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“The moon shot has long been a favorite trope of politicians plugging for new government programs, right up there with the Marshall Plan. It was a wondrous achievement, but it presented a relatively discrete engineering problem. If only reforming education, a complex task involving the crooked timber of humanity here on earth, were as straightforward.” – Rich Lowry, giving his less than joyous take on the State of the Union address by The One. January 25th, 2011 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A rat has been photographed outside 10 Downing Street. Presumably the only thing that makes this news worthy is it was not exiting the building and getting into an official chauffeured government vehicle on its way to Parliament. January 25th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I look at this item over at Wired, the technology/culture publication, and think that this is all very geeky, very Sci Fi and very clever, but it also makes me think, as a commenter does on the article, that it is hardly surprising that defence procurement costs are so high, and getting higher. Which is possibly not very smart if government budgets are under so much strain. January 25th, 2011 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Hawkins: Now, in recent years we started to hear more people calling to get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good idea, bad idea? What are your thoughts? Thomas Sowell: Good idea. John Hawkins: Good idea? What do you think we should replace it with? What do you think we should do? Thomas Sowell: Well it’s like when you remove a cancer what do you replace it with? January 24th, 2011 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
I heard the BBC’s A Point of View on Radio 4 this morning, Sunday. It is a 10-minute talk for general edification, falling between the religious service and the current affairs programme. The pop philosopher Alain de Botton has tenure on the current run. He called today’s piece “The ecological sublime” – a strange name, since it was concerned not with the sense of awe but with the anxiety and even terror aroused by environmentalists. I recommend hearing this short piece (available for a week, I believe) for the sake of the picture he paints of the desperation promoted by the deep greens’ jeremiads: a state of mind in which, as he says, we cannot fly to Florence to view Titians, raise our eyes to the snows of Kilimanjaro, transport milk by lorry to supermarkets, or enjoy an unusually warm spring day, without immediately fearing that we are implicit in crimes more enormous and devastating than nuclear bombing, while we are more powerless than any footsoldier caught up in a war crime – powerless because “we need collective solutions” and they are near-impossible because they would require the cooperation of over six billion people. He talks of Armageddon, of species suicide. The natural world no longer evokes forces greater than ourselves but only suggests our own powers – and those powers are terrifying. The new environmental awareness threatens to drive us into despair. De Botton is not pointing to these baleful effects in order to condemn the doom-mongers. He swallows the whole thing hook, line and sinker. And what is his remedy? He does not offer any philosophical resistance. His first remarks on opening the talk are on the general irrelevance of his own vocation: we should be drinking up the solid science of the ecologists rather than bothering about philosophers like him. He thinks the philosophical job is done by sketching out the situation created by the new environmental awareness. He recommends that we turn to artists – those gullible groupies of the greens! – to give us heart. De Botton has another suggestion: that we counter our megalomania by meditating daily on selected astronomical objects, driving home to ourselves how very big they are and how very far away. That will keep us in our place, he thinks; it is his secular alternative to religious meditation. This sorry suggestion would not work for me. I have always been fascinated by astronomy and I know quite a few of its big numbers. They never made me feel humble. Perhaps if de Botton thought philosophical thinking were more important than he does, he would think it important to investigate the environmentalists’ descriptions of reality, and think critically about their nostrums. He might conclude that environmental pessimism is a libel on the state of the human race: things are in good shape, they are looking good for the future, and, rather than feeling despondent, we can feel proud of ourselves. January 23rd, 2011 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Leaving aside current affairs for the second, feast your tired eyes on these absolute beauties of motorcar design. Ralph Lauren certainly has an exceptional collection of classics. My favourite is the mid-60s Ferrari. January 23rd, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
How about adding some math lessons to plot statistically the chance of an Arab suicide bomber and a gay socialist vegetarian pacifist wearing a Che Guevara tee shirt and no sense of irony all ending up on the same bus in London? Sigh…Math was never that much fun in my school days. State education is beyond parody. – Perry de Havilland commenting here January 23rd, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
I reacted rather badly the other day to Baroness Warsi’s weird rant about ‘bigotry‘ towards Muslims but it is gratifying to see I was not the only one who her remarks rubbed the wrong way. Warsi seems to be of the view that unless you have a positive view of Islam, it is not really acceptable for you to express your opinions in polite society even in private ‘around the dinner table’. That someone who is a member of the establishment in the UK could think that notion was going to fly is a measure of the disconnect between some people ‘at the top’ and us oiks out in the real world. January 22nd, 2011 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a nice piece by Don Surber (H/T, Instapundit) seeking to explain the hatred that is felt among some folk for Sarah Palin. He obviously focuses on the attitudes of Americans, but I’d wager that some of that applies also to non-Americans who hate or despise her in much the same way that such people also got riled by Ronald Reagan’s folksy speaking manner and ignored the wisdom and intelligence of that man. It is a good piece. It got me thinking about why certain politicians, even if they espouse views which are not necessarily all that outrageous or objectionable, provoke feelings of such hatred in some quarters. In the UK, for example, the last person I think who was really hated in the Palinesque sort of way was our own Margaret Thatcher. There are certain things in common – although not ones I would stretch too far – such as that they came from unfashionable parts of their countries (Lincolnshire/Alaska); made a point about religion in their lives (they are obviously nutters then); happy marriages (which provokes a strange kind of resentment among some folk); a certain middle-brow, cultivated lack of pretension; the pitch and tone of their voices (Maggie sounded very arch early on), and so on. Add in the fact that they are women in a male-dominated arena of politics, and the reason for hatred grows. And I also think that for a lot of so-called feminists, a woman who espouses “family values”, supports capitalism, etc, is seen as letting the side down. This rather ignores what we Samizdata writers would say, that free markets, when freed of state interference, are usually very good news for women, since bigotry against women, like any other group, is a cost. There is also something quite useful about Sarah Palin in this regard. Although I do not agree with all her views, at least as far as I know what they are, I usually find that the sort of people who say they hate or despise her are nobs of the first rank. So it is a sort of useful marker: if I find myself talking to someone and her name comes up and the reaction is as described, I can usually pigeonhole that person as someone to be avoided. And Palin has great legs. The sources of hate must run very deep indeed. January 21st, 2011 | 75 comments - (Comments are closed)
Indeed. And not just the price of all the other kinds of gas. Am I the only one who suspects that a lot of the climate change hubbub whipped up in recent years was really just a cover for getting young lefty-inclined scientists to find other kinds of energy, not actually to save the planet, but rather to enable the rulers of the West to tell those pesky Arabs to take a hike? I don’t read the right sort of blogs and websites to know for sure, but I doubt very much that I am. Anyway, now, another kind of energy has come on stream, of the sort that conflicts with all the climate change hubbub, because it is disturbingly similar in its imaginary climatic effects to the stuff that our rulers want to be able to stop buying from the Arabs. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin quotes the Chief Economist at the International Energy Association, Dr Fatih Birol:
That settled science is already turning out to be not so settled after all, and this just might be part of the reason, don’t you think? Governments, for their own reasons that have nothing to do with the actual argument, are now switching from being climate change fanatics to what the climate change fanatics call climate change deniers. The moral is: if you want to spread some ideas, any ideas, don’t rely on governments to help you. They will help you, if and while it suits them. But if and when it stops suiting them, you’d better be ready to win your argument all by your little old self. January 20th, 2011 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other night, when I had the TV on, I saw that one of the programmes, featuring the BBC top economics and business correspondent, Robert Peston, was all about the financial panic of recent years. Oh dear, I thought, I can just imagine the usual line about how it was all the fault of greedy bankers, insufficient regulation, “unregulated laissez faire capitalism”, and on and on. Well, not quite. Yes, some of those elements were there, but there was also quite a lot of sophisticated explanation of how a combination of forces – leverage, “too big to fail bailout protection, over-confidence in newfangled ideas of risk management and misalignment of incentives for bankers – combined to create the storm. I would have liked to see more focus on the role of ultra-low central bank interest rates in creating the crisis, as well as government intervention in the housing market and through deposit insurance, but to be fair, this was mentioned, several times. There was little in the show with which someone like Kevin Dowd, recently referred to here, would dispute, although I imagine Kevin might want to make more about the vexed issue of ownership of banks and limited liability. And about three-quarters of the way into the show was Toby Baxendale, founder of the Cobden Centre, the organisation founded last year to flag up the problems caused by central banking fiat money, and which sets out alternative ideas, such as the possibility of giving depositors in no-notice cash accounts the right to demand that their cash is properly looked after, not lent out for months in a risky play. (Yup, it is that pesky fractional reserve banking issue again). Toby was very forceful and his views were treated respectfully by Peston. There was no sneering. In short, this was and is a pretty good programme as far as the MSM goes. I give it about 8 out of 10. Yes, I am not drunk. January 20th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Nolte, at the Big Hollywood blog. I think he has a strong point in his praise of Ricky Gervais’s performance, but I have a slight reservation. Imagine if Gervais had said such insulting things about showbiz people that Mr Nolte holds dear, or causes he supports. I doubt we would get such applause. And I also note that in the Daily Mail newspaper yesterday (I quote from reading the print edition), the writer, Quentin Letts, raves on about Gervais’s rudeness as if it was a barnstorming example of high wit. No it wasn’t. I cannot imagine your average Daily Mail reader enjoying say, an attack by an American comedian on the Royal family, for example. The sad truth is that yes, Hollywood is full of self-regarding jerks who deserve all they get. But that does not make gratuitous rudeness somehow clever, as far as I can see, and I don’t see how we are going to get better movies as a result. And this does all rather cement the idea in American’s minds that many Brits are little more than hooligans. (I’d like to know what Stateside commenters think of how this all comes across.) Talking of good movies, has anyone yet seen The King’s Speech? January 19th, 2011 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
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