The IMF auditors have arrived in Dublin. What should Ireland do now?
|
|||||
|
The Atlantic Monthly has a profile of Freeman Dyson, a scientist and contrarian who, I would hazard to guess, is known and has been read by a few regulars around these parts. It is okay up to a point – there are some nice biographical details to spice things up – but then it comes up with the following:
So I presume that instances such as the spectacular achievements of land reclamation by the Dutch over the centuries – turning tidal waters into productive farmland, for example, don’t count? On it goes:
These are assertions not backed up by actual numbers or clear sources in the article. They are just trotted out as “facts”. In Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, he points out, if my reading of that book is correct, that much of the data on resource depletion and species loss, etc, is wildly exaggerated, and Lomborg was able to point this out by using publicly disclosed data from the very sources so very often cited by the doomsters. The Atlantic’s article does, at least, concede that in the richer nations of the West, such as the UK, rivers have been cleaned up to some degree (as in the Thames), and air pollution of some kinds is far less – the smogs that were familiar in Victorian London are things of the past. What this article is talking about in fact is more about poverty; but as living standards rise and profit-making businesses look to wring out efficiency gains, so the use of fossil fuels to deliver a given level of output goes down. This has been a fairly widely observed fact. In the US, for example, thanks to improved efficiency as firms look to cut costs, less oil/coal is needed to produce a given amount of stuff now than was the case 100 years ago. Here are some figures from the US Energy Agency. I found the tone of the article somewhat patronising, to be honest. Here is this fearesomely bright guy and he’s a Denier! The shame of it. On a related theme, I have just received my copy of Tim Worstall’s Chasing Rainbows. I’ll try and post a review soon. November 19th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Real life spy dramas are interesting but what happens after the Big Denouement?
Hardly surprising…
…so his loved one were left behind in Russia when we was extracted by CIA Operations, eh? Pity that but…
…er, hang on, Fyodor… did you not just say his loved one were not by his side? Sorry but sounds to me like some guy called Hank Smith from Chickasaw Falls, plus his wife Wilma, son Hank Jr and daughter Natasha… er, I mean Britney… are living Happily Ever After and spending that hearty ‘financial settlement’ from Uncle Sam in a suburban strip mall looking forwards to Christmas somewhere with a fuck load better weather than Moscow. November 19th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
November 18th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
An American friend of mine, Andrew Ian Dodge – known to several folks around here – has recently undergone a deeply unpleasant encounter with airport security types in the US, thanks to those lovely folk from the TSA. A few years back, Andrew had surgery for cancer treatment, and bears the scars of that. It seems that he suffered a lot of discomfort when a TSA character tried to pat him down, as they say. What the TSA goons may not have realised, since Andrew is not your regular stiff in a suit as he dresses more like a rocker clad in plenty of leather, is that he has some pretty weighty political connections, and will use them. There will be consequences. I am not an expert on the pros and cons of scanner technologies, or whether they flood the body with dangerous radiation, and so on. What I do know is that this sort of outrage will always happen when certain persons, such as TSA officials, have that moment of supreme power over anyone else, as in a queue for security at a busy airport. What I suspect is different, however, between the USA and the UK is that the former country, as demonstrated by the recent successes of the Tea Party movement, has not yet entirely decided to kowtow to the conventional wisdom. So there is a decent chance, I think, that Congressmen and women might try and smack the TSA down, and hard. We can only hope. Back in the UK, there seems to be scant chance of this occurring. Our sheeplike habits are now too ingrained. There is a good article in the Wall Street Journal on the same issue. And NickM, of Counting Cats, has an absolute blinder of a post on the subject. As he says, whatever excitements may once have attended air travel – at least the nice kind of excitements – are dead. The only people who can enjoy such travel these days are the mega-rich and politicians. As for the rest of us, we get the dubious pleasure of being felt up by the state’s functionaries. November 18th, 2010 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Quite a lot of the time, I get irritated by the Channel 4 news programme, and its anchor, Jon Snow, who is often so blatant in his bias that it no longer angers, merely bemuses. But in fairness to that channel, it still seems willing to take risks with genuinely intelligent and argumentative programmes of the sort that the BBC will often rarely touch these days. Case in point was this programme. It does not pretend to be coolly objective: it is fiercely pro-free market; it hammers away at the fact that Britain is massively in public debt and that this issue primarily stems from decades of the Welfare State and a socialistic polity. Various people, such as Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, appear on it. (Very good he is too, as the old film reviewer Barry Norman used to say). I would imagine that anyone watching this who is a Keynesian or big government type would be spitting blood by the end of the show, particularly as a result of how, for example, it raves about Hong Kong under the benevolent guidance of John Cowperthwaite during the late days of Hong Kong’s colonial history. Another thing struck me: Alisdair Darling, the former finance minister in the recent Labour government, came across as incredibly weak in defending his views; he looked a broken man. The head of the TUC, Brendan Barber, looked like a complacent City banker during the fat years. This show is not an isolated example of how the channel has thrown rocks at the received wisdom. This show was another case; and this more recent tilt at the gods of AGW alarmism was another. Of course, these may only be isolated examples. But I am not so sure. There is, at the moment, a general questioning among some people about certain supposedly “settled views”, such as that we need governments to prevent AGW, or that printing money and expanding the state is a good thing, or that genetically modified crops are the mark of Satan, and so forth. And I can remember the Channel 4 Diverse Reports series of the 1980s, including its show, The New Enlightenment (which I don’t know is still available). I remember watching it for the first time and imagining how the the heads of leftists and tweedy Tories would be exploding. November 17th, 2010 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The story of Waleed Hasayin, a Palestinian West Bank atheist blogger, is indicative of the nightmare that is inevitable in any system where state, society and religion are completely intertwined.
The mere existence of an outspoken atheist is intolerable in such an environment… but the thing about tolerance is it is only appropriate when it is reciprocated and Islam does not tolerate views that deny their God’s existence, so why should any non-Muslim tolerate Islam? Tolerance for intolerance is cowardice, not to mention suicidal. November 16th, 2010 | 92 comments - (Comments are closed)
It didn’t used to be so hard to get the liberal message heard over the screams of reality. Journalism was once a respected profession where liberals ignored reality to portray themselves as unbiased newsmen while actually pushing people towards liberal ideas and away from thuggish reality. Reality still found ways to occasionally get people to listen to it, whether through economic conditions or war, but its message could be contained. Eventually, though, reality weaseled its way into the media, first through talk radio, then Fox News, and now the internet, where pajama-clad imbeciles with brains too simple to understand anything other than reality spout reality on numerous websites on a daily basis. November 15th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
According to Allison Bray writing in the Irish Independent the smoking rate in Ireland has soared despite the Irish smoking ban.
I wonder if “despite” should actually be “because of”, though I am not sure why that should be. The Irish Independent article is actually over a year old, but still of interest, I thought. I found it via a comment from Dave Atherton to this post by Mahendra Jadeja at Big Brother Watch. November 15th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit linked a while back to a very short blog posting entitled Why are anti-gun activists so violent? This being in connection with a news story about a politician accused of abusing his wife. The question seems to be rhetorical, but I can think of at least one possible real answer, which you arrive at by reversing the question. Why are violent people inclined to be anti-gun activists? If you are yourself of an unusually violent disposition, and if you yourself sometimes believe that, had a gun been handy for you, you might have been tempted to kill your wife with it during a domestic disagreement, and you simply add in that one crucial extra assumption so often added, so wrongly, in so many situations, to the effect that most others are just like you, then it would make sense to say that you and your fellow men-on-the-verge-of-a-murderous-tantrum ought to be denied the means of committing murder. Arming the majority, in your eyes, is no answer, because the majority shares your own tendencies. That would only make things far worse. In my opinion, an amazing number of mysteriously vehement, evidence-defying opinions can be better understood once you understand that the expresser of such opinions is unthinkingly assuming that most others are, in some particular respect, just like him. Consider another quite common figure in our world: the repressed homosexual, who assumes that most “heterosexuals” are, like him, homosexuals who manage to suppress their natural homosexual urges. Such a person quite logically believes that homosexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm society (merely because it actually only threatens to overwhelm him) and to bring child-rearing and with it civilisation itself to an abrupt end. Another consequence of the unexamined assumption that everyone is like me is that society becomes quite easy to plan from the top, because we all have the same tastes, preferences, ambitions, beliefs, and ways of going about things, don’t we? Us deciding about how to satisfy other people’s wishes does no great harm, because we effortlessly know what these wishes are. They are just like ours! I first collided heavily with this everyone’s-like-me notion not in political discourse, but in the course of doing, of all things, career counselling. A client who thinks that everyone else wants what he wants is caste down into unnecessary pessimism about his own chances of a happy life. He desperately wants to be a hotel manager. But so does everyone else! Brain surgeons, motor mechanics, professional sportsmen, hairdressers, estate agents, popular novelists – all these unfortunates are merely frustrated hotel managers. So what chance can he possibly have to buck this universal trend? The same inevitable fate awaits him. He is doomed to eke out his living by becoming a movie star (who occasionally gets to play a hotel manager), or some such hideous and soul-destroying compromise. Shining a torch on such everyone’s-like-me assumptions can provoke lasting happiness. Hey, I might get what I want after all! There are far fewer people in the race I’m trying to do well in than I thought! In what way does my sometimes vehement libertarianism result from assumptions that I make about others mostly being like me? What do libertarians generally assume to be true of people generally, which actually isn’t? November 15th, 2010 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Crace of the Guardian writes about someone totally cool.
November 15th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Royal College of Nursing has just won a case against a bureaucratic body in England that many may not have heard of, the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). The victory is a fairly minimal one: it has been ruled that the ISA must confirm to some elements of fair procedure, and may not ban people from their professions automatically without hearing. None of the professional bodies or establishment human rights organisations such as Liberty appears to be challenging the principle of state vetting in employment. They are fussing about the procedure. But to me this is an epitome of the degree of state intrusion into our lives that is now accepted in Britain as completely normal. Here, from the Nursing Times report, are summaries of the cases on the basis of which the most recent ruling was made:
For those who are unfamiliar with English criminal law, “accepted a caution” is a sort of plea bargain in the hands of the police. If one accepts a caution, one is admitting an offence in return for no further action being taken by police (except keeping a record on you, fingerprints and DNA, till you reach the age of 100). One might believe one was avoiding punishment. That would almost certainly be suggested by police (whose figures are improved and paperwork decreased by disposing of offences by caution). Nevertheless the routine admission of a minor offence can be used by distant bureaucrats (whether they give you a hearing or not) to deprive you of your career (and in the case of British nurses wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money in training). And not only that but such a decisions makes it a criminal offence for anyone to employ you in any capacity in medicine, education or social care. Mr O and Mrs W would have been barred not just from professional nursing, but scrubbing the lavatories in a school after hours, or driving a bus for the elderly. (Or even, by a bureaucratic version of magical contagion, a bus for carers for the elderly. see pdf Q.35) And cautioned for what? In the one case leaving a near teenager alone for a short while. In the other for allowing (allowing!?) one’s wife to leave the children for less than a working day. Who knew these were criminal offences? I want children to grow up to be independent. That means them learning to manage themselves as early as they can. Leaving your children on their own for short periods, perhaps overnight or for a weekend, with proper provision and knowledge of who to call in case of problems, is not criminal. It is fine. It is laudable. But we live in a state that demands you not use your judgement, that cannot bear the possibility of error and learning. It fears mistakes enough that there are now rules about how you may bring up your family, requiring all minors to be treated as needy infants. All adults, on the other hand, whether at home or in their working lives, are deemed to be cruel monsters unless restrained by the threat of excommunication from the benevolent database. The state knows what is right. The ISA was originally to use a checklist to assess lifestyles for ‘risk‘, though that has been deferred for the moment. You are either among the elect, or you are damned – and the ISA has a list saying which is which. November 14th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments