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One of my great regrets is that I never saw a Lightning take off. – By regular Samizdata commenter Nick M. I hate to rub it in, Nick, but I did, as a young kid at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, on a day out with my old man (RAF navigator in the 1950s). A totally awesome sight and noise: my ears are still probably ringing with the impact. Here’s a picture of one of these bad-ass beauties. December 4th, 2007 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
 With all the combination of self-inflicted disasters hitting the British government – lost data, Northern Rock, dodgy donations, ranks of senior military officers stating the bleedin’ obvious about lack of funding – it has been an extraordinary time for the Conservatives. Dead in the water, so we were told by the commentariat, back in September, David Cameron suddenly discovered the wonders of tax cuts – inheritance taxes, to be exact – and the momentum of politics suddenly shifted. There is still a huge way to go as the next general election is some way off, however, and in this environment, the spotlight will shine a lot more brightly on Cameron now that his prospects of getting into 10 Downing Street have increased. This is as it should be. And one or two people have already concluded that Cameron is a bit of thug under that Etonian gloss. I have noticed the same thing. Thuggery has its limited uses, of course; if it means Cameron has the killer instinct in standing up to the government, excellent. If it brings closer the time when the current government, with its dotty plans for ID cards, etc, get removed, that is good. But there is a nagging worry that I have; with politicians who lack a clear set of principles to distinguish them from their opponents, it creates a vacuum. I think that Cameron, in general, is not very different from the man he shouts at across the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons, apart from his rather different social origins, speech inflexions and choice of friends. Into that space that might have once be filled by large political differences enters personal animosity. True, in the 1980s, when politics was in some ways far more ideologically charged than it is now, Margaret Thatcher could be pretty savage to poor old Labour leader Michael Foot (personally a most charming man, apparently) and she treated Neil Kinnock (remember him?) as a joke. But in some respects, as politics crams in to the supposed ‘centre ground’ and ideas matter less, the hunt for power becomes even more vicious. I am not entirely sure this is smart for Cameron to play the schoolyard bully. We Brits are a funny lot. People might, just might, start to feel sorry for Brown (please stay with me on this one). They might think, “Kerist, we all have bad weeks in the office”. I know I do. So that fatal fair-mindedness of the British may assert itself. Which would be a shame, since Brown, wrecker of pensions and much else, deserves to be kicked out. The next election is in two years’ time. To adjust a famous quote from the late Harold Wilson, that is a bloody long time in politics. December 4th, 2007 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
My sparser (even) than usual blogging lately is largely the result of the expanding demands of NO2ID. Thank you to everyone (including several Samizdata contributors) who has added to the avalanche of cheques into our legal fund. The bank clerks in Marylebone High Street are grateful for the work, too. We (NO2ID) are about to make things even more fun by recruiting a new cohort of refuseniks to join those 10,000 immortals who committed themselves in 2005. In the aftermath of the HMRC data-sharing scandal, the British public is ready for the message that the only way to stop the state from debauching your personal information is not to give it a chance. When Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne vowed to defy the ID scheme recently, it quickly became clear that not many people really understood what this meant. We have formulated a nice clear promise that anyone at all can make, and set it free, online and off. It will be an interesting exercise in network effects.  What follows is a piece I wrote for public distribution explaining the point of the whole thing: You might be prepared to go to gaol rather than have an ID card. But you can’t. David Blunkett has been smugly pronouncing that there will be no ID card martyrs because the intent is to have a system of penalties – like monstrous parking fines – hard to contest in court. So further punishments would relate to failure to pay, not ID cards. That silly distinction is currently irrelevant, since powers of direct compulsion have been dropped, for now. It has not stopped Mr Blunkett repeating it, though. Subtler minds have been at work. The Home Office plans to make you to “volunteer”. It hopes almost all the population will “volunteer”, before most people have even noticed what is happening. Well before it rounds-up and force-fingerprints a few pariahs. Official documents will one by one be “designated”, so that you cannot get one without at the same time asking to be placed – for life – on the National Identity Register. The civil servant, Sylvanus Vivian who originated this idea in 1934 – yes, that’s right, nineteen thirty-four – called it “parasitic vitality”. In other words, the scheme is a vampire. It has no life of its own, and thrives only if it feeds. → Continue reading: Just say no December 3rd, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Where do they find these people?:
It is unpalatable because it is f******g stupid, Maddie. And how do you tell the difference, pray, between “hyper-frantic consumerism” and say, the mature, intelligent, oh-so virtuous form of consumer activity that you might favour? No answer to that, of course. We are just supposed to accept the wisdom of rationing by our betters instead of the supposed wild anarchy of the marketplace. Well, it is Monday, start of the week and all that and a dotty Guardian columnist has got me all fired up. It is almost better than going to the gym. Update: I urge readers, if they have the stomach for it, to actually read the CiF comment thread. Quite encouragingly, some people get just how authortarian Bunting and her mindset actually is. It is, at last, starting to dawn on the smarter parts of the left (sometimes I think this is a rather select demographic) that the whole Green agenda is poison to genuine, progressive politics. Once, socialists were supposed to be rather keen on consumption, I thought; okay, they were totally wrong about the process of getting more stuff to consume, but consumption was part of the idea. M. Bunting is, of course, precisely the kind of reactionary-in-drag worrywart that Brendan O’Neill complained about the other day. Update 2: this comment at CiF is worth reproducing in full:
Well said. My only nagging worry is that rationing might be introduced. Never underestimate the sheer fanaticism of the eco-authortarians. December 3rd, 2007 | 70 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday I did a posting here about climate, but I hope I will be forgiven for another one today on the same general subject. This one is because, in connection with yesterday’s posting, a commenter copied and pasted this story from Canada, which can be summarised briefly as: Canada is going to have a very cold winter. I was not surprised by this news, even though many Canadians perhaps are. This is because, ever since doing this posting here a month ago, the notion mentioned at the end of it as hardly more than an afterthought has stuck in my mind. Here is how that posting of a month ago, mostly about giant diggers, ended:
Yes, that Bishop Hill again.
Maybe now we are seeing. Maybe. What impressed me about this prophecy, unlike so many others in the climate change rack … , er, field, is that this one had a time frame attached. It concerned this winter. This winter is going to be cold. Since I am on the subject of cold weather, let me mention another prophecy, also of cold weather to come, also because of the behaviour of the sun, also reported in Canada. Take a look this piece from a few weeks back, about the work of a man called Rhodes Fairbridge. Fairbridge, we learn, explained what causes the sun to influence the earth’s climate in different ways at different times. It is all to do with the alignment of the planets, and consequently the degree to which the sun is close to or quite far from the centre of gravity of the solar system. No, I do not understand that very well either. What interested me about the article was not that it made any particular sense to me. It did not, and I am in no position to pronounce on its scientific merit or content, which could very well be zero for all I know. No, what caught my attention was that there was, once again, a prediction being made, with some dates attached to it. → Continue reading: There are cold times just around the corner! December 2nd, 2007 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you thought spiders and scorpions bigger than humans were just 1950’s B-movie creations caused by nuclear testing then think again. Paleontologists from Bristol University and Germany found a rather large scorpion claw in a German rock quarry:
This is not a critter you would want to find under a rock in your garden. Assuming, of course, you have very. very large rocks… December 2nd, 2007 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am feeling rather groggy after a wonderful party yesterday – I also watched the excellent Barbarians-South Africa match in a pub – but this item on a website called Sharp as a Marble is an instant hangover cure. Good heavens – the stuff you can find on the web. December 2nd, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Thanks to Instapundit, I came across this staggering collection of photo images of vandalised speed cameras – called “Gatsos” – on the sides of British roads. The website I have linked to gives the impression that it is generally rather in favour of this practice, on the grounds that many such cameras are difficult to spot and hence set up as a sneaky way to catch out motorists to make money from fines, rather than actually trying to slow down speeds to cut the risk of accidents. A recent book by Christopher Booker and Richard North contends that the obsession with reducing speed limits on Britain’s roads has not reduced the amount of accidents, although it has made the driving process even more tedious than it can be already. Frankly, I am not able to judge whether North and Booker’s analysis is correct, although they present a formidable number of facts to demonstrate their argument. Rather, what the extraordinary collection of images of vandalised speed cameras demonstrates is how far Britain has retreated from quiet deference to the rule of law. I think that society needs to have laws and certain laws need to be enforced and respected. It is a perversion of the argument for freedom to state that it implies a lack of respect for the law. Not so. But what is also clear is that in a society burdened with a rising weight of regulatory, nannying regulations, that a degree of blowback, if I can use the term, will occur. Which is a pity. Motorists who hammer along roads in streets near schools and houses are a menace. December 2nd, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bishop Hill has a couple of good postings on climate themes. We here cannot keep track of all the climate hysteria and anti-hysteria, but he tries do. First, there is this bit of stand-up making fun of Al Gore. Stand-up is cheap to do, cheap to film and easy to stick up on YouTube. Even if YouTube are lefties, they cannot hope to censor everything. Watch this and feel the political climate changing. The good Bishop ended the posting before that one, a round-up of climate stuff with lots of good links – climate cuttings number 14, no less – with the following:
Surely blogging means sitting down on your backside, not getting off it. But, that was the only mistake I could spot. December 1st, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The deranged individual who forced his way into Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign office has given us all a wake up call. How much longer will we tolerate the situation where any lunatic can threaten innocent people?
The message could not be more clear… ban duct tape now! Do it for the children. December 1st, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a work colleague about the kind of sport shown on the BBC television channels (not Sky or the satellite stuff). One thing that came up in conversation was how little boxing there was on the BBC. Was this just because Sky and the paid-for TV channels had bagged all the top fights? It seemed so, but was there something else going on, like a PC revulsion on the part of the BBC top brass about puglism? It seemed a bit odd. When I was a youngster, there was always some boxing match in the offing featuring the likes of Barry MacGuigan, or Joe Frazier, Lloyd Honeygan, Nigel Benn, Frank Bruno (“know wot I mean, ‘Arry?”) Chris Eubank, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Sugar Ray Leonard… the list was endless. Some of the matches were brutal and there were tragedies: Michael Watson was seriously maimed in a fight; Ali, of course, suffers from a severe form of Parkinson’s which must, surely, be linked to the injuries he sustained. Boxing has always had a sleazy side too; some of the money-men involved in the sport probably have spent a lot of time brushing up against the law. In the early days of the big fights in Las Vegas or London’s East End, there was more than just a whiff of organised crime involved. But – there is a but here – boxing is more than all that. Competitive pugilism involves a lot of skill, just as martial arts do; it is a terrific way to keep and get fit and it is also a good way for potentially wayward youngsters with lots of testosterone to channel their aggression and learn to act like a man in a fair fight under the guidance of a referee. And for all that boxing can be and is a brutal sport, I have watched some matches that had me sitting on the edge of my seat in excitement: I particularly remember the epic fight, in 1985, between MacGuigan and Predoza. Absolutely electrifying fight. And I defy anyone to watch an old video of Ali, in his fights against Patterson or Frazier, and not admit to be astonished by the man’s athleticism and skill. British boxing is now in the best state that it has been in for years. Boxers like Ricky Hatton and others are blazing a trail; the countries of the UK look to be able to field a decent bunch of entrants for the Beijing Olympics next year. And even the BBC, which recently seemed to be turning up its nose at the sheer vulgarity and general non-PCness of boxing, seems to be covering boxing quite a lot all of a sudden, invalidating my earlier wonderment about whether the BBC had killed the sport from its programmes. No longer. Good. Boxing has been through a fallow time in Britain over the past few years and there remain legitimate worries about the potential injuries that can be inflicted. But if you accept – as a genuine liberal must – that grown-up adults can and should be able to consensually fight and accept the consequences, there should be absolutely no suggestion that boxing be banned, any more than say, wrestling or other contact sports which can cause injury, including life-threatening ones. There is also a cultural issue worth throwing into the mix: boxing seems to be one of the few sports that have drawn in young Muslim men in Britain, apart from cricket. That has to be a good thing. December 1st, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
It always amazes me the number of businesses who use the Internet without really understanding how it has changed everything in business, not just the bits they find useful. The entire balance of power has been shifting towards information rich customers for years now and one of the things about this shift is that people’s tolerance for a company’s behaviour when things go wrong has also changed dramatically. It has always been the case that when things go wrong, the single worst thing any company can do is to make a customer feel he is being ignored. In many ways, even a half-arsed press release is (just) better than none at all, but frankly the days when a press release drafted by a PR professional whose job it is to pretend everything is all right are long gone. That approach never worked, only now the fact the PR Emperor has no clothes (and in truth never did) is impossible to hide. Customers are going to tell each other just how much they hate you, if indeed they do, regardless of whether or not you participate in the discussion because companies can no longer frame the terms of the debate. This article is an example of that, in fact. And so I was amused by a fairly trivial incident: a purchased a copy of the Epic/Microsoft games studio shooter Gears of War for the PC. Cool game. How do I know? Because I have repeatedly played the first two to ten minutes of the game before getting a wargame-g4wlive.exe crash to desktop. And judging from the number of screaming customers on the Epic forums, I am far from alone in experiencing this. Now the truth is, games these days are bloody complex things and it is rare to get a major game released without some significant kinks, so far be it for me to criticise Epic for releasing a bugged game… it happens and is probably an inevitable fact of life. Also I have no doubt that Epic has an army of coders working to fix the (many) issues that people have reported and most likely they will solve them all soon. Looking at their forums, both Epic and Microsoft developers posted early comments and that is exactly the correct approach. If people know for sure that someone is on the problem, it is amazing how much slack they will cut a company and in many cases, dealing frankly with the issue and frequently acknowledging there is a problem makes people empathise rather than criticise. But after the initial surge of developer input, the forum started filling up with often highly irate and typically semi-literate gamers cursing and howling because they had become convinced that as the first attempts to patch the game had not helped a great many people, the companies had just banked their money and written the game off. In truth I think that is highly unlikely at this stage and it is an avoidable self-inflicted wound to have well paid programmers working to fix what may be a difficult problem but because your inept PR department does not make that clear on a daily basis, customers whose game is about as useful as a prismatic beermat are left incandescent with rage at being ignored (as they see it). Crazy corporate behaviour. Interestingly, posts to the forum filled with F words and imprecations about the marital status of the developer’s mothers when they were born, seem to be generally left on the forum. I posted an invective-free article urging Epic to get themselves a new PR director and the post was taken down, which I must confess I find vastly amusing. So no prize for guessing which department is responsible for the Epic forums then. November 30th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
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