'Nother Solent

The Real Michael Howard

is not the much-unmissed Tory former Home Secretary or the distinguished-but-still-wrong-about-the-war-in Afghanistan military historian, but this excellent person:

"After being charged 20 pounds for a 10 pounds overdraft, 30 year old Michael Howard of Leeds changed his name by deed poll to 'Yorkshire Bank Plc are Fascist Bastards.' The Bank has now asked him to close his account, and Mr Bastards has asked them to repay the 69p balance by cheque, made out in his new name.

(I didn't spot this myself but lifted it from a post on the Libertarian Alliance Forum.)

Quick update: "is", of course, should have read "was". But I don't suppose I shall often need to distinguish this Mr Y. B. P. a F. Bastards from any other Mr Bastards.

No apologies

for posting a story that first came out on New Year's Eve. I only just found it, but the last few lines of this article (about a yellow pushchair of all things) from the NY Times just stopped. Me. In. My. Tracks.

I found it in a blog new to me, Jeff Jarvis's World War III. It's a heavyweight, passionate blog, not least because Mr Jarvis was present at the WTC when it was attacked. (His own story is on a sidebar.) But it does have its lighter side - and I hope that this side was predominant when Mr Jarvis makes his beef against me, saying that it was he not Ken Layne who invented the "fly naked" initiative. Um, sorry, I must have misread it.

There's also some worrying prognostications about the possible end of free Blogger. Looks like I'm not the only person who has yearned for cash for clicks. In the next few days I'll put a selection of the responses I got on this controversial issue together on a separate page and link to it on the sidebar.

I'm going to be light on posts over the weekend because I've got a zillion real-life things to do. I just hope this one works; I keep getting error messages. Here goes...

The ghost at the feast

was Tim Blair, electronically gatecrashing a talking heads show on Australian TV. Absolutely everyone has linked to this, and no wonder. I thought, who's that mad old witch cackling? - and it was me.

Tim will be glad to know that he has attentive readers If you compare the transcript he provides (Incidentally, what a marvellously useful service. Does anyone provide transcripts of BBC talking headfests?) with his posts you'll see that... Tell you what, why don't I hop into my TARDIS and invite myself along as well?

MAXINE McKEW: Tom, let me say, perhaps start with you. If you could characterise 2001, as some have, as the year of living cautiously, what would you say about 2002? What are your hopes?

THOMAS KENEALLY: Well, I hope it's the year of living incautiously. We haven't resolved the question of whether we're a brave or a timid nation yet.

We are simultaneously bronze Anzacs and tenuous maidens likely to be raped by foreign strangeness and we have to decide which we really are.

TIM BLAIR: Can't we be sort of half one thing and half another? You know, like your beard?

NATALIE SOLENT: Wait up, Tim, he hasn't said the bit about "the appropriate sense of self-silliness" yet.

TIM BLAIR: Hi Natalie. Natalie! What the hell are you doing here?

THOMAS KENEALLY: You wanna step outside and say that about my beard?

NATALIE SOLENT: I've edited myself in. If you can do it, so can I. (Accusing tone) And By The Way, you edited out some of the best bits.

MAXINE McKEW: Matthew? How do you see it? Do you think that Tom's right, that we're a mix of the timid and the brave?

THOMAS KENEALLY: I'm not bloody afraid of you, you beardless -

TIM BLAIR: Now, now, not both of you at once. (Soothingly) Honestly, Natalie, I was just leaving some jokes for you. As the Good Book says, "And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger." Leviticus 23.

NATALIE SOLENT: Oh, all right then.

MATTHEW REILLY: (shouting everyone else down) I think 2001 can be characterised as a year of fear and, if I'd like to see anything change in 2002, it is, I'd like the dialogue in Australia to change from our first response to some new challenge, not being fear, but being understanding, trying to know something first before you're afraid of it.

(long pause)

TIM BLAIR: That made no sense at all. Are you feeling all right?

THOMAS KENEALLY: You won't be feeling all right when I've finished with you. I was really proud of that line "the appropriate sense of self-silliness" and you just threw it away. Edited out. Gone.

MATTHEW REILLY: I think we leap and under the current sort of political leadership, I think our first instinct - or from 2001 - is leaning towards fear.

NATALIE SOLENT: If you leap leaning you fall over. I'm beginning to see Tim's point. Shut your eyes, snip coming.

Snip!

JOHN BIRMINGHAM: Having grown up in Queensland like you, I mean, I know what a repressive right-wing government's like and I know that it's very, very different from what we're living under now.

In Queensland, when I grew up, if you stepped out of line or stood against the system, it would reach out and touch you in the night and it would take you away and you know, you might have to flee the state.

TIM BLAIR: Yes … the Killing Fields of Paddy Gully. I know of them well.

JOHN BIRMINGHAM: Mmmmfff. mmf! mmfhandOFFMYMOUTH!

NATALIE SOLENT: Look I'm absolutely with you on that point, Tim, the guy is being a self-dramatizing prat when he talks about Queensland as if it were Stalin's Russia, but don't you think you should get your hand off his mouth and let him say the bit about the cops planting evidence in drugs busts? I mean, might he not have a valid...

TIM BLAIR: Who invited you?
NATALIE SOLENT: Who invited you?
OMNES: Who invited either of you?

THOMAS KENEALLY: There are some things that happened in the last year which, as a child of a digger, I find a bit sinister - the SAS being sent out to the Tampa, the Armed Forces, which are a noble and very highly trained force in Australia being used for reasons that aren't really military …

NATALIE SOLENT: Go on, go on. Don't let that Tim guy put you off. Now comes the bit about the army being used for "eugenic reasons, race control reasons."

THOMAS KENEALLY: You've made me lose my thread. All the fun's gone out of it now. Where was I?

NATALIE SOLENT: (Hurriedly snipping) Here.

MATTHEW REILLY: Are we not noble or are we just apathetic? Are our politicians preying on the Australians' natural apathy towards political matters?

NATALIE SOLENT: Don't you want to object to being called the "chattering classes" then? Look, it's here in the script. Then John Birmingham gets to say it's a phrase only used by half a dozen right wing columnists earning $1,200 an hour. Hmm, $1,200... Maybe I should move to Australia.

OMNES: We don't let riff-raff in.

MAXINE McKEW: Robert, if this is right - if we're a satrapy of the US. And, Tom, if you're right, that we've taken the first step along the path to, perhaps, a more oppressive regime. Like, if you're right, let me say to you all, that this is great raw material for writers. You are talking the stuff of tremendous conflict and tension. And I'm - you know, I risk buying into a tremendous argument here, I'm aware, but why is it so few of our writers are addressing these big contemporary issues?

TIM BLAIR: Like, you're kinda old lookin' to be talking like, you know, a teenager.

NATALIE SOLENT: And kind of silly to pretend you're taking such a big risk in suggesting to writers that writers were not addressing the big issues. As if you didn't know that anyone allowed round that table has been carefully vetted. No one nasty was ever going to let near, love.

THOMAS KENEALLY: You're absolutely right. We - there was no novel by Australian writers on the Timor situation.

MAXINE McKEW: John wrote a history.

TIM BLAIR: Did anyone buy it?

NATALIE SOLENT: Timmy my boy, you missed Thomas Keneally's hurried correction: "There was no notable work, apart from John's." I thought it was quite funny, you know, him suddenly realising he'd dropped this great big brick.

MAXINE McKEW: (hurriedly) Let me then move this conversation on to this.

NATALIE SOLENT: And let me move this conversation on to this!

Snip!

MAXINE McKEW: Honourably?

LINDA JAIVIN: I like that. Courageously, compassionately.

TIM BLAIR: Retardedly?

ROBERT DESSAIX: It's interesting that it's people like us who are talking about these ideas normally. No-one would look to people like us in this country to talk about these things.

NATALIE SOLENT: Now you say, "They would in America."

ROBERT DESSAIX: Will you stop doing that?

MAXINE McKEW: That's my hope for 2002, that we do a bit more of this.

NATALIE SOLENT: C'mon Robert, now you say, "And in France" Then you say, Linda, "They'd definitely ask people like us and we'd talk for four hours on the television, not just half an hour." Then I can say, that's all you people want isn't it? Jobs for the boys. Have you ever watched French TV? Has anyone? The answer is no, because, you're right, it is full of left wing intellectuals talking for four hours at a stretch. Thomas Keneally then almost redeems himself, if you're interested, by showing a bit of irony and saying, "The demise of the chattering classes." But that Marion woman doesn't like that, oh no, she says "You see, you're being pejorative but I think chattering, talking--"

TIM BLAIR: (throws self under passing truck)

NATALIE SOLENT: As I was going to say before that truck went by, then the transcript mysteriously stops. Y'know, I hate to be rude about your country, Tim, but don't you clean floors in Australia? There's all red muck on this one. Tim? Was it something I said?

(Just a note for any hermits reading. This is a spoof of a spoof. You have to see Tim Blair's instaclassic original spoof to get it.)

Gotta go but first a Quick one on Libertarians being just as silly as some others.

Micropayments

I had a lot of response on this one. Bear with me while I digest it all.

War, Blogs of.

The Blogs of War in a post dated 4 Jan (you have to scroll a fair way down) had this intriguing thought:

As a solution to our practical problems [adjusting policies to remove root causes of hatred], this line of thinking is dubious in the extreme. In fact, it has always struck me as a kind of "primitive magic," wherein operations and rituals we perform upon ourselves are supposed to have a transformative and determinative effect on the world outside.

I found this particularly interesting because I could criticize it quite strongly - there is nothing impossible about operations we perform on ourselves changing the world outside; it's only a posh way of saying that if you clean up your own act you will have more influence with others. Nor is "get rid of root causes" talk ridiculous of itself. (Even if I do scream, "Who attacked who here?" every time it is said. But that's just me.) Yet I, like Dr Frank, do indeed sniff a strong scent of magic in a lot of this talk of the West buying safety by self-transformation. As soon as I read the m-word, it was like finally being able to put a name to a flavour in a stew or remembering a word that had been on the tip of your tongue. I'll back this up with quotes when I find some.

War.

Justin Raimondo, who's The Other Sort of Libertarian, going OTT in an article criticising Andrew Sullivan for support of India. Sample extract:

Violence and rhetorical hate directed at Christians, and against Catholics in particular, is on the upswing in India: oddly, this doesn't seem to bother Sullivan [a Catholic], who only needs to know that India, like Israel, "must be unequivocally supported."

Well, I'm also a Catholic and it bothers me. It didn't stop me being horrified by the attack on India's Parliament. India has too many violent Hindu-fascist mobs, but there's a big difference between a mob and a government mob. Raimondo ought to present some evidence that Sullivan is actively ignoring or denying violence against Christians in India rather than simply not having it as his subject in that particular column.

Lileks last laugh.

I just loved the last paragraph of this.

"The cruel thing to do, of course, is to walk past the guy and say “man, are you high,” which would just paralyze him. Or perhaps say “rooty-toot parakeet clock face McMango” in a dead expressionless voice. Or bark, once."

I made similar joke once, but I don't know if it ever got a laugh. I had a version of my CV which I may or may not have sent out to a potential employer (I honestly got mixed up between the sensible and not-sensible versions. In either case they didn't call back.) which included, without comment or explanation, the line "Health: good, except for being a werewolf."

Payment without Tears.

Anita Jensen has clearly been thinking along the same lines as me and Joanne Jacobs, but has taken it somewhat further. She writes,

"I have long thought that one part of the answer to content was payment in such a way as to be unobstrusive (who wants to remember what the stupid registration thing requires on each site? ) and almost automatic (e.g. you give permission once a year to Amazon or Paypal or whoever) so that you could surf happily without having either (a) the guilt that you're absorbing someone's labor without recompense or (b) the fear that some horrible Register For This Page popup will disrupt your surfing and ask you to remember hopeless details about what you thought your password to the Times of London was.

"This would be in the familiar format of a subscription but at a rate that makes sense on a daily basis. For instance, if I view a page each day, I have no problem paying a cent a time. Over the course of a year, that would amount to $36.50 or so, about what you would expect to pay for a respectable magazine, especially one that did not assault you with advertisements. Speaking for myself, I spend much much more than $36 a year on magazines and I have absolutely no opposition to doing do electronically if it can be made reasonably commensurate with my habits and reasonably hassle-free"

Of course, we are dealing with two separate issues: the first is subscription versus donation, and the second is the search for means of smooth, continuous, easy payment rather than payment in chunks. I think the term for payment being divisible into small particles is "frangibility". I would like to see all possible binary combinations of voluntaryism and frangibility available. Going on:

"But I would like to know when I have rung up my limit on a period of reading so that I can pay my fair freight. This is not something I am now organized enough to keep track of.

On reading this another problem pops into my fertile brain: under my desired system it is even easier for cops to watch you surf. But seems like that they're determined to do that anyway. Ms Jensen also makes some observations about rates of pay:

"Your comment suggested a miniscule one-tenth of one cent. I suggest a cent per site view because that seems to me to be miniscule enough. The links to other sites from bloggers, alone, weed out hours of unproductive surfing. This would mean that mega-bloggers like Sullivan could count on $220 a day for his labors (assuming he gets his 22,000 views per day average) and it would mean that less-known or start-up bloggers would have some hope of carving out a niche that would compensate them somewhat for their time and energy. "

If I might finesse the issue of "compensate" a little... I do not, of course, think that the world owes me or any other blogger a living (Not that Ms Jensen does either, I'm just free-associating onward from her starting point.) If the idea got about that readers should pay writers for their creative agonies, rather than their output, then I'd have to pay you guys, 'cos I love to blog. In a sense, of course, I do pay to blog in the currency of money-making opportunities forgone. Another point for smaller-scale bloggers is that a sum of money exactly tracking the stats curve of how many views you get is more predictable, and hence more useful, than the same amount of money received as surprise donations. (Of course the surprise donations are more fun.) I assume this effect disappears at Sullivan's exalted level, rather in the way that Premium Bond prizes are statistically predictable once you hold enough bonds.

"I would also expect that such a process would reduce the number of casual views. This might mean a start up would elect to go free initially to build an audience, but loss-leaders are a part of all businesses and personal ones need not be different. But if a site then achieved a 2000-person readership per day, that would bring the writer a small payment per day (less whatever the collecting agency charged), not a lot, but then again, blogs are done as much for energy and enthusiasm as for money.

"If such a system could be established (and I expect the software and technology is in place, and only needs putting together) it would have a couple of salutary effects. It would separate the readers from the view-throughs; it would provide a quantitative basis for the major media and bloggers to recognize the phenomenon for what it is because it would help establish the parameters of what it is; and it would probably change in fundamental ways the way that the regular media now use websites.

"It is this last piece of the action about which I am most dubious, but I don't doubt that an effective mini-payment plan for bloggers would encourage major media to contemplate ways to cut themselves in on the deal."

Yup. A potential downside to my desired option is that the newspapers we blog from would soon want to charge too! Maybe I would end up wishing I had let sleeping dogs lie. On the other hand, most of their online readers are not and never will be bloggers, so arguably whatever factors make them think it worthwhile to publish free online would still operate.

"Anyway, it's a subject that ought to be aired more comprehensively, because it is entirely idiotic to assume that people are going to devote hours of their daily lives to this activity without recompense for the rest of time, and because blogs provide a terrific place on the Web for people like me who can't tolerate the idiots who dominate chat rooms."

I would point out here that there is recompense, in the pleasure one gets from blogging. The reason I would like to see some sort of frangible payment system is that, without it, direct publishing is more skewed than it has to be towards those with significant spare time or money. An awful lot of great student bloggers are going to - horrors! - graduate one day, and get jobs, and that's the last we'll see of them. Housewife bloggers like me are also at risk of this terrible fate. On other hand (I think I'm using up hands too fast, this is at least my fourth) some bloggers might graduate to the mainstream media. I sort of want to do this myself. But.. but.. what I really want to do is BLOG TILL I DROP BABY! Yeee-HAH!

Lord Irvine jeered by own side.

Good.

I'm waiting for the mother-ship.

I used to know a song to the tune of "She'll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes" that described the coming return of "Lord Lucan, Elvis and all, and all-ll-ll/ Lord Lucan and Elvis and all." But I never knew Kitchener was in there too. Weird tales for our times, told by David McKie in the Guardian.

That completes yesterday's posts.

The poor things were kept in detention overnight by Blogger. No access to a lawyer, and the only person they were allowed to communicate with was me. Shocking.

The British handgun ban has succeeded so far.

Regular readers will be surprised to hear me say this, as I opposed the ban. Partly I mean it in a cynical sense. The ban has succeeded in appeasing public wrath at how an awful crime was "allowed to happen" (a most revealing phrase). It has succeeded in answering the demand to Do Something. However I do not believe that the motives of Michael Howard and Jack Straw were wholly or mainly cynical. The aim of the ban was not particularly to cut down general crime, but to stop another Dunblane. So long as there isn't one it can be said to have worked.

I do not believe that the fact that there has been no British gun massacre (I refer in this discussion to mass killings of strangers) since pistols were banned after Dunblane was a result of that ban. After all, there was no gun massacre for nine years between Hungerford and Dunblane under less strict gun laws, and no gun massacres at all before Hungerford under less strict laws yet.

I wrote a pamphlet on this subject, called "Rachel Weeping for her Children". That link takes you to the more computer friendly HTML version. The PDF version as originally published under the heading "Personal Perspectives No. 15" can be found at the Libertarian Alliance website. I started writing it on the fifth anniversary of the massacre.

Whether there will be another spree killing in Britain is a matter of chance. One means of getting a gun, the legal means, has been closed off. Illegal routes multiply. I doubt whether the final post-Dunblane closing off of the legal route had a great deal to do with the subsequent multiplying of illegal guns, except perhaps whatever connection there might be between two different avatars of the baleful spirit of the age. It seems to me that it is the possibility that the criminal might find his victim armed that deters, not the mere existence of guns for sporting purposes - which is all there was before the 1997 Act.

Self defence in Britain had been dead for years. Even before Dunblane, even before the Hungerford massacre nine years earlier, I kept my pistols in a locked cabinet, in accordance with the law.

This post was prompted by discussion in Instapundit, Edge of England's Sword and, of course, Random Jottings. I'll be saying more later on the link between the right to self-defence, murders by sane criminals and murders by insane spree-killers.

Big fat dollop of sympathy

you'll have with me wanting to get paid for simply publishing other bloggers' e-mails. But can I help it if they are good? Here's Iain Murray:

Pallas (I always prefered that name) wasn't so much the defender of the "state" as of the city-community. Athene Polias was her name in this guise, and the Athenians erected a huge stature of her looking out over the city on the Acropolis(therefore the theatre next to it was called the Palladium...) I don't think the Athenians would regard what we call the state as anything like the city. Athene, if anything, would regard such a thing as an assault on her city's independence, and would therefore protect her from it.

I can actually see Pallas as the patron deity of the "No" campaign against the Euro. Now where's Diomedes when you need him?

I love it. But I don't love Oliver Letwin.

Joanne Jacobs

e-mailed back with a neat analogy that says it all:

"The solution would be a way for people to pay a very small amount per read, like the cost of turning on the light, instead of asking them to donate the whole electric bill when they feel like it. I hope all those ingenious minds out there will figure out how to make it feasible."

Some revolutions run out of steam.

Before I go away to do some work (this is a pointed remark), a salutary thought from Joanne Jacobs:

Blogger Revolution
"I finally read the James Bennett piece on weblogs in Anglosphere (English-speaking cyberspace): He thinks we're Martin Luther!

"I think we bloggers are on the cutting edge of something, but I'm not sure what. We've created an international salon to discuss ideas, trade jokes, critique the established media and fight for truth, freedom and justice.

"But it relies on unpaid labor. I'm averaging $30 a week in Amazon donations, despite tripling the number of visitors since September. And with all the new, excellent blogs out there, I keep spending more time reading blogs and less time in activities for which I conceivably might earn money. I can't tell you guys how often I vow to cut back, stop reading, stop blogging, write the damn books. How long can we keep this up?"

Sell-out you may call me, but I would like to see a way in which one could charge a tiny, really tiny, sum for each pageview, and do it in a way that would cost the viewer no effort. For most people Blogging would then be a hobby, as it is now, but with some slight renumeration to wave at sceptical spouses. For some it would be a second income, for a very few a serious first income.

I know there are tips jars, and I do thank those who have contributed to mine. Perhaps I'll sound less greedy if I talk in terms of me as giver/payer rather than recipient. Giving a donation is slightly stressful. Vastly slowed down here is a transcript of my thought processes as the question "should I donate to this blog?" comes up on the radar:

Why this blog? Why not that one? If I give the same amount to X as X gave to me it looks and is ridiculous, like mechanically swapping equal cheques at Christmastime. Tell you what, I'll wait three months and then do it, if I remember. Then again, if I'm giving money maybe I ought to give it to a real charity. But not till after the car's had its MOT. Ooh, my head hurts. Don't want to think about it. But its such a corker of an article, I really ought to, but...Aha! Here's an interesting link. Click.

Compared to all that the dim background knowledge that I was automatically paying one tenth of a penny would be ease itself, even if I ended up paying more at the end of the day. I know, I know, nearly every attempt to make people pay for content has failed. But I would like to find some solution. I really do think it is high time the citadels of comment were stormed by the people, and there will be more stormers if they are paid for it. Just a little bit.

Tiny technical note.

Reader Alan Robertson says he had no problem following my Indy links and returning to my site. So I'll put it to the test. Ever eaten dog?

Here's a much more conventional, but still interesting, column from Janet Daley in the Telegraph where she reminisces about the days when railway guard was the job of choice for Marxist militants who lacked the patience for teaching. This explains a lot. Did they, I wonder, all keep the communist faith as the world moved on? I've never been a porter but I have been a teacher, and, despite the vast and continuing numbers of political idiots in that profession, it did seem to me that there was something of a reality-check as time went on. Even true believers tend to go off encouraging the oppressed masses to rise up in glorious struggle against all patriarchal manifestations when the first step of said struggle is a kick in the nuts for trying to stop the brats smoking behind the gym. Railway staff have also been the victims of rising numbers of assaults - but you do have to be that bit more intelligent to make the connection with what you have been preaching all these years...

Would you like to see Zanu PF's website?

I mean "like" in a rather specialised sense, of course. Here it is.

Safety kills.

The people who die because a drug is not approved by the FDA and similar bodies die not knowing they could have had years more life. Their relatives, unless exceptionally well informed, never complain. Rarely does their story reach the media. But here is one time where it did: an account by Reason Online, via the US Daily Report, on lives lost because gene therapy was forbidden.

Athena, not Venus and a chap called Caroll, not a lady called Carol.

You remember how in this brave new world of blogs we soar above conventional media in our adherence to the facts, ma'am, nothing but the facts? That's true for all bloggers but me.

From The Goddess Athena website, this
description of Athena:

[Note from me. The goddess Athena has a website? Terry Pratchett, thou shouldst be living at this hour! And fortunately, you are.]

Daughter of Zeus, and only by him, the Goddess Athena was not generated by any woman. She leaped from the head of Zeus, already adult, dressed with her armor.

But the mother is not completely missing from the miraculous birth of Pallas Athena. According to Hesiod's account of the weddings of Zeus, the King of the Gods chose Metis as his first wife. She was of all beings "the most knowing" (as the word metis is interpreted), or "of many counsels" as translated in the sense of the Homeric epithet polymetis.

As she was about to give birth to the Goddess Athena, Zeus deceived his pregnant wife with cunning words and assimilated her into his own body. Mother Earth and Father Sky had advised him to do this so as to prevent any of his descendants from robbing him of his kingly rank. For it was destined that the most brilliant children were to be born to the Goddess Metis: first, the daughter Athena, and later a son, the future King of Gods and men.

In the most ancient account, the Iliad, Athena is the Goddess of ferocious and implacable fight, but, wherever she can be found, she only is a warrior to defend the State and the native land against the enemies coming from outside.

She is, above all, the Goddess of the City, the protectress of civilized life, of artesian activities, and of agriculture. She also invented the horse-bit, which, for the first time, tamed horses, allowing men to use them.

She is the favorite daughter of Zeus; and that's why he let her use his insignia: the terrible shield, the aegis and his devastating weapon, the ray.

The most used expression to describe her is "the bright eyed". She is the first of the three virgin Goddesses, also known as Maiden, Parthenos, and from this name was taken the name to the most important Temple dedicated to her, the Parthenon.

In poetry she is the incarnation of Wisdom, Reason and Purity.

Athens is her city; the olive tree, created by her, is her tree; the owl, is the birth consecrated to her.

I like the sound of "Wisdom, Reason and Purity," not to mention "ferocious and implacable fight." I'm not so keen on defending the State per State, but Athena remains, as Mr Bloyd said, a far more appropriate patron for bloggers than Venus.

It was Athena, not Venus, who sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus

. I knew that. A lady called Carol Bloyd has written me a nice e-mail with gory detail, but it'll have to wait until tomorrow because this computer is going out of action while my husband (a chap far more handsome and much sounder in every respect than Oliver Letwin) murmurs strange incantations over it.

Ben Sheriff thinks I have a "thing" about Oliver Letwin.

A scandalous libel! I am above Things. I commentate, Mr Sheriff, and I observe. I observe, among others, the next man to hold the post of Her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Home Department. Nah, I can't make myself believe it either. Here's the blog.

Also, flip down to Saturday's post about the Brian Toohey on Aussie fireys (firies?) article panned by Tim Blair. The point I want to make explicitly is why on earth shouldn't a free market fire service include volunteers? I'm a rampant capitalist lunatic, and I'd volunteer in like circumstances. The important point about this freedom stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is no coercion. Ain't nothing free about a law against giving. [Quick thought later: indeed there ain't. Tips jar is on the left!] Whether money changes hands is up to the people on the ground.

Has the Indy fixed the problem

whereby once you link to them you can't go back? Let's see with this story about female US fighter pilot McSally resisting the abaya. Here goes! No. They haven't. Obviously they don't want to have the keen AB1 audience of Blogland read their stuff. Fine. See if I care...

Trial By Jury.

Another good Guardian comment piece, this time by Hugo Young on, you guessed it, Trial By Jury. I would once have looked at that phrase and thought only of Gilbert and Sullivan. I thought it was a done deal, an acknowledged achievement of British and Western culture, the cornerstone of law. Now I am actually, genuinely afraid.

"Hunh?"

sayeth Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings about a Washington post piece on tax cuts. He sayeth also many more educational things.

I got that via AintNoBadDude. Twice in the last few days Brian has participated in really, meaty, important debates (guns and God) just made for me to jump in and splash around in. Yet I haven't, to my shame. Now I've figured out why: it's because I feel I must have something deep and impressive to say and I'm waiting for a masterpiece to spring, like Venus, fully grown from my forehead. I promise to just come out with my usual happy piffle in future, and you can mine from within what nuggets of non-piffle there may be.

Heartwarming scenes of wet Australian firefighters

frolicking in the long-awaited rain were on the TV news last night. I saw one fireman dunking a firewoman in a puddle. Everyone seemed to be having fun, amply deserved, but I was a little bit worried that some busybody would leap in and start screaming about "inappropriate physical contact." Then I remembered that that sort of thing never happens in Australia, where men are real men and wombats are real wombats.

On the same bulletin we also heard that Yves St Laurent was retiring. If he's such a fashion genius, take a look at the third picture down (YSL between the two models) and tell me how come his Sixties self was clearly the inspiration for Austin Powers, Man of Mystery?

Sadly, not all the news stories were happy ones. Baby Jennifer Jane Brown died in her parents arms after just ten days of life. The contrast between the Chancellor's happiness at her birth and what he and his wife must be feeling now is really heartbreaking. This Guardian leading article expresses what I and many people feel.

Breen Haiku.

Isn't this little poem profound?

Working to
discover why
some eat and
some starve
is not an
exercise in
taste.

In fact it is part of a sparky debate between Ms Breen and Mihir Sharma, the latter defending Roger Owen's article comparing - or refusing to compare - the Islamic world with South East Asia. The poetic layout is the heartfelt cry of an emerging computer consciousness, trying to express its deep artistic yearnings in the only way available to it. Sometimes it seeks to communicate with me, as well as Moira, hoping to reach out to my soul by employing a ballad form, where every second line is one word long, in which to give plangent extra meaning to my stolid re-postings from other fora. My crude human fingers shatter its careful efforts, cursing as I go.

Seriously, I'm glad to see Innappropriate Response has come back in the last two days, because an awful lot of my links seem to have gone off skiving. I was beginning to think sinister thoughts. Was the word going round: "Link to Natalie Solent and you... disappear!" I had better re-package it as "Link to Natalie Solent and you... get a life!" Now, somebody send out a press gang and get back Dawson, Pellerito and Zilber.

Grim history

There's a post about gun massacres in Random Jottings. You may recall that in late September there was a gun massacre in Switzerland. This is what I posted to the Libertarian Alliance Forum at the time:

It's been on the news that a lone gunman has killed 14 people in a Swiss regional parliament, and then himself. The killer fitted the now-familiar profile of a disgruntled isolated male taking revenge on those he thought had persecuted him.

It would be a callous thing to look at the deaths of 14 people who wanted to live solely in terms of how they affect an argument - however it is inescapable that Switzerland has, until now, often been cited as an example of a society that was heavily armed but not violent.

What I really, really want to know is why DIDN'T this sort of massacre happen for decades after the invention of the revolver.

So far as I recall the beginning of the grim series was the "clock tower" masasacre at a US university in the 60s. Subsequent massacres are a series of imitations obviously, but why did it start then and there? Pure chance or something to do with the sixties? Is there any way we can go back to a state of innocence?

I re-post this now not because it particularly adds to the debate, but because the idea being put forward by the Weidners and others offers some, not much, but some, hope of returning to that "state of innocence." I also think that in past times we would have been much more likely to fight back against killers; this passivity is modern. I think.

Wrong and weird.

I was wrong when I said that the twelve mystic stars in Captain Euro refer to the countries actually converting to the things. The true answer is much, much stranger. It was revealed to me by Emmanuel Goldstein, acting as a an intermediary for, by one interpretation, God, or by another, the Whore of Babylon.

Natalie Solent asks why "when there are 15 members of the EU, were there only twelve mystic stars". The version I heard was that it was supposed to represent the woman with twelve stars around her head in the Book of Revalations, which the predominantly Catholic architects of the European Union would have seen as representing Mary. In fact the design is based upon the window in Strasbourg Cathedral, but they started at six until they got to twelve, and then said stop. (Source Catholic Information Network).

I remember when I heard Ian Paisley put this view forward, and I thought that it was mad (he gets a wee bit agitated about the Holy Mother Church), but much to my shame I found out that Fr Paisley was right.

Cute but wrong.

A subtle analysis of that Jonah Goldberg article I mentioned yesterday by Bjorn Staerk. (Look down until you reach 3 January, posted 18:26.) I should say that it's me that thinks JG is cute, not Mr Staerk. To be fair to the fair Goldberg, his article had a dinner-table debate tone to it, and I don't think it was ever meant to be a rigourous statement of his beliefs.

The Fugitive, updated.

The New York Times has this story about a Saudi princess living in Orlando who is accused of beating her Indonesian maid, and perhaps even holding her against her will. Instapundit and Rand Simberg have commented on the slavery issue. I think they are all being very unfair to the poor Princess. For one thing, let's have some cultural sensitivity here! After all, slavery was only abolished in The Kingdom in 1966. We must not impose our white liberal notions on other cultures. For another she has not been tried and may be innocent. Just because Saudi women frequently beat up their skivvies, in London as well as Orlando, it doesn't mean Princess Bunniah did in this case. Rather than comment on a case which is sub judice I prefer to express my admiration for what the Sheriff's office seems quite happy to state as fact. Is this woman cool or what? When this multi-millionaire (I only meant "poor" metaphorically, you understand) decides to steal from her own servants and flee with hopefully-untraceable bundles of cash raised thereby, does she do as common mortals might and check into a crummy motel? No way! She is captured three days later in the $525-a-night Hyatt Grand Cypress Hotel. Sheer style. Maybe that was her idea of a crummy motel.

On. Off. On. Off. On. Off

. if I were to attach some electrodes to my brain, wire them up to a light bulb and somehow fix things so that the circuit included my opinion of Oliver Letwin then I could sit me down in an art gallery and make a fortune. The circuit is "off" at the moment. Despite his own experience of chasing robbers the other day, our Ollie has gone soft on the right to self defence.

A nice straightforward description

of the Law of Unintended Consequences from the Illuminated Donkey. This link is really a coded message to anyone out there who is cross about me supporting the right to discriminate in the "Transgendered rights" post below. I'm ready for ya!

Jonah Goldberg is cute

. Yes he is. Look at his picture. Quite a few good lines in the column, too, such as "the only responsible way to pursue one's interests is to be realistic about how the world actually works." But hasn't he got a nice smile? Can he really be the heartless butterfly who spurned the pageviews of a good woman just because they came to him via Samizdata?

Transgendered rights

. I was struck by the opening line of this column in the St Petersburg Times (St Petersburg, Florida, not Russia in case you were wondering!) It must be all the empty space in that brain of mine that allows quite incongurous attitudes to this sort of thing to share the same skull without mixing very much. Part of me just sees it all as an opportunity for funny remarks. Remember that post where I picked up - with no more motive than getting a laugh - on a story that talked about shooters in "Western drag", where drag could have two meanings? I had quite forgotten that I know of at least one British shooter who was not merely a cross-dresser but had changed sex to female. To put it mildly that is not part of the usual cultural repertoire of the shooting community, although it would not raise nearly so many eyebrows among my SF* acquaintance.

Well, columnist Robyn Blumner, makes some fair points and is sensitive to both transgendered employees and their employers. But I think she - and most modern thought on the subject - is on a quest for the wrong holy grail. Although she recognizes that the world is complex, she's hasn't given up on her aim of finding a way to outlaw bad discrimination and allow good discrimination. So far as I'm concerned that's like outlawing bad speech and allowing good speech. It's not that I want the discrimination, any more than I want people to fill the airwaves with foolishness and hate, it's just that freedom of association comes as part of our God-given rights as social beings.

Having got this far down the column and radiated nobility in all directions, my high-mindedness battery then ran out. I got to the bit about how, in the March issue of Vanity Fair

'an article on "furries" described a community of people (men, mostly) who feel they are animals trapped in a human body. They attend conferences where dressing as a fox, raccoon or wolf is an act of self-identity. "I am a tiger in a human body," said one conferee, expressing the views of many.'

and I just fell about. There's a hyena in me, baby.

*That's Science Fiction, Ken, not San Francisco. Though from what I hear.... Oops. Went into silly remark mode again. Consider it an illustration of my complexity.

Good news. Doomsday postponed.

. That headline was so good that the US Daily Report picked it up, but the story came first from our very own Telegraph. What story? The fact that the Earth will not now be eaten by the sun. When I say "now", I mean in about seven and a half billion years, of course. Which is all well and good - but what I want to know is have they checked for mutant star-goats?

The Chancellor's nine-day old baby daughter looks near to death

, if I have understood the coding on the statement I heard on the radio. How terrible it is when the shadow of tragedy looms over those not-quite-real figures in the papers and on TV. Suddenly we're reminded: they are real people after all. I pray that Jennifer Jane may recover.