|
|||||
|
Look, I don’t blame Michael Phelps for apologizing. He has a living to earn, so he did what he had to do. In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health – and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are. – Andrew Stuttaford, referring to this. February 4th, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I just watched this BBC Horizon programme, about cannabis. Many who favour the legalisation of cannabis base their case on the claim that cannabis is less harmful than is widely assumed. It is less bad than you think, they say, in fact very good. For me, the case for legalisation does not depend on any claim about riskiness or lack of it, but rather on the idea that individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves about the risks they take, and about how pleasurable the pleasures are that they take these risks to enjoy. Not myself having any plans to take cannabis, I have tended to remain rather ignorant of the details of the riskiness argument, because I just do not think that this is what matters, any more than I favour denationalised washing machine businesses (which I do), because of and following long years spent studying the internal workings of washing machines. But being a libertarian, I inevitably come across screeds about cannabis, of which this splendid rant (linked to from here yesterday by Johnathan Pearce) is a fine example. Spurred on by this rant, I watch the BBC show. I dozzed off during some of it, but still learned quite a lot. → Continue reading: Late night thoughts about cannabis February 3rd, 2009 | 52 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UK’s National Gallery – a state-backed institution – and galleries in Scotland have secured £50 million to pay to keep a Titian painting “for the nation”, using state – taxpayer’s money – for this purpose. A Scottish Labour MP has criticised the use of taxpayers’ funds on this painting, arguing that such money would be better spent on supporting arts eduction for school children instead. The story is here. Naturally, the idea that a work of art that has been loaned by its owner is private property and should not be thought of as a something that belongs to “the nation” is not addressed in the article I link to, since that is outside the intellectual frame of reference either of the arts bureaucrats who spend this public money, or indeed the Labour MP who criticises them. Leave aside the hopefully temporary problems posed by the credit crunch. For the past decade or so, there has been a huge amount of money swirling around among the rich and even not-so-rich to be spent on the arts. There is no need, in my view, for a penny of taxpayer’s money to be spent on the arts. Leave aside whether you love or loathe the things that public funds are used to support: the point is that these things should not be receiving tax-raised funds at all. Let the rich of today patronise what budding Titians, Raphaels or Turners that might be out there. February 3rd, 2009 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
… the state incurs those well-known debts for politics, wars, and other higher causes and “progress,” thus mortgaging future production with the claim that it was in part providing for it. The assumption is that the future will honor this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief. – Jacob Burckhardt, from lectures on the history of the the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries given at the University of Basel between 1865 and 1885, later included in Judgments on History and Historians. February 3rd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 3rd, 2009 | Comments are closed
…and so they face the final curtain:
Their friends will say it clear, they’ll state their case of which they’re certain:
But there were times, I’m sure you knew, when they’d print off something not quite true. But through it all, when there was doubt, they’d make it up and churn it out. The record shows, the public chose….
….to do it our way. February 3rd, 2009 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 2nd, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
There may be an interruption to the blog-flow/disturbance in the force as our switch over to a new CMS is imminent… hopefully. February 2nd, 2009 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
It is on days like these that I am glad that I work for a web-based business and that I work from home for part of the day anyway. Judging by how severe weather has hit the UK overnight, rendering the UK public transport network immobile, that is just as well. The London Underground – with the exception of the Victoria line – is down. Buses and other transport like trains are severely affected. I am hearing that this is the heaviest snowfall since 1991. We have already had some severe cold in early January. Whether this is part of a trend I have no idea. But some of us are rediscovering how to cope with severely cold weather in the UK. I have a father who is recovering from a major operation in hospital and may not be able to go home because of the weather. Take care out there. February 2nd, 2009 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
We saved the world. I say we party! – Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Is it just me, or is the thought of Gordon Brown attempting to party even more frightening than the thought of Gordon Brown trying to ‘save the world’. February 1st, 2009 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I occasionally will read a big novel, such as a “classic”, because I think that it is a mark of a reasonably intelligent person to be on nodding terms with some of the high points of our literature, although I often wimp out and pick up an old R. A. Heinlein or the latest John Varley science fiction novel instead. But I certainly do accept that there is nothing more tedious than plodding through acres of text as if it were somehow proof of moral virtue or literary stamina. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a bit like climbing the North face of the Eiger – more of an effort than I think it worthwhile making right now. And James Delingpole thinks the same. His article on the late John Updike is caustic, if not disrespectful. January 31st, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Via Will Wilkinson’s blog, a term I think is ideal for the crazed Keynesian policies now being applied: disaster dirigisme. January 31st, 2009 | 10 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