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Scanning the news headlines at lunchtime today, I read through the Wall Street Journal and saw this item, in relation to the expenses scandal of British Members of Parliament:

I thought the headline was interesting, in that the WSJ - still an overwhelmingly US-centred publication, covering world affairs through the prism of certain American assumptions, likes to refer to MPs as "lawmakers". To be pedantic, it is true that they do continue to make some laws and pass many others, but given that their legislative functions have been largely subsumed within the structure of a EU superstate, maybe the term "lawmaker" somewhat flatters the true status of these characters, who are more akin to members of a local council.

Just a thought.

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"When I hear the word “holistic” I reach for my BAR and don’t worry about the safety."

- Regular Samizdata commenter NickM, over at his CountingCats redoubt. He's talking about Prince Charles. Of course, if Charles wants to revert to an age of Divine Right, witchburnings, absence of notions of individual rights, logic, science and so forth, then maybe he should remove himself to a place more congenial to his outlook.

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The British Prime Minister, Mr Gordon Brown, is going to promise nursing at home for all cancer patients who desire this. Such nursing is already provided by the Macmillan charity (hence "Macmillan cancer nurses"), but people will soon forget that. If the plan goes ahead and (a rather wild assumption) the British government manages to stagger on for a few more years without bankruptcy from its endless schemes, people will soon be saying "if it was not for the government people with cancer who wanted to stay at home could not do so - unless they were RICH" (the word "rich" being said with hatred).

This is how the expansion of government happens. The government takes over something (and civil society retreats) and soon people do not even know that it was ever done voluntarily. And, too often, the people who used to undertake the activity welcome the advance of government - "now we will not have to go begging for money" they tell themselves, not understanding that where there is government finance there is also government control.

It may even be that, a few years down the track, some future government decides to abolish home nursing of cancer sufferers ("it would be more efficient to do this in hospital"). Take over and then some time later close (or mutilate) has been a common thing in such things as health... for example the cottage hospitals that local communities had financed for centuries... or education (no more need to go "begging" for funds to finance talented poor children going to the local grammar school, for the government would fund the grammar schools - accept that the government closed them after a couple of decades).

The education "system" (the schools and the universities - with the exception of the University of Buckingham) teaches none of the above - one would not expect it to, after all even the private schools are dominated by such things as they need to pass examinations set by government approved people. However, even the privately owned media is useless - at least in Britain.

For example, today "Classic FM" (one of the largest non-government radio stations in the United Kingdom) just covered the matter in its news broadcasts by saying how Mr Brown was making this nice offer - and had a person on saying how the whole scheme might even pay for itself by helping people back into work and... basically flying pigs nonsense.

As for the Conservative party - there was no opposition in principle (no defence of civil society), just a question of what was going to be cut to pay for the noble scheme.

Lastly where Mr Brown is going to make his promise is worthy of note - he is going to make a speech at the "King's Fund". This was once a charity set up to give poor people health care and it was given vast sums of money (by rich people - but also by a lot of people who were not rich at all) which was invested to provide an income. Then the organization changed its function (to offering advice conducting, non medical, "research" and so on) - but it never gave any of the money back... It is controlled by ex BBC people, and other such, these days. Actually the King's Fund is, therefore, a perfect venue for a speech that will (in reality) announce the death of another piece of civil society - but I doubt that anyone present for the speech will understand this.

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Ballet by elephants.

- Mike Carlson, commentating for BBC1 TV during the first quarter of Super Bowl XLIV, describes the Indianapolis Colts offence as they run in the first touchdown. 10-0 Colts at the end of the first quarter.

(24)

No doubt it must be global warming that has caused the most severe snowfall on the US capital in ninety years. I eagerly await an IPCC report on this!

I can only wonder if Dave Cameron actually reads the newspapers. The first rumbling of disquiet on his caring/sharing Green Tory-ism started last year and it is not too late to get rid of this half wit and replace him as leader of the Conservative Party with, well, a conservative.

Gah. Sorry, I think I just had a 'brain displacement'... this is the Tories I am talking about! What was I thinking! The party that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity! Silly me. Still... is it not enjoyable to watch the unravelling of an overarching global narrative?

(7)

Mental hospitals in this case.

I sometimes get stick on Samizdata for pointing out that the demands of practical politics in a media democracy mean that it is pointless to try the public statements of politiicans against an ideological touchstone, and unreasonable to believe that they believe everything they say from day to day. But I do greatly resent two consequences of populist pandering: first, the willingness to distort the facts to flatter or inflame public delusions and foster moral panics; second, the blithe adoption of policy that is logically or strategically utterly incoherent, suggesting they have no understanding whatsoever of what they are doing. Today brings an example of the latter:

The Conservatives' planning system would remove potential obstacles to the development of new schools by curtailing the power of local authorities in this area, according to the document.

The leaked planning policy says "for the [education] policy to be successful it is essential that unnecessary bureaucracy is not permitted to stifle the creation of new community schools".

Fine. Perfectly sensible. Get the monopoly producer interest out of the way. That is entirely consistent with an implicit aim of Tory education policy (definitely not publicly advertised as such) of permitting competition between schools. But..

Under the policy, as well as planning decisions on new schools being taken by the secretary of state for children, schools and families, anyone would be able to turn an existing building into a school without the need for planning permission.

Which might be good, but the madness is starting to creep in. If any building can be converted into a school ad lib (excellent), then what "planning decisions" could there be for the Secretary of State to take? And how does that accord with a general claim to be in favour of decentralisation?

And when an existing school closed, that land would not be allowed to be used for any other purpose without the agreement of the schools secretary.

Straightjacket for Mr Neill, please. That is just crazy.

"Let us establish a ratchet/racket whereby the proportion of land and other property occupied by schools is calculated to increase, regardless of demand. Let us destroy much of the advantage of the freeing up of planning, by making it clear to investors that they may be stuck with the change of use. Let us put future Secretaries of State in the position where they are directly politically responsible for the closure of any school, and therefore likely to be under pressure to resist it from concentrated interest groups, and constantly preoccupied with campaigns over particular cases. Cottage Hospitals, you say? What are they?"

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A North Korean is on average six inches shorter than a South Korean.

- Christopher Hitchens writes about A Nation of Racist Dwarfs

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There has just been a burst of speculation about whether a certain Paul Dennis leaked the Climategate files. In a comment on a posting at Bishop Hill, Dennis denies it. The police did talk to him. But that's all, he says.

A few weeks ago, in among the comments on this posting at Watts Up With That?, I came across the following comment from Anthony Watts himself, following earlier comments speculating about who the leaker was:

You missed the joke, the "mole" was CRU's own incompetence, they left the file out in the open. The mole was whoever left it there. Steve McIntyre can confirm this, as can Steve Mosher. We were all just having a bit of fun with CRU until they figured out their own blunder, and when they did, they started erasing all sorts of public data on the FTP server.

http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/31/the-cru-data-purge-continues/

I got half way through doing a posting about this at the time, but then I thought, what do I know? I am about as much of a journalist as I am an astronaut. I mean, if I had noticed something, how come nobody else had?

But did I perhaps stumble upon the simple truth of this, told to me by the people who actually know? Simply, the CRU people (Jones?) just left a lot of stuff lying around in a what they thought was a private place, but which was actually rather public, to anyone who knew their way around. Then CRU realised this, and scrubbed it. But by then the bird had flown, as speedily as such birds can nowadays, and, over the next few weeks, it was a skeptic or skeptics quite unattached to CRU who put together that Read Me file. He/They started out that editing process with a lot more stuff.

Dennis did send some emails asking about the leak, but he did not initiate process. That is what he says in his comment at Bishop Hill, and I do not think he would lie in a blog comment. Not now, or ever if he's the kind of guy I now guess him to be. And not there. If he was the leaker, he'd now be working on a big splash admitting it (proclaiming it), and meanwhile telling no lies, or very many truths come to that.

Or have I got the completely the wrong end of completely the wrong stick? Apologies all round if I have totally misunderstood this situation. This is one of those postings that may find itself with an ADDENDUM, saying ignore all that, see comment number whatever from so-and-so. But, maybe not.

(10)

For several years now, most of us mainstream bloggers have been loftily contemptuous of paper and television "journalists". They are ridiculous dinosaurs, say most of us, slaving away fully clothed at desks and at computers that they often don't even own, pushing prejudices and biases that may not even be theirs, stuck in their own myopic little worlds and blind to the larger forces at work in the world. Worse, these bizarre individuals often insist on tramping about in the open air, talking to people who are, if anything, even more bewildered by the story in question than they are themselves. They need to get out less. Don't they understand that there's an internet in there, full of blogs, which they could learn stuff from? And none of these journalists have proper jobs, because this is how they make their living!

Actually, most journalists do make extensive use of the blogosphere. Where would they be without bloggers to supply them with facts and with coherent arguments?

But as for the idea that these journalists, writing in "newspapers", present any sort of competitive threat to the mainstream blogosphere, well, most of us greet such outlandish notions with a pitying smile at best, and as often as not with loud laughter.

But I believe that we bloggers may be making that common error of confusing the typical with the most significant. Just opening up ten random newspapers and sticking a pin into them ten times, and then reading whatever one happens to encounter, doesn't do justice to the potential importance of newspaper journalists. Sure, most of what they write is pompous crap recycled from anonymous political or business spin-doctors and gossip-mongers. But the best of the output of these journalists is often well worth reading, and bloggers can often learn useful extra titbits from them.

Obviously, there have to be bloggers to draw the attention of readers to the good stuff in newspapers. Regular people with jobs to do and lives to lead haven't time to search through great piles of paper every day, looking for the occasional treasures buried in among the landfill. And the average journalist is indeed bizarre figure, with little in the way of a future. But the best of the journalists are, I would argue, worthy to be ranked alongside the better bloggers, and some bloggers are starting to sit up and take notice.

Bishop Hill, for example, wrote magnanimously yesterday about the efforts of a journalist who writes under the name of "Fred Pearce":

Still, Pearce is new to questioning climate science, and he hasn't made a bad fist of this story.

Indeed.

Richard North is taking all this a stage further. Not only does he make extensive use of the reactions of journalists to stories first aired in his and other blogs. He also himself sometimes writes things for a newspaper. He even occasionally appears on television.

Wise moves. We bloggers must guard against complacency. We cannot and must not assume that our current domination of the media world will last indefinitely.

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Every now and again I have one of those "It's amazing what you can buy nowadays" moments, when I am confronted with some aspect of the modern world that is working really well. As parts of it most definitely are, even as other aspects of human civilisation remain shambolic or worse. So it was yesterday, when I saw and snapped this, through a rather grubby and blurry shop window, just across from the ticket barriers at Piccadilly tube station:

I know. 32 gigabyte SD cards have been around for months, and for many were no big deal in the first place. I actually seem to recall seeing a 64gb SD card yesterday also, somewhere in Tottenham Court Road, but for some reason this didn't amaze me so much, probably because the price was so huge that I wasn't so gobsmacked by it. It was the fact that the above 32gb SD card wasn't just in existence, somewhere foreign and only reachable via the internet, but in existence right there in a pokey little shop window like this one that hit home to me. This was a 32gb SD card, and it was no big deal. That was why, for me, it is such a big deal. For me, all this is amazing. I can remember having a hard disc in my PC that was only 30 megabytes.

Read more.

SD cards matter to me a lot, because I like to take photos, such as the one above, and such as the one I posted at my personal blog yesterday, of a new tower at the Elephant and Castle to which the finishing touches are even now being put, or the snaps I took the day before yesterday of the Shard, another implausibly tall new London building, which is still going ahead now despite everything. Or just of strange things that I see around town.

Not so long ago, when out on one of my photographic rambles around London, I had to keep changing the SD cards in my camera, because they kept running out of space. Then came vast 2gb SD cards, vast when I first got one, and the changes became rarer. Now I have two 8gb SD cards, one of which comfortably lasted for an entire recent break in Spain which lasted for the best part of a week if you include all the travelling. Those 8gb SD cards can each store over two thousand of my snaps. And now, presumably for not a lot more than I paid for my 8gb SD cards, or before that for my 2gb SD cards, you can get a 32gb SD card. Amazing.

The point about quantitative leaps of this kind is that there comes a point when quantity becomes quality. 8gb SD cards meant that I no longer had to worry about running out of space, no matter how many snaps I snap. For me, taking still photos, 32gb would be overkill, unless I decide to investigate the world of RAW.

But imagine how much of a difference these cards are now making to those who like to make movies, as they roam about the world. Time was, I presume, and not so long ago, when taking enough footage - with enough takes, done often enough to be good enough - to make a reasonably good home-movie-type movie, as opposed to the sort of home movie I am used to, was just out of the question. But now ...

In earlier times, what about that moment - which seemed only to be a moment, looking back on it - when fiddling about with photos on one's home computer went from ridiculously time-consuming and cumbersome and hard-disc eating, to just plain easy? All because of quantitative things like speed and hard disc space. Then as now, idiot techy columnists asked: "Do we really need ...?" - this much hard disc space, this much memory, this much space on a card, this much speed, this ... much? Well, maybe "we" didn't need such things then, but we soon found things to do with all this this-much-ness that meant that we did need it. Want it, anyway.

The point of this posting is not just to celebrate the seemingly endless creativity of capitalism, although I trust it does this. It is also to make a comparison between different ways of doing things. During the Cold War, it was possible to make starkly geographical comparisons between entire economic systems, between economic philosophies even, between moderately underanged, and totally deranged, in two instances (Germany and Korea) even between separated bits of the same countries. Although the catastrophe that is North Korea still staggers on, it is now harder to make such comparisons. But it is still possible. It is still possible to look at the rules governing how SD cards are made, and at the rules governing the management of state schools and NHS hospitals, to the extreme advantage of the former. Imagine a world in which healthcare was getting better as fast as digital photo storage space is now growing.

Strangely, I was yesterday looking for SD cards that were only 2gb sized. This is because I have a digital radio that records onto SD cards but only onto the primitive sort which are 2gb in size, maximum, everything bigger being "SDHC". See the picture above. And it turns out that 2gb SD cards have actually got more expensive than when I last looked. This particular variant of the SD format has now arrived at the past-it-but-still-wanted-by-a-few-weirdos category. Supply and demand sometimes plays funny tricks.

Read less.

(13)

I am going with my son to the Royal Institution on Friday to hear the debate between Roger Pielke, Jr, and Bob Ward, of LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (Bob Ward recently starred in a Samizdata post by Brian Micklethwait). The debate is titled 'Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?' Not hard to guess Bob Ward's answer. A flavour of Pielke's position is given by this extract from a Wall Street Journal opinion piece (not by him) from last June. According to the WSJ, a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (prop. Kofi Annan) warns:

that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts 'mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness' unless countries agree to 'the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated' at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.

To which Pielke Jr replies:

... 'To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters,'... the Annan 'report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.'

Doubtless he will be boggling our minds on Friday along these lines.

I did not realize untill I started writing this post that RPj and Ward had such a long history with each other. Just lately there has been massive to-ing and fro-ing between the two of them on RPj's blog. Ward helped with the notorious report produced by the boss of the Grantham Institute, the Baron Stern of Brentford. The report just took a serious hit from Pielke, for silently correcting an important number in a table after publication:

Interestingly, it looks like Stern chose to change the report rather than issue an Errata. Either way (though an errata would have been more proper from an academic standpoint), the issue lies not with a typo, but what problems are revealed once the typo is corrected. ... Correcting the typo does not make the analysis correct, just obviously wrong... None of this excuses altering a published government report quietly and without notice, after its publication and wide dissemination.

Bob Ward does not hesitate to use the 'vested interest' smear against opposition. There is an interesting piece on the Grantham Institute's own vested interests at Climate Resistance.

This is going to be interesting. What a change there has been in the climate-change climate these last few months!

(2)

Tom G. Palmer, a writer I greatly admire, nicely calls out some rather boorish behaviour by the leftist writer, Jonathan Chait. I am a bit surprised: I always figured that Chait was one of the more reasonable leftists, so it seems a bit disappointing that he is a sneering jackass.

Mr Chait's powers of reasoning are in any event, somewhat over-rated. I fisked something by him in relation to the Great Depression some time ago.