A headline in the Australian newspaper struck my eye just now: ‘Teachers warm to merit pay‘. A deeper reading of the story reveals a few caveats, but the fact that Australian education unions are willing to concede anything at all to the principle still struck me as the most surprising thing to me. I thought we’d see peace in the Middle East, cold fusion and spending cuts long before seeing education unions in Australia concede the principle of merit pay.
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Statistics of the sort unearthed by Matthew Elliott here are of the kind that any ambitious Tory MP, anxious to hammer the government, should memorise by heart. January 16th, 2008 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
 One of the briefing notes that I get from a stockbroking company has this to say:
The circular refers to this story. Now, ideological purists for classical liberalism might well argue that charitable tax breaks are a problem, since they immediately beg the question of who gets to decide who is entitled to the tax break and why. Far better, of course, to get rid of the taxes in the first place and let people spend as they wish; part of the case for low, flat taxes of course is that it will remove the need for a vast stage-army of accountants, lawyers, “tax planners” and the like who earn a high living on what is essentially paper-shuffling rather than genuine wealth creation. But, but… we live in the world we have, not Galt’s Gulch. Hence the current attack on tax breaks and government interference in private schools should be seen for what it is; an attempt to further undermine any semblance of independent education in the UK. Of course, Samizdata regulars will know that for real radicalism about education, we need to embrace the notion of removing compulsory schooling across the board, but I’ll discuss that again in the future, no doubt. January 16th, 2008 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
If only I was a American voter – what wonderful things I would be get for voting for the correct person. Former Governor Romney has been busy for weeks telling everyone that he will restore “every job” lost in the Michigan Auto industry if they vote him – and not by anything difficult like taking away the government granted power of the United Auto Workers union. No, all that is needed is more taxpayers money for scientific research and ‘Mitt’ Romney’s own management skills if he becomes President. After all there is no basic difference between a business enterprise and the government, so if one can run a business one can “run the country”, right? Senator Hillary Clinton has added another 150 billion Dollars of government spending on top of the all the other hundreds of billions of Dollars the Senator has already promised – again if only people will vote for her. And it is only January. What will the candidates be promising by November – eternal life? January 16th, 2008 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Kill six millions Jews in Germany, your name becomes a synonym with evil. Kill between 44 and 72 million Chinese, you get a café named after you. It’s a funny old world, eh? – commenter Jill Murphy January 16th, 2008 | 91 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a truly bizarre story on Reuters saying that the French car manufacturer Citroën has apologised for running an advertisement featuring a scowling Chairman Mao.
Astounding. The man who was probably the most prolific mass murderer in history, who murdered between 44.5 & 72 million mostly Chinese people and brought tyranny to almost one fifth of the world’s population, is regarded by some people in 2008 as “the symbol of China”? That is truly surreal. Well, I suppose he is in the same sense that Jack the Ripper is the ‘symbol’ of Whitechapel. Yet somehow I cannot see the residents of Whitechapel taking umbrage at an advertisement by Citroen featuring Jack the Ripper being portrayed with a less than congenial expression. Just how many people does a tyrant have to order killed before he becomes absolute anathema in China? How many lives does he have to ruin to stop being ‘the symbol of China’? What kind of moral derangement is required to take insult in this manner? Well people in China should indeed be insulted, but by the fact Citroën used the image of that vile psychopath to portray anything other than horror, death and misery. How dare someone trivialise suffering on such a colossal scale? How would people react if they had used Hitler instead? People would certainly protest but somehow I do not think all too many Germans would be saying “The Fuhrer is the symbol of Germany”. A Chinese person I know described the Mao era as ‘The Long Nightmare’. It seems some people in China do not want to wake up. January 15th, 2008 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Germany recently, there was a pleasing moment of defiance in the face of the determination of the banning classes to ban smoking. Boss fires staff for not smoking is what the headline says, and this is – surprise surprise – inaccurate, assuming that the report under the headline is accurate. The boss fired the non-smokers because they were making a damn nuisance of themselves by demanding that the smokers stop smoking, and he has now announced that he will not hire any more non-smokers, in case they behave similarly. Nobody got fired merely for not smoking. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. But this is only a very small and temporary victory for the right of employers to hire and fire at will, restrained only by whatever contracts may have been made that require otherwise.
It is the little word “still” that tells the true story here. And big offices have already been sorted out. This tiresome little anomaly will soon be corrected, and Germany will proceed methodically towards making smoking illegal everywhere. Adolf Hitler (not even he was able to give legal force to his detestation of smoking) is smirking in his grave, doing no turning whatsoever. January 15th, 2008 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Christopher Hitchens recently mentioned a small, if telling example, of how Hillary Clinton fibbed about how she got her first name. It is a small detail, not the sort of thing to necessarily cause my blood pressure to rise dangerously, but it is revealing about what sort of character she is. Rather like Tony Blair claiming to have seen Newcastle FC legend Jackie Milburn, when that would have been an impossible feat, given Blair’s age when he made the claim. These little details, they get noticed. January 15th, 2008 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
It was a bit of a shock to read, in my old local newspaper, that F-15 fighter/bomber aircraft used by the US Airforce are suffering quite so much from wear and tear. They are currently based at RAF Lakenheath, west Suffolk. At one stage, East Anglia, the flat bit of the UK, was rather like a gigantic airfield with more than 100 airfields for British and American fighters, bombers, recon aircraft and transportation. Even after WW2, when the Liberators, Flying Fortresses, Mustangs and Thunderbolts no longer buzzed around, the area played host to the jets of the Cold War era. It was a common experience on my parent’s farm to be walking around and suddenly, at about 100ft above the ground, a pair of Jaguar jets or an American A-10 “tankbuster” would come over (the latter was eerily quiet, and had an enormous 30mm cannon mounted in the nose). Now it is almost all gone. In a silly sort of way I rather miss the din of jet aircraft. But then, we won the Cold War. It is never a mistake to remind ourselves of that fact. January 15th, 2008 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Check out this Bloomberg headline. No doubt one of the editors thought this was nicely “ironic”, etc, and I get their point. Even so, I fail to see why a Vegas stripper or waiter is not as able to judge the wisdom of where to put nuclear waste as say, Hillary Clinton. January 15th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
So you have been smited, eh? Yes, yes, we know… the correct term is ‘smote’ or ‘smitten’, not smited, but we say ‘smited’ because it makes us laugh and we are easily amused. Chances are the reason you are here is when you posted a comment to Samizdata, you saw this appear… Standby for Smite Control  Oyez, oyez: Your comment has been held for approval by Samizdata’s editorial pantheon and if you are not some odious spammer, loony toon conspiracy theorist, raving racist buffoon or worthless troll, chances are your remarks will appear in due course. Puzzled? Confused? Look here and all will be explained So… What does this mean? It means your comment has been chosen for moderation by the smitebot. Now smitebot is not a person, he is just a bot. A piece of code. So please do not take it personally that smitebot has smited you because smitebot has no idea who you are. All it does, in its simple minded but quite effective way, is look at all the comments and try to figure out if they are spam or something else we do not want. And being a bot of little brain, sometimes it makes mistakes.
The answer is yes. The alternative is wading through three viagra adverts, mobile phone adverts, Russian kiddie porn site links & xxxBigTits site links, for every legitimate comment.. and we really hate spammers. The fact is we have to put up with a number of false positives or comments will not be viable. That is the down side of this blog being so popular, alas… Samizdata is a spam magnet in ways sites with lower readership and technorati rankings do not have to worry about. It sucks but there you have it. 97% of the spam gets intercepted by the smitebot and you never even see it, but it is there, trust us on that. Of the 3% that gets through, we delete it manually as quickly as possible and you probably never see it. False positives run maybe 1-5% per day of posted comments (some days are worse than others). It is annoying as hell to get smited, we know, but having smitebot around is unavoidable. So now you know. And so to cheer you up after the indignity of getting ‘smited’, we have posted some stupid cat pictures for your edification (we did tell you we are easily amused)… January 15th, 2008 | Comments are closed
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