Norman Borlaug has died. He may well have saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived.
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“We have an incoherent attitude to freedom in this country. We imagine that we value freedom above almost everything else and yet at the same time we are neurotically averse to risk. Every time something terrible happens, such as the murder of a child, the public clamours for something to be done to ensure that such a thing never happens again. Such unspeakable suffering must not have been in vain; inquiries must be held and systems must be put in place; all such risks to children must be eliminated. Yet the harsh truth is that risk is the heavy price of freedom.” She points out that the development – as elaborated below on this blog by Natalie Solent – will poison civil society and discourage volunteering. I think that is actually part of the idea. I have long since abandoned any notion that such developments are introduced by well-meaning but foolish people. Their intentions are to Sovietise British society, to put all law-abiding adults under a cloud, and rip up the autonomous, private spaces that make up civil society. There is a comment I remember being made by the late Tory MP, Nicholas Budgen: “Old Labour wanted to nationalise things; New Labour will nationalise people.” September 13th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Via Instapundit, here is the modern form of the classic Mercedes car, known as the gullwing. Given its price tag, I’d only be able to afford the badge, alas. Anyway, it is nice to see a manufacturer trying to make something with a bit more of a stylistic personality. I am writing this while keeping the TV on in the background and the programme is the F1 qualifying round for Monza, Italy. Seems rather appropriate. September 12th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Morning Advertiser essentially reproduces what the IPS press office told them (there’s a shorter version of the same flacking in The Publican), and no doubt other drinks trade press will be printing some of it in due course, so here is most of it.
Note that the existing proof-of-age cards, the PASS scheme, that he goes to such trouble to rubbish, have been supported by the Home Office hitherto, and millions have them. (One of the better ones, CitzenCard, has 1.8 million cards in issue.) They are cheap. They are private and secure, the information on them being minimal and the back-up systems being separate from anything else. Suppliers take no more information from you than necessary to establish your age. They will destroy it on request. They will in general not share it with anyone without your permission. And it is a relationship in which you have contractual and statutory rights which can’t be waived to suit the supplier. The IPS line is that drinkers will prefer to be fingerprinted at their own expense, and provide a massive amount of personal information to a government agency, which will then be held on a central register for life (and likely for ever), used to cross reference other information about them, and passed out to a range of government agencies that are entitled to ask for it. The ‘convenience’ of this card will be enhanced by criminal penalties if you lose it and don’t report it, civil ones if you fail to inform the authorities about changes to your residence or other circumstances, a log of every time the card is used and where, and the possibility that the information required, what can be done with it, and the obligations attaching to the scheme can all be altered by regulation. Who-whom? September 12th, 2009 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Parents who ferry children to clubs face criminal record checks, reports the Guardian.
Other interesting quotes from the article:
And
And
I do not know if this will actually come to pass. The proposal is massively unpopular on all sides of the political aisle, judging from the comments to this Guardian article and indeed the comments to this Daily Mail article, and this BBC Have Your Say forum. But a moribund Government can convulse in strange ways; they may not care very much about popularity. September 11th, 2009 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 11th, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
… thirty nine years ago, the Dawson’s Field hijackings were in progress. I have long thought – longer than eight years – that the seeds of a poison tree were sown by an event that happened soon afterwards. To quote the Wikipedia entry linked to above:
September 11th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
If I go through life free and rich, I shall not cry because my neighbour, equally free, is richer. Liberty will ultimately make all men rich; it will not make all men equally rich. Authority may (and may not) make all men equally rich in purse; it certainly will make them equally poor in all that makes life best worth living – Benjamin Tucker September 11th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
And now for something completely different: the amazing new photos via the Hubble telescope. September 10th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Part of me hopes that Michael Moore’s movie makes hundreds of millions of dollars and that he suddenly wakes up from the slumber of logic he has been in for many years while the opportunity to choose to help the downtrodden and poor has passed him by. But I now see what Moore truly is in a different light, and success will only encourage him to lie to more people and mislead them about the opportunities that await them, should they only dream. After all, he’s a rich and powerful capitalist. The same thing he’s teaching his audience to hate. Irony, in a word.” Michael Wilson, who has made a film about the rotund limousine socialist. If he ever imagines Mr Moore, a truly revolting character, is likely to have an epiphany when his bank account gets ever bigger, he’s in for a long wait. Of course, such things do occasionally happen: to wit, the case of playwright and film-maker David Mamet. September 10th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Regular commenter here, IanB – who now gigs over at CountingCats – bashes those doctors, who, claiming to speak for all doctors, want to ban alcohol advertising. Authortarian creeps, the lot of them. If one thinks about it, the number one addiction in the world that needs to be curbed is the habit of trying to tell grownups how to lead their lives morning, noon and night. Inevitably, they do this in the name of protecting children, so it is not censorship, you see. How conveeeenient. Look, I like children and feel parental control and guidance is fine, but can we just remind ourselves that as kids, we managed to grow up into relatively sane creatures without being mollycoddled and protected by state censorship from adverts for beer, gin and plonk? Considering the risks that send our so-called medical “establishment” off the edge, it is a wonder we made it to adulthood at all. September 9th, 2009 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day, I criticised a short programme slot about how the Chicago school of economics – to use that rather loose term – might have to carry some responsibility for the credit crisis. The programme was put together by the Channel 4 news programme. Anyway, someone at the show noticed my comments, and the journalist who put the programme together, Faisal Islam, was kind enough to comment at some length in an email to our editors. Here goes: “Hello Johnathan,”
Here is Faisal’s link. Good for Channel 4 for its reponse to what was a fairly grumpy posting by me. I guess I should have mentioned its Jim Rogers interview. I actually did link to it a while ago on this site. Jim Rogers is great value. Anyway, I think my original point still stands, although in the light of the reaction, I will be a bit easier on Mr Islam from now on. It is gratifying that we got a response, and that Mr Islam even understood the significance of why we are writing about this topic and get annoyed if schools of economic thought are presented in a seemingly unfair way. If parts of the MSM pick up on the idea that the credit crisis cannot be blamed on “greedy bankers” and derivatives – although these instruments can be aggravating factors – but has origins in erroneous ideas of printing money, “too big to fail” bailouts and the rest, then we might be making progress. By continuing to slog away at it, we can influence ideas that are held in the media/academy and even public affairs more broadly. And influencing a guy who presents economic and business news for a major UK news channel is a pretty big deal. September 9th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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