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I’m pretty sure that a lot of people’s (by which I mean Government’s) assumptions about a ‘digital divide’ are a myth. I think they have visions of a bunch of poor, obese black kids sitting in a council house eating turkey twizzlers, cleaning their guns, just wishing for the day they could access this internet thing that people are talking about. – a friend who works in local government in UK, responding to Social networks may subvert ‘digital divide’. June 25th, 2008 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I came across this from the online version of the German magazine, Der Spiegel (hat tip, Tim Worstall):
“All good things” – oh really? The euro has not been a great success. Sure, it is a strong currency relative to the dollar at the moment, largely because of the Fed’s policy of printing money like it had forgotten all that sage advice from a certain late Professor M. Friedman, but the one-size-fits-all interest rate of the euro zone has proven a burden on the likes of enfeebled Italy, has boosted the Irish economy to boiling point, and now of course Ireland is in trouble, suffering a sharply contracting property and stock market. I am not sure how that impresses the Spiegel editors. For them, the whole project is going splendidly. As for the “binding” climate policy, I guess it does all rather depend on whether one accepts the thesis that Man-Made global warming is either happening; is happening at the speed some people claim, or justifies imposing heavy costs on industrial nations to correct it in ways that might affect other, more urgent human needs. But this paragraph is the beaut, the one to savour:
Jeez. June 25th, 2008 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
What the hell is going on in Japan? June 25th, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
June 24th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
The State of Pennsylvania has made a very old CMU Fine Arts Department tradition untenable. The 89 year old quadriennial Beaux Arts Ball is so well known in the arts community that its passing rated a New York Times story. They call it “the original toga party”. That is putting it mildly. Although the article presents a number of reasons for the passing, the biggest one is Statist intervention. They grey minded, grey suited, grey souled clones killed it:
I might add I was costumed as sort of ‘Retief’ type interstellar adventurer at the 1985 affair, complete with cape, tights, a chestpiece glittering with LED’s and a mean looking laser side arm in my quite real holster. And yes, it was … quite a party. June 24th, 2008 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’ve spent more than a decade working as a nightclub doorman. I’ve been involved in hundreds of violent incidents, including many away from the club. I can state unequivocally that in situations where some of these punks decide they’re going to pick on myself, or someone with me, with the intention of stealing our property, terrorising us or just for shits and giggles, on the occasions I’ve been armed, the situation has suddenly resolved itself when I produce a weapon. A doorman, quoted at the blog of Rob Fisher, occasional commenter over these parts. June 24th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don’t have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven’t learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn’t, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that’s what you think while you watch. When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott. Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what’s happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful – if often hideously slow-scoring – opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world’s most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators. I don’t usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn’t widely selling it wouldn’t have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn’t hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott’s trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong. → Continue reading: Geoff Boycott and the vices and virtues of selfishness June 23rd, 2008 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a great new book to cheer libertarians as we draw close to the sixtieth anniversary of the National Health Service. Written by the director of Nurses for Reform, Dr. Helen Evans, and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, ‘Sixty Years On: Who Cares for the NHS?’ not only shows that the country’s top 100 health opinion formers no longer actually believe in nationalised healthcare but, gloriously, this book fundamentally challenges the medical monopoly inherent in all health systems around the world. Citing a huge array of free marketeers the work is awash with glorious quotes like this one from David Friedman:
Quoting our own Brian Micklethwait we again read:
Powerfully, he concludes:
Evans’s book is a must read for libertarians. It is also a tonic for the period of NHS propaganda we will no doubt endure over the next couple of weeks. June 23rd, 2008 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have eased up a bit on “serious” blogging the last few days – I almost felt I had reached the point of mid-summer blog burnout – and have been too busy with other stuff, not least work. But I cannot resist linking to these fine folk who have set up a blog dedicated to the ferociously competitive world of barbecue food. God, I feel hungry already. No doubt those citizens of Jefferson’s Republic are gearing up for 4th of July. In a moment of transatlantic solidarity, may I ask commenters what sort of BBQ’s they will be doing on that day to give me some ideas? I’ll be back to bashing Gordon Brown and the rest of them later, I promise. June 23rd, 2008 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
I rather like this observation from
He’s completely right. The Most Reverend, the Most Fluffy, Archbishop Rowan Williams is, in his determined niceness, on precisely as solid ground as is his scarey African co-churchman whom I just heard pronounce on Radio 4 that The Bible says the punishment for homosexuals is death and we are not entitled to disagree with God’s word. The ground is precisely as solid because it really amounts to ‘Because I say so. This is what scripture means because this is what I wish it did mean. It accords with the sort of society I want to live in, and therefore it is correct.’ At the risk of waking the throbbing-veined antimussulmen among the commentariat, the same is true of all proponents – and almost all interpreters – of a religious world-view. Those who say cosily with Tony Blair that Islamist terrorists are engaged in a “dreadful perversion of the true faith of Islam” are on precisely as strong a ground as both the followers of ibn Qutb and their countersupporters in western fearfandom, who say that that is what Islam ‘really’ is. Tapdancing in a vacuum. The assertion of ‘truth’ is meaningless without the possibility of falsehood. The oxymoron ‘true faith’ invariably means the model of a religion, his own or someone else’s, that the speaker prefers, the one that gives him the most explicable, grippable, world. They all say, without any real self-doubt, and without the glorious dramatic irony of Alf Garnett: “It stands to reason.” No it doesn’t. It is the opposite of reason. All of it. June 23rd, 2008 | 63 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some of our long term readers may have noticed I have not posted a great deal on Iraq over the past several years. This is not due to any change in my support for the war or for the fine soldiers who have fought through dark times and bright. The real reason is the type of war being engaged in the last several years is one in which I have insufficient expertise to really comment on. Weapon systems and correlations of forces and international intrigue I deal with well… but cointerinsurgency strategy and tactics is not one of my strong suits. As an example, I was not for the surge when it was first proposed because I felt a too heavy foot print would cause us more trouble than not. I was decidedly wrong, but at the time no one seemed to be making a clear and cogent case for the other way. Now some one has. I recently finished reading Michael Yon’s “Moment of Truth In Iraq” and found it a marvelous learning experience. While some of this material may have been published on his web site at the time it was happening, the book puts the events and tactics in perspective. He shows how at one point we really were making a muck of things by applying the wrong tactics. There were things happening in the middle phase of this war that I found disquieting but was unable to place into a broader context. Michael Yon has done so. Michael shows how General Petreaus consistently succeeded where ever he was placed in Iraq because he did indeed know how to go about things. Where I would have thought putting a few soldiers here and there right in the middle of the population would make them think more of us as invaders, Yon shows how it did the exact opposite. It created trust and faith that we had their backs. You could really only know this by being there. He shows how misunderstanding the tribal power structures was a mistake of the first order and that learning that lesson and working with the grain of the culture instead of against it has led to success. I highly recommend this book. June 22nd, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The fundamental story about consumer taste, in modern times, is not one of dumbing down or of producers seeking to satisfy a homogeneous least common denominator at the expense of quality. Rather, the basic trend is of increasing variety and diversity, at all levels of quality, high and low.” – Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: how globalisation is changing the world’s cultures, page 127. June 21st, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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