George Monbiot aka Moonbat has joined the great and the good in the 2004 edition of Who’s Who, described as environmentalist and writer.
Oh dear.
(in today’s Telegraph’s print edition)
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George Monbiot aka Moonbat has joined the great and the good in the 2004 edition of Who’s Who, described as environmentalist and writer. Oh dear. (in today’s Telegraph’s print edition) With a rapidity which defies belief, Mr Bezos, of Amazon.com, has delivered to my grasping hand Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense, and a copy of Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, direct from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, via standard shipping, in less than a week. Remarkable. I thought I’d warm myself up for the big one, from Herr Hoppe, with the 1944 classic from Herr Von Mises. And what a true classic it is. I’m only on page 19, of its one hundred and thirty four pages, but already it has staggered me with its guillotine-sharp language, its brutal power, and its Germanic eloquence. Magnificent. We simply are unworthy of this greatest of the twentieth century’s bearers of the flame of liberty. One quote has already caught my eye, after a recent David Carr article:
Wired has an article on how to have a national ID card that doesn’t threaten civil liberties.
Read the whole thing. The most relevant, in my opinion, is the conclusion of the article that says that according to Steven Brill the pressure for ID cards will be overwhelming after the next attack, so a well-designed one is better than a desperate one. It is not entirely without merit to say that rather than fixating on whether ID cards threaten privacy, civil libertarians and techno-positivists should explore security measures that might actually thwart terrorism. This might take the wind off the governments’ sail to introduce feel-good solutions that are invasive, threaten privacy and are ultimately less safe. There’s been lots of talk here in the UK, over the past few days, about the core beliefs of the Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard. This fragrant Man of Wales published these core beliefs in the Times Newspaper, last week, basing them heavily upon the spirit of the American Constitution. About a year ago, I would have signed up to them. But since then many good men and women have directed my thinking towards an entirely different direction. So I wondered this evening, after trying to avoid the issue for several days, if I could still support the Tory party, especially after their former Chairman, Norman Tebbit, recently declared on the BBC that he greatly admired public service broadcasting. So, right up to the minute here on Samizdata.net, what would your beliefs be? Here are Michael’s: → Continue reading: A Welshman protests Spy Blog has an excellent resource page on ID cards. It will also be linked permanently in the right hand column in the Links section. Give me dusky capitalism over Aryan socialism/fascism any day There’s a curious use of a word to be found here, or there is now, as I concoct this, at about 4.40 pm on Sunday afternoon, London time. Maybe it will change soon. I refer to the little heading which leads to this story. The story itself is headed “Blair praises UK troops in Basra” and I have no problem with that. But the bit at the main website that leads to this story says, on the left, just under where it says “NEWS”:
Rallies. Yes, you read that right. Evidently some twit at the BBC thinks that Britain’s army has just suffered some sort of defeat. Please understand that I am not in any way blaming Blair for this absurd word, merely the fool who put it up at the BBC website, and as I say it may soon vanish. These people are starting seriously to believe their own bullshit. Most of our readers probably know Tony Robinson best as the much put-upon Baldrick at the bottom of the Blackadder pecking order. He has cunning plans, but they don’t work. However, last night I watched a Tony Robinson effort that was slightly more substantial than one of Baldrick’s plans, and an interesting sign of the times in this United Kingdom of ours, namely a couple of Channel 4 TV shows about the history of the British monarchy. I missed the early part of the first of the two hour-long shows that airedlast night, but my understanding is that in the first, Mr Robinson started out investigating Richard III and ended up by satisfying himself that the current official Royal Family is descended from a deception, in the form of Edward IV. Edward IV was born in 1442, having been conceived the regulation number of months before that in Rouen, France. Both the circumstances surrounding that birth, and the gossip which it immediately gave rise to say that Edward IV’s biological father wasn’t the King of England that he should have been, but was instead a French soldier whom the Queen had a brief fling with. Edward IV looked nothing like his official dad. More fuss was made when his younger brother was born than when he was. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Richard III alluding to the gossip to the effect that Richard III’s rival was a bastard. And so on. Robinson even had himself a bona fide historian on hand to back this up with some new documentary evidence which further proved that the king was nowhere near Rouen when he should have been to be Edward’s biological dad. It is possible – not likely but possible – that there will be an explosion of comments on this posting from people we don’t usually hear from, because believe it or not, the rights and wrongs of whether or not Richard III was or was not the Bad Thing that Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier, and now Ian McKellen, have portrayed him as remains a live issue among a certain sort of rather eccentric English person. The argument goes that Richard had the Princes in the Tower killed, not because he was a swine and wanted the Real Monarchy out of the way, but because he considered it his painful but patriotic duty to put and end to a couple of nationally disruptive fakes. So, having satisfied himself that our actual monarchy isn’t our real monarchy, in the second of his two programmes, Robinson proceeded to chase down who our Real Monarch now is. To cut a long story short, this real King of England is a bloke called Mike Hastings, who left England to live in Australia in his teens, has had a great life there, and who actually voted for a Republic in the latest Aussie referendum on that subject. (I’m only making this up if Tony Robinson was too.) Mike and his disbelieving and frankly rather suspicious not to say rather contemptuous daughters were shown chuckling over it all, when Robinson arrived to visit him with a film crew. Although, it’s fair to add that Mike did take his ancestry seriously enough to possess his own chart, which luckily confirmed all of Robinson’s conclusions about his ancestry. It was a thoroughly enjoyable programme, and on the whole Robinson didn’t try to make too much of things. By their own rules, the monarchs of England aren’t as kosher as they would like. If those rules had worked out differently, things would have been different. That was what he was really saying. His main conclusion wasn’t that Queen Elizabeth II should now be knocked off her throne. It was that we live in a rum old world. → Continue reading: Baldrick’s revenge – Britain’s Real Monarch is an Australian bloke called Mike! The Sunday Telegraph has an article about Winston Churchill’s lifelong battle with the taxman that continued even at the height of the Second World War. Documents covering a 20-year period were published for the first time last week and refer to Churchill’s “latest attempt to minimise liability”. They indicate that he used every lawful opportunity to avoid tax. At one stage he considered setting up an overseas company to ensure that his lucrative extra-parliamentary earnings would be exempt from income tax. Andrew Roberts, a historian who has written extensively about Churchill, said:
Au contraire! They further point to Churchill’s excellent judgment as to who the enemies are… Message to the Inland Revenue Just before Christmas I rang up a friend of mine and asked if she had taped a television program that I had missed, and if she had whether she could send me the tape. She had, but she was due to fly off to Italy the next morning and I hadn’t realised this. I told her to worry about it when she got back, but she decided to be nice to me and send it anyway. There is no post office in the terminal at Stansted airport but there are a couple of post boxes, and she put what she thought was correct postage (from the limited selection of stamps she had) on the package and posted it to me. As it happened she made a mistake. She put stamps worth 68 pence on the package. Correct 2nd class postage was 69 pence. Now, what did the post office do? They actually noticed that the postage was one penny short. Rather than receiving the package I received a card on December 30 saying that insufficient postage had been paid on a package for me and that I had to come to the local post office parcels office to pick it up. I attempted to pick it up on December 31, but the office in question was closed due to it being New Year’s Eve (not actually a holiday, but a good enough reason to close the post office parcels office). I came back on the second of January, and the office was open. I took the card to the counter, and the man behind the counter took close to ten minutes to find the package. I was then charged one penny additional postage and a £1.00 “handling charge”. Total wasted time for me due to two trips to the parcels office: a couple of hours. Total wasted time for post office staff: probably about 15 minutes. Plus I was inconvenienced by not receiving my video tape until three days after it should have arrived. And this is all about a single penny not paid, which was clearly a mistake and not a genuine attempt to defraud anyone. I tend to think a certain amount of flexibility could be shown in cases like this. In fact I think I would prefer to send my mail via one of the Royal Mail’s competitors that is more concerned with providing good service to customers and less concerned with inconveniencing both customers and themselves with idiotic bureaucratic inflexibility. However, I can’t. Such competition is illegal. → Continue reading: Two tales of customer service, or If only McDonald’s ran the post office Iraqis are not just depending on government to protect their new liberty. According to this report from the Coalition Provisional Authority, they are armed and dangerous… to terrorists:
Is it just me or does this paragraph sound like something out of an L Neil Smith novel? An American scientist, William von Hippel has an explanation for racism. Well, a theory of why elderly people are more likely to be prejudiced than young people. And if his research is right, it’s not just because they grew up in a different era, because Blair’s Britain is a sink pit of immigrant crime, or because old people are brave enough to fly in the face of political correctness. Mary Wakefield explains in today’s Telegraph that a bit of their brain is missing:
I have no idea whether the theory will hold up to further scientific scrutiny. I also do not like the implication that older people’s opinions and behaviour are somehow not results of their rational discourse but determined by a neurological phenomenon. Nevetheless it is an interesting article that caught my attention and so it appears here without any firm conclusions from me as to its goodness or badness. If true, it has highlighted the importance of stereotyping and unexamined prejudices. Get your opinions in order before you are disconnected from them and begin to embarass your offspring. Of course, this means that there could be a psychological metacontext. |
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