If you are a lover of aviation history, you may want to help them out.
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There are two ways to reduce the connection between politicians and money. One is to reduce the role of money. The other is to reduce the role of politicians. I choose the latter. I contend that reducing the role of money of politics in order to make politics more honest is like trying to make airplanes safer by reducing the role of gravity. Let’s get money out of politics by making politicians less powerful. – Russell Roberts (over a week ago now but surely worth being made to linger a little) September 16th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I just found out about this good news in Pennsylvania:
This is particularly heartening to me as I vote absentee in Pennsylvania. September 16th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I had long intended to write a post on the issues thrown up by the Max Mosley case. Basically I was going to ask the readers of the post to help me come up with a principled justification for thinking what I do think, namely that the News of the World did not have the right to sneak a camera into Mosley’s commercial sex session and yet the New York Times did have the right to expose Elliot Spitzer’s commercial sex session. “Private citizen versus politician” looked like it was giving me the answer I wanted, but the post kept off veering into the issue of the implied contract of confidentiality between prostitute and client. As it happens, Spitzer was not betrayed by his prostitute but what if he had been? I strongly disapprove of adultery. I disapprove, though much less strongly, of fornication. (I confess that I take a certain transgressive pleasure in writing that last sentence on Samizdata.) I strongly approve of people having the political right to commit adultery and fornicate, including the right to employ prostitutes or be a prostitute. Did I really want an outcome whereby a person became fair game for being spied upon and betrayed simply because he was a politician? Then along came this Jill Greenberg thing and made me want, no burn, to write an almost completely different post. Shame to waste a good title, though. → Continue reading: A disgrace to the honest profession of whore September 15th, 2008 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
The answer appears to be “because some congressman negotiated to have some money spent in his district” (which possibly precludes sanity) but it still rather boggles the mind. September 15th, 2008 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bloody hell, I did not see this coming. Bank of America has bought the 94-year-old brokerage, Merrill Lynch, for a cool $50 billion after the latter firm got hammered by worries about its ability to sustain huge losses. Meanwhile, the investment bank Lehman Brothers, one of the veterans of Wall Street’s banking sector, has gone bankrupt. I know a lot of people who work for both places. I imagine that the atmsophere is grim. About the best that can be said about all this is that at least the Fed, or the US taxpayer, have not been asked this time to ride to the rescue, as was partly the case with the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, as that deal was underwritten by guarantees by the Fed. At last, it has dawned on policymakers that hurling more public funds into the black hole of the current financial mess merely prolongs the agony; it does not end it. That, of course, is zero consolation to the thousands of people who will lose their jobs from these institutions. This may be the “dark that comes before the dawn”, but it will not feel like that if you are close to the action. I just hope that politicians resist the urge to lock the door after the horse has bolted by imposing new reams of pointless legislation. We have already had endless efforts by central bankers and other luminaries to impose capital requirements on banks through what is known as the Basel process, and a fat lot of good that has done. What is pretty clear from my own vantage point is that we are seeing the culmination of a credit and asset price bubble that has burst very nastily. Relearning the merits of sound money is going to be painful. A point for the economists to ponder over is whether the use of complex financial products like derivatives have concentrated the risks of financial collapses or made it easier to spread those risks around, so that although there is pain, it is not lethal to an entire economy. I incline to the latter view. September 15th, 2008 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a small conjecture concerning the claim that secret racism may be causing US pollsters to overestimate Barack Obama’s true support, which I have most recently been reading about in this article.
Maybe the concealment is real, and maybe some of what is being concealed is indeed racism, but maybe some of it is something else. What if a lot of people secretly oppose Obama being the President for good non-racist reasons, but fear of getting involved in arguments which will involve them being accused of racism, even just thought to be racists, by annoying pollsters? Although not Obama supporters, such people just say “I will vote Obama” to avoid even the hint of such unpleasantness. They will not be voting Obama, because they think he is a vacuous windbag, from Chicago, too thin, dodgy on Iraq, or because they don’t care for Biden, whatever. They will be voting for McCain for similarly varied reasons, other than McCain’s mere whiteness. But they fear that the pollsters they are talking to might suspect otherwise, and who needs that grief? For that to make sense, it is necessary to believe that people care what stupid strangers think of them. But surely, at least some do. I certainly care, a bit, what people whom I hardly rate at all think of me. I don’t like being cursed for my lack of generosity by drunkards in the street, or shouted at by people who are clearly rather unstable, or denounced for bumping into someone by someone who actually bumped into me. I don’t like it when a mere fleeting expression on the face of such a person even suggests such critical thoughts on their part. None of this matters to me very much. Such slights are very quickly forgotten But then again, nor would lying about my true voting intentions to some annoying pollster in what is, after all, supposed to be a secret ballot. Remember that merely replying that “most people” would never think like this is no answer, although a sadly frequent error when all that is being surmised is that a few people might be persuaded to act differently by an oddity in their environment, although not a majority, and certainly not everybody. This is a surmised marginal effect, influencing a few but ignored by most, like a small change in the price of a chocolate bar. To dismiss what I am suggesting, you would have to believe either that nobody thinks thus, or that there are other concerns – what concerns? – that might cancel out such tendencies. Just a thought. No link, because I have not seen anyone else say such a thing, although I’m sure plenty have. If not, I am sure that some have thought this. More US election speculations from me here, which has links to more. I am flattered that the mighty Guido Fawkes thought this piece worth linking to in his Seen Elsewhere section, although blink and you would miss that, because Guido sees a lot. UDATED UPDATE Sunday evening. The link chaos of the final paragraph is now all corrected. Posting errors by me have been cleaned up and my own blog is now back in business. Apologies for all the confusion, and apologies also for spelling apologies wrongly in the previous version of this update. September 14th, 2008 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bruce Dickinson, front man for the heavy metal rock group, Iron Maiden, is a qualified civil aviation pilot and was involved in flying home tourists left stranded by the collapse of a UK tourist agency. A nice story. Of course, if I am on a flight that Bruce is piloting, I’ll insist he plays something really, really loud during takeoff. Go Bruce! September 14th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. – Thomas Paine, from The Age of Reason September 13th, 2008 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 13th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
The National Space Society held a press event at the National Press Club today in conjunction with the Discovery Channel to announce the results of power beaming tests carried out in the Hawaiian Islands earlier this year, between January and April. The testing was funded and filmed by the Discovery Channel as an episode of an eight part ‘Discovery Project Earth’ series and should be airing tonight in the US. The briefing was given by John C. Mankins, COO of Managed Energy Technologies LLC who actually built and carried out the tests and shared the podium with Mark Hopkins, Senior Vice President of the National Space Society. The house was packed, standing room only with more people in the hallway,.according to an attendee whom I interviewed. John Mankins and his crew built a portable and modular energy transmission system for under a million dollars. This was not just a technological feasiblity study. We have known for decades that it is possible to transmit power via microwaves over long distances. What the Mankins test showed was how it can be done in a real world situation. They had to work around bureaucratic approvals which limited the total power; they had to deal with tribal religious requirements that nothing be left on the sacred volcano over night and they had to build equipment that could be carried to a site, plugged together, aimed and turned on. They succeeded. 1 watt of power was beamed from a portable antenna on Maui to a small receiving antenna on Hawaii, 147 kilometers away. The equipment was not engineered for efficiency nor high power, both of which are possible. Mankins and the Discovery Channel team have succeeded in what they set out to do: they have an iconic real world demonstration that shows the key technology behind Geosynchronous Solar Power Satellites works. September 12th, 2008 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a comment at Coffee House on this posting:
This is from “alan” and is comment number nine, at 8.09am. As a political prophecy I think it is barking moonbattery. But as a description of economic reality, does what alan says, suicide note capitals and all (“SUCH a policy”), perhaps have merit? I have long believed that leaving the EU would be good for Britain’s economy, quite aside from such incidentals as the rule of law rather versus rule by the mere say-so of rulers, and in due course getting dragged into whatever European civil wars accompany the eventual break-up of the EU. But I have tended to assume that leaving the EU in the nearer future would inevitably involve a period of economic bad news, during which the associated dislocations – and the EU’s enraged punishments – would be immediate, but during which the clear eventual benefits to Britain’s economy would be somewhat slower to materialise. However, would leaving the EU be a short-term fix for Britain’s present economic woes? Would it have the immediate benefits that alan claims for it? If so, that would be a meme worth getting behind. UPDATE: Some interesting EUro-commentary from Guido. September 12th, 2008 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
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