaucracy is relatively easy, in so doing setting up supply chains and logistical systems in the country, and are now just starting to move out into the mass market. Carrefour are, i think, the best in the world at general retail in middle income and developing countries. Their two most important competitors in this are Wal-Mart of the US and Tesco of the UK. Carrefour resembles Tesco more than it does Wal-Mart. Both Carrefour and Tesco began as food retailers, and as supply chain management became more and more important became better and better at it. Both were very good at negotiating the vagaries of their local planning laws and local labour laws, and expanded domestically to a huge extent as a consequence of this. Both added more and more non-food items as they opened larger and larger stores, to the extent that they became general retailers rather than simply food retailers. (The French use the word hypermarché or possibly the pseudo-Anglicism hypermarket to describe a large store that sells both food and non-food under the same roof. The English stick with supermarket regardless of how big it gets. As well as opening larger stores, they also opened smaller stores, becoming masters of everything from small convenience stores to giant mega markets (some of which do not even sell food). Using economies of scale to run both very small convenience stores and very large megamarkets at the same time was a relatively new thing, and both companies got this relatively early. Both took advantage of the new markets that opened up in Eastern Europe after 1989. Wal-Mart on the other hand came from general non-food retail and added food later. → Continue reading: Urban development in Jordan and the power of French hypermarkets (but not French politicians) May 5th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
David Cameron, who clearly does not have enough to do, has pledged to consult on campaigners’ proposals to force internet service providers to block porn by default. I am against the proposals because of the force. I also agree with Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group that non-porn will get blocked by mistake. There will likely be other technical problems. And it will make the perceived problem it is trying to solve worse because parents will have a false sense of security while savvy children figure out how to work around the filters. And I am not convinced that porn harms children. But mostly I want the government to stop messing with my internet. May 4th, 2012 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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