And speaking of rain, so here I am in Los Angeles, having escaped dreary grey London for a while and…
…it has been pissing down with rain here for 11 days now! Wonderful.
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January 10th, 2005 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Severe irony has swept the northern parts of Britain over this weekend. Samizdata readers may be interested to know that Britain, the north of it especially, has been afflicted with flooding caused by the old fashioned method: a lot of water dropping out of the sky, all of it trying to use the same rivers. It has also been extremely windy. It has been fairly breezy down here in London. The city of Carlisle, the most northerly habitation in England, has been especially hard hit. Last night, the place with without any power, and tonight I heard a TV weather person predicting more rain for the area. There have been casualties, but the deaths so far are in single figures and look like they will stay that way. [Correction!! Carlisle is NOT the most northern place in England. See comments 3, with a link to a map, and 4. I had at the top right of the Anglo-Scottish border but it is at the bottom left. Apologies.) Under the circumstances, this report, dated last Friday just as the city was filling up with water, is particularly ironic. It is about Carlisle’s efforts to collect money for the Asian Tsunami victims:
Disaster caused by un welcome water was about to be brought a little closer to home even than that.
I do not think that this event was able to proceed as planned, and if anything similar is rearranged in the near future, I suspect that at least some of the proceeds will be distributed nearer home. January 9th, 2005 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are a lot of big shiny 1940s-era aircraft zooming across our cinema screens at the moment. Yeh! We have had Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, we are due to get the remake of The Flight of Phoenix, based on the wonderful old movie starring James Stewart, and I have just returned from watching The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio as mogul, test pilot and eccentric, Howard Hughes. It is a fine film, and makes a number of important points about the man himself, the nature of doing business in America in the mid-20th Century and the evolution of modern air travel. The story is quite well known of how a rich young oil family son becomes a major player in the aviation industry, challenges rivals like PanAm, produces smash-hit movies, before descending into madness and solitude. Director Martin Scorcese has long been fascinated with Hughes’ tale and gets DiCaprio to convey the mixture of driving ambition, brilliant engineering skills, bravery and craziness. Hughes could be seen, from one vantage point as an almost Randian-style business hero, challenging rivals like PanAm, whose boss was played with appropriate menacing charm by Alec Baldwin. There are two great scenes which get the pro-enterprise, unpretentious side of Hughes across. He drives with his then girlfriend, Katherine Hepburn, excellently played by Cate Blanchett, to see Hepburn’s family. At lunch, Hepburn’s mother, instantly declares to Hughes that “we are all socialists here”, and “I do hope you are not a Republican”, and Hughes, bless him, looking around the vast mansion and its grounds, is too dumbstruck at these comments to make a fast and smart reply. Recovering his composure, later Hughes tells the preening Hepburns that his favourite reading is technical engineering reports on planes, which of course has the welcome effect of shutting the ghastly Hepburns up. In a later scene, set in 1947 when Hughes is fighting for the future of his airline TWA against the monopolistic ambitions PanAm in cahoots with the U.S. Senate, Hughes makes a number of fine points about competition and business risk-taking that almost got me cheering in the stalls. Hughes wins his battle and PanAm is forced to concede. Hughes was a troubled man and spent the last two decades of his life in circumstances so lonely and depressed that it of course will colour one’s view of his life in the round. But I came away from the film feeling a certain admiration for Hughes in how he was willing to challenge the status quo. Long after people have forgotten corrupt U.S. senators and complacent airline bosses, they will remember the man who built and flew some amazing planes. I also cannot help but wonder whether people will think something similar in future about our contemporary airline boss and daredevil man of action, Britain’s own Richard Branson. We shall see. 
January 9th, 2005 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
They’ve been getting plenty of mad props from all over the ‘sphere, and rightly so: no one bashes the UN better than Diplomad. Every self-absorbed, self-interested, counterproductive flaw you ever imagined the UN had, has been on display in response to the tsunami, and Diplomad has the goods.
We can never get too much UN-bashing here at the Rancho Dean. Add ’em to your blogroll, sez R. C. January 8th, 2005 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
At Joanne Jacobs I learned about another of these teacher/pupil ruckuses where the teacher would appear to have behaved very stupidly. 17 year old Ahmad Al-Qloushi disagreed with his teacher, Professor Jospeh Woolcock, about America being great. Ahmad Al-Qloushi thinks it is. His teacher, Professor Joseph Woolcock, on the other hand, said to Ahmad Al-Qloushi that he needed therapy for expressing such an obviously bonkers opinion. The story is already bubbling away on the internet and will surely spread. Al-Qloushi has put his version of the story out there, and however much the Professor may curse, he cannot now reverse this. The Professor has filed a grievance, whatever exactly that means, against Al-Qloushi, for putting his, the Professor’s, name out there, but out there it is and out there it will now remain. Whenever I hear about disagreements like this, I always think to myself: well, maybe the guy is a bit crazy. Maybe, in this case, the essay was a bit bonkers. And maybe Al-Qloushi had said and done other crazy things which he is forgetting about, and this essay was just the final straw in a hayrick of craziness that we are not hearing about. So, I am especially interested that in addition to reading Al’Qloushi’s complaint, we can also read the offending essay. → Continue reading: The lefty Professor versus the Arab college Republican president January 7th, 2005 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has become the unfortunate reality of all things political: celebrities love to chip in with their insights and opinions on the Big Events of our time. Following Yasser Arafat’s death, this weekend the Palestinians are holding elections. As a result, they have been treated to this television ad in an attempt to rouse them into voting, which starts with:
Excuse me?
Wait – the entire world? What is about being left-leaning and famous that makes most people so grossly overestimate not only their intelligence, but also their relevance? Does Gere really think that there are hordes of Palestinian girls out there getting all weepy over An Officer and a Gentleman? Indeed, most Palestinians greeted the ad with a shrug. But many voters, already struggling with the labyrinthine politics of the West Bank and Gaza, say they have never heard of the actor. “I don’t even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere,” Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters. It is too bad that Manar is not more familiar with the Gere canon. Surely he and his fellow Palestinians would just love to take political advice from an actor perhaps most famous for his role as a degenerate, imperialistic tool of American capitalism who falls in love with a prostitute. Or perhaps he would be more interested in hearing the views of Gere’s co-stars in the ad, one of whom has gone on record as saying:
Nice work, Rich – the Dalai Lama would be proud. (Hat tip to Little Green Footballs.) January 7th, 2005 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, showing some political leadership in his “State of the State” address. January 7th, 2005 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have been a blogger for almost three years on my own blog and for about 18 months here at Samizdata. The nicest thing that has happened due to this is that it has allowed me to become connected and to meet a great many people I would not have met otherwise. Not the least of these are of course Perry, Brian, Adriana, Gabriel, David and the rest of the Samizdata team. And of course links and comments come unexpectedly, from people with in widely dispersed places and from widely dispersed cultures with who one none the less discovers one has a fair bit in common. (When I write a travel article, it is always nice to be commented on and linked to by people native to the place I was writing about. And this often happens. But being linked to is fun. Take for instance something that happened this evening. Looking at the refers to my personal blog, I discovered that I was listed in a page of links to expatriate blogs, that is blogs written by people living in places other than their native countries. This is fine and indeed good. I am certainly an expatriate. And expatriate blogs do have certain things in common. If you live in a country other than your own you do find that you look at things in a slightly different way than do natives, and you do have this in common with other expatriates, even expatriates from wildly different places and who are living in wildly different places. And unsurprisingly the compiler of this list is an expatriate blogger himself. Like me, this blogger lives in London. However, whereas I am Australian, he is apparently German. (Actually, I have no idea whether it is a “he” or a “she”, but I kind of think the mindset is a male one. And of course he could be Austrian or Swiss). As he is writing in a language I do not understand, I cannot read the blog. But from the pictures, it is none the less obvious to me that the author of this blog is my kind of guy. And possibly also Brian’s kind of guy. And perhaps Jackie’s kind of guy. January 7th, 2005 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tony Blair is only one of many who has expressed amazement at the scale of the response by individuals to the Tsumani disaster. Just why this particular disaster has, as they say, caught the imagination of the public is a complicated matter. It was photogenic, for one thing. More to the point, it was and is still being actually photographed. Lots of flattened towns and recycled amateur videos of the waves themselves crashing in on everything. That helped and still helps a lot. Like Dale Amon, I think that the media have made a huge difference. Indeed, I would say that this is the kind of situation when we see these people at their considerable best. And I like also to think that the Blogosphere in particular and the ‘new media’ in general were also helpful in communicating the story, as I have already written here. It must have further helped that many of those blogging or new-media-ing were able to do so in English, the lingua franca of the Aid-giving world. The presence of tourists who are (or were) Just Like Us surely added to the sense of involvement many of us felt, and although people understandably derided headlines like this, the fact that celebrities had their holidays all disrupted brought it all that bit nearer home to us, surely. Call me shallow and Dianaficated – and knowing our commentariat I am sure several will – but this catastrophe only really impinged upon my feelings, as opposed to my numbed and astonished brain, when I learned that Lord Attenborough had lost his fourteen year old grand-daughter. Lord Attenborough is famous for his stellar film career, and also for his habit of crying on British TV for the most trifling of reasons. There will be fewer jokes about his crying now. His loss surely affected other feelings besides mine. So, explaining this tidal wave, if you will pardon the metaphor, of freely donated money, as well as political money in response to the public mood, involves many different variables. But I would like to add a few more thoughts to the mix. This catastrophe is, it seems to me, an exception to a rule which is now widely accepted among the donation-giving (as opposed to donation soliciting) classes. This rule is: that most of what passes for Foreign Aid these days is pointless, or worse. Personally I believe this, and I now believe that a lot of other people believe it too, and have believed it for some time. → Continue reading: Where did all this Tsunami money come from? January 6th, 2005 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just imagine a country with a low crime rate yet loads of people own guns and finding a fully automatic rifle in someone’s house is not at all unusual. Imagine that this country does not even have a single unifying language, has a weak central government and strong regional government, yet is politically stable. It has few natural resources compared to many other parts of Europe yet has low unemployment, a diverse economy and one of the highest per capita incomes in the world (about the same as the USA). Of course like everywhere it has its problems and it is not a paradise on earth, but it is a pretty nice place to be and an even nicer place to do business. It is also a place that has been praised on this blog before.  Yes, I just got back from Switzerland. January 6th, 2005 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
With all the understandable attention being focused on the dreadful situation in the lands skirting the Indian Ocean, there is always a danger that disasters of a different, more Man-made kind, get overlooked. Well this week the German statistics office reported a dreadful set of unemployment figures, showing the number of jobless in Europe’s biggest economy to be at the highest level for seven years A Bloomberg report on the story contains the following passage:
But it is clear that the German authorities are still tinkering with the issue. That 10.8 percent of the working age population of such an important country should be out of a job is a disgrace. What I find odd though is how little outraged commentary in the economics part of the press there is about this. It is almost as if the European chattering classes have come regard this problem in Germany, and also France, with an air of sullen resignation. Of course, dealing with it will involve lots of vulgar, Reaganite actions such as deregulation, tax cuts to spur business formation and the like, which of course goes against the grain of Germany’s ‘managed’ form of business so beloved of leftist commentators like Britain’s own Will Hutton. Germany needs to get its act together. Some 15 years since reunification with the eastern part of the country, Germany has failed to live up its early promise. With so many young people, including those from immigrant backgrounds, on the dole, no wonder commentators wonder about the social fabric of that country. They should. January 6th, 2005 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Entrepreneurship does not seem to get a very fair run on our main terrestrial television channels, as far as I can tell. The BBC is a particular offender. So credit is due to the BBC for a programme that shows how contestants with business ideas compete for money and interest from a panel of venture capitalists. I watched the programme on Tuesday evening, and after my initial reservations about the format I became pretty engrossed. At the end, the final contestant, who eventually negotiated a deal where the others had failed, came across as such a smart fellow that I would have invested my own meagre funds in his idea. The impression I got was that the producers asked the panel of VCs to play the role of flint-faced, capitalist bastard. They certainly succeeded. I disliked all of them intensely. No doubt that was the goal of the producers, but despite all that, I could not fail to be impressed by the enthusiasm of the wanna-be entrepreneurs. The BBC may not fully realise it, but it is spreading the entrepreneurial meme. January 5th, 2005 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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