Valzhalla

Must-see museums 1

2010-06-26T12:05:00.001+01:00

The Comic Museum

"Inaugurated in June 2007, it is located in a building recently acquired by the Municipal Authorities and restored according to a project of the local architects Alberto Mengual and Jose Gonzalez. There is a big space in the middle, top lighting and a metal staircase that leads to the upper floor. You can see the comic figures painted by Elias Urbez and small alabaster windows in the facade."

It's important to get one's priorities right. Though tempted by the opportunity to see the big space in the middle, we decided that a walk on the beach would be more improving to the soul.

Must-see museums 0

2010-06-12T19:07:00.002+01:00

Collection Museum

The Collection Museum was opened in September 1997 to hold the personal collections of the members of the Marina Alta Collectors’ Association.

Here I am in front of this collectors' paradise:

I never did discover what had been collected - the museum was closed for the siesta.

In his master's steps he trod

2010-04-25T18:11:00.001+01:00

Well, here it is, a nine hundred-word email about the Conservative election campaign that is entirely free of content. We do have several more buzz-words to add to Hope and Change, though:

Focussed
Positive
Passion
Conviction
Leadership
Vision

Don't ask me, or Mr Osborne, what the Vision is of - neither of has a clue, because Mr Cameron didn't say. All we know is that he is Focussed, Positive, Passionate and Convinced about something, possibly the Big Society that he will Lead us into via the National Citizen Service.

Mr Cameron may have been "talking directly to people", but the only appropriate reply is "Baaaaa!"

Dear Valda,

We've had a good, strong week and the campaign is moving our way.

We have stayed focused and positive. In the second TV debate David showed he was ready to be Prime Minister in two weeks time. He clearly won on the big foreign policy issues - Afghanistan, terrorism and Europe. He explained how a Conservative Government would stand up for Britain in the EU and was the only leader prepared to say that all politicians have to take responsibility for the expenses scandal.

Throughout the debate David showed passion, conviction and leadership. Qualities that have been on display as he travels the country talking directly to people about the change we need. Our new Party Election Broadcast brings together some of his speeches at recent rallies, setting out his positive vision for our country

Yesterday Sir Philip Green - one of Britain's most successful businessmen - backed our economic plans to cut waste and spoke out against a hung parliament. In response, after a lot of Twitter excitement, Labour have revealed their secret 'big name' ... an Elvis impersonator. An appropriate choice as according to the polls the public are fast reaching the conclusion that Gordon Brown should leave the building.

In fact Labour's campaign is now in disarray. They have been reduced to briefing journalists that Gordon Brown is going to be meeting more "real people". Unfortunately for them, the more people see of Gordon Brown the more they are convinced that they don't want another five years of him.

This was the week when Labour's negative campaign was exposed for all to see. One of the most powerful moments of Thursday's debate was when David exposed Gordon Brown on Labour's shameful scaremongering leaflets. For too long Labour have been trying to scare pensioners by saying we would scrap the Winter Fuel Allowance, cut pension credit and other key benefits, end free bus travel fo pensioners and get rid of free TV licences for the over-75s. As David Cameron told the whole country in the debate, none of this is true.

Having been found out, Gordon Brown could only respond with the extraordinary claim that he hadn't approved any of these attacks. Yet many of them were included in Labour's election broadcast and on their website. Once again he is taking the country for fools.

We're picking up rumours that Labour are going to get even more negative next week. If true, this will be just another sign of desperation as their campaign continues to collapse.

This was also the week when the Lib Dems' policies - on immigration, on the economy and on national defence - fell apart under the spotlight. In the face of the scrutiny that his party has avoided for so long,Nick Clegg was unable to defend his confused and contradictory manifesto promises. And in a debate with me and Alistair Darling, Vince Cable also showed that he could not stand up to sustained scrutiny.

Labour's collapse has opened up new opportunities for us that we will be making the most of in the week ahead. We are expanding our battleground against Labour and now have a good chance of winning many more seats where they are haemorrhaging votes, including Ed Balls's seat in Morley & Outwood. In many seats Labour seems to have given up.

Today David was in Thurrock where Jackie Doyle-Price is running a fantastic campaign. We are also targeting the next door seat of Dagenham & Rainham as well as seats in the North of England like Middlesbrough South & East Cleveland. And we are keeping up the pressure on the Lib Dems in seats like Romsey & Southampton North and Winchester in the South, and in towns like Cheltenham and Harrogate & Knaresborough and across the South West.

Our positive message of change is resonating in seats like these and all around the country. This week we launched our new poster campaign with positive examples of the change that a Conservative Government would bring: stopping Labour's jobs tax; National Citizen Service; cutting benefits for those who refuse work; better schools; funding new NHS cancer drugs; and scrapping ID cards.

Next week we will be explaining the clear choice on the economy at this election. People know that Labour have failed and that all they offer is a jobless recovery from a weak government. But we'll also be explaining why a hung parliament would bring economic paralysis that would put the recovery at risk. Only a Conservative majority will bring the leadership that we need to deal with our debts and get the economy working for everyone.

If anyone you know is in any doubt about how important a decisive Conservative government is for our country, please make sure they watch this short video - 1 minute of Labour.

We have had an incredible response to the Pound A Day campaign - over £150,000 raised from thousands of individual donors in the last seven days alone. Your donations are really helping us to combat the Lib Dems and to take the fight to Labour in new seats that are now winnable. Please keep giving what you can, the campaign depends on your support.

We're coming into the final straight, and we've got to keep fighting for the change our country needs. Thank you for all your hard work and long hours over the past week. With less than two weeks to go, it is more important than ever that we stay focused, energised and determined. Let's work flat out for change.With your help, we will win this.

George Osborne

Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

Never mind. At least Good King Wenceslas Cameron won't let the poor go without winter fuel.

Digging for Britain

2010-04-18T11:58:00.001+01:00

Mr Cameron is such a nice man, it seems unkind to pour scorn on his witless manifesto. I should let him speak for himself, but since we're all in this together, I decided to chip in....

Dear Valda,

Next month, you'll get to choose a new government. But don't just choose it, be a part of it. I mean it. We've got big problems in this country and the truth is politicians can't do everything on their own. We need your energy, your ideas, your passion to get this country moving.

Translation: we need your tax money, and maybe a bit of conscription too.

That's why this email is an invitation to you to join the government of Britain. It might not be embossed on a thick white card, but it's still heartfelt. If we win this election, we're going to give you more control over your life, more power to make a difference to your neighbourhood, more opportunities to change our country for the better.

Translation: we're going to give everyone more control over your life.

Watch this video to find out how you can help build the Big Society

Just imagine: a country working together to dig ourselves out of this debt and get our economy moving. A country working together to protect our NHS and improve it for all of us. A country working together to mend our broken society. A country working together to make politics and politicians work better.

Translation: unable to understand the concept of individual rights, we prefer togetherness (so did the collectivists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, and so do Labour and the Liberals).

So come on then Valda, get involved. The more people join, the stronger the force for change will be. I want millions to be inspired and mobilised to play their part - and that movement starts here. So please, spread the word. I'm asking you to send this invitation on to just three friends, workmates or family members. Get them involved too. Extend the invitation. Together we can build the future.

I'd rather be left alone to build my own future, free of anyone else's force. Oh, by "force" you didn't mean physical compulsion? But that's what your policies, so far as they can be discerned, amount to.

The Conservative campaign manifesto makes almost as much sense as this:

"Last week, I met a black baker, who told me that benefit tourists were no substitute for proper married relationships."

(from Who has David Cameron been talking to?, a source of continuing hilarity to me).

What's the Big Idea?

2010-04-18T01:21:00.003+01:00

Well, it's not too clear, but according to the Conservative Manifesto, the Big Idea is that we're just a big collective:

How will we deal with the debt crisis unless we understand that we are all in this together? How will we raise responsible children unless every adult plays their part? How will we revitalise communities unless people stop asking ‘who will fix this?’ and start asking ‘what can I do?’ Britain will change for the better when we all elect to take part, to take responsibility – if we all come together. Collective strength will overpower our problems.

Do you hear the echo? That's the sound of old ideas bouncing from wall to wall in an otherwise empty brain. "[A]sk not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country". Do the Conservatives really believe that random recycling of buzz-words will win them them the election? If so, they should point their supporters to these guys, who do the same thing more entertainingly:

http://www.fridgemagnet.org.uk/toys/dave-met.php

A couple of samples:

"Last week, I met a wheelchair-bound farmer, who told me that paedo bikinis ruined this country by recklessly lending money."

"Last week, I met a white working-class nurse, who told me that bogus asylum seekers meant the dead going unburied."

"Last week, I met a disenfranchised Chelsea supporter, who told me that Facebook was just getting far too uppity."

[Hat Tip: Rory Hodgson]

We know how the Conservatives intend to cope with the enormous national debt: they will waste money more efficiently than Labour. What they don't discuss is cutting spending on social welfare and the sacred National Health Service, freeing the economy, and repealing the myriad assaults on individual rights passed into law by the present regime.

I fear that the Conservatives, so far from having a Big Idea, have no ideas at all.

Conservative campaign drivel

2010-04-10T21:47:00.014+01:00

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, has sent me an email (contents displayed below this rant). "Dear Valda" is the only phrase in it that doesn't offend me. Let me enumerate the main idiocies:

1) Conservatives think that government can make 'efficiency' savings - no it can't, no matter who runs it, if it is trying to do things that government has no business doing. The only way the Conservatives can cut Labour's waste is by cutting Labour's programmes and not starting any new ones of their own. Which brings me to...

2) David Cameron's idea of a big idea is 'The Big Society' - starting with a voluntary national citizen service for bored 16-year olds. Forget society: abolish the minimum wage, compulsory schooling and child labour laws; and let those listless boys aspire to real jobs, funded by the people who want the work done.

3) Conservatives think that a levy on banks to support marriage is another spiffing way to promote their Big Society. My family, or lack of it, is none of the government's damn business, and the nastily populist twist of making the banks pay for Moral Majority-style social engineering disgusts me.

4) Conservatives think that David Cameron is better than Gordon Brown because Mr Cameron has spent more time campaigning. However, Mr Brown does happen to have a country to run, even if he is determined to run it into the ground.

5) Conservatives think that I might want to fund a campaign of this calibre. If I were dumb enough to donate, I'd feel almost as embarrassed as the aged Michael Caine looks ("I'm here to represent young people") in the ghastly video.

6) Oh, and that logo - green may be the new blue, but if the Conservatives had any sense they'd sidle away from climate change alarmism and its discredited proponents.

Dear Valda,

The first few days of the campaign have been as fast-paced as I expect the next few weeks to be, so I thought I'd send you a quick update on how I think it's going.

We've had a strong start. We've been the ones showing energy and ideas, while Labour have spent the whole week on the back foot. I can't think of a single positive argument or new idea that Gordon Brown has come up with.

It's clear that the big story so far has been Labour's jobs tax that will kill the recovery. Go to our website to find out why more and more business leaders and small businesses are backing our plans to cut Labour's waste so that we can save more than 50,000 jobs.

It's been striking that Labour and the Lib Dems have nothing positive to say on the economy. They have shown that they're more interested in personal attacks on the people who create hundreds of thousands of jobs than engaging with the arguments. Alistair Darling has been forced to admit that his plans will lead to what he calls "manageable" job losses, but he refuses to publish the Treasury's analysis of how many people would lose their jobs.

As well as having the right argument on the economy, we've also got the big idea for the future of our country. We believe that Labour's big government has failed, and that it's time to build the Big Society.

A key part of that is going to be our plans for a National Citizen Service that we launched on Tuesday. Watch this video to see Michael Caine talking about the scheme.

And this weekend we have launched our plans to recognise marriage in the tax system, funded by a levy on banks. Making Britain the most family friendly country in Europe is an important part of our plans to build the Big Society. Yet again, the predictable response from our opponents has revealed they have nothing positive to offer and no new ideas.

It's increasingly clear that there's only one party offering real change in this election and that's the Conservatives. On issue after issue Labour and the Lib Dems are making the same old arguments that got Britain into this mess. Whether it's resisting action to cut waste and stop the jobs tax, or arguing against recognising marriage in the tax system to strengthen our society, Labour and the Lib Dems are the roadblock to change. They are relying on the fear of change and only the Conservatives are offering the hope of a better future. I know which side I'd rather be on.

So there's a lot to fight for in this election - and it's great to see people up and down the country getting the campaign off to a flying start. In the first few days alone volunteers in our target seats put up 25,000 campaign posters, rang 100,000 voters, and delivered an astonishing 5,000,000 leaflets.

This enthusiasm has been reflected right at the top of the party too. The Shadow Cabinet have been campaigning all around the country, and David Cameron has rolled up his sleeves and shown tremendous energy in travelling over 3000 miles in the first few days, visiting eight regions of the country in five days. What a contrast to Gordon Brown.

Not only that, but Samantha Cameron has been out and about with her visits to social action projects. Her blogs and videos are already proving to be a hit.

And let's not forget that there will also be local elections on the 6th of May. Our local government team have been working flat out. We have nominated candidates in 98% of contests - a record - and we are contesting more local government seats than any other Party.

I'm delighted that we've had such a great start. But there's still a long way to go - and it's absolutely vital that we keep this momentum going.

That's why we're asking today if you can give just one pound a day to our campaign until we get to polling day.

If you give now, you'll be giving just £25. Please click here to make your contribution.

That's it from me for now - we've got another big week ahead with the launch of our manifesto on Tuesday, and Britain's first ever party leaders' TV debate on Thursday.

Thank you for all you are doing. If we all keep up the hard work we really can bring the change Britain needs.

George Osborne
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

If "Big Society" sounds familiar (as well as risible), it might be because it's an echo of the Great Society. From Wikipedia:

The Great Society was a set of domestic programs proposed or enacted in the United States on the initiative of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but differed sharply in types of programs enacted.
Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. Johnson's success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress. Anti-war Democrats complained that spending on the Vietnam War choked off the Great Society. While some of the programs have been eliminated or had their funding reduced, many of them, including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal education funding, continue to the present. The Great Society's programs expanded under the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.[1]

No idea is so low that the Conservatives won't steal it. I Hope that will Change...

Why we need more chairs 6

2009-12-28T13:02:00.005Z

And when the male slave is thus immobilised, guess who has to make the coffee? Yes, the Hand Maiden.

Ayn Rand in the UK: Yaron Brook's UK speeches

2009-05-14T07:33:00.043+01:00

Last February Dr Brook visited the UK to speak at Oxford University (here and here) and at the Adam Smith Institute in London. He also gave a fascinating interview just before the ASI speech.

Videos of the London interview and speech are now available on YouTube.

Interview (about 28 minutes in total)
London interview Part 1 - Ayn Rand in the UK; what "free markets"?; the actual causes of the economic crisis
London Interview Part 2 - Why everyone always blames the bankers
London Interview Part 3 - Why the $9B Stimulus Package must fail and what would succeed
London Interview Part 4 - President Obama; the future of the Right

Capitalism without Guilt: the moral case for freedom - main speech (about 32 minutes in total)
ASI speech Part 1
ASI Speech Part 2
ASI Speech Part 3
ASI Speech Part 4

Capitalism without Guilt - Q&A session (about 27 minutes in total)
ASI speech Part 5 - Is it in one's own interest to save a drowning child?
ASI speech Part 6 - Did the Republican Party's move towards religion put off voters?
ASI speech Part 7 - How can we communicate the true nature of capitalism to those unversed in economics?
ASI speech Part 8 - What is the proper role of government?
ASI speech Part 9 - How can the philosophy of Objectivism be reconciled with democracy?
ASI speech Part 10 - Views on Ron Paul; Should Holocaust deniers be prosecuted?
ASI speech Part 11 - Views on torture; Aren't altruism and socialism incompatible; How can we make the emotional case for capitalism; Should we be optimistic?

Among Dr Brooks's innumerable virtues as a speaker is his habit of addressing the wider implications of every question - so you'll get a lot more out of the clips above than the brief descriptions suggest.

To see the whole collection in one place, just go to

http://www.youtube.com/user/AynRandForum

Oliver Williams made and uploaded the videos.

Andrew Medworth, the interviewer, posted an account of all these events on his blog.

Why we need more chairs 5

2008-12-23T15:10:00.009Z

It's because somebody else (that blotched arrangement) always tries to hog The Best Chair, and I just can't get comfy on inferior surfaces.

There's no pragmatic way out

2008-12-13T07:33:00.001Z

Tara Smith wrote an arresting article on "The Menace of Pragmatism" in the Fall 2008 issue of The Objective Standard. She explained that

[w]hile pragmatism presents itself as a tool of reason and enjoys the image of mature moderation, of common sense and practical "realism," in truth it is anything but realistic or practical. Pragmatism has become a highly corrosive force in people's thinking.

Later on she identifies the key features of the pragmatic style (it could hardly be called a method) of thinking:

A short-range perspective

The inability (or refusal) to think in principle.

The denial of definite identity.

The refusal to rule out possibilities.

Professor Smith's article has many examples; but I came upon a concretisation of the psychological process involved in a totally different source, a World War II thriller I'm reading [The Polish Officer by Alan Furst].

It snowed, early in November, and those who read signs and portents in the weather saw malevolence in it. The Germans had lost no time stealing Polish coal, the open railcars rattled ceaselessly across the Oder bridges into ancient, warlike Prussia. The men who ran the coal companies in ancient, warlike Prussia were astonished at how much money they made in this way - commercial logic had always been based on buying a little lower, selling a little higher. But buying for virtually nothing, well, perhaps the wife ought to have the diamond leaf-pin after all. Hitler was scary, he gave those huge, towering, patriotic speeches on the radio, that meant war for God's sake, and war ruined business, in the long run, and worse. But this, this wasn't exactly war - this was a form of mercantile heaven, and who got hurt? A few Poles?

The thugs in charge of economic regulation in Britain and America, like the Fascists of the 1930s, are getting away with a course of action that verges on insanity and can only lead to ruin. As far as Britain's Gordon Brown is concerned, borrowing billions from the producers of the future works quite well in the short run, because the opinion polls report that his popularity has increased, and other European politicians have praised him for his economic leadership. It's true that injecting all those billions of nonexistent money into the economy doesn't seem to have eased the flow of credit much yet... But perhaps, somehow, Keynesian economics will succeed this time round, if only government ministers can bully financial institutions into making magic work.

The mixed economy v. capitalism

2008-12-12T18:05:00.007Z

Two recent articles, one by BBC reporter Robert Peston in the Times Online, and one by Ayn Rand Institute analyst Alex Epstein in the the Telegraph Blogs, present contrasting analyses of the economic crisis. Peston thinks capitalism will have to metamorphose:

A New Capitalism is likely to emerge from the rubble, one which may well seem fairer and less alienating than the model of the past 30 years. The system's salvation may require it to be kinder, gentler, less divisive, less of a casino in which the winner takes all.

Epstein says that the system we have had for the last hundred years is not capitalism at all:

[G]enuine capitalism was abandoned long ago in favor of a mixed economy - an unstable combination of economic freedom and economic coercion by government. Today's crisis, like the 1970s stagflation before it and the Great Depression before it, took place under, and is growing under, a mixed economy - not a free market.

Peston blames private enterprise:

Who's to blame? The short answer is all of us. But it's hard to mount a convincing argument against the notion that the most at fault were the banks and bankers - because they systematically failed to do what they were handsomely remunerated to do, which was to assess properly the risks of all that lending. Their survival as institutions now wholly depends on the goodwill of governments and taxpayers.

Epstein blames the crisis on the failure of decades of regulation:

In fact, today's crisis illustrates the evils of government intervention in the economy and vindicates supporters of laissez-faire capitalism. The traditional, laissez-faire view of government, held by thinkers such as philosopher Ayn Rand and economist Ludwig Von Mises, was that the sole purpose of government was to protect individuals rights against force and fraud.

This purpose necessitates, in Rand's words, "the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade." Laissez-faire thinkers explained how any and all of the supposedly moderate, progressive government interventions in the economy, from the money-printing Federal Reserve to government insurance of failing banks, were morally unjust and economically disastrous.

Peston thinks the solution is still more government interference:

But the biggest lesson of all is that we are a million miles from having created the political and regulatory institutions to help us to contain the risks of globalisation. If the unfettered movement of capital, goods and services is going to survive, if there is not going to be a retreat into national fortresses that could impoverish all of us over the longer term, we will have to find a far better way of monitoring global risks and of bringing governments together to deal with them.

Epstein thinks the solution is laissez-faire capitalism:

To anyone who is unhappy with the direction the economy is going, take note: the free market philosophy has not failed-the unfree market philosophy has failed. Do your homework, speak up, and put the interventionists on the defensive.

Do you think that spending money you don't have, but that somebody else is going to have to earn, is a moral way to conduct economic affairs? Do you think that businessmen ought to be the servants of politicians? Do you think that forcing banks to make unsound loans is the way to cure a disaster brought about by government-induced imprudence? If not, read Alex Epstein's article in full (it is brief and clear) and follow his advice - if you do want to be free.

Here's hoping

2008-11-24T19:45:00.015Z

Now that the weather has turned bitterly cold, I find myself afflicted with an inchoate aspiration. I want to... Help those with less Heating than myself? No, that doesn't sound right at all. I want to... Hark the Herald angels sing? No, not so soon after Halloween. Let's see: I want to... Hide my savings under my duvet? Sure, but I'd Have to convert them to Hard cash first. I want to... beHead the Chancellor perhaps, or at least shave off his eyebrows? (Yes, but hagainst the law.)

Shhh! Let me concentrate. Now then: I want to... um... Hug a Hairy Hominid? No, no, no! I really want to... Hibernate? Closer, but not there. I want to... Have a Holiday in Hawaii! Yes, that's it. Phew! Just goes to show how far you can stray from your real needs when you confuse your aspirations with your aspirates.

The Independent earns its name

2008-10-15T21:51:00.011+01:00

The Independent is an interesting newspaper. It is mostly left wing, but sometimes it presents unconventional viewpoints. Nothing could be less conventional, or more right, than this article by Dominic Lawson. An extract:

John Maynard Keynes, rather than Ludwig von Mises, is the economist whose name is currently being invoked on the airwaves in Britain. in his own day, too, Keynes obliterated Mises: it became fashionable to believe that Roosevelt's New Deal was a kind of successful rudimentary application of Keynesianism.

Yet Roosevelt's policy of massive intervention by the state to prop up wage rates and inflate credit gets a much better press than it ever deserved. Consider this: in September 1931 the US unemployment rate was 17.4 per cent and the Dow Jones industrial Average stood at 140. By January 1938, unemployment was still at 17.4 per cent, and the Dow Average had dropped to 121.

Mises' followers insist that the present problems in the economies of the West have not been caused by laissez-faire, but by the opposite: politically sensitive central bankers so desperate to prevent any stock market slump that they cut interest rates to a level which turbo-charged the debt markets. So when George Osborne, as he did yesterday, declares that "laissez-faire is dead", the Mises-ites – one of whom is the libertarian ex-Presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul – would protest that such a policy was never tried in the first place.

Read the whole thing. Also read Andrew Medworth's comment, which identifies the fundamental issue:

A crucial question, not addressed by this article, is why these disastrous policies were followed in the first place. Here we must turn to moral philosophy. Ayn Rand, herself a great fan of Mises, observed that laissez-faire policies such as the gold standard depend crucially on egoism, the view that self-interest is man's proper fundamental motivation. Government inflation has always been justified by the claim that it helps the poor: ultimately, of course, it harms us all, but if we want to see a change, we must address the moral issues behind the policy debate.

Capitalism is the only practical socio-economic system because it is the only moral system.

Killing the messengers doesn't change the facts

2008-10-05T20:09:00.005+01:00

To the British government, and a distressing proportion of economic commentators, it's still all about spin: the problem with the markets is lack of confidence. Silence the doomsayers, and all will be well; credit will continue to flow to the unworthy, and no one will have to call in the loans any time soon. Subjectivism rules: if you just believe that everything is fine, it will be - so long as we manage to suppress those spivs who tell it like it is.

Well, here's a different view:

In Defense of Speculators and Short-Sellers

By Amit Ghate

Everywhere today government bureaucrats and media pundits blame
unwanted price movements on speculators and short-sellers. If prices
are "too high"--it's the fault of greedy
speculators; if prices are "too low"--it's the work
of evil short-sellers. To hear these critics tell it, speculators have
the ability to create artificially high prices, while short-sellers
can wantonly destroy sound companies. (Ignore for now the obvious
question: "Where are the short-sellers in markets that are 'too
high' and the speculators in markets that are 'too low'?")

The critics then claim that since neither speculators nor
short-sellers perform any positive economic function, barring them
from the marketplace is an appropriate remedy, one that's long
past due. (Recently the United States did just this by making some
shorting illegal.)

So to begin, let's ask what the critics consider a
"correct" price? Clearly it's not the price which
obtains when all market participants are free to engage in trade based
on their best judgment, because this is precisely the free-market
price--a price which they so vociferously condemn. But if "too
low" and "too high" aren't judged relative to
the free market, what is the standard? Stripped of euphemism: their
wishes.

For example, they wish--contrary to all relevant facts--that oil be
priced at $20/barrel and that Lehman's stock trade at $80/share.
Never mind that environmental policy has prevented the drilling of oil
and the development of nuclear power for decades now, or that Chinese
and Indian oil consumption is growing relentlessly; forget too that
Lehman chose to leverage itself at 35:1 and made riskier trades year
after year--if these critics wish for a price, then that should be the
price, facts be damned!

But of course, attempting to set prices by wishing doesn't--and
can't--work, not for Lenin, Stalin or Brezhnev; or for Paulson,
Bernanke and Bush. If prices are to reflect reality, they must be the
result of an objective process of discovery and judgment performed by
interested actors.

So just as doctors specialize in identifying and evaluating the facts
affecting health and disease, speculators and short-sellers specialize
in identifying and evaluating the facts pertinent to market prices.
They make it their business to understand economic facts like supply
and demand, and then risk their capital on their judgment, properly
profiting if they're right and losing if they're wrong.
Thus in a free market, rather than prices being set by wish or decree,
they are set by a rational process, one which benefits from the
knowledge of all who participate.

For instance, if speculators believe that future oil supplies
won't match demand, they buy oil, increasing its price. If
they're right, and oil prices continue to increase, they sell
their positions, profiting from their insight but also capping prices
as their supply comes to market; furthermore, their initial effect on
prices signals to the market that greater oil supplies are needed and
reduced oil consumption is appropriate--efficiently allowing market
participants to adjust their actions to the facts.

So too for short-sellers. If they judge that Enron is cooking the
books, or that Lehman is insolvent, they can seek to profit from their
insight by short-sales. These lower stock prices in the present and
convey to the market that there are potential problems with the
companies, helping others avoid losses in the stocks. And if shorts
are proved correct, rather than exacerbating any price slide, they
actually mitigate price declines when they buy their positions back.
(Of course, short-sellers, like speculators, only profit if their
judgment is correct. If they short a productive, undervalued firm,
say, e.g., Wal-Mart or Apple, they lose when the actual facts belie
their predictions.)

Consider the recent failure of Lehman, where critics claim that
short-sellers caused the decline by obscuring and distorting the
company's true value. The facts say otherwise. When the
government shopped Lehman to potential buyers, opening the books to
them, not a single buyer emerged, not at any price! Everyone who
examined the company concluded it was worthless. This was the fact
that short-sellers grasped earlier than others--it wasn't a fact
they created.

Speculators and short-sellers don't create facts, they seek to
identify and respond to them; and in the process they help adjust
prices to economic conditions and establish smooth and liquid markets.
As a result--instead of being scapegoated and banished--they should be
respected and welcomed for the productive role they play in our
markets.

Amit Ghate is a guest writer for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual
Rights, a division of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a full-time trader
who often speculates and shorts.

Copyright (c) 2008 Ayn Rand(R) Center for Individual Rights. All rights
reserved.

Op-eds, press releases and letters to the editor produced by the Ayn Rand
Institute are submitted to hundreds of newspapers, radio stations and Web
sites across the United States and abroad, and are made possible thanks to
voluntary contributions.

If you would like to help support ARC's efforts, please make an online
contribution at http://www.aynrand.org/site/R?i=rMO0Fscp3HJyqrAW-x5x-g.. .

This release is copyrighted by the Ayn Rand Center, and cannot be reprinted
without permission except for noncommercial, self-study or educational
purposes. We encourage you to forward this release to friends, family,
associates or interested parties who would want to receive it for these
purposes only. Any reproduction of this release must contain the above
copyright notice. Those interested in reprinting or redistributing this
release for any other purposes should contact media@aynrand.org. This
release may not be forwarded to media for publication.

You can also see this article, and others on the financial crisis, on Amit Gate's blog, Thrutch.

CAPITALISM

2008-09-14T15:22:00.013+01:00

No, not capitalism, CAPITALISM - the INSISTENCE on using UPPER case for ALL the SIGNIFICANT words in EVERY SENTENCE, ESPECIALLY in ELECTRONIC formats like THIS one. CAPITALISTS do not REALISE that CAPITALISING a sentence's most IMPORTANT words makes it HARDER not EASIER to understand. CAPITALISTS, I implore you: rely instead on the natural emphasis inherent in well constructed prose. Listen to the rhythm of what you write: if the words don't jive, rearrange them, don't just make some of them bigger.

But if it was capitalism you were after, I don't want to disappoint you. Here's where you can find out more about capitalism:

The Ayn Rand Lexicon for a basic definition and further explication drawn from AR's writings. The entry starts with this:
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.

The ARI's Capitalism page for op-eds, articles, lectures, videos and books aimed at the general public and businessmen

Clemson Institute for a university website with links to study resources.

If you read just one book from the Clemson's bibliography of capitalism classics, let it be Frederic Bastiat's The Law

The strangled remnants of capitalism in today's mixed economies are responsible for the wealth and freedom we still enjoy. If we understood the moral foundations of capitalism, we would clamour for less, not more regulation of economic activity.

Ironing Board Philosophy

2008-09-06T17:44:00.019+01:00

Eurkea! Yes, I have found the solution to my ironing-bored problem. (Sorry about the pun but I can't help it, being British.) The lovely flower has two roots: web technology and Dr Leonard Peikoff. I recently bought a Mac iBook to replace my ancient PC. The laptop is easy to carry and of course has a wireless internet connection, so I can surf from anywhere in the house. When I have ironing to do, I connect to Dr Peikoff's website, download his latest podcast, and stow the Mac on the little shelf beneath the ironing board (I think it's meant for folded shirts). Then I listen to Dr Peikoff's benevolent, frequently witty and always original views on the topics raised by his audience; and I zip cheerily through my load of crumpled clothing in what seems like no time at all.

According to Myrhaf's recent post, I can look forward to LP's answers on the following: "sex with prostitutes, can a whore have a heart of gold, is the absence of evidence not the same as evidence of absence (an argument for God), can one be a Howard Roark or John Galt and still believe in God, why does Roark says he would sacrifice his life for Wynand, does faith lead to better health, and reading Rand's fiction or non-fiction books first". Tomorrow's ironing session should be good.

My opinion on the last topic: read Ayn Rand's fiction first!

Old Hats

2008-09-03T20:31:00.015+01:00

The ancient ladies from sunny Tanagra:

A well-bronzed male showing off the same fashion:

A much younger man in a beautifully polished hard hat adorned with flowing horse hair:

Two other young men sporting full heads of bear hair:

Demented music

2008-09-02T12:03:00.005+01:00

All of the following drive me up the wall:

An English Country Garden.

listen

Gilbert and Sullivan. Tit-willow, tit=willow, tit-willow - what does that mean?

Anything played on the pipes of Pan.

I'd rather be a hammer than a nail

Mozart. Respect - really - but, apart from a few songs, I can't stand his music.

Absolutely barking.

Dolphin Lamppost

2008-09-01T18:01:00.001+01:00

Now that's what I call a lamppost!

(It's in a quiet part of central London a little north of Hyde Park.)

Nothing new under the sun1

2008-08-31T15:00:00.016+01:00

A favourite image of mine, the Ancient Greek Laptop, has been doing the rounds for many years now. I thought it was about time I found out which of endless thousands of Greek pots it came from. An informative post by Vagabond at allempires.net directed me to the slow but stunningly comprehensive Perseus site. The famous image turns out to be from a cup painted by Douris in the early fifth century BC, Berlin F2285 .

The laptop scene comes from side B of the Douris cup - teacher and student with stylus. According to the description,

The teacher in the center, who is seated on a cushioned stool facing right, holds a writing tablet on his lap, his stylus held in his raised right hand. His student also stands facing him, wrapped in his mantle.

For another example, in close-up, refer to Philadelphia MS4842.

Though the classicists claim these are writing tablets, I have word from Mount Olympus that the gods hid fully formed laptop computers in the caves for the Ancient Greeks to discover. Historians who claim that technology evolves over hundreds of years are wrong, because Zeus can create a laptop in an instant - and these pots prove it. But the gods became angry with the ancient Greeks for spending too much time on Facebook, so they caused mankind to forget where the original laptops were hidden and made the successors of the Greeks discover them the hard way, which took two and a half thousand years. The point is, if it weren't for intelligent design by the gods, laptops could never had existed at all.

Life as a bear

2008-08-16T20:39:00.004+01:00

I'd like to try living as a bear for a year or two. The bear's lifestyle appeals to me. In summer and autumn it crams itself with salmon and blueberries until it is fat. Then it hibernates throughout the winter, oblivious to the bitter cold. In spring it wakes up thin.

What happened to the buttery pecans

2008-08-15T22:34:00.008+01:00

Paddy and I attended the wedding celebrations of his nephew in New England recently. From the various events we each gathered two sets of wedding favours: buttery pecans, nicely packaged and tied with a white ribbon. We brought them home with us. And then:

I decided to take the pecans to work to share with my colleagues.

Paddy opened one packet at home and ate a few pecans.

I finished the packet (you mustn't let them go stale).

I opened one more packet at home and ate quite a lot of pecans.

Paddy finished the packet (you mustn't let them go stale).

I decided to let Paddy take the remaining pecans to work to share with his colleagues.

Someone opened the third packet at home.

Someone or two finished all the pecans (you mustn't let them go stale).

Paddy opened the fourth packet at home and ate a few pecans.

I finished the packet (you mustn't let them go stale).

All I can say is: we didn't let them go stale.

Jesus played cricket

2008-08-13T23:18:00.003+01:00

What's more, he may have walked on water while doing it. Rogueclassicism has the gen:
http://www.atrium-media.com/rogueclassicism/Posts/00008359.html

Coming out in sympathy

2008-08-08T22:07:00.002+01:00

This morning Paddy took a day off work because he was ill with a sinus infection. Too sick even to watch the cricket, he stayed in bed. The cats kept him company. Pussy Janeway was sick on the blanket in sympathy. It is time to put her on the market, but who would buy her? "For sale: eleven-year old mackerel tabby, very affectionate, finicky eater, regularly sick on bed or carpet, clean condition, only seven pounds (in weight)."

Life, and other kinds of existence

2008-07-27T10:26:00.011+01:00

A very old woman in failing health, with nothing to look forward to, became tired of lingering. She asked her doctor, a Glasgow GP, for strong sleeping pills. He prescribed them to her. She used them to commit suicide.

The Independent of 24th July reports that the British General Medical Council suspended the GP for six months for

actions "inappropriate, irresponsible, liable to bring the profession into disrepute and not in your patient's best interest".

They found he prescribed the retired businesswoman, known as Patient A, with sodium amytal "solely for the purpose of ending her life" and practised poor clinical management after she took an overdose of a different drug.

The panel also found he prescribed sodium amytal without adequate reason and contrary to guidance, and that he failed to make adequate notes.

Dr Kerr said he gave Patient A the sleeping pills as an "insurance policy".

He told the hearing in Manchester: "She said 'Give me something that I can take if things get too bad' and I said yes."

Suzanne Goddard QC, counsel for the GMC, said what Dr Kerr did was "akin to handing her a noose with which to hang herself at a time of her choosing".

Patient A later disposed of the sleeping tablets because she did not want to get him into trouble after learning he was being investigated by health chiefs for his views on assisted suicide.

Patient A was an osteoporosis sufferer who loved playing bridge and attending family events but feared becoming a burden upon her family, the GMC heard.

Her son told the GMC she was strong-minded and had a high regard for Dr Kerr.

He said she was aghast at witnessing the deterioration and death of her sister from bone cancer.

Dr Kerr said Patient A had "firm views about how she wanted her life to end" and wanted to maintain control over what happened to her.

She made an advance statement in which she expressed her desire not to be resuscitated if she became gravely ill, the GMC heard.

Patient A killed herself in December 2005, aged 87, using a cocktail of Temazepam, antihistamines and painkillers.

The GMC heard she made a failed suicide attempt two weeks earlier using Temazepam but was not referred to hospital by Dr Kerr.

His decision to prescribe her more Temazepam three days later was branded "illogical" by John Donnelly, chairman of the GMC Fitness to Practise Panel.

The panel found Dr Kerr had not failed to take adequate measures to dissuade her from suicide.[my emphasis]

Mr Donnelly said: "Patient A was an elderly lady who made her end-of-life wishes quite clear, in that she did not want to become a burden upon her family. The panel found that she was determined to end her own life."

[Dr Kerr] told the GMC: "I think when dealing with someone holding a rational view of the circumstances in which they want to end their life, it was my duty to at least consider whether he or she had a reasonable opinion and that it was my duty to assist if I thought I agreed with that patient's assessment."

He also said his concern was for the wellbeing of his patients who had placed their trust in him.

Lives are individual. Individuals who choose not to continue a painful existence have more respect for life than those who would deny them the right to assisted suicide. As philosopher Tara Smith says in her book Viable Values:

[T]he reason that suicide can be morally allowed is that life is not intrinsically valuable. Life is not to be maintained at any cost, like it or not. A life-based code is not a sentence to live, saddling people with the obligation to endure, however painful the circumstances. Life is the standard of value and source of moral obligation if it is a person's goal but it is up to the individual whether to embrace the goal.

Who in the world has the right to tell Patient A whether to value her life or not? And, if she didn't, what was she supposed to have done instead of seeking help from someone she trusted? Leapt off the Forth Bridge? Dragged herself through another few hateful months or years of increasing dependence as her health continued to deteriorate? For whose sake should she have done it? The religious have an answer: for God's Sake. For God's sake!

2008-07-21T20:10:00.007+01:00

South African cricketer Hashim Amla is a good player, and I congratulate him on his recent test hundreds against England. No, really. That hissing you hear is not from me. May the best man win, and all that - and Amla's technique has improved markedly over the past couple of years. Unfortunately, his appearance has not. He shaves his scalp and compensates for it with a horribly bushy beard. Every time I see him play I think he looks as if he's put his head on upside down. It seems that making yourself ugly is characteristic of the devout of all religions.

How to do things properly

2008-07-20T20:39:00.009+01:00

Here's how to do push-ups properly:

Really, I never knew. They're hard! I did look up how to do them in The Royal Marines circuit training book, but the text there didn't tell me everything I needed to know. The illustrations, featuring an unattractive, vest-clad man with a moustache and protuberant buttocks, weren't explicit enough either. Videos are better at explaining how to do exercises, and it helps if the presenter is cute.

VideoJug tells you how to do everything properly:

How To Eat Sushi

Oh boy. I now realise that in the past I have offended by taking way too much soy sauce and wasabi in one go, not bothering to eat the ginger at all, and nibbling sushi to bits instead of taking an entire piece with a single bite. And you're supposed to dip with the fish side down! And you're not allowed to leave any rice on your plate! I am really going to have to practice.

The solution to the food/energy/whatever crisis

2008-07-16T20:53:00.005+01:00

I've been thinking about this food waste problem, because I want to do my bit to save fuel, or the economy, or the Ethiopians, or whatever it is one saves by not casting out unwanted food (bearing in mind that it is also a sin to be fat). What we require is an engine that can take in large quantities of stale food continuously, without developing a blockage, and convert it to kinetic energy. The solution already exists: it is called a Dog. All we need is some really big dogs and a lot more treadmills.

The English Climate

2008-07-11T00:07:00.007+01:00

I love nothing so much as a thunder storm. We don't get many in this country. I'm tempted to move back to the tropics, but the spiders are bigger there. I think I'll just stay here and pretend I don't mind the fact that two weeks in April now constitute the English summer. It's all my fault anyway, for wasting food and thus contributing to global warming - "Gordon Brown has urged families to make saving food as important as saving energy as he arrived for a crunch G8 meeting with world leaders." We used to have proper weather in England but now what we have is a Nanny climate.

Lifeboat

2008-07-07T21:23:00.002+01:00

Someone rang the doorbell this evening. I feared it might be Christians, but it was only a woman collecting for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. I gave her £2 - you never know when you might need a lifeboat.

King of the beasts

2008-07-06T12:31:00.023+01:00

Pussy Kirk often displays leonine manners at the food bowl as he shoulders Pussy Janeway out of the way and snarfs her dinner (boys first, might is right). I wish him to extend this sort of behaviour to the outside world. He must defend the home against our insolent neighbours, who caterwaul in the early hours, leave insults on the front lawn, and spray the plant holders in the back yard. If he is to put them in their place he needs a clear example of the proper attitude to strike.

I first thought of the Maltese lion:

but this creature does not inspire respect (though it brings to mind Kirk's piteous cries when the food bowl is empty).

The Chinese lion, guarding the portals of a restaurant at the cruise ship terminal in Valetta, goes too far in the direction of ferocity:

The ancient Greek lion in the British museum, though impressive and dignified, is a little too distant to convey the right degree of vigilance.

Here is what we need:

One of the four Landseer lions in Trafalgar Square, he frowns down at the milling crowd, knowing that one swat of his majestic paw can quell it.

But here is what we have:

sensational salads

2008-06-23T20:10:00.004+01:00

The packaging of the salad I bought in my local supermarket describes the contents as "peppery wild rocket and vibrant baby-leaf red chard". I know what "peppery" tastes like; but Mr Sainsbury, please explain how "vibrant" tastes. The Concise Oxford, 6th edition, defines vibrant as: "Vibrating; thrilling with (action etc.); responding readily to emotions etc.; (of sound) resonant." The salad is quite nice, and I'm likely to buy it again, but I cannot say I found the red chard thrilling or resonant, synaesthete though I am. Didn't get too much of a response to my emotions either.

While you're at it, Mr Sainsbury, please tell me why you consider pea shoots an acceptable salad ingredient. They may be green and non-poisonous but that doesn't make them edible. Don't you know that most green stuff is not in fact edible? Grass, tree leaves, hedges, weeds, brussels sprouts - we don't like to eat them.

All the same, I love the man-made miracle of supermarkets. For a pound or so - the equivalent of about three minutes of work - I can buy a fresh, washed, bug-free pack of salad. How much would it have cost me to grow that, harvest it, prepare it, and have it ready just when I wanted it?

Goldilocks and Christian de Bear

2008-06-20T19:49:00.013+01:00

I just found this off-the-wall cartoon ("A Bear Attempts Romance"):
http://wondermark.com/d/106.html
Thanks to Chad Hansen, via HBL, who posted a link there to another Wondermark comic strip.

The Bear's script doesn't sound like the work of Cyrano de Bergerac. Here's a sample of what Cyrano, pretending to be Christian de Neuvillette, said to Roxane as he stood in the shadows beneath her window:

Little things, pretty things -
Arrows and hearts and torches - roses red,
And violets blue - are these all? Come away,
And breathe fresh air! Must we keep on and on
Sipping stale honey out of tiny cups
Decorated with gold tracery,
Drop by drop, all day long? We are alive;
We thirst - come away, plunge, and drink, and drown
In the great river flowing to the sea!

(from Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, Act III, Brian Hooker translation).

Now that's romantic.

Petiquette

2008-05-29T07:34:00.001+01:00

A short time ago Pussy Janeway ran in with a mouse in her chops. Pussy Kirk wanted it. There were words between them (a little muffled in Janeway's case). Janeway ate half the mouse but this time had the manners to leave the other half for me. Ooh! Fresh hind end of mouse! But I have just had breakfast.

Menagement

2008-05-28T21:41:00.001+01:00

Paddy and I have just done a deal with our neighbours. We'll swap our cats for their grandchildren. No doubt they'll bitterly regret the decision, having no idea how troublesome a pair of tabbies can be, but a deal's a deal and we will stand firm.

Later
Sue and I have agreed a contract amendment: Paddy, Stan, the cats and the grandchildren will all be made to live outside. (It's OK - both households have garden sheds.) The men and the cats will be allowed to visit during the hours of darkness, but not the grandchildren.

This is how life is lived in suburbia.

The Cigar Slave

2008-05-27T12:57:00.002+01:00

The cigar slave is a superior kind of slave. Not for him the lowly tasks of the farmyard and scullery. He is to be found in the upper apartments of the villa, elegantly if scantily clad, lolling about on couches. His job is to smoke cigars for me. I would smoke them myself, if only they tasted as good as they smell. But since the smell of the cigar is the whole of its attraction for me, the cigar slave puffs fragrant clouds of smoke into the air on my behalf. Ah... that's good.

I have thought of getting the cigar slave to smoke pipe tobacco as well, but pipes are a little too fragrant. He can smoke those on his own time. Oh - I forgot, he's a slave, so he doesn't have any time of his own. Well then, in between bouts of cigar smoking, he can open oysters for me. I don't know if there is any natural limit to the number of oysters I can eat at a sitting, apart from availability, and I need to find out before my next visit to Galway.

The beam in my own eye

2008-05-26T10:07:00.003+01:00

I like Nora Roberts and have read many of her books, including some that feature sorcery and celtic mythology. One thing that I objected to in those however was her use of the word "mote" in spells - eg

And each cross of silver a shield will be. As we will, so mote it be.

[from Morrigan's Cross]

The silliness of rhyming spells was bad enough; but "mote", I thought, was not an auxilliary verb, and I couldn't find it in the Concise Oxford either.

You have to be careful, though, before you castigate a favourite, so I looked for "mote" on the web and lo!

http://www.yourdictionary.com/mote

I see now that it's also in my 1955 edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. ("Shorter", by the way, does not mean short: the SOD contains over two and a half thousand large format pages and weighs eight pounds.)

O Julissi

2008-05-25T08:56:00.005+01:00

I heard on Radio 4 that the Belgian entry for the Eurovision Song Contest would be sung in a made-up language (and no, it won't be Belgian). The band, Ishtar, gave a brief rendition during the interview - they had to stop after a few bars because they forgot the words...

If you play the video and can get past the prancing around on stage, you might notice that the lead singer has a lovely voice.

Vide Dicus et Jana

2008-05-18T17:04:00.017+01:00

I've had this wonderful picture on my desktop for a few years now:

I don't know where it came from, but I've heard that rogueclassicism might have more information.

The Dick and Jane Hamlet is also educational - an excerpt:

See Hamlet run. Run, Hamlet, run.
Where are you going, Hamlet?
"I am going to find Uncle Claudius" says Hamlet.
On the way he passes a brook. In the brook he sees Ophelia. Ophelia is drowning.
"Where are you going?" asks Ophelia.
"I am going to find Uncle Claudius."
"Glub, glub," says Ophelia.

Dazed with look-say admiration, I can only exclaim "airplane!" But I was probably meant to say "up" - as this article explains:

The Scott, Foresman series was heavily illustrated with pictures intended to help new readers associate a word with its meaning: a picture of Jane and Sally looking up at Dick's flying airplane above a few lines of text repeating the word up, for example.

That's enough about Dick and Jane. Richard J King has an interesting post about a corrective, the Dr. Seuss books. He identifies two reasons for their success: children loved the hilarious chaos created by the exuberant and irresponsible Cat; and they probably also found them easy to read.

Another important influence, albeit a largely indirect one, was Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, published in 1955. This book argued that children’s primers were not just boring, but educationally flawed, based as they were on word recognition, by which children learn words by memorising them. Flesch, by contrast, proposed a system whereby children are taught to associate letters and groups of letters with particular sounds. This, it was argued, would equip young readers to make sense of unfamiliar words by sounding them out phonetically.

It certainly worked for me.

Update: I found the source for this very silly picture (and here's a translation)

Terrorism by other means

2008-05-16T16:36:00.008+01:00

My friend Tom Minchin posted more news on libel tourism, or lawfare, on HBL , telling us of an interview in FrontPage Magazine with the laywer Brook M Goldstein. Here's what she has to say about the situation in Britain:

...UK libel jurisprudence, in direct contrast to US law and due process considerations, effectively operates to declare Defendants guilty before proven innocent and UK courts have become a magnet for libel suits...[S]o heavy is the burden of proof put on the defendant that the mere threat of suit in a UK court is enough to intimidate publishers into silence, regardless of the merit of their author's works.

A major player on this front is Khalid bin Mahfouz, a wealthy businessman who resides in Saudi Arabia and who has been accused by several parties of financially supporting Al Qaeda. A notable libel tourist, Mahfouz has sued or threatened to sue more than 30 publishers and authors in British courts, including several Americans, whose written works have linked him to terrorist entities.

Faced with the prospect of protracted and expensive litigation, most of the parties targeted by Mahfouz have issued apologies and retractions, while some have paid fines and "contributions" to his charities.

An earlier post from Tom Minchin on HBL drew attention to the publisher Ezra Levant, the victim of similar action in Canada. This link is to the first of a series of YouTube videos showing how he fought back against the Human Rights Commission in Canada, the vehicle used by Islamicists there to silence him and others. As Mr Levant robustly points out, free speech includes the freedom to offend - because the truth will always offend those who can't or won't see it.

Hair time

2008-05-09T19:34:00.003+01:00

Every time I have a hair cut my stylist asks me, "And how has your hair been?"

How does one answer that? I racked my brains, and here are some of the things I might have said:

"It was worn to a frizzle from all the traveling but bounced back after a week in the office."

"It's been dull and dispirited since I stopped the vodka rinses."

"It's just got engaged to a Rastafarian."

But in fact I only mumbled "Oh, you know, much the same..." as I mentally rehearsed my answer to the next question: "Have you got any holidays planned?"

Baltic delights

2008-05-05T12:38:00.006+01:00

Years ago, about to go to the supermarket during my lunch break, I asked my colleagues if they needed anything. "Yes, please!" cried one. "Get me a pack of Finish". I was stumped. Finnish? what could it be? Was it something like Danish - a sort of pastry, perhaps an iced bun? Or would it be more like polish - a sort of rubbing substance, perhaps involving steam and birch twigs?

Finish, it turned out, was a detergent for dishwashers. In those days I thought dishwashers unnecessary (I was young), so I'd never heard of it before.

The Polish connection made me wonder if vodka could be used for cleaning - and lo!

http://www.essortment.com/home/unusualusesfor_swnv.htm
Nothing can make your glass and chrome bathroom fixtures shine like a polish with some vodka.

Leonard Peikoff revealed in his February podcast on philosophy that vodka was his favourite drink (yes, it was on-topic - listen and discover how). I suppose he buys the best Polish. Does he know of its other uses?

Music of the gods

2008-05-05T01:09:00.007+01:00

Want people to go home at the end of your party? Try putting one of these numbers onto the music centre:

http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agm/

I attended a public lecture on ancient Greek music in Oxford a few years ago at which they played a fragmet of the music for a tragedy (one of Euripides', I think). When the music started, there was no actual noise from the audience, but I felt a sort of collective gasp. The music was horrible - not because of incomprehensible dissonance, in the way of classical Japanese music, which is so alien to the Western ear as to seem hardly like music at all - but because of the all too comprehensible sense of overwhelming dismay it imposed. I have to say it worked: I can imagine no more effective accompaniment to a typical Greek tragedy. On the whole, though, I'd rather listen to the Czardas Princess.

Planes I have missed

2008-05-05T00:37:00.007+01:00

I don't mean that I longed for them; I mean that I didn't catch them. In my entire life I have missed only three planes (and not longed for any).

The first was a 19-seater Beechcraft from a small military airfield in Wiltshire to an even smaller civilian airfield in Cumbria. I missed it because I got lost in Bath (not actually on the way to the airfield), but my excuse was that floods the night before had blocked the minor roads I had planned to drive down. No harm was done: I just caught the next flight, a couple of hours later, and arrived all too soon in the lovely town of Barrow.

The second was an Air France flight from Lyons back to London. I missed it because I stayed too long at a meeting and was afraid to drive like a Frenchman in order to get back to Lyons in time.

The third was an EasyJet flight from Glasgow to Bristol. I was at the boarding gate early; but I fell asleep sitting there and woke just after the boarding for my flight had closed. Frequent red-eye flights have taught me to catnap, and I now do it too well.

I'm not a nervous flyer, and actually enjoy turbulence, but I am a nervous traveler. So many things could go wrong: setting the alarm for 4.00pm instead of 4.00 am; having the wrong id (I once brought my boyfriend's passport instead of my own); packing something illegal (I have no idea how that carpet tack got into my carry-on bag, but it didn't get through security); boarding the wrong plane (I've done that twice)... I may seem to have done every dumb thing I could have done at airports, but I fear there are more awaiting discovery.

Getting rid of bugs

2008-05-05T00:06:00.004+01:00

I have recently started doing Fagan inspections again. I favour Tom Gilb's variant, and thoroughly recommend the book he wrote with Dorothy Graham, but whichever approach you take, Michael Fagan is up there with the heroes of software.

Inspecting a document is a lot like de-fleaing a cat: you suspect it has bugs, but you have no idea of the scale of the infestation until you apply the pesticide and see hundreds of the vermin dropping from their victim.

Why we need more chairs 4

2008-04-06T20:40:00.000+01:00

Look: we just do.

Rules is rules 1

2008-04-05T20:45:00.000+01:00

We are not allowed to jump up onto the worktop.
We are not allowed to lick from other people's bowls.

But we do.

Because we like it.

Coming out 2

2008-04-04T18:47:00.014+01:00

I used to think Lorem Ipsum was Latin.

You know the sort of stuff:

Etiam cursus cursus dolor. Lorem Ipsum quisque in lacus et dolor fermentum malesuada. Integer eleifend libero ac est. Suspendisse vitae urna. Etiam mattis convallis libero.

Unable to make sense of the snippets I saw now and then, I thought I must have lost the moderate grasp of Latin I'd had when I left school in the year 3 BPC (Before Personal Computers).

But recently I needed to copy a block of dummy text into an html template... and concluded that Lorem Ipsum wasn't any language at all, even if some of the words were Latin and many others looked as if they might be.

It seems I'm wrong again: according to this interesting BBC article, the Lorem Ipsum text is Latin, though not in a form anyone could be expected to understand:

...For many years it was believed that it was a random, nonsense text. However, Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia...has established that Lorem Ipsum is derived from two paragraphs of Cicero's 'De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum' (The Extremes of Good and Evil), written around 45 BCE. It is somewhat scrambled from the original, with words interchanged and syllables missing.

In fact,

...Lorem Ipsum has also become a spoken language - albeit a fictional one. In the novel, 'Something Rotten' by Jasper Fforde...Ms Next's toddler son, Friday...grows up burbling phrases of Lipsum that only his mother and their pet dodos can understand.

Friday Next isn't the only Lorem Ipsum speaker around. I often have the sensation that what someone is saying to me sounds like real language but doesn't actually mean anything. (This is one of the more creditable reasons for my tendency to think about imaginary people at meetings.)

FITNA

2008-03-30T14:56:00.010+01:00

Can't find FITNA? Found one of the fake versions on YouTube instead? Try this link:

AJM's FITNA

This is the version I saw on LiveLeak a few days ago.

RightCrazy has some other links as well as a downloadable version:

This thing is out there and the genie’s damned well not going back into the bottle. And now that you’ve managed to work your usual magic of murderous intimidation, even more people are going to want to see it to find out what the hell all the fuss is over. Here’s a list of some of the places where you can still download the video and see it for yourself:

AJM (dedicated server — very fast)

Bivouac-ID (French subtitles)

Czech Infidel (Czech subtitles)

Daily Motion (flagged as inappropriate — must register to see it)

Google video

Isohunt (links to torrent sites)

Rapid Share (flv format)

Rapid Share (wmv format)

The Pirate Bay (bit torrent)

If none of those work, just click here and download it from my server (about 35MB in .wmv format for now) to keep on your hard drive. Here’s a torrent link, if that’s more your style. And as soon as I can find it in a format that’ll embed good here, I’ll be doing that too.

I don't know the site, but that particular post is worth reading in full.

The tooth fairy

2008-03-20T20:35:00.023Z

I've had a lot of trouble communicating with my dentist recently, and it's not because I put the wrong teeth in.

It started like this: I needed to arrange an appointment for a tricky (and expensive) piece of work. Using a number stored on my mobile, I phoned the reception and asked how long an appointment to book. The receptionist said she didn't know - the best thing would be for me to discuss it with Ali, the dentist, who would call me when he was free. He never called.

I tried again a fortnight later. The receptionist took down my full name (I had to spell it three times) and agreed to arrange an appointment with Ali. I suggested the next Tuesday afternoon; she said Ali didn't work Tuesday afternoons, how about Thursday?

Fine, I said, but how long should the appointment be?
"Well, you'd need an initial consultation first..."
No, no, I said; I'd had the consultation, I'd had the X-ray, we'd agreed the work to be done, all I needed was to make a long enough appointment.
"Then I think you'd better talk to the dentist..."

I explained, through clenched teeth (bad dental habit), that I'd already been through that with the other receptionist.

"Oh... but I can't find you on our database. Have you been to us before?"
Yes, I was a regular, and at my last appointment Ali and I had agreed the work to be done.

My voice was becoming strained, but through the red haze the truth began to glimmer. I asked if this was the Abbey Grove Dental Practice.

"No, this isn't the Practice, this is the Clinic."
The Abbey Grove Dental Clinic? Not the Abbey Grove Dental Practice?
"Yes, the Clinic, not the Practice - it's not the one in Abbey Grove, it's the one in Charing Cross."
Okaaaay... but they did have a dentist called Ali?
"No, we don't".
Then with whom had she been going to make the appointment?
No reply.

Dazed by the inversion of normal sequence during this bizarre conversation, I mumbled something about checking the phone number and hung up.

The next day I found the number of the real dental practice on an old appointment card. I got through to a courteous receptionist with a brain, operating in real time. The real Ali phoned me back just as promised. I booked an appointment in a few seconds. There is no tooth fairy and all is well.

Of course, if I'd been trying to get an appointment with an NHS dentist, I'd still be waiting. Some people do believe in the National Tooth Fairy, who flits from flower to flower sipping National Insurance contributions and fixes your teeth for free. They get upset when they can't find a National Health dentist to take them on: they don't see why the demand for "free" dentistry should so exceed supply.

Too big to fail

2008-03-20T20:01:00.006Z

I heard on the news today that the British government is likely to pump another £11 billion into the financial system - this time to help high street banks keep on lending. Just whose billions is the Chancellor planning to give to the banks? The government doesn't have any money of its own, so it's going to be taxpayer's money - whether taken directly from tax funds or indirectly by printing money. Words fail me. Fortunately, Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute does have something to say in his short but illuminating article "Too Big to Fail". He explains how the policy of bailing out big banks encourages poor investment decisions at the expense of those who exercise better judgment, and argues that the risk of bankruptcy is the ultimate protection against irresponsible lending policies. Instead of allowing the people who make the bad decisions to suffer the consequences, the government encourages corporate and individual irresponsibility by interfering in financial markets. If the American and British governments go on implementing panic measures then, as Epstein says, "the next financial market fiasco is just a matter of time."

When the Fat Lady Sings...

2008-03-09T14:57:00.006Z

...the controversy about low carbohydrate v. low fat diets may end. The idea that high carb diets promote weight gain is older than most people think. For instance, in the 1930s short story "Jeeves and the song of songs", Bertie Wooster has this to say of his pal's intended: "...she proved to be an upstanding light-heavyweight...she seemed to me a good deal what Cleopatra would have been after going in too freely for the starches and cereals."

This hilarious story was dramatised in the TV series "Jeeves and Wooster" (which Secular Foxhole reminded me of in his recent comment)

Coarse Outfits

2008-03-09T13:47:00.011Z

I am taking a short course on elementary web design. One of the students gave us a link to an example of bad design, Bosfish. What stuck in my mind even more than the garish fonts was the opportunity to buy a Coarse Outfit. I have always wanted to wear a coarse outfit. I can't choose between the Mega Coarse Outfit 2007 and The Supreme Coarse Outfit 2007, but both are probably still in fashion. This page also offers coarse packs, such as the 'Baggin Machine' Waggler Pack and the Shock Core Elastic Pack from Middy. Those do sound vaguely but shockingly coarse. No wonder fishing is the most popular participation sport in Britain.

English Immigration Restrictions

2008-03-08T20:04:00.008Z

I demand that we place immigration restrictions on the English language. Words that have already settled into English must, I suppose, be allowed to stay - all those Greeks and Romans and French and Dutch and Indians and Arabs have been here for so long that we'd have a job getting rid of them now. But no new immigrants! Let us have no more foreign words stealing the jobs English words used to do! If we have to support redundant words, let them be English words, not words that don't belong to this language. We should keep foreign words out before they swamp our schools and hospitals. We have to stop these words from just waltzing into our language without restriction, as though they had a right to be here. Those admitted on tourist visas should be italicized and made to leave as soon as their time is up.

Laughing at anti-immigration arguments is one thing. For a reasoned defence of free immigration, go to the internet version of The Objective Standard and read the article "Immigration and Individual Rights" by Craig Biddle. He's talking about America, but the same moral principles apply to immigration into this country.

Mixed Species Metaphors

2008-02-24T12:37:00.003Z

For example, there are one or two flies in my house. I don't know where they came from, but it is February, and cold, so the flies are sluggish. Sluggish flies! (Now I'm imagining slugs with wings, so I have to pause for a brief memory wipe.)

OK, I'm better now.

Take dogs: dogs frequently wear sheepish expressions after doing something forbidden but overwhelmingly tempting, like eating the entire birthday cake in three gulps, candles and all, while mommy is off fetching the matches.

If you prefer (I do), take cats. My boy cat, now eleven years old, tries to ravish my girl cat, his sister, at least twice a day. His ravenous glare betrays his wolfish lust as he doggedly pursues poor Kitty Janeway all through the house. Since he has soft fleecy fur and a tendency to emit loud bleats when hungry I often call him a wolf in sheep's clothing. A cat-wolf in sheep's clothing, you see - and weren't there a dog and a raven in there as well?

Fear of aconyms: acronuphobia

2008-02-10T18:35:00.000Z

I need a word designating "an abnormal dread of acronyms". "Acrophobia" would have done, but of course that's already taken. Since the Greek root is the same akron plus onuma (name), I thought "acronophobia" might be an acceptable coinage. To my surprise, a web search found this word... but only because of a couple of people who could not spell "arachnophobia". I didn't want to coin a word that already existed on the web as a spelling mistake, and decided that in any case "acronuphobia" would be more correct.

I don't suffer from acronuphobia myself. I'm just the type who might, but gradually increased exposure under controlled conditions has cured me. I'm even developing a habit of making up my own acronyms for my grocery shopping lists:

KBs (Kidney Beans)
BEBs (Black-Eyed Beans)
NBBs (Naked Baked Beans - actually covered in sauce)
HBs (Hash Browns)
RW (Red Wine)
WW (White Wine)
WWV (White Wine Vinegar)
GPs (Green Peppers)
RPs (Red Peppers)
PTs (Plum Tomatoes)

One item I write out in full every week for Paddy's benefit is "NO BEER". He ignores it.

Can you spell Onomatopoeia?

2008-02-09T15:43:00.001Z

Forget French pop music. Have you ever heard anything like Kevin Kirk and Onomatopoeia? Their music is exuberant, tuneful, fast, driving - it's jazz, I suppose, but not as I know it. I have the sample from the website playing now, rather loudly, in one of my other browsers while I type this - over twenty minutes of it is on offer.
Hat tip: Greg Perkins at Noodlefood (Greg himself is a member of the band).

government pickpockets

2008-01-25T15:39:00.000Z

I'm a big fan of Fagan Inspection, a proven and effective method software defect prevention. Note the spelling: Michael Fagan has never been unkind to Oliver Twist, unlike old Fagin. (He is also a real person, even if he does look like Max Headroom). One of the techniques an inspection leader may employ is to have a "novice" on the team: someone unfamiliar with the product domain who will ask obvious questions and may thus uncover unwarranted assumptions.

Let me now take on the role of the novice in the domain of economics. In recent months we have learned that the "sub-prime" mortgage crisis arose because banks had been lending too much money to high-risk borrowers; many borrowers defaulted on repayments, causing enormous losses in the finance industry and a tightening of credit. Stock markets around the world have reacted with steep falls.

To stop this cascade of trouble, the Federal Reserve has decreed a sharp cut in the interest rate. In other words, they've loosened the constraints on credit. The root cause of the problem was easy money... so the US government's remedy is easy money. This seems like a mediaeval quack deciding to bleed a patient who is suffering from the symptoms of anaemia.

We Brits, meanwhile, will soon be forced to lend billions of pounds to a bank.

Fagin would have been impressed.

Comedy differences

2008-01-21T20:01:00.000Z

My TV diet for the past few weeks has been restricted to test cricket (the Sri Lanka series wasn't at all funny for England supporters) and two American sitcoms: Frasier and 3rd Rock From the Sun. I also watch reruns of the British comedy Coupling when I remember.

The big difference between American and British sitcoms is that the American ones are optimistic while the English ones are melancholy.

American comedies poke fun at the foibles of successful people. The eponymous Frasier Crane and his brother Niles, for all their absurd affections, are cultured professionals who pursue happiness and to a large extent achieve it. The aliens of 3rd Rock usually get their own way on earth despite their inadvertently outrageous manners. Though I didn't particularly care for Friends, they were hardly inadequates. According to Wikipedia, some people think Seinfeld is nihilistic, but I find it just cheerfully callous, and I love the inexorable logic of the way each episode develops a trivial event into an absurd crisis.

Most of the funniest British comedies, though, are about failures. The manager in the British version of The Office is so ghastly, and his victims so helpless, that I couldn't bear to watch more than a few episodes when it first came out. Victor Meldrew of One Foot In the Grave is an embittered old man whose character flaws lead him into hilarious predicaments with depressing resolutions. All the characters in Only Fools and Horses are small-time conmen whose scams generally go wrong. Count Arthur Strong could be regarded as senile (I have to say I thought he was just eccentric and absent-minded when I wrote this post; senile isn't so funny).

Coming out 1

2008-01-14T20:43:00.002Z

I like French pop music.

There. I said it. I have now lost all credibility in Britain. My friends will disown me. My relatives will publish statements denying any connection. My old piano teacher, dead these many years, will turn in her grave. My colleagues will sidle away from me at meetings. Josh Dickson of Mancini will have to pretend he's never met me. And the French still won't like me.

No man, it's an island

2008-01-11T16:21:00.000Z

During the Christmas break Paddy bet me £10 that Vancouver was not an island. He meant the city of Vancouver. So did I, but since the city of Vancouver is in fact on the British Columbian mainland, I'm going to claim that I meant Vancouver Island.
One reason for being sure that the city of Vancouver was on an island was Paddy's assertion to the contrary. I am speaking of the man who once asked me if Turkey had a border with France. (For the geopgraphically challenged: No, it doesn't; it doesn't even have a border with Germany, despite the large number of Turks in German industrial towns and the even larger number of Germans in Turkish holiday resorts.)

The Spirit of Christmas (not)

2007-12-23T12:40:00.001Z

Here's my favourite Christmas story:

About four weeks ago, I was rushing around trying to get some last-minute shopping done. I was stressed out and not thinking very fondly of the Christmas season right then. It was dark, cold, and wet in the multi-story car park. I realised that I had lost the shop receipt, which I would need to get out of the car park without paying. So, mumbling under my breath, I retraced my steps to the shopping centre entrance.

As I was searching the wet pavement, I heard a quiet sobbing. The crying was coming from a poorly dressed boy of about ten years old. He was short and thin. He had no coat. He had only a ragged flannel shirt to protect him from the evening chill. He was holding two fifty pound notes in his hand.

Thinking that he had got separated from his parents, I asked him what was wrong, and he told me his sad story. He came from a large family. His father had died when he was seven years old. His mother worked two full time jobs to make ends meet. Nevertheless, she had managed to scrimp and save two hundred pounds to buy her children Christmas presents. She had dropped him off at the shopping centre on the way to her second job. He was to use the money to buy presents for all his brothers and sisters and save just enough to take the bus home. He had not even entered the shopping centre when an older boy grabbed two of his fifty pound notes and disappeared into the night.

"Why didn't you scream for help?" I asked. The boy said, "I did!”

“And nobody came to help you?" The boy stared at the ground and sadly shook his head.

“How loud did you scream?" I enquired. The soft-spoken boy looked up and meekly whispered, "Help me!"

I realised that absolutely no one could have heard that poor boy cry for help. So I grabbed his other two fifty pound notes and scarpered.

But I also like this, which is all over the internet now:

The 12 Days Of Christmas (For the politically correct)

On the 12th day of the Eurocentrically imposed midwinter festival, my Significant Other in a consenting adult, monogamous relationship gave to me:

TWELVE males reclaiming their inner warrior through ritual drumming,

ELEVEN pipers piping (plus the 18-member pit orchestra made up of
members in good standing of the Musicians Equity Union as called for in their union contract even though they will not be asked to play a note),

TEN melanin deprived testosterone-poisoned scions of the patriarchal
ruling class system leaping,

NINE persons engaged in rhythmic self-expression,

EIGHT economically disadvantaged female persons stealing milk-products from enslaved Bovine-Americans,

SEVEN endangered swans swimming on federally protected wetlands,

SIX enslaved Fowl-Americans producing stolen non-human animal products,

FIVE golden symbols of culturally sanctioned enforced domestic incarceration,

(NOTE after members of the Animal Liberation Front threatened to throw red paint at my computer, the calling birds, French hens and partridge have been reintroduced to their native habitat. To avoid further Animal-American enslavement, the remaining gift package has been revised.)

FOUR hours of recorded whale songs

THREE deconstructionist poets

TWO Sierra Club calendars printed on recycled processed tree carcasses

AND a Spotted Owl activist chained to an old-growth pear tree.

Finally, if you want something that is in the spirit of Christmas, try "Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial" by Dr. Leonard Peikoff.

Rules for simpler living

2007-12-19T21:11:00.000Z

Don't warm up butter before you try to spread it. Just cut off thick slabs of the cold butter and lay them side by side on the bread, leaving small gaps inbetween so there's somewhere for the honey to go when you press the two slices of bread together.

Don't recycle anything at all (unless, like me, you find composting a fascinating recreation).

Don't buy socks of only one colour. All my socks are black, but each pair is subtly different from every other pair, and I also have three odd socks. I keep these because one of the paired ones might develop a hole, and if that happened the newly widowed sock might just match one of the old odd socks.

If you have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, do not buy coloured hangers. We have many plastic hangers and I am always tempted to match the hue of the hanger to the hue of the garment. I also feel the need to arrange the hangers in rainbow order. The pink, cream, brown and grey hangers worry me: should pink, for instance, be a subdivision of red, or should the pastel and murky colours be arranged in a separate series? Checked and striped clothes also worry me.

Don't have more than one handbag. All my stuff (and I do mean all) is in a single handbag. I can't always find what I want in its cavernous depths, but I can be sure that it is in there somewhere. If I need the item quickly, I get Paddy to extract it for me, because he searches systematically whereas I just scrabble.

Don't buy lots of household cleaning fluids. All you need is one cleaner (any non-corrosive kind will do), and a dog (to deal with food spills).

Philosophy applied to every day life

2007-12-13T18:39:00.000Z

That's what you get from Leonard Peikoff's podcasts. The latest, published on 11th December, gives philosophical (and, of course, practical) answers to moral questions about labour unions, pain relief and musical preferences, and explains why it really ought to take three people to make a child. The one before (4th December) tackles tatoos, property rights, legal murder and the age of majority.

Count Arthur Strong Talks about Creationism

2007-12-11T20:52:00.001Z

I listen to Count Arthur Strong's radio show on BBC Radio 4 every Tuesday on the way home from work, but I'd never seen what he looked like till I found him on YouTube. During this Tuesday's show, when Count Arthur is supposed to debate Creationism at the Oxford Union, I was laughing so hard I had to move into the nearside lane to reduce my chances of swerving into another vehicle. Count Arthur Strong's blatherings are the funniest thing I've come across since the TV skit, years ago, showing how it would be if we had guide cats for the blind.

I wonder now: what would my moral status have been if I'd had an accident while deliberately listening to a comedy show? Maybe I should read Diana Hsieh's articles on 'the problem of moral luck' to find out.

Update: rewritten 13-DEC-07 after problem with html script

Gracious old lady

2007-12-09T19:01:00.000Z

This is one of my favourites in the British Museum - I visit her every time I go there, which is at least once a year. She lives in the Wolfson Galleries, not far from the Molossian Dog. She looks young, but she's well over two thousand years old - an Etrusco-Latin bronze, half life size, thought to have been found at Nemi and cast during the third to first century BC. There's more information about her on the British Museum site, though she has a presence and grace that I think my photo captures better than the BM one.

Hat tip: Kieron McNulty, who was kind enough to answer my appeal on the Open University Student Association's Classics Forum, found the link for me.

2007-11-30T18:49:00.000Z

Someone at work mentioned Belbin team roles, and that has been my ruin today. I did a Belbin test about twenty years ago and came out as a "Plant". Wondering if that would have changed, I wasted time on a fruitless search for a free online test after work. But I did do a consolation quiz that is probably nearly as accurate, courtesy of Monica at Spark A Synapse, and came out the same as her on the Sesame Street one. And what do you know, I do collect unusual objects (my objets trouves collection is under constant threat of being thrown out by Paddy). Since I was in the mood I did a whole series of these amusing tests and was impressed with this one:

Your Brain is Purple

Of all the brain types, yours is the most idealistic.
You tend to think wild, amazing thoughts. Your dreams and fantasies are intense.
Your thoughts are creative, inventive, and without boundaries.
You tend to spend a lot of time thinking of fictional people and places - or a very different life for yourself.

What Color Is Your Brain?

It's the usual guff, but the last line is actually true: I really do spend a lot of time thinking of fictional people (especially at meetings).

In debt

2007-11-25T10:23:00.000Z

The shame and disgrace continues. Yesterday I went to the library to return another book (a well written but pointless novel by Martin Amis, can't remember the title.) A shelfful of books was for sale: "fill a bag for £1". I selected three books, took them to the counter and opened my wallet - which contained nothing but a £20 note. The library is not set up to handle that kind of money, so the librarian kindly put an electronic note on my library card: owes £1. She said I could pay up the next time I came by. Poor gullible creature - she'll get into big trouble when I skip the country instead.

Saudi Arabia is not our friend

2007-11-25T10:04:00.000Z

Saudi Arabia funds Islamic terrorism - using the money we give them to buy oil from the oil wells they confiscated from western companies in the 1970s. And now, they are using our laws to silence a westerner who has criticised the Saudi regime - see the short film from the Moving Picture Institute that I linked to in yesterday's post. The film is about Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz's attempt to destroy Funding Evil by Rachel Ehrenfeld, a book documenting how he and other Saudi Arabian bigwigs further the cause of Islamic totalitarianism.

As Dr Ehrenfeld explains in the video, paying for terrorists to bomb our soldiers, our skyscrapers and our public transport is expensive. Still, the Saudis have a lot of money left over, and they use some of that to buy advanced military systems like the Eurofighter. Western governments eagerly thrust these weapons at the Saudis. They are our allies, after all, aren't they? Unfortunately for us, they're also theocratic barbarians. With money extorted from the west in the first place they buy weapons we provide for them. What reason do we have to suppose that they'll use them in ways that won't harm us? About as much reason as we have to suppose that Iran wants nuclear capability so that it can generate more electricity.

The Libel Tourist

2007-11-24T19:49:00.000Z

"Saudi Billionaire Accused of Funding Terror Exploits British Laws to Silence American Authors. Documentary Film Shows How The Libel Tourist Failed to Silence Rachel Ehrenfeld.
The Moving Picture Institute (MPI) has released a documentary short film (at libeltouristmovie.com) casting light on what a former ACLU director calls 'one of the most important First Amendment cases of the past 25 years.'"

The Libel Tourist exposes how Saudi billionaire Khalid Bin Mafhouz exploits the British legal system and sues for libel in London even though he does not live there and the articles or books are not published in Britain. It is an outrageous abuse of the legal system," said the film's Executive Producer Rob Pfaltzgraff. Many American authors and researchers are finding themselves silenced and harassed by Mafhouz's trans-continental manipulation of libel laws. MPI's new 8-minute film The Libel Tourist is a story about how Saudi money is used to silence and control the media through the British court system.

Directed by MPI fellow Jared Lapidus, the film explains how Mahfouz filed a libel suit against Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed - and How to Stop It. The suit was not filed in the United States, where the book was published and sold, but instead in London, where Mahfouz associates ordered 23 books online. The judge ordered all copies of the book pulped, and ordered Ehrenfeld to pay the legal fees and damages, despite the fact that nothing in her book about Saudi funding of terrorism was ever disproved.

Since 2002, drawing on a vast fortune, Mafhouz has sued more than 36 times in London, where the libel laws heavily favor the accuser. Every media outlet or publisher he sued, or threatened to sue, apologized, retracted and paid fines. "Mafhouz has single-handedly wiped out an entire genre of reportage. Researchers are chilled into dropping the entire subject." said Pfaltzgraff.

Mahfouz's frequent libel lawsuits have earned London the title of "World Capital for Libel Tourism;" even Cambridge University Press, the oldest English-speaking publishing house, chose to pulp the book Alms for Jihad, apologize, and pay Mahfouz.

Ehrenfeld, however, is fighting back. In The Libel Tourist she speaks about her shocking experience of modern-day book burning by British courts, and the First Amendment lawsuit she filed against Mahfouz. Oral arguments in her case were heard November 15, 2007 in a New York courtroom.

Contact:
Audrey Mullen, Advocacy Ink: (703) 548.1160 email: audrey@advocacyink.com.

Hat tip: Ed Cline via UKOA

Putting up with the little things

2007-11-23T20:54:00.000Z

For a year or two now I've had a slight problem with my right knee - a twinge of pain when stepping down from one level to another. I think it started after I slipped while hurrying down some steps in the rain and banged my knee hard on the concrete. I'd never done anything about it and had almost stopped noticing it. However, I recently started running once or twice a week and found that that made the pain worse.

Worried that the extra exercise might lead to a real injury, I resolved to do something positive to prevent it. I considered a visit to the doctor; but that didn't appeal, because I would have had to take time off work and probably would have got nothing out of it but a prescription for ibuprofen and a referral to a physiotherapist with a three month waiting list. Then I realised what might really help: and I resorted once more to Sarah Key's The Body in Action. There is, of course, a knee section in there, so I did all the knee exercises she recommended (they don't take long). Judging by what she writes about the initial difficulty of doing these excercises, both my knees are actually pretty healthy; so when I felt an improvement the very next day I wondered if it might just be a placebo effect. But I noticed, when I stepped down from the kitchen onto the back porch, that I had omitted to do something: I hadn't braced myself for the expected discomfort I would feel on bending my right knee. I'd got so used to something being wrong that compensating for it had become automatic. Now, it's normality that seems novel.

One of my reasons for writing this is just to say again how good Sarah Key's exercises are.

My other point, though, is that we shouldn't get used to something being wrong - physically or psychologically - without first finding out if it can be fixed. Some things can't be fixed, and we have to get used to those. But I wonder how many times we subconsciously wince before enduring yet another little niggle that could have been fixed without much difficulty, if only we'd stopped long enough to identify it, but that is gradually developing into a real problem because we're ignoring it.

To keep putting up with minor annoyances, enduring slight discomforts, and finding ways round small obstacles is to allow disorder to accumulate in our lives as more and more of our enerby becomes unavailable for useful work.

Why we need more chairs 3

2007-11-23T19:05:00.000Z

This photo reminds me of the old story about the Princess and the Pea: the one where the princess is so sensitive to discomfort that she can't sleep a wink, despite the fact that her bed is piled with twenty-three feather matresses, because right at the bottom of all of them is a dried pea.

Pussy Kirk is very like her.

hapax legomenon

2007-11-20T21:39:00.000Z

Come on, you ought to know what that means - after all, it's there as bold as brass in the Oxford Concise (9th edition, 1995). It is of course, "a word of which only one instance of use is recorded. [Greek, = a thing said once]".

I found it on the way to "he" (which I'd decided check up on while writing my previous post).

Grammatical neutrality

2007-11-20T21:20:00.000Z

I'm off on another grammar whinge (actually, only the second on this blog, but unlikely to be the last).

My favourite offender, Pet Supermarket, warns me about the perils of Christmas in the following terms:

Your cat is likely to hide if there are lots of people or noise around the house at Christmas. Give them time and encouragement and they will hopefully venture out and be included so they too can enjoy the Christmas festivities ... If your cat is nervous and hides away, make sure they either have access to the outside to toilet or the use of a clean litter tray.

Now who are "they" - all my clamourous but timid guests, queing nervously in the shadows outside the bathroom door? No, "they" are my cat - he, she or it. I know we aren't allowed to say "he" any more when we mean a person of unspecified sex (just try doing it when you write material for a training course or a company's business management system). But now, it seems, we aren't even allowed to refer to an animal of unspecifed sex as "it". We are, however, allowed risible constructions like those quoted, because it's quite alright to be grammatically incorrect.

Falsely accused

2007-11-19T18:00:00.000Z

The Council sent me a threatening letter about an allegedly overdue library book. If I did not return the overdue item within a fortnight, it warned me, "borrowing privileges will be suspended. Daily fine: 15p per adult item." By the time I got the letter the item would have been nearly a month overdue and attracted a fine of over £4; so of course I phoned the library at once and protested my innocence.

After an investigation lasting several minutes the librarian found the book right where it lived, on the fiction shelf under "R", and apologised profusely. I accepted her apology. Afterwards Paddy told me I should have requested compensation: for did this false accusation not cause deep psychological distress to me, bring shame and confusion to the family (me, Paddy and the tabbies) and cast a shadow of local ignominy upon me? People would have pointed as I walked through the town and whispered to each other: "She's been excommunicated, you know." I would have had to buy all my books instead of just most of them. I would have had to move to another county, perhaps change my name.

The book, by the way, was Tears of the Moon by Nora Roberts (an author recommended to me by my friend Jack Gordon). This is not her best, and I am not fond of the Irish saga genre, but it was well worth reading, especially for the sex scenes.

American Football v. Rugby

2007-11-18T21:23:00.000Z

I just watched a bit of an American football game, New York Giants against Detroit Lions. I know nothing about American football except what Charles Sures once told Paddy and me way back in 1989 at the Objectivist summer school in La Jolla: it's all about territory.

At a first glance, American football looks a lot like rugby - muscle-bound scrums, running with the ball, rough tackling, trying to carry the ball over the line. Rugby players, however, look nothing like football players. Rugby players look battered: broken noses, cauliflower ears... features coarsened and blurred by repeated trauma over the years. Football players look well cared for: some faces sharp-featured, others with smooth curves and planes, all unmarked by injury. Rugby players do not wear helmets. Football players wear helmets (and shoulder pads, and gloves).

Football players also seem a bit taller and more slender than rugby players. I don't know if they really are, or if they just look that way because they wear skin-tight breeches instead of shorts.

My verdict is that, on aesthetic grounds alone, American football beats rugby hands down. Just to be clear: football may or may not be better in other respects (I suspect it is); but it's already better enough in the way it looks to be better overall than rugby. And isn't it just a bit dumb for rugby players not to wear more protection?

Back to Greenwich Mean Time

2007-10-28T18:31:00.000Z

Today is the day when the clocks go back. I wish they'd stay back.

Civilisation has many things for which to thank Benjamin Franklin, but I don't count daylight-saving as one of them. Twice a year we have to wrench ourselves forward or back in time by changing all the clocks, and in high summer we have to put up with unnaturally late sunsets. I don't blame Franklin though. He may have been the first person to suggest the idea, but it wasn't a serious recommendation - it appeared in a humourous essay he wrote in 1784 while he was in Paris.

Benjamin Franklin is famous for proving in a dangerous experiment that lightening was a form of electricity. He had started out in life as a printer. Another, greater scientist interested in electricity also began his working life in a trade linked to publishing: Michael Faraday, born the year after Franklin died, who completed a seven year apprenticeship as a book binder. It's not really much of a resemblance, though, since Franklin never lost his love of printing and made his fortune by it whereas Faraday got out of bookbinding as soon as he could (by taking a job as Humphrey Davey's assistant at the Royal Institution). But it does show that the sky's the limit for a boy who knows how to read and is willing to make the most of it.

I learned only recently that Faraday was a chemist as well as a physicist and is also famous for isolating benzene. Of course the ancient Ethiopians were able to exploit a natural source of pure benzene, but I don't believe they knew its formula. (Actually, neither did Faraday; that had to wait for Kekulé.)

Wait your turn!

2007-10-26T14:26:00.000+01:00

Brent Cowgill alerted me (via UKOA) to this wonderful story in the Daily Mail. Published on 23rd October, it is about a petrol station cashier who told a robber she was too busy to serve him:

Instead of surrendering the £15 cash from her till, the 51-year-old turned to the raider and told him she was too busy to deal with him.

I just got on with it," she said. "British people don't stop work just because someone is trying to bully us with guns."

Yesterday David Collinson, 42, was beginning a seven-year jail sentence after he was convicted of robbery at Gloucester Crown Court.

When her colleague told her she had to give the robber money,

"I said, 'Whatever for?'"

[snip]

"I was going to thump him, but I thought twice because it may well have been a real gun. Anyone that knows me, knows that I would."

Good for her.

Why we need more chairs 2

2007-10-25T20:28:00.000+01:00

There are two of us and two of them. We bought enough chairs for ourselves. There will never be enough chairs for them.

The Cat's Pyjamas

2007-10-24T20:32:00.000+01:00

Here is Pussy Janeway showing off her fine... um... markings. The book is Ayn Rand's The Art of Non-Fiction - which is, of course, the cat's pyjamas.

Right on target

2007-10-23T20:22:00.000+01:00

Today Pussy Janeway sick-bombed the ironing board. About half went on the cover, soaking through to the foam below, and half went on the shirt I had been going to iron. Well aimed, PJ. And now I am going to cook you.

Cascades of error

2007-10-21T20:09:00.000+01:00

Several recent posts on HBL refer to this interesting John Tierny article, published in the NYT on 9-OCT-07:
Diet and Fat: a Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus

The whole article is worth reading, both for its specific discussion of the crusade against dietary fat and for showing how the mechanism of mistaken consensus leads to such crusades. An extract:

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

The obvious analogy to the anti-fat crusade is the global warming crusade. Only heretics dare question four assumptions that have yet to be provided with a plausible foundation:

1) Long term global warming is occurring
2) Economic activity causes global warming
3) Global warming is a bad thing
4) Governments should curtail economic activity to prevent global warming

One HBLer discussed another interesting article, Science is the pursuit of the truth, not consensus, by John Kay in the Financial Times (also on 9-OCT-07). Some extracts:

Numbers are critical to democracy, but science is not a democracy. If an evangelical Christian converted all members of the Royal Society to creationism, that neither would nor should affect my belief in evolution. Most scientists know no more about climate change, HIV/Aids or the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine than do most lawyers, philosophers or economists, and it is not obvious who is better equipped to assess conflicting claims on these issues. Science is a matter of evidence, not what a majority of scientists think.
...
Statements about the world derive their value from the facts and arguments that support them, not from the status and qualifications of the people who assert them. Evidence versus authority was the issue on which Galileo challenged the church. The modern world exists because Galileo won.

I have to agree with that.

Independent of the Truth?

2007-10-21T11:07:00.000+01:00

Here's a disappointing example of unprofessional journalism - a factually innacurate attack on Ayn Rand ineptly disguised as a news story:

The Independent, 12 October 2007
"Guru of greed: The cult of selfishness"
By Leonard Doyle
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3052382.ece

[Several paragraphs at the start, asking why Americans don't vote for welfare-statists, snipped.]

So what's the matter with America?

The answer may be contained in the writings of the Russian emigrée and radical libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand. Two decades after her death, she remains the darling of right-thinking Americans and sales of her novels, paens of praise to unbridled capitalism, are even outselling The Da Vinci Code.

More copies of her book Atlas Shrugged are sold now than when she was the literary pied piper of Wall Street. In his early thirties, no less a figure than Alan Greenspan, who married one of her closest friends and went on to become the chairman of the Federal Reserve fawned over her. On Saturday nights he made his way to Rand's deliberately darkened apartment in Manhattan to sit in rapt admiration as passages of her novels were read aloud to her conservative salon.

[several paragraphs about Alan Greenspan snippped]

Some argue that it was Rand herself rather than her philosophical ideas that held the public gaze. Biographies penned by spurned lovers and collections of her letters reveal a difficult personality, alternatively passionate and cold. A woman who kept lists of sworn enemies. She enjoyed kinky sex with swinging couples and enforced a cult of loyalty among her followers.

Rand was born in 1905 in Russia and her comfortable life was turned upside down when the Bolsheviks attacked her father's pharmacy, declaring his business to be state property. She had fled the Soviet Union by1926 and soon arrived in Hollywood. There she looked
though the studio gates to see the director Cecil B. DeMille on the set filming a silent movie, King of Kings.

She talked her way onto the set, and got a job as an extra, later becoming a junior screenwriter. There she also met and married the writer Frank O' Connor.

For a few years she wrote screenplays as well as novels that failed to sell. It was only in 1943 that her career took off when word-of-mouth campaign got The Fountainhead noticed and put her on the road to success.

Rand's most influential book, Atlas Shrugged begins in a recession. To save the economy her hero, John Galt, calls for a strike by intellectuals against government interference. Factories, farms and shops close. Riots break out as food becomes scarce. Rand herself said she "set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them" and to portray "what happens to a world without them".

The book was published into a welter of criticism. The New York Times critic denounced it as "written out of hate" and called it "a triumph of English as a second language". Both conservatives and liberal critics disparaged it, with the right condemning its promotion of a godless ethic and the left condemning its message of "greed is good". Rand cried every day as bad reviews poured in.

But now she is back in fashion of a sort. Her theories have made inroads into academia. Objectivism is taught at more than 30 universities, with fellowships at several leading philosophy departments. The Ayn Rand Institute has a war chest of over $7m to promote her ideas and more than a million high school pupils are being given free copies of her novels to read.

[several paragraphs on Ayn Rand's influence and the continuing high sales of Atlas Shrugged snippped]

One of the characters in Atlas Shrugged, summarises her philosophy of Objectivism with the following oath: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another human being, or ask another human being to live for mine."

[one paragraph snipped]

One way or another Rand's ode to American individualism has made her one of the towering figures of US political thought in the late 20th century.

By rejecting altruism and embracing selfishness she rejected the Judaeo-Christian underpinning of the religious right. The only moral obligation a person had was to his or her own happiness. That meant capitalism should be given a free rein with an unregulated market economy.

She pushed America's cult of individualism into uncharted waters where ruthless self-interest and disdain for poorer members of society were the guiding principles.

Her admirers partly credit her revived appeal to an absence of ideas coming from the US left: "Today's left doesn't have anything positive to offer to young people," says Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute. "When they were socialists, there was at least something they were fighting for, and they believed in a right and a wrong [snip] Ayn Rand is the only voice that offers a secular absolutist morality with a positive vision and agenda, for individuals and for society as a whole."

The coming presidential election will reveal the extent to which ordinary poor Americans will proudly vote themselves out of jobs, off the land and ensure that their children can never afford to go to university or afford health care. It happened in the last two presidential elections, and the Ayn Rand Institute is banking that it will happen again.

Aeon McNulty, a businessman, wrote to the editor. In a letter too long to be published, though not long enough to enumerate all that was wrong with Leonard Doyle's article, he summarised the reporting errors:

Sir: the article on Ayn Rand entitled "Guru of greed: The cult of selfishness" by Leonard Doyle (12th October) contained the following errors.

1. Ayn Rand is categorically not a "libertarian". She repeatedly expressed her profound disagreement and disgust with libertarians, branding them "hippies of the right".

2. The phrase "biographies by spurned lovers" is severely misleading because the use of the plural directly implies that there has been more than one. In fact, although there are certainly many biographies of Miss Rand in print, there is only one penned by a former lover: the bitter and biased account by Nathaniel Branden which was published after her death.

3. Miss Rand did not keep "lists of sworn enemies". What she kept, and frequently wrote about, were notes on intellectual ideas that she disagreed with. Since ideas come from people it's entirely unsurprising that these notes often contained the names of their proponents.

4. There is no evidence that she "enjoyed kinky sex with swinging couples". Miss Rand did not view sex as a smutty or casual indulgence. She regarded it as a profound expression of joy and affection. At the time of her alleged affair with Mr Branden she was, by all accounts, deeply in love with him. There is no indication ofany other extramarital sexual activity during her life.

5. Frank O'Connor, her husband for fifty years, was an actor not a
writer.

6. John Galt (the hero in Atlas Shrugged) does not call a strike in
order to "save the economy", that is obviously never his aim (or the result), he explicitly calls it to free the "men of the mind" from the "morality of self-sacrifice".

7. "Greed is good" is not a phrase attributable to Miss Rand, she never said it. It comes from the well-known 1987 film, "Wall Street".

8. Miss Rand did not cry "every day as bad reviews poured in". This is lifted directly from a ridiculously arbitrary assertion by Harriet Rubin that appeared in a recent article in The New York Times. To those that knew Miss Rand the very notion of her crying over a bad review is laughable.

9. The following is a misquotation, "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another human being, or ask another human being to live for mine." It should instead be: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

10. It is claimed that the Ayn Rand Institute is hoping for (indeed "banking" on) another Republican victory. It is a matter of record that the ARI has been a consistently harsh critic of the Republican Party since the institute was founded.

Thank you for your time and attention.

The writer Ed Cline agreed. In his own letter to the editor he said:

The errors present in Leonard Doyle's "Guru of Greed: The cult of selfishness" (12 October) are too numerous to list in a letter. These errors center on what Ayn Rand did or did not do, on what she said or did not say. To cite one instance, she did not cry "every day as bad reviews poured in" of her novel Atlas Shrugged. If she did anything, she shrugged. And, her novel is having the last laugh; after 50 years, it is still selling strong and influencing people, while all those smarmy, vitriolic critics are gone.

My contribution was:

The title of Leonard Doyle's article "Guru of greed: The cult of selfishness" set the tone for the absurd assertions that followed. Ayn Rand identified rationality as the basic virtue and the source of all others. In her philosophy of Objectivism, selfishness is the virtue based on the facts about what man requires for his proper survival. To call rational self interest a cult, and Ayn Rand a guru, is a profound misrepresentation of the greatest philosopher of the modern era.

DSA Murray, an artist, targeted misapprehensions about Objectivism in two separate letters - first on 13th October:

Contrary to Leonard Doyle's article, Ayn Rand was not an advocate of the commonly held view of "selfishness".

Through her integrated philosophy, Objectivism, Ms Rand rejected the false alternative of sacrificing others to yourself (Nietzschean behaviour), or sacrificing yourself to others (altruism), by advocating a rational self-interest of neither living as a profiteer of sacrifice, nor as a victim, but as a voluntary "trader" of values for mutual benefit.

By upholding a "benevolent universe premise", Ms Rand argued that it is not "selfishness" that is the route of malevolent behaviour, but precisely the absence of a "self" e.g.,
the need to be admired, envied, feared, thought great, etc., by others.

She opposed altruism, which she defined as, "service to others as the moral justification of a man's existence and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty", because it destroys genuine benevolence and is the foundation of all forms of tyranny. Indeed, by elevating the idea that helping others is an act of selflessness, she argued, altruism implies that a man can have no selfish concern for others, that morally an act of goodwill must be an act of sacrifice, in effect destroying any authentic benevolence among men.

and then on 15th October (in response to somone else's letter):

...Rand was not opposed to acts of kindness towards others, indeed, she upheld a "benevolent universe premise" based on "rational self-interest". What she opposed
was a sacrificial moral code that turns men into either profiteers of sacrifice or victims.

She argued that by elevating the idea that helping others is an act of selflessness, altruism implies that a man can have no selfish concern for others, that morally an act of goodwill must be an act of sacrifice, in effect destroying any authentic benevolence among men.

The Independent, to its credit, did publish this last. As Daryl explained to its letters editor, "I don't expect The Independent to necessarily agree with, or fully understand Objectivism, (it requires major study), but I do expect the chance to correct any editorial errors or misconceptions about Ayn Rand's life and philosophy."

Note: all hyperlinks inserted by Valz.

TV confession

2007-10-20T18:39:00.000+01:00

I don't watch TV often enough. My friends have recommended many shows I know I should watch, but I never seem to find the time. I've missed most episodes of Firefly, Lost , House and Heroes. Maybe Lost is not such a loss... but I didn't see the first season of 24 until about forty thousand hours after it was broadcast on Sky (I watched it on DVD last January). Most episodes of Seinfeld have come and gone without me. Niles in Frazier got married without my knowledge. Documentaries are being presented by people I've never seen or heard of. I just have to buckle down to the box!

Morning call

2007-10-20T17:40:00.000+01:00

Here's how many cat owners greet the day:

Wake-Up

Pussy Kirk does this sort of thing to Paddy every morning, about ten minutes before his alarm goes off.

But I'm the one who wields the baseball bat, and I only do that to stop the snoring.

Whose environment is it?

2007-10-15T19:28:00.000+01:00

Decades ago, most governments banned the use of DDT to kill mosquitoes. They did it because it was supposed to be bad for the environment. Millions of people in Africa and Asia died of malaria as a result of the ban. Now, some of those countries are allowing DDT again - because it is the safest and most effective way to eliminate malaria from the human environment. Whose environment are the environmentalists trying to protect? Not ours - not one fit for human beings to inhabit.

article on Yaron Brook in OCR

2007-10-13T10:39:00.000+01:00

There's an excellent article in the Orange County Register on one of the locals:

OCR article

It appeared on 9th October and was written by Terry Sforza under the heading Atlas came to Irvine: ex-socialist runs the Ayn Rand Institute. Here's what it says:

Yaron Brook grew up a socialist. What choice did he have?

His parents were "standard leftist intellectuals," he said, driven from their homeland of South Africa by the injustices of apartheid, and drawn to Israel by dreams of Zionism and kibbutz-living. A kibbutz, you know – one of those communal farm/socialist-type utopias where everything is shared, collectivism rules, and other people help bring up your kids.

Brook's dad was a doctor. The family spent time in England and Boston, and he fondly recalls arguing with his Western capitalist classmates over the blights of poverty and economic inequality that went hand-in-hand with the free market.

So honestly. How did Yaron Brook come to be one of the nation's – nay, the world's – leading spokesmen for "rational selfishness" and "laissez-faire capitalism"?

How did he come to conclude that making money is good – very good – and that life's highest moral purpose is achieving personal happiness and individual fulfillment, not necessarily helping the neighbor in need?

How did Yaron Brook come to be president of the Ayn Rand Institute?

***

He was 16. It was summer break. A friend lent him a copy of Rand's 1,000-plus page "Atlas Shrugged" (which was published 50 years ago today to mostly scathing reviews and is now hailed as one of the most influential business books ever written).

In "Atlas," the capitalist movers and shakers – "individuals of the mind" – go on strike to protest overbearing government regulation and forced income redistribution. They simply drop out, refusing to contribute to a corrupt social order that confiscates their profits and tries to dictate their actions. These folks are, Rand argues, the very glue that holds society together.

In Rand's view, selfishness is a virtue, not a vice. An individual is an end in himself. He should be motivated by rational self-interest and guided solely by reason. And making money is a sign of success, proof that you have created something of value. The government shouldn't take money away from you and give it to the unsuccessful hordes.

Whoa. "I fought the book," Brook says. "I didn't want to agree with it. It challenged everything I believed in." But, after "Atlas," there was no going back.

At age 18, Brook entered the Israeli army, where he met his wife, Revital. On their first date, he gave her a copy of Rand's "The Fountainhead." On their second date, he took her to a lecture.

***

Now, what does a young man afire with rational self-interest do with his life? Brook got his civil engineering degree from the Technicon — Israel Institute of Technology, but it didn't much agree with him. This backbone of civilization stuff – bridges, roads, sewer systems – had rather limited appeal. There wasn't a great deal of individual fulfillment involved. And the money wasn't so hot either.

"After you come to the conclusion that the purpose of life is to maximize your own well-being, then there is only one country in the world that allows you to do that," he said.

So, like Rand, Brook came to America.

He got his master of business administration from the University of Texas at Austin, and followed up with a doctorate in finance. In a delicious irony, he became an assistant professor at Santa Clara University in San Jose, a Jesuit Catholic university. He started several businesses, including an investment consulting firm and Lyceum International, which organized conferences on objectivism, Rand's philosophy.

It's through those conferences that Brook got to know the movers and shakers in the world of objectivism. Warm, smart and funny, he was eventually asked to head the Ayn Rand Institute, the largest of the think tanks devoted to Rand's work.

Its mission: "To spearhead a cultural renaissance that will reverse the anti-reason, anti-individualism, anti-freedom, anti-capitalist trends in today's culture," its Web site says. "The major battleground in this fight for reason and capitalism is the educational institutions – high schools and, above all, the universities, where students learn the ideas that shape their lives."

The institute began in 1985 with just two staffers in Marina del Rey. Brook agreed to take the job in 2000 on two conditions: that he get an Apple computer, and that the institute move from Marina del Rey to Orange County.

****

The institute devoted to the high priestess of profit is, well, a nonprofit. Brook proudly earned a total compensation in excess of $356,000 as president last year (he says he could make a lot more in finance).

When he took over in 2000, the institute's budget was less than $2 million. It just closed the books on the 2006-07 fiscal year at a stunning $6.7 million.

More of that money is going into programs, and less into fundraising and administration. In 2004, 57.8 percent of the institute's spending was on programs. Last year, that shot up to 80.6 percent, according to financial information filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

"I don't even know where I am anymore, it has grown so much," said Donna Montrezza, one of the institute's original employees. "Beyond my wildest dreams."

It gives away Rand's books to high schools (some 700,000 to date). Runs an essay contest that annually attracts some 20,000 high school students. Supports college objectivist clubs, writes op-ed pieces, comments regularly on Fox News and CNBC. Next year it will open an office in Washington, D.C., to educate those in the capital on what America is reallyabout.

And, as a special treat for locals, it holds public lectures in Orange County, delightfully poking its fingers in the eyes of conventional wisdom and the status quo.

On Nov. 7, a talk titled "Religion vs. Self-Esteem" will argue that religion undermines every essential precondition of self-esteem.

Brook has lectured on "The Morality of War," arguing that trying to spare civilian lives has prevented the U.S. from winning in Iraq. "If, once all the facts are rationally evaluated, it is found that directly bombing civilian populations or torturing POWs will save American lives, then it is moral – morally mandatory – to do so."

Brook isn't exactly an ideologue. He's fine with charity, for example, so long as it's done voluntarily and for personal fulfillment, rather than out of guilt or self-sacrifice. He lives in Trabuco, watches lots of movies with his wife and two sons, takes in the opera, loves to travel – Italy, Thailand, China, Japan. But, more than anything, he loves the intellectual joust.

Brook sits at his desk and smiles, clearly relishing his philosophical about-face. "My parents," he says, "are still waiting for me to grow out of it."

Register wire services and staff writers Peter Larsen and Frank Mickadeit contributed to this report.

Worth preserving, I think.

The Centre of the World

2007-10-07T19:36:00.000+01:00

My home town is the setting for a silly science-fantasy novel I recently borrowed from the local library:

[It] is an old town and not all of its ghosts sleep the sleep of the just. Nestled in the rolling hills and valleys of the county of Wiltshire, in the ancient heart of the south west of England, many kinds of people have lived in [it] down the centuries, and some of their past deeds live on to trouble the present.

According to the novel, more ley lines cross each other here than anywhere else in England, making it the real centre of the world...

But its oldness does fascinate me. When I was a child nothing around me was old: my parents had been on earth longer than any of the buildings I walked past. Almost all the buildings in the centre of this town are old, and if you walk over ploughed fields in its environs you're quite likely to find bits of Roman or mediaeval pottery in the soil and see pieces of stone from Roman villas in the dry stone walls separating the fields.

Why we need more chairs 1

2007-10-07T18:57:00.001+01:00

The handbag was not put there for scale. (It's true that Janeway is a small cat, but there again, the handbag is huge). No, I put the handbag there to prevent the cat from claiming my chair - but the chair was big enough for both of them.

The thing is, Jinny-Puss, my chair is not big enough for both of us.

Soy lake

2007-09-30T19:22:00.000+01:00

I don't want to sound obsessed with food, but in fact I am (it will soon be time to hibernate). That is why I must announce that I have just bought five litres of Kikkoman dark soy sauce from an online Japanese food store.

Now I don't need to stock up at one of the Chinese supermarkets in Soho next time I visit London. They can be fun to look round, but they often smell bad, they're always packed with other shoppers (ie people who get in the way when I've a train to catch) and they usually hide the Kikkoman somewhere in the basement where uninitiates would never think of looking for it.

Lettuce - why?

2007-09-29T16:27:00.000+01:00

What I want to know is, why anyone ever thought of eating lettuce.

Now in civilised societies, lettuce is an excuse for mayonnaise and vinaigrette. But what made the first lettuce eaters decide that lettuce was worth eating? I've eaten naked lettuce myself a few times: it is insipid and slightly bitter. I doubt that it's even particularly good for you, but if it is, the smart thing would be to get something else to eat it for you and then eat that creature. (I'm thinking rabbits here, not slugs.) Then you could save the vinagrette for your seafood salad and just eat the mayonnaise straight from the jar.

Accidental tomatoes

2007-09-22T11:30:00.000+01:00

A few months ago I emptied the compost bin and stored a large tubful that we weren't able to use immediately. Later I noticed that some sort of weed had started to grow in the tub but I didn't bother to extirpate it. The "weed" turned out to be this exuberant tomato plant.

Having seen how many bunches of fat tomatoes weighed down its stems, I started to water it every day and feed it occasionally with bonfire ash. It's a race against time now: will the fruits ripen before the autumn frosts set in?

The silly thing is, I don't much like tomatoes. Their only edible forms are those that don't require chewing: very finely chopped; cooked to mush; juice, puree, sauce and soup. Paddy likes them raw, though, and casts a lustful eye on the accidental tomatoes every so often.

Coffee is good for you?

2007-09-21T17:50:00.000+01:00

If so, I'm glad to hear it. I went through a green tea phase a few years ago, but it ended when I admitted to myself that green tea both looks and tastes disgusting.

According to a recent post on Healthbolt, coffee is...

...Not just good, but great! Reasonable amounts of coffee - no more than a few cups a day - promote all kinds of healthy side effects, from reduced risk of colon cancer, Parkinson’s, and type 2 diabetes to healthier liver function (aha!). And three cups of coffee have just as much fiber as an apple.

I had already heard most of this elsewhere, but not that "three cups of coffee have just as much fiber as an apple". How reliable is this assertion? I'm not qualified to say, and Healthbolt doesn't cite its sources, so I'll take it with a pinch of salt (but I may have to watch my blood pressure there).

Another thing I've read about coffee is that it isn't really an anti-diuretic. The Coffee Science Information Centre, for instance, says:

Q: Is coffee a diuretic?
A: The caffeine in coffee is a mild diuretic, but
moderate consumption of coffee has no greater effect than that seen with plain water. Decaffeinated coffee contains minimal amounts of caffeine and will therefore also have no greater effect on fluid loss than water.

Q: So will drinking coffee make me dehydrated?
A: No, coffee is an important source of fluid in the diet and moderate consumption, of 4-5 cups per day for the general population, will have no adverse effect on fluid levels in the body. In fact, experts in nutrition state that coffee can contribute significantly to daily fluid intake.

CoffeeScience (which appears to be a different organisation) confirms this and goes into more detail - an excerpt:

The diuretic effect of coffee was also evaluated in previous studies which Dr. Armstrong reviewed. The mild diuretic effect in coffee, tea and soda stems from their active agents, classified as methylxanthines. Dr. Armstrong explained, “The caffeine in coffee, tea, and soft drinks is 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine. Tea contains theophylline – 1,3-dimethylxanthine. Theobromine is found in tea, chocolate and cocoa as 3,7-dimethylxanthine. All three compounds are central nervous system and cardiac stimulants, as well as mild diuretics in some situations.

Both serious athletes and weekend athletes consume a number of beverages that, when taken in large volume, have a diuretic effect. It is interesting to note that researchers have shown that fluid-electrolyte replacement beverages have diuretic activity, and that even water is a diuretic. At less than 300 mg a day, the diuretic activity of caffeine is similar to that of water.

What I can tell you for sure is that drinking coffee is good exercise (but just how good depends on how far your desk is from the coffee machine).

Botched operation

2007-09-19T20:26:00.001+01:00

Now I know what surgeons go through.

I needed to repair the hem on a pair of trousers. I got out my sewing basket, selected my tools, prepared my materials and mentally rehearsed the procedure one more time. I was now ready to do it live. I accomplished the first part of the procedure by neatly pinning the hem so that it would stay in place while I worked on it. I checked that the vertical crease on the turned up section was exactly in line with the rest of the leg, both front and back. I threaded my needle with just the right length of cotton and penetrated the cloth.

Then I proceeded to sew up the wrong damn leg.

Cat Worship...

2007-09-17T20:42:00.000+01:00

...Have I allowed it to get out of hand?

Widbrook Wood

2007-09-16T20:42:00.000+01:00

This morning I went out for a walk along the canal at about nine o'clock and came back via Widbrook Wood, a part of the Moulton estate which Alex Moulton (famous for the Moulton bicycle and dynamo) has generously opened to the public. The week before I'd seen some red current bushes full of ripe fruit - light red, translucent and glistening. They looked so attractive that I decided to pick some this time and collected about four pounds from just three bushes growing near the grassy walkways that the estate has laid out between the trees and shrubs.

The trouble with currants is that they are too sour to be eaten raw, and have such large seeds that they can't be used in pies. Just about all you can do with them is make red currant jelly - so that's what I did. I found a simple recipe on the internet which didn't even require pectin. All you had to do was boil up the currants until they were mushy, strain them through a "jelly bag", and then boil up the juice with a large amount of sugar. We don't use sugar at home, so I had to nip out to the corner shop for some, but I did have a suitable bag from my wine making days.

Then I boiled, and I boiled, and I boiled. I was afraid the end result might be a sort of red toffee, but the hot juice did eventually jell into a sticky goo, reminiscent of jam, which I was able to pour into two large jars. It tastes nice but it is very sweet, even though I used less sugar than the recipe specified.

The question now is: how much venison am I going to have to eat in order to use up all the jelly?

Environmental compromise

2007-09-14T10:02:00.000+01:00

Most people understand that environmentalism reduces standard of living. Airfares and car journeys become harder to afford if carbon taxes are added to the price of fuel; garbage is collected less often and costs more to dispose of if everyone has to use recycling bins as well as one for general rubbish; "energy efficiency" drives house builders to design ugly boxes with thick walls, low ceilings and small windows.

Fewer people realise that this is a life-or-death issue. After all, those who think government should impose 'green' taxes don't advocate killing anyone: they just want to take a little bit of life away from everyone. Like petty insurance cheats, they think their victims can afford to lose the small amount that's stolen from them. But there's no place to draw the line, morally or materially, for either theft or a forced reduction in standard of living.

The connection between standard of living and life itself is not obvious in western society. No one in the west starves, dies of exposure for want of warm clothing, or is worn out at forty by manual labour. The widows of Kensington may live ten years longer than those of Clydeside, but all of them can expect to reach their mid-seventies. The connection is clearer when you compare our society to those of the third world: there aren't many old people in Mozambique or Haiti. So, here's a question for environmentalists: just how much life is it OK to take?

Blowing hot and cold

2007-09-13T17:15:00.000+01:00

Since I, in common with most environmentalists, am not a scientist, I won't try to explain the absurdity of attempting to reduce "carbon footprints". Here's a hint, though: carbon dioxide is not a significant greenhouse gas.

I'll believe the predictions of global catastrophe when scientists understand the climate well enough to a) predict what the local weather will be next week; b) explain the enormous fluctuations in climate over past aeons; c) determine just what the optimum temperature is, so that each of us can know whether global warming, or global cooling, or global stasis, is good or bad, with respect to our own location.

magical creatures

2007-09-12T16:30:00.000+01:00

Wondering what had caused his abrupt return to consciousness, he opened his eyes and saw something with very large, round, green eyes staring back at him in the darkness, so close they were almost nose to nose.

This sounds very like Pussy Janeway; but in fact it's Dobby the house elf, as described by JK Rowling in Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire(Chapter 23). Unlike Dobby, Pussy Janeway apparates silently. Once she's made herself comfortable on the bed pillow, though, she starts washing loudly - SLURP! SLURP! SLURP! nick-nick-nick SLURP! SLURP! How we love her, in the hours before dawn.

Happiness - Greek, not Roman...

2007-09-09T16:25:00.001+01:00

... according to The Oxford History of the Classical World. Reading up on Cicero, I came to this passage:

Before and after Cicero, it was common to comlain of the deficiencies of Latin as a philosophical language. Cicero protested, with some justice, that new subjects in any language require the creation of new words, and that Greek philosophers too had resorted to neologisms. He himself introduced, for example, qualitas, moralis, and beatitudo, for 'quality', 'moral', and 'happiness' (it is suggestive that Rome, left to herself, needed no word for happiness).

[Ch.19, "Cicero and Rome" by Miriam Griffin, p. 458.]

When I learned Latin at school I was taught that the word for happiness was felix, but that this really meant good luck rather than the meaning captured in Galt's Speech:

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one's values.")

[Galt's Speech, in For the New Intellectual and Atlas Shrugged]

So Republican Rome had no concept of an earned happiness! That sort of figures: all those stories about violated virgins committing suicide to escape dishonour and statesmen preferring to execute their own sons than deviate from the letter of the law...
The Greek concept of happiness wasn't quite the same as ours either, though it seems a lot closer: Jonathan Barnes notes in Aristotle that Aristotle used the term eudaimonia, which means 'flourishing' - a successful life and the activity required to achieve it - rather than the state of consciousness that might be expected to proceed from flourishing.