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Michael Totten has some more great stuff from Lebanon that you just will not read in the mainstream media. And remember he does not have a news organisation behind him, so he trips and reportage are all funded from his own pocket and from donations from readers. January 13th, 2007 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
 Last night I and several other assorted bloggers and Samizdatistas dined at Chateau Perry, at a gathering hosted by Jackie D. The guest of honour was Mr Squander 2. Of course we all asked after Mrs and Baby Squander 2, and the good news is that mother and child are doing much better. For me the most memorable thing that got said last night was when Mr Squander 2 told of how, during the Brezhnev era, poor old Mr Brezhnev apparently consumed an annoyingly large amount of Soviet and in particular KGB man hours trying to get various of his minions to answer for him the question: “Who runs capitalism?” Presumably so that they could take him/her/it out, in some way or another, and score a cheap and quick victory in the Cold War, although sadly that wasn’t part of the story as told last night. Or, maybe the idea was for Brezhnev then to able to sit down with this controlling mastermind, and to ask him/her/it: “How can we do it?” Knowing the damn Bolsheviks, it could well have been both. First find out how they do it, then kill or enslave them all, starting where it makes most sense, with whoever is in charge. Anyway, (1): Heh. And (2) does anyone know anything more about this? I tried googling: Brezhnev “Who runs capitalism?”, but that yielded nothing. It is such a great story that it is the kind of thing people believe because they want to believe it. I know I want to. But, is there any truth in it? January 13th, 2007 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Greetings Samizdatistas, greetings Commentariat. Long time no see. I expect Brian would have blogged about this were his education blog still going (I for one would love to see it back) but instead the task has roused me from the sweet repose of my “resting contributor” coffin. Here goes. On the face of it, the idea of raising the school leaving age to eighteen might seem reasonable, especially given that the British government still plans to permit either schooling or “vocational training” when it bans young people from full-time work. After all, the idea apparently works fine in Canada. They simply enforce the law by taking away young people’s driving licenses if they attempt to work for a living. Clearly it is the working teenagers we need to worry about when it comes to youth crime, truancy and so on. Work is bad for you, and encourages bad behaviour! Young people should be writing essays, not mending cars! But underneath the face of it, I have a few questions:
Just wondering. January 12th, 2007 | 51 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well-intentioned politicians are of two kinds, those who want to help people directly and those who want to free people so that indirectly they can help themselves. The distinction may sound like a quibble, but it is not. – paragraph one of a Telegraph piece yesterday in which Tim Congdon explains why from now on he will be voting UKIP (thank you Iain Dale) January 12th, 2007 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recently I have been reading gadget blogs a lot, and it would seem that I am not the only one who likes to do this. This week, all the gadget blogs,along with the rest of the world, have been screaming, in among their regular stuff about incomprehensible boxes: iPhone iPhone iPhone. Which is understandable. Either the iPhone is a truly remarkable thing, or the hype surrounding this unremarkable thing is all the more remarkable. Now hats off to Apple and all that, especially for keeping it all so secret for so long, although, they do rather seem to have screwed up the calling it the iPhone side of things. But the iPhone, for all its various innovatory features, is just another mobile phone with some add-ons. It is the embodiment of the claim that mobile phones are destined to swallow up all the other mobile objects people like to travel around with, such as music machines and digital cameras (the camera is the only iPhone add-on that really gets my attention), but this notion has been rattling around for some years now. The iPhone looks like being a smash hit precisely because so many people already understand why they want one. However, of all the things I have read about on the gadget blogs this week, this item was the one that I found the most striking. This, for me, has the look and feel of a life changer:
Now once again, this is something that the sort of people who saw this coming saw coming. But, to me, when adverts change moment by moment in a semi-intelligent way, perhaps even in response to their understanding of who is in the area that they are pointing at, then that will be a very different world to the one I have become used to. It will look different and it will feel different. → Continue reading: Billboards are about to become computer screens January 12th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mickey Kaus breaks it down:
Of course, nothing convinces like an apples-to-apples comparison. And on that front, we find:
(emphasis supplied) In theory, I got no problem with unions – they could be nothing more than a free association engaged in bargaining with willing buyer for their services. The problem is, there are no unions that represent this ideal. Unions in the US are an artificial creation of the state, a relic of an earlier day when socialism was The Answer to society’s problems, and unions were seen and used as a vehicle for rolling back, reforming, and ultimately displacing free market capitalism. It is no accident that, in the US at least, unions have been steadily losing ground for decades in industries that actually have to compete to survive. The only areas where unions are strong at all is in the government sector and, sadly, in the quasi-government sectors (such as healthcare). While there is zero chance of any reform of the state apparatus supporting unions (which is probably a shame; there may well be a legitimate and beneficial role for non-corrupt, non-state-supported unions in some sectors, but we will never know), but I for one am glad to know that they are in broad decline, and that globalized markets mean there is little to no chance they will ever stage a resurgence in their current form. The fate of unions seem to be a rare example of civil society grinding down the state. January 12th, 2007 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
How cool is this? A MIG-21 available on eBay! Although it is not all that expensive, sadly I really do not have anywhere to put it.  January 12th, 2007 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O’Rourke telling me about the history of California’s state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger – they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted. O’Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan’s political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O’Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely. Two things have somewhat distressed me about O’Rourke’s career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts. → Continue reading: P. J. O’Rourke does British television – very well January 11th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.” Edmund Burke, the 18th Century politician who has been described by historian and journalist Paul Johnson as the “greatest Irishman who ever lived”. January 11th, 2007 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
At long last the secretive space venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has gone public. The video of the test hop is very informative to the rocket afficionado. Note what you do not see: rocket ‘bells’ and flames. The lack of expander nozzles and the large number of small engine ports in the bottom are strongly indicative of an aerospike engine; the lack of flame means they are probably running a high efficiency cryogenic engine using LOX/LH. These features, plus the shape of the vessel have a long commercial space history. The prototype of this design was Gary Hudsen’s ‘Phoenix’ of the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s, Bill Gaubatz of McDonell Douglas actually built something much like it, but without the aerospike. Bill used the easily available RL-10 LOX/LH engine for his ‘boilerplate’ test ship. (Some months ago I posted a picture of the remains of this test vehicle). I have been waiting a long time for someone to actually try this configuration. Some say it cannot be made to fly single stage to orbit; others swear vehemently that it can. Noone, however, disagrees that it can do a fine suborbital job or that it is a much more effective general purpose space vehicle than anything with wings. January 11th, 2007 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is good that Perry has supplied us Samizdatistas with a category called How very odd! to describe our oddest postings, because how else would you describe the calculation that England are now, still, the second best test match cricket side in the world? On the other hand, England really are that bad at one day cricket. January 11th, 2007 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
The satirical Songun blog has dug up a North Korean propaganda movie shot in the 1980s that is worth a look. Songun has made Always Working Together For The People available on YouTube, split into seven segments (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7). Combined, there Is about an hour of video. I am a little weird – I watched it all. However, I find this sort of thing quite fascinating; lots of interesting tidbits to be found. For example, part three sees Kim Jong-il being exhorted for easing all the Great Leader’s concerns about the people’s welfare (a common theme), in this instance in the field of “traffic problem”. What bloody traffic problem?? There Is nary a car to be seen motoring down the wide boulevards and highways shown. (Fair enough, those ridiculously broad motorways were designed to serve more than one purpose.) In part four, the two Kims are seen pouring over an architectural mock-up of Pyongyang in a manner most reminiscent of those Speer/Hitler snaps showing them admiring a model of the Berlin they were going to create after they won the war. Hopefully, the latter day town planners meet a similar fate as their similarly megalomaniacal forebears. This propaganda piece is clearly a past effort to position Kim Jong-il as Crown Prince by welding him on to his father’s cult of personality. His leadership abilities are constantly lauded and he is portrayed as an indispensable part of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. The succession issue is explicitly mentioned at the end of segment six. Still, in spite of all the adulation, it is difficult not to laugh at the rather miserable figure Kim Jong-il cuts throughout the programme. Part 5 shows Kim Jong-il and daddy making a trip to the Dear Leader’s fabled birthplace, Mount Paektu. The glowing exaltations to the younger Kim pair most incongruously with his stature and bearing – unless ‘mountain spirit’ is a North Korean euphemism for ‘ample paunch’. Really, how can you not laugh at the spectacle of this malignant little gnome. As was said last week – and in great anticipation of a repeat performance – sic semper tyrannis. January 11th, 2007 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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