We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Reading Perry’s story below reminded me of the word ‘canard’. In English, canard is a word often used to describe a hoax, or tall tale.
It comes from France, where the word also means duck. Now, it was a legend in my family that the reason this word came to mean a hoax was that there was a 19th century French farmer, who had twenty ducks. He killed one, and fed it to the other nineteen ducks, and then he killed another, and fed it to the surviving eighteen, and so on, until there was only one duck left, which had therefore eaten nineteen ducks. And that apparently, this tale was widely reported in the newspapers of the time, until it was revealed to be nonsense.
Hence, ‘canard’ entered the English language as a word meaning a hoax. Or so my grandfather told me.
Despite my best efforts, I have found no evidence of this story online. Perry’s jog of my memory causes me to ask the wide knowledge of the Samizdata readership this question- was my Grandfather telling me a ‘canard’ about the origin of the word?
Now this gaffe by the French foreign minister in Israel would seem to defy belief…
The French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine reported in its September 14th issue that during the visit of French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy to the new Holocaust museum in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem on September 8, he asked – while perusing maps of European sites where Jewish communities had been destroyed – whether British Jews were not also murdered. Needless to say, Douste-Blazy’s question was met by his hosts with amazement. “But Monsieur le minister,” Le Canard quoted the ensuing conversation, “England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II.”
Now please, somebody, tell me this is a piece of gross mis-reporting by Haaretz (not the first time that would have happened). Surely, the foreign minister of France cannot actually be that utterly clueless. It would be funny if it was not so scary to think someone like that can hold high office in a nuclear armed First World nation.
Or could he have been thinking about England in 1190 and just got a bit (ahem) confused about the dates?
Hat tip to the Dissident Frogman for unearthing this gem
I pledge allegiance to the curve
Of supply and demand in equilibrium
And to the principle for which it stands
Market pricing, with low transaction costs
Yields utility and profit for all
– Commenter thoreau, at Hit and Run.
I see that Instapundit has started a bit of a blogstorm with his campaign against government spending. Together with the Pork Report blog, a grass-roots campaign against government excesses might well take off.
I just wish I could imagine this happening in Australia.
Be that as it may, I wonder what the anti-Porkers will make of the latest NASA plans to resume manned missions to the Moon. It is all very good, but NASA admits it will cost $104 Billion and what is the betting that figure will grow as time goes by?
And this drives to the heart of any anti-Pork campaign. What is pork, and what is legitimate government spending?
For centuries, philosophers and poets have tried to understand what happiness is, and what might contribute to it. In recent decades, scientists have started to come up with the answers. Happiness is electrical activity in the left front part of the brain, and it comes from getting married, getting friends, getting rich, and avoiding communism.
– Johan Norberg
Though I am without a car, and without a prospect of a car, I love Jeremy Clarkson. The motoring information is not useful, but the snide asides are glorious. And usually spot-on (if exaggerated for effect).
But here the striving for effect goes horribly wrong:
The Olympics are a test designed to quantify and celebrate human physical achievement. They are not an opportunity for a bunch of stupid, left-wing, weird-beard failures to make political points.
Jeremy, Jeremy, Jeremy. For once, you have missed the point entirely. The Olympics are only the grand jamboree they are because they provide an opportunity to make stupid political points for collectivist monsters with funny macho facial hair. (Moustaches mostly — you should recall cuddly Ken is a recovering moustache-wearer — though the beards do get a look in.) Any human physical achievement is the incidental means not the end.
For anyone who doubts me on this, imagine an alternative Olympic movement. There are no anthems; no national teams; no equipment the competitors cannot personally carry; sponsorship, fine, but of individual achievers not collectives. The venue is chosen by lot, 18 months in advance only, among those places that already have facilities adequate for staging the narrower set of events, so there’s no auction using other people’s money.
Would such an event still constitute a celebration of human physical achievement? Would there still be sporting heroes and heroines? You bet.
Would it be beamed 20 hours a day to the state television channels of all the world’s nationalist socialist régimes (i.e. almost all the world’s ré:gimes)? No. It would be relegated to the status (too high for my taste, but that’s the market) of ordinary sports programming, with each sport taking its usual audience share. The main news would turn back to “Prime Minister greets Chinese Foreign Minister and signs Human Rights Treaty” news, where a quota of flags, anthems, parades, and national self-importance could be assured.
In an interview for the New York Daily News in 1997, the actor and entertainer Clint Eastwood explained how the world would change if politicians adopted a flat tax:
“All of a sudden, what do you have? You have the whole tax system run by a little old lady on a home computer, doing the work of all these thousands of bureaucrats and accountants. Passing that would be amazing, wouldn’t it?”
Go ahead, Gordon. Make our day.
– Matthew Elliott
I fly a lot and have spent more hours in aircraft and the associated departure lounges than I care to think (don’t get me wrong, I am a regular propellerhead). One thing that really cheeses me off is that creature: The Flight Attendant/Pilot Who Thinks He Is The Next Great Wit. On a recent flight our pilot insisted on mixing up his usual spiel (read the safety instructions, we arrive at X GMT, please fasten your seatbelts) with a sort of annoying, endless attempt at making the whole process funny. You could tell that the passengers were getting restless. One chap sitting behind me shouted out “Don’t give up your dayjob” but it was no good. The jerk went on and on for about 10 minutes before, mercifully, takeoff commenced.
A small plea to any wannabee Bob Newharts out there in the airline business: just fly the goddam plane and shut up.
Okay, I feel better now.
Just in case you have not been already doing so, essential blog commentary on Germany’s cliff-hanger can be found over on David’s Medienkritik.
It will be interested to see if just under 12% unemployment has actually got the attention of the German electorate or is it going to be more of the same old stuff? Angela Merkel is something of an unknown quantity and the mere fact she is described as a ‘loose cannon’ by the political chattering classes makes her someone worth watching with at least a soupcon of hope. Germany badly needs an ‘Iron Lady’ so it will be interesting to see if Angela Merkel has what it takes or will the entrenched system just make her one of them.
The election hangs on a knife edge…
Charles Moore on the lamentable Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone:
This man is the Mayor of our greatest city. He condemns the bombing of that city (because it was an attack on “working-class Londoners”, not on “the mighty and the powerful”). But he is friends with our enemies. New York had Mayor Giuliani at its darkest moment. We have Mayor Livingstone. We are in trouble.
We are. The time has long gone when Livingstone and all that he represents could be dismissed as fringe Moonbattery. But he remains in power because he is such a cheeky chappy. Well, I am not laughing.
Thanks to regular commenter Julian Taylor for pointing out the Moore article. Read it all.
Friday’s Guardian carried a scary piece, headed:
Extremist groups active inside UK universities, report claims
So? What do you expect? I was getting ready to say. Of course students like to try on new ideas and they suck up stuff from all sorts of weirdos from the Hare Krishna, to the Federation of Conservative Students (RIP), to the Department of Gender Studies. Some of my best friends are “extremists”. A university that’s a tepid-bed of moderation is scarcely worthy of the name.
Then my eye hit the scary bit. The second paragraph reads:
Yesterday the education secretary, Ruth Kelly, ordered vice-chancellors to clamp down on student extremists in the wake of the July terror attacks in London.
I may have had very little administrative contact with my own universities, but I am fairly sure it wasn’t part of the vice-chancellors’ job description to tell students what they can say and what they can think. And I knew the current administration had taken the first steps to control by seizing admissions procedures, but I definitely missed the bit where universities ceased to be independent institutions, and Mrs Secretary of State Kelly could order vice-chancellors what to tell the student body what it may say and think.
The excitable self-promoting report by erstwhile history professor Anthony Glees (who seems interestingly close to the security establishment) was picked up in a number of places, but I haven’t heard suggestions elsewhere that Kelly is doing any such thing. Let us hope that this is just a mistaken presumption on the part of the journalists involved that all-powerful ministers can order anything… not a PR prelude to the Government “discovering” it does not have such a power and that it is vital it gets it quick “for national security”.
In fact, the only fun and spontaneous bit was booing Livingstone, but I assume that was edited out. If those feet in ancient times really did walk upon England’s mountains green, they’d have found themselves with Sue Barker sticking a microphone in their countenance divine…
– Pete
For our Trans-Atlantic brethren who do not get the reference, the words of the hymn Jerusalem can he found here or hear it here (Real Audio required).
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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