We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Okay – it’s like this. There’s a tribe living by a river, and in the river there are crocodiles. The tribe has one particular piece of wisdom passed down through the generations. It goes like this: if you happen to meet a crocodile, don’t stick your head in its mouth. Every now and then – and who knows the reason – people ignore this advice. Which is sad. Because they die. But very stupid because they were warned. They had a choice. The moral of this story is – you can’t afford to be stupid. There are crocodiles.
– The words of Steven Moffat, as spoken by Julia Sawalha, in the final episode of Press Gang. Few things recently have pleased me as much as the announcement that Moffatt will be the new showrunner of Dr Who. The rumour today is that Neil Gaiman will be writing for the show, too, so there is lots to look forward to.
Is the Guardian becoming increasingly illiberal? It may have a section of its website called “Comment is Free”, yet it is now attacking free speech when it disagrees with the opinions expressed.
Once a supporter of liberal values, the Guardian was the sort of paper that would have quoted Voltaire’s “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” But just as it has dropped support for liberal ideas on economics (it was once a free trade paper), it now appears to be dropping liberal ideas about freedom of expression.
In that vein, it is getting itself worked up because one of its rivals, the Telegraph, runs a blogging platform, like Blogger or Typepad, where members of the public can start their own blogs. That blogging platform has been one of the reasons why the Telegraph, according to moaning articles in the Guardian, has recently overtaken the Guardian in online readers.
Among the 20,000 people who have signed up for a ‘MyTelegraph’ blog, one is a member of the anti-immigration British National Party. The Guardian thinks the Telegraph should ban him, but the Telegraph says that it believes in free speech – even when the views are wrong – and rightly so.
The Guardian’s lack of faith in free speech is not just restricted to BNP-type comments. It whines that: “My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters, including a minority of active members of the far right, anti-abortionists, europhobes and members of an anti-feminist ‘men’s movement’.”
Anti-abortionists! Europhobes! Opponents of excessive feminism! I wonder if the Guardian would prefer a return to the old days before the decentralisation of publishing in which only the elite, who knew best, were allowed a voice.
“At 7.30 on the morning of Thursday, August 12, Bond awoke in his comfortable flat in the plane-tree’d square off the King’s Road and was disgusted to find that he was thoroughly bored with the prospect of the day ahead. Just as, in at least one religion, accidie is the first of the cardinal sins, so boredom, and particularly the incredible circumstance of waking up bored, was the only vice Bond utterly condemned.”
From Russia With Love.
It is a measure of the achievement of what Ian Fleming produced that, for all the criticisms hurled at his 007 adventures for their supposed snobbery, sexism and violence, that no-one ever accused his output of being boring and that he ended up producing the most famous fictional British character of all time, apart possibly from Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Born on this day in 1908, Fleming died at the relatively young age of 56 in 1964, just when the movies made out of his books were going into overdrive. Goodness knows what he’d make of the hoo-ha marking his centenary.
Sebastian Faulk’s new book, which he has tried to write in the Fleming style, is in the mail. I’ll put up a short review when I get it. With any luck, the book will be fodder for another great film with Daniel Craig.
Update: here is an article in the New York Times about Fleming and the new book. It is pretty harsh about Fleming, calling him a nasty piece work, including the sin of anti-semitism. Really? I cannot remember anything in the books that refers to Jews in a clearly disparaging way. Considering his depiction of the Nazis in Moonraker, I’d say that Fleming was pretty sound, in fact. As far as I know from reading his books or the excellent biography of him by Andrew Lycett, this was not an issue that came up. Was he a racist? Well, his portrayal of blacks in Live and Let Die is a bit condescending. He writes about people of different races, such as Koreans and Turks, in ways that sometimes paint too broad a brush, but I do not get the sense that he damned whole swathes of humanity because they had different skin colour. The NYT reviewer also refers to Fleming as a “failed” journalist. That is flat wrong. He worked for several years at Reuters and covered the Moscow show trials of the early 1930s with considerable aplomb; after the war, he worked as a senior executive at Kemsley Newspapers, responsible for running foreign news and training up staff as well as checking copy; he also had a column at the Sunday Times. Yes, he was not, by his own frank admission, one of the “greats”, but to say he was a failure is grossly unfair. At least – unlike the NYT – he did not make up news stories and kept his fictional skills for his novels.
I never thought I would find myself agreeing with anything written by Johann Hari, but in today’s Evening Standard he has a piece deploring the rehabilitation of Mary Whitehouse. I agree that she was a dangerous evil old woman, not remotely funny, not a gentle eccentric.
However, there is in the piece something that does not ring at all true, viz –
In an old episode of her favourite show, Dixon of Dock Green, you can see the dark side of the world she fought to preserve. When Constable Dixon stumbles across a woman being beaten black and blue, he reassuringly tells the camera it’s nothing to do with the police.
If that is true, it is appalling. Not actually a mark against Whitehouse (which illustrates why Hari is untrustworthy – Whitehouse cannot be held responsible for every item of content in a programme she allegedly liked), but appalling nonetheless. Dixon of Dock Green was a top-rated show, and one criticised in the 60s and 70s for its rosy-tinted view of East End police-work. So if a sentimental prime-time show really did show domestic violence as accepted by the police (whether it was in reality or not at the time), then the social attitudes endorsed by the BBC in the early 60s were even more alien than I thought… Except, as someone who takes and interest in cultural change, I would have heard about it before now. And the clip would be familiar from dozens of documentaries, would it not?
Is my education very lacking, or is Hari just making this up? If not, where has he got it from? Who else makes the claim? Is there an incident in Dixon of Dock Green or some other contemporary drama that has been so interpreted as to have directly or indirectly given rise to the tale?
Greedy, greedy, lying, incompetent, untrustworthy, crooked bastards.
– From the first comment in response to Guido Fawkes‘s latest revelations about how much MPs are now deciding to pay themselves
My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, “The Right Stuff”, based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.
Via the Andy Ross blog, here’s a review of a new book on von Braun.
Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.
I guess the rise in commodity prices – as I alluded to in my post below on farming – has galvanised a fair bit of commentary on the business of producing, shipping and selling food. Perhaps it is a welcome sign that in an affluent age such as ours, when so many people are utterly divorced from this most basic human activity, we have been reminded of it. Anyway, it tells one a lot about the state of the culture that this is considered a good headline in the Daily Telegraph: “Big supermarkets are not evil.”
Of course they are not evil. But at a time when any business, even if it has to operate in a ferociously competitive one like retail, is regarded as morally dubious if it is simply big, it is at least good that some in the MSM are, however belatedly, sticking up for such enterprises. About the only thing I can think of that counts as a legitimate criticism of supermarket chains is when their bosses exploit, or actively seek, to get governments to pass eminent domain, or compulsory purchase, laws to make it easier for them to build their sites. That is a just cause for free marketeers to complain about. Otherwise, though, bleating about supermarkets is largely nonsense. If they do “force” smaller shops out of business, the truth is more often that regulations, high taxes and extortionate rents are hurting small shops. It may well be that low-price supermarkets, which exploit economies of scale, are biting into the margins of some mid-tier shops that neither have the benefits of bigness nor the niche attractions of a high-margin, specialist retail outlet. But I suspect that a lot of the dislike of this trend is more aesthetic than economic. Oh the vulgarity!
One issue that tends to be overlooked is that in our prosperous age, we have lost some of that early awe, even excitement, that people used to get when they had walked into a massive shop for the first time. Back in the early 1950s, when there was still some rationing in Britain, my father remembers how impressed he was by walking into a supermarket in Canada. You could, he noted, buy anything from a suit, a tractor, to a tin of salmon. He thought that was fantastic.
Could we bring back a Dinosaur? It is a fascinating idea. After watching a documentary on the ‘Dinosaur Mummy’ found in the badlands of the Dakotas I was forced to ponder the idea once again, Since last night I saw adverts for a Discovery documentary on this very topic that will be on next week I decided I should record my ideas on the subject post haste.
Pretty much everyone has seen the movie ‘Jurassic Park’ where scientists find strands of dino DNA inside assorted biting dino-pests preserved in ancient amber. The problem with this scenario is no such viable DNA has ever been found. It is highly unlikely any has survived intact over the many millions of years seperating us from the end of the Cretaceous when dino-kind had a very bad day.
Given the unlikelihood of finding a T Rex blueprint, one might think the idea of bringing them or any of their relatives back is an idea well and truly dead. “Time to consign the idea to the pages of fantasy stories!”, one might say… but not so fast!
There are other approaches to the problem. Researchers are churning out genomes of many, many species per year even now, including that of the Mammoth and the Neaderthal. The rate at which this happens is expected to reach a species per day per machine in less than a decade. That opens up a whole new possibility: reverse engineering.
Let us say we have the genomes of most living dinosaurs sequenced and sitting in databases on our computers of the 2030’s. “Living dinosaurs? Where?”, you say.
Open your window. Listen to those little dinos chirping, cheeping, singing and in general making a racket as they fly about. They are direct descendants of the dinosaur Raptor clade. Not a side shoot: a direct, bona-fide descendant.
So for a start let us run our AI programs and use our species genome data base to work our way backwards through bird ancestors. The results will not be a full dinosaur genome but we will be getting closer. We might even find some 100,000 year old bits of DNA from dead species in the Russian tundra with which we can cross check our calculations.
We can work the other direction to some extent as well, if we work backwards in the mammalian, crocodilian and reptilian trees until we get to the common ancestor between each of them and the dinosaur clan. It will be rough and full of holes, but it adds constraints and that is what we need.
It is still not enough though. The next step requires we that we understand how DNA and DNA regulation actually builds a creature. If we can infer the DNA required for a feature we can tweak our model genome to fit. Now the coup de grace: if you have seen a documentary called ‘Dino Lab’ you will know where I am going. We now have the ability to roughly model the entire animal and to use AI learning programs to understand how it moved and what its metabolism was like. We have fossilized stomach contents. We have examples of skin and organs fossilized in the ‘Dino Mummy’. With a few more orders of magnitude of computing power, we might run Monte Carlo simulations of entire sections of ancient ecosystems until we find the best match to fossil evidence.
With those constraints on reality we will, before the end of this century, be able to infer with reasonable confidence the genome of a dinosaur and, if we wish to do so, bring it back. It will not be a perfect reproduction but it will certainly be good enough to make a day at the zoo a rather exciting affair!
This unintentionally hilarious news story at The Observer reveals a great deal about the mindset of the urban, ecologically aware types that write for that newspaper:
Soaring food prices are threatening to inflict widespread ecological damage on the countryside, as farmers abandon environmentally friendly schemes that have improved much of the landscape.
It is a matter of debate whether these schemes have improved or harmed the landscape: such an observation has as much to do with a certain aesthetic taste as anything else. For years, policymakers have thrown vast gobs of taxpayers’ money to discourage farmers, such as in my native Suffolk, from growing crops like wheat, barley, soybeans, beans and so on. Now that the price of wheat has skyrocketed, encouraged by such developments as biofuels and rapid growth in emerging market economies, the economics of “set aside”, as the daft policy is known, looks completely indefensible. So farmers are acting as entrepreneurs should in the face of rising prices for their produce: they are growing more crops. If that means that land that had been set aside for cute little meadows is now being ploughed up and sown with wheat, well, that is just too bad. Do the Observer journalists argue that there should not be some change in land usage at a time of rapidly rising food prices? There is no point in bashing the current government for such rising prices – I don’t think even the most fanatical Gordon Brown hater thinks he is to blame for this – if farmers are not allowed to exploit market forces in the way they should have been allowed to do all the way along.
For what it is worth, the Suffolk farmer’s son in me rather objects to the countryside being regarded by the Guardianista classes – many of whom have no idea about husbandry – as a glorified park for them to ramble around in. It is, as this article reminds us, primarily a place of work, where food is produced. It is sometimes useful to be reminded that the landscape has been moulded by the hand of Man. I personally rather like to see large, golden fields of wheat. But then I’m kind of strange in that way.
If you are interested in watching the Phoenix Mars Lander land, click here.
Phoenix is down! Congrats to the Phoenix team!
Here is a long and good article about the destruction of the economy of Venezuela by Hugo Chavez, the president who recently attempted – unsuccessfuly, thank goodness – to get himself voted president for life. I know I am preaching to the coverted around here by pointing out the sheer folly of what this thug is attempting, but sometimes you have to keep pointing to such examples lest people in other parts of the world forget just what a disaster state central planning is.
It never fails to strike me how such a resource-rich nation like Venezuela can be ruined by a political operator like Chavez, and contrast that with how a small colony, with hardly any resources at all apart from sheer entrepreneurial spirit, like Hong Kong, can rise to be one of the richest places on the planet.
For a great guide to some of the key drivers of wealth in countries down the ages, this classic by David Landes is greatly recommended.
Meaning is a bit like happiness, the more you go looking for it the less you find
– The incomparable Lucy Kellaway
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
Recent Comments