Because he’s a Democrat.
– Overheard by Damian Thompson at the unveiling of the Ronald Reagan statue in London this morning. Someone was explaining why David Cameron gave the event a miss.
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Anger at failure of £2bn fund to help bands, writes Mark Sweney in the Guardian. He is concerned that:
In the comments, a character called “stewpot” performs an extended comic riff on the lines of
An excellent joke, made even better by the fact that half the other commenters appear to have taken it seriously. Good as stewpot’s joke was, Mark Sweney’s is even better. So far I am the only person who has seen that it is an obvious wind-up. In these days of austerity, two billion pounds of taxpayers’ money to be lent to wannabe rock stars? Come on. July 3rd, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Will militant unions derail big fat Greek sell-offs on the rocky route to recovery?” sayeth the Telegraph. Well anyone buying Greek infrastructures with private money deserves everything they will get… it would be easier and probably less stressful to just flush the money down the toilet and call it ‘performance art’. Leave Greece to circle the drain as a prime example of Mencken’s observation:
Greece will just be the first of many as the vast ponzi scheme that is the ‘welfare state’ reaches its climax set to Bouzouki music playing faster and faster… July 3rd, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 2nd, 2011 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is difficult to know how seriously to take China’s red revival. Like the idea of a Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant – could the world imagine an Auschwitz Café? – to Western eyes the campaigns are almost beyond parody. – Peter Foster discussing the nauseating celebrations of the communist party in China July 1st, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Johann Hari, you are a plagiarist!” I shoot those words at him and let them hang in the air between us. He shifts uneasily, but when he replies his voice is surprisingly unapologetic.”When dealing with an inarticulate interviewee, or one whose English was poor,” he confides, “I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.” “Yeah, right,” I say, my outrage rising, “but when you talk about what they said more clearly elsewhere what you really mean is what they said more clearly when interviewed by someone else, huh?” He furrows his big, broad brow, pats my knee, and tells me about the night he knew he was going to die unless he got his copy in on time. “It depends, ” he says, looking away, “on whether you prefer the intellectual accuracy of describing their ideas in their most considered words, or the reportorial accuracy of describing their ideas in the words they used on that particular afternoon.” “Intellectual accuracy,” I cry, grabbing his patting-hand in a jiu-jitsu lock and hurling him over my shoulder, “cannot exist independently of reportorial accuracy.” Floored equally by my logic and a martial arts technique taught to me by a secret order of fighting monks living in the high passes of Chingford, he apologises to a lampshade for having once supported the Iraq war and hobbles away. This interview was true in spirit. It was also almost entirely an excuse to say something that I had been meaning to say for ages, but was too short to be a post on its own: never mind all this twitter and email and communication-y stuff, the underreported way the internet changes everything is the way that everything anyone writes is still there years later. I cannot even safely assume that you have forgotten that I said this before, on Tuesday March 1st 2005. – UPDATE: Today’s Guardian carries an interview (which I am fairly sure really happened) in which Stuart Jeffries talks to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age. Much there to disagree with, in particular the way Mayer-Schönberger chucks around the word “should” in “He argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date”. Does “should” mean “it would be nice if manufactures put this in” or “let’s have a law to force them to”? When a professor of internet governance and regulation fails to make this distinction it strikes me as sinister. Nevertheless the interview is fascinating, particularly when Mayer-Schönberger talks about how “the Panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace”. June 30th, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
It bemuses me that a certain type of commentator will often – sometimes rightly – be angered at the over-reach of Western powers’ foreign policy but be quieter about other, less obvious, intrusions if they happen when a more leftist government happens to be in power. And a lot of this sort of double-standard occurs with the United States. Such critics appear to have been silent on the following issue: under the current Democrat presidency of Mr Obama, the US last year passed a stunningly badly crafted piece of legislation, known as FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act). The law was passed at a time of what can best be described as hysteria about the amount of money that Americans were allegedly stashing abroad in places such as Switzerland, the Bahamas, the Caymans, and so forth. The major governments of the world, such as the US, Germany and UK, fondly imagine that there is, so to speak, a huge pot of gold that got lost down the back of the sofa. What FATCA does is require any financial institution that is believed to deal with expat US citizens and Green Card holders to provide a great deal of information to the Internal Revenue Service. In other words, all manner of financial institutions, ranging from big banks to small investment boutiques, must prove to the Internal Revenue Service’s satisfaction that they have not got US citizens/GC holders on their books if they want to be unmolested by the IRS’s powers. If they have such clients or invest into the US stock market, etc, they must provide huge amounts of additional reporting data to the US. “Foreign Financial Institutions” must report investors who are taxable in the US to the US tax authorities. If they fail to do so, they pay a 30 per cent withholding tax. And proving that someone is, or might be, a US citizen might be hard, particularly if that person has been living outside the US for decades, and there is not much paperwork going back, say, 30 years. This is a quite stunning extension of the IRS’s power around the world, affecting European, Asian, African, Latin American and other regions’ banks, who may have been blissfully unaware that some of their clients had, at any point, a US “taint”. And I am frankly astonished that not more has been said by non-US governments about this; however, given that governments such as those of Germany have resorted to the dubious practice of paying for data stolen from Swiss banks, I have no great hopes that respect for sovereignty or the rule of law applies. The net effect of this law will be to make it even less likely that banks and other firms will want to touch Americans living outside the US due to the heavy compliance cost. The law will be a blow against globalisation and business growth, as this article at Forbes makes clear. It will be even less profitable for firms to deal with Americans if they live abroad. Those US nationals working in the City of London, for example, will find it is harder to open a bank account, manage a mutual fund or get insurance. A former US colleague of mine is in a nasty predicament. When I called the US Embassy here about the matter, I received nothing but blank ignorance. FATCA is yet another blow against the free movement of people around the world, and will be particularly tough on the middle class, hard-working professionals who don’t have access to the flashiest lawyers and advisors. The super-rich and well-connected will, of course, be okay. I doubt that someone like the US Ambassador or military types serving abroad have even heard of it. (The US military tends not to be affected by such legislation anyway, although you can never be sure. If any serving personnel do get hit, it would be good to know the details). It is sometimes said, by a certain type of sneering European or self-hating international travelling American, at how bad it is that all those ghastly, ignorant hicks don’t hold passports. Well, part of the reason is that getting a passport is a bureaucratic nightmare in the US. Another is that the US is a big and beautiful place with so much to see that why would any sane American want to leave for any extended period of time? But another reason is that the IRS, which is out of control, is making the process of being an expat a waking nightmare. As for whether politicians of any kind, including the Tea Party crowd, give a flying f**k about this issue, is unclear. There may be few votes in it, but I would have more respect for supposedly libertarian-leaning GOP members such as Ron Paul, his son, or one or two others, if they could be persuaded to lobby for wholesale repeal of this atrocious piece of legislation. June 29th, 2011 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Now who is the Forgotten Man? He is the simple, honest laborer, willing to earn his living by productive work. We pass him by because he is independent, self-supporting, and asks no favors. He does not appeal to the emotions or excite the sentiments. He only wants to make a contract and fulfil it, with respect to both sides and favor on neither side. He must get his living out of the capital of the country. The larger the capital is, the better living he can get. Every particle of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer. But we stand with our backs to the independent and productive laborer all the time. We do not remember him because he makes no clamor; but appeal to you whether he is not the man who ought to be remembered first of all, and whether, on any sound social theory, we ought not to protect him against the burdens of the good-for-nothing.” – The Forgotten Man, page 209 from On Liberty, Society and Politics. The Essential Writings of William Graham Sumner, Edited by Robert C. Bannister. His idea that a large swathe of people who asked for no favours – nor received many – has its echoes, however imperfect, in such expressions as Richard Nixon’s “Great Silent Majority” or, in the UK perspective, “Middle England”, or perhaps, “the coping classes”. Sumner is a useful reminder that the great classical liberal thinkers of the 19th Century and before acutely understood the issues of class and the difference between the self-reliant and others, but without the tedious animosity and simple-mindedness of the Marxians or the patronising dreams of High Tories a la Disraeli or, god help us, David Cameron or the late Harold Macmillan. I strongly recommend this book, although these reprints of old classics by Liberty Fund are not exactly cheap. June 28th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stretch yourselves. Answer these questions, if you think you’re hard enough:
Michael Gove to set out tougher teacher training rules, reports the Telegraph.
The questions quoted above were from the current versions of these literacy and numeracy basic skills tests. One in five trainee teachers fails either the literacy or numeracy part of this fiendish Educational Tripos on the first sitting. Oh dear. Is the correct word perthetic, pafetic, or pathetic? Answer: all three, with knobs on. You might think from this that I am going to urge the Secretary of State for Education to an even more drastic reform than allowing only two re-sits. One re-sit! One re-sit and then euthanasia! I make no such urgings. It none of it matters. The trouble is, to put in terms that an old D&D-er like the Minister would understand, is that it is a very bad idea to magic missile the orcs while the lich remains undefeated. The least of the problems with state education is that orcs who made a bad INT roll are let into the profession. Orcs can do quite nicely as teachers. A teacher needs to roll for three characteristics: – knowledge of the subject he or she is to teach, Of course it is good to have rolled high in all three, and, to be fair to Mr Gove’s latest initiative, he is probably right that a 1 in any of them probably should disqualify the applicant. But a good score in two qualities can usually compensate for one bad roll. But by Garl Glittergold’s holy nugget, I did not mean to get distracted by recommending this tweak or that tweak of Mr Gove’s new “tougher” criteria! It’s all pointless, I tell you. (Particularly as by Mr Gove’s express wish, a person who really had passed the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge would be refused a bursary to train as a maths teacher, if he or she had only a third class degree. Yes, really, even if they could work out how many bottles of vinegar were needed.) The point was this. You don’t fight the orcs, Gove the Mighty But Deluded. You fight the liches. Give the man his due, allowing for the fact that “Secretary of State for Education” is a useless character class that ought to be deleted from any future editions, he is doing better than any we have had for years. If he survives the liches, he may even take the fight to the Blob itself. Just leave the orcs alone. Head teachers can fight their own orcs, or hire ’em, you don’t have to worry which. It is unbecoming for anyone above fifth level to bash an orc. June 28th, 2011 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Prime Minister of China has just been on the television news (more on the story here) telling “Britain” (by which he seems to mean the British government) not to indulge in “finger pointing” about China’s human rights record. He loves Shakespeare, he said. Do any of China’s critics know anything about Chinese literature? It’s an interesting idea, that you need to acquire a love of Chinese literature before you can reasonably complain about circumstances like this (just lately linked to by Instapundit):
But it is not enough of an explanation of such events to say that the people of Guangdong don’t like being horribly treated. My question is: how come they now feel able to be so angry? I mean, it’s not like they have never been maltreated before. Answer:
It sounds as if finger pointing by the likes of David Cameron won’t be necessary to make China’s bosses, political and economic, start to become a tiny bit nicer, year on year. Supply and demand, of and for labour, is now working that trick. The Forbes piece, with its headline about “Conflict handbags”, implies that soon there may be calls for boycotts of handbags made in China. But is it not the willingness of richer people to buy such stuff that is bidding up the price of labour in China, and making such things as the denial of toilet breaks so unsustainable? Meanwhile, where is the voracious demand for the services of Britain’s public sector workers, who are also threatening strike inaction? The government is going to stop! State teachers will stop teaching! Here is a case where a strike is being triggered by a fall in demand for the relevant labour. The paymaster is feeling the pinch, and wants to cut their pensions. I wonder what the Prime Minister of China thinks about that? Seriously, I would like to know this. Even better, I would like to see him doing some finger pointing. That would be a real laugh. I don’t know how many illusions Britain’s state pen-pushers and button-pushers have about how loved they are by the rest of us. When we encounter them we tend not to discuss any feelings of rage towards them that we may be engulfed by, which is all part of why we often get so enraged with them. On the other hand, they talk about the “front line” services that they supply, like they know they are in a war, rather than serving anyone besides their bosses. Their calculation has to be that the government needs them, in order for the government to go on being the government. But, the threat by them to stop the government … spending money, won’t necessarily come over as much of a threat to the nation as a whole. But those state teachers might also want to be a bit careful. If they go on strike too enthusiastically, they might find that people might work out how to get along okay without them, and maybe with humiliating speed. June 27th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
And even if the Greek populace remained blissfully oblivious when all that debt was being piled up, they certainly are aware of it now. But judging from the riots in the streets their only thought still is that they want the party to continue, at someone else’s expense. They deserve what they get. – Commenter ‘Laird’ June 27th, 2011 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favour of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office – H. L. Mencken June 26th, 2011 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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