Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
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Monday, May 19, 2003
Airports must grow or die, writes Neil Collins in the Telegraph, along with much other mercantilist tosh. He seems stuck in a pre-Adam Smith economic model that assumes that if one man prospers it can only be by doing down another: Britain must trade internationally to prosper and, in the winner-takes-all world of modern trade, you either do well or you don't do at all. Success tends to reinforce itself, just as it does in the Premiership.Yes, international trade is just like the Premiership. We've all observed how there can only be one prosperous country in the world at any one time. All other countries except this year's cup winners are obviously doomed to have a GNP equal to Liberia's. The option of giving up a little economic growth for a little less effort or sacrifice doesn't exist.That's why it is a known physical impossibility for any woman to ever turn down a higher paid job because she'd rather spend time with her family. That is why it defies natural law to ever find a successful professional man on the golf-course. That's why everybody works overtime every night. No other options exist.
And while I'm on the subject, why is it that everyone assumes that if budget air travel pushes up demand the only possible answer to that demand is "yes."
The tone I take here may superficially resemble anti-capitalism. Don't be fooled. I love capitalism, but I love it because when freedom is the root, capitalism is the flower. Forcing people to sell their homes when they don't want to isn't freedom and isn't capitalism. The fact that the end result of this process is more trade is irrelevant. The end result of a burglary may well also be more trade, much of it honest, but we don't encourage burglaries on that account. A mysteriously un-named primary school will be holding a non-competitive sports day out of sight of the parents in order to "spare the feelings of the losers." But is that really secure from prying eyes? Might not some obsessively competitive parents peek through the railings to watch little Aaron participate in a Class Sharing Event under the great big nylon parachute? To be really sensitive to children's needs, wouldn't it be better to hold Sports Day in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'? Tough on the kids for whom Sports Day was their one big chance to show that they were not losers. Richard Heddleson writes: You write: Aaagh! No! Not the Hessians again! No! I can't stand any more! (Hey, after all that, won't it be a laff if the Blogger archive bug strikes.)
Last to the party. I was going to weigh in with some criticism of this essay in Right Wing News. However Instapundit and others have been there before me. Germany and other European countries have indeed let the city walls decay, allowing some infiltration of their culture by barbarous elements against whom a previous generation kept better guard. I don't dispute that Mr Grimm saw what he says he did. I don't dispute that it's scary. However I don't like the sound of this: "The Eternal Nazi, I'm afraid, will be with us as long as there is a German nation."Replace "the eternal Nazi" with the Nazi phrase it (ironically? unconsciously?) echoes, "The eternal Jew" and see how it reads. The idea that the Germans are eternally evil is nonsense. Everyone thought they were cuties circa 1795, what with the little toytown states and all. Numerous other groups and nationalities once had completely different reputations than their present ones - somewhere I once read a charming quote about how the Japanese were really too happy and indolent to ever make much of a mark in the coming (twentieth) century. It says in the Bible, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?" One of my regular themes in this blog is that refusing to see the beam in thy brother's eye because of the mote in thine own is also a sin: it denies the differing relative importance of beams and motes. But the beam isn't part of you, traumatic though it may be to remove. Not for the Germans, the Jews, the blacks, the whites, the Palestinians. Not for anyone.
Saturday, May 17, 2003
I am the Human Flower. Weapon: Dark Thorns. Transportation: Golden Jet Pack. From Lee's Useless Super-hero generator. And the number of thy counting shall be... four? You may find this hard to believe - not that anyone would would make up being as vague and unobservant as this - but I read this post from Iain Murray and completely failed to take in that I was, to my later astonishment, number four in BlogStreet's Most Important Blogs. I had registered that I was somewhat above Edge - a cause for slight surprise - but it was not until Dave Farell sent me an e-mail that I actually took in the number. It was too good to last. Now I'm down to a (still jolly) ranking of 25, the pack of readers from Enter Stage Right having lapped me and passed on. But still, like Iain, I haven't quite got used to the idea that people actually read this stuff. I sped past 100,000 in the New Hit Counter Era courtesy of Mark Steyn's slipstream and forgot to notice when.
UPDATE: Dr Weevil writes: Last Monday I calculated a list of "Bloggers' Bloggers" by taking the Blogstreet Blog IQ Top 100, dividing their Blogstreet ranks by their Blog IQ ranks, and then sorting the results. You came out in fifth place, ranking 216 among the general run of blogs and 25 among the heavy hitters, for a ratio of 8.64. A statistician could probably come up with a better formula, but results suggest that this is a pretty decent measure of who is "punching above their weight". Of course, I have an incentive to think so, since I come in at #15 myself. My old comrade Amygdala and my even older comrade Ain't No Bad Dude hold the number one and two spots respectively in this list of "blogger's bloggers". Both are what you might call "robust left". I wonder if that means anything?
(Fans and anti-fans of John Lott a.k.a. "Mary Rosh" of More Guns Less Crime fame might be stimulated by a scroll down the Dude's multiple posts concerning his disappointing behaviour. However I'd take issue with the term "counter-intuitive" or Tim Lambert's claim that... oh, don't get me started. I must go away now and do important things or the whole continent will be engulfed by atomic fire.) Thursday, May 15, 2003
Eurozone on edge of slump as UK thrives, says this article in the Times. Foreign readers are requested to pay four trillion Euros and make sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl in order to read it, so I'll save you the trouble. It says that the Eurozone is on the edge of a slump as the UK thrives. Mark Holland writes: Loath as I am to nit-pick with a Mark Steyn endorsed scribe I must point out a weakness with the "set-buster" bomb you mentioned. Unfortunately it's only good at Venn diagram mutilation. 'Set' has the most definitions of any word in the English language. 127 if memory serves. However the badger's dwelling is not one of them as it is a 'sett'. Well, Mr Holland, I am not at all loath to nit pick with you. My dictionary has "sett (also set)" and tells us that the tt spelling prevails in technical senses, such as the particular pattern of a tartan. I don't think a badger hole is at all technical, so there. But let's not quarrel. That one little letter need not hold us back from using weapons of mass destruction on mathematical constructs. These Venn diagrams have it coming. I don't know whether "A union B" refers to trades unions or some kind of imperialist agression, but either way let's nuke 'em back to a pre-Platonic geometry. The local press where I live made much of the fact that a rocket launcher was handed in during the recent firearms amnesty. I think that it is the rocket launcher mentioned in passing in this story about a World War II grenade. A source who ought to know gave a different slant to the story. Want to know what that "rocket launcher" actually was? A spud gun. That's right: it shot potatoes.
Seduced by the color-blind eye of the Cyclops of Power, or Give Me That Old-Time Commiedom. On Tuesday I was complaining that the People's Daily were sounding unduly like normal human beings. No such complaint can be sustained against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Their communiques, informing us with the greatest urgency that the Iraq war is going to be a big mistake, romantically hail from "the Mountains of the Mexican Southeast." Fair enough: I suppose the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee can't very well supply the authorities with a return address. The language is so quaint as to suggest that the Indigenous Committee might be into the bits of Indigenous Culture that involve ritual peyote use. A the whole loopy package is solemnly re-published by ZNet in association with - get this - Le Monde Diplomatique.
Do ZNet have any idea how weird and cultish this association makes them look?
Vale. Salud and may the world which is to come have the distinctive signature of no one!
I have a supplier who discreetly provides me with this sort of good stuff: ...Leaving aside that the title "Interior Minister" has a certain sinister and Metternichian sound to it... ...Nicholas Sarkozy (a name which if you see it upside down in a mirror probably reads 'I am Lord Voldemort')... ...I think perhaps Spanish men are going to need more than just the weapon in their pants... ...Cardassians are stupid and annoying. And lumpy. ...and suggest safe daily limits for the intake of statist propaganda... ...So why are you still here? P*** off and read it, stoopid!
Dave Kopel's in town, and not as pessimistic about gun rights here as you might expect. He mentions a new book by Peter Hitchens called A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. It normally happens that whenever one of the talented Hitchens family puts pen to paper the result is reviewed and discussed half to death all over Radio 4. I haven't heard a word about this book. Wednesday, May 14, 2003
A public service. "If you want to appear like you’re at the cutting edge of net culture but can’t be bothered to spend hours online, then never fear. Scotsman.com’s pathetic team of geeks, freaks and gimps will do the hard work for you. While you sip wine, read a book or engage in normal social interaction, they will burn out their retinas staring at badly designed web pages and dodge creeps in chatrooms to prepare for you: Scotsman.com’s lazy guide to net culture." Back off youse creeps, that pitch belongs to us bloggers.
I have no strength left to comment on this story about how the burglar shot by Tony Martin is trying to sue him. Or maybe I have, just. I've heard two separate people ask why no one has yet seen fit to assassinate the burglar concerned. When the law of the land visibly ceases to function something much cruder will take its place. The truth about Bart Simpson's race. Gary Farber writes: "'What race is Bart Simpson anyway? Is he even human?' Boris the Evil Badger has been executed, according to the Guardian. If one casts the democracies as the humans and dictatorships as badgers, there is something Saddam Hussein-like in his story, (although no-one to my knowledge ever stole Saddam from an animal rescue centre): early coddling led to a loss of proper fear, so that he attacked humans instead of running away. For a while he was able to defy all attempts at sanctions, forcing two police officers who were trying to catch him to retreat to the safety of their patrol car. Eventually, however, the increasing boldness of his attacks on seemingly random targets could no longer be ignored and he was reduced to his component atoms by a massive earth-pentrating "set-buster" B61-11 mini nuclear bomb launched as a favour from USAF B-2s stationed at RAF Fairford. Or, if you prefer, put down by a local vet. No doubt local activists will say that he could have been contained by non-violent means, but I can't help thinking that an assisted passage to the next world was the only real solution to the Boris problem. Mr Mike Weaver, chairman of the Worcestershire Badger Society has claimed that, "This tragedy shows the folly to keep [sic] wild animals as pets." Seems to me that Boris did just fine as a pet and "this tragedy" actually shows the folly of freeing animals from rescue centres. Staff at Vale Wildlife Rescue (who had taken in Boris after he was hand-reared by some party not mentioned in the report) said that he had never displayed any signs of aggression before being stolen or deliberately released from the centre last week.
Which is more than you can say for Saddam Hussein. Mass grave of Saddam's victims found in Iraq.
Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Israelis not the targets this time, so.... Marduk reports that the Guardian, the Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle have all rediscovered the word "terrorist". Tories pledge to scrap tuition fees. I'm just waiting for the Conservative Central Office discussion paper on nationalisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then again, better for several million people if the People's Daily really was indistinguishable from the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser, i.e. extinct since 1973. This disquisition on who qualified as human in communist terminology serves as a reminder of just what a bunch of grindingly vicious dipsticks the People's Daily served. Comprador Bourgeois Element Realises Futility of Remaining As Running Dog of Imperialism. The People's Daily also reports Clair Short has resigned. They don't say anything remotely resembling my headline, though. I made it up. Okay, so the hard-drinking boyos of Beijing press pack didn't exactly break that story themselves, but you'd think they could do more than reprint Reuters or AFP. It's a cold grey world we have come to, when the People's Daily is indistinguishable from the Peterborough Citizen and Advertiser. Couldn't the comrade writers put more of a Chinese slant on things? Oops. I'm just leaving.
UPDATE: If Bart Simpson were here (which thank the Lord he's not, sir) he'd tell me not have a cow, but I'm actually having an attack of PC guilt about the post above. You know how it goes, some incongruity makes you laugh, you press post & publish, you go away, you come back, you re-read your own stuff, you realise that you will have to go away forever and live out your shameful days as a bag lady. Can I just take this opportunity to state that I am quite aware that the possession of an epicanthic fold is, objectively, the human norm, and to generally emote a soft mist of niceness and goodwill over everybody. Thank you.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: What race is Bart Simpson anyway? Is he even human?
"Those insane Canadians," writes Rob Hinkley, "painting cartoon birds, tigers, bomb-wielding pink elephants and skantily-clad ladies on their bomber planes.And proudly calling a bomber which has flown 84 missions the "X-Terminator", as though to celebrate the carnage it has caused: how grotesque! How hideous! Or something." There are no problems, only opportunities. The ever-positive People's Daily sees the bright side of SARS. "Hu Angang, a noted researcher, said the changes underway in China's public health system would bring more changes to the country's whole government administrative mechanism.I mock, but he has a point there. China's government needs a lesson in the costs of authoritarianism - I just wish it could be given by some other teacher. Monday, May 12, 2003
Still obsessed after all these hours? The rest of the blogosphere has moved on in its orbit about whatever it orbits about, but I'm still stuck in the Drabble season. Here, Ms Drabble, is a picture of an RAF aeroplane bearing shark's teeth nose art pictured in North Africa early in WWII. Some accounts say that the Americans picked up the habit from the RAF, not vice versa. That's RAF as in Royal Air Force as in your own British air force, Ms Drabble. Still think "a nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane," huh? Probably.
Royden H Wood IV writes regarding my admission last Wednesday that I don't know the polite way to eat oranges: Maybe I can help you out with the orange peel thing too. Take the entire Orange, peel and all, and before cutting it or whatever, take it between your open, flat palms and roll it around a bit. Kind of like you're working with clay. Do this for a little bit, maybe a minute. Then peel with your fingers, starting at the top or bottom, whichever, start at a pole. Dig your finger in there, and peel a little back. Work it carefully, in a spiral fashion, and you can peel the entire, err, peel in one piece. Voila, you don't have to worry about the polite way to discard the peel.Of course it isn't. The truly thoughtful guest refrains from eating the peel until he has amused the company by wrapping it round his teeth, flexing his gums and saying (indistinctly), "Run away, I'm the orange-toothed monster." Daniel Messing writes: I read Greenmantle and the other Hannay mysteries long ago, and have re-read them (once, with difficulty, to one of my children--too different a world for him). I take them down now and again to re-read favorite passages. So much of it so un-PC, and yet seems to ring true.Me, too, muchly. And there's the interlude on board the Essen barge, a sort of hard-working arcadia. And the thought of Mr Blenkiron makes me wonder about George Galloway. Sunday, May 11, 2003
Enter Stage Right has up an interview with Mark Steyn. ESR's e-mail alerting me to it mentioned a shocking secret, and there certainly is one¹, but for me the big surprise came one or two paragraphs before the end. Synchronicity is a wonderful thing. There can be no more than a few hundred souls on this planet who have read Buchan's Greenmantle during the last three years, and Mr Steyn and I are two of them.² There are a select few hundred, too, who have read this blog... and whaddya know?
¹Berkeley!? How could you? ²Truth to tell, I skipped a bit when that Von Einem woman started to play a major role. It's so tedious to be told that one ought to be fascinated. Going wobbly. The TV news says that General Jay Garner has been recalled from Iraq, following regional administrator Barbara Bodine. Seems a weak move to me, designed to pander to "world opinion" and its squeamishness about the military; if the US isn't careful it'll end up with the worst of both worlds - having to jump when the UN says "frog" yet still having to carry the blame for any failures on its own. UPDATE: Now Ceefax is reporting a slightly different story, with Gen. Garner demoted/moved sideways rather than recalled. Not so much a wobble as a worrying vibration. My point stands: there are two good things about the UN not being involved in Iraq. One is that the UN isn't involved; the other is that the US knows it can't blame anyone else if everything goes pear-shaped. That's a motive to damn well make it work. Let her very name be accursed. Iain Murray has taken a most awful revenge on Margaret Drabble for this. He has quietly appropriated her last name to express his frustration with the Blogger bug that takes the reader to the wrong post despite the link being correctly typed. (Naturally, his link will probably take you to the wrong post. If it does, go here and look for "Just like that.") Should the usage become general, it won't be the first drabble in the dictionary. It has long meant a story told in a hundred words: a structure as light and strong as a balloon that can carry its own weight a thousand times over. The origin of the term, according to Secret Master of Fandom Dave Langford, lies in Monty Python's Big Red Book which says: `Drabble. A word game for 2 to 4 players. The four players sit from left to right and the first person to write a novel wins.'
Monty Python had a bit of a thing about Margaret Drabble. She turns up in this sketch, too. Man: ...It's a free country. (enter a knight in amour) I mean if I want to eat a squirrel now and again, that's me own business, innit? I mean, I'm no racialist. I, oh, oh... Thirty years on, the unconscious wisdom of Python becomes clear: Drabble and the occasional eater of squirrels were avatars of each other. ("I mean, I'm no racialist" - "I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect") Male and female. Plebian and genteel. It's a ying-tong thing. You Americans wouldn't understand. Friday, May 09, 2003
You won't believe the error message I just got. (Hat tip to Boris Kupershmidt via the Libertarian Alliance Forum) One death is a tragedy. Thirty million deaths aren't even a statistic. Junius has a post recording his astonishment at the short shrift given to the millions who starved during Mao's Great Leap Forward in a magazine containing resources for pupils studying history. Arguably the biggest famine in history. Didn't rate a mention. A few years ago that would have been par for the course. Not usually a fan of book burning, I might make an exception for the textbook full of smiling peasants from which I learned something calling itself geography in the 1970s. It's fair to say that GCSE history textbooks are usually better than that these days, as I know from having had a small role in producing some. I have to hand a copy of "History in Focus GCSE: Modern World History" by Ben Walsh, published by John Murray. (Just to be clear, this book was nothing to do with me.) It is a little skimpy in its treatment of the Great Leap Forward, but the thirty million are there, as is the fact that the Great Leap was a "disastrous failure" and not a natural one either.
Robert Conquest has done his work. Most British schoolchildren are no longer taught to think of the Soviet/Chinese communist system as just an alternative to our own, "valid in its own way", though I'd be willing to bet that 80% of them wouldn't know that Stalin killed more than Hitler did. My main beef against pretty well all the twentieth century history books I have seen is not one that Chris Bertram would share. They are all written by social democrats. Nice 'n' cuddly social democrats I am sure, but irredeemable statists. Mr Walsh's book is typical. Under "Achievements of the New Deal" it says: (The comments in italics are mine, in case you hadn't worked that out.) "Revolutionised the relationships between local and central government" listed as an achievement. Bleah. Not that I wish to pick upon Mr Walsh's generally admirable book as worse in this respect than any other: they all worship the Tenessee Bleeding Valley Bleeding Authority. A little scepticism has finally crept in regarding the Aswan Bloody Dam and the Akosombo Damn Dam but the TVA still has the benefit of some grandfather clause permitting unalloyed admiration for this ancestor of all those ecology-blasting peasant-dispossessing schemes that have plagued the world since. (Just for the record, no, I have no desire to see the return of the dustbowls and nor do I think that all dams are a bad thing. I just don't think much of expropriation and nationalisation.) To be fair there is also a list of "criticisms of the New Deal," though I can't help noting that the word "criticism" leaves it open whether the criticism is fair but the word "achievement" assumes that the thing is good and that's that.
Changing the subject, my ever-distractable eye was caught by a couple of lines (intended lightheartedly, I think) that Chris Bertram included in an e-mail alerting me to the post. "Much as I'd rather be detecting pro-Tory or pro-libertarian biases in our school curriculum to moan about, I was so taken aback by the treatment of modern Chinese history in a magazine dedicated to the national curriculum for history that I had to blog about it..."This illustrates why I think the adversarial system works well in our courts, and why the separation of powers in the US constitution also works well. The Bertram heart is naturally going to leap a little higher when and if he detects an opportunity to battle for (broadlywithlotsaqualificationsyaddayadda) his own side, just as the Solent heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth fruit given the chance to nail a pinko. People work with a bit more zip when it is for some cause or organisation that they feel is their own, and an adversarial system works with that grain of human nature, always assuming that all sides are given a free run. Yet there is a countervailing motive (illustrated by the post Chris actually had rather than the one he wanted) that is present in the hearts of many bloggers, and is something to be encouraged. We all want to be seen to be more than party hacks. In our purer and better moments we even want to be more than party hacks. I shall duly report any examples of pro-Tory or pro-libertarian bias in GCSE textbooks I see. Just don't hold your breath. Wednesday, May 07, 2003
Now is the time... The "famous American cartoonist Gary Trudeau has come to the aid of the French as they are faced with a campaign of denigration organised from America," reports Le Monde. Trudeau is going to put out Doonesbury in French without subtitles for a while. Well, if Mel Gibson is going to do the Passion in Aramaic, why not? There is always room for a new niche market. Why, if you lose and alienate enough of your once-loyal audience you might even qualify for a subsidy. Hey, it worked for the French film industry. Nothing about the idea of running an American cartoon in the French language outrages me. I can plough my way through Mr Trudeau's undemanding text, and the notion would still amuse even if I couldn't. However if you are seeking something to finally motivate you to dig out that Lingaphone set from the back of the cupboard, look elsewhere. Last Sunday's cartoon is embarrassing. The characters look outside the cartoon strip and harangue the reader, for one thing, in the manner of Henry the Home Safety Hedgehog using the last frame to say "and as I found out, kids: it's dangerous to play with matches!" But that isn't the worst thing about it. The absolute Yeuch-factor-Triple-A moment occurs when Trudeau assumes that no one would have dreamed of being harsh to the French if they had known it would insult him. M. Trudeau, êtes-vous donc si égoïste que vous ne reconaissez même pas que le question en discussion n'est pas votre nom?
And if terrorists had blown up the Eiffel Tower I don't think that an American book saying that it never happened would have made the US bestseller lists. "The US is a police state," says a senior German diplomat. One Jurgen Chrobog told his colleagues at the annual meeting of German ambassadors that the US was restricting more and more of its civil liberties. True, but - "thank you for your valuable feedback, Mr Pot." Meanwhile the German Defence minister, Peter Struck says, “It’s not for a German Defence Minister to show regret or guilt feelings towards his American counterpart. We have an equal relationship.”An equal relationship means a relationship where the parties have equal status, not equal moral status. If one party has behaved badly he or she should show regret and feel guilt. Never mind the news, I have an important question. What is the polite way to eat orange segments? The efficient way is to bite down on about half the segment, peel and all, and then pull it out through clenched teeth, stripped clean. Yummy, but I am not under the impression that this is an elegant procedure. Sunday, May 04, 2003
Is Cuba the land where communism works? This editorial in the Hindustan Times doesn't think so. Three generations of Indians have taken an understandable pleasure in thumbing their noses at their former colonizers by displaying ostentatious friendliness towards Communist regimes, but times are changing. And while I'm here: My comment on the success of the far-right British National Party in the recent local elections: racial politics is an ugly game, and one that everybody loses in the end. But when it's the only game in town everyone will play it, and that includes the whites. Shh. I shouldn't be here. I know I'm meant to be doing other things, but I cannot resist mentioning that Biased BBC is zipping along at the moment, gas in her tank, wind in her sails and mix in her metaphor. Great posts from Kerry Butram, Toby Blyth, Patrick Crozier and a little snuck-in one from me. Friday, May 02, 2003
High pressure of work and low pressure of air are combining to keep me away from blogging at the moment. The lights keep flickering, the storm clouds gather and Samizdata is having server problems. Is someone trying to tell me not to waste time on the internet? See you in a day or two. Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Iain Murray writes: Nefas is, of course, the subject of the most memorable Latin grammatical rhyme:I must re-read Down With Skool, How To Be Topp and the rest agane. I probably didnt get about a quarter of the jokes becoz I dont akcherly speak Latin chiz. But my husband sez that any fule can learn it even grabber winner of the mrs joyful prize for raffia work.Sung, in my memory, to the tune of Greensleeves. A partly-lawful day. Sometimes a snatch of song, a line of dialogue or a euphonious name will lodge itself in my mind. All day yesterday it was two words: nefastus parte. It started when I incautiously decided to follow up on two terms I discovered in a Latin trivia quizbook: fas and nefas. Here are some of the websites Google threw up. (It's better than the sortes virgilianae any day.) This extract from a book about Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe gives a good explanation of the term: The unlucky days were those that immediately followed the Kalends, the Ides or the Nones; these, and some others, would be marked in his calendar with the letter N as nefastus, unlawful. On those days, in Rome, the courts could not open. Other days were partly lawful: on NP days (nefastus parte) the morning was unlawful, but if the gods were propitiated with sacrifice the afternoon could be used for court business; on EN days (endotereisi), hearings were allowed in the middle of the day. There remained the days, like this one, that were reminders of previous troubles. It is probable that the dates around Passover were already marked in his calendar with the special dots or seals proclaiming them unlucky, auspicio malo. This website instructs the reader on how to practise the Religio Roma in the modern world. The sacrifice in today's world is a complicated matter. Many localities have ordinances that forbid blood sacrifice, or even the keeping of animals necessary for the rites. Therefore, a devotee will have to make many concessions.Er, not wishing to be intolerant or anything but that doesn't cut both ways. Finally, this is a micro-nation called Nova Roma. One of the participants is apparently the same chap who wrote the advice on sacrifice above, as his entries on the Roman calendar, the names of gods and so on, are the same in both sites. Not all the other members of the forum were appreciative of his contribution.
When Chris Tarrant tells you you've won a million, the final question having been whether certain semi-auspicious days of the Roman calendar were known as A - festina lente B - caffe latte or C - nefastus parte, I'll expect a decent cut, OK? This looks bad. Two more Iraqis killed by US troops in Fallujah. Other reports speak of demonstrators wounded, not killed. You remember this post about the use of the words "right wing" in the anti-racist educational website Britkid? Well, the author, Chris Gaines, has said he will be changing the wording soon. I love the internet.
UPDATE: ...except when I hate it. The link to "this post" having ceased to function, try this one instead. Tuesday, April 29, 2003
Fear and loathing amid the Rachmaninoff. Have I mentioned yet how much I hate, detest and despise those radio adverts for the charity World Vision? Classic FM, the station which usually keeps me company in the Solentmobile while I do the ton through narrow country lanes, scattering hens and peasants before my wheels, is infested with the things. Only the fact that I never can seem to maintain the elegance of my italic letter-forms when driving at speed has stopped me writing down their script - and, oh boy, do they have a script, strenuous efforts to imply the contrary notwithstanding - word for word and hence being able to to fisk them so accurately that you'd all laugh your socks off. So, sock-wearers still, you will just have to pay attention. No doubt World Vision do worthy work. If you want to be pen pals with little Waeroo and pay for his education, that's fine. (I'd always be a little worried that Waeroo will turn up on my doorstep all grown up already circa 2014, but that's just me, and is, incidentally, the sort of semi-serious inhibition to generosity that can only see the light of day sandwiched between several jokes. Forget you saw it here.) But why do World Vision have to hire a bleeding Tony Blair sound-alike to make their pitch? The pauses, the verdammt pauses, it's not the words that get me, it's those awful meaningless... PAUSES. They don't even have the decency to be properly silent pauses: instead the man emits a sort of ghostly glottal stop, :yy!, like the noise a ninja makes when removing an enemy's head under conditions of urgency and secrecy. "When I learn what a difference it has made to Waeroo that he. Swipe. Can go to school in a proper building instead of. Parry. Under dangerous palm trees, it gives me. Shuriken! A real feeling of. Disembowelling thrust. Pride. So die all enemies of the Mogowawa clan! So I guess that. Drink deep of Igichiro blood, O my thrice-tempered sword. Helps both of us."
I suppose the actors, and Tony Blair, get it from watching too much fly-on-the-wall TV. Have you noticed how Tony Blair doesn't employ the ghastly spontaneous pauses when he really is being sincere? US troops are to leave Saudi Arabia. Just after a victory is a good time to go. It will be hard for Bin Ladenists to claim that they leave with their tails between their legs, and now that the threat from Iraq is gone they are not needed anyway. The threat may not be quite gone yet. There were also a few words in the BBC story about the shooting dead of 13 demonstrators in Iraq, the US army having claimed - quite credibly - that they were fired at from the crowd. I thought of Bloody Sunday. Front line combat troops doing demonstration duty... bad lookout. Yet, as I said, I have no trouble believing that they were fired upon, just as I have no trouble believing the Paras were fired upon three decades ago. One step the British Army found useful in avoiding further Bloody Mondays, Tuesdays etc. was to avoid issuing the troops with too much ammunition. Monday, April 28, 2003
What percentage of British people would carry a gun if it were legal? Steve Chapman has found an astonishing statistic in the Observer. UPDATE: B.A.B.S.A.: General link to blog here. Junius starts off this post with a gratuitous insult directed at the opinions of Simon Jenkins of the Times. And it even gets better than that - just read the comments, 17 so far, which delve into the psychology of numeracy and whether our intuitive perceptions of probability can be trusted. At last. David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky carries out an unceasing search for kindred spirits who, like him, disagree with the dominant Scottish political culture of tax, spend and whinge. Sometimes he finds them. Here he links to a simply marvellous article by Fraser Nelson: Deceit and betrayal that are crippling Scotland. Sunday, April 27, 2003
"This information came to me from Winston Churchill: "On the day I took over the Prime Minister's job again in October 1951 after considerable military opposition from the Attlee faction representing the Dragon, 126 members of my "supporting cast" - artists, writers, photographers, copywriters etc who had been imprisoned by the Attlee government mainly because they were working for me - were released on my order from prison. Frank Hampson the principal artist of the Eagle comic was one of them."
Corking stuff, eh? It gets better. This website, which appears to be serious, is devoted to preaching reincarnation and exposing the demonic activities of Prince Philip via Churchill's memoirs from beyond the grave and hidden messages in Frank Hampson's artwork.
"Churchill separately described Philip as: 'A gryphon and a wereson. A gryphon is one who serves the Lord Above All not, being neither fish nor fowl nor bird of the air and an abomination in the sight of God. A wereson is one who is ensorcelled - who has within him another being, hidden, watchful and looking out.'"
"Vora is mostly Herbert Morrison the member of the Labour Cabinet who had taken over from Clement Attlee as chief concupiscent of the Dragon, or "head worm" as I termed him, following the failure of Attlee and Truman's gold-exporting efforts to the War on Saturn on behalf of the Dragon and their consequent extinction in September 1951."
So Vora is mostly Herbert Morrison. I just knew it had to be something like that. Nothing daunted by the loss of Columbia a Russian and an American have blasted off for the International Space Station, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon has made serious progress towards building this sweet little bird. I knew this timeline just needed a few little kinks knocked out of it. Interesting stuff found while Googling. To keep the last post brief I've edited out the stuff about Mona Baker and Tom Paulin, but here is a good article from a secular Jewish perspective called "The Left, the Right, and the Jews." Why am I still surprised by these things? This is "the National Grid for Learning", a government-sponsored directory of resources for teachers. This is "Britkid", one of the sites it recommends. This is a website about race, racism and life - as seen through the eyes of the Britkids. Would you like to... hang out with a Britkid, or go into town?I did a bit of both and it's OK. Conscientious, and I approve of conscientiousness. Utterly convinced that any progress in getting along is the result of laws demanding that we should, but, let's face it, the libertarian meme on that issue has yet to pentrate very far. The author, Chris Gaine, spent many a wakeful hour worrying about the extent to which our nine sample Britkids should bear the weight of representing stereotypes; too much and it defeats the object, too little and, as the author puts it: ...this would have given an entirely untypical picture and failed to make some essential points about the social ramifications of racism.There is one little form of stereotyping, however, that the author has not spent any time at all worrying about. He or she ('Chris' could be either) has a page called 'Right Wing' Movements. We do have those quotation marks around the first two words of the title, but any momentary thought that they presage an examination of how and why the sozialistiche bit came to be in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei is soon quashed. There are one or two references to murders and firebombings by extreme right wing groups, but in general this website, supported by a government body for use in schools, is quite happy to to make no distinction between the BNP and the Conservative Party. This is why it's important here to have some understanding of who the Nazis were, and what happened when they were in power in Germany. Their persecution of minority ethnic people is an extreme example of what a right wing movement can do...By any normal definition of "right wing", Jose Maria Aznar's ruling Popular Party is among them. ...Their ideas are often supported by right wing organisations in America who feel that although many different minority ethnic people now populate America, there is still a chance that Europe might 'avoid' being populated by so many different groups.In some ways this is not my problem. In the World's Smallest Political Quiz I come at the top, not at the right. But there is something very wrong when children are taught, by a government approved website (have I got that point across yet?), that the political beliefs of half the country are synonymous with racism, or that the right wing is the only source of racism, or that the right wing is the only source of anti-semitism. By disallowing all but one side of the political spectrum's sincerity in opposing racial hatred, they are cutting off the branch upon which they sit. Some of the real 'Britkids' reading this, never having been taught any logic, will decide that if being right wing means being racist then so be it. UPDATE (30/04): I sent a note pointing out this post to Chris Gaines. He (it turns out he is a he) has said he has thought about it and will be changing the wording. Friday, April 25, 2003
Anyone else on AOL? I suppose somebody must be; I can't be the only one paying for all that advertising, it just feels that way. Isn't it adorabubble the way the pre-printed favourites list includes an entry called "Recipies". It's been that way for months and nobody has noticed except me. I was put off steak and kidney by school dinners, but chicken is nice. So is apple, but I think I'm right in saying that recitart would be the correct British usage. Most boring Tim Blair post ever. But it made its point, dears, didn't it? UPDATE: The curse of Blogger strikes again. This time it's the bug I call the "Mystery Tour." I refer not to the "Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy" post, which is quite interesting - and would probably be very interesting if I understood what to do with those MP3 doodads - but to the Ted Turner one. Just click here and scroll up, down or sideways. Parting shot. I just noticed Dawson's last ever* comment : bet every time you go to pee you whip out a hair and piss in your pants, Klotz. No fried catfish for you!Way to go, amigo.
Come, Comrade, Join Us in the Collective Farm! as Vera Korableya's poster once put it, to the admiration of softhearted 1930s liberals from Stockholm to San Francisco. Their childrens' hearts (and heads) are still soft. Colby Cosh points out a naive article in the Christian Science Monitor glowingly describing the way that Venezuelan oil workers once hostile to Chavez have started to bubble with enthusiasm for his brand of redistributive politics, including slashing their own salaries... since the army took over their workplaces. Thomas Sowell on what's wrong with the welfare state: One of the most dangerous things about the welfare state is that it breaks the connection between what people have produced and what they consume, at least in many people's minds. For the society as a whole, that connection remains as fixed as ever, but the welfare state makes it possible for individuals to think of money or goods as just arbitrary dispensations.I was going to say, "I love this man and want to bear his children". Instead I will say a big hel-lo to my dear husband of so many happy years and speak of my intellectual admiration for Prof. Sowell's precise and economical distillation of something I had long thought in an inchoate way. I just love the delicate phrasing of the pricelist for the Indy's new Pay-per-view scheme. Much of the content on the site will remain free to read, but subscribers will be able to tailor their Independent Portfolio to include one or more of the following sections:Makes it sound as if the presumed snob-appeal of being able to choose which options to buy far outweighs the inconvenience of having to pay (and pay plenty, a quid for a day's hire* of one Fisk column, for goodness' sake) for what once came free. Some copywriter worked hard on those words. Appreciate them. I feel a cold wind blowing over all these blogs of ours.
*Just to clarify here, you have to pay them.
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Which country is about to overtake Sweden as having the highest level of government spending per head in Europe? Which country spends more of its national income on health than any other country in the developed world? Which country has the lowest life expectancy in Europe? The answer is the same for all three questions. (Via David Farrer - to whom congratulations, BTW. Scroll up to see why.) Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Want a little anger before you go to sleep tonight? I meant to post this hard-hitting Michelle Malkin article quoted by Joanne Jacobs earlier but happy scenes of Eastertide drove it from my mind. Now I'm back to my usual grouchy self, why should you be happy? Joanne certainly isn't. Scroll down to her comments at the end: Pre-schoolers can be "activists" for more TV or later bed times. When it comes to military and foreign affairs, pre-schoolers can be cute, little puppets for the person who controls snack time. Scaring pre-schoolers into thinking the Blue Angels are going to bomb Seattle . . . That's not fair. UPDATE: The link within a link takes me to the wrong Michelle Malkin article. I could have sworn it was working before. I'm on the case.... Aha! Joanne's link takes you to Ms Malkin's latest, which was then but isn't now the kiddy peaceniks thing. Here it is from the archives. By the way, I woke up still angry. It's not so much the political indoctrination of pre-schoolers, disgraceful though that is, it's the deliberate lies told to put the children in fear of their lives. "Respect our words, Blue Angels. Respect kids' words. Don't kill people."It is not clear whether the words above are quotations from the children or Ann Pelo taking it upon herself to speak in their voice, although the former quotation, particularly, sounds like activist-speak not toddler-speak. It is clear that she felt it quite OK to leave her charges under the impression that the Blue Angels, the US Navy's equivalent of the RAF's Red Arrows, might really turn round and bomb their local library. Perhaps she justified herself on the grounds that, well, they do bomb Iraqi children (she would, of course, ignore the unprecedented success in avoiding civilian casualties in the war just ended) and so it's morally right that American four year olds should feel the same fear. A whole generation of Irish writers, I sometimes think, became writers in order to finally express their resentment about the way their Catholic schools would terrify pupils with visions of hellfire - but at least the monks and nuns believed in the hellfire themselves and were passing on the truth as they saw it. This woman Pelo inflicts psychological torture on children in order to bring them to her version of correct thinking: the very charge sometimes justly laid upon Christian educators. But Ann Pelo doesn't think the Blue Angels will bomb Seattle, she just thinks it useful that the children she teaches should.
LATER: Just out of interest, This link from 'Rethinking Schools Online' and this blurb about 'That's Not Fair' provide more insight into her thinking (such as the chapter heading 'Preparing the Travelers: Fostering Dispositions for Activism in Young Children'). You know, it is probable that she did eventually get round to reassuring the children that they were not about to be killed by US Navy pilots, having allowed them to think otherwise for long enough to produce the stuff about the library. Yet in the 'Rethinking Schools Online' link, when talking about derogatory racist stereotypes arising in play, she rightly says that the teacher should immediately step in to give the children a more accurate view of the world. Waiting for permission. One of Junius' correspondents writing from China points out how China's authoritarian culture weakened its response to SARS. Tuesday, April 22, 2003
More than one hot cross bun. Remember how blogger David Holford got a letter full of Lawyer Macho from Tower Hamlets council after publishing a post called Hot Cross Councils (scroll down) a little while ago? You can read his updates here, but it seems he wasn't the only one who came under the Sauron-like gaze of the redoubtable Tower Hamlets Head of Communications. I posted about David Holford's experience on this blog and on Samizdata, and Joanne Jacobs commented that she had got the same letter, or rather Jewish World Review which linked via Fox to her blog post on the matter had got it. They ignored it. I wonder how many other sites had the same letter, and how many of them complied with Tower Hamlets' demands through fear? And I wonder how much of the Community charge so gladly paid by the citizenry of Tower Hamlets goes into employing officials to blogsurf looking for unfavourable mention of their doings?
NEW exciting bonus post!!!! This post was originally a half-written version of the one above which first dis and then re-appeared in the system somehow. Now it has been reborn as an exciting new Galloway Hypothesis #5: Agatha Christie Rides Again. Remember the one where the chap plants evidence against himself for a murder he did actually commit, his motive being not contrition but a cunning plan to be tried for the murder, have the case break down because the evidence is flimsy and then be protected by the double-jeopardy rule forever.... In this version Galloway (or, far more plausibly, a Galloway-friendly person or organisation acting entirely without Mr Galloway's knowledge or consent, M'lud) fabricates and plants evidence of dramatic, obvious and well-paid treachery, anticipating the libel trial. The trial occurs, breaks down when Abdul Al-Somebody confesses to having made up the letter, and no-one ever dares investigate the remaining evidence for a less well-paid and more ambiguous, but still disgraceful, form of cooperation with Saddam Hussein.
My ingenuity astonishes even me. The Telegraph is very sad that we can't hang Mr Galloway. I've often thought the same. Oh, my ears and whiskers, there will be the mother of all libel trials if they're wrong about this.
Iain Murray thinks they're right. I daren't, I simply daren't, fully trust anything so utterly confirmatory of all my prejudices.
Hypothesis #1: Secret service black op. A little obvious methinks, and probably Saint Tony wouldn't want to know about it, but it's not as if they haven't done some breathtakingly ruthless things.
Hypothesis #2: Prankster. People are funny sometimes, and about some pretty grim subjects too. Remember the Observer's Farzad Bazoft, hanged by Saddam Hussein in 1990 in part because it was someone's idea of a joke to get the papers to say he was a spy? (I can't find anything on the internet about the hoax angle, but my memory insists that some such claim was one of a series of hoaxes perpetrated on British newspapers at about that time.) In favour of this hypothesis is the story's very appeal.
Hypothesis #3: Cultural confusion. In this one Galloway really does think he's raising money for worthy causes (however misguided his definition of worthy), but his Iraqi opposite number thinks he's taking a bribe because that's what he'd be doing.
Hypothesis #4: Tra-la-la boom -ze -ay, we're gonna hang Gall -o - way... Howdya wangle that, you jammy b... And his comments are up the spout, preventing me from fully expressing my envy. UPDATE: His archives are even further up the spout. It's Briffa I'm talking about. You know, Peter "Just a little thing I dashed off for the Times" Briffa. |
